EPCOT Acronym coined by Walt Disney in 1966 meaning Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. The park was called EPCOT Center when it opened on October 1, 1982. It was a major undertaking for Disney, costing in the neighborhood of $1 billion. Toward the end of his life, Walt Disney became interested in the problems of cities. He had read books on the subject and thought it would be great if he could do something to help. With the huge number of acres that he was accumulating in Florida, an ideal place was available. He made a film in October 1966, meant for the people of Florida, which explained what some of his ideas were. He wanted to build a place where people could live in an environment like no other. The central core would be the commercial center. Radiating out from it would be strips of residences, with vast green spaces in between for recreation, schools, and similar facilities. Supply trucks and other traffic would use underground tunnels. Unfortunately, Walt died before he could refine his ideas. Nothing definite had been planned. Roy O. Disney, taking over for his brother, rationalized that since the company knew how to build a Magic Kingdom, they should start with that, to get some cash flow started, and then they could consider Walt’s final dream of an experimental community. The Walt Disney World Magic Kingdom did open successfully in 1971, and the Disney executives never forgot Walt’s ideas for EPCOT, even though Roy Disney also passed away. In 1975, Card Walker, president of Walt Disney Productions, announced that the company would proceed with EPCOT. But Walker and his advisers determined that Walt’s ideas for an idealistic city were unrealistic; one could not expect people to live under a microscope, as it were. It could not be both a showplace and a place to live. Instead, the Disney Imagineers got busy and soon had their proposals ready for a park consisting of two areas—Future World and World Showcase. When it was ready to open in 1982, they decided to call it EPCOT Center, reasoning that the whole Walt Disney World property was part of Walt’s grand idea, and this was only the Center of it. It was a little difficult marketing a name like EPCOT, which no longer had its original meaning, but over the first decade of the park’s history, people forgot that it was an acronym and it became its own word. Thus Center was dropped from the name in December 1993, the letters were lowercased, and Epcot came into its own.
