Body Wars
| Body Wars | |
|---|---|
| Park | EPCOT |
| Land / area | Wonders of Life, Future World (now World Discovery) |
| Type | Motion simulator |
| Opened | October 19, 1989 |
| Closed | January 1, 2007
|
| Status | Closed |
Body Wars was a motion simulator in the Wonders of Life pavilion at EPCOT at Walt Disney World. Guests were a miniaturised crew inside a human body on a rescue mission. It was EPCOT's first thrill ride and Walt Disney World's first simulator, and it developed a lasting reputation for nausea.
History
A ride through the human body had been discussed since the earliest planning for a health pavilion at EPCOT Center, imagined as a large dark ride. Building full-size sets of organs made that impractical, and the concept was revived only when the simulator technology developed for Disneyland's Star Tours (1987) offered a way to travel through the body on film. Body Wars opened with Wonders of Life on October 19, 1989, sponsored by MetLife.[1]
The ride film was directed by Leonard Nimoy, known as Mr Spock in Star Trek. It starred Elisabeth Shue as Dr Cynthia Lair, Tim Matheson as Captain Braddock and Dakin Matthews as the Mission Commander.[2] At opening it drew long lines as EPCOT's first ride with height and age restrictions — at least 40 inches tall and three years old.
Experience
The queue cast guests as volunteers of Miniaturized Exploration Technologies (MET). They boarded a Bravo 229 Body Probe, an ATLAS simulator cabin holding 40 riders — the same system used by Star Tours, weighing about 26 tons at full size but, after miniaturisation, supposedly less than a drop of water.[3] After "dermatopic purification" and a briefing, the probe was shrunk into a volunteer's body beneath the skin of a finger, to observe white blood cells attacking a splinter.
Inside, the mission changed. Dr Lair had been carried away in the bloodstream and was being attacked by a white blood cell. The probe pursued her through the heart and into the lungs, freed her with its lasers and took her aboard, but lost power. Following her suggestion, the crew rode the circulation to the brain to recharge from its electrical energy, then raced back as the miniaturisation wore off.
What distinguished the ride was its movement. Where Star Tours simulated the smooth manoeuvres of a spacecraft, Body Wars simulated a body: the cabin pulsed with the heartbeat and surged with each breath in the lungs. Combined with the biological imagery, that motion made guests ill in unusual numbers. Disney soon cut about 20 seconds from the film, much of it in the lungs — an edit that left film and simulator slightly out of sync and, by many accounts, did not solve the problem.[4]
Closure and legacy
After MetLife's sponsorship ended in June 2001, Wonders of Life moved to seasonal operation in January 2004, and Body Wars closed permanently with the pavilion on January 1, 2007. Its simulators were reported cannibalised for spare parts for Star Tours, whose identical cabins remained in service for years.
The attraction's legacy is double-edged. It proved EPCOT — built on slow Omnimovers like Spaceship Earth and Horizons (EPCOT) — could host a thrill ride, a step toward Mission: SPACE and Test Track. It also became the standard example of a ride whose concept worked against its hardware: the more faithfully it reproduced being inside a body, the fewer guests wanted to repeat it. Its dome was announced in 2019 as the future Play! Pavilion, a project that stalled after 2020, leaving Body Wars with no successor.
See also
- Wonders of Life
- Cranium Command
- Horizons (EPCOT)
- Mission: SPACE
- Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind