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World of Motion
1982 -
1996
"Ride through the evolution
of transportation and see just why 'it's 'fun
to be free''
" -
1982 EPCOT Center Guide |
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World of
Motion
Extinct Attraction
Location:
Future
World,
EPCOT Center
Opened: October 1, 1982
Closed: January 2, 1996
Contributing
Personnel:
Buddy
Baker, Claude Coats,
Marc Davis,
Ward Kimball,
Ken
O'Connor
Narrator:
Gary Owens
Bibliography: WDW
Eyes & Ears April 30,
1982 Realityland by David Koenig, 2007
Descendant of:
If You Had
Wings
(1972-1987)
Location
Later Became: Test Track
(1998-)
All images
copyright The Walt Disney Company. Text 2011 by Mike
Lee
I'd like to acknowledge the
assistance of Alice and Marc Davis, Thomas Hance, Kelly Norris and Ross Plesset with
their assistance on WYW's World of
Motion research
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Last
Update
to this page: December 30, 2011 (additional video and images added)
PART I
- World Of Motion Overview
PART II
-
World Of Motion Images, Audio and
Video
PART III
-
Links to
Other World Of Motion Resources & Sites
Part I - World Of Motion
Overview
For thirteen years, General Motors'
World of Motion contained within its
circular walls some of the absolute best elements that EPCOT Center and
Walt Disney World ever had to offer. That included the largest
cast of audio-animatronic figures (most counts put
it at 140) ever used in a single Disney attraction combined with detailed sets, a
massive array of projector effects, distinctively lighthearted
music and the versatility of the Omnimover ride
system to illustrate a comical history of man's quest
to "travel from here to there" by increasingly efficient - and
expedient - means. When guests exited their
ride vehicles, they passed through the TransCenter
post-show which contained a variety of exhibits geared toward the future of automotive travel
and mass-transit systems, back when that might have been something
apart from everyone in 2069 wondering whatever happened to the Aero
2000 while they're still driving around in cars
that look like they were designed in
2022. Plus, no
peoplemovers.
A Transportation Pavilion was one
of the earliest original planned
elements of EPCOT Center, going back to 1975 when the concept for a
"Future World Theme Center" was first floated out by WED Enterprises
(Walt Disney Productions' design & engineering arm, later known as
WDI) as a complement to the just-slightly-older plans for a
"World Showcase." By that time, the 1966 plans for EPCOT as an
actual city had been definitively tabled by Card Walker, president of WDP, in favor of what was
quickly becoming a two-parks-in-one approach. The
proliferation of the term pavilions in
the company's descriptions of EPCOT was a solid indicator that
this new development would be kickin' it World's Fair-style, as were the
concept renderings and models being produced at WED. After the
work Disney had done for the Ford Motor Company,
Pepsi-Cola, General Electric and the State of Illinois at the
1964 New York World's Fair, the men and women of WED were clearly
familiar with what it took to make entertaining
landmark attractions tailored to the needs
of well-heeled sponsors.
This time they were going to make one for General
Motors. GM's involvement came about largely because of a chance
meeting between WED's Bob Gurr and GM's head of design, Bill Mitchell,
at a 1976 art school dedication in Los
Angeles. The "Big Three" automaker entered into discussions
with Disney that year and signed a sponsorship agreement on the last
business day of 1977, making
GM the first official EPCOT Center participant.
At the 1964 World's Fair, GM had sponsored Futurama, the Fair's most
popular exhibit. This fact was not lost on WED Enterprises, whose
four shows had been close runners-up, and they intended to deliver an
even more compelling presentation for GM in Florida. But whereas
Futurama had focused on futuristic habitats on the moon, under the sea and
in the jungle**, GM's EPCOT Center pavilion would be more squarely focused
on the evolution of transportation and, before the experience was
completed, tie that in directly with modern-day GM cars and
prototypes.
