Walt Disney’s Carousel of Progress

Walt Disney’s Carousel of Progress 1975-Present

No attraction at Walt Disney World has traveled further to get here. Walt Disney created the Carousel of Progress for General Electric’s pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, where it was one of the fair’s most popular shows; afterward it moved to Disneyland, playing there from 1967 to 1973, before crossing the country to open in the Magic Kingdom’s Tomorrowland on January 15, 1975. It has been turning there ever since — which makes this, astonishingly, a show Walt himself built, still in daily operation more than half a century after the fair.

The idea is in the name. The audience sits in a theater that itself rotates, carrying one room of onlookers around a family’s living rooms across the twentieth century: the turn of the century, with gas lamps and a hand-cranked kitchen; the 1920s, with electricity arriving wire by wire; the 1940s, with a kitchen finally full of labor-saving machines; and a modern finale that has been gently updated over the years. John, the father, narrates each leap forward, the family dog barks at the future, and every act lets out into the Sherman Brothers’ theme, “There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow” — written for this show, and still its whole philosophy in one chorus.

This recording is the complete show, all four acts and the song that stitches them together. Its optimism had descendants: at Epcot, Horizons was built openly in the Carousel’s image, following one family into the century after next — and in Tomorrowland itself, the Carousel’s nearest stage neighbor is another tireless performer, Sonny Eclipse, on duty at Cosmic Ray’s since 1994.