IllumiNations: Reflections of Earth was a nighttime show performed nightly at Epcot at the Walt Disney World Resort in Bay Lake, Florida. The show utilized fireworks, pyrotechnics, water fountains, fire effects, lasers, searchlights, and a large rotating globe with curved LED screens to create a visual production on the park's World Showcase Lagoon.
The show told the story of Earth and was divided into three movements titled "Chaos," "Order," and "Meaning", emphasizing the idea of humanity as a single unified tribe on this planet. The lagoon was surrounded by nineteen large torches signifying the first 19 centuries of the common era, and the show culminated in the globe opening like a lotus blossom to reveal a twentieth torch, representing the now-completed 20th century.
Created and directed by Don Dorsey, the show premiered on October 1, 1999, as IllumiNations 2000: Reflections of Earth as part of the Walt Disney World Millennium Celebration. It was so successful that after the celebration ended, the 2000 was dropped from the name and the show continued. The show has received several awards throughout the years including 11 straight Best Outdoor Night Production Show Golden Ticket Awards (2005–2015). The show's final performance was on September 30, 2019. It was initially replaced by Epcot Forever which premiered on October 1, 2019, and later by Harmonious which premiered on September 29, 2021. A week after the last-ever show, the globe was disassembled and destroyed and sent to a scrapyard.
IllumiNations and the versions of the productions before it remain the only Disney nighttime spectaculars at EPCOT that did not feature any intellectual company property (other than their original songs) and focus solely on cultural soundtracks that honor the countries represented in World Showcase.
Show summary
Introduction Torches were lit around the lagoon. The beginning of the show was narrated by Jim Cummings:
The original narration substituted the first two sentences with "Good evening and welcome" but was changed for the Year of a Million Dreams.
Immediately after, there was the sound of a flame being gently blown out, the lighting was immediately lowered throughout the World Showcase Lagoon, and the show began.
Act I: Chaos (The Earth Is Born) Chaos represents the creation of the planet Earth. Once the torches are extinguished, the thud of a drum is heard. The sound repeats, accelerating in tempo until a singular perimeter firework shot from the top of the America Gardens Theatre streaks halfway across the lagoon, colliding with another firework, exploding in a huge circular shape right in time with the music. Explosive fireworks and hot flames from the Inferno Barge engulf the lagoon. The side fountains add colors of red, orange, and yellow. At the end of the segment, large white fireworks exploded and small white points would glow at various places on the lagoon surface like a field of stars.
Act II: Order (The Triumph of Life)
Space The spouting flames from the Flame Barge were reduced to a low sputter, as a blue colored laser covered the sky above the lagoon. The Earth Globe, covered in a dim glow of white began to slowly glide across the lagoon to the center, accompanied by colored water effects emanating from the side fountains. As the Earth cools, the fountain color changed from hot white to red, ending on blue.
Life Images of trees, flowers, and animals covered the Earth Globe. The side fountains displayed green water effects. A video of a horse running in a field fades into a cave painting of a horse. Images of other cave paintings appeared on the Globe, which began flickering, showing the invention of fire. The side fountains then displayed a singular red stream of water, symbolizing the humans discovering fire.
Adventure The Earth Globe began showing images of native humans developing methods of transportation and images of vast landscapes. As countries and civilizations are formed, images of famous landmarks cover the Globe as the World Showcase pavilions are lit. Since the buildings of the Morocco Pavilion are replicas of buildings that have a great religious significance, the lights on the pavilion did not light up during this segment. In order to keep symmetry, the Norway Pavilion did not light up either. During this section, the side fountains and lasers alternated between various color combinations of blue/green, blue/orange, and blue/red. Four white clusters of fireworks were then launched and fizzled. As the pavilion lights faded, the fountains stopped, and the images on the sphere fizzled out. Blue and purple lights illuminated the inside of the Earth Globe allowing the structure behind the continents to be backlit.
Following this, strobe lights on the barge and pavilions flickered in sync with the music. Four sets of different colored high-launch fireworks were then launched from the center lagoon, one color at a time (magenta, green, orange, and yellow, respectively) as images of painters, dancers, sculptors, musicians, and architects were displayed on the Globe. Searchlights and lasers of the same four colors scanned the sky and lit the smoke from the fireworks. The side fountains matched the searchlight colors. Images of historical figures and folk heroes important to society were then displayed on the Globe closest to the countries which they originated. The final person shown on the globe was an astronaut who spun around further away from the foreground, spinning with the astronaut were colored fragments that eventually joined creating the seven continents.
