We’ve spoken about the Disney studio’s recent trip to Mars as well as Bob Clampett’s (non-Disney) attempt to animate the series of Edgar Rice Burroughs stories in 1936. But in 1957 Disney himself took a brief trip to Barsoom via Mars and Beyond, the beloved episode of the Disneyland television series directed by Disney [...]]]>

We’ve spoken about the Disney studio’s recent trip to Mars as well as Bob Clampett’s (non-Disney) attempt to animate the series of Edgar Rice Burroughs stories in 1936. But in 1957 Disney himself took a brief trip to Barsoom via Mars and Beyond, the beloved episode of the Disneyland television series directed by Disney animator and eccentric Ward Kimball.

The episode, which speculates on what man would find when they inevitably journeyed to the red planet, began with a retrospective of Mars’s influence on our culture. In true Kimball fashion we get a wacky look at the past, and on past theories about Martian life. One segment is devoted to the civilizations, flora and fauna of Mars as described in Burroughs’s series of John Carter novels.

I’ve always lamented that Walt’s studio never made much science fiction, and we can only dream of how wonderfully manic a true Kimball-directed John Carter movie would be. But these designs give a hint of how Kimball’s wild imagination envisioned the world of Barsoom.

The segment begins by discussing Burroughs's "Martian Dictionary", and all the terms he created for the population of Mars...

Here are Kimball's version of Barsoomians. Not exactly Lynn Collins, but...

...they do fight!

Calot: Described as "A large dog-like creature with a frog-like mouth and three rows of teeth", one of these creatures becomes Carter's pet, Woola, who appears in the recent film... looking very differently!

A Calot howling at the moons...

This is a Banth, a ten-legged Martian "lion"...

Beat that, Industrial Light and Magic!

This is a Martian Plant Man. They don't appear in the recent film...

...what's this?

Don't eat it, stupid! You don't know where that's been.

...what's all this, then?

OH SNAP. Ya burnt!

This is a thoat - an eight-legged Martian horse...

...this does not happen in the movie.

For your enjoyment, here’s the entire, fantastic special. It’d made a good dark ride for the parks, don’t you think? I certainly do. If you’re just interested in the Barsoomian action, it starts at 11:20. But I recommend watching the whole thing! And remember – vote GARCO in 2012!

Many people over the years have contributed to what we consider the Disney legacy. Sadly, as time passes, we lose more and more of those iconic figures who were Walt’s hand-picked talent; those who were behind the golden era of Disney animation, film, and theme parks. Today we have lost another titan of old [...]]]>

Many people over the years have contributed to what we consider the Disney legacy. Sadly, as time passes, we lose more and more of those iconic figures who were Walt’s hand-picked talent; those who were behind the golden era of Disney animation, film, and theme parks. Today we have lost another titan of old – Robert Sherman, half of the legendary Disney songwriting team – passed away yesterday at the age of 86.

Aside from my condolences to his family and friends, there’s so little that I can say that could adequately encapsulate the magnitude of the Shermans’ contributions to the popular culture of the 20th century. As I said when I reviewed their retrospective musical collection, their contribution to Disney songwriting is so fundamental that one cannot quite grasp it; as staff songwriters, their fingers were in so many pots creatively that the entire soundscape of that era would be vastly different without them.

And, of course, their creations are evergreen. The luckiest songwriters can claim to be the “voice of their generation”; Robert Sherman was a voice of at least four generations and counting with no end in sight. He bridged the eras of Tin Pan Alley, the Hollywood studio system, and theme parks and Broadway. Men are mortal but Robert Sherman’s songs will outlast us all.

Robert Sherman saw many things in his long life, some of which made a lasting mark, but despite it all he left a legacy that charmed and entertained literally billions. How many can say that? I could go on about this at length, so great my respect for this man. But perhaps it’s better – much better – to just sit back and listen. Here are some peeks back at the Sherman legacy.

Thanks, Bob.

First, a Disney Family Album from the Disney Channel…

And here, in Sherman’s own words, are his thoughts on receiving a window on Main Street USA at Disneyland.

One of the catchiest, yet seldom heard Sherman songs, comes from Meet the World – a Tokyo Disneyland attraction originally planned for Epcot Center.

Here, the boys appear with Walt to promote the Carousel of Progress, and their song There’s a Great, Big Beautiful Tomorrow which plays in the Disney parks to this day.

Perhaps one of the greatest Sherman numbers from my generation was One Little Spark from Journey into Imagination.

Their work was never dull…

And always catchy…

And occasionally trippy!

They invented words…

A lot of words…

And popularized others.

The took us to exotic realms…

And to the cozy yesteryear of middle America.

They even traveled beyond ordinary… MAGNIFICATION.

And finally, perhaps my favorite song that the brothers wrote – On The Front Porch.

Our lives are all richer for Robert Sherman’s efforts. Once again, thanks, Bob.

In 1982 Buddy Baker was a busy man, jetting around the world to record the scores for a slew of new attractions and films for EPCOT Center. For the French pavilion’s Impressions de [...]]]>

"Buddy Baker, Director of Music at WED & MAPO, conducting the National Philharmonic Orchestra inside the EMI/Abbey Road Studio in London"

In 1982 Buddy Baker was a busy man, jetting around the world to record the scores for a slew of new attractions and films for EPCOT Center. For the French pavilion’s Impressions de France, Baker and other Disney personnel traveled to London to record the National Philharmonic Orchestra at the fabled EMI/Abbey Road Studios. This marked the first time a film had been produced with an entirely digital soundtrack.

And, obviously, you can’t visit Abbey Road without the requisite photo op…

"Buddy Baker of Show Design, Rick Harper, formerly of Show Design and Glenn Barker and Dave Spencer of the Audio/Video Dept. cross London's Abbey Road"

Courtesy of John Donaldson come these sketches by Herb Ryman; they are preliminary studies for EPCOT’s Italy pavilion. While they are merely sketches, they do convey a Rymanesque sense of atmosphere and – of course – hint at a cast of interesting characters in the foreground.

The landmarks depicted do differ somewhat from the [...]]]>

Courtesy of John Donaldson come these sketches by Herb Ryman; they are preliminary studies for EPCOT’s Italy pavilion. While they are merely sketches, they do convey a Rymanesque sense of atmosphere and – of course – hint at a cast of interesting characters in the foreground.

The landmarks depicted do differ somewhat from the pavilion as we know it. The campanile and the building in the rear resemble the St. Mark’s Square replicas found in EPCOT today, but the obelisk is more reminiscent of one found in Vatican City than in Venice. In the foreground, you can make out the caption “view from the Rialto”; this alludes to Venice’s Rialto Bridge, which does receive a nod in the current pavilion’s design.

Here’s another perspective on Ryman’s design. Note the caption for the puppet show and the organ grinder – and also that the art was due Wednesday afternoon!

While these pieces were never intended to be seen by the public, they are an interesting look at the early phases of Imagineering artwork. And perhaps they can make us mere mortals feel a little better that even the greats had to sketch things out first instead of going straight into painting a masterpiece!

Over at the Walt Disney Family Museum’s blog Storyboard – which you should be reading regularly by now – I’ve written an article about the Disney studio’s contributions to the VIII Winter Olympic Games in 1960. It’s an interesting and rarely-told part of Disney lore, and an overlooked step in Walt’s progression from Disneyland [...]]]>

Over at the Walt Disney Family Museum’s blog Storyboard – which you should be reading regularly by now – I’ve written an article about the Disney studio’s contributions to the VIII Winter Olympic Games in 1960. It’s an interesting and rarely-told part of Disney lore, and an overlooked step in Walt’s progression from Disneyland towards the east coast. Check it out!

Today, the Walt Disney Company is a multi-billion dollar hype machine cranking out a stream of press releases on a daily basis. But long ago, the Disney studio was literally a garage-based organization and hardly the talk of the town. Still, the 22-year-old aspiring mogul managed to get his name in print – no [...]]]>

Today, the Walt Disney Company is a multi-billion dollar hype machine cranking out a stream of press releases on a daily basis. But long ago, the Disney studio was literally a garage-based organization and hardly the talk of the town. Still, the 22-year-old aspiring mogul managed to get his name in print – no small feat, even in 1924.

Hollywood bigshots with enough time on their hands to browse the back pages of the Los Angeles Times might have come across this blurb at the bottom of a long column of movieland news on July 6th, 1924. I’m curious as to how this story came about; perhaps it was the work of Disney’s distributor in New York. In any case, one could hardly have guessed at the time the magnitude of events which would result from this simple announcement.

ACTORS MIX WITH CARTOONS

In Hollywood a young cartoonist by the name of Walt Disney is making a series of twelve animated cartoon productions. Real people are seen acting with pen-and-ink actors. They are known as the “Alice” series and 5-year-old Virginia Davis, de luxe child dancer, has the big part. M.J. Winkler of New York is releasing the comedies.

In a speech during the 1970s, author Ray Bradbury famously referred to Imagineering as a “Renaissance organization.” That was an apt metaphor; that first generation of Imagineers contained a remarkable collection of what could legitimately be called Renaissance men (and a handful of Renaissance women as well). These artists, many of whom had been [...]]]>

In a speech during the 1970s, author Ray Bradbury famously referred to Imagineering as a “Renaissance organization.” That was an apt metaphor; that first generation of Imagineers contained a remarkable collection of what could legitimately be called Renaissance men (and a handful of Renaissance women as well). These artists, many of whom had been culled from the realm of live-action motion picture art direction as well as Disney’s own animation studio, had not grown up going to Disneyland and dreaming of theme parks; they had seen the world and, like Walt himself, were fascinated with a slew of seemingly unrelated and esoteric subjects.

Over the years, though, the mantle of Imagineering’s resident “intellectual” seems to have settled on John Hench. Another long-time Disney staffer and former artist at the animation studio, Hench was the reserved, studious sort. After Walt’s death, when individual Imagineers started to come to the fore in the media, Hench’s position at the top of the WED pile ensured that he received lots of print coverage as Disney tried to figure out what they were going to do about EPCOT. During this time, he publicly began to discuss his philosophies about “the architecture of reassurance” and what, exactly, made Disney Disney.

It’s hard to tell how much of this Henchian analysis went into the original design of Disneyland. Although I hope it’s obvious that I adhere to the viewpoint that theme parks are art, Hench’s musings have always struck me as ex post facto philosophizing; they seem better suited to figuring out why Disneyland worked as well as it did than as a predictive method of effective design. A problem I often have with deep-text analyses of themed design is that it assumes intent that I don’t always believe was there. It strikes me that most of the original Imagineers – including Walt himself – were deeply intuitive artists who judged things solely by whether they liked them or not. Not for nothing was Walt’s famous sign-off “That’ll work.” I’ve always interpreted that as a literal statement of fact, not as a prelude to “That’ll work to help subliminally evoke race-memories and instinctual reactions in the hippocampus to evoke the proper reaction.” That might be what’s actually happening, but I can’t believe that the designers thought it out to that point. You don’t crank out artwork at the rate Marc Davis did by stopping to plan and analyze the semiotics of the piece; surely he was simply drawing things that he liked, or thought entertaining?

Walt’s artists were indeed brilliant, but I think of them more as intuitively so rather than intellectually so. They were well-read and well-traveled, and those experiences and knowledge informed their design, but I don’t feel like they set out to rationalize everything beforehand. For one thing, there was little time to do so. For another, Disney attractions typically included several “authors” and eventually the ultimate editor, Walt himself. I can’t imagine Hench going on like this back in a design meeting with Walt; it’s mere speculation on my part, but I can’t imagine Walt having patience for such things. I very much doubt that Walt cared why things worked, since he could so quickly and intuitively tell that they would work. Why stop and think about it if it’s instinctive?

Nevertheless, for those of us who aren’t geniuses (and for some of you that are), such analysis can be fascinating. There is a reason why Disneyland works. There is a reason why Disney was successful in the first place, and it wasn’t good marketing or good advertising (although that never hurts). It was because of a qualitative difference in the world Disney created as opposed to what could be found elsewhere. And the reason that many of us get upset with the wayward drift of Disney parks over the last 15-20 years or so is because too many decisions are not being made on the instinctive or intellectual basis that made Disney famous in the first place.

But that’s a rant for another day. What follows is an article from New West magazine in December of 1978, with Hench’s thoughts on what makes Disneyland work. There’s a touch to the hagiographic about the article, but it’s an interesting piece and a nice look at Hench’s mindset at a critical time for Imagineering. Just a few months prior, Walt Disney Productions had announced that it would, in fact, proceed with development on EPCOT Center, and between that project and Tokyo Disneyland, WED was entering the busiest period of its history.

CHARLIE HASS on the Magic Kingdom’s master manipulator

DISNEYLAND IS GOOD FOR YOU

You’re waiting in line for Pirates of the Caribbean, inching along and feeling not too great – a result of injudiciously going to find out what had gotten into the Matterhorn so soon after the Casa de Fritos – and you are fingering the “E” ticket in your breast pocket every thirty seconds or so even though it’s going to be fifteen minutes easy before you reach the turnstile, and in those fifteen minutes you think about, oh, all kinds of things: sex, the Sox, the drive here, the drive home. Your thoughts are your own business, even at Disneyland.

But it may be instructive to consider a few things you are probably not thinking about as the line moves slowly and surely forward. The real good likelihood is that you are not dwelling on the confidence engendered in America by industrial progress and national expansion in the late nineteenth century, nor on the importance of central fortresses to the earliest cities, nor on the pleasure of prehistoric tribes at sharing fresh-killed game. You might happen to hit one of these if you majored in anthropology, maybe two if you’ve been reading yourself to sleep with Man and His Symbols. But three?

Just the same: Out of mind, at the Magic Kingdom, is not necessarily out of sight. In your least adventuresome moments – window-shopping Main Street, shaking hands with Mickey – you are firmly encircled by subtle but deliberate visual signatures of those remote notions you’re not thinking about as you languish in line, and of several more of human history’s greatest hits. Disneyland, as one of its key creators explains, draws much of its legendary power to entertain an international audience of all ages from its skillful incorporation of aesthetic effects that find their resonance in the visitor’s genetically inherited ancestral memories – a nostalgia of considerably longer standing and more compelling power than a childhood devotion to Dumbo.

A portentous claim for an amusement park, but then it is a major article of Disneyfaith that Disneyland is not an amusement park but a themed entertainment experience. Disneyland is to an amusement park what a well-designed shopping mall is to a rundown city block of randomly arrived storefront businesses – an equation to conjure with, because it is necessary to know why simply being on a city street is so bad for your evolutionary capabilities in order to know why being at Disneyland is so good for them. To understand that, and the whole process that brought atavism to Anaheim, you have to talk to John Hench.

"The Inner Disneyland - Walt's original theme park runs on elaborate psychological clockwork, revealed for the first time in the words of John Hench, executive vice-president and chief operating officer of WED Productions."

John Hench, who is 70, is executive vice-president and chief operating officer of WED (Walter Elias Disney) Enterprises, the division of Walt Disney Productions responsible for the design and execution of attractions, including all the rides and shows at Disneyland and Walt Disney World. Trained as a painter before joining Disney almost 40 years ago, Hench worked on live-action and animated features – as an artist, set designer, and special-effects technician – before Walt Disney put him to work on the planning of Disneyland in the early fifties. Combining his practical experience with a wide range of research, Hench has become the Disney organization’s ranking theoretician on how movies and theme parks can be programmed to produce effects on the unconscious as well as the conscious mind – the rightful resources of the informed entertainer, or the tactics of manipulations, depending on your point of view.

Hench is an intellectual out of Disney casting: He is genuinely brilliant and articulate, and his theories ofter get to complex and exotic places. But he employs a softening measure of colloquial offhandedness that makes him seem an unthreatening regular guy. And a company man: His deferrals of credit to Walt Disney are frequent and fond. Though he is balding and his face is well lined, he undercuts the appearance of age with vigorous speech and movement and a casual look. During a recent conversation, he wore a bright ascot under a shirt on which several Mickey Mouse heads – the same color as the rest of the shirt, but woven in a different density – were visible in certain lights. His mustache, silver and neatly trimmed, is reminiscent of the late Disney’s. Sitting in a borrowed office at the Disneyland Visitors’ Center, Hench describes Disneyland as a “storyboarded” environment, one in which the sequence of impressions and experiences is carefully regulated by a supervising intelligence.

“It is easily understandable when you think of it like a film and how identity is controlled in a film. Identity is a figure-ground relationship: Scene five takes its identity from scenes one, two, three and four. If you put scene five against that background, you understand it, but if you just dropped it in the audience’s laps they wouldn’t know what was going on. There’s a flow of relations that you must have so that their attention doesn’t wander. We did a slide show once, called Good Show – Bad Show, to demonstrate why Disneyland is different from someplace else, why there’s a sense of order here and what order is supposed to do to you. And the photographer who put it together came up with a wonderful example of a bad show. He took a picture of that Gothic tower at Franklin and Highland, where is a pure piece of Gothic – it speaks to us even yet, after all these years. That Gothic message didn’t come out of one man’s head, but out of a group movement, like a folk song. And right in front of it is a big gasoline sign.

“Well, one contradicts the other. They juxtapose. And the Gothic tower doesn’t do the gasoline any good either, you know. A city is made up of all kinds of things that way, unrelated things, and it doesn’t add up to anything except chaos. We have a couple of million years’ experience with chaos, and we know that it’s the next step before conflict, and we have experience with conflict also, and it’s something that doesn’t endorse our survival potential. So cities are threatening.

“But the order here at Disneyland works on people, the sense of harmony. They feel more content here, in a way that they can’t explain. You find strangers talking to each other without any fear. You actually find people patting strange kids on the head, which of course they wouldn’t do anywhere else. If you walk down a city street – just any modern city, Chicago, Tokyo – you don’t look people in the eye. God, you’d be in trouble if you did that! You don’t smile at a stranger. They’d only think you were making an ass out of yourself. And so you lose some of the faculties that you need in order to evolve successfully.

“So people come to Disneyland, and they’re aware – through this extraordinary mechanism that they inherit from their ancestors – of the kind of harmony here. Things seem to know each other. One side of Main Street is aware of the other side. It was planned for this very effect, and who else but motion-picture people, who design sets, could do it? Walt understood the relation between scene one and scene two, he knew how to identify something and how to hold the identity due to something the Germans call gestalt. Nothing has an identity of its own until it’s related to something else. If you can control that relation, you can control identity. You can use images in a literate way. And Walt sensed what you could do with entertainment. Entertainment is usually thought of as an escape from problems, an escape from responsibility, but as far as I know he had an original idea – and there are some practicing psychiatrists that happen to agree with us, that what we are selling is not escapism but reassurance.”

