Magic Journeys (Magic Eye Theater Load Music)

Every great show starts before it starts.

In the Magic Eye Theater at EPCOT Center, a performance of Magic Journeys began while guests were still finding their seats: an instrumental statement of the film’s theme, written by Richard and Robert Sherman, played over the house as it filled, purple 3D glasses in hand, the room settling by degrees. This is that music, the theater’s load loop.

Magic Journeys itself was a first: Disney’s first 3D film, shot in 70mm, directed by Oscar-winning documentarian Murray Lerner, and seen entirely through a child’s eyes. It opened with the park on October 1, 1982, in a pavilion whose ride was not finished yet; the theater carried the Journey Into Imagination pavilion for its first five months. The film ran at Epcot until February 9, 1986, when Captain EO took the theater, and went on to play at Disneyland, Tokyo Disneyland, and the Magic Kingdom.

The load music is the overture to all of that. It framed the film on one side, just as the theater’s slideshow pre-show, Makin’ Memories, framed it on the other: photographs and a song about memory out front, and behind the curtain, this, the sound of anticipation itself. Stated instrumentally and left unhurried, it does the quiet work of turning a crowd into an audience.

Preserved here from the Magic Eye Theater’s Epcot years: the house music of the original Journey Into Imagination pavilion, from the minutes before the glasses went on.

Photo: the Imagination pavilion entrance at Epcot, by Michael Rivera, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).