Horizons (EPCOT)
| Horizons | |
|---|---|
| Park | EPCOT |
| Land / area | Future World |
| Type | Omnimover dark ride |
| Opened | October 1, 1983 |
| Closed | January 9, 1999 |
| Designer | Walt Disney Imagineering
|
| Status | Closed |
Horizons was a dark ride at EPCOT at Walt Disney World in Florida. Located on the eastern side of Future World, it carried guests in suspended omnimover vehicles through scenes of everyday life in the twenty-first century, as imagined in the early 1980s. Sponsored by General Electric, it was conceived as a successor in spirit to the Carousel of Progress, extending that attraction's story of one family through changing times into a future the family might one day inhabit.
History
Horizons opened on October 1, 1983, exactly one year after EPCOT Center itself, as part of the park's second phase. The idea grew from discussions between Disney and General Electric about a pavilion that would look forward rather than catalogue past inventions. Earlier working titles reflected a focus on the coming century, before the name Horizons was chosen to suggest possibilities lying just beyond view.
General Electric sponsored the pavilion for the first ten years of its life. When the company chose not to renew, its sponsorship ended on September 30, 1993, and its name and logos were removed. Without a sponsor to help carry its running costs, the attraction's future became uncertain. Horizons closed in December 1994, then reopened on December 24, 1995, largely because two neighbouring Future World attractions were unavailable during their own major rebuilds and the park needed the capacity. It operated on a reduced and sometimes intermittent basis thereafter.
Experience
The ride began with a section looking back at earlier visions of the future, from nineteenth-century illustrations to the streamlined futures imagined in the 1950s. Guests then passed large projection screens showing technologies that were new or emerging in the 1980s, presented as the tools with which the coming world might be built.
The main scenes followed members of an extended family living in different environments. A couple in a futuristic city apartment spoke by video link with relatives elsewhere: a daughter overseeing robot workers at Mesa Verde, a desert farm where arid land was made productive; her partner working at Sea Castle, an undersea research and living base concerned with ocean farming and exploration; and family gathered for a birthday aboard Brava Centauri, a rotating space station. Each setting was built as a detailed physical scene, with figures, props and, in the desert sequence, a very large model landscape.
Near the end, riders chose their own route home to the fictional FuturePort. Each vehicle had buttons for the three environments, the majority choice in that vehicle decided the ending, and a short filmed flight simulation from the chosen setting played as the ride concluded. It was an early example of guests selecting an attraction ending for themselves.
Closure and legacy
Horizons closed permanently on January 9, 1999. No single public explanation was given at the time, but the loss of sponsorship, the cost of maintaining a large and technically complex show, and plans for a more thrilling replacement all shaped the decision. The building was demolished rather than reused, and Mission: SPACE, a spaceflight simulator, opened on its site in 2003.
The attraction has remained one of the most fondly remembered of the original EPCOT pavilions, in part because it attempted to summarise the whole park's theme — communication, energy, land, sea and space — in a single story. Mission: SPACE has acknowledged it quietly: the Horizons logo appears at the centre of the gravity wheel in its queue, a small tribute on the ground where the earlier ride once stood.