That reassurance, Hench says, comes not only from the harmoniously designed environment but from thrill rides such as Space Mountain and the Matterhorn, which expose the rider to a threat and then take the threat away as the ride ends. “It goes back to the one universal human dynamic – survival,” Hench says. “We’re here today because our ancestors were good. They knew the patterns of survival, they knew how to do it. The others, who were foolish or didn’t pay attention to it, are not here at all.

All social groups train for the coming challenges of survival. Even puppies play at battle. What we do here is to throw a challenge at you – not a real menace, but a pseudo-menace, a theatricalized menace – and we allow you to win. Like Space Mountain. You might feel threatened on that. You feel that you’re going way to fast for safety. Some people come off there with a dose of adrenalin like they haven’t felt for a long time. They might be kind of hyperventilated – but they win, and they feel good about it.

“The psychiatrists are beginning to agree that survival is our single dynamic. We tend to think of our aesthetic sense, for example, or our sense of ethics, as something separate from this, but if you really look at it, ethics are quite obviously associated with survival – you know, you belong to the tribe,” Hench continues, “you don’t lie to the leader, and so forth.

“Most people don’t really understand how vision can be part of this dynamic, but obviously, the better you use your eyes, the further away you can size up a situation and relate it to survival or its opposite, the better off you are. So those of us who are here today, whose ancestors survived, are very good at relating images together. Those people in primitive times who waited until they put their hand on it and felt it and said, ‘It must be a saber-tooth tiger’ – those people have no representation at all here today. So for us, the eye is overpowering, and for that reason Walt particularly used and exploited visual images. He knew they would get through in front of sound every time – in fact, we did some experiments, taping dialogue over a film situation, and distorting or contradicting the visual just to see how much attention would be paid to the narration. Well, people weren’t even aware that there was a contradiction because they never heard it. The eye dominated.”

It is Hench’s reading and thinking – along with the attentions of sympathetic psychologists, architects and urban planners – that has brought these ideas into currency in the Disney organization. “I suppose I’ve been the one to talk about it the most. But it was always here – Walt said it in various ways. You have to understand that Walt was a highly intuitive man. When we were building the little stagecoaches, I said, ‘Walt, God, look at this thing, we’re putting leather straps on it and everything else – it’s perfect. I don’t think they’re going to appreciate it.’ And he said, ‘Yes they will,’ and he gave me a lecture on understanding people. He said, ‘If they don’t appreciate it, if you do something and people don’t respond to it, it’s because you are a poor communicator. But if you really reach them and touch them, they will respond,’ he said, ‘because people are okay.’ How about that? He really believed that people are decent. It’s a matter of bringing that out, letting them know who they really are.

“I suppose some of our thinking stems from Jung, and from Freud, too; Freud came around the edges of it, but he didn’t really get into the basis of the threat. He understood that sexuality is naturally a very strong point of the survival mechanics, but – well, people have a problem because they were threatened so severely when they were young. They were left alone, or their mother didn’t love them, or some damn thing, and so they build up a defense, and that’s the source of all their trouble. And both Freud and Jung felt that you shouldn’t touch that defense because the threat is so overpowering that you need the shielding, that the defense is the only thing that keeps the guy alive and working. But there are a few people practicing now that don’t mind walking right in there and spreading that thing out – and again, it’s always a threat. And we have a number of psychiatrists who support our work, who’ve discovered that there’s something beyond an amusement park here. Because it works on people. It obviously works on people.

“If you’re at a state fair or something, everything clamors for you, so you look and you look and you try to make sense out of things, you try to decide and you constantly make a lot of judgements. But here, when we come to a point in the park that we know is a decision point, we put two choices. We try not to give them seven or eight so that they have to decide in a qualitative way which is the best of those. You just give them two. Then we get the guy farther along and he has another choice, but we’re not giving him four to being with. We unfold these things, so that they’re normal.

“It’s admitted that the shopping malls – the whole ‘malling of America,’ I think is the expression – comes from Main Street here in Disneyland. They suddenly discovered that they could build a shopping mall and make it work a lot better by just observing what happened here. Their observation is only partial, it didn’t penetrate too deeply, but they knew they wanted to make a sense of place. And how is a sense of place achieved? Simply because every member of the thing, every facility, agrees on what the place is. One building recognizes the existence of the other. There’s plenty of diversity, but there isn’t contradiction.”

"Walt Disney - Peace and harmony in the Magic Kingdom"

Whatever the proportion of intuition to intention, the Disney studio at its best – in animated features such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Dumbo, Fantasia and Peter Pan – has taken frequent advantage of the powers of myth and symbol, and the psychology of color and form. Animation, with its almost unlimited vocabulary of colors and motions, is in some ways an ideal laboratory for testing the effects of moving shapes on the viewer’s emotions. The Disney features are lessons in the use of those effects: objects whirling in circular symmetry, friendly roundnesses played off against threatening angularities, shapes dissolving into other shapes with a revelatory facility that recalls dreams. In Fantasia especially, but in the others as well, mythic themes of fear and reassurance are played out in various costumings, with light quite literally triumphing over dark again and again.

One of the most popular criticisms of Disney, in fact, is that the studio’s films have neutered myth material, replacing instructive complexity and ambivalence with a placating singlemindedness. A similar complaint is that Disney’s live-action films and outdoor attractions depicting historical periods or foreign locales are prone to simplifying and sanitizing their subject matter to a misleading degree.

As Hench explains the Disney organization’s interest in psychology, subliminal impressions and the evolutionary value of harmonious surroundings, a more disturbing series of apprehensions comes to mind: One imagines a Disneyesque sorcerer playing one’s unconscious like a pocket calculator, punching in childhood triumphs and tribal anxieties so that some new thrill ride will come off like gangbusters. The themed entertainment experience begins to sound less like pricey fun and more like inexpensive therapy. But at what point does skillful entertainment turn to dangerous abuse?

