WHEN the EPCOT Centre opened in 1982 it could not have been farther removed from Walt Disney’s original vision. Disney had wanted to build an “experimental prototype community of tomorrow”, or EPCOT, a Utopian town of 20,000 where a towering city centre would be covered by a dome, where there would be full employment and where new ideas and technologies were always being tested. When Disney died in 1966 that dream died with him. His successors turned EPCOT into a theme park that resembled a permanent world’s fair. Half of it was given over to visions of the future sponsored by corporations. The other half was a “world showcase” containing national pavilions with reproduction architecture—a faux-English pub in Britain, a miniature Piazza San Marco in Italy.
More than three decades after it opened, EPCOT remains hugely popular. It is the sixth-most-visited theme park in the world. It caters mostly to adults: bachelor parties and 21st-birthday drinking binges come for the “drink around the world” challenge, which involves drinking at each nation’s pavilion (avoid the Norwegian aquavit). The...Continue reading
Source: United States http://ift.tt/2i6dgVa
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