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Claude
Coats - a
veteran Disney Studios artist and one of WYW's
favorite WED heavyweights - did a large amount of design work on
early versions of the Transportation Pavilion. Former WED
employee Kelly Norris said that Coats' work was accomplished but somewhat
stoic, with GM reportedly wanting something a little more Disney i.e., a little
more fun. And this is where World of Motion's history hits a fork in
the road. If you would have spoken to anyone from Disney at
the time of EPCOT Center's opening, they'd have told you
that their longtime animator Ward Kimball was the loony
genius who infused World of Motion with its requisite humor. And if you had read
any of the newspaper or magazine articles published about the park
back then, you'd have come away with that same impression. The
only problem with that story - one I'd read and believed for seventeen years
- is that it wasn't
exactly true. Kimball DID work on World of Motion, but he was not
a one-stop-shopping maverick that brought the attraction around from its c.
1978 presentational origins to the gag-laden, dioramic banquet that opened
to the public in 1982. That credit belongs largely to Marc
Davis.
Like Kimball,
Davis was a key
Disney animator with many
iconic character designs (including Tinker Bell and Maleficent) under his belt. He had joined
WED in 1963 and in the ensuing ten years would be,
along with Coats, one of the two artists most responsible for defining what constitutes a "classic"
Disney attraction, namely the signature blend of humor, staging and
animatronics found in Pirates of the Caribbean and the Haunted
Mansion. Davis
had retired from WED in 1978, but was
approached by the company almost immediately afterward to provide material for
the General Motors pavilion. His notoriously prolific work ethic led to dozens
of
renderings for
GM, among them were the above rendering of an octopus wrapped around a
shipwreck, a vintage plane flying low over a farmer milking a cow (causing the
cow to run away), a caveman carrying a bear on his back, an
overcrowded streetcar and a man in a hot air balloon with birds
swarming toward him.
That Davis would have come up with a
lot of material is no surprise. What's noteworthy is that much of his art
was translated almost verbatim into an attraction for which
Kimball was brought in to do further work, and
for which Kimball received press coverage. WOM's crocodiles ready to nip the toes of the
man on the raft, the paintings of watercraft projected behind that scene, the Chinese
man being pulled in a rickshaw, the
bull holding up a steam coach ... all of these and many more find their
genesis in Davis's work; some were used without revision. I
was fortunate enough to see a lot of this art during a 1999 interview with
Davis, his wife Alice and Ross Plesset, which is how I learned of
Davis's involvement with the ride. Although not present in his notebook at
the time, Davis said he had also conceived of the pavilion's showpiece
scene, "the first traffic jam" - in which a motorist has shattered
a horsedrawn produce cart on a busy city street and caused backups in
all directions. It's a piece that Marty Sklar, former
vice-president of WDI, attributed to Ward Kimball according to Jeff
Kurtti's 2008 book Walt Disney's Imagineering Legends.
Below is a poor reproduction of a piece
of WOM concept art that was briefly on display at EPCOT's
Innoventions in 2007. It's definitely Marc Davis and anyone can see
that it's a precursor to the final traffic jam scene
that appeared in the ride (pictured to the right) with the key
elements in place. Having only seen some of Davis's
work on WOM and none
of Kimball's,
for me the record suggests a possible
Ken Anderson/Sam McKim/Haunted Mansion-style chicken or the
egg situation** surrounding two very talented and extremely deceased
individuals. Davis's work on WOM did start
coming to light publicly c. 2005 in some books and articles,
while more recent accounts of Kimball's role have characterized
him as a "consultant."*** As such, did he suggest the
traffic jam scene's final configuration that moved the panicked
horse to the foreground? Were some of the ride's scenes
entirely of Kimball's own doing? And where is his WOM artwork hiding if we've
seen that of Davis and other WED personnel such as Ken O'Connor?
I can't figure it out, but somebody else will; a 2010
blog post by Didier Ghez stated that someone had bought a box of Kimball's
WOM artwork on ebay and might build a website around it. That
would certainly help answer some
questions.