“How do you abuse harmony?” Hench replies. “How do you give people too much of a sense of well-being? I don’t understand that, it’s hard to imagine. What is it? Euphoria? There has been research done by stimulating a part of the brain, using a very light electrical current and producing what seems to be pure pleasure. People think that satisfies every instinct – success, beautiful girls, the whole business all wrapped up in one. I suppose that would be an abuse. But there’s nothing like that in what we have in mind.”

But how about those – myself, say – who prefer the inchoate poetry of a city street to the more sterile harmony of Disneyland? Don’t some people thrive on randomness, surprise, disorder?

“They think they do,” Hench says. “And it’s true, it does have some stimulation to it because it’s a threat – you’re stimulated by a threat, but how long can you continue that? Exercise is great for you, but try holding your arm out with a ten-pound weight on it and hold it for hours and hours. That’s not good for you. It must have been stimulating to be in a boiler factory, in those days when they pounded those things and made a hell of a lot of noise, you know, but just keep that up and you kind out it’s a threat. That’s why it’s a stimulus. But we stimulate them with another kind of emotion, with the kind of stimulus that says, ‘You’re going to be okay.’ It’s the stimulation you get out of a party or a fiesta, or having fresh-killed game. The primitive thing – we all eat again. It’s not a threat, it’s the reverse.”

To illustrate, Hench leads me onto Disneyland’s main drag and entranceway – Main Street, U.S.A.

“The forms of these buildings,” he says, “are locked into old associative forms. The old forms weren’t designed by some person at a desk, an architect – the designers responded to a kind of group dream, a group aspiration. In the same way, a folk song was not written by some guy at a piano. That represents a lot of experience, and no one person can put it down. In a symbolic way, architecture is the same – an old architectural form has those reassurances locked in there. You take a certain style, and take out the contradictions that have crept in there through people that never understood it or by accident or by some kind of emergency that happened one and found itself being repeated – you leave those things out, purify the style, and it comes back to its old form again. It has its old message.

Main Street, of course, has the Victoria feeling, which is probably one of the great optimistic periods of the world, where we thought progress was great and we all knew where we were going. This form reflects that prosperity, that enthusiasm. Walt wanted to reassure people. There’s some nostalgia involved, of course, but nostalgia for what? There was never a Main Street like this one. But it reminds you of some things about yourself that you’ve forgotten about.”

Including, presumably, how small you once were – all the buildings on Main Street are considerably smaller than life.

“Yes,” says Hench, “that slightly miniature style is another kind of reassuring thing. Something very large is threatening, but this looks like you could handle everything. You know, of course, that in Europe the great cathedral builders were sensitive to that. They’d put a door in that matched the scale of the building, but then they’d put a smaller door inside that one, and then another one, and finally they got down to a door you could walk through with pleasure because it was your size.

“Here we have City Hall, and of course the opera house, the fire department. And look” – Hench floats a hand in front of him, tracing the tops of the buildings across the square from us – “there is no jar, your eyes can just flow through there. There’s a harmony, a definite relation there, the buildings know each other. They were produced by the same spirit. The fire department wasn’t designed by some guy who hated the guy who did the opera house. These buildings agree on the rules of the game. And notice these columns.” He turns to point out the slender columns on the façade of a nearby store. “We exaggerate the slimness of the columns – again, for confidence. A building with thin columns knows it’s not going to be attacked. It has nothing to fear. People can respond to this confidence without knowing just where it’s coming from, particularly if it’s not contradicted anywhere. These forms aren’t poverty-stricken. They’re just the opposite. Those buildings over there” – he points to the Penny Arcade, Candy Palace and Sunkist Citrus House – “there’s a great deal of variety there, but they all have a harmony running through them, a single theme. They were considered as a unit, not as individual things.”

A few feet away, a cluster of people surrounds an actor in a Mickey Mouse suit. Hench joins the crowd. “The real marvel,” he says, “is this thing. Mickey Mouse is made up almost entirely of curves, and again that’s very reassuring – people have had millions of years’ experience with curved objects and they’re never been hurt by them. It’s the pointy things that give you trouble. Imagine putting a set of dynamic curves together in a design that has the power that this one does, so that he goes all around the world and no one ever thinks of him as an American import. They give him a name and then it’s a déjà vu experience – they know this guy already. They respond to the curves.”

Hench leads the way toward Tomorrowland. “This park was planned like a motion picture,” he says, “to evolve and unfold in time so that a thread runs through it. There are a couple of contradictions that occur on a rational level. Like having a castle at the end of Main Street. But here we’re calling back the old image of a secured point, a strong place. It doesn’t belong on Main Street, but it does belong at the end of a vista like this. The old cities of the earth clustered around a strong point – in fact, in the early colonies you were fined if you lived too far from the center. They figured that if you couldn’t run to the meeting house in time to help defend the group, you were a menace to the community, so you were fined for living out too far. And I suppose there’s enough left in our blood, we who come from Europe, to know that the castle is the strong point – and a home as well. You know the expression, ‘A man’s home is his castle.’ So, in the end, this castle is Everyman’s home.”

Since the summer of 1977, Tomorrowland has been dominated by Disneyland’s newest ride, Space Mountain, a cone-enclosed roller coaster designed to evoke rocket thrust, weightlessness and other scarifying joys of space travel. The cone’s sweeping curves and sharp upward direction state the space theme nicely, Hench says, and “it’s also a logical shape to put that kind of gravity ride in, because if you start at one point and spread the energy, you inevitably wind up with a cone. And cones are very satisfactory as to scale; they look like mountains. The one in Florida has a disarming way of appearing nowhere in particular – you don’t see the base of it, so it floats. It seems like it’s very far away and in fact it reminds me of Mount Fuji in Japan. It has that same kind of serenity and speaks very much the same language.”

A short stroll later – Hench refers to the interstices between lands as “cross-dissolves,” after the filmmaking term for overlapping scene transitions – we are in the courtyard of the Fantasyland castle. “This, of course, is like the medieval fairs,” Hench says. “The courtyard of the castle, where they would pitch the tends for fairs and festivals.”

The ornate carousel, I suggest, is probably one of the least original rides at the park, and the least subject to improvement. Not so. “You’ll notice that we have all white horses,” Hench says. “They weren’t that way originally, but we painted them. Most children want to ride the white horse, since they’ve learned that heroes always ride white horses. In spite of the story of Black Beauty, a white horse is what you’re suppose to ride to glory on.”

