Occasionally we come across something that is not directly related to Walt Disney World but piques our interest. That is what happened when I came across this 1985 Sesame Place brochure at a flea market this past weekend. As a Philadelphia-area resident where the first and for a long time only Sesame Place is located I’ve always had a mild interest in the place.
This stems largely from the fact that, until a few years ago, I’d never been there. I was six when Sesame Place opened in 1980, a few years past Sesame Street’s target age. To boot: My mom had no interest in taking me and my siblings. Back then kids didn’t get to do whatever they felt like. If we had a birthday party it was cake and hot dogs in our kitchen or burgers at McDonalds, not renting out the local Bouncetown for $1000 and inviting 30 kids. But I digress…
When Sesame Place opened it had no mechanical rides. No coasters, no spinners. It was ball pits, moon bounces, mazes and obstacle courses and things you’d find at the most elaborate playground you can imagine. A water park was added soon after and over the decades a limited selection of mechanical rides have been added including two small coasters in the 2010’s.
Two things grabbed my attention when I saw this brochure. First, the computer lab/classes for families on the inside cover. 1985 was a pivotal year in home computer ownership as it was around that time that most families with school-aged children/teens realized they’d eventually own a computer as opposed to it being an expensive luxury that only the weird family down the street had. In 1980 it seemed as likely to parents of young children that you’d own a nuclear reactor as to own a computer. By 1990 your family might as well have been among the Amish if you didn’t have a computer in the house.
So in the mid 80’s there were all kinds of franchises, community schools and the like that taught people how to use computers. It was fun to see that Sesame Place had a program for doing that using Apple IIe computers.
The second reason I picked up this brochure was the “Indoor Fun” section. Often these days when someone asks me whether I think EPCOT could ever return to its EPCOT Center roots I tell them no. The reason for that is simple economics. In 1982 you paid the highest theme park admission prices on the planet to go to EPCOT Center and do cool things there you couldn’t do anywhere else. The Imagination pavilion’s “Imageworks”, Communicore and Spaceship Earth’s Global Neighborhood post-show area all had exhibits you didn’t find anywhere else — and they blew your mind!.
Just three years after EPCOT had opened you can see Sesame Place has recreated a bunch of the things you could do in those EPCOT “play” areas, as parks and museums across the country continued to do over the next two decades. As those experiences became available, and even commonplace, at museums and attractions closer to home there’s less of an incentive to pay the highest theme park admission prices to go do things you can do at home for a lot less money. What park goers expect for their money is an experience they can’t get at home. So as Disney continues to chip away at what’s left of the original EPCOT Center this 1985 brochure gives us an early “canary in the coal mine” view into why and how some of that has happened.
That said, I always advocate people patronize their regional science and learning museums that are awash in attractions and experiences in line with the old EPCOT we remember and love. When we did our Communicore episode in 2018 we discuss this and, with our listeners, compiled a small and incomplete list of places like this you might want to visit. You can find it here.
Wow, this brochure is great, thanks for sharing it… I went to Sesame Place around 85-86 when this stuff was new, and remember seeing all these things. I’m the oldest child in our family, so it wasn’t for me, but it was neat to see the TV show in “the real world”, and my little brother and sister and their friends really enjoyed being there. I also saw EPCOT for the first time in the summer of 1985, and remembered thinking Sesame Place was “ok” but no where on the same level as EPCOT, I understand your point though… I don’t think the current management will make a return to the original EPCOT, because of “economics”. The original Future World Pavilions, like Disneyland and Magic Kingdom’s attractions, were financed by corporate sponsors, and the seem to be moving away from that. Even the environment ideas of animal Kingdom are getting eclipsed be things like Avatar. I think they could go back to the original EPCOT’s core idea, but they just don’t want to, I think they believe it’s easier to “sell merch” for Guardians on the Galaxy than The Universe of Energy, and don’t seem to view these parks as having any “role to play in society” anymore.
I always heard that the original Epcot Center was designed to be something that would change over time, but some people “didn’t get it at all” initially, and other people (like me and my family) fell in love with those original attractions. For us it was because they were clearly designed by the people who created the Magic Kingdom. We didn’t know names like Marc Davis and X Atencio in the early 1980’s, but you could tell that “The World of Motion must have been made by the same people who created Pirates of the Caribbean and The Haunted Mansion” there was a similar “Disney sensibility” and sense of humor. All those Future World attractions had great theme songs and music like The Magic Kingdom, and The Sherman Brothers, Buddy Baker, and George Bruns were responsible most of the music, in the Disney Parks, TV shows and Movies… A lot of those crazy Dean Jones movies you’d see on TV as a kid were scored by George Bruns, who also did the original Pirates theme, and adapted Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty Waltz into “Once Upon a Dream” …my point is, there was a “consistency” to the product that The Walt Disney Company produced when EPCOT was new, but as Walt Disney World begins to “feel less Disney” our Family has less interest in going all the way to Orlando to see “what’s left” of The Walt Disney World we fell in love with.
The Irony though is our kids loved Sesame Place when we took them there a few years ago, and the “Sesame Street Set” mentioned in this brochure, was recently replace by a replica of the actual Sesame Street… similar to the “immersive environments” the Orlando parks seem fixated on creating, except it’s just a few hours away in Langhorne PA, and a lot less expensive than going to Orlando. The Elmwood Park Zoo in Norristown PA, recently had their “big cat house” redesigned by the former Walt Disney Imagineers who designed the Animal Kingdom animal exhibits, and they are planing on doing more exhibits there… so it’s really nice having that so close to home. If the Franklin Institute and Please Touch Museums in Philadelphia “up their game” a bit, I won’t need to bother taking our kids to “what’s left of” Disney World at all, they said they like the Jersey Shore better anyway.
I grew up in Doylestown and went with my sister’s Girl Scout troop in the 82-83 time frame. It felt like it was a million miles away but literally about 35 min from our house. As I grew older and realized it was so close, I could never figure out why we didn’t go every weekend. Up until a few years ago I still had some of the Big Bird tokens they gave you to play the video games. They were not traditional arcade games but themed video games where a character would do some simple activity or game. Simple but fun for sure especially for kids of our era. This may predate our family’s Odyssey gaming system. Thanks for sharing. Love the podcast.