Walt Disney Imagineer Zach Riddley has taken to social media to share another behind-the-scenes look at work taking place in Creations Shop – EPCOT’s new flagship store. Here’s what he shared:
As announced this week – Creations Shop and Club Cool will officially open at EPCOT on September 15!
To celebrate, here’s another fun detail for our Guests to discover when these locations open next week. 🐭
Continuing this legacy of original artwork at EPCOT, our team behind the new Creations Shop commissioned a collection of 10 new sculptures titled “Mouse as Muse” to live in this new space. Each sculpture, standing 26 inches tall, is a one-of-a-kind piece designed and crafted by an Imagineering artist – inspired by their personal interpretation of what creativity and Disney means to them and their work. Mickey Mouse is the blank canvas, but the subject and the final result were entirely up to each Imagineer!
These original sculptures form a permanent collection that will be unique to EPCOT, housed in special niches along the back wall of Creations Shop, and distinct from the Disney Fab 50 Character Collection coming to Walt Disney World for the 50th anniversary celebration.
I’m proud to reveal the first of these new sculptures – one that goes back to the earliest ideas for EPCOT depicted in Herb Ryman’s painting that gave form to this truly “Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow.”
From the artist herself:
“This piece is an homage to the original EPCOT visionaries, to the designers, artists, Walt himself, and the heights to which they aspired. How motivating and spectacular that an enterprise of creators beginning with a simple, yet successful, sketch of a mouse could evolve and grow and thrive so far as to set in motion a plan to bring about an entire community centered around the ideas of creativity, ingenuity and imagination. This is a plan that lives on in the form of EPCOT, ‘community of tomorrow that will never be completed.’”
This transformation is about the past, present and future coming together. EPCOT has a long history of artists, designers, characters and stories – foundations on which the last 40 years were built. Our team has much more to reveal that will celebrate those indelible nods to EPCOT’s past as we continue to share more design details across World Celebration in the coming months and years.