Video from the opening of Epcot Center's Spaceship Earth

Dan R sez, "This corporate news piece from the opening of 'Spaceship Earth' has plenty to offer the casual to semi-rabid technology fan who is also partial to World's Fair-esque exhibits about the FUTURE! Great footage of 'Spaceship Earth's' exhibits abound, and the film also features other highlights of EPCOT, including Exxon's 'Universe of Energy,' replete with animatronic dinosaurs."

I got trapped on Spaceship Earth during opening month (it had been going down sporadically all day, resulting in heroic queues), just as we reached the top. After a long wait at the apex, we all got to walk down the stairs to get out. It was my first look backstage at a ride. It was seminal.

Chronicle News Update: EPCOT (Thanks, Dan R!)

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MORE: corporatism • Disney • epcot • futurism • happy mutants • Old school • submitterator

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robdobbs

Well, the Exxon exhibit isn’t there anymore.
- http://twitter.com/MicaR Monica Roddey
  
  The Universe of Energy is absolutely still there. Now it’s “Ellen’s Energy Adventure” with Ellen DeGeneres. Exxon was the sponsor of the pavilion until 2004.
Sagodjur

Ah, the golden days of my youth. I remember being completely fascinated by all the (now I realize) simple computer games they had. Basic games about navigating cars through traffic from a bird’s eye view or picture jigsaw puzzles.

My favorite exhibits were the World of Motion’s concept cars and the Norway ride. The country exhibits that didn’t have rides were boring. China’s exhibit was a theater without seats – how fun…
- http://www.tulgeywooddesigns.com Amphigorey
  
  The “Reflections of China” CircleVision movie is beautiful, and contains one of the best pieces of subversion I’ve seen anywhere, especially at a Disney park: The narrator, playing the Chinese poet Li Bai, quotes Marco Polo as saying that Suzhou is the Venice of the East. In a sly poke at Eurocentrism, Li Bai says that if he had visited Venice, it might have been called the Suzhou of the West.
  - Sagodjur
    
    My bratty 8 year old self disagrees with you and wants to go back and ride Star Tours again for the fourth time in a row.
MatthewKrohn

EPCOT has always been my favorite park!
David Aked

Not overly related to the story, but a technical complaint. That video is kind of offensive in the bandwidth. It downloads automatically without me clicking anything. Coming from a country that loves to cap bandwidth, it’s a pain in the rear-end. Could you please link a site that doesn’t (typo edit) force itself on you? (Even if this comment gets moderated, that’s fine. It means it’s been read by someone inside).
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_ZSXBAQDZHMI4PTZU4HHIRK4WDI BirukM

Some parts of the park won’t open until 1983, 1984? I can’t wait ’till then.
sam1148

It was pretty ground breaking at the time. I especially remember the kiosks around the park. Which had laser disk inside to show to highlights of the resturants, menus, etc.
With a ‘touch screen’. To zoom in on information..a short film of the resturant. Or ask for a ‘path’ from your present location to resturant.

Choose a resturant. Touch “Make reservation” you’re connected to a live video chat from reservation central with two way video. (remember this was 1982 or so). Connected to a real person, dressed in polyester EPCOT costume–that would either make the reservation, or suggest something that’s open if your choice was booked up. They could see you and interact and you could see them.
The touch screens worked via a array of photo optic sensors mounted around the video screen, as there were no ‘touch screens’ as we know them today.
For the early 80′s that was something not seen before on a large scale.
And the video portion of the information was pretty good for the time.
jeligula

We got stuck on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disney Land in 1978. What made this much worse was that the boat stuck right at the entrance and we had to listen to that damned skull with the horrible pirate accent for two hours. When someone tried to get out of the boat to push it, a loud speaker told us to keep our seats for own safety. It finally came unjammed, or they fixed whatever was broken in the cavern itself and allowed us through. It was well past 10 pm when we got out of the ride and we got a golf cart trip through a darkened park to the entrance. It was kind of spooky with all the lights out and nobody around.
- Hanglyman
  
  DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES!
naufragio

Monopolies* sure did build some neat stuff!

*AT&T pre-divestiture
hagbard

I rode on the Spaceship Earth ride the day before Epcot opened. My friend had learned that Epcot was secretly opened the day before, so the press could write about it. This was especially cool because the opening ceremonies the next day were held inside the park with very important people only, while us mehums loitered outside, unable to see or hear what was going on.

They were still working the bugs out on the attractions: the Spaceship Earth ride broke down when we were very near the top. We sat there waiting for perhaps 10 minutes. Then they decided they weren’t going to have it running anytime soon, so the lights came up, and we had to climb down. I was surprised to find walkways and stairs along every bit of the track. In retrospect this seems perfectly obvious. With the lights on, all of the machinery that makes it work was exposed, and it suddenly became far far more interesting than it had been.

I agree with Amphigorey about how beautiful Reflections of China was.
Vanwall

Getting stuck on a ride is sometimes fun. I was on a boat when it ran off the guide rails in the Jungle Cruise at Disneyland and was trapped on it for a while, while it was a fair ways out on the run. The fun part was having another boat come down the river and pull up alongside, rail to rail, while we debarked on the crippled ship and boarded the new one mid-stream. Unfortunately, we weren’t allowed to grab the roof rail and swing over the gunwales in Crimson Pirate style.

The other fun time getting stuck at Disneyland was when the Yippies invaded in 1970, and they closed the whole park early. We had been on Tom Sawyer’s Island most of the day, just running around, and had no idea the Yippies were headquartered there. We were directed out to the front gate and often were going behind some of the scenery and back areas of the rides, it was pretty interesting. Main Street was lined with riot cops and one of the guys we recognized from the island jumped a cop and was slammed down in a cloud of nightsticks and hustled out right in front of us. Hell, that was more fun than any ride, we thought.
Frank W

I’m still stuck on Spaceship Earth and where the hell are the escape pods?
- http://noctilucent-studios.blogspot.com/ Noctilucent Studios
  
  You can find the escape pods right here.
  
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethyltryptamine
hexmonkey

BUT WHAT WAS THE GIFT!!!???
SHeadius

Where the video should be I see “missing plugin”.

Recent beta of Chrome, Win7x64, blahblahblah.

What am I missing?
jkonrath

When I went in the winter of 1983, there was a cold snap and all of the generators were working above capacity to drive the heaters, and it was causing a bunch of rides to get stuck. We got stuck on Spaceship Earth, and it was right at the point of the burning Rome scene. There wasn’t power to keep the tracks running, but the smellitizer was fully operational, so we got to sit in the nice fake burning smell for a half hour.