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I’m always interested to learn more about how Disney Imagineers got started early in their careers. Few take the predictable route to a job in theme parks. Glenn Barker played drums in parades at Disneyland before ultimately joining Disney’s sound department. At that time, it was a small group before the parks’ massive worldwide expansions. Barker worked at Disney for more than 45 years creating the sounds that we know and love on Disney attractions.
Barker is my guest on this episode of The Tomorrow Society Podcast to talk about his background and work on iconic rides and shows. His diverse projects include Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, Space Mountain, Impressions de France, The Matterhorn, Star Tours, and Pirates of the Caribbean. This list represents a small portion of Barker’s career, which also involves Disney Cruise Line and the 50th Anniversary special with Steve Martin. He’s also the voice of The Hatbox Ghost at Disneyland and gives other Easter eggs about his place in the parks.
Beyond the specific projects, I really enjoy the way that Barker explains the process for designing sounds at Disney’s theme parks. Specifically, his explanation of the audio for the Pirates of the Caribbean battle scene illustrates the complexity in supporting a show scene. Barker also describes the tricky process of creating on-board audio for Space Mountain at Disneyland. His expertise in sound design makes for an episode with a lot of great information. I’m thrilled that I had the chance to speak to Barker and learn more his amazing career.
Show Notes: Glenn Barker
Learn more about Glenn Barker on Episode 299 of the Moustalgia podcast (July 13, 2014)
Watch Glenn Barker talk about creating sound at theme parks on the Soundworks Collection episode on Imagineering (January 23, 2011).
Related Tomorrow Society Podcasts
Episode 83, Sound Designer Greg Meader (Carousel of Progress, Disney/MGM Studios)
Episode 33, Composer Bruce Broughton (Spaceship Earth, Soarin’ Around the World)
Transcript
Dan Heaton: Today on the podcast, Disney Imagineer Glenn Barker talks about more than 45 years of creating sounds for Disney’s theme parks, including Space Mountain, Pirates of the Caribbean, Big Thunder Mountain, the Matterhorn, and so much more. You’re listening to the Tomorrow Society Podcast.
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Dan Heaton: Thanks for joining me here on Episode 84 of the Tomorrow Society Podcast. I am your host, Dan Heaton. I’m reminded every day about how little I really know about how theme park attractions really come together and how they work. I can read books about the subject, I talk to experts in the field, but still what I know is a minute amount of actually what goes into making these attractions tick, which makes it so exciting for me when I talk to someone who’s an expert in their field.
That’s definitely the case with Glenn Barker. Glenn is a master of sound design and creating media for the parks. He worked in Imagineering for more than 45 years and has been involved in so many key achievements in sound at the parks. There are a few examples during this conversation, which blew my mind. First is when he talks about onboard audio at Space Mountain and what it took to put that together, which is mind blowing given the technology at the time when it was created.
Another is when he talks about Pirates of the Caribbean and the way that sound was put together as an example of just the different challenges and approaches you can take to make an immersive theme park attraction that really ticks and those are just a few examples of many during this podcast. We talk about Glenn’s background and how he got involved working at Disney and what he’s worked on, but what really made it click for me was the information, the background on how sound really comes together.
Glenn could give a masterclass on how to create sound at theme parks, and it was really fun to talk with them and learn just a bit about what he and his expertise in this subject. I feel really fortunate that I was able to talk to Glenn for this amount of time. It was great to learn a bit about his story and I think you’re going to enjoy this show. There’s a lot more we didn’t even get to, and plus there’s some fun tidbits about how certain sounds that we’ve all come to know at the parks are put together. So here is Glenn Barker.
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Dan Heaton: When you were younger, before you even started working at Disney or anything, how did you get interested in Disneyland or even in Disney itself?
Glenn Barker: Well, I grew up in Southern California and we saw Disneyland being built on the Disneyland TV show and when it opened in 1955, we waited. I’m talking like I was part of this decision. I was five years old. My dad and mom took us out there. It was in about 1956 was my first. I just absolutely fell in love with it. We got to go once a year usually on our birthdays. I just love Disneyland and everything about it; I think my favorite place was Fantasyland.
I always wanted to ride Peter Pan, the first thing and they wanted to ride. The steam train does the loop around the park and you can kind of get a better feel for it. So that went on for years and another key event that happened when I was 13, my brother and I wanted to form a band.
The Beatles came over and everybody was hot on forming a band, so he took guitar lessons and I started taking drum lessons and my mom took me to Huntington Park, a music shop there where I met Mr. Moore, who was also the band director of the Huntington Park Youth Band, which was the oldest youth band in Southern California. He wanted me to play in his band.
So next thing I knew, we were off to New York for a trip and it was for the New York World’s Fair in 1963. And naturally I saw “it’s a small world” and Carousel of Progress and the Ford Pavilion and Lincoln and I just was again blown away by the audio animatronic figures and the music in small world and it just all clicked for me about the same time I met a girl in the band. Her name is Sandy, and we started dating when we were 15 years old and we’ve been married now for 44 years.
My band director then passed me off to another music teacher and he encouraged me to go up to Cal State LA and take music lessons up there, which I did. As soon as I turned 18, I went out to Disneyland because I wanted to work there. That was my dream is to work at Disneyland. I went out there and I got turned down. They said they were already full for the summer, so I found out that if you went to the placement office at the school, they could get you an interview, which they did.
So I got a fantastic job in the in-between as a busboy, did that for one summer and then I was able to, through the help of Mr. Moore and the youth band, Sonny Anderson, who was the director of music at Disneyland at that time, had played in that same youth band years before me.
So he had called him and said, Hey, I’ve got a good drummer here. The next thing I knew, they said show up for rehearsal, not even audition. I got into the Fantasy on Parade at Christmas and did that for three Christmas seasons. I played drums in the Winnie the Pooh unit, which was kind of fun. We had to wear these big furry costumes and they had a head that came to a point where the nose was like a big ice cream cone and it was just a little mouth, so the only instruments that would fit in there was soprano saxophones, things like that. So we had four soprano saxophones, four banjos, a bell glockenspiel and a snare drum. And we played the Winnie the Pooh song down Main Street and back up at the end of the day for about three weeks every year.
I did that for two years and then I got into the Royal Band with Cinderella, and that was great fun. It was a blast. Good money. I mean, they paid us Union scale at the time, which was way more than they were paying the people working in the park, but it was only for a couple of months with rehearsals and performances. So I went back and asked for another job that I could get more hours.
