Designing in Form

Firstly, a congratulations: To all the talented young men and women who sweated away their blood and tears this summer as participants in Drum Corps International's "Summer Music Games". All the corps did an absolutely astounding job with their shows on both of the occasions we had the pleasure of seeing them.

Hats off especially to Phantom Regiment, who took their first ever World Championship title (in full) and garnered the "Spirit of Disney" Award for their 2008 program entitled Spartacus. The thing we can all admire about this cherised activity is that the focus is where it belongs: on the audience, the show, the music and, most importantly, the lessons and friendships learned and obtained through participating.

While viewing The Cadets 2008 program, entitled The Pursuit of Happiness, some interesting thoughts came to mind in regards to the activity and its relation to other types of entertainment.

After the Cadets performed their Quarterfinals show on Thursday evening, corps director and program coordinator George Hopkins had a brief conversation with one of the hosts of the event: "I think there is definitely still potential for voiceover narration in this art form."

The Cadets show this year, I should explain, was a source of much controversy in the Drum Corps community. Having been astounded at the Corps' previous performances, I was disappointed not with the talent and expertise of the corps members, nor with their performance, but with the material itself.

The show is an original production that garners its title from the Thomas Jefferson quote that opened the Declaration of Independence:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness."

From there, we listen to an NPR Radio broadcast about a woman called Sarah Jones, and we follow her through her life and her Pursuit of Happiness.

With key pieces of narration, I could see such a concept working. As it was performed at the DCI Quarterfinals in Bloomington, the show was actually even tolerable. Previously, as when the show was performed in Orlando, The Cadets were still being covered over by voices through most of the more complex musical moments and forming giant smiley faces on the field.

All of this strange spectacle brought to mind a lesson that designers in many different companies in Themed Entertainment have failed to learn: the idea that we must all design within a form.

When we look at The Cadets show compared to the shows of other corps, particularly Phantom Regiment's Spartacus, a much clearer picture begins to emerge. While Hopkin's idea of narration has yet to find its place in the form or its audience, there may still be potential for it in the future.

The fact still remains that what The Cadets said in nearly twelve minutes of narration and music, Phantom Regiment said in twelve minutes and three single words: "I Am Spartacus."

In other words, they let the music tell the story. For Drum Corps, letting the music tell the story is what I'd call designing within the form. The Cadets' program from this year suffered not because of a lack of musicianship or performance quality. In fact, the brass and percussion arrangements and the guard work were all very well arranged, but the reason the show suffered in the end was because of the removal of the narration.

The designers depended far too heavily on something that wasn't within the form to carry the show, and as a result the removal of that element left the music to provide only half of the equation where it should have been providing a solid base on which the rest of the program could grow.

There are foundations in every art form. Calling them rules isn't something I find terribly attractive, because that implies that they must always be followed. Foundations, though, merely implies that things will be easier to build if they are used.

In Drum Corps, the main foundation is the arrangement and/or composition of the music. Next comes the visual impact, which owes to the drill (i.e. the forms the band creates visually on the field by marching in different lines and patterns), and the colorguard. These two elements combine to create what the judges call "General Effect"- in short, how did the audience react to the show?

In Themed Entertainment, the first foundation is story. If an attraction or experience doesn't have story, it may just as well not exist. From story comes character(s), which makes the experience relate to the audience, and sensation & mood, which are what link the experience with the others around it and eventually form a themed environment.

The key to both forms, to any form, really, is story. Its simply the method of relating that story that changes. In Corps, it is done first through music and secondly through visuals. In experiential design it is done through any number of methods: Movement, Sound, Music, Color, Architecture and Action are just a few examples.

All of these things relate directly back to the story.



Stitch's Great Escape. Perhaps the most mentioned failure of Walt Disney World's recent history. Where did things go so terribly wrong?

One of the mainstay ideas behind design in any form is that you must play within certain guidelines. They aren't rules, because they can be broken. The key, as with many arts, is to break them for maximum effect. Stitch's Great Escape is a fabulous example of a show that doesn't play within the guidelines at all the wrong moments. There are shows that utilize audio as a supremely effective story-telling tool (See: The Haunted Mansion, just across the ailing Liberty Square Bridge at Florida's Magic Kingdom Park). Stitch attempts to do exactly that, and fails in a less than spectacular fashion.

