Spaceship Earth

This is Spaceship Earth. It's the main attraction at Epcot Center. I had forgotten that I was reviewing rides at WDW until I saw the news item about Walter Cronkite. I was so sad (and kind of surprised because I thought he died a few years back) because Walter was my favorite narrator of the old school Spaceship Earth ride.

Back in the day, when I made my first pilgrimage to the WDW, the first place my mother took me was Epcot Center. She thought it would be less crowded. We walked in and I saw this giant golf ball in the sky and said, what happens in there? My mother took me by the hand, onto the moving platform and into the rotating cars for a magical journey through time! Seriously, they built a time machine inside a giant golf ball and Walter Cronkite used to narrate it. It was beautiful.

I wikipedia'd this shit to find out what went wrong with the ride. You see, somewhere around 1994, some asshole decided to mess with a good thing and remodel the ride. That would have been fine, except they cut the hotness right out of it! They swapped Walter Cronkite's magical voice for JEREMY IRONS! It was awful. I had a panic attack the next time I went on the ride. But at least then it was still the original ride.

Imagine my horror when this past January I went back to the WDW to find that AT&T no longer sponsors the ride. Now some German company does, and zee Germans ruined the ride! And they have JUDI DENCH narrating it! It's even more awful than Jeremy Irons. Plus, they cut out my favorite scene. There's a place in the ride where there's an ancient Roman street and they say "All roads lead to Rome". Then in the next scene there's destruction because since all roads led to Rome that meant that the riff raff could get in and they did and destroyed the shit out of the city. Anyhow, there was this fog that smelled like rotten feet... I think it was meant to be burning flesh...but it was my favorite. NO LONGER! Zee Germans cut it out. Now you ride through that part and it smells normal, which really takes away from the magics.

So, my review is as follows:

5/5 for the Walter version

3/5 for the Irons version...and

2/5 for the Dame Judi version