Spaceship Earth in name only- Spaceship Earth is dead

In July 2007, many Disney fans rejoiced that the hideous Epcot wand was coming down, thus restoring Spaceship Earth to its iconic glory. Eight months later, whenever I see the now wandless Spaceship Earth, I don't celebrate, but rather get angry. The giant golf ball that stands at the entrance to Epcot has no meaning any more. It's not majestic, and it's not powerful symbolism. It's simply a monument to a once great attraction. Like everything else in Epcot the exterior stands as a reminder to what once was, while the inside is infected with a disease. Its soul was sucked out when Disney finally went in to dust.
I'm not going into specifics here because I'm saving most of my ranting for later. I will say that the current version of Spaceship Earth's script would get a C if it was written in High School. As I was assembling it, I can't tell you how many times I got a grammatical error highlighted. Typing it up made me realize it is actually worse than I thought it was. It reminds me of a certain teacher I once had that tried to make history fun, but was completely inaccurate in most of his statements. The other students loved him though, just like guests love this garbage. The moral is that as a teacher or as a company, there should be an obligation to the truth, to making others understand significance, not to keeping people awake by watching movies or elfing yourself. This version is a disgrace to the purpose of Spaceship Earth, and a disgrace to the entire history of the Walt Disney Company.

See how many times the narration changes between past tense and present tense.

Spaceship Earth Version 4

Like a grand and miraculous spaceship, our planet has sailed through the universe of time, and for a brief moment we have been among its many passengers. But where are we going, and what kind of future will we discover there? Surprisingly, the answers lie in our past. Since the dawn of recorded history, we’ve been inventing the future one step at a time. So let’s travel back in time together. I’ll show you how our ancestors created the world we know today, and then it will be your turn to create the world of tomorrow.

Here in this hostile world is where our story begins. We are alone, struggling to survive, until we learn to communicate with one another. Now we can hunt as a team and survive together. It takes 15,000 years to come up with the next bright idea- recording our knowledge on cave walls. There was only one small problem: when we moved, the recorded knowledge stayed behind.

Now let’s move ahead to ancient Egypt, because something is about to happen here that will change the future forever. This unknown Egyptian pounding reeds flat is inventing papyrus, a soft paper. Papyrus in turn creates better record keeping of plans, designs, and unfortunately taxes. But it also brings with it the dawn of great civilizations.

At this point, each civilization has its own form of writing which none of the others can understand. But the Phoenicians, who trade with all of them, have a solution. They create a simple, common alphabet adaptable to most languages. Remember how easy it was to learn your ABC’s? Thank the Phoenicians.

The ancient Greeks were great inventors of the future. First they established public schools, and then begin teaching an intriguing new subject called mathematics; and with math comes mechanical technology and the birth of the high tech life we enjoy today.

With lessons learned from the Greeks, the Romans create a powerful empire. To move their armies around, they built a system of roads all over the known world. Rome built the first World Wide Web, and it’s leading us into the future. But then we hit a road block. Rome falls and the great library of Alexandria in Egypt is burned. Much of our learning is destroyed, lost forever- or so we think. It turns out there were copies of these books in the libraries of the Middle East being watched over by Arabic and Jewish scholars. Call it the first back up system. The books are saved, and with them our dreams of the future.

In the meantime, here in Europe monks toil endlessly recording books by hand. But that is about to change. In 1450, Guttenberg invents the movable type printing press. Now knowledge can travel as fast as these new books, and travel they do. Books make it easier to invent the future in every field, and the result is an incredible explosion of innovation we call the renaissance.

Now communication technology races headlong into the future, and soon people all over the world are sharing life’s most important moments faster than ever before. By now we’re all communicating from anywhere on Earth, and in 1969 from somewhere else.

To send a man to the moon, we had to invent a new language spoken not by man, but by computers. At first very large and very expensive computers, but we see the potential. What if everyone could have one of these amazing machines in their own house? There’s just one problem- they’re as big as house. The solution comes in 1977 in of all places a garage in California. Young people with a passion for shaping the future put the power of the computer in everyone’s hands, and once again we stand on the brink of a new renaissance.

After 30,000 years of time travel here we are- a truly global community networked online poised to shape the future of Spaceship Earth. For the first time in history, all of us can have a say in the kind of world we want to live in. The choices we have made for the past 30,000 years have been inventing the future one day at a time. And now it’s your turn. On your computer screen, answer a few questions. Then we’ll add a little future technology and show you a new world custom made just for you. Are you ready to create the future? Let’s get started.

Well done. And now I believe your future is just about ready. Let’s take a look shall we? Well, I think the future we’ve created looks very promising, don’t you? So here’s to the next 30,000 years on Spaceship Earth. While no one knows for sure what we’ll see or do, I do know it will be quite an adventure. An adventure we’ll take and make- together. See you in the future.