This may seem like a strange thread topic, but hear me out.
At least for the next week, we are still in the opening year of a new theme park. This is an incredibly rare occurance, and usually parks will change substantially over the course of months and years after they open. There does exist preservation of articles, advertising, signage, Preview Centers, entertainment offerings, unique attractions or effects around each land, for parks like Islands of Adventure and Animal Kingdom, but since those opened during a time when the internet, video streaming, social media, and camera technology were nowhere near where they are today, there are lots of gaps in our knowledge from those opening months. Lots of things that we know of, but don't have any high-quality pictures, video, audio recordings, etc. Lots of stories or reports posted on web forums that were lost, often scrapped alongside the forum server they sat on at some point in the 2000s or 2010s.
I just wish to point out the very unique and singular opportunity afforded to us right now. We exist at the same time as the opening of this brand new theme park. It seems very exciting and shiny and fresh to us now, but it will inevitably become just another one of our Orlando parks, and it will also inevitably be very different than it is today. Kids will be born and grow up in a world that has seemingly never not had an Epic Universe, and a Wicked land, and an empty meet & greet location in Darkmoor, or some version of that.
We are the forum posts that bored kids will dig up in 2045 when they want to learn about this park that has always existed for them. Epic has the advantage of existing alongside modern phone camera tech and social media, so there is a lot more preservation of it than any new park in recent memory. But annual passholders don't exist yet, the park is still difficult to access for most locals, and we have no idea what will happen to the park going forward.
I would love to see a push for more thorough documentation of what currently is on offer at Epic around its' opening seasons. What if the Dragons drones and robots don't quite make it to year 10 of Epic? What if they make a new park BGM loop after the first year? Do we have recordings of the small fountain shows throughout the day? If any of those were to go away, would people online in 2035 have any way to know that they existed or what they were like?
As someone who likes to dig into theme park history rabbit holes, it's been eating at me for a bit now, and I figured if its' getting this kind of response from myself, maybe someone else here thinks a similar way. This is just such a unique position that we are in. What if we had modern recording tech around the opening year of Epcot or USF? What could we have visual evidence of, that currently doesn't exist? What if we had access to webforums immediately and inside of the park to report on new developments, changes to infrastructure or offerings, etc?
I believe if we're lucky enough to go consistently, and if we're able to spend as much time thinking about Epic as we do, there is a responsibility to preserve as much as we can for the theme park fans who come after us.