Wow. And I thought my joke was tasteless and evil. Way to raise the bar! 
CaerieD has already mentioned this, but there’s a big restaurant in the Morocco section. We ate there, using the Disney Dollars vouchers we got for listening to a TimeShare pitch. The food was good, and they had a musician and a Belly Dancer there.
I’m sure they “got in there” in the name of cultural diversity. I’ll bet they wanted to have a Middle-Eastern marketplace. Maybe somebody saw the second version of The Man Who Knew Too Much and decided it would be a good “scene”. In any event, it came ion handy, years later, when Disney seemed to be self-consciously trying to seek out new cultures and settings. On our second visit the Morocco section, which on our first visit had no tie-ins with animation features, now bristled with “Aladdin” stuff.
It’s both. Every time I go I roll my eyes until I get a little misty there at the end.
Yugoslavia sould be added. Every day at 11 it could break up into Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Hercegovinia, Serbia, Montenegro, and Kosovo. All the staff could dress as UN troops.
Tangentially, the funniest museum restaurant name I ever encountered was the cafe at the Royal Armored Corps museum in Bovington. The name of the cafe was The Gauntlet. Hungry from looking at tanks? Well, run your tummy through The Gauntlet. It’s a fist full of flavor right in your belly!
Actually, from what I’ve read, the “outpost” was the half-hearted end result of an effort to design a pavilion for a sub-Saharan African nation. FWIW, here is the succinct version as noted on Wikipedia (although I have seen the story related elsewhere:
Speaking of Red Stripe…perhaps a pavilion honoring some Caribbean culture would be neat. The only problem would be choosing one sovereign nation, as opposed to a territory, but all of the other ingredients are there: distinctive architecture (Spanish-style a la Old San Juan, the colorful buildings of Curacao, etc.), cuisine (Jamaican-Puerto Rican-Cuban with lots of roasted meats, beans, plantains, beer, and Ting), entertainment (steel drum bands, calypso, G-rated Carnival dancers), and Disney can always think of something to sell, so gift shops are of course no problem. Throw in a ride or a CircleVision show, and we’ve got ourselves a deal. At the least, it would be nice to have a “real” Caribbean counterpart to the Anglo-dominated “movie” Caribbean represented by the Pirates film/ride oeuvre.
I live to serve!
If India is added, then monkey brains must be put on the menu. Cause all I needed to learn about India I learned from The Temple of Doom and Bollywood.
There should be at least one country from Sub-Saharan Africa represented; probably South Africa, it’s more prosperous – and a safer tourist destination – than any other.
Definitely India, Definitely Russia.
Because the [ahem] industry for which they are best known is [cough] not exactly Disney-showcase material. :o
Another gastronomic vote for Belgium: beer, chocolates, mussels, waffles, and frites.
If this really is a park devoted to The Future™, they ought to have a pavilion or two on the potential impacts of future technologies that currently are only in the gleam-in-the-eye stage: Space elevators, nanotechnology, strong artificial intelligence, full-immersion virtual reality, direct neural-electronic interfaces, genetic engineering, etc.
Doesn’t WDW already have a Jamaican thing…only it’s a bus that travels around Epcot and not a “country”?
Have they changed Epcot so much since I was there (I think it was 1991) that they no longer do that? When I was there, that was what they did. Not in the pavilions area, but in the rest of Epcot. It was a bit dated, but it’s clear that that’s what they were trying to do.
Of course, things like that get dated very quickly, because predicting the social impact of future technologies is notoriously difficult. Science fiction writers often manage to predict some technology or other. It’s much rarer for them to accurately predict the social ramifications of a future technology, or even of an existing technology as it becomes cheaper or more widely available.
And then there’s the additional problem that some of these things or some of their potential applications (like genetic engineering) are controversial. Controversial stuff makes people boycott parks, and that means less money for Disney. They don’t want that.
Huh, I’ve never heard of that (or seen it, but it’s not like I go to Epcot every day or whatever). I know that Epcot did have a temporary pavilion set up right around the turn of the millennium that had a plethora of craft/gift/food booths featuring countries not represented in the WS - I bought a Thai rope dragon there, so Thailand was definitely one of them 
Perhaps the Jamaican bus was part of that whole promotion and I missed it. It also would not surprise me if Disney added the bus to commemorate some celebration that is big in the West Indies, like Carnival.
While the Jamaican bus does sound…interesting, I don’t think its existence right now would preclude a Jamaican/Caribbean pavilion from actually being built, if Disney wanted to (I haven’t heard any plans fielded for such). Again, with India and Africa, there is the issue of redundancy with AK. Although this might not sound appropriate to bring up in the “yeah, but what new pavilions do you WANT?” discussion, chances are that if Disney went ahead and squeezed an India or Africa into one of the Epcot spaces, I would prefer their AK counterparts anyway. Not that this is a slam at Epcot, it’s my favorite park, but they just have more space to work with at AK. How can you top that tiger trail, anyway? Or the safari? Or Expedition Everest? (technically Nepal, not India, but still) Not at Epcot.
This article might lead some to believe that a Russian pavilion is actually in the advanced planning stages at WDW, although it’s by the sometimes over-enthused Jim Hill so take it with a grain of salt. The notion that Imagineering DID develop plans for a mini-Russia/USSR at some point seems pretty plausible, however. It certainly wouldn’t be as hard as designing a new country from page one, if Disney decided to go ahead with mini-Russia.
Not that I recall, and I’ve been there several times. Never seen anything about nanotech, neural-electronic interface, or a space elevator. (Strong AI is a matter simply assumed whenever you have funny robots, but never seriously explored.)
Maybe so, but Walt woulda dug it! (Megalomaniac control freak that he was. Are you familiar with his original concept for EPCOT?)
The bus that travels around Epcot with the characters is (or maybe was) called the Junkanoo bus. At one time there was also (and may still be) the Joyful Junkanoo Junk band. That is, AFAIK, as close to adding anything Caribbean to Epcot has ever come. Besides, there’s no need - stroll over to the Caribbean Beach Resort for your Caribbean fix.
Technologies that are currently on the cusp of being useful are currently presented in the two Innoventions pavilions. The presentations are a little scattershot - some things are crowd-pleasers, and others go ignored. But Innoventions is, at least in theory, Epcot’s nod to emerging technologies. And it’s designed to be updated accordingly, so nothing becomes dated (in theory).
They still have large and ever-changing sections of new technology bits and the East and West pavilions around Spaceship Earth. It’s usually a bit more practical than “space elevators”, but they do different stuff.
I didn’t mean they had those things specifically. I meant they had technologies that somebody thought would be in use in the world of tomorrow. I think I was thinking specifically of the Horizons attraction, which is now gone.
Those would be the Innoventions pavilions: Innoventions East and Innoventions West.
Italy has performers in Venetian Carnival costumes & masks.
Gorgeous costumes.
The rest of it–forgettable.
And overpriced.
How about the Borg? They could replace the big globe thing with a cube.
(We now return you to your regularly scheduled Disney Channel selections).