The entire last half of the show is audio. We are shown the gorgeous, reality-enhancing Stitch AA figure and it is then abruptly removed from our field of vision, cast out into the audience as a wave-length that relies on multi-dimensional sound. The show that Stitch replaced, Alien Encounter, used audio to maximum effect. The guideline, you see, is that audio should never be used alone because it frightens and confuses the guests, and even more so when it is used in dark and enclosed spaces.

Alien Encounter used its audio tracks in dark and enclosed spaces to do exactly that: frighten the guest. It worked better in that show than it had in any since the original incarnation of The Haunted Mansion at Disneyland.



Another productive tool in the designer's toolbox is smell. Soarin' (Over California or not) uses this tool to its maximum effect- and it doesn't break the rules. Interestingly, the smell guidelines have been broken before, namely in the retrofit of Journey into Imagination at the lower-case Epcot, where we are forced to sit through the smell of a skunk.



Stitch decides to run along a similar line and force us to smell his burped up chili dog- not that chili dogs have the faintest thing to do with the mythology of the character, or made any mention or appearance in the film, but then we are talking about breaking all the guidelines at the wrong times, aren't we?

In a nutshell, Stitch's Great Escape and Journey into Imagination do something to the guest that completely pulls a 180 from the original concept of themed show design: these are attractions that place the audience in unpleasant situations without giving them a payoff.

Observe several more successful attractions:



Indiana Jones Adventure: Guests are menaced by snakes, rats, bugs and a giant boulder.
Payoff: Guests escape the boulder and get to live the moment as Indiana does in Raiders of the Lost Ark.



The Seas with Nemo & Friends: Guests are menaced by a forest of Jellyfish and a scary Angler fish.
Payoff: They get to surf the EAC with Crush and....they find Nemo!

Expedition Everest: Guests are menaced by a Yeti high on the Forbidden Mountain, and are thrown backwards through the tunnels and caverns.
Payoff: Guests escape with their lives after a fantastic view of the Yeti and have gained a new understanding of the creature as the protector of the forest.

In short, themed design is all about putting our guests in highly emotional and unexpected situations, perhaps related to the content or characters of their favorite films or television shows, and seeing just how far we can take things before we have to follow the natural story arc and give them the payoff they've been waiting for.

This is the only way the story moves forward. If the Magic Kingdom were filled with lackluster pieces like Stitch's Great Escape, the Magic Kingdom's story arc would not arc at all. It would be a flat line on a boring blank piece of paper.

And we all know how scary those can be!


In the same way that The Cadets didn't design The Pursuit of Happiness within the form, the designers of Stitch's Great Escape neglected to supply their story with the proper foundations. There is a term at WDI that is used more and more often, and to less and less effect. When an attraction is removed, there is often times a war that goes on between different factions of the Disney elite- Creative Entertainment, which sucks up valuable real estate and installs wonderful productions that very rarely fit with their surroundings or have any significance to the story (Finding Nemo: The Musical, anyone?). Walt Disney Imagineering itself, which still puts a great deal more thought into what it places where, and Park Management, which usually makes even further ill-advised decisions because they aren't designers.

It's really a three way street. A theme park is an extremely complex mechanism that couldn't operate without all of these working parts. At the same time, it is impossible to make everybody down the totem pole happy. If you're going to please marketing or park management, good luck pleasing the Imagineers, and if the Imagineers are happy, marketing generally is upset with the outcome.

The term used when an attraction is removed but a new show is placed in the old show space is "Retrofit." Stitch's Great Escape was retro-fitted from "Alien Encounter", which in itself really didn't jive with Tomorrowland or the Magic Kingdom, and really didn't have a place at the Magic Kingdom.

There are lots of different views in regards to what should go where. Certainly, Stitch in Tomorrowland should make sense....but certainly, placing Monsters, Inc. Laugh Floor there made no sense at all, because it has no relation to Tomorrowland or its central story. Never mind that, though, because obviously our guests want Monsters. They don't care where we put them. It isn't important.

Well, there is a simple and unfortunate fact that designers and management alike tend to overlook. Our guests are going to enjoy whatever we give them, almost. The meaning of this is not that our guests are stupid. Far from it, actually. It's a fact of human nature that once you've established a name in any entertainment field, there are always expectations, but there are also reverse expectations: the kind that mean audiences will pay to see a film just because it says "Disney".



