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RCA Leads The Way!

Here’s to the future and you!

In the lead-up to the creation of Epcot Center during the 1970s, a common refrain from Disney publicity was that, in many ways, Walt’s futuristic dream for the city of EPCOT had already come true in the Florida swamps. The underlying systems and technologies in use at […]

EPCOT, Epcot, Figment, Saltyhinder And More!

My latest pieces on the D23 site…

First, rare photos from the set of the EPCOT Film, the now-famous production filmed during the last months of Walt’s life to pitch the concept of EPCOT to the Florida government and other industries.

If you worked at Walt Disney Productions in the 1980s, you could have auditioned […]

Hench + Tiki + Booze = Awesome

Orlando Sour? Yes please!

One of the first truly awesome (for me) things I dug up while rummaging around the Disney Archives came when we were doing research to prepare for the Epcot 30th Anniversary event last year. In a box of files that once belonged to Imagineer John Hench, there was this […]

Let The Games Begin…

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 […]

Hench On Hench

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 […]