World Of Motion By General Motors
The World of Motion was EPCOT Center’s great comic pageant of transportation, and this post preserves its complete ride audio: Gary Owens’ deadpan narration, the TransCenter’s echoes, and above all Buddy Baker and X Atencio’s “It’s Fun to Be Free,” restyled a dozen ways across fourteen centuries of travel. World of Motion carried more Audio-Animatronics figures than any Disney ride before it, all of them in on the joke. It opened with the park in 1982 and closed in 1996 — the first of the original Future World rides to vanish for good.
It’s Fun to Be Free
General Motors was the first corporation to sign on as an EPCOT sponsor, and its pavilion — a great round building shaped like a wheel — housed an Omnimover ride through the history of getting around. The design team leaned on two of Disney’s funniest men, Marc Davis and Ward Kimball, and their sight gags filled every scene: cavemen nursing sore feet, a used-chariot lot, the world’s first traffic jam. Against all this, the narration stayed magnificently straight-faced. Gary Owens, the announcer of Laugh-In fame, delivered the history of transportation as though it were a state occasion, and the contrast is the comedy engine of the whole ride — and of this recording.
The World of Motion pavilion in 1989 — guests spiraled up the building’s outdoor ramp to board. Photo: Larry Koester, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).
The scale of the thing deserves a pause. The Omnimover chain ran some 1,730 feet of track through roughly thirty scenes, and in its prime the ride moved on the order of twenty thousand guests a day — it was one of Future World’s great people-eaters, absorbing the crowds Spaceship Earth couldn’t, and amusing them so thoroughly that few noticed they were being processed. The theme song played in the queue as well as on the ride, so by the time you boarded, you already knew the tune by heart.
The score did the same trick in reverse, taking one cheerful tune dead seriously in every period style imaginable. “It’s Fun to Be Free” — music by Norman “Buddy” Baker, lyrics by X Atencio, the team behind “Grim Grinning Ghosts” — turns up as ragtime, as Dixieland, as a Broadway showstopper, as a Copland-esque western cue, even on kazoos, as the ride rolls from foot power through the wheel, the steam age and the freeway, ending in the speed tunnel and CenterCore, a city of the future in perpetual motion where a Pepper’s Ghost effect seated guests in bubble cars of tomorrow. Disembarking, you entered the TransCenter, GM’s hands-on future showroom, where the Bird and the Robot held court and concept cars turned slowly under the lights.
World of Motion Gives Way to Speed
By the early nineties GM wanted a thrill ride, and on January 2, 1996, World of Motion closed — breaking down, in a finale almost too perfect, halfway through its last ceremonial ride, with company executives aboard to walk out. The building was gutted and rebuilt as Test Track, which finally opened on March 17, 1999, and still occupies the old wheel today; its 2020s redesign openly salutes the ride it replaced. But the Omnimover pageant itself — nearly fifteen minutes, some thirty scenes, the largest animatronic cast Disney had ever fielded — exists now only in memory and in audio like this. Play it and listen to Gary Owens insist, over the chaos of history, that it has always been fun to be free.
The entrance sign in June 1989. Photo: Larry Koester, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).
For more Future World music of the same era, the park’s original entrance medley quotes this ride’s theme in its seven-song suite — World of Motion was the third stop on that loop, right after “Golden Dream” and before “Listen to the Land.”