The "almost" comes in often when classic and beloved shows are ripped out in favor of something new. Throughout history, it has often been the case that guests become extremely upset when a show is removed. The current situation with Pleasure Island is no exception. Many claim to be extremely devoted to the enterprise of saving Pleasure Island. The problem is, they aren't here to show Disney. They cannot make good on their claim. However, if they don't come back because Pleasure Island is closed, and maybe they choose to visit somewhere new and exciting and fresh like Dubai on their next vacation...well, Disney just lost business.

Themed Entertainment isn't a business where business results are immediate, yet most of the current big cheeses think and act the way any MBA would think and act: we want low cost, high-profit, immediate return solutions. Sooner or later, I think they will have no choice but to realize that by retro-fitting attractions or shows into places they don't belong they are not only upsetting and losing their best designers, they are upsetting their paying public, and just because they aren't there to show their support doesn't mean they will forget it and choose to return to a Disney park for their next vacation.

The very essence, the thing that separates a Disney themed show from a standard Six Flags ride, is that we tell stories. It's been banged into the heads of anyone over the age of three that The Walt Disney Company is and always has been in the business of telling stories. Our guests are going to take whatever stories we give them. The very first Imagineers knew this, and they chose to look at the situation in a positive light and used this fact as inspiration to do their absolute best.

This relates directly back to John Hench's experience with a film director from another motion picture studio who commented that his audience "wouldn't know the difference, anyway". It relates directly to the fact that once they are in the gates, we already have their money. This relates directly to the entire concept of Imagineering:

There are two ways to look at a blank sheet of paper. It can be the scariest thing in the world, because no one has put anything on it yet, or it can be the greatest opportunity in the world because no one has put anything on it yet.

If we think of our guests' experience as a blank sheet of paper, we can either choose to view it as the scariest thing in the world (or the most unimportant thing) and not do our best work and provide them with the best show, or we can choose to take it as an opportunity and give them more than they expect. Even, sometimes, more than they can comprehend.

There is a whole new world of Designing within the form waiting. It is the choice of the designer to tell the best story that can be told, or to simply give in to the marketing and management teams that attempt to shoehorn their ideals into a business that has, for nearly 55 years, chosen to disregard them as standard business practices because the goal was the creation of a brand new standard.



Drum Corps is also an activity where storytelling is paramount. Lets not forget that one of the most esteemed titles is the Spirit of Disney award (Phantom Regiment won the Spirit of Disney award for their 2008 program, "Spartacus", pictured above).

Regardless of the form, if we don't stay within the guidelines we risk losing our audience (or our guests). The Cadets risked it this year, and it didn't pay off. Stitch's Great Escape, Journey into Imagination (Redux) and The Enchanted Tiki Room: Under New Management have all risked it in the past and it didn't pay off.

There is only one other thing more terrifying than a blank sheet of paper, and thats a show that breaks the form in the wrong places and provides our guests with experiences they'd rather not remember.

The End of the World (as we know it)

Atleast thats how some people feel about the changes currently taking place (or rumored to be taking place) at "it's a small world" in Anaheim.

At EPCOT Center, for years and years before the travesties of EPCOT '94 and now Epcot, we were treated to an opening narration set to the music of "We've Just Begun to Dream."

The narration stated the facts about the park that changed Walt Disney World from a resort destination into a science, education and entertainment capital:

"Walt Disney was a dreamer and a doer, a man who believed in the world and it's problems. He believed that people could develop solutions to problems, if equipped with information and technology."

The Latest in Hostile Fannitudes! 

Though the debate has died down considerably while the actual rehab on "it's a small world" at Disneyland progresses, I'd like to take a few minutes and discuss the devil's advocate position on the "proposed" changes to the attraction.

First of all, no one ever said that Mickey and Minnie Mouse would be added, that the rainforest would be replaced or that the scene replacing it would be a tribute to America's cultures and architecture.

These rumors swirled in the rumor mill of the internet until they churned out the other side and straight into Glendale, where they fueled some serious hostility amongst the Imagineers. If your paying public is disowning you the way these people claimed to be, you've got not only some serious creative pitfalls but also a major business problem...

But that was just the thing. These rumors came from the "other side". The so-called "Disneyana" community read into the situation and posted their opinions and thoughts, as internet bloggers (myself included) are prone to do. They may or may not have been accurate in their statements, but it hardly mattered because some of them made a huge fuss and created a serious controversy.

Now, WDI isn't entirely innocent here, either. To add to the speculation, they decided not to respond at all. When they didn't respond with Florida's Mr. Toad and Submarine Voyage, or the Country Bear Jamboree at Disneyland, it meant curtains for those beloved attractions. The "changes" that were "proposed" for "it's a small world" were considered by most to be accurate depictions of the future. They were delivered by a group that, for better or worse and whether I personally agree with their sentiment or not, is rapidly becoming a serious concern to WDI and The Walt Disney Company as a whole: the bloggers.

A few weeks after the Small World debate had really died down, another incident regarding the Florida version of Toy Story Midway Mania fueled serious opposition within the ranks of the Imagineers. A blog posted an article regarding a serious problem with the audio in the attraction, and condemned WDI for not paying enough attention to the details. This opinion was posted just a day or two after the cast previews for the attraction had been completed, so the Imagineers were still very much in the test and adjust period, and were still in the process of handing Toy Story over to park operations.



The Imagineer's response was less than pretty. It was issued to the offending website and to the Orlando Sentinel, who ran the story and created a minor stir. The Imagineer in question called out the Disney "Fan Community" and stated that WDI is not concerned with these people because they aren't the paying guests.

I'd call this response right and wrong. As a company, you should be concerned with every member of your audience. You should care what they say to a degree. When WDI says, though, that they don't build attractions for the "Disney Fan Community", they are 100% correct. As a business, Parks and Resorts caters to families. Disney is still a family entertainment company, like it or hate it, for better or for worse, forever.

The Disney Fan Community may have its share of interested fathers or armchair Imagineers, but the diehards are mostly not from that particular arena. This isn't good or bad. It simply is what it is, and when the Imagineers say they build their attractions with their audience in mind, they are telling the absolute truth. Otherwise, we'd have seen amazing things like WestCOT and Port Disney come to life.

The major issue at Walt Disney World is that less than 5% of the guests there are repeat visitors or from a local audience. The majority of guests are vacationing families, many of them coming from international destinations, so WDI has to adjust what they do in Walt Disney World accordingly. The audio problems in Toy Story Midway Mania were really just the straw that broke the Florida camel's back, and sent WDI over the edge and into an admission that they no longer cared a nickel for what this particular faction of the Disney audience had to say. This was probably because everything they've done in the past fifteen years has been lambasted and thrown into the garbage can by this same group of people.

This is because the audiences' needs have become different from the needs of a repeat viewer. For the same reason film and television are now regarded as two very different mediums, Disneyland and Walt Disney World have different audiences and require different business practices and creative initiatives in order to stay alive.

The sad part is that most of the times in the past fifteen years that Imagineering, and the company in general, has been put to the gallows by the fan community, the fan community has had the opinion that has made more sense. The really, seriously even more sad part is that the paying customers- those aforementioned families and their character-hungry children- haven't agreed often with the fan community.

There was a time when there was no faction. Disneyland, as John Hench stated, "is good for you." It was good for everybody. Disneyland, in fact, still is good for most people. Disneyland's management has made far fewer mistakes than Walt Disney World's, and the reason is as plain as day:

Disneyland is not run as an outpost of the empire, under control of people who make their decisions without taking into account what their "superiors" in Burbank and Glendale might want or think or how they feel...they simply do. Until recently, Disneyland executives had a handle on things that was so in tune with what their superiors in Glendale wanted that there was barely a moment when both parties not only knew what was happening, but they agree that it should happen.



Mary Blair presents a mural to two nuns at the hospital across the street from the Walt Disney Studios, Burbank, 1943. The Mural remained in the Hospital Nursery for many years.

A Designer's Perspective

Thats really where our story begins. There are only a few key points I'd like to make on the creative side of things.

Imagine for a moment that you are an Imagineer. Imagine that you are a WDI Creative Executive. You've been told to look long and hard at Disneyland. While California Adventure has been placed in the more than capable hands of MGM Studios designer Bob Weis, Disneyland has been placed in the care of Tony Baxter and his team- of which you are a member.

As you review Disneyland's overall story concept, its thematic structure, and study long and hard all of its genius elements of placemaking and theory that have been put into place over the past five decades, first by Walt Disney himself and then by three generations of the most creative Imagineers the world has known; you begin to notice the displacement that took place after the conclusion of the 1964/65 World's Fair at Flushing Meadows, New York.

After the fair, Walt (as promised) moved three of the four key attractions intact to Disneyland in Anaheim and moved key set pieces of the fourth to a shed along the Disneyland Railroad. His test for Disneyland East had been successful, but it would still be another three years, an amount of time surpassing what Disney had left, before any land would be purchased east of the Mississippi River.

For now, the UNICEF pavilion desperately needed a home at Disneyland. It was placed near the conclusion of Disneyland's story, between Fantasyland and Tomorrowland. It isn't until late 1992 that this becomes a serious problem. With the January 1993 opening of Mickey's Toontown, the "Small World Promenade" becomes misplaced. It used to lead guests from the fairy tale realms of the imagination into the exciting conclusive statement of the future that was Tomorrowland.

After the addition of Toontown, the attraction sits between a natural extension of Fantasyland and the hulking mass of Space Mountain in Tomorrowland, and it didn't make a whole lot of sense.

If we look at Disneyland as a continuous story experience, we see that the majestic Matterhorn provides us with our final vantage point within the story. It is the last high point before we venture out of the realm of America and into the realm of our futures as people of the world. "it's a small world" made the perfect transition point. It's thematic message was very clear: You've been through turn of the century small town America. You've seen the jungles through a scrim of 1930s American romanticism. You've experience New Orleans, the queen of the delta, the American Frontier and the forests of the Pacific Northwest where animals can talk. We've shown you the stories that are central to our pathos as Americans and as children.

Now, here are the other nations of the world, and as we cross into Tomorrowland, here is what our future together can bring us. With the addition of "it's a small world" to Disneyland, Walt not only had a highly entertaining, high capacity attraction with a knock-out hit song, he also had a point of transition that was setting up what he wanted to do with his new Disneyland East project. The themes of the World's Fair weighed heavily on Walt Disney, and he saw the promise of tomorrow as a major opportunity to create new things; new cities, new experiences in entertainment, new destinations where people could live, work and play without ever getting behind the wheel of their own car. Small World introduced, for the first time in the history of Disneyland, the Global Concept.

Walt Disney stands at the scale map of EPCOT inbetween takes. According to Marty Sklar (WDI Ambassador to the World), the joke here was "If this map is to scale, that makes me 6 1/2 miles tall!"

Fast Forward to 1993. Mickey's Toontown now exists as a natural extension of Fantasyland. Here are the classic fairy-tales from your American childhood (not inconsequentially all retold and put in new forms by Walt Disney and his company), and here are where the most classic of all those characters actually live. Mickey's Toontown is a fantastic story extension onto the whole of Disneyland. After all, in the mythology, this is really Mickey AND Walt's park, and it turns out Mickey was the one who went so far as to offer Walt the land next door to Toontown to build Disneyland!

However, now "it's a small world", with its brilliant but non-specific design, is now a transitional element dropped into the middle of a scene. If we think of Disneyland as a motion picture, where the attraction once served as the fade and the statement between the world of fantasy and the world of tomorrow, we've now taken that fade and dropped it into the middle of the World of Fantasy scene. Not a good thing!

The Official "Seal" of Mickey's Toontown, which opened behind "it's a small world" in 1993 and changed everything.

The Other Side

I'm going to play devil's advocate. While I agree that the inclusion of any sort of "Up with America" tribute scene in the attraction is a major mistake, as is the addition of Mickey and Minnie when so much thematic space is devoted to them just fifty feet beyond Small World's door, I think the addition of some link to Fantasyland is a wonderful idea.

"it's a small world" has sat in a very difficult location for fifteen years. To make Disneyland's story cohesive, and avoid the same issues that have plagued Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom in recent times, something needs to be done to link the attraction with its surroundings. You don't see Space Mountain towering over Fantasyland, and you don't see Splash Mountain plopped down in the middle of Fantasyland.

The Arguments

Argument: You are ruining Mary Blair's brilliant designs!



Answer: The additional Disney characters will be similar to the ones employed at Hong Kong Disneyland, and the dolls will be in the original style of the brilliant Mary Blair.

Argument: Adding Mickey and Minnie is a ploy to sell more toys.

Answer: First of all, Merchandising and their lack of coherent attraction-specific merchandise design is an issue for another post. Secondly, at this point, we are being told that Mickey and Minnie will not be added to the attraction.

Argument: The rainforest is the most brilliant piece of design in the show! You can't remove it!



Answer: I Agree. Removing any part of the show for the addition of something that breaks with the transitory theme of the attraction and compromises its place in Disneyland's story arc is not a good idea. At this point, we've been told that the rainforest sequence will also remain intact.

Argument: Adding an "Up with America" tribute in place of the rainforest is sacrilegious!

