[Mr. EPCOT]

Hello all! Just to clarify, Spaceship Earth has only been opening for intermittent previews, it is not even into the official soft opening phase. The construction walls aren't even down yet.

The general feeling out here for those of us who have ridden it is that the first half of the ride is absolutely spectacular, and the second half is extremely disappointing. All of the classic scenes (the ascent) have wonderful upgrades, very fluid AAs, beautiful costumes, lots of nice little added touches (i.e. animated cave paintings), and a couple of brand new sets that are simply awesome.

Once you exit the garage where the personal computer is being invented, it all starts to fall apart. You go through a short semi-transparent tunnel that has what looks like code from The Matrix projected in it. The tunnel only wraps halfway around above you. There are some visibility issues as you from the end of the tunnel as you fully emerge into the top of the geosphere. Before the refurbishment, you would hear Jeremy Irons narrate "...on this, our Spaceship Earth," and then your Time Machine would rotate into a reveal of the beautiful view of Earth from space. Now the narrator (Judi Dench) doesn't stop talking until well into the area.

As was stated before, the finale with the touch screen is a mess. There is great potential for the interactivity, but as of now it is not even approaching that potential. And as uninteresting and cartoony as the video is, you can't really look around you because there really isn't anything to see. And it's not just that there is nothing there, it's just a bunch of crap. What look like to be lighting fixtures and stuff left over from the old version of the finale. Now, I could be wrong about that, and it is actually new stuff that they just haven't turned on yet, but it sure looks like a lot of the same stuff from before.

Another thing to note is that the consensus is also that the music is very underwhelming. Very unnoticeable throughout most of the ride, and very out of place where it is. In my opinion, the only place where it really works at all is the view of Earth and finale, but to paraphrase my old film music professor, "Good music can't make a bad ride good, but bad music can make a good ride bad." Unfortunately, this ride has the distinction of being plagued by both, as I would say that the music is the only thing that brings the first half of the ride down, but the music that is okay throughout the finale doesn't matter anyways, because that part of the ride itself is lame.

Once again, though, I will point out that this all just during the very earliest previews. There is still plenty of time for WDI to work on it until it officially reopens in February.