Space in the Eighties: Vintage EPCOT, Gerard K. O’Neill, and A Little Spark of Imagination
When EPCOT Center was brand new, Horizons was the place to be.
Forget the hours-long lines waiting in the hot Florida sunshine for Figment popcorn buckets: EPCOT Center during the 1980s was indisputably awesome. The original Journey Into Imagination ride, featuring Dreamfinder and his dragon Figment, will always be better than the retooled ride — and may have boasted one of Disney’s catchiest-ever songs. Spaceship Earth was narrated by the avuncular Walter Cronkite, and was epic. The Canada pavilion had a superbadass Circle-Vision 360° movie, and the whole park was redolent of an exciting, switched-on future where communication was just a television-phone call away (sound familiar? Zoom much?), and robot butlers tidied up our living rooms…in space. Which brings me to the greatest ride of them all at early EPCOT Center: Horizons, which was sponsored by General Electric.
Opened on October 1st, 1983, one year after EPCOT Center was opened to the public, Horizons was part of the center’s “Future World,” which endeavored to showcase what to expect during the world’s next century. Indeed, Horizons was…
