Why Did Epcot Open with Five Rides?

Celebrating it’s 35th anniversary this year, Epcot is iconic and beloved by many. Today it has a lot of unique experiences and festivals to offer. When it opened in 1982 however it was lacking in the rides department, only starting with five. For a $1.4 billion park, why weren’t there more?
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Today Epcot is seen as one of the four theme parks in Disney World, but back in 1982 EPCOT was meant to be so much more than that. You see, prior to the creation of Disney World, Walt had envisioned EPCOT to be a functional city of the future that people would live in. Needless to say, but the city concept never came to fruition, and the construction of Disney World had to go forward without Walt.
It would take years before the company decided to address the looming question of what to do about EPCOT, and when they did it was decided that without Walt to lead the way, an actual city just wasn’t plausible for them. Instead they conceptualized a sort-of year round world’s fair called World Showcase .
World Showcase was planned to open in 1979, at which point Disney would begin work on another area called the Future World Theme Center, which similarly would feature pavilions sponsored by leaders in industry to show the public what they had in store. It was only after Disney struggled and failed to find adequate funding for World Showcase that they thought to merge the two ideas together into one single project, EPCOT Center.
I mention all of this because these roots explain why EPCOT wasn’t built as a typical theme park. After all, at this point Disney had never had a second gate. Just 15 years earlier Walt wasn’t even sure if there was enough demand for a Disney on the east coast, nevermind a second theme park just five minutes away. Disney was constantly concerned with making sure the EPCOT was not in any way relatable to The Magic Kingdom and Disneyland. They even insisted that none of the classic Disney characters show up in EPCOT, instead opting to create a new one specifically for the park, which is why we have Figment.
So for all intents and purposes, while EPCOT Center wasn’t going to be Walt’s city of the future, it wasn’t going to be a theme park either. It was intended to be a perpetual world’s fair mixed with elements of theme park design. This is why EPCOT leaned heavily on exhibits and shows rather than rides. Now that said, even the New York World’s Fair had some rides. In fact it was Walt who worked on some of the most popular among them.
So conceptually it’s fair to say that Disney wasn’t concerned with packing EPCOT full of rides to begin with, but nevertheless over the years they did have plans to offer some E-ticket experiences to balance out the educational side of it all. Some examples of these attractions include a Mount Fuji roller coaster in Japan, a bullet train ride in Japan and a Switzerland pavilion with an east coast version of the Matterhorn Bobsleds.
Why didn’t we get them? Well World Showcase as a whole ended up not going a smoothly as Disney had hoped. You see like they did with other rides and companies, Disney’s plan was to reach out to nations around the world in hopes that they’d sponsor their country’s pavilion at EPCOT. In theory it made sense because this is exactly what was done for world fairs, and EPCOT was intended to be a year-round world’s fair after all.
The problem was in that year-round bit. Sponsorship contracts were 10 year commitments, and while it was one thing to get a company to commit to funding their attraction for ten years, it wasn’t as simple for governments. For some of the countries, the government could see leadership change multiple times over in that ten year period, making the budgeting for such a long commitment difficult. On top of that while private industry mostly had themselves to worry about, governments had a nation of citizens to look out for, which made it harder to justify the spending.
Eventually Disney gave up on going after governments and instead sought out private companies within those countries. While they did have better luck that way, it ultimately wasn’t enough nor was it fast enough, and as a result the more expensive e-ticket ideas were the first to go. During planning Disney estimated that EPCOT Center would open with between ten and seventeen national pavilions. Come 1982, it would open with just nine. Of the nine there would only be one ride, El Rio del Tiempo in Mexico.
In any case, if you find yourself at Epcot, wondering why this theme park just doesn’t have a ton of rides like the Magic Kingdom, just remember that at one point it was hard to even call it a theme park.