The other day my fiancee and I visited Disney World's EPCOT center. All in all it was a tiring experience for the following reasons:

(1) It was incredibly crowded and generally people react in subtley hostile ways to fellow strangers when crammed together in large numbers. The "Living Seas" was a massive wait in a huge line from one waiting room to another. I felt like I was a refugee being processed. All in all I did not get a very friendly impression from this vacation spot or about human nature, in general.

(2) The Disney "cast" (their word for "staff", ok, fine with me) all wore these massive, phony perma-grins, seemingly etched into their faces. They all smiled with their mouths and not their eyes. It was somewhat surreal. I knew this is how they are trained, but in a way I felt sorry for them.

(3) The implicit message around EPCOT is that the technology or corporate giants will "save" the world and make it a safe, green, cheerful, multicultural environment where borders will fade and the human family will be one. Now this is a nice thought on the surface, but it is also a very heavy one, weighed with difficult ramificiations. Around every corner I felt I was being "preached at" by some variation of this message--usually in reference to how we humans need to behave in the "new millenniun." I kept thinking, "If EPCOT center touts itself as the quinessential celebration of human progress, I'm afraid Progress (as seen by Disney) is going to bring us a very nervewracking next 1000 years!"

(4) While the themes and pagentry of EPCOT tended to clash rather abrasively, nowhere did it clash and clamor as loudly as in their so-called "millennium parade." I first got an inkling that something was up when a couple of guys in a strange contraption went rolling through the park. Somber (almost tearfully so), maudlin bagpipe-sounding stuff blared from their wheels. Then about a half hour later the big parade started. It was extremely difficult to navigate through the crowds as we were in a bit of a rush to see the big attractions and had little patience for this spectacle. Artistically it looked pretty cool in a bizarre way--kind of like a Mummer's Parade on hallucinagens. At the head of it was a character whom I will call "Mr. Millennium." He was on a high, ornate float that was embellished with various symbols of time. He was dressed in an imposing papal sort of garmet, covered with incomprehensible runic symbols. His face was silver. Creepy.

Booming louder than any conversation my Better Half and I tried to have was their Millennium Theme Music. It was percussive and and melodic and was filled with vague chantings which sounded something like "millennium" but could well have been Disneyese, for all I know.

The problem with the music is that it was so friggin loud. And repitious. And inescapable. The Millennium and all its hordes was breathing down our necks and we wanted OUT. (We're not oldsters--but we are not getting any younger, either--and we grew weary of being reminded of that dismal and inevitable passage of time. Disney seems to have stuck itself in the horns of a dilemma: in a theme park based on youth and eternal childhood, it decides to hype up the notion of time and our reckoning of it.)

We managed to escape to Journey into Imagination, which, by the way, has a fairly good exhibit. There we spent much the remainder of hour hours at EPCOT, from which we subsequently departed as exhausted and harried as can be.

A word to the wise: if you want to see Disney World, stick with the Magic Kingdom! Or better yet, don't spend the money. One-day tickets are extremely expensive.

Any other impressions?

-- coprolith (coprolith@fakemail.com), December 29, 1999

Answers

In 1977 I was impressed with Disney World. It was a fun, reasonably priced place to take the kids. By my next visit in 1993, it was horrible. There were no small, inexpensive meal options, and the lines were very long. Never again.

-- Pearlie Sweetcake (storestuff@home.now), December 29, 1999.