** This Futurama
subject matter became the springboard for everything WED was to do with
General Electric's EPCOT Center attraction, Horizons, with its colonies in
space, underwater cities and desert farms. Horizons ended
up sitting right next to World of Motion in Future World
East. It's tempting to characterize that as irony, but it seems
almost deliberate.
*** Kimball may have simply
found himself in the strange position of being "trotted out"
by WDP management looking to reinforce EPCOT Center's ties
to the time of Walt and, by inference, lending the
project additional credibility. John
Hench served a similar purpose at the time by virtue of
not just having worked directly with, but also by
resembling Walt
Disney to a certain extent. And if there's any
one result WDP management was
seeking from EPCOT Center in 1982, apart from people coming to see it,
that was to convince the world that Walt's last/greatest dream was
realized.
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Regardless of whose pen each flowed from, the
concept sketches led to another of WED's
magnificently intricate and fully-painted scale models,
covering all of the attraction's 31 show scenes.
This was an art form that artists such as Harriet Burns, Fred Joerger and Ken
O'Brien in the Model Shop had brought to miniature perfection in the
1960s. Although the handcrafted artistry of
modelmaking never lost its appeal or went away at WED, computer
modeling and sheer economics made the dimensionality, scale, level
of color and detail seen in those earlier models an
increasingly scarce sight as later parks and attractions were
developed. The EPCOT Center models, fortunately, were
well documented in pre-opening materials such as books and
postcards.
Construction on World of Motion, as well as the
sculpting process for its battalion of animatronics
(most requiring entirely new production vs. re-use of old molds and
tooling) began in 1979. The statistics involved with the
undertaking are impressive:
Building
Dimensions: 55' height, 320' diameter Ride System: Omnimover, 141
on 47 separate platforms - in groups of three vehicles per
platform Track Length: 1,750 feet Ride
Length: 14-1/2 minutes Hourly Capacity: 3,240
World of Motion yielded great construction
and in-development photos. By May of 1982 the pavilion was
nearing completion, according to the April 30, 1982 issue
of WDW cast newsletter "Eyes and Ears," and the sight of immense
props like railroad cars and classic automobiles being hoisted
through the open sides of the building by crane had been published
in The Orlando Sentinel, Orlando-Land magazine and several
national periodicals. Video footage of the man in the
stagecoach poking his head in and out of the window was being shown
virtually any time someone did a televised report on EC's
progress.
World of Motion opened to
the public on EPCOT Center's official opening date of October 1,
1982, but experienced operational problems such as the ride system
starting and stopping repeatedly throughout the day. The narration
by Laugh-In announcer Gary Owens also dropped in and out
of the ride vehicles, mid-sentence, for no apparent reason. These
problems were mostly resolved by month's end, however, and World of Motion
became one of the most heavily-visited and popular attractions in the
park.
Occupying the same
southeastern quadrant of Future World as the Odyssey Restaurant
and Communicore's EPCOT Poll, World of Motion was approached by guests from
the north or west on main Future World pathways just as Test Track was
still being accessed in 2011. The glass-covered outer surfaces of
the circular building constituted the near-whole of its exterior, framing
the entry alcove which featured one central support pillar
wrapped by the ride's first section of track. Guests could clearly
see that this was a slow-moving experience as they walked
into the open space, with the blue Omnimover vehicles twisting clockwise
from the ground floor up to the second level and entering a contoured hole
in the red wall - where the ride's show scenes began*. In the
background, a sixteen-minute loop of instrumental music putting twists on
the pavilion's theme song, It's Fun To Be Free by Buddy Baker and X. Atencio, echoed off the
walls and blue tiled floor. As with its predecessors like
If You Had Wings and It's A Small World, the entire
attraction featured variations on this upbeat theme, making it
hard to pinpoint one version as the "official" take. In this
courtyard area, the arrangement was predominantly symphonic,
with diversions into jazz, swing and country time
signatures.
