The American Adventure
| The American Adventure | |
|---|---|
| Park | EPCOT |
| Land / area | World Showcase |
| Type | Audio-Animatronic stage show |
| Opened | October 1, 1982 |
| Designer | WED Enterprises
|
| Status | Operating |
The American Adventure is both the United States pavilion in World Showcase at EPCOT at Walt Disney World, Florida, and the Audio-Animatronic stage show that is its main attraction. The pavilion stands at the centre of the lagoon's far shore, between the Italy Pavilion and the Japan pavilion, and serves as the host pavilion of World Showcase. It opened with the park on October 1, 1982, sponsored jointly by American Express and Coca-Cola.
Unusually among the World Showcase pavilions, the American pavilion does not take the name of its country. Disney designers considered a modernistic glass structure and a colonial American town among other approaches, and eventually built a large Georgian colonial-style hall, drawing on Independence Hall in Philadelphia and Colonial Williamsburg, deliberately set back from the promenade so that its scale would not overwhelm the pavilions around it. Forced perspective in the upper storeys and roofline makes the five-storey building read as a more modest three storeys from across the water.
The show
The attraction is a theatrical presentation of about half an hour, staged in a theatre seating roughly 1,000 guests inside the pavilion hall. It is hosted by Audio-Animatronic figures of Benjamin Franklin and Mark Twain — figures from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries respectively — who narrate and comment on a sequence of episodes from American history, presented by a cast of 35 Audio-Animatronic figures in total.
Beneath the stage, a computer-controlled mechanical system stores the show's sets and figures on a large movable carriage and raises each scene into position as required, allowing the stage to transform without visible scene changes. Scenes are combined with images on a rear-projection screen about 72 feet wide behind the performers. Among the episodes dramatised are the arrival of the Mayflower, the Boston Tea Party, George Washington's army wintering at Valley Forge, the writing of the Declaration of Independence, the Civil War — staged as a dialogue between two brothers on opposite sides, accompanied by the song Two Brothers — westward expansion and Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, the Centennial Exhibition of 1876, the Great Depression and the Second World War.
Two effects have been singled out since opening: Franklin appears to walk up a flight of steps, an unusual achievement for an Audio-Animatronic figure of the period, and Will Rogers twirls a lasso in his Depression-era scene. Rogers had been considered as a third host, representing the twentieth century alongside Franklin and Twain, but the design team judged him less universally recognised and reduced him to a single scene.
The show closes with Golden Dream, a filmed montage of American people and events of the later twentieth century and beyond, set to a song of the same name. The montage has been periodically re-edited to bring its ending closer to the present. The rest of the presentation has changed little: a technical revision in 1993 installed new figures for the hosts and a re-recorded version of the theme, performed, like the original score, with orchestral accompaniment recorded for the attraction.
The pavilion
Visitors enter through a high, domed lobby decorated with flags and quotations, known as the rotunda, which serves as the theatre's pre-show area. The Voices of Liberty, an a cappella group in early American dress, perform sets of American folk songs and patriotic music in the rotunda through the day, and are a fixture of the pavilion independent of the show.
The pavilion also contains the American Heritage Gallery, an exhibition space that has hosted displays on subjects including Native American art, and the Regal Eagle Smokehouse, a quick-service barbecue restaurant that replaced the original Liberty Inn in 2020. Outside, the America Gardens Theatre, an amphitheatre facing the lagoon, hosts concert series during EPCOT's festivals, including the Eat to the Beat concerts and the Candlelight Processional dining events.