I’ve made no secret of the fact that Vasily Korsokovach‘s love of Disneyland comes directly from me. I’ve been a fan of Disney for as long as I can remember, and ached something awful when my best friend was able to visit Walt Disney World during the late 1970s. One of the worst things my parents did to me was to add the newly created Disney Channel to our cable package, for while it routinely played amazing content from the archives, it also provided a mind-blowing play-by-play account of EPCOT Center as it was being built. The early 1980s were a time before the internet, so these tastefully crafted teases of what was to come down in Florida were irresistible, especially to the Saturday Morning Cartoon Set.
My worlds collided when William Shatner hosted the opening festivities in 1982; I honestly don’t remember what channel aired it, but I do recall forcing my family to switch to it so we wouldn’t miss a moment of what was being unveiled. And then that wound up not being the end of it, for over the next few years, even more stuff got added to EPCOT, all of it carefully documented by the Disney Channel.
By the time I was able to visit the park, EPCOT Center had become, simply, Epcot, but in 1995 it was still fairly close to the original concept. I spent nearly an hour talking to someone from Oracle about relational databases at their booth in Innoventions, then saw some impressive demos of what was being called “broadband internet,” something that offered speeds higher than the dial-up modems we’d been stuck using. Kodak was demoing the first wave of digital cameras, and out on the lawn, John Deere had a solar-powered robot cutting the grass.
World Showcase was insanely interesting for someone like me, whose passport is rather devoid of entry stamps. Having lived in Maine, I’d once visited Canada, but walking around the lagoon at Epcot told me there was far more to explore. Interacting with people in the pavilions and learning about their culture (while enjoying the representative food and spirits each had on offer) was an eye-opening experience, one that I still find on each subsequent return just as cool.
The park has changed quite a bit in the years since I was there that first time; attractions have come and gone, and the Disney characters that had been conspicuously absent in the early years have begun to creep into every corner. It’s not a terribly bad thing — such updates keep the experience fresh and new — but there are times when I find myself nostalgic for the park I’d once known. Thankfully, I have a ton of photos from my various visits, enough to continue to remind me of what once was.
Will I go again? That’s a hard question to answer now that I live so much closer to Disneyland than Walt Disney World. The experiences of the two parks are so fundamentally different, though, that I find myself leaning into the probably, why is this even a question? category, especially given just how much I truly enjoy the time I spend at Epcot. For there just isn’t a park like it anywhere else in the world.