Through a little finagling, they hired me into Merlin’s Magic Shop in Fantasyland. So I got to be a magic demonstrator and learn how to do all the magic tricks. That was really a lot of fun too. And that’s the same shop that Steve Martin had worked in about six or so years before me. And in fact, I met him when we did the 50th anniversary film and had a great conversation with him about working in Merlin’s and everything.
So while I was there, I decided to, I didn’t want to be a music teacher, and that’s where they were taking me at Cal State. So I started playing around with a film camera and I loved taking movies and editing little things together, and my folks who had met at USC right after the war said, well, why don’t you go over to USC? They’ve got a film school there.
So I applied and I got in, and so I took all the film classes, editing, recording, and that’s where I learned how sound on films works, which was another vital thing to the job that I eventually got. Then I met a guy named Michael O’Connell who was working in the candy shop on Main Street making candy in the window, and he had a dream of getting into WED with this model that he had built, fantastic model, and he had a whole layout of it.
It was called Circuit 30, and he was looking to do a soundtrack for a slideshow that would go along with it, and that was going to be his portfolio to get into WED, and so I volunteered and worked with him and built the soundtrack for it, just using tape recorders in my parents’ basement. We presented it up at the university there at Disneyland, and lo and behold, he got the job and I continued working down there when I almost graduated about a month and I had to go before I graduated.
He called me, woke me up one morning and he said, I think there’s a job up here if you want it. And I said, wow, okay. I drove right up there and met my boss and I got hired. There was only two people in the Sound Department. My first jobs were mainly doing transfers because all of the production was done over at Disney Studio, which is over in Burbank, and we were down in Glendale until the production was done using film technique.
All of the soundtracks were recorded and edited on what was called 35 millimeter magnetic film, which I don’t know how many people are familiar with how they used to make movies. They don’t necessarily this way anymore, but they’d have a picture that was 35 millimeter with all the pictures on it, and then they would build up the different roles of all the different elements of the soundtracks.
So you’d have music, you’d have dialogue, you’d have sound effects, and a lot of times you’d have multiple roles with different sound effects on it, different layers of music, and they’d synchronize all of these things because they had sprocket holes in ’em and they were able to run the picture along with all of these, they call ’em dummies, which were just playback machines that would roll right along and put a start mark on each one and thread it up and then start ’em all, and they’d all go together.
It was quite an operation to see these working. But anyway, that’s how they would make the shows and then they would deliver the masters over to us and then we would transfer those onto the format that actually played back in the park. A lot of times we use quarter inch tape or we would use for a multi-track show like Lincoln, which was the first one I worked on.
I was only there a month and they said, okay, we need to install Lincoln. So I would take these master tracks and put them up on these machines and transfer them, patch it all up into a one inch tape that had 14 channels of audio on it and everything was routed to the different speaker in the playback in the theater there. I would make those tapes and then they would wear out because tape wore out maybe would last maybe a month, and I’d get a call, oh, we need three bare band tapes, or we need three small world tapes. So that was my main job was putting those together.
Dan Heaton: How much of that were you just learning on the spot? Because it sounds so specific to working in that park and how they did things. It seems like a lot of it was trial and error. I mean, did that relate a lot to your background or was it a lot of just every day was something new basically when you were working there?
Glenn Barker: Every day it got more and more. They started giving me more and more work, but to answer your question, the technology was very similar to what I had been doing at USC when we were making our little student films, except we were working on 16 millimeter and not 35 millimeters. So this was going from a model the size of your fist to one the size of your leg, and everything’s so much bigger and easier to work with when you’re making a film.
They make the soundtrack from a movie and back in the earlier days it was just one channel behind the screen, and then they started getting into stereo and then multi-track. Now I think they’re up to seven or maybe 11 channels in a theater with left center, right, right surround, left surround, rear surround. But they’re all standard. They’re going to make 5,000 movies and they’re going to or prints, and they’re going to all be shipped out to all these theaters all over the place.
Nothing is custom for just one theater unless they were doing what they called roadshows like Fantasia, where they would have special tones on the track that would steer the sound around inside the theater and panic from left to right and very gimmicky if you ever listened to the original Fantasia. But for us, every show you did was custom. So what do we need?
And in these early days it was, of course, it was all laid out by my boss and people before me because something like Lincoln had been in New York and then they put it into Disneyland in ‘66, I think, and then they took it out and put in the Walt Disney Story. That was a funny one because people didn’t like that Lincoln is something that you don’t mess with. I would be working that one Christmas season; I was working in the Main Street Magic Shop.
People would come across from the Lincoln Theater and walk in and start yelling at me for changing out Lincoln to put in Walt Disney. And I said, well, okay. After two or three of those, I just picked up the phone and I said, I’ll take care of it. They laughed and realized I had nothing to do with it.
So I pointed them across the way I could actually see City Hall from the Magic Shop and say, that’s where you want to go. I think a lot of that public outcry is what made Lincoln go back in. That was one of the first things that I worked on pretty soon because all of the people I worked with, you don’t have any idea who these people are, but talking about, well, Marty Sklar, of course, he was running the place Marc Davis, X Atencio, Ward Kimball, Claude Coats, and Ken Anderson.
They would be bringing me things to do because every one of them were working on different concepts for different shows and all of those had sound in them, so they would bring records or ideas and scripts and we would record. We had a little recording studio there and we would record what’s called a scratch track, which is just a temporary, usually somebody in the building that had a good voice and had acting abilities and they would put these together, I’d add music to them, we’d put sound effects in, and then I’d make ’em a little cassette.
If you’ve ever seen like Marc Davis’s 11×14 drawings at any of the shows he would do for Bear Band, he would draw a little sketch of the scene in color and they were beautiful and probably worth a fortune, but he would have ’em all up on a board and then play the track and talk through the show. That was the early ways that they would pitch these shows to the upper management and some would get turned on and some wouldn’t. Then the other ones were the real shows that were greenlit. So like Space Mountain had opened in Walt Disney World and we built another one in Disneyland in 1977. Working with X Atencio, I’m assuming the people that have listened to this show this far, know who these people are?
Dan Heaton: I think so. The names you’ve listed, I mean, most people that are going to listen to this type of interview for sure would know it. I mean, that’s a legendary group including X Atencio, It’s quite a group.
