Spaceship Earth With Jeremy Irons

Spaceship Earth With Jeremy Irons 1994-2007

When Spaceship Earth reopened on November 23, 1994, the voice welcoming you aboard belonged to Jeremy Irons — fresh that same year from voicing Scar in The Lion King, and bringing the same silk-and-steel gravity to Epcot’s signature ride. He had taken over from Walter Cronkite, whose version had run since 1986.

This was the ride’s biggest reinvention yet. Edo Guidotti composed an entirely new score, “Tomorrow’s Child” was retired, and the final scenes were rebuilt for the internet age: the home computer, office network and space station tableaux of the earlier versions gave way to new vignettes of a wired world — a virtual classroom, and an American boy and a Japanese girl talking face to face by video phone across the Pacific. Downstairs, the old Earth Station post-show became AT&T’s Global Neighborhood.

Irons leaned into the poetry of the script, narrating communication as the thread that binds humanity together, and this recording preserves his version complete, as guests heard it for thirteen years. Disney’s own description of the 1994 relaunch promised a storyline of how communication “bridges the barriers between us,” and the new descent delivered on it: where Cronkite’s finale had sung “Tomorrow’s Child,” Irons’ riders now passed a high-tech video classroom and children linked across oceans — the internet age arriving inside the sphere, years before most homes had it. When the attraction closed in July 2007 for its next great overhaul, Irons became the second voice of Spaceship Earth to pass into this archive.

The full succession lives here: Vic Perrin’s original narration at the head of the line, and Judi Dench’s current version, still playing today, at the end of it.