Word: epcot
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...Epcot Center, a toytown to entertain and educate...
Unlike Alexander the Great, Walter Elias Disney never ran out of worlds to conquer. This week, nearly 16 years after his death, the most ambitious of all the great fantasist's projects opens at Disney World in central Florida. Named Epcot Center, Disney's last, vast vision is a combination world's fair, theme park and dream factory executed at a cost to date of $900 million. Like the Magic Kingdom at Disney World and California's Disneyland, it is destined to become a part of the American experience, but with a difference. Unlike its predecessors...
While Disney's successors have clung to the founder's ugly acronym (Epcot stands for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow), they have departed from his Utopian concept of a real-life community evolving in harmony with an ever changing and beneficent technology. What they have wrought is not the town but the adult toy of the future. Epcot is a mind-pummeling assault of electronic ingenuity, historical fact, fancy, showmanship, faith, hope...
...fairway consists of two principal areas: Future World and World Showcase, both intended, in the words of Disney's trumpeters, to "satisfy the imaginative appetites of the tens of millions of people . . . destined to become 'Epcot travelers.' " Visitors enter through a building that is already a symbol of the center: an 18-story geosphere called Spaceship Earth. Inside they are whisked along a track to view a depiction of man's evolution in communications from cave to spaceship, glimpsing such wonders as Gutenberg's print shop, an Audio-Animatronic Alexander Graham Bell inventing the telephone...
Despite, or maybe because of, the sanitizing, Epcot is bound to be a huge success. Though the new venture is more than half financed from its own assets, the Disney organization is no longer the magic profitmaker that Uncle Walt bequeathed. Disney films have flopped almost without exception since Mary Poppins in 1964; the organization's celluloid bid for adult acceptance, TRON, has yet to recoup its $22 million expenditure. The recession and the declining appeal of its theme parks have reduced attendance at Disneyland and the Magic Kingdom. Epcot Center is expected to attract 9 million admissions...