Glenn Barker: And I had no idea. To me they were just the guys there. I was kind of considered the second generation. I was one of the first hires after the original Magic Kingdom in Walt Disney World was built. They had a layoff after that and then they started creeping back in because the guy I replaced retired. So they needed somebody to make these show tapes, which was like I said, the main function.
Then they liked what I was doing, and so they kept bringing me things and pretty soon I did the sound effects for Space Mountain and one of them X was so much fun, he would just say, have fun with it, and then he’d come back and listen. So one of the tracks that I thought was kind of funny was there was a meteor shower in one of the upper lifts, and so I thought, well, let me try something.
So I went in the booth and took a microphone and just went, made all these sounds, and then I pitched them up and down. We could do that and I could echo ’em and make ’em play backwards and combine them, and I put it all together just as a test and X comes in and he listens to it and he says, perfect, it’s done. So that played for all the years until we put the sound on board.
So he was a real kick. And then Rick Harper had an AX, which was an early synthesizer, and he and I sat there and he created some of those little spacey sounds that you heard on the ride. All the speakers were off board, there was no onboard yet. And then I did the Matterhorn and the fun one there was Marty I think had the idea to have a contest for the big growl.
And so we had all these people come in and yell into the microphone and the guy won it, his named Dennis, and coincidentally, I had gone to high school with him, so I knew him, and so we ended up using his track for the first monster you’d see when you went around. Then Jack Wagner wanted to get in on it. He was the voice of Disneyland at the time, and so he did that one. That was the most famous that played in the top.
Unfortunately, Dennis passed away not long after that. I think he had a massive stroke or a heart attack, young guy too, and everybody was just devastated. That’s where if you’ve ever been to WED Imagineering, WDI, the Big D restaurant, everybody thinks it stands for Disney now it stands for Dennis. Then later, well I did the growls actually, there’s a grumbling growl at the base of the Matterhorn where you hear kind of a sound.
Dan Heaton: That’s pretty good.
Glenn Barker: These are all copyrighted.
Dan Heaton: I won’t use that.
Glenn Barker: You can, you can. But I slowed it down and we added reverb to it and all that, and that one’s still there. When we put the new snowman in, we decided to go with something different because it’s a totally different figure. So the creative, these aren’t my decisions. I want you to understand there’s a whole team of people, a lot of creative leaders that all come in with their ideas and things. So we’ve made the one that’s there now, but if you listen to it really carefully, it does have a hint of the one that Jack Wagner did, and it has some stuff that two or three of us did, humongous speakers in there.
It was really hard to get that loud enough. When we first did the first one, I remember it blew up the speakers constantly, and so they finally put in a huge amplifier and speaker system, and I went up to test it, and that’s when the holes were there, where the Skyway went through. And so we played it. I went, holy finally; I said, let’s back it off. I think we finally got the system that can handle this later; I was having lunch over in New Orleans Square and somebody says, what was that loud sound I heard come out of Big Thunder. And I laughed. I said, that came out of the Matterhorn. So it was that loud.
Dan Heaton: When you’re doing sounds like that for the Matterhorn or even Space Mountain with sound effects, those rides, especially before it was on board with Space Mountain, the attraction is pretty loud. The vehicles take, they have a sound to it and such. Is that a challenge to find, like you mentioned the sound effects that can play over that without just blasting our ears out?
Glenn Barker: Well, the thing is, with the original Space Mountain, the only sound that was on the ride, not on the vehicles, but played for the ride other than the queue line and the engine and the safety spiel, but the only sound was as you’re going up the lift, there’s a lift and then you go straight for a bit and then you go up a B lift, and then C lift is around and by the time you’re into the gravity portion, there was no soundtrack at all until you came into the reentry.
Then we had a series of speakers that played a, it was actually a jet airplane backwards, so it it’d go and then you’d hear boom, a sonic boom. So until we put the sound on board, we didn’t have it. So to answer your question, if you had tried to, you would’ve been blowing people’s ears off probably because the ride systems are so loud, and that’s one of the challenges of doing the sound on some of these things, especially the roller coasters.
Dan Heaton: Right, yeah. And I know you also worked on, I know I kind of cut off the middle there, but for Big Thunder, you did a lot of the soundtrack for that, and I know that one, I feel like the sound effects set the mood well. So could you talk a little bit about how that worked out for you?
Glenn Barker: Sure. There again, the design was to have sounds in the queue. There’s background music in the queue, Western style music and then the safety spiel, Dallas McKennon, here’s our wildest ride in the wilderness. It wasn’t intended to play well. There’s a few tracks that play as you first go into it. There’s a little whistle, and then when you go in the back cave, there’s bat sounds, but the sounds that you hear when you’re in the queue, especially that lower part where you’re kind of weaving through the rock work there are intended to play to the queue.
So the train sounds where you hear the train going around the spiral butte or trestle six to seven, which is on the left side over there, those are all speakers aimed out. So again, we’re not trying to fight with the noise of the ride for the people on the ride.
I created all of those just using like I had a bucket and the squeaks when you’re going up the, in that day there was an earthquake. So yes, there was a big subwoofers in there for that. But again, you’re going up a lift, and even though there was a chain with those low frequency speakers, we could overpower at least the chain. I mean, you wouldn’t want to stay in there very long. Let me put it that way. I made some of those with breaking sticks and then slowing it down, so it sounded like a big timber.
We had just moved into a 1927 house in Burbank that had one of these old Merritt stoves, and I noticed when you pulled out the oven thing, it made this hideous screech. And I said, Ooh. So I took those pans out and took them in and recorded that as that squeaky hear it crack and it goes, and Kim Irvine, you know who Kim Irvine is?
Dan Heaton: Oh, yes, yes. She’s still working at Disneyland too,
Glenn Barker: She’s still down there. She ended up with that stove and loves to tell the story about how I made Big Thunder soundtracks with that stove. I remember another funny thing, well, it wasn’t so funny for this guy, but there was a security guard walking around up there on the track and we were testing those sounds for the first time and coming out of there and later on this guy says, were you guys doing that? I said, yeah. He says, man, I almost jumped off the track. I thought a real train was coming. So I said, oh, that just tells me it worked.
We’re doing those kinds of shows. I’m making show tapes. Then we started getting ready to build EPCOT and was a guy named Randy Bright who was working at Disney World, and he came back out and I worked on a number of presentations with him, and we put together slideshows where I’d make a soundtrack, and then they would have slides of all the different ideas for the different world showcase billions and feature world.
