I know, I know. The acronym EPCOT was dropped back in 1994 for the simple non-word Epcot. EPCOT originally stood for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. It was Walt Disney’s dream that EPCOT would be a real city.
Walt’s dream was to create the perfect city with a central commercial area surrounded by a residential community. The plan was to have 20,000 residents who would try out new ideas and materials that would eliminate the social ills found in other American cities. There would be schools, preschools, community centers, and churches but no unemployment, retirees, land ownership or voting rights. Walt Disney would be the king of it all.
Cutting edge technologies like mass transit would eliminate personal cars. Walt was quoted as saying “EPCOT will always be a showcase to the world for the ingenuity and imagination of American free enterprise.” Collaborating with such companies as General Electric, Westinghouse, and RCA was key to Walt’s plan to make EPCOT a laboratory for their most cutting-edge technologies. The plan was to make EPCOT a city free of accidents, noise and pollution.
Sadly, Walt died late in 1966 and just shortly before construction on Walt Disney World began in 1967. Disney’s board of directors promptly decided to dump the idea of Walt’s perfect city of the future. It wasn’t until 1978 when then Disney CEO E. Cardon Walker decided to produce a scaled-down version of Walt’s EPCOT dream. On October 1, 1982, the $260 acre and $1 billion EPCOT Center opened. While they kept the focus on showcasing American technology in Future World, the rest of the park showcased various world cultures in a World’s Fair style format.
While it is a far cry from Walt’s original dream, EPCOT is a financial success due to it’s immense popularity with over 10 million visitors every year. Walt, were he alive today, might be disappointed with what his dream for EPCOT has become but it is a safe bet that his accountant certainly would not have been.
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