I usually prefer the slower "dark" rides with the "edutainment" format, but in this case I prefer Test Track over World of Motion.
When they built Test Track, it seemed right to mix it up a bit in FutureWorld because there were so many slow moving dark rides at that time. My kids were happy to get a little "thrill" ride factor in Epcot.
Now, if the discussion was Horizons or Mission Space.....Horizons, hands down.....not even close.
I totally agree with you - the Horizons/Mission:SPACE change was a mistake. I would have respected HP a lot more had they updated Horizons instead of destroying the classic.
In both cases I do prefer the original. I miss those slow moving dark rides. When I was younger, I wanted to spend all day going between SSE, Horizons, WoM, Listen to/Living with the Land, The Living Seas, and Imagination. I could spend days in Future World riding those things over and over again. Now all we have is a half done SSE, an imaginationless Imagination, the 5 minute retelling of a Pixar movie involving a lost fish, a simulator that simulates a training simulation, and a car ride. All that we really have left is Living with the Land, which is really one of the better Disney attractions anywhere in the world.
I've said for years that SSE was the brain of EPCOT, Imagination was it's heart, and Horizons was EPCOT's soul. What we have no is a lobotomized brain, a heart transplant gone wrong, and a missing soul.
Not that Mission:SPACE is a bad attraction. It is a neat ride that is relatively unique in that the rider gets to actually experience real g-forces as though they were launching into space. Having flown for NASA in the past (doing zero-g research on the "Vomit Comet" N931NA and N932NA), I can say that the g-loading experience at MS is pretty good. It is a little heavier than the 1.8 Gs that we would pull in the climb in the Vomit Comet, but less than the 3 Gs that the Shuttle would experience on reentry and a LOT less than the 7+ Gs that the Apollo capsules experienced on reentry.
Test Track is actually a lot of fun too, and we enjoy it very much. We don't skip Test Track because we like it (we do often skip MS and Energy these days). I just wish it had been added to EPCOT without the loss of a classic like WoM.
Additionally, I completely respect anyone who thinks that MS and TT are "better" attractions than Horizons and WoM. I disagree, but respect the opinion.
The problem I see with both MS and TT is that they replaced attractions that were totally different. There was no need to replace either Horizons or World of Motion at EPCOT in order to add MS and TT. EPCOT keeps getting shafted when it comes to updating attractions. They replace instead of add. Heck, the park feels like it has less to do today than it did back in the early 80s. It certainly has less to do today than at it's peak in the mid 1990s.
WoM and Horizons were both story-driven experiences with great storytelling, fantastic musical scores, and really neat things to see. MS and Test Track are relatively mindless thrills that don't offer the sort of emotional connection as their predecessors. Both have a place. Neither is necessarily better than the other. I may prefer one over the other, but that is my opinion. The problem is when one overrides the other (like what has happened in Future World East), leaving only one type of attraction in a place that should have a wide variety.
Horizons is gone and MS in it's place, while WoL sits empty and underused. WoL would have been a much better location for MS, leaving Horizons intact and prime for an upgrade.
