Disney Imagineering; The Movie
The beige block office on Flower Street in Glendale, CA does not look like much, but the “imagineering” studios of the Walt Disney Corporation are anything but ordinary.
I had the very rare chance penetrate these hallowed walls recently. The company has not opened these doors to outsiders in more than 30 years, one of the executives muttered. I came as part of a group of international journalists who were more interested in the buffet than checking out the Tinkerbelle renderings on the wall. But I arrived early and required an escort, it seems, to get me from the lobby, down corridors of “secret stuff” and into the back area deemed safe for public consumption. Still, I did a stealth maneuver to the ladies room through the cafeteria and kept my eyes wide.
Even the eating areas were full of Disney puns: a lifeless but life-size chef sitting on a chair like a prop waiting to be placed in New Orleans Square; drawings and paintings of parks in various stages of development lined the wall, a gallery of ideas come and gone.
Eventually, the curtains parted for us and we were escorted, 20 at a time in three groups, into rooms of wonder where cameras were verboten and even pen and paper were discouraged. This was Disney’s core, the brain, the pulse, the lifeblood of the company where attractions are birthed and magic made.
Lining the corridors through this inner sanctum are graffiti quotes from imagineers past writing words like, “The closer you look at something, the more you see…”
Hall walls here simply more blank canvases, free places to scratch and toil until something pops to life.
But a lot of that scratching happens in the mysterious room of electronics. We were escorted into a garage-sized room bearing three large flat screens in a U and tables of blinking computers lining the rest of the perimeter space. The lights went dim and suddenly we were not just watching but seemed to be inside the Cars Land ride opening this summer at Disney’s California Adventure. We inched along through the faux desert landscaping, stopping, starting, curving around cartoonish objects and scenes thrown in to make the journey to Radiator Springs more interesting. We were seeing the ride as it will be seen and experienced; every crack, color and corner of it, for this room is where the ride was built, piece-by-piece, nuance by nuance. No hydraulic fits and starts under our seats; no 3D glasses in place. But we were still in the ride, audio-surround effects in place, racing with speed through the finale with all the satisfaction a three-minute Disney-style ride can muster.
Next stop, the model room. We passed through what would pass for the art department in college with all manner of boards and materials stacked randomly in odd places and working tables bearing heads, hands, fantasy animals in varied roughness, a nine-foot castle, a sea turtle or two. We were hurried through here; one sensed that we were not really supposed to look around.
Possibly that was to save time for the true treasure before us: the hall of heads. Passing likenesses of Lincoln, Clinton, and Walt Disney it was hard to know where to put your gaze. Inside a locked cabinet: Judy Garland and Julie Andrews. Did they pose for these? Their bare, white visages were wedged between others, mostly made up characters, such as those ghost heads that talk to you during the Haunted House ride. A nine-inch elephant displayed in its own glass box turned out to be the original Dumbo, while in another corner, a 14-foot statue of plastic limbs and wires was not the warehouse remains of C-3PO but the core structure of what was supposed to be an animatronics version of Joe Cocker.
A jumble of Snow White sculptures stood in a line in front of the model head cabinet — seven dwarfs all cut from Italian marble and a rather short Snow White to accompany them. Older Disney fans would remember these items from the wishing well in front of Cinderella’s castle at Disneyland. Turned out the imagineer working from that 1937 Disney film classic sent the wrong specs to the Italian sculpture. Who knew one Snow White equals two dwarfs?
Next, we explored the audio room where nine hanging three-foot speakers circled an equipment platform – a mix master’s dream. But the sound we were given to hear came not from the speakers but from simple headphones. As the sound came on, it circled each of us individually in precisely placed sound locations that induced story visuals of what we were hearing – in our minds, that is. It’s what you don’t see that is the scariest, our geek guide reminded us.
The technology here, long used in Disney’s “circle vision” productions, requires sound measurements from hundreds of points around the head by using an actual model of a head wired exactly with all the sound sensing fibers of a human head. The cranial likeness is placed on a pole and taken on location to different settings to collect real world sound. The technology can put any sound in any spot, but the only place you can actually experience it at a theme park is at the Haunted Mansion in Florida. Inside the stretching room it is that strange little voice that whispers in your ear and says, “Get out!”
And with any Disney show there is always a grand finale – that last great and unexpected roller coaster dip or the interactive Radiator Springs race, to come, in the Cars Ride. At the little lab on Flower Street this night it was Lucky the Dragon, a fully sentient robotic serpent that can walk on its own, roar on its own, even hug on its own. You can see him ambling here and there through Disneyland now and then. Give him an order and he might obey. And he might not. It all depends on what these guys are thinking that moment and what the chef is cooking up in that cafeteria.
Photos by Lark Gould, copyright© 2012