“The 21st century begins October 1, 1982.”
Make no mistake, EPCOT Center in the 1980s felt like the future. A masterpiece of brutalist architecture, bold ideas and the sound that we all heard in our heads when we thought about the world of tomorrow. EPCOT was a brilliant evocation of Walt Disney’s sense of optimism and big ideas and few were more important to that feeling than George Wilkins.
Wilkins was the protege of Disney Legend Buddy Baker who had not only penned the scores for a large number of Disney films but was rapidly becoming the go-to composer and arranger for the parks as well — having written Grim Grinning Ghosts for The Haunted Mansion amongst many others. As such a significant piece of the theme park puzzle, a near-tragic auto accident in the late ’70s had Disney executives panicking over what might become of their current projects if their primary composer was no longer around and they asked him to bring George Wilkins up to speed.
Wilkins began slowly taking over the arranging duties for the soon to be opened EPCOT, starting with arranging the long beloved Kitchen Kabaret and soon expanding The Sherman Brothers’ simplistic demos for Journey Into Imagination’s One Little Spark into a pavilion-wide audio tapestry. Guests walking into the EPCOT Entrance Plaza were welcomed by Wilkins’ angular take on the Bright/Hart composition Golden Dream from The American Adventure and if they were walking around The Universe of Energy or Wonders of Life pavilions, they couldn’t help but be swept up in Wilkins’ perky, synthy, environmental arrangements that filled those areas.
Wilkins was far from just an arranger however, composing entrance plaza music for The Living Seas, The Image Works soundtrack, the incidental score for Living with the Land, and what many consider his masterpiece, the theme for EPCOT’s ambitious Phase 2 attraction, Horizons. On the World Showcase side of the pond, Wilkins worked on The American Adventure doing arrangements and incidental music.
The sound of EPCOT was very much the sound of George Wilkins — aggressively modern, electronic, and just strange enough to keep people’s ears perked. But EPCOT isn’t where Wilkins’ influence in the parks ends by a long chalk. He composed We’ve Come So Far for Walt Disney World’s Space Mountain. The entire Sonny Eclipse show in Magic Kingdom’s Tomorrowland is a George Wilkins composition. He has the dubious distinction of having arranged the two most reviled attractions in Disney theme park history — The Enchanted Tiki Room Under New Management and Superstar Limo — but let’s not hold that against him when he also did arrangements for both the Country Bear Vacation Hoedown and Country Bear Christmas Special.
His credits go on and on.
Like his mentor, Buddy Baker, George Wilkins also took some young composers under his wing. Both John Debney (Phantom Manor) and Russell Brower (Disney Animal Kingdom) were given breaks and tutored by George Wilkins.
The passing of George Wilkins reminds us of the passing of a particularly, and peculiarly, American kind of optimism about the future. Like his music, there was a brashness to it, but also a real sincerity. It is hard to listen to the man’s work without growing a smile. Perhaps his legacy will be that whenever we hear a piece either written or arranged by George Wilkins, we can feel a sense of what hopefulness about tomorrow felt like when the 21st century began, in 1982.
And perhaps it can bring us a little hope today.
RIP George Wilkins (March 14th, 1934 — November 9th, 2024)
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Kelly McCubbin is a columnist for Boardwalk Times