* This was the best pavilion
entrance at EPCOT Center. Seeing the ride track twist up
through that open space was
irresistible.
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Once guests passed through the automatic glass doors
below the track and entered the queue's proper holding area, they
heard another sixteen-minute loop of music
that took the song in other directions with sound effects punctuating
the transitions. The sound of a biplane carried across
the room by a series of overhead speakers and was followed by a player
piano rendition of the music, the sound of a hot rod preceded a
vaguely Beach Boys version, etc.
These two loops of
music suggest that the indoor and outdoor queue areas were probably expected
to facilitate a 30-minute wait between the two of them, and the line did
on some occasions even exceed that duration and alloted space. That
was mainly during the park's early years and peak seasons, however, as more
of us remember walking right in and hopping on, more often than not, in
the late 1980s and early 1990s. My most memorable time spent in
that line was with a surly Amy Jones, in the summer of 1985, when
we spotted Bill Wadhams of Animotion a few minutes ahead of us in line
and played a round of "does anyone else know who that guy is?" We
concluded that no one else knew who that guy was.
The holding area
was fairly stark in terms of visual details, with attention drawn to the
elevated Load platform at the top of a ramp constituting the end leg of
the queue. The unending stream of Omnimover vehicles could be seen
departing the Load point and exiting the room to make the upward spiral in
the courtyard beyond. Along the opposite (northwest) side
of the room, a series of vertical silver panels were mounted on the curved
blue wall, each with a series of vertical groooves - most parallel, a few
tilted. Nowhere in EPCOT Center was there to be found a
queue, holding area or pre-show rivalling the Magic Kingdom's best
(such as Pirates, Space Mountain, If You Had Wings or even Mission To
Mars), and WOM presented a good example of that. Early EPCOT
Center's most interesting waiting areas were those for The American
Adventure and Kitchen Kabaret, which isn't saying much, and World of
Motion's would have been almost unbearable were it not for the sight
of Load ahead. Fortunately, the line moved pretty
fast.
Guests were directed onto a Speedramp by a host or hostess
and stepped into one of the ride's blue Omnimover cars, which of course
never stopped unless there was an operational problem, that rolled westward
toward a ramp that led up and outside to the aforementioned spiral.
Once seated, the vehicle doors closed autmatically and the voice
of narrator Gary Owens was heard through onboard speakers: "Ladies and
gentlemen, welcome to the wonderful World of Motion. General Motors
now invites you to travel the open road, to discover that when it comes to
transportation, it's always fun to be free."
During the climb, riders could see Communicore,
Spaceship Earth, Universe of Energy and Horizons in the
near-distance. Then they entered the hole in the red wall, which led
into a cave, and the narration of actual show scenes began with Owens
stating, "Throughout the ages, we have searched for freedom to move
from one place to another. In the beginning of course, there
was foot power. But with our first wandering steps, we quickly
discovered the need to improve our basic transportation." The
impressions of feet lit up against the stone walls* and the cars turned
left to face a cavewoman and caveman sitting on rocks, fanning and
blowing on their hot, red, blistered feet. A sleeping cavebaby
lay next to them, swaddled in a pelt-and-stick baby
carrier.
*Precursors to the glowing footsteps added to
WDW's Haunted Mansion in 2007.
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This first vignette established the tone for the rest of the
ride with its humor and in situ
dynamic; Benjamin Franklin may have been walking across the floor over at
The American Adventure, but World of Motion's cast were more likely
to be lamenting side effects of transit, demonstrating an
inability to get started or pretending to move when in truth they
just weren't going anywhere. Robida's flats
in Horizons got more traction than WOM's would-be
travellers. The scene also indicated something about EPCOT
Center that was (to me) kind of problematic i.e., TWO Future World rides
starting with cavepeople? TWO films in the park that made it
look like you're skiing off the edge of a snowy cliff? TWO
attractions depicting a space shuttle launch? TWO boat rides that
took you through a speakeasy where a hundred gangster
kids covered in custard sang a Paul Williams song?* I know they had different
Imagineers working on different pavilions, but come on!
