The first show on the water.
Epcot Center was dedicated in October 1982, and World Showcase Lagoon got a nighttime show for the occasion. Its full name was Le Carnaval de Lumière's International Festival of Festivals, a celebration of celebrations, promising in the dedication program to transport visitors to other times and cultures through moments of festivity around the world. It ran for barely eight months. Most guests never saw it properly. And the ideas inside it kept the lagoon lit for the next thirty-seven years.
The show floated. Nine platforms sat anchored in a 1,400-foot arc a few hundred feet offshore: five projection barges, each stacked with screens forty feet wide and twenty-six feet high, fed by sixty 35mm projectors that could throw one enormous picture or four separate ones; and four fountain barges, each carrying forty individually controlled water jets reaching ninety feet, lit in five colors, with some seventy-five fireworks tableaus fired among them. Every barge carried its own onboard computer and took its cues by radio. In 1982, that was science fiction with outboard motors.
Don composed the show's suite, The Festival of Festivals: a fanfare, celebrations on land, spectacles on water and revelries in pyrotechnics, realized on synthesizers. All four movements survive on his 1997 Telarc album Busted, which remains the easiest way to hear tonight what the lagoon heard in 1982.
The flaw was geography. The show was built to be watched from Showcase Plaza, the stretch between Mexico and Canada at the mouth of World Showcase, and from nowhere else. The arc of barges faced one direction, so most of the promenade looked at the back of a spectacular. A lagoon ringed with prime viewing space had a show that used a fraction of it.
Carnaval came down in June 1983 and its successor went up the same month. But the lesson it taught, that a show on this lagoon has to play to the entire shoreline at once, became the founding rule of everything that followed, all the way to Reflections of Earth. The first show was the least seen and the most instructive.
Next in the story: A New World Fantasy and Laserphonic Fantasy. Or go back to the Lagoon.
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