Elsewhere in Fantasyland, the pirate ship and Skull Rock from Peter Pan sit side by side, the ship doubling as a snack bar and play structure, the huge skull providing shade for picnickers. A death’s-head hardly seems an icon of reassurance and well-bring – but, Hench says, “it’s softened by the growth around it and by people eating under it. The ship is odd too, you know – a boat sitting here with its gun trained on you like that.” Does making the marauding vessel into a restaurant domesticate it? “Yes, I’m afraid it does,” Hench smiles. “But just look at the kids, climbing around up there. At one time we had a one-legged pirate on there with a parrot, but he wasn’t quite the guy you would want to have around kids. They didn’t quite understand what the pirate was there for, so we took him away.”

The skull and pirate ship aren’t the only death-related images rendered harmless by the overall design at Disneyland. In Frontierland guns are everywhere – from the large display sign of a musket and powder horn to the long rifles in the shooting galleries. The catch, Hench shouts above the incessant barrage of shots, is that these are “old-fashioned weapons. They’re part of the safe past. Nobody worries about the past, and in a sense nobody worries about the future, because that’s going to be up in space, in the space colonies. It’s today where you have the problem – though in Florida we’re going to have a special pavilion about America and tell about America today, so we are taking on that problem. We have spokesmen for the past – Benjamin Franklin, Will Rogers and Mark Twain – but we don’t have anybody for the present or the future yet. We’ll have animatronic figures of those three men like Lincoln, and those figures speak to you. They have a living presence, as it were. Franklin will tell about what the American spirit really was, how it came here and got started, then Mark Twain will take over for the great expansion, and Will Rogers will sum it up. Those last two guys were kind of iconoclasts; Mark Twain was certainly a balloon-buster if there ever was one, so it isn’t a Pollyanna kind of thing. But we’re backing it up with big images.

For the summing up and the future, that’s a problem. I don’t know who in today’s world sums it up as accurately as the musicians, the young musicians. But who are they? They seem to be a collective bunch, they come and go like flowers, you never know – there’s no one guy. But they seem to distill an essence, the spirit of things today. Most of them are optimistic.”

By now we’ve made our way to New Orleans Square, the fictionalized French Quarter built around Pirates of the Caribbean. “I enjoy this,” Hench says. “I think it tells something about New Orleans, the same way our Main Street tells something about Main Streets. It’s a kind of – oh, I suppose it’s like poetry. It condenses everything down to its essence. This, I think, has caught the essence of New Orleans. Of course, it smells better than the original – they have that heavy humidity there.”

His gaze wanders to the Haunted House. “This is another curious building. I think most people expected us to make a Charles Addams ruin here. That was my first opinion. But Walt said, ‘No, I don’t want a ruin over there- God, I don’t want a ruin anywhere.’ He gave us a whole outline of what ghosts were supposed to do. He said, ‘They’ve committed something or other, and they have to live out their crime, act it out. they need an audience. It’s like the old actors’ home, the Motion Picture Country Home out there.’ He went on the BBC and criticized the British for tearing down all their old houses and thus cutting short the ghosts’ terms of going through their particular crime. He said, ‘We have the best audience in the world, and I hereby invite all your old ghosts that are homeless to come and live with me. I’ve got hot and cold running chills, wall-to-wall freaks.’ Before we got the house built, we had a little place there that announced what we were going to do, and any wandering ghost could come into the office and sign up and secure space. It’s really unlike a haunted house, you know – it’s a nice-looking house and it’s not a grim thing at all. It’s kind of funny, It’s full of amusing gags. And it gives people a relation with even the dead.”

A safe relationship with the dead and the instruments of death – with everything, finally, because the setting, the storyboarding and the harmonious environment replace the kiss of death with the sign of dreams. If the only images present were of funny animals, the mechanics of reassurance would not be effective – it’s necessary to supply threats and disarm them, to defang the worst demons and make a world demonstrably safe for the funny animals to play in. The essential message of Disneyland, Hench says as we walk back toward Main Street, is that “there is nothing to fear.”

In a property ordered environment, he continues, the message is wholly accurate. “Look how people who live in cities have to go somewhere int eh country for vacation, and when that sense of natural order creeps back into their veins, they are quite different people. They talk to each other. When the birds are singing and there are green trees and the sun is coming down, they start to feel open and alive again. In the cities, we’re threatened. We don’t talk to people, we don’t believe everything we hear, we don’t look people in the eye – the whole thing is anti-survival. We don’t trust people. We find ourselves alone. If we keep pulling these blinds down and cutting ourselves off, we die a little bit. I think that explains even those brutal pictures like Jaws. People go in there and it scares the hell out of them, and they walk out thinking, ‘My God, I felt something. I’m alive after all.’ They get an exuberance out of discovering that they’re not dead, that they’re feeling things, and maybe they’ve been in some kind of humdrum thing where they haven’t felt anything like that for years.”

Crossing Main Street, Hench stops and glances toward a group of trees near one of the stores. “There’s something,” he says. “You see those trees? They’ve grown rather large – they’re a little bit out of scale here. I guess we’re going to have to do something about that.”

The final story in the General Electric promotional booklet for Horizons concerns the wizards of WED that brought the attraction to life. Without further ado…

In 1964, a little boy [...]]]>

Filmmakers attend to the massive Sea Castle set for the Horizons "Choose Your Future" finale

The final story in the General Electric promotional booklet for Horizons concerns the wizards of WED that brought the attraction to life. Without further ado…

Disney’s House of Magic

by Donna R. Carpenter

In 1964, a little boy named Tom Fitzgerald went to the New York World’s Fair and visited a pavilion called “Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln.” He stared in wonder as a startlingly lifelike facsimile of the nation’s 16th president rose from his chair to address his latter-day countrymen. Abe Lincoln not only talked – he emphasized his thoughts with gestures and his eyes raked the audience as though challenging debate. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other and his expression changed with the sense of his words. He almost seemed to breathe.

The impact was extraordinary. The boy made up his mind that someday he would work with the people who had made this marvelous figure. So, after graduating from Northwestern University, he went to California to convince the people at WED (Walter Elias Disney) Enterprises that he belonged in their house of magic.

