“Man and His Spaceship Earth” — Ray Bradbury’s Original Script

This is Ray Bradbury’s original script for Spaceship Earth. Its title page reads “Man and His Spaceship Earth,” “Theme Show for EPCOT Center/Future World,” and “Concept by Ray Bradbury,” dated July 22, 1977.

It is a scan of the typed manuscript, and it offers a look at the creative thinking behind the attraction before it was built.

View the PDF (23 pages, 2.6 MB)

Spaceship Earth Design Meetings

Almost nobody gets a seat in the room where an attraction is being invented. This typewritten transcript puts you there. John DeCuir Sr., Bob Gurr, Don Iwerks, and others think out loud, trade ideas, and work through problems as they come up. In the transcript the speakers appear as initials: JDC (John DeCuir Sr.), BG (Bob Gurr), and DI (Don Iwerks).

Here you can watch Spaceship Earth take shape. DeCuir Sr. describes a big time tunnel that goes first back through history and then forward. It begins with prehistoric humans: a volcano erupting, lava running down, a mammoth swinging right by over the ride track, and figures fighting for survival around a cave. Then comes the hard part, which is how to pull it off. They weigh stacked projectors, scrims, beaded screens, CircleVision, and forced perspective to bring a Roman Forum, a printing press, or a moving Rosetta Stone to life, and they look to other rides for ideas, such as the Bell Telephone ride at the 1964 New York World’s Fair.

“…whole message of Spaceship Earth has to be beautiful[ly] done.”

They are also reacting to Ray Bradbury’s script, the document above, which describes the cities beginning to “unbuild themselves.” DeCuir Sr. points to that idea of stones and cities coming apart and argues that simply reversing through the eras, from the Renaissance back into Roman times, would get the idea across without taking the stones apart (PDF page 2).

Page 1 of the transcript is missing, so this copy opens on page 2, in the middle of a conversation. The exact dates of the meetings are not known.

This document comes from the John DeCuir Production Design Studies Center at Asbury University. The pages are scans of a typewritten transcript with handwritten annotations. The text has been made searchable with OCR, so you can search within the PDF, but recognition is not perfect, especially on some pages. The scanned pages themselves are the authoritative record.

View the PDF (33 pages, 9.2 MB)