Dream It! Do It! (Disney Editions Deluxe) (14 page)

Walt set the tone for the meeting, stating it was a key to establishing planning parameters, so that the legal staff could lay out the requests that Disney would make to the Florida Legislature. Walt emphasized the need to control the area, so that what happened around Disneyland—a neon jumble of signs along Harbor Boulevard in Anaheim, fronting the entrance to the park—could not happen again. “By keeping standards high,” Walt said, “we can maintain the prestige of the entire area.”

Walt outlined four basic developments that had to be encompassed on the code-named “Project Future” property:

1. The theme park, based on what Disney had learned in nearly eleven years at Disneyland.
   
2. The resident and guest hospitality areas, including “neighborhoods” and hotels and motels.
   
3. An industrial complex, providing both a “showcase of industry at work” and an employment base.
   
4. Other recreational facilities—water sports on Bay Lake, golf courses, campground, etc.
   

Of these, Walt thought of numbers two and three as the Epcot areas of Project Future.

Day one of the meeting was one of the most tense days I had ever experienced. Both Walt and Roy Disney spent the entire day listening to the presentations, with Walt asking key questions of the New York legal team and Disney vice presidents Donn Tatum, Foster, and Joe Potter, who had become Disney’s front man in Florida. Walt had hired him as the company’s number one executive in Florida, for his administrative skills and because of his familiarity with the Army Corps of Engineers, which played a key role in creating the drainage canals on the Walt Disney World property.

As Walt stood up to leave at the end of the first day, Joe Potter had the final say. “Walt,” he gushed, “I’ve been in Florida as your representative for three or four months now, and everyone I talk to thinks that you can do
anything
and
everything
.
They think you can walk on water
!”

Without a word, Walt walked to the door and exited the room. We heard his footsteps, echoing down the hallway. Suddenly, they stopped, and we heard him returning in our direction. The door opened, and Walt Disney stuck his head back inside the room. “I’ve tried that,” he said, before closing the door and leaving all of us to wonder: was he successful?

I doubt anyone in the room thought otherwise.

As the only designated staff writer at WED in those days, I was a jack-of-all-trades, leading a small team in creating the attraction scripts, all the park and resort nomenclature, some of the written marketing materials, and working with our key “Participants” (sponsors) on anything related to the shows, exhibits, and name displays they sponsored. In that connection, Dick Irvine asked me to create a standard for the display and recognition of our valued sponsors. None existed, even at Disneyland; Dick’s idea was to make sure everyone—those selling sponsorships, park operators, and our graphic designers—all knew the rules. We recognized the importance of making sure the public, our guests in the parks, knew that the attractions were created by the Imagineers, while providing recognition and an opportunity to associate with a particular attraction for our participants. We developed the form that is still in place today:

TITLE OF ATTRACTION

presented by

Name of Sponsor

For instance, one that exists in Epcot today is:

SPACESHIP EARTH presented by Siemens

Dick Irvine was ahead of his time on this issue. Just turn on your TV set to the New Year’s Day football bowl games to see why: Allstate Sugar Bowl, Capital One Bowl, GoDaddy.com Bowl, and, my favorite, the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl. Only the Rose Bowl in Pasadena has held firm. On a recent New Year’s Day it was “presented by Vizio.”

A key to maintaining the Disney standard is
consistency
around the world. Thus, guests find these examples: The Broadway Music Theatre, presented by Japan Airlines (Tokyo DisneySea); Hong Kong Disneyland Railroad, presented by UPS (Hong Kong Disneyland); Autopia, presented by Chevron (Disneyland); and Rock ‘N’ Roller Coaster presenté par Gibson Guitar (Walt Disney Studios—Paris).

As that jack-of-all-trades on the Imagineering staff, I was constantly being given new challenges by Dick Irvine. One day Dick gave me a new assignment: get Herb Ryman to finish the concept design for the Walt Disney World castle.

“Herb is holding up the whole project,” Dick explained. “The architects can’t do the design and working drawings until they have a concept direction.”

“Dick,” I asked innocently, “doesn’t Herb report to you?” “Of course,” Dick responded.

“Then why don’t you talk to him?” I asked.

“Because,” Dick replied, “he won’t listen to me. So I want you to tell Herb he has to
close his door
and finish the design.”

I approached my new assignment cautiously. First, I suggested to Herb that Dick wanted him to keep his door closed: Dick’s thinking, of course, was that if Herb had his door closed, he’d stay in his office and focus on finishing the design. Herb complied with part of Dick’s request…except, with the door closed, it was easy for him to be invisibly
absent
from his office. Herb loved to wander about and help his fellow artists with
their
projects—especially spending time mentoring any young artist who needed a brush-stroke or two to straighten out his or her drawing.

Finally Herb asked me, “Why are you coming to my office every day?” I had to admit that Dick had told me to get him to finish the concept for the castle, which was nowhere to be seen on Herb’s easel. With a sigh, Herb told me to come back Thursday, and I would see the first drawing. Upon my arrival a few days later, he proudly unveiled the very first vital concept drawing of the Magic Kingdom’s Cinderella Castle: it was an eleven-by-fourteen-inch pencil sketch of
me
as a gargoyle (Ryman called it “Sklargoyle”), clutching my scripts to my breast, and spewing admonishments from the parapets! The original is framed and hanging in my home.

