Hot Lasers!

Hot Lasers!

“When you are curious, you find lots of interesting things to do.”

Walt Disney

Every Sunday night, we watched Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color, in black and white, until sometime in the late sixties when we got our first color TV.

The show often featured Disneyland, and it was thrilling to me, as a kid, just knowing that it was only an hour away from our home in Tarzana.

I’ve always loved Disneyland and was just happy to be there walking down Main Street, U.S.A. I particularly like The Pirates of the Caribbean, The Haunted House and The Jungle Cruise.

So when Walt Disney announced the idea to build the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, a.k.a. EPCOT Center, I wasn’t too interested. That sounded suspiciously like school to my ten-year-old brain, and who would want to go there when you could go to Disneyland?

As I gradually learned more about it, I thought, well ok, I guess I ought to give it a try next time I am in Florida, where I had never been. Even so, why go there when we have the original Disneyland right here in California?

Many years later, the chance arrived. I won a company trip to Orlando and added on a few extra days to see the “new” Disneyland, and yes, EPCOT Center. My cousin Hawley was about to start working with my company, Connecticut Mutual Life, and I invited him to go along.

EPCOT was wonderful! I loved that the cultural exhibits were so interesting and staffed by people from the countries they represented. And by this time in my life, I had fallen in love with science, so I really enjoyed the other half of EPCOT as well.

They had a spectacular laser, fountain and fireworks show to close out the evening. So, of course, we stayed for that. But being newbies to EPCOT, we were way deep in the park when the show ended and the crowd of thousands began to crawl slowly towards the only exit, which seemed miles away. 

Packed in, like the 405 at rush hour, I had a sudden inspiration, and adopting a carnival barker-like demeanor, I began to exclaim, “Hot lasers coming through, hot lasers coming through!” Hawley immediately picked up on it, and began to shout the same, in time with me.

No one looked around to see if that’s actually what was happening, but they miraculously did part, a little. I felt a bit like Moses at the Red Sea, as we moved somewhat more quickly through the crowd.

Looking back, it’s amazing how immature I was back then, in my early thirties, but I have to admit it was really fun at EPCOT!

-Hank