Tom Fitzgerald

Hired as a writer in the communications department, Fitzgerald worked his way into Show Design and, in 1981, was assigned to help write the script for the GE pavilion at EPCOT Center. He, Show Designer George McGinnis, and the Horizons design team applied the same attention to detail that made Lincoln come alive to the scenes at GE’s Horizons pavilion.

“The GE credo, ‘Better than the best’, is a phrase that we at Disney understand well,” says Fitzgerald. “Walt Disney had a favorite way of saying the same thing. When everyone felt that they’d done the best they could, he’d ask them to ‘plus’ it – make it even better. He’d spare no expense to help them do this: When animators were working on Bambi, he had live deer brought in for them to observe. When the Audio-Animatronics Abe Lincoln was created for the World’s Fair, he hired an actor to play Lincoln for his Imagineers (Disney’s word for the creative “team” at WED).

"Early stages of Horizons pavilion design included the making of detailed models for "Looking Back at Tomorrow" and space colony sets of show."

“But it’s the Disney staff’s ability to observe reality and then take it one step further – to make something larger than life – that enchants audiences. It’s the crocodile that smiles in Peter Pan and the nervous gestures of Lincoln giving a speech – the imaginative little details that no one else puts in.”

When Fitzgerald was assigned to Horizons, the main themes for the attraction had already been established by WED Senior Vice President John Hench, Executive VP for Creative Development Marty Sklar, McGinnis, and a host of WED Imagineers. The ride would include a whimsical look at past visions of the future; motion pictures of present-day science and technology presented in Omnisphere, the world’s largest motion picture system; and sets depicting Audio-Animatronics figures in different habitats of the future.

For the “Looking Back at Tomorrow” portion of the show, Fitzgerald examined ideas that famous futurists of the past had on rapid transit, space travel and robots. “The technologies that men like Verne and Wells envisioned were 100 years ahead of their time,” he recalls, “but the designs remained rooted in their own time.” Thus, this segment shows a spaceship with rivets and bolts and velvet cushions on its way to the moon, and a household robot with the appearance of an Art Deco antique.

Past Meets Future

How do you introduce the future in a dramatic way? WED Special Effects Manager Dean Sharits did it with a spectacular fiber-optic cloud wall, containing 40 miles of fiber and 22,000 points of light sheathed in hand-sculpted acrylic layers. The wall’s shifting colors and flashes of lightning give an illusion of traveling through time.

Horizons’ effects are more than just visual, though. “What would the citrus trees in our desert habitat be like if they didn’t smell like citrus?” asks Sharits. “But the tricky part isn’t getting the smell; it’s getting rid of it on cue.”

The difficulty that he doesn’t mention – perhaps because he’s so used to living with it – is designing reliability into all of EPCOT Center’s special effects, which operate 18 hours a day, 365 days a year. And those effects run the gamut from an erupting volcano to upside-down waterfalls.

For the segment depicting future habitats, WED Imagineers used an extended family and its friends to link different scenes. “We wanted to emphasize the family unit,” Fitzgerald explains. “Some people think that it may not exist in the future, but our feeling was that advances in transportation and communication will bring families closer together.”

The habitats where family members live were chosen carefully. “Both Disney and GE were anxious to show that desert, sea, and space could be interesting and practical places to live and work,” says McGinnis. “We got some concepts and models together and tried them out on the experts. For the space colony, we worked with Princeton physicist Gerard O’Neill. And we talked to NASA and Cal Tech’s Jet Propulsion Lab about growing crystals for semiconductors in space.

George McGinnis

“For the desert portion, we worked with Carl Hodges, director of the Environmental Research Lab at the University of Arizona. Following his suggestions, we used genetic engineering principles to design new plants and create voice-activated robot harvesters and helium lifters to load and deliver crops to market.”

Subtle details were also considered in designing sets. “The future is often presented as all sterile colors and threatening angles,” McGinnis continues. “So we used a lot of soft forms – the circular kitchen comes to mind-and warm colors, particularly in the urban setting, the first future habitat presented. We kept ‘people’ details in mind, too. We’re convinced that even though environments will change, people won’t. Teenagers in our show still monopolize the phone; kids and dogs still exasperate mom and dad. We believe one of the main differences high technology will make is that it will give us more choices.”

Alex Taylor

Flavor Grapes and Pepcumbers

WED’s Alex Taylor, responsible for designing the futuristic plants and trees, had a tough problem. “Every time I designed something I thought was totally new, I would take it over to our horticulturists and they would tell me it already existed. I began to despair of ever coming up with something nature hadn’t already done.”

So Taylor turned to the animal kingdom for ideas, creating “Golden Glow,” the electric eel of the plant family. An ancient Greek musical instrument gave him the idea for the “Aeolian Harp,” which catches the wind to produce music. And semiconductor patterns inspired his “Circuit Egg Ivy,” which grows in a kinked and twisted pattern resembling an electronic circuit.

“Carl Hodges told me that using the principles of genetic engineering, I could let my imagination run wild,” says Taylor. “And I did.”

Taylor also designed future crops: “pepcumbers,” a cross between a pepper and a cucumber; “flavor grapes,” which grow in clusters of different colors and flavors; and the “lorange,” an elongated orange which grows on the outside of the tree, making it easy for robot laborers to harvest.

"While the 80-foot-high Onmisphere theater (top) was being constructed, filmmakers were designing, building, and filming enormous models for the Horizons finale."

Fantastic Film

An 80-foot-high screen presented another kind of problem – and challenge – to filmmaker Eddie Garrick. The Omnisphere theater, created by putting two of the biggest screens in the world together, was originally slated to be the finale to Horizons. Now it’s the centerpiece. It was to present images of science and technology in the world’s largest format. But the equipment to photograph some of the images desired for a screen that big – molecular structures, underwater scenes – and to animate others – computer data, Landsat photos – had not yet been invented. So Garrick, who has produced TV specials for National Geographic, helped design it.

His hard-won and stunning visual effects are complemented by a state-of-the-art sound system which uses digital recordings and transmits infra red light to the ride vehicles, where it is received and converted back into sound. Low-frequency sonic transducers attached to the vehicles near the base of each rider’s spine give the full-bodied “feel” of a concert-hall performance.

Marty Kindel (center)

Wathel Rogers

How Do You Follow That?

