Cranium Command
| Cranium Command | |
|---|---|
| Park | EPCOT |
| Land / area | Wonders of Life, Future World (now World Discovery) |
| Type | Theatre show with Audio-Animatronics and film |
| Opened | October 19, 1989 |
| Closed | January 1, 2007 |
| Duration | About 17 minutes, plus preshow |
| Status | Closed |
Cranium Command was a theatre attraction in the Wonders of Life pavilion at EPCOT at Walt Disney World in Florida. A humorous presentation on the importance of the human brain, it combined an animated preshow, a live Audio-Animatronic performer and a filmed cast of celebrity comedians playing the organs of a twelve-year-old boy. It is regularly cited as a forerunner, in concept, of Pixar's Inside Out (2015).
History
Cranium Command opened with the Wonders of Life pavilion on October 19, 1989.[1] The show was directed by Jerry Rees, and its animated preshow was the first directing work of Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, who went on to co-direct Disney's Beauty and the Beast. The score was by composer David Newman. Among the animators credited on the preshow was Pete Docter, later a leading Pixar director; Docter worked on the attraction early in his career, and the show's control-room-of-the-mind premise has often been compared with his film Inside Out.[2]
The central character was originally conceived as Captain Cortex before being redesigned as Buzzy, a bumbling young recruit — a change that gave the show its underdog structure. From January 4, 2004 it operated only seasonally, and it closed permanently with the pavilion on January 1, 2007.[3]
Experience
Guests first stood for an animated preshow of about five minutes. In a briefing room for Cranium Command, an organisation whose pilots operate human brains from inside the skull, the booming General Knowledge — voiced by Corey Burton — drilled a class of new recruits on stress and the brain's role in managing it. Buzzy arrived late, was singled out, and was given what was presented as the most unstable craft in the fleet: a twelve-year-old boy. Failure, he was warned, would mean reassignment to piloting a chicken.
The main show, about 17 minutes long, took place in a 200-seat theatre built as the inside of that boy's head.[4] Buzzy, an Audio-Animatronic on a swivelling command chair, looked out at the boy's day through screens representing his eyes. As Bobby overslept, skipped breakfast, missed the bus and fell for a new girl, the organs reported in by film: Charles Grodin as Left Brain and Jon Lovitz as Right Brain; Dana Carvey and Kevin Nealon as the heart's ventricles, reprising their Saturday Night Live strongmen Hans and Franz; Bobcat Goldthwait as the Adrenal Gland; and George Wendt as the Stomach. Buzzy had to keep the competing voices working together so stress did not overwhelm the system. He succeeded, and General Knowledge welcomed him into Cranium Command.
The point was delivered inside the comedy: the brain coordinates systems that are constantly arguing, and managing stress is a matter of that coordination.
Closure and legacy
Cranium Command never reopened after January 1, 2007. For years its theatre was reported to survive largely intact behind the walls of the dome's Festival Center conversion, making it a frequent subject of "abandoned EPCOT" reporting. The Buzzy figure itself drew sustained fan attention, including widely reported claims in 2018–2019 that it had been stolen from the closed theatre; Disney has not presented Buzzy publicly since.
The show's reputation has grown since closure. Its cast and its central idea — a headquarters staffed by competing impulses inside a child's head — look, in retrospect, like a dry run for ideas mainstream animation would make famous decades later, in the same Future World generation as Horizons (EPCOT).
See also
- Wonders of Life
- Body Wars
- Horizons (EPCOT)
- Mission: SPACE
- Test Track