That eventually became a movie that they took to New York and had all the models set up there, I think in the NBC Studios or RCA one of them. That’s where they pitched all that to the sponsors. And so we were getting started to gear up. That’s when we added video to the department and it became audio/video. About the time I started as a manager video was kind of interesting because anything that was supposed to be video was all on film.
For instance, the Mission to Mars, if you’re old enough to remember that one, you’d, fly to Mars, but you’d be looking at a movie and there was maybe dirt on the film and it’s gone by, and all those monitors in the pre-show there with Mr. Johnson were all rear screen film projectors. So we wanted to get video into the park somehow, and so we convinced the company that we ought to get this, plus we could also use it for presentations.
And they’d build a model, but you’d have to really get down on your knees or something to see it so we could get these little lipstick cameras and move ’em through the model and give you a real guest side view of what the model was going to look like. So video was really hitting it. We would make laser discs, send out tapes and have laser discs made and put those in the park, and a lot of those went into EPCOT for a lot of the interactive things.
So video became a pretty important part. A guy named Rich Barnes who worked in Florida, he came out and he became my supervisor in the video production. By the way, the very first use of video in the park was at Disneyland, and it was a trailer for The Black Hole that used to be a ramp there. Now you have to walk up the stairs, but it used to be a moving ramp and it was monitors above that were playing a trailer for The Black Hole.
So anybody asked you, that was the very first video that ever played in I believe. Anything in the park that played off of a three-quarter inch tape with a shuttle system, what they call, where one tape would play for an hour or whatever and then hit the end and then the other machine would start, and then the first one would rewind.
That’s the way all of the playback machines worked in New York. They had these shuttles. If you’ve ever seen, there’s one TV show I think it is, where Walt Disney’s standing with Herb Taylor and they’re looking at the machines and one of them’s going, and then it stops and then the other one starts. It’s very interesting too, if you’re a nerd like me, you love that kind of stuff.
Dan Heaton: I think I’ve seen it. I think it’s like the World’s Fair episode where they go through each attraction and everything. That’s an amazing episode of that series. I’ve seen that one before. I could watch that over and over.
Glenn Barker: Yeah, I love it. So newer shows started coming at us and we got more and more involved, and I started bringing on more and more people. I mean, we went from two to 25 in about a year’s time when we were building the EPCOT project, and you’d have creative meetings where you’d sit down and learn about what a show was, and then we’d get drawings and layout where the soundtracks would be, again, working with creative. We’d get with the show set people and our engineering and audio video engineers, and they would do the real nuts and bolts of the hardware design.
Again, going back to what I said before, there was no restriction on how many soundtracks we could have while we had to do was figure out how to make ’em work, how to synchronize things. Today’s technology when I get there is way, way easier than trying to do all of this with tape cartridges.
The synchronizing was very primitive. There was a time code that was invented right around in this time called SSMPTE Time Code, which is a major thing in the industry today. Everybody uses that to synchronize electronically rather than the sprocket holes. But in those early shows, the films were on motion picture film like France, there was five screens, and then we would have a time code going to a tape that would synchronize with that projector so that we got finally got off of the 35 mag playback in the park.
But you’d meet with the creative folks and of course there’d be iterations and changes and all of that. And the engineers, we’d figure out what the sources needed to be. The source of the sound would be like, you might think of an MP3 player, although we’d never used that. It would be a high quality digital player today.
Back then it was either a quarter inch cartridge tape or a two inch. We got off of the shuttle system by coming up with what was called a bin loop. This was a thing that really goes back to band organ days back in the 1820s or 1800s where a paper role that would play a band organ at a carousel would play across the tracker bar, make the music sound, and then spill into a big bin. It was just an endless loop. It would lay over itself, back and forth, back and forth, and back and forth, and then come up the other side and you’d think it’s going to get all tangled up in there, but it didn’t.
So we had these tape machines that did that same thing. It was a bin loop of tape, so it never had, I mean, they had one splice in it when they put that particular copy of the tape in, but then it never had to rewind. So it could roll right through the splice and it would be seamless. A show like “small world”, there’s no beginning and there’s no end. It’s just as everybody knows, it just plays over and over and over.
Dan Heaton: Yeah. Well, let me ask you this question because I know that you were involved with basically the first soundtracks that were produced digitally, like for Impressions de France, I believe, where that was a big change for theme parks. So I’d love to hear about that, about how that switch happened and how challenging it was to kind of use digital.
Glenn Barker: Back in the early eighties, we had a demonstration of digital audio. You have to realize that this was around 1979 or about. Then the compact disc wasn’t available until 1983. This was out way earlier than that, and there were only one or two companies that were making machines for that, and we demonstrated it to our management and they thought it was spectacular, and we wanted to use digital audio for EPCOT.
The advantages are that when you’re making something with analog, you’re making copies constantly. You have an original recording, you’re not going to mess with that. You’re going to make a copy of it and you’re going to edit that, and then they make a change. So you go back and you make a copy of that. It’s already been edited, and by the time you get it into the park, you might be eight generations down a generation being a copy.
So digital, the sound is originally analog because that’s how we hear, but it’s converted into numbers and then stored as digits on a tape. So if you copy that number, it’s still the same, so you can go down and down and down. That’s one advantage of it. Plus it doesn’t have any wow and flutter.
It’s all spit out by a crystal, so it’s very, very speed accurate, and the signal to noise on it, that’s the difference between the loudest sound you’d record and the quietest thing you hear got up to about 90 DB where it was only about 60 for the earlier tape. So there’s a lot of advantage to it, and it sounded so clear that we just thought this is the way to go. Rather than using film techniques, the studio was getting too busy to do a lot of these productions anyway, so by bringing them over to WED and buying these machines.
So we bought 4 32-track digital machines and instantly became the largest digital audio facility in the whole world in one day. So they were new and there was a lot to learn with them. My chief engineer, a guy named Dave Spencer, figured out because nobody was doing what we were going to do with them.
They were not synchronizing ’em and all of that. So he figured out how to synchronize those machines by using a Commodore Vic 20 that he bought at Toys ‘R Us and taking the little motherboard out of it. We’re talking about 20 kilobyte computer. I don’t think you can breathe that fast anymore, but he would put those into a little black box and be able to control the speed of the machine and using video sync, synchronize it with video. And that’s what gave us the ability to do things where we were using Picture.
