Today marked the return of fireworks to Walt Disney World with Happily Ever After playing at 9:15pm and EPCOT Forever blasting off at 10pm. We’ll head over to Magic Kingdom soon, but we were very curious to see what modifications Disney would make to EPCOT Forever now that there is quite a bit of hardware on World Showcase Lagoon with the October 1st debut of Harmonious. As we reported earlier, none of that Harmonious hardware is being used for EPCOT Forever. As it turns out, Disney has made a few (rather small) changes to EPCOT Forever, but notable enough to brave the rainy evening and bring you a front row view of the return of fireworks to EPCOT.

The most notable omission in the 2021 version of EPCOT Forever is the impressive pyrotechnic kites. As it turns out, Disney will be using the jet skis over at Disney’s Animal Kingdom this fall for the new Disney KiteTails show. In the absence of kites, Disney utilizes what is probably the bare minimum additional pyro to keep the show going. The kites were really the highlight of EPCOT Forever and the show lacks the “wow moment” that they provided.

Another notable difference was the absence of lasers in the 2021 version of the show. Overall, we’d say that the 2021 version of EPCOT Forever was probably less impressive than the original version of the show. Hopefully Harmonious is the nighttime spectacular anchor that EPCOT needs.

Here’s a look back at the first version of EPCOT Forever on October 1, 2019.

As always, keep checking back with us here at BlogMickey.com as we continue to bring you the latest news, photos, and info from around the Disney Parks!