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Virtually all the attractions at Epcot--from the American Adventure pavilion, with its engraved quotations from Wendell Willkie and Ayn Rand, to the Universe of Energy ride through a forest of snarling dinosaurs--celebrate the perfectibility of man through democracy and technology. It can be pretty tedious, one exhortation after another to "Let us dare fulfill our destiny!" Best to relax your brain and go where the fun is: to the Journey into Imagination, a clever ride that honors, with suitable frivolity, man's capacity to spin dreams (awwww); to the enthralling travelogues in the Chinese and French pavilions (awe); to the Teatro di Bologna commedia dell'arte at the Italian pavilion (ha!); to Emil Radok's 8 1/2-min. film as you enter the Energy building (wow). The screen's 100 triangular elements reveal, on a single surface or in multifaceted relief, a gorgeous variety of images relating to natural and man-made energy. Hard not to call it the most astonishing movie of the decade.
To emerge into the Florida sunlight from one of these nifty experiences is to walk back into the unreal world the Disney "imagineers" have fabricated. In this sanitized sensory bombardment, everything is so clean, so controlled, so world-put-back-in-joint, that the place seems less an Epcot than an Epcoy: an experimental prototype community of yesterday. To return, then, to one's own drab excuse for real life after a trip to a dream park is to realize something important is missing in each of them: order and harmony at home, surprise and funk and compromise in Disney World. In central Florida, though, real life often surrenders with a smile. A tourist stopped at a local Denny's and chatted with the cashier. Asked where he was from, the tourist replied, "New York City." "Oh," the cashier said earnestly, "do they have rides there too?"