Spaceship Earth With Judi Dench

Spaceship Earth With Judi Dench 2008-Present

The voice of Spaceship Earth today is Dame Judi Dench, whose version of the ride officially opened on February 15, 2008 — and which has now outlasted every narration that came before it. It arrived with the attraction’s fourth great overhaul, under the sponsorship of Siemens, and it changed the ride’s ending more completely than any version since the original.

Bruce Broughton composed the new score, recorded with a 63-piece orchestra and a 24-voice choir, each scene dressed in the musical dress of its era. The ride vehicles gained touch screens: you choose a language, tap where you live and have your photograph taken on the climb — then, on the descent, the screen builds a personalized cartoon future around your face, a playful echo of the choose-your-own-ending once offered by Horizons.

Much of the classic journey survives intact — the cave paintings, Gutenberg’s press, the burning of Rome, which you can still smell — but the modern scenes were rebuilt, including a 1960s family watching the moon landing on television, where the face on the screen is, fittingly, Walter Cronkite’s. And Dench gave the ride its most-quoted line of all, an instruction every rider now knows by heart: thank the Phoenicians.

This recording is the complete current ride-through. When you’re finished, the archive holds the whole line of succession: Jeremy Irons before her, Walter Cronkite before him, and Vic Perrin’s original at the head of the line — or you can strip the voices away entirely with the instrumental version.