Ok, I'm going to try and be a little limited on my response here, mostly to keep the people who are sick of hearing me rant about Epcot happy. With your permission, I might try and dig deeper into the question elsewhere, and to try and maintain the No Self Promotion part of the Terms of Use here on the site, I'll not link directly. That deeper dive will likely take me longer to digest and write.
This is probably a question that is factually too difficult to prove Epcot Center's impact on the world at large.
I know I can speak personally and anecdotally from others I've spoken to. I know that Epcot Center did inspire me to explore and learn more about things I'd not thought of previously. It fostered my sense of curiosity and my interest in science. I can trace my current sense of excitement in discovery back to Epcot. I cannot quantitatively measure how much impact it had of course, but I can say
for me it did have an impact.
Based on some of the extremely passionate conversations I've had on here with other Epcot Center diehards, I can say that it had an inspirational impact on them as well.
How large that impact was is harder to measure. I might have to do some googling to find quotes about this.
I'll say that it likely is not, but it's too hard to remove the other billion factors that went into making the 21st century that exists today. Not to get all Ian Malcom Jurassic Park on the question, but how many butterflies have flapped their wings in the past 34 years. I do feel that if we could find a way to measure it's impact, it would be a massive net positive.
Indications I've heard from people who tend to know-things about the design of early Epcot Center tend to point to the designers of the park having true grander intentions than making just a money-making theme park. There does seem to be a prevailing opinion that at least a large portion of the people working on Epcot Center fully believing that they were building something more, something with a larger purpose.
I think that if it were a corporately manufactured feel good fantasyland, there were a lot of ways that they could have approached building the park that would have been far more successful at doing so. I think that if they were looking at taking our money in the 80s, or trying to get more money out of, or for, their corporate sponsors, then the sponsors would have been much more integrated into the experiences that were built than what was done.
That is hard for me to judge for the royal We, meaning the world as a whole.
I can say that I am constantly struck with wide-eyed wonder. Since we're in a media-centric culture now, I'll use some examples from that realm. I listen to a lot of podcasts, and there are some that are created with such a passion that it bleeds through into the finished product. Radiolab, Snap Judgement, Freakanomics, heck, a good portion of the million TED talks that exist. I'm constantly struck wide-eyed, sometimes even slack-jawed, when someone with a real passion for a topic brings you deep into that story. Who knew I'd ever sit rapt in my car, parked at home but unable to leave, at a story about the 3 lbs of
living microfauna in our intestines that can actually have drastic impacts on our brain, and mental health, expertly told by
Radiolab?
Look no farther than Cosmos to something that can give that feeling. The most recent version of that series was the thing that gave me the most Epcot Center feeling I've had in decades.
In other words, I do think that as a species, there is a sense of exploration and discovery that is built deep into our DNA. I think that it's something that is not tapped nearly enough these days, but I think that is exactly what the designers of Epcot Center were trying to do, and what the current Disney corporation is ignoring.
And yes, this was "brief". If I get around to digging deep into this, look out, I'll write thousands upon thousands of words on it.
I like it, George, I like it!
