Chapter One: Death and Rebirth Of An Attraction

World of Motion, the historic transportation-themed attraction at Epcot's Future World came to an unceremonious halt New Year's Day 1996 and before the morning crew had arrived to clean up what was left of the place after ringing in the new year, a number of the Omnimovers had been removed from the trackage.

The change had begun.

There was a time when the thought of going to a Disney park meant revulsion at the thought of syrupy kiddie rides and long lines to most thrillseeking teenagers. Now, the thrill is on, and the long lines are braved in order to experience new generation Disney thrills like the George Lucas created Star Tours or the monstrous flume drop on Splash Mountain. The same folks that brought us spinning teacups also decided to drop us thirteen stories from the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror and trap us in a small chamber for a meat-eating Alien Encounter. Now, Walt Disney Imagineering lead show producer Orrin Shively has taken all that he's learned in the past three years while working on the Indiana Jones Adventure and Disneyland Paris' Star Tours attractions; he's taken it a step further in what will undoubtedly be one of the most thrilling adventures ever unfurled at the generally unsuspecting public.

Brace yourself kids. We're going to keep the automotive theme of the pavilion and focus on automobile testing.

The GM Test Track.

As construction began in earnest, I began to unravel the mystery of what this new attraction was all about. General Motors wanted to give the public an inside look at how an automobile was created, by placing them inside the car through all phases of testing. Of course, it would have to be all up to the Imagineers to figure out how to make it truly thrilling, so GM invited a group of them out to their American proving grounds.

When they got a look at the various rigors of automobile testing, it was decided that they had a bounty of material to work with. The surface and brake-testing was promising as was the hot and cold testing; that had a lot of spunk. But when the WDI crew got a gander at those high-speed passes around the giant GM track with its steeply banked curves and punishing grades; little bells went off. They went away to design a new type of "E" ticket.As the blue walls went up, the men in little white hard hats came out and the main queue was torn out. Bulldozers tore through the red-painted stucco and tore out chunks, revealing the silver panels inside. The interior began to disappear as bits and pieces of the track, sets and Audio-Animatronic characters began to be shipped out. Some of the AA figures would head off to California to be used in a proposed Jungle Cruise rehab while the Omnimovers were junked.

Soon, scaffolding began to appear and the first signs of track surfaced around the building. The structure, long since an icon of the park, is 318 feet in diameter and about 60 feet high. Inside, there's plenty of room to house the complicated scenes that were being finalized and tested in Glendale, California.

An amazing amount of work was going into the attraction so that it would be finished in time for Walt Disney World's 25th Anniversary Celebration. Construction teams worked around the clock, preparing the building for its new occupants which were even now speeding across dirt roads and parking lots to test comfort, safety features and of course, speed.