Answer: Lets keep in mind where this particular rumor came from. The Hong Kong version of the show, the first to feature characters from the animated films, is in Hong Kong. When bridging cultures, as we saw with The Haunted Mansion's transition to Phantom Manor for Disneyland Paris, Imagineers must alter attractions to reach the cultural limitations of the area the attraction will be constructed in. For example, the French don't relate to ghost stories in the same way that we do, and they associate ghosts more with the old west of America than with the south. Because "it's a small world" is now being placed in a different cultural environment than the one it was designed for, and because in China "Disney" is synonymous with "America", an America scene in Hong Kong is totally appropriate where the same scene in America might not play. In short, its all about the guests and what they can and cannot relate to.



Argument: Any change to Disneyland (or its "classic" attractions) should be prevented in the spirit of preservation.

Answer: (the oldest trick in the book, but its still in the book because it works)

"Disneyland will never be complete. It will continue to grow as long as there is Imagination left in the world."



But the simple fact is this: As a dreamer and a doer, Walt's dreams had the thing that allowed them to become reality. 

They had the ability to change.

Formatting Issues

Authors Note: 

In regards to the article entitled "The End of the World (as we know it)", I would like to make you all aware that the post was actually completed about two weeks ago. 

Due to serious formatting issues and the anti-user friendly blogger editing system, I was unable to post the article until this evening. 

Much of the formatting is still rather off. Be aware that the formatting tools employed by blogger do not work very well for their intended purposes. 

Thank you all for your understanding, and I hope you enjoy the article! 

"Icon-O-Class"

Ah, the Disney icon.


The "Weenie", according to Disney-Speak. Weenie was actually an old carnival term, and the meaning is derived from the idea that a dog is drawn to a hot dog the way a person is drawn to a large, central object. Of course, at the carnival, this was always the roller coaster or chief attraction, and also the most expensive. Usually the Ferris Wheel was the tallest attraction in a traveling carnival, so it would be placed closest to the roller coaster in order to draw people in that direction. The idea, after all, was that upon reaching the weenie, the "customers" would spend their hard-earned cash.

Disney took the term and applied it to a narrative, story-based infrastructure, so that it became the central point of their overall story: Sleeping Beauty Castle was the very first Disney Park icon, at Disneyland. Walt wanted the castle to be the centerpiece of the park because it was the centerpiece of the idea of the park's primary attraction, Fantasyland (at that time, the only land to look and feel like anything close to complete).

Sleeping Beauty Castle, interestingly, underwent a last-minute name change for promotional purposes. The castle was originally called "Snow White Castle"- it is unclear if the name implied ownership to Disney's first princess- and in 155, Sleeping Beauty was well under way. To help promote the film, Walt renamed it to Sleeping Beauty Castle. If you look at the actual castle from Sleeping Beauty, it looks a lot like Cinderella Castle at the Magic Kingdom. Is it pure coincidence that the restaurant inside that castle, upon its opening, was called "King Stefan's Banquet Hall"? King Stefan, aside from supposedly being "Walt Disney's favorite character", was the father of Princess Aurora, not Cinderella. This particularly story has never been discussed by anyone with access to the information, and its entirely possible that the reasons have been lost to time- or atleast to a vault somewhere on Flower Street.



Anyway, Sleeping Beauty Castle is 77 feet high. The Matterhorn, added to Disneyland in 1959, towers above the castle, but the placement of "Holiday Hill" where the Matterhorn was constructed was ideal because of the angles it could then use to play off of the castle. That way, the architecture blended seamlessly with Fantasyland, provided a unique backdrop for the Submarine Voyage (let us not forget that Mt. Prometheus served as thw backdrop for the real Nautilus in Jules Verne's story), and looked accurate with the castle's immaculate charm.

Alas, an entire book can (and, now, has been!) written about Disney's mountains, so we will save that topic for another day. The question is, if we are a designer at WED in 1953- we've just come over from animation, and Walt has charged us with figuring out a design for Disneyland's castle that works with the surrounding ideas and architecture. What do we do?



The answer turned out to be the combination of several key historical sites. The castle Neuschwanstein in Bavaria was a major influence, as much as architecture from classic fairy-tales. The blending of real life and fantasy locations created Sleeping Beauty Castle. Disney Legend and Imagineer Herb Ryman was the man charged to create the look of Sleeping Beauty Castle. The design wasn't quite right until Herb turned the top portion of the castle around backwards, so that the front actually faces Fantasyland's main courtyard.

