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By Michael - February 22nd, 2009 Where’s Walt? In your nightmares! How’s this for a weird publicity photo:
 “Hiya fellas, I had the boys at the studio whip this up for ya!” “Geez Walt, that’s… dark” (AP Photo) In the aftermath of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, concern spread about the possibility of chemical attacks on mainland America. In January of 1942, T.W. Smith, Jr., the owner of the Sun Rubber Company, and designer Dietrich Rempel drew up plans for a Mickey Mouse gas mask for children, which Walt is seen presenting in the photo above. The original caption reads:
Animator Walt Disney, second from left, hands over his sketch of a Mickey Mouse gas mask to Maj. Gen. William Porter, right, in Washington, D.C., Jan. 8, 1942. Civilian defense and chemical warfare officers plan to produce the design intended to encourage children to use their mask readily for protection during World War II. The man at left is not identified.
Maj. Gen. Porter was, at that time, the head of the Chemical Warfare Service. Judging from this post on the esteemed Toons At War blog, the unnamed man on the left is either Colonel George Fisher or Colonel Maurice Barker.
The Mickey Mouse gas mask actually did go into active production until rubber eventually began to be diverted away for other wartime purposes. There were no chemical weapon attacks on America during the war.
Few examples of the Mickey masks are known to exist today; aside from a few masks in various military museums and one partial mask in the Disney archives, little evidence remains of this bizarre footnote to Disney merchandising history.
Read more:
Toons At War
The Mickey Mouse Mask
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By Michael - February 20th, 2009  THE “WORLD CITY” MODEL: Project designer John DeCuir completes an initial concept for the World City model, an amphitheater depicting a future community in the process of grown and adaptation. – Walt Disney Productions, 1975 In 1975, EPCOT Center was a far different creature than the park that debuted in 1982. Known then by the unwieldy moniker “EPCOT Future World Theme Center”, the park had yet to be mated with its counterpart, the World Showcase, which was still intended for a site across the Seven Seas Lagoon from the Magic Kingdom.
At the center of the parks layout, shown below, was the “World City” model. This would be part of the park’s Communications Corridor, or “Communicore”, which would act as the park’s Main Street area and extend from the park’s entrance through to where the Fountain of Nations is today.
 EPCOT as conceived in 1975 – The EPCOT Future World Theme Center. The World City model is at the center of the layout, with the Communicore extending from the the park’s entrance at the bottom of the image. The World City model was described in the 1975 Walt Disney Productions annual report:
– The World City model, which would combine advanced entertainment techniques – miniaturization, video projection, animation and computer-driven simulations and displays – to trace the evolution of the major cities of the world, and to portray a model community of the future in the process of growth and adaptation.
The artist in the image at the top of the article is John DeCuir Jr., long-time Disney Imagineer. His father, John DeCuir Sr., also worked for Disney while also having a long career as a prominent Hollywood production designer and art director. His credits included Hello, Dolly! and Cleopatra, among many others, and relevant to our discussion he worked on the original Space pavilion intended for EPCOT Center.
The younger DeCuir has a long list of Disney design credits, including the Hall of Presidents, the Contemporary and Polynesian resorts, World Showcase, Spaceship Earth and later MuppetVision 3-D and Alien Encounter. He has continued to work on film and television projects to this day.
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By Michael - February 18th, 2009 Disney to reorganize parks. Details in the L.A. Times.
More to come soon…
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By Michael - February 15th, 2009 
For everyone with RSS subscriptions and links – Progress City is moving to a new URL at https://progresscityusa.com. Please adjust your links and subscriptions accordingly!
UPDATE: OK, it looks like things worked. WordPress is so wacky, and both the old and new directories are both feeding off of the same database, but it looks like everything is managing to redirect to the new URL. If anyone finds anything missing, or find themselves stuck somewhere with the old URL, let me know. Otherwise, welcome to the future of the future!
UPDATE x2: For serious this time. Now not only does the site redirect but you can see all the pretty pictures too, which is kinda useful now and again. It’s all fixed and it only required me to learn SQL on a Sunday night. I am so smart…. SMRT… I mean, SMART… Anyway I wouldn’t clue my dear readers into behind-the-scenes drama save for the fact that I request constant vigilance against bugs – let me know if anything weird happens.
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By Michael - February 15th, 2009 
As you’ve no doubt seen by now, the reports were true and, last Monday, Walt Disney Pictures signed a deal with Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks studio to distribute at least thirty films over the next five years. The first six films are slated to be released in 2010, and will be distributed through Disney’s Touchstone banner.
The Touchstone label had almost disappeared in recent years, due to new Disney CEO Bob Iger’s strategy of paring down the release schedule to focus on family-friendly and ultra-marketable franchise films for the Walt Disney Pictures brand. This reduction of new product left a great deal of unused capacity (and thus wasted overhead) in Disney’s distribution pipelines, which include not only theatrical release but pay-television (due to their long-term contract with Starz!) and home video. Six pictures a year from DreamWorks will help fill empty distribution slots and increase profits.
As part of the deal, Disney paid DreamWorks between $150-250 million (the amount varies among reports) to stabilize their finances and will receive a distribution fee of between 8-10% of each film’s gross.
Unfortunately, while DreamWorks is free to license its film properties to Disney for new park attractions, Spielberg’s existing contract with Universal prevents him from personally consulting on Disney theme parks. Spielberg’s deal with Universal, which dates back to the 1980s, earns him 2% of their parks’ annual earnings – reported to amount to as much at $50 million. While Nikki Finke recently reported that Universal raised Spielberg’s ire in recent negotiations when they expressed the desire to reduce that percentage, the deal stands for now and I doubt that Disney would care to make an equivalent offer.
It’s also important to underscore again that this deal does not include DreamWorks Animation, which is a separately traded company and which continues to distribute its films through Paramount.
DreamWorks already has a number of films in development; Jim Hill has reported that the first of their films under the Disney deal might be Spielberg’s long-anticipated Abraham Lincoln biopic starring Liam Neeson as the Great Emancipator. Hill claims that Imagineers are making plans to re-open Disneyland’s Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln in 2010 with a newly-recorded narration starring Neeson. Other media sources mention in-development DreamWorks projects like the Aaron Sorkin-scripted The Trial Of The Chicago 7, Steve Carell comedy Dinner With Schmucks, an action film based on the Secret Service called Motorcade, and an adaptation of the children’s fantasy book series The 39 Clues.
Read more:
– New York Times
– Variety
– Hollywood Reporter
– Variety’s Peter Bart interviews Spielberg
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The Progress City Primer
 From the Progress City archives comes this collection of 33 tall tales and true from Disney history. Available in paperback, hardback, and ebook formats. |
“Hiya fellas, I had the boys at the studio whip this up for ya!” “Geez Walt, that’s… dark” (AP Photo)
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