For instance, what really was important was with the Circle-Vision films, because they used to go down to Disneyland to do a mix and they’d shut down Disneyland Circle-Vision show, and then they would have some machines in there that would record and they’d have to do the whole thing in one pass. If they made a mistake, they’d have to back it up. I’m talking about the mixing where you’re combining sound effects with music and with dialogue.
So we wanted a system that we could have locally, so he came up with a nine-screen system that uses video projectors. We would take the films and transfer those to video, and then we could, with this technique he came up with, we could synchronize those videotapes to the sound machine. Of course, you’re not using the videos in the park, that’s just a reference so you can see what you’re mixing.
So that was one of the advantages of it. And so every session we did, we insisted on using digital. There’s a couple of ’em that I really think are really great, and one of ’em was Impressions de France. We decided to use the National Symphony Orchestra over in London at Abbey Road Studios where the Beatles recorded.
So we had to ship our machines all the way across the Atlantic Ocean to get there because we found out that they did have one because one of our machines, they ran a forklift through it, they was able to find an earlier version of one of these machines and they pulled all of our cards out and put it into that one, and we were able to do the session. We really needed two so that you can make a protection copy at the end of the day, otherwise you’d have one master tape and if something happened to that, you had nothing.
And this is the kinds of things I had to with our neck was way out. Rick, I remember telling me he was sweating bullets because he realized how new this whole thing was. But the sessions were fantastic, I think, and we still are using it. That’s one show that’s still there today and we haven’t had to do much to it except when we opened, the digital technology wasn’t robust enough to play full-time like it has to in a theme park.
There was nothing that could do that to play these multi-tracks in a loop and stop and start without having problems. So we decided that the first generation analog tape would play in the parks on opening day, and then years later, as more and more technology was invented and we went through a number of things, we did everything we could to get off a tape with the tape.
It sounds great the very first time you put it in, but after a week it, it’s starting to sound dull and after a week it’s starting to sound dull. The same with the picture. It’s starting to get scratched, and they’ll run those as long as they can without it starting to look really bad and then put in a new copy. But if we could get it off of tape onto something, so we had a laser disc system that stored the audio where the video would normally be, and you’d lock together a bunch of those machines and run that.
Then we had a CD machine stack of those that would run to get the multiple channels that you need. And now it’s all on flash memory or an internal digital chip. There’s no moving parts in any of the sound sources in any of the parts today. So that’s a real important turn of events, if you will.
Dan Heaton: It took so much ingenuity at the start, and it sounds like now it’s easy in a different way.
Glenn Barker: Well, when I think back the way it worked, because when we were putting EPCOT in, I was still, even though I had a team, the one thing I wanted to do was still be involved with it. So I went down to the park and I would sit in the theaters with the engineers and they would send a tape down, we’d load it up, and then we would temporarily hook up what’s called an equalizer, which is a fancy name for a tone control and make level adjustments of the different frequencies and try to get it to sound really as good as it could.
Then that equipment didn’t live in the park. It was too risky to have all of those adjustable doss. It was hard enough just keeping the overall levels right, because the amplifiers back then just had a big knob on ’em, and anybody could go in the equipment room and start fiddling with it.
I would make these changes and then call back to California and say, okay, track one down two DB at five kilohertz, track three, and then they would burn a new tape, and we put that in and we’d do that back and forth until everybody was happy with it. Nowadays we take the whole shebang to the park. We do what we call an infield mix, and everything lives in a computer. The guys can even take a laptop and use it as a remote control and do all the mixing.
For instance, we redid pirates at Disneyland a few years ago when we added the Jack Sparrow figure into a number of scenes, and we did a lot of changes. We had Barbossa up on the ship, and so we sat in the boat with a mixer and I said, okay, let’s put a cannon shot there, and we actually edit right in the space, which is unheard of years before. So that makes it a whole lot easier to do and then also make changes.
Dan Heaton: What’s that process? So I mean, when you cited Pirates as an example, because the sound in Pirates now in the battle scene for example, is so stunning. You’re sitting there and you’re making updates. How are you doing? Are you basically getting it down to every cannon shot and where it lands and how you fit it all together, or how much trial and error do you have to do there?
Glenn Barker: You basically set up your sound system, your speaker locations, each gun, each cannon up there. I think there’s one speaker in between each pair of cannons, so we don’t have eight of them, I don’t think. I mean, a lot of this is charter room or everything, but you know where your speakers are. There’s one up there next to the captain, there’s one on the ship in the back for the crew. Then there’s speakers along the cannons on the ship.
There’s some on the fort, the farthest fort that’s over there, and then there’s some on the right fort, and then there’s some for the crew on the fort, so you know where all these are. Then you route all of the soundtracks that have been made. We’ve done a pre-mix in one of our bigger rooms when we started getting all this work, we got the budget to build a very state-of-the-art recording studio, and we have one room that has the ability to set up a Circle-vision in it.
It’s like about a 40-by-40 foot square room sunk into the ground. So you can walk under the screen and we can set up those rooms to emulate a pirate ride or a Star Tours ride or Tiki Room or anything that we’re working on and get kind of a rough idea of how it should be and get buy offs from our creative people so that in case they say, no, I don’t like that line of dialogue, well, we have to go back then and bring in the actor again and have ’em do a new line or edit it or whatever.
So there’s all that going on during the earlier part of the process. We can’t get into the ride. It doesn’t have any water in it yet or they’re painting or building sets. So it’s a massive coordination with every department. So when it’s finally our time and we’re usually pretty close to the end, I think the sound and the figure animation and lighting are the last ones that are in there adjusting.
We have a phrase that we don’t ever finish anything. We just open it because you don’t have to ship 5,000 prints out. You can make changes, and we still do even after it opens, if something isn’t sounding right, we’ll go back in and change it. But to get back to your question, so you have a system that has all of the production stuff in it, and it’s an editing system, very state-of-the-art, and you route the output of each of those channels into the amplifiers in the equipment room.
So the sound will come out, the correct speakers, and then you can work with your remote control laptop and do the editing, the adjusting if you want to edit within one of the tracks that are there. You’re looking at a whole row of soundtracks, and this top one might be the dialogue, and this middle one is one cannon and this is another canon, and then you can pan from one of the fort speakers to one of the ship speakers.
