There’s No Place Like World Showcase (The World Showcase March)
Some Disney songs get a ride, a parade season, and a track on the souvenir album. There’s No Place Like World Showcase got almost none of that. Richard M. and Robert B. Sherman wrote it for the opening of EPCOT Center in October 1982, it served as the theme of the World Showcase Parade on opening night — and then, after only a handful of performances, it slipped away. It was left off the park’s official album, and no commercial release of it has ever surfaced. What you are listening to above is the song itself: two minutes and twenty-seven seconds of Sherman Brothers pageantry, written to salute a brand-new ring of nations around a Florida lagoon.
There’s No Place Like World Showcase: A Theme Song for Opening Night
EPCOT Center opened on October 1, 1982 — exactly eleven years after the Magic Kingdom — and World Showcase was its second gate’s worth of ambition in a single sweep: nine pavilions arranged around a mile-long promenade and a broad lagoon. Mexico, China, Germany, Italy, The American Adventure, Japan, France, the United Kingdom, and Canada stood ready that first morning; Morocco and Norway would not join until later in the decade. The Sherman Brothers, Disney’s house songwriters, were given the job of giving that ring of nations a theme, and they answered with a march whose chorus is pure Sherman lift: “Oh there’s no-o-o place, like World Show-ow-owcase on the face of the whole wide world!”
On the evening of October 1, the World Showcase Parade stepped off around that promenade: hundreds of dancers, musicians, and costumed characters circling the water with the march as its theme. The Shermans themselves later recalled that the parade “was only performed a handful of times before it disappeared forever” — and the song went with it. The march was also heard through the month’s dedication ceremonies, and when the whole park was formally dedicated on October 24, 1982, a 450-piece marching band of college players from across the country performed it alongside the opening anthem “We’ve Just Begun to Dream.”
The March the Album Left Behind
A song can survive a cancelled parade if it makes the record. There’s No Place Like World Showcase never did. When Disneyland Records released The Official Album of Walt Disney World EPCOT Center in 1983 — twelve tracks drawn from the park’s first year, from the Main Entrance Medley to the Kitchen Kabaret Medley — the World Showcase March was not among them. The omission has held for more than four decades: Walt Disney Records’ The Music of EPCOT, the 23-track retrospective released in 2026, leaves it out as well. In 2015 the reissue label The Second Disc listed the song by name among the Sherman Brothers’ unreleased “lost treasures” of Disney park music, which is about as official as a rarity gets.
One Last Lap: Skyleidoscope
The march did circle the lagoon once more. In September 1985, EPCOT Center premiered Skyleidoscope, a daytime spectacular of kites, ultralight aircraft, and fireworks over World Showcase Lagoon, hosted in its story by Dreamfinder. There’s No Place Like World Showcase was woven into the show — its only known afterlife anywhere. Skyleidoscope closed in the fall of 1987, and when it ended, the march left the park for good. No later parade, show, or album in any source we checked has brought it back.
Hearing It Today
Who performs on this recording, and exactly when it was made, is not documented in any source we could find — the song’s paper trail simply runs that cold. What is documented is the tune itself, and it deserves its two minutes back in the open. If it puts you in an opening-era EPCOT mood, keep the evening going with the Main Entrance medley that greeted those same first guests in 1982, the film still playing across the lagoon in Impressions de France, and the original IllumiNations, which eventually inherited the lagoon at night.