Fortunately, Herb understood that this would not satisfy Dick, and he agreed that if I came back the following Tuesday, he would have the sketch. And he did: an exquisite pencil drawing of a Cinderella Castle-to-be. It became the basis for Ted Rich’s beautiful architectural design—a perfect fit for the site of that big yellow “X.”

Our planning for the Magic Kingdom was not without early mistakes. In Fantasyland, there’s still a “pinch point”—a passageway too narrow for the amount of guest traffic—in the corridor between “it’s a small world” and Peter Pan’s Flight. And because a new concept by Marc Davis, a “Western River Expedition” featuring Audio-Animatronics cowboys and Indians, was being groomed as a major feature, Pirates of the Caribbean was not included in the original park plans. It was finally added in 1973 as part of the new Caribbean Plaza attached to Adventureland. But the biggest “goof” was the view we held of Florida’s audience that resulted in a decision not to build any “thrill rides” for opening day: we figured there would be too many older, retired people. When the audience demographics proved to be almost identical to Disneyland’s—
families
with small children and teenagers, as well as young adults looking for a thrill—the call went out for the Imagineers to solve this oversight as quickly as possible.

Two lucky opportunities converged to make a timely response possible. One was the contract with RCA to work with our engineers in designing “the first twenty-first-century information-communications system”—linking computers, telephones, automatic monitoring and control devices, mobile communications, and television. The contract included a significant quid pro quo: RCA agreed to consider sponsorship of a major attraction in the Magic Kingdom Park after its opening,
if
(that was the key word) we Imagineers could develop an attraction that they would be proud to be associated with. Ten million dollars, the equivalent of about $90 million today, was on the line.

Before the Magic Kingdom’s opening in 1971, John Hench joined me and artist T. Hee in developing a story and design concept for RCA. It didn’t take long; RCA was then in the computer business, and we determined to take Tomorrowland visitors
inside
a computer to tell its story.

Finally, after nine long months working our way up the corporate ladder, we secured an audience with RCA’s chairman and CEO, Robert Sarnoff. The night before our big day, we set up our presentation in the RCA board of directors meeting room. We lined one side of the room with nine, four-by-eight-foot storyboards covered with sketches, paintings, and graphic concepts. Everything was positioned so that Mr. Sarnoff, sitting in the center of the boardroom, would see everything directly in front of his chair. As we completed our perfect setup, the meeting organizers played their wild card: Mr. Sarnoff, they said,
always
sits at the head of the table. Sure enough, we made our pitch the next morning with the chairman sitting so far away, he needed binoculars to see our materials. It was impossible to communicate our brilliant concept for the computer story.

For a moment, I thought we might recover, as John Hench, T. Hee, and I joined Mr. Sarnoff and three RCA vice presidents in the seats adjacent to him. But soon Mr. Sarnoff scribbled a note and passed it to the VP next to him, who passed it to the next VP, who passed it to me. When I opened it, I read:
“Who are these people?”

Reality hit me—hard. The VPs had not even told Sarnoff who we were, or why we were there! Nine months of my life down the drain with four words scribbled on a notepad.

My associates and I returned to California, and I went straight to the office of Card Walker. “Card,” I said, “I don’t care if you fire me, but I’m not giving another nine months of my creative life to RCA.” His response was clear: “Marty, you guys at Imagineering have to figure out a way to get RCA to sponsor an attraction. We need it!”

So we went back to the drawing board. And as good fortune would have it, there was a perfect idea staring us in the face. John recalled the day in 1964 when Walt brought a team of Imagineers together to discuss a “rocket flight into the cosmos” for the new Tomorrowland planned for Disneyland, to open in 1967. “Walt wanted to build a rollercoaster-style ride, but
in the dark
, which no one had ever done before,” John wrote in his seminal book,
Designing Disney—Imagineering and the Art of the Show
, published by Disney Editions. “He wanted to have precise control of the lighting and to be able to project moving images on the interior walls.”

John’s illustration of the now-familiar structure, drawn in 1965, excited the Imagineers—and created a huge stir among Disney fans. But there was one major issue: computer systems were not sophisticated enough to design a ride system to be run safely in the dark. Once again, technology needed to catch up to Walt’s vision.

A good idea
may
come back to life in the world of Disney…but a great idea
will
find its way into our parks somewhere in the world. Space Mountain was clearly a great idea, so John Hench and I created a way to make it work for RCA. First we had to enlarge the whole structure—at the Magic Kingdom, it’s 183 feet high and 300 feet in diameter, versus 200 in later versions at Disneyland, Tokyo Disneyland, and Hong Kong Disneyland. There was a necessary and practical reason for this: we had to create an RCA story before and after the trip through space, so we developed “Spaceports” along the long entry walkway, allowing guests to “view out into space” to see the RCA-developed communications satellites of the 1970s at work. And as a post-show, we created a moving ramp that revealed a “home of the future,” filled with RCA products—highlighted by an opportunity to see yourself on color TV as you exited the attraction.

Armed with this complete package—including the thrill ride itself—we had another day in court with Chairman Sarnoff.

This time, as we returned to the scene of our failure, we again set up our presentation of storyboards—and again the RCA people reminded us (after we were already set up) that “Mr. Sarnoff
always
sits at the head of the table.” “Fine,” I said, “but whoever sits
there
” (pointing to a seat in the center) “is the person I’ll be talking to. And if Mr. Sarnoff sits
there
” (pointing to the head seat), “I’ll have my back to him for the entire presentation!”