The sphere itself becomes the show.
In 2021, ahead of Walt Disney World's fiftieth anniversary, Imagineering fitted Spaceship Earth with something it had never had: a permanent lighting package built into the sphere itself. Fixtures called points of light were mounted across the surface, beginning at the top in the spring and working down, each one engineered to reflect color onto the triangular facets around it rather than shine as a bare bulb. The result is a ball that can be painted in light, panel by panel, without changing the silhouette of the icon by day. On October 1, 2021 it lit up as one of the celebration's Beacons of Magic, and it has been performing ever since.
The lights now carry a nightly rotation of short shows, beginning at sunset: an anthem piece written for the park by composer Pinar Toprak, seasonal programs for Epcot's festivals, and the one that matters most to this site, the anniversary show.
That show arrived on October 1, 2022, for Epcot's fortieth birthday, and it is built entirely from the park's own musical past. It opens with Gavin Greenaway's Tapestry of Nations, moves through Listen to the Land, New Horizons and the original Journey Into Imagination, and closes with We Go On, the finale anthem of IllumiNations: Reflections of Earth, while the points of light draw the Epcot logo across the face of the sphere and Walt Disney's own words send everyone home.
We Go On is Gavin Greenaway's music and Don's lyric, written for the lagoon in 1999. Reflections of Earth took its final bow in 2019, but the anthem never actually left: the anniversary show still plays nightly, which means that every evening at Epcot, years after the show it was written for, a song carrying Don's words still closes the night.
Go back to the Epcot Lagoon, or read the full story of Reflections of Earth.
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