Home As the fragments joined and the music peaked, four very bright high-launch fireworks shells exploded in the sky while four other shells exploded soon after and fell immediately to the lagoon evoking the visual of a meteor shower. The side fountains lit up in blue and orange, while World Showcase pavilions were then all lit together for the first time. Blue and orange laser light filled the lagoon spreading from the American Adventure pavilion. Strobe lights flickered on the pavilions and from within the center of the Earth Globe. Fireworks were then launched from all around the perimeter of the lagoon.
Celebration More fireworks were launched, as the side fountains changed colors from blue to orange. White beam fireworks were launched from around the Earth Globe, and smaller purple bursts were launched immediately afterwards. This effect continued throughout the entire segment. The lasers frequently changed colors while the World Showcase pavilions were lit with purple front light. This portion of the show concluded with another set of white perimeter fireworks and thousands of small purple fireworks filling the whole center of the lagoon. The Earth Globe fizzled to black while the pavilion lights remained lit.
Act III: Meaning (Hope for the Future)
As the song "We Go On" was played, the final act of the show began. Videos of passing a flame are shown on the Earth Globe. The torches around the lagoon are re-lit and the searchlights, aimed upwards at an angle, light up the sky above the lagoon, with the side fountains lit in a bright white. The Earth Globe then slowly began to open like a lotus blossom to reveal the final unity torch. Emanating fireworks are then launched, followed by 1,000 white fireworks brightly illuminating the lagoon. The show concluded with a final launch of perimeter fireworks and a set of bright white flashes, launched in sync with the music, ending with a loud crackle. The crackle made by the final set of fireworks could often be heard within several miles outside of the park.
Post Show The show ended with a post-show announcement (spoken by Tom Kane): This was substituted by Cummings saying:
The song "Promise" by Kellie Coffey then played as guests exited the park.
This song was then followed by the soundtrack to the Tapestry of Nations parade, another addition added to EPCOT as part of the Millennium Celebration. Once this song ended, the torches around the lagoon were extinguished.
Technical infrastructure
Earth Globe
The centerpiece of the show was the Earth Globe, a diameter globe housed on a barge. The world's first spherical video display system, the globe was wrapped in 15,600 LED clusters, each consisting of 12 light-emitting diodes. The Earth Globe started its journey from the edge of the World Showcase Lagoon, a man-made lake in Epcot, before anchoring itself in the middle of the lagoon. The Globe was in diameter and sits on top of a 10-foot pedestal. It contained 258 FlashWorks mini strobe lights (43 per petal) and was controlled by 6 computer processors. This was the only barge in the show with a driver on board, who uses an infrared guidance system. The Earth Globe was said to be one of the most complicated piece of show equipment made by Disney by History Channel's Modern Marvels.
Jerold Kaplan of Walt Disney Imagineering designed and engineered the Earth Globe and supporting barge. The detailed engineering for the barge and its propulsion and control systems were provided by Glowacki Engineering of Orange Park, FL. The Earth Globe Barge was built by Sun State Marine Services in Green Cove Springs, FL and was delivered in four major components which were assembled on site. The LED video display was run by a Pentium II server running Microsoft Windows 95/98 using a Serial ATA drive. There were two servers constantly running the same programs at the same time for fail-safe support. If one went down, they could instantly switch to the other server which presumably will still be running. The video control software, written by Derek Brown for Hitech Electronic Displays of Clearwater, Florida, communicates with onboard PLCs using two interfaces. The serial interface is used to receive the 4 character command codes separated by spaces to signify the end of each command. The NIDAQ (National Instrument Data Acquisition) card was used to provide status back to the PLCs. There are 8 optically isolated status channels. One channel was used to provide a heartbeat signal to tell the PLC that the software is on and functioning. The file formats were uncompressed AVIs passed through a masking filter to put the pixels in the spots for the countries.
During the first two minutes of the show, the Earth globe's LED screens were off. It was brown in color, but invisible in the thick black of the night. The Earth Globe's LED screens turned on in part two of the show, showing imagery of the natural world and iconic man-made structures. Slightly fewer than 300 pictures appeared on the Globe's spherical video screen during the show. Century III, an Orlando area film company, edited the video portion of the show. The pictures came from the stock libraries of Image Bank, National Geographic and Archive Films, some custom-shot live footage, and a single 3-D graphic animation shot. At the end of the show, the Earth Globe blossomed like a flower, revealing a flame torch that rose 40 feet above the lagoon. When the show ended, the fires on 19 of the torches keep burning, but the Earth Globe's torch is put out.
In the summer of 2008, the show ran a shortened, modified version in order for the Earth Globe to be refurbished. The refurbishment was to install a new LED video system, improving the clarity of the video. The content of the video was not changed.
Inferno Barge
The Inferno Barge was a barge with an isopar system on board that sent balls of fire soaring into the air and on to the surface of the lagoon from 37 nozzles. of isopar were used every night for the show.