A Friday Visit with Jim Korkis: Walt Disney’s EPCOT Center

By Dave Shute

Welcome back to Fridays with Jim Korkis! Jim, the dean of Disney historians, writes about Walt Disney World history every Friday on yourfirstvisit.net.

YOUR PERSONAL DISNEY LIBRARY (24)

By Jim Korkis

• Walt Disney’s EPCOT Center: Creating the New World of Tomorrow by Richard Beard

While there have been many impressive recent books about Walt Disney World, it is also important to consider adding some older editions to your personal Disney library.

Walt Disney’s EPCOT Center: Creating the New World of Tomorrow is historically fascinating and still valued by Disney fans for its text and illustrations, despite much of the information being outdated by all the changes that have taken place over the decades. It really is a time capsule for a park that no longer exists and will disappear even more with the new changes that have been recently announced.

Published by Harry Abrams Inc. in New York, it had the full approval and cooperation of the Walt Disney Company. Originally written just before Epcot opened so it could encourage guests to visit Disney’s newest theme park, it was hugely popular.

The earliest edition features beautiful concept art that was replaced with color photos in the second edition. In fact, the book resembles the high-end art books being produced by Harry Abrams Inc. at the time, including even fold-out pages for some of the illustrations.

There are four distinct versions of the book.

The first edition was simply called Walt Disney’s Epcot. The second edition after the park opened was entitled Walt Disney’s Epcot Center with the addition of the five interlocking circles logo and the official Epcot Center lettering on the front cover.

Both editions are huge, roughly 9.5 inches wide and 12 inches tall and 239 pages long. Other than changing some of the concept art and models for photographs of the finished park, the text and the layout remains pretty much the same in the second edition.

The book traces the design and construction of the park but avoids discussing why Walt’s original dream failed to materialize. The wonderful artwork and photos make the book a priceless addition to a collection especially for a fan of Epcot.

Two other smaller, thinner editions were issued that measure roughly less than 9 inches wide and 11 inches tall and contain only 127 pages. They have a stiff board cover rather than the dust jackets on the two larger editions.

These smaller versions were less expensive and meant to be sold as a souvenir edition at the Disney theme parks. Like the larger editions, one was published just as the park was opening and the other had updated photographs after the park had opened.

I point out these differences because it is important to know which edition you are purchasing. I have all four editions so that I can use them for reference when I write my articles and books, but you may just want one of them to add to your collection.

The larger volumes have an almost twenty page introduction by Marty Sklar that is trimmed to roughly four pages in the smaller editions. When I talk about concept art, it is not just the paintings shown in the American Adventure section or Bob McCall’s paintings for Horizons, but material like three pages of artwork for Japan’s Meet the World attraction that never opened at Epcot.

Unlike some other older books, this is not a difficult or expensive book to obtain. I definitely wish similar volumes had been produced for the other Disney theme parks, but it is great that this one was.

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Thanks, Jim! And come back next Friday for more from Jim Korkis!

In the meantime, check out his books, including his latest, Disney Never Lands, and about planned but unbuilt concepts, and Secret Stories of Walt Disney World: Things You Never You Never Knew, which reprints much material first written for this site, all published by Theme Park Press.

 

 

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