Little did the Imagineers realize at that time, but Sleeping Beauty Castle would only be the very first Icon. The grandfather of them all, so to speak. More were on the rise, literally and figuratively.

When Walt began to plan in secret for his "Florida Project", referred to at one time as "Project X", the theme park was viewed as a means to an end. It was not to be a direct copy of Disneyland, but his focus was on something far more grand than what he had achieved in Anaheim. Walt wanted to create an working, living, breathing community in the heart of Central Florida. He wanted to call this futuristic place EPCOT: the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow.

We're getting ahead of ourselves. In December 1966, Walt Disney passed away. Prior, the theme park at Walt Disney World would have been far more similar to Disneyland. Now, not only did "Disney World" become "Walt Disney World" in honor of the man who started it all, but the theme park became the center of development. For many years, Disneyland was referred to as "Walt Disney's Magic Kingdom", a term Walt first used while promoting Disneyland in the early 1950s.

Florida's Magic Kingdom Park would have the same central layout of Disneyland, but would feature a castle far grander in scope and scale than the Anaheim original. Walt had always wanted Disneyland's castle to be small, so as to not appear imposing to younger guests. John Hench, Walt's premiere art director at WED and a master of color, set out to design Cinderella Castle at the Magic Kingdom.

In his wonderful book Designing Disney, Hench talks about the idea of ceremony and ritual and how those concepts have a heavy bearing on the way guests experience a Disney show. In one interview, Hench talks about what he refers to as "Sensory Information". He stands with his interviewer in front of Cinderella Castle at Florida's Magic Kingdom, and discusses the minute detail of several gargoyles high on a distant windowsill: Hench uses the gargoyles to make his point clear.



If they are there, the guest understands that everything feels right. There are a thousand tiny details in the Castle Hub area and if any one of them, from the balloons to the music to the gargoyles high and nearly invisible on the castle weren't there, the guest wouldn't quite notice it, but they'd know that something wasn't right. This, in Hench's definition, is the true art of Imagineering. The details of a show are what make it blend cohesively with reality and in many cases become the reality.

Disney's version of "reality" is of course enhanced, and it differs depending on which experience the guest might choose. At Animal Kingdom, the enhanced reality needs to feel natural and flowing, at EPCOT it needs to surround us and tower over us, to bombard us gently with beautiful ideas and visions and sounds of the future and the world we have created.

At Disney's Hollywood Studios (formerly Disney-MGM Studios), the enhanced reality must feel as though it has stepped directly off the silver screen and into the world around us. At Disneyland Park, the reality must present us with a view of America and its history and future through the eyes of a wonder-struck child. At Magic Kingdom, the reality must be the fantasy that was embedded in our lives at a young age. The great challenge of the designer is to walk in the shoes of a guest experiencing stories, ideas, locations and characters beloved to them, and to be able to successfully create the reality for each of these things.



The Disney Icon must embody the central theme of a themed entertainment experience. In example, Grauman's Chinese Theatre at the Studios park in Florida was the very thing that one might expect to see at the far end of an idealized Hollywood Boulevard. A giant movie palace of the 1930s, replete with spires and window displays and a courtyard touched by a million young stars and starlets. It had what designers refer to as a "payoff". Payoff, in terms of design, is the opposite of contradiction.

Now, when guests reach the end of Hollywood Boulevard, they are met with an image that is by nature contradictory; They don't make hats that big, and one certainly doesn't make much sense at the end of a 1930s idealized version of Hollywood Boulevard....


Or Does it?

If you look at the prototype icon of Sleeping Beauty Castle as Disneyland, it really doesn't "make sense" in "reality" to find a fairy tale castle at the end of a turn-of-the-century Main Street, USA.

Next time, we'll look at the concept of "Enhanced Reality" as it relates to Disney's Icons, and how the development of Spaceship Earth provides the first example of a "thesis attraction" for a themed environment. We will also discuss how perhaps the problem with the sorcerer hat isn't the lack of image, but the lack of payoff and the inherent contradiction it creates from longshot to close-up.

Thanks for coming to the very first Icon-O-Class!

Future Magic

Your comments and constructive criticism are what will inspire Foundations of Magic for future articles and discussions!


If you are reading this, please feel free to leave a comment or suggestion.

If you would prefer, you can also email us at: foundationsofmagic@rocketmail.com