Moving the Omnisphere presentation from the finale to the middle of the show created the needs for a new finale. The catch? Designing something that would fit into the area left in the pavilion that would not be a letdown after the Omnispehere. McGinnis suggested using the ride vehicle’s on-board computer and a 50-foot “traveling picture” to allow guests to choose a ride through one of the habitats – ocean, sea or space – seen earlier.

Engineer Marty Kindel began working out the complicated logistics that would enable the guests in one ride vehicle to see the show of their choice, while the next group of guests would see the show they had chosen. By using GE Talaria projectors, tilting the ride vehicles and using the low-frequency transducers to create a feeling of acceleration, the Disney staff has come up with a way to make guests feel as though they are taking a high-speed ride into the scenes being projected.

Shooting the segments that would be seen by the audience was equally complex. David Jones, a special-effects veteran of Star Wars, spent two years designing, constructing and filming models for the three segments. “The desert film alone involved an 86-foot model and was the longest continuous sequence ever done with miniatures,” says Jones.

All filming was done by computer to get a precise camera path and a special gantry system was constructed to keep the camera from casting a shadow over the desert model. “All that for 31 seconds,” signs Jones. “But what seconds!”

The ride itself echoes the Horizons theme of choice in your future – just as you can choose the ending to your ride, you may someday be able to have a much larger choice in how and where you will live. That kind of tie-in appeals to Marty Sklar. “Horizons is the type of pavilion that I think Walt had in mind when he visualized EPCOT,” says Sklar. “It’s a synthesis of all the other pavilions in that it encompasses energy, transportation, communications and so on. And it incorporates a lot of ‘firsts’ for us as a company.

“It also provided an opportunity for some of the people who’ve been with us for 30 or 40 years to work with people in the 20s and 30s who grew up with the Disney culture.”

Tom Fitzgerald was drawn to WED to work with his childhood heroes, the people who could bring Lincoln back to life. And, though dreams of childhood seldom parallel reality, in this case the reality was even better. One of the people with whom Fitzgerald worked on Horizons was WED Show Quality Assurance Director Wathel Rogers. A Disney employee since 1939, Rogers started out as an animator, worked on Disney movies like Mary Poppins, and was one of the original group of Imagineers who, for the 1964 World’s Fair, created the Audio-Animatronics Mr. Lincoln.

Walt Disney with GE's Dave Burke

THE GE-DISNEY CONNECTION spans almost a quarter of a century and zig-zags from New York to California to Florida.

Three years before the New York World’s Fair opened in 1964, GE planned to be there as an exhibitor. Wanting to have one of the best exhibits, the Company turned to Walt Disney, whose successful theme park in California – Disneyland – was drawing millions of visitors a year.

Already planning his Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, Disney agreed to design the GE exhibit.

It was the first project Disney ever developed for an outside corporation and, launching into this new area of business, Disney himself created and designed the Carousel of Progress. Still successfully on display at Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom in Florida, it presents an entertaining review of the role electricity has played in improving the American standard of living from the 1890s to the present.

When the Carousel was nearly finished, Disney called in his people and representatives from GE for a preview.

As Dave Burke, who retired from GE two years ago as manager of Corporate Communications, recalls: “We all loved the Carousel when we saw it. Except Walt. To him, something was missing and he said afterward that it needed a ‘wienie.’ A wienie, I asked? What’s a wienie? One of Disney’s people said, ‘you’ll see.’ Walt promised the wienie in two weeks.”

Two weeks later the GE and Disney people reassembled to see the mysterious wienie. Before the show, Disney turned to Burke and told him a wienie should tie a show together, give it continuity. Anyone who has seen the Carousel of Progress now knows what the wienie is.

“It’s the dog,” says Burke. “And Walt was right. That shaggy pup pulled the whole exhibit together, gave it comic relief, provided transitions and, if you’ll excuse the expression, gave it a human touch.”

GE Advertising Manager Karl Koss

WED Executive VP Marty Sklar

During the two years of the World’s Fair, the Carousel of Progress enjoyed more than 45 million visitors. And because it was so successful it was transported to Disneyland in Anaheim, Calif., in 1967 and then transferred to Walt Disney World in Florida in January 1975.

The Carousel was also instrumental in helping Walt Disney realize his EPCOT dream. Explains Marty Sklar, WED’s Executive VP for Creative Development: “When Walt first advanced his idea of EPCOT he said WED couldn’t do it alone. We’re in the entertainment business and, obviously, we felt our strength was to entertain people and communicate through our entertainment. But we had to bring in other companies, like GE, to add their expertise in developing our communication about the future. It was important to the credibility of EPCOT that we create a synergism – with Disney as the communicator, the entertainer, and companies like GE and Exxon and Kodak as the experts, the people who really are in the businesses we’re portraying.”

Sklar continues: “How do you start out interpreting a corporate culture? Just like there’s a Disney way to our company, there’s a GE style. Every company has its distinctive culture and legend and ways that it sees itself. Our job was to create a pavilion specifically for GE, whose theme is ‘the achievable future’. How do you bring that vision together?”

A scene from GE's Carousel of Progress

The answer comes from Karl Koss, General Electric’s manager of Corporate Advertising and Exhibits, who has succeeded Burke as GE’s liaison with WED.

“Both our cultures are always changing – tuning to different times, adopting contemporary styles without giving up valued substance. It’s the spirit that led the Disney people to propose what they did and that led us to approve it – a vision of the future firmly rooted in what we know can someday be done.

“Our cultures also share a spirit expressed in the theme lyrics of Horizons: ‘If we can dream it, we can do it.’ Disney calls it ‘Imagineering.’ At GE, it harks back to Thomas Edison’s philosophy that it takes a little inspiration, and a lot of perspiration.”

Adds Robert Pulver, manager of EPCOT Horizons for GE: “With Horizons now a reality, we’re working with the Disney organization on expanding the Carousel of Progress. Typical of our two cultures in ever-changing times, when we asked to meet and discuss our ideas, they said they, too, had specific ideas and welcomed a meeting. And so the GE-Disney connection goes on.”

Disney animation stalwart Andreas Deja has set up his own blog with which to share his vast collection of vintage artwork and stories of working with the legends of Disney animation. I’ve no doubt it will be a project to follow with great interest…