Horizons opened Oct. 1, 1983, hung riders from the ceiling for 15 minutes and let each car pick one of three futures by majority vote. It closed Jan. 9, 1999. Then Disney did something it had never done to a show building.
Horizons opened at EPCOT Center on Oct. 1, 1983, exactly one year after the park did, and for 15 years it was the ride the serious EPCOT fans loved most. Ask one today and they’ll tell you it’s still the best thing Disney ever tore down.
It closed for good on Jan. 9, 1999. In 2000 the building came down, and Mission: SPACE went up on the spot.
Twenty-seven years later, people still leave flowers on the internet for it.
What was Horizons at EPCOT?
A ride about the future, sponsored by General Electric, that didn’t just show you tomorrow. It let you choose it.
You boarded a four-seat car that hung from a track in the ceiling, an Omnimover turned upside down, and rolled sideways past scenes of life in the 21st century: a desert farm with robot harvesters, an undersea city, a floating space colony. The grandparents narrating the trip lived in a high-rise apartment in a city called Nova Cite.
The whole thing ran about 15 minutes, on roughly 1,346 feet of track. Long by Disney standards, and slow, which was the point.
How did the Horizons ride let you pick the ending?
Near the end, each car got three touch panels: Brava Centauri for space, Mesa Verde for the desert farm, Sea Castle for under the ocean. Everyone pressed one. AllEars puts it plainly: “There were three touch panels to choose on, and majority ruled.“
The winning choice played a short film on the screen ahead of you, about 31 seconds long, as your car headed home. D23 says it was the first Disney attraction ever to let guests select their own finale.
A fourth ending, a maglev train ride through Nova Cite, was planned and dropped before opening.
What was the big screen in the middle of Horizons?
Two Omnimax domes stitched together, something nobody had done before. D23’s history of the ride says “Imagineers placed two Omnimax screens together for the first time anywhere,” making one curved surface 240 feet wide and 80 feet tall.
Your car swung out over it and you flew: through a space shuttle launch, a DNA strand, a jet over the desert. Imagineers originally planned it as the finale and moved it to the middle. It was the part everyone remembered.
The theme song, “New Horizons,” carried the line the ride is still quoted by: “If we can dream it, we can do it.”
Why did Horizons close?
GE walked away first. Its sponsorship ended Sept. 30, 1993, after ten years, and Disney ran the ride unsponsored.
Horizons closed in late December 1994 and looked done.
Then it came back, in December 1995, because Universe of Energy and World of Motion were both closed for refurbishment and EPCOT needed somewhere to put people. It ran on borrowed time for three more years.
The final day was Jan. 9, 1999. Fans have passed around a rumor about a sinkhole under the building; Disney never confirmed it.
Did Disney really demolish the Horizons building?
Yes, and that’s the part that made it a legend. Disney usually guts a show building and reuses the shell.
For Horizons it knocked the whole thing down, starting in spring 2000, to build Mission: SPACE, which opened Oct. 9, 2003.
Orlando Informer calls it “the first time that the company had ever outright demolished a show building.” Whatever the reason, the pavilion that looked like a landed spaceship is gone, foundation and all.
Who were Hoot and Chief?
Two fans who decided to save Horizons before Disney could erase it. After the 1995 reopening, Dave Ensign, who went by Hoot Gibson, and Ed Barlow Jr., who went by Chief, started riding it constantly, and then started getting out of the car.
Over the next three years they walked the sets, sometimes for four to eight hours at a stretch, photographing everything and recording the audio. Their material surfaced online in 2009. On their site, Mesa Verde Times, they put it simply: “We love Horizons and did our best to document it before it was destroyed.“
Chief died in 2014. Most of what the internet knows about the inside of Horizons, it knows because of them.
Is there anything left of Horizons at EPCOT?
A logo. In the Mission: SPACE queue, the big spinning gravity wheel carries the Horizons emblem at its center, Disney’s own small nod to what it replaced. Fans also point to a Horizons reference in the Space Mountain post-show and in Tokyo’s Star Tours.
That’s it. Two hundred and forty feet of Omnimax, three futures, one vote per car. The desert farm never got built, and the undersea city didn’t either.
The button still worked, though. For 15 years, on the way home, you got to pick.
Article compiled with the help of the Pirates & Princesses newsroom.
Pirates and Princesses is your destination for Disney news, theme park updates, and the pop culture you love. From Disney cruises and travel tips to Disney fashion, food, collectibles, and movie news, PNP covers it all. Visit us at piratesandprincesses.net for daily coverage. Follow PNP on Facebook and Instagram, and listen to the Pirates & Princesses podcast on Apple Podcasts and YouTube.
Hat Tips:
D23 (Horizons A-to-Z entry and Attraction Rewind: Horizons History), opening and closing dates, the GE sponsorship end, the first-choose-your-ending claim, the Omnimax screens and the Nova Cite fourth ending
AllEars (Horizons tribute), the ride length, track length, the three endings and the voting quote
Laughing Place (Disney Extinct Attractions), the 1995 reopening and the tributes in Mission: SPACE, Space Mountain and Tokyo Star Tours
Orlando Informer, the demolition of the show building
Dangerous Minds (Aug. 2016) and Mesa Verde Times, the Hoot and Chief story and quote
WDW Magazine, the closing date and the sinkhole rumor
Tomorrow Society, the “If we can dream it” line
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