"After years of stumbling
around, we launch a new idea: our first safe highway,
water."
Through reeds lining the shore of an
Egyptian river, guests saw a man reclining on a singled-masted wooden
raft, seemingly asleep with a smile on his
face, legs crossed and a foot dangling out, inches from the open mouth of a
crocodile. Two other crocs watched to see what would happen. On the
horizon line were those projections of watercraft that Davis had painted. A papyrus boat rested on the bank to the
right.
"On land, our animal friends
give us new freedom, and we test drive many new
models."
Spinning
back across the track to the right, the cars turned to face
a congregation of beasts and their riders backed up at
the walled
entrance to an ancient middle-eastern city. At the head of
the line, an old man in
rags tried to manage enough coin from a
burlap pouch to gain passage while the gatekeeper in his toll
booth shook his head in disapproval. The old man was leading, by rope,
a burro who was one pant away from collapsing beneath the oppressive weight of
sacks, baskets, bundles, gourds and a big woman whose face was hidden beneath a
blue veil. Just next to the burro,
a man struggled in vain to raise the posterior of an
similarly burdened and now-fallen zebra, whose extended tongue, rolled back eyes and back laden
with rope-bound parcels spoke to a wearying journey. A little further back, a
worried man riding an ostrich pulled a
basket of fruit back from the hungry face of
his conveyance ... not yet aware that the camel behind him,
whose master lay back contentedly between humps, was already partaking of grapes. Behind the camel,
a man and woman riding an elephant waited their turn patiently. A
boy riding a water buffalo, wooden sled in tow, occupied
the foreground next to the zebra. Above it all, a turbaned
man floated blissfully on a magic carpet with some kind of mystical orb
in his lap.
This was the first WOM scene
that, as a child, not only got
my
attention
but kind of blew my mind.
It rivalled the Pirates auction scene for LSGO** and set high expectations for what was yet
to come. So much to like and so little time to take
it in! It was the first and last time I've seen an
animatronic ostrich, for example, or a camel. And that
zebra ... I felt so bad for him even though I knew he wasn't real. Same for the donkey.
* I may have this particular item
confused with something I saw on HBO after a trip to EPCOT Center.
** Levels of S#!& Going On. Use the phrase in daily conversation to win friends
and influence people.
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Then the vehicles passed through
the city wall into the throne room of an Assyrian (I guess) palace, where
a crowned and bearded high potentate had summoned inventors to
present their concepts for "the wheel."
Your
Attention Please - WYW's
World of Motion page will expand into this space during a future
update. Isn't that an exciting
thought?
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Even though the Speed Rooms
could be construed as
a kind of budgetary cop-out - something to fill long stretches of
track that might have otherwise contained more amazing animatronic scenery -
we give WED no grief for them because Speed Rooms and TRON
footage are cool in their own right. It's just that the
juxtaposition of those rooms with the detail and humor that was
prevalent during the ride's first ten minutes made three Speed Rooms in a
row feel kind of weird, whereas in If You Had Wings seeing more film projections
at the end of a mainly film-driven experience made sense.
CenterCore, the ride's finale, is where WED got really strange on WOM.
