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The American Adventure Show Review

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The American Adventure Show

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Category: Amusement Parks
Location: Epcot

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Fodor's Review:

Duration: 30 min.

Crowds: Large, but the theater is huge, so you can almost always get into the next show.

Strategy: Check the entertainment schedule and arrive 10 min before the Voices of Liberty and the Spirit of America Fife & Drum Corps are slated to perform. See the drum corps outside, then grab a bench or a spot on the floor inside to enjoy the Voices' a cappella tunes before the show.

Audience: All ages.

Rating: ***

The pavilion's key attraction is this 100-yard dash through history, and you'll be primed for the lesson after reaching the main entry hall and hearing the stirring a cappella Voices of Liberty. Inside the theater, the main event begins to the accompaniment of "The Golden Dream," performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra. This show combines evocative sets, the world's largest rear-projection screen (72 feet wide), enormous movable stages, and 35 Audio-Animatronics players that are impressive but could use some upgrading. Ben Franklin still climbs up the stairs, but his movements are more tentative when compared with newer-generation figures. Beginning with the arrival of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock and their grueling first winter, Ben Franklin and a wry, pipe-smoking Mark Twain narrate the episodes, both praiseworthy and shameful, that have shaped the American spirit. Disney detail is so painstaking that you never feel rushed, and, in fact, each speech and scene seems polished like a little jewel. You feel the cold at Valley Forge and the triumph when Charles Lindbergh crosses the Atlantic; you're moved by Nez Percé chief Joseph's forced abdication of Native American ancestral lands and by women's rights campaigner Susan B. Anthony's speech; you laugh with Will Rogers's aphorisms and learn about the pain of the Great Depression through an affecting radio broadcast by Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

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