Spaceship Earth is the icon of Epcot and, with some changes, has been the same basis ride since the park opened. But at one point Disney considered replacing this ride with something completely different.
Welcome to Epcot Center's Cancelled Attractions and to our first look into Project Gemini. This will almost definitely become a part of future articles as well, but today we look at the proposed Spaceship Earth replacement, Time Racers. For a look at previous articles in this series please check here.
Project Gemini was a proposed massive retheme for Epcot's Future World in the 1990s. Most parts of the plan never ended up happening, but we did get a few interesting ride proposals as a result of it that would have forever changed the park.
To briefly summarize, this plan would have involved retheming Future World into Dicoveryland, focusing more on Discovery in general as opposed to future technologies. It involved much more green space, as well as massive rethemes of the Land, Seas, and Spaceship Earth pavilions.
Today we are zeroing in on the replacement for Spaceship Earth. Time Racers would have been a time travel based roller coaster through the ball. It would have been mainly projection-based, similar to the seasonal overlays of Disneyland's Space Mountain.
No track layout was ever released for this attraction, and the above layout is the only significant image related to the entire Discoveryland project.
The entire project would come to be canceled, but the reasons for this specific attraction being canceled was apparently that the Spaceship Earth building simply could not handle a roller coaster like this. It makes sense considering the building was designed to hold a slow-moving omnimover attraction. Trying to add a roller coaster to a preexisting elevated building like the Spaceship Earth building was likely not the best idea.
This renovation never happened and at least thus far Epcot has never received a time travel attraction. Spaceship Earth is also likely about to receive its second major refurbishment since Time Racers was proposed.
Did you enjoy this article? If you did be sure to check out the other articles in this series here. Be sure not to miss out on the next article in this series, The Switzerland Pavilion.
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