By panning, that means you faded over there, so it sounds like it goes boom pow and hits the other side to do it right. It sounds like it’s flying right over your head. So then once you think you got it pretty good, then you take those tracks and transfer them into the actual source playback equipment, plug it into the equipment, into the equipment room that is going to actually play it back forever and ever. Then you start riding it, and then we can still make level adjustments.
We can still make equalization adjustments. The beauty of the park playback system is you can’t do drastic changes to the track, like editing words out, but there’s a routing computer that allows you to say, okay, you hear the dialogue coming out of that speaker, I want it to also come out of that one over there, same track, but I want it coming out of two places.
In the old days, they’d have to go in after we were done and cut wires and re-patch and all of that. Now they just bring it up and it’s like doing a, if you will, a CAD drawing where you take the output on a screen of this channel and now we’re going to add a little mixer here and there’s a little mixer with knobs on it, on the computer screen, and you can set the levels on each channel of it and then route it into this other amplifier over here. I hope that’s not too technical.
Dan Heaton: No, it’s fascinating. It’s complicated, but still it just gives me more appreciation for what goes into sounds and how we do things. Now, even with all the technology, and I think it leads well into onboard audio, I would love to know kind of how that’s developed or how that’s basically become so important, or even back to when you just got it started.
Glenn Barker: Well, the first one we did was Space Mountain, and that was back, that was in 1996. They wanted to try to put the sound on board. So first we rode it with headphones on and playing little tape cassettes or something and seeing how that would work. So we came up first, they had to come up with the way we could do the hardware. They made a new vehicle.
I think since then they’ve created a whole new version of the vehicle with better speakers in it. But the first ones, they kind of added a headrest that had this two speakers for each seat in it. So you had stereo. So now you say, okay, what I’m going to use for the source, you’re not going to put a little tape machine on there. They came up with this little device called an LCU, which was stand for Local Control Unit, and they were custom built by Disney.
They were flashcards where you could store sound. Well, here’s the problem, since it’s a gravity ride, once you leave that top lift, you’re just falling until you get down to the bottom of it. And what that means is if you have a heavier vehicle, it’s going to go faster. And if you have a lighter one, it’s not going to go as fast. So this means you can’t just play one track all the way through the whole thing, or it’ll be way out of sync at the end.
So you have to build it up in little chunks of audio that can overlap, and the device that you have on there, you can program. Then we put little sensors around the track and say, all right, when it gets to sensor three, start sound number two, fade out sound number one in two seconds, and then it would carry that sound until you got to the next sensor that you wanted to do something with.
Or you could start a dialogue track as you’re going up the lift. So everything is overlapping and it all mixes together on the ride. The trick of it was, okay, how are we going to compose this music? So I said, well, let’s, we’ve got all the sensors laid out where we think they should be, and with that one, that was the version, well, everybody calls it the Dick Dale version, but Dick Dale just did the little sweeteners on the curves.
The rest of it was done by Aaron Richard, and it was produced by Eddie Sotto, and it was a version of Saint-Saens “Carnival of the Animals”, if you’re familiar with that piece, it’s one of the first pieces that’s in France film except played as a rock and roll version. So we decided, all right, we’d have this play. Then when we hit the curves, we wanted to have Dick Dale’s guitar licks when you went around.
So we put sensors on every curve, and then I had some special soundtracks, which was basically me saying numbers, and we put it on there and I put a video camera and a microphone next to the speaker, and we rode that around. So when I hit a sensor, it would go one, and then you’d go around again and it would hit two and then three, and it would go all the way around to about 27 of ’em.
Then we could take that video back to the studio and work on, the composer could work his composition against that video, and then we’d say, okay, we’ll make a change there, or we’ll add a guitar run on sensor number four, or if the sensor wasn’t where you wanted it, we could put a delay. We’d say, what’s the earliest one before we want it? And then say, all right, at sensor number four, wait 30 milliseconds and then play. It’s as if there’s a conductor on there doing all this every time.
Dan Heaton: Again, it’s so much more to it where as you mentioned, the gravity, of course, my brain went, oh, yeah, can’t. It’s not like part of me thinks, oh, I just put the CD in there or something. Not CD, but you put in the sound and it’s good. I’m trying to wrap my brain around as not being a composer or anyone dealing with sound about the 27 spots and how you would actually compose the music. It’s super complicated.
Glenn Barker: You might only use four of ’em or three of ’em, but they’re there if you want ’em. Or maybe the music is only three of these pieces because you’re right, you don’t want it to get too choppy. Now, what works best is if the music has some kind of a tail or a sustain where it would go, bam, then you’d hit the next one like we did with the California Screamin’, if you remember, that track was when you got to the top, I’m talking about the original version, it would be this sustain there, and then when you hit the next sensor, it would carry into the heavier rock and roll thing.
But yeah, if you’ve got a beat going on, you don’t want to interrupt that. So you may want to live with that little bit of an error, but have one more somewhere along there where you can catch back up and then use the other sensors.
Or part of them don’t do anything except the computer is looking for ’em, and if it doesn’t see one where it’s supposed to be, even though it didn’t have any instruction to do anything, it shuts it all off because it’s telling the system that the ride is stopped and you don’t want to be in that vehicle when the ride is stopped and everybody’s scared. It doesn’t happen very often, fortunately, but it basically times out and so we just shut off the sounds.
Otherwise, there’d be no way for somebody to get up there and turn it off because it’s all built into the vehicle. The other fun thing is how do you power it? You got no extension cord that’s going to make it all the way around that track. So we have these big capacitor banks on there that are like batteries, and the only time that you get to charge them is when you’re coming through the unload.
So as the vehicle comes in, it stops and you’ll see these big brass contacts that the vehicle goes against. It’s getting charged for about 15 seconds, then it rolls a little more and it gets another 15 seconds. Then it rolls a little more and gets some more, and then it goes a little more and it gets some more, and that’s enough for it to make it around two times before the sound will die on you. So it’s an amazing thing. Then we got the request to put two shows on they wanted to do well. We replaced the Eddie Sotto version, Dick Dale version, with Michael Giacchino, which we call the classic version, and we did that one pretty much the same way we had the video. Michael worked against that.
I dunno if you know of Michael Giacchino. He did Up and The Incredibles and Lost and a number of things, an amazing talent. I loved working with him. We had that on there and then they wanted to do at night a different version, so we had to figure out how to do that. It’s called the Rocking Space Mountain, and that was with the Red Hot Chili Peppers. It was only on for one summer or something. We figured out that we had enough memory on there, we could put two shows, and then they had a little off-board device. When the vehicle pulled up before, right before it went off, it was told which show to play.