After leaving the third Speed Room, vehicles
rounded a corner in complete darkness. Gary Owens'
voice rejoined riders: "Yes our world has indeed become a world of
motion. We have engineered marvels that take us swiftly over land
and sea, through the air and into space itself. And still bolder and
better ideas are yet to come, ideas that will fulfill our age-old dream to
be free; free in mind, free in spirit, free to follow the distant star
of our ancestors to a brighter tomorrow."*
The
ride vehicles entered a half-circle loop through the middle of the
building, where they all faced a large model of a future city at
night; hovering vehicles slowly spun through open spaces
or navigated the gaps between starkly vertical buildings
illuminated in twinkling lights as an ethereal version of the ride's
theme echoed throughout the room. You already knew from
the narration that there wasn't a lot of conceptual meat on this
particular bone, but is this really where Disney or GM thought our
motion-obsessed species was heading? All that wacky
travel stuff went down for thousands of years and we have this to
look forward to ... a disembodied, almost foreboding panorama devoid
of verve or mayhem? No way! What about a
rocket traffic jam? Martians holding up an intergalactic
train? A spaceman on an asteroid, blowing to cool
down his overheated jet boots? It was like a version
of the Haunted Mansion where, instead of all kinds of spooky
hell is breaking loose in the graveyard, you just see a landscape of
pretty tombstones bathed in blue light with an occasional distant
spirit flitting through the sky.
Of course some people
may have thought CenterCore was the best part of WOM
because in spite of what it wasn't, it was
futuristic. And it was, without question,
a pretty
thing to look at. It was just, in addition
to those two things, a misfit ending for this particular ride**.
"Ladies
and gentlemen, General Motors now invites you to share the challenge
of the future. We need you to help us shape tomorrow's mobility.
Just ahead is General Motors' exciting TransCenter. Join us behind
the scenes, where we are working to ensure that tomorrow's
world will continue to be a world of
motion."
Speaking of The Haunted Mansion, WED dipped one last
time into their Omnimover grab bag for a WOM coda ... guests as
hitchhiking ghosts. In a reversal of what WDW
visitors already knew from the Magic Kingdom, a few
seconds after leaving CenterCore guests saw themselves reflected
in a window to their left, riding inside "futuristic vehicles" that
were moving on an independent track behind the glass, lit
up just enough to be transparent. And then a GM concept
vehicle followed them home.
The final portion of the ride was the approach to
Unload and its Speedramp (belt moving the same speed as your
vehicles). Guests stepping off the belt and could see the
pathway to the Transcenter post-show ahead, beginning with blue neon
letters against a black stripe on the wall that proclaimed, "the future of
transportation is
here." The neon cut across
a large metallic silhouette of a human head, in
the center of which was a circular projection screen depicting
concepts for possible vehicles.
* That was Owen's lead-in to this scene for
the majority of WOM's operational years. His first version fit the
scene even less appropriately and can be heard in the live 1983 recording
in the Audio section below.
** Again, the
original Spaceship Earth had already covered the caveman angle and the
"let's picture a future that's in the dark and not exactly
joyful" angle.
The
conceit here was that TransCenter was more than just a display area
- it fronted a little bit as a laboratory-type environment
where a guest might expect to see GM engineers collaborating on ideas
for more aerodynamic cars and more fuel-efficient mass transit
systems. The truth, of course, was that the only GM employees to be
found were those distributing promotional literature for the company's
current line of cars on display in the showroom that constituted the
last section of TransCenter. Everything in between the ride and
those cars was good, clean,
we-have-no-actual-plans-to-build-any-of-this-crazy-stuff fun. Which
is not
to say that my mother-in-law's 2010 Prius doesn't look a little
bit like the Aero 2000. As for the Lean Machine and other concept
vehicles, though, not so much.
Your Attention Please -
WYW's World
of Motion page will expand into this space during a future update.
Will you come back for
more?
As
the links section in Part III will indicate, there
were solid World of Motion testimonials online for years
(the same is true of Horizons) before I started writing this page, which
tries not to duplicate the efforts of those who provided
their own tributes. In truth, Widen Your
World's coverage of early EPCOT Center was slim for so long in
part because of those other sites and a pronounced online presence on
the part of original Future World fans*. And then there's the
simple fact that few people really care what I have to say
about
World of Motion! But they
might like seeing more pictures. So having said that, and
having said everything else, it's high time to retreat into darkness and
listen to live theme park recordings.
* Including
Hitler, strangely enough, who had a soft spot for
Dreamfinder.
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