Expanding Our Horizons

The sign that for so many years welcomed guests to take a look over our Horizons. (Picture courtesy of WDWMagic.com)

October 1^st marks the 25^th anniversary of the opening of Horizons, a much revered attraction at EPCOT Center in Walt Disney World. This Future World exhibit was one of the best representations of Walt Disney’s original concept for EPCOT-that of an actual community utilizing progressive technologies and ideas for better living. While it’s brethren in Future World focused on future concepts in transportation, energy, agriculture, communication and imagination, Horizons focused on a futuristic setting that utilizes all of these concepts, showing how a family might live with all of these progressions as an accepted aspect of society. While these concepts were already over 15 years ahead of what Walt had envisioned before his death, they were an entertaining depiction of the type of living he had hoped people would actually have in his Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow.

Horizons opened a year after EPCOT opened to the public. My family and I had gone to Disney World for the first time in 1982, just missing EPCOT’s launch that following Fall, so by the time we visited EPCOT for the first time in 1984, Horizons was an existing part of Future World. It instantly became a favorite for not only my family but apparently other families as well. I was 10 years old at the time, just old enough to enjoy the wonder of the attraction yet too young to grasp the technicality of it all. However, we’d return to Disney World and EPCOT in ‘86 and ‘88 (as well as ‘91 and ‘92) which allowed me to grow up with extractions like Horizons around me, connecting with the concept of it more each time.

The Horizons building was cleverly built to emulate the perspective of looking towards the horizon. It also looked like a spaceship! (Courtesy of WDWMagic.com)

This is a large part of why I appreciate so much of the Disney aesthetic because I was fortunate enough to have spent the formative years of my childhood vacationing there and thus allowing so much of what I saw to imprint on my growing mind. In many cases, this was just for shear entertainment value. However, it had a large influence on areas of creativity for me, including design, architecture, conceptualizing and storytelling.

Horizons was essentially a sequel to Walt Disney’s Carousel of Progress, which details the large steps in progress mankind-and particularly one audio-animatronic family—had made throughout the 20th century, including the ever-shifting future. Horizons took the futuristic aspect and ran with it into the 21st century, expanding this idea to not only include entertaining visions of the future but also practical, relevant advances in technology. The dark ride started with a look back to the future, showcasing perceptions of the future through the eyes of Jules Verne and up through the 1950s. Then you’re shuttled past two Omnimax screens depicting the ongoing advancement of technologies (at the time). (Of note, you now know Omnimax as IMAX, but at the time, very few had seen something like this.)

At this point, you now witness these technologies being applied in futuristic settings in cities, out in the desert, underwater and in space, quite literally around the world.  Disney utilized it’s a combination of audio-animatronic and real film to depict these settings. At the time, concepts such as voice-activation or videophones seemed truly futuristic and yet many of these concepts are either a reality today or are very clearly on their way there. There’s a memorable part of the ride where you pass through an orange grove scene and you actually can smell oranges. This really underlines how successfully Disney displayed a fully immersive experience.  My memory can still smell those oranges. The finale of the ride allowed each omnimover vehicle to choose their method of transportation back to the fictional FuturePort. Buttons lit up on the dashboard on the doors of the vehicle, allowing the riders to choose a half-minute ending film that took you through space-colonization, arid-zone agriculture and ocean colonization. All the more reason to go on the ride 2 or 3 more times! (And I distinctly recall doing just that with this attraction, particularly when we saw there wasn’t a long line to get back on!)

A vintage Horizons postcard. That scene on the upper right is at the point of the ride where you smell the aforementioned oranges.

But the sun eventually set on Horizons before the end of the Millennium, ironically enough. The attraction had a reprieve when EPCOT started a refurbishment of Horizons’ neighbors in Future World. But eventually the lack of sponsorship and a rumored problem with structural integrity would close it down for good. Unfortunately, I took my last ride on Horizons in 1994 and by the time I started frequenting Disney World again in the early millennium, it was gone. In 2005, I was able to visit Mission: SPACE, the successor to Horizons. A wild ride that simulates g-force, I couldn’t help but feel that the thrills came at the cost of that wonder that Horizons provided. It just isn’t the same.

When I think back fondly to the ‘80s and the things that really made an imprint on my life, our family trips to Walt Disney World are a significant part of those memories. And Horizons is one of the highlight attractions of those trips. There are dozens more I’ll write about in this space that I rode in the ‘80s and was still able to ride as recently as 2005 and every time I revisit those attractions, I get that spark of nostalgia and feel like a kid again. Horizons is the king of the attractions whose light went out too soon.

EPCOT was always full of breathtaking nighttime visuals and Horizons was a big part of that.

Click These! Disney fans are a notoriously abundant and passionate fanbase and the internet has only helped proliferate our fandom into all facets of the medium. Horizons1.com is neat little site with history, facts, photos and media on the attraction. There are also plenty of fan-filmed ride-through videos on Bit Torrent; I use MouseBits as my search mechanism for the best of these videos (including a number of Horizons videos). ExtinctAttractions sells documentaries of past Disney attractions on DVDs, including one on Horizons. And my friends at WDWMagic form a great community of fellow fans for discussing Disney attractions past, present and future. That’s where I scooped the great photos in this post from. (I also have a link in the post to EPCOT Central’s post on the smell of oranges at Horizons; check out their other stuff.)