My people

For Epcot purist, looking towards the films of World Showcase can be heart-wrenching. On opening day only China, France, and Canada were the only pavilions that came complete with films. Norway would add a fourth film to World Showcase when its pavilion opened in 1988. Of the three original films, only France’s Impressions de France has remained unchanged for the past twenty-five and a half years. Both Wonders of China, now Reflections of China, and O Canada! have seen updates in the past few years. While opinions vary on what is and isn’t effective in these films, they are, without a doubt, not the films that originally graced World Showcase.

In honor of the sole-surviving film of EPCOT Center’s original World Showcase, today we look at some facts and figures from Impressions de France.

¤Impressions de France is shown in the Palais de Cinéma, a theater which can accommodate three-hundred and fifty guests.
¤The eighteen minute film is projected onto five screens, each of the five pieces measures twenty-seven and a half feet wide by twenty-one feet tall. By using these five screens, audience members are given a 200-degree view.
¤Locales observed in the film’s forty-nine scenes include, but are not limited to, Loire Valley, Vezelay Church and village, Monbazillac Vineyard, Versailles, Chaumont Castle, Charmonix, La Rochelle Harbor, Normandy, Mt. Blanc, and various landmarks and vistas of Paris.
¤The score from Impressions de France is composed of music from Camille Saint-Saëns, Claude Debussy, Jacques Offenbach, by François-Adrien Boieldieu, Maurice Ravel, Éric Satie, and Paul Dukas. Additonally, original scoring was done by Buddy Baker.