So all they had to do was flip a switch in the tower and it would play the other show. They just had to spend more time with the lighting and stuff like that during the changeover. But so now we still have, I think there’s three shows on there. Well, rocking is gone, but now we have the classic show, the Michael Giacchino version, the Ghost Galaxy, which was the Halloween version, and then the new Hyperspace, which is kind of really cool. Have you seen that one? Have you been on that one?
Dan Heaton: I’ve seen videos when I’ve gone, it’s been when the Michael Giacchino one has been playing, which I loved, but I haven’t experienced in person, but I’ve heard the Hyperspace Mountain is amazing.
Glenn Barker: Hyperspace is I think really cool because we give it that weight at the beginning of every film where you start taking off, you start going up the lift, and then we hit you with that big downbeat and you just go, everybody just goes, wow, that’s really cool. But they’re all good. Well, one night, the same night that we put Rockin Space Mountain on there, we did that till about two in the morning, and then we had to go over to California Screamin’ and do the same thing there. So that was a long night and it was raining. So we were out there riding this thing, adjusting sound in the rain. If you ever ride a roller coaster in the rain, they probably shut it off, but they didn’t with us. You feel like you’re being pelted with stinging bullets.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, I’ve done it before.
Glenn Barker: Anyway, that was a long night, but it’s all for the show business.
Dan Heaton: Yeah. Well, you mentioned California Screamin’, and I know you were the lead media designer for DCA. What did that involve as leading that media? I mean, to do a whole new park? I mean, how much was there to it leading a team for that team?
Glenn Barker: The media design role kind of came out in around 1994, and prior to that, you’d have a person assigned to a show and they would carry it all the way through. From the very beginning, working with a creative and the layouts and all the things I’ve talked about to producing the soundtracks to going down and working on the install. What was happening is the deadline of getting a show open was much greater priority than going to a meeting about a show that they’re just talking about. You wouldn’t have anybody that could go and learn about the new show, and so you’re always catching up later trying to go, oh, we could have done this or we could have done that.
So our boss at the time recognized this and he started this media design role where your young guy or woman would be the media designer, and they would go to the meeting and then they would bring the concept to the engineering group and the sound department and then kind of be the overall person for that. Being the lead media designer would mean that I would lead a number of other media designers that were assigned to different shows.
So we had Robin, she handled most of the theater shows. I worked on some of the ride ones. We just kind of worked it all out Soarin’ over California. We built a 35-foot scaffolding right down in the pit with a recording console on top of it, so we could be up where the center of the sound is and mix it. Then once we thought we had it pretty good, then we’d ride one of the side runs and see how it was. And then once that was good we’d pick out the scaffolding and then ride it again and make adjustments from the floor. But yeah, it was just an amazing amount of soundtracks to produce. EPCOT was way more complicated and a lot more tracks with EPCOT.
We put lists together. We said, we’ve got a thousand tracks to do and if we finished this China Circle-Vision, we can knock off 10 of them. I mean, it was kind of like that, and they had all the posters up, we can do it. So California Adventure went pretty well. I also learned a lot about acoustics in the earlier days. Part of laying these out, I kind of breezed over that, but you want to work, you might be working with people that haven’t really done too many of these and they want people talking on both sides of the track or something.
You have to explain, this has to be orchestrated because if you look to the left and you can see something and you look to the right and you can see something else, but you can’t do that with the sound. If you’ve got a guy talking here and talking over there at the same time it turns into a cacophony.
Part of it is laying these rides out so that the sound flows through. The other thing then is getting good acoustic absorption sound is what we call the stuff you want to hear. Noise is the opposite of that. You don’t want that. So when you’re in scene one, the sound is coming at you, it’s hitting your ears. It goes past, if there’s hard rock work or a drywall or something and it bounces off of there, it comes back to you as noise or it bleeds into the next scene as noise. So we work real hard to try to put absorptive materials in and a lot of creative that doesn’t blend too well.
They want it to look like rock. So we found rock that absorbs sound and use that for a lot of the caves kind of places. Like in Little Mermaid, you ride through there, it’s what we call a pretty dry room. There’s not a lot of reverberation going on, and you’re able to have the sound pretty clear. Plus we’ve found speakers, we’ve worked with speaker manufacturers to come up with speakers that in some cases have a more narrow pattern. So when you’re in front of it, you hear it real well, and then as soon as you pass it, it fades out rather quickly so that you can get to the next scene because you’re always moving through.
Dan Heaton: That’s really interesting, I think of Spaceship Earth where there’s constantly scene after scene after scene, and especially given in 1982 how challenging that might’ve been to try and get the sounds to work. Where I think today, like you mentioned, you’ve learned a lot where the latest version, it really flows better. It sounds like technology has helped, but also that you’ve learned so much, like you said. How much of things changed in that way in other senses, what has changed with how you do a show beyond just the tech like that?
Glenn Barker: Well, probably the biggest change is a gift of the new technology, and by that I mean, let’s take Star Tours. When that opened, it had a 70 millimeter film going up and down in a loop cabinet, not a cabinet. Well, it wasn’t a cabinet. So imagine a strip of film, I dunno if these people have put pictures of these out, but just imagine a piece of film going up and down, up and down, up and down across the whole back of that cabin right behind where the people are up through a projector, which is down below it and shining up on the screen.
The soundtrack was one linear sound. It was 15 channels. So we had a lot of channels, but it was just basically one version of the show. Then when we put the new one in, The Adventure Continues, I think it’s called, we went to digital cinema and now it’s in 3D, and the sound is all on these digital players and the picture is on a digital player and it allows you to play the first part of it up to a point.
You go into light speed, that’s a great place to transition. Now you can come to one of three or four different scene twos and then the sound transitions with it. So you can create all of these different versions. I think literally hundreds of combinations because we’ve added more scenes with the newer films. As the new Star Wars films are released, we usually add a new scene that features that version. So I would think that’s probably one of the biggest changes that happen for us.
The new ride in Star Wars Land is amazing what’s going on in there in terms of interactivity and all of that. I did get to go down, even though I mentioned, I dunno if I mentioned it or not, but I retired basically three years ago, but they’ve got me still working as a consultant doing show quality. And what that is, is I go down to the park and ride the rides and then give ’em notes on what I find wrong, and those go through the departments and I work with them so that they’re doing it with me just trying to show them, because a lot of people might have different ideas on what it should sound like and something should be louder or softer or whatever.
So I still am keeping my hand in it, and that was something, there’s somebody I haven’t really mentioned, and that’s a guy named Buddy Baker who is like my dad practically. I got to work with him early on in my career. We used to go down to Florida four times a year and go up and down the stairs and adjust the sound for the different attractions that would start drifting off and just do this show quality thing.
But he said that he actually started out when Walt Disney asked him to go down and check out Lincoln because he said, there’s something’s wrong with Lincoln, can you go down there and check it? And so he drove down and he says, yeah, it was a little out of balance, and so they touched it up and now it’s much better. Of course, Buddy did the score for that show, so you didn’t want to argue with him.
Anyway, so he goes back to the studio and told Walt, he says, well, I think you ought to start doing that more regularly. I think that was the beginnings of what this Show Quality Standards program has become. Now, they have them lighting, there’s animation sound, all the different disciplines go through, and I try to get through four times a year and do half the parks, one trip and then half the parks the other trip. Hopefully somebody will keep doing that because it’s kind of something you have to pass down. I’m sure everybody that would go through and have a different idea on what the show should sound like or they don’t notice something, they’re so close to it.
Randy Bright used to have a thing called the “glacier effect” he’d talk about, whereas the glacier moves so slowly that you don’t notice the change it’s making you come back a million years later and you go, wow, look at that. Well, this is what happens to these attractions is they just slowly change, slowly change. The operators might not notice and then pretty soon it’s out of whack or something. They can’t hear one track, so they go and turn it up. Well, the problem really was the three tracks around it were too loud. So that’s where you learn how it’s supposed to be and keep it that way.
Dan Heaton: I think plus too, with your experience, I mean, I’m glad that roles that are in place because even as someone, as a guest, there are times when you go in, you go, something’s a little bit off, but you can’t always pinpoint what it is if something’s not working right. We’re having your background, especially with sound. I mean, you’re able to say, oh, okay, that tracks like you mentioned too loud or too soft. It’s great that that’s done.
Buddy Baker who, I mean, I’m a big fan of a lot of the music that was in the first incarnation and a little after at Epcot Center, and he’s all over that. So definitely I can appreciate so much what he brought and he really had, so his hand was in so much of the great Disney music, either through arranging or writing, and so I hear a lot about him when I read things or when I talk to people that worked around this time.
Glenn Barker: Well, the other one I mentioned was Impressions de France. The other one is American Adventure, and Buddy did the score for that, and we wanted to do it with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and they didn’t have a recording studio in Philadelphia. They used the Academy of Music, which is actually a concert hall where Fantasia was recorded back in the ‘40s.
So we shipped our machines back there and Buddy, all of us went and we set ’em up in their VIP room, which had probably millions of dollars worth of antique furniture, and they moved that all out. We set up our two machines and we set up the recording console in there and we started a rehearsal with them. What happened was the rumble from the air conditioner was so loud that we were picking that up too much. And so we said, all right, we got to shut the air conditioner off.
So we did. And Dave, the guy I mentioned earlier, says at one point he says, Glenn, we got about 30 more minutes before the machines are going into thermal overload. And I went, oh, so what do we do? Well, the director of the show came up with the best idea, Rick Rothschild, and that’s kind of taken from Cousin Orville in Carousel Progress.
We went out and got 600 pounds of dry ice and some fans and put that behind the machines and blew cold air across the dry ice into the back of these tape recorders to bring the temperature down so that we could record otherwise we would’ve been sunk. Then when after the first hour we decided, okay, let’s take a break, and we opened the door, we were playing it back, and all of the, we realized we were all hyperventilating.
Well, it was from all the carbon dioxide coming off the dry ice. So we opened the doors and then we started feeling better and we started playing it, and all the orchestra wanted to come in and listen. They knew what we were doing with digital and everything, and we said, get out. This is our air. We need it. That was a pretty amazing trip. But the sound, again, it’s very good. I think it holds up to what they’re doing these days. And that was what, 30, 40 years ago now.
Dan Heaton: The sound for that show, yeah, I visited when I was younger, and even now I know they’ve made some upgrades, but it drives the show because you come out of it. It’s a powerful show, and what the orchestra did really holds up.
Glenn Barker: And another good one is Hall of Presidents, the new version I worked on putting that in, went to Memphis and recorded Morgan Freeman. Pam Fisher was the writer and the director of that, and Joel McNeely did the music. And I don’t know if you’ve seen that version, I haven’t seen it since they put Trump in, but when we put the Obama in, there’s some moments in that show that are just very, very emotional when they start talking about the Twin Towers and all of that. And I never got tired of hearing Morgan’s voice. He was just so good.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, I have not seen it with Trump, but I have seen the Obama version and that show. I always enjoyed that show, but that version is, it really expands it to a new level, I think.
Glenn Barker: Well, something else I just wanted people to know is that I’ve spent a lot of precious time whenever we do a rehab on something like the Haunted Mansion, Pirates of the Caribbean, the Tiki Room, “small world”. Since I had such a love of Disneyland, I wanted to make sure that we’d never lost the original recordings, the creative intent of the original shows. So when we would have an opportunity like Mansion, we put in one year, we put in all new speakers and made it sound so much better, but I took all of the tracks, right, recorded ’em reference copies right off of the machines that were playing them back in the park.
So I had a really good reference of what was playing there, and then we would put that into our system and then go back. There was a guy named Ron over at Disney Archives Sound Archives, and he had a seven-year project to transfer all of the original masters to digital and then put them on these roles that we could use. And so painstakingly go in and finding, because the notes weren’t that great, but you had the recordings and that’s what counts, but find all the different music cues and lay them down against there. So when we reopened the show, it was the same show, but just as if it was edited from the first generation of the recordings and the real one that shined was “it’s a small world”.
We did those tracks that were playing there were done by Bobby Hammock. Buddy was too busy to do all of those shows, so Bobby did those and they were recorded and then mixed down to mono. I didn’t realize that the original recordings were in multi-track, so you could do a stereo kind of stereo imaging thing with them. And we did a project that was a four-disc, four or five disc cd set for the World’s Fair, but we started pulling those out.
A guy named Bruce Gordon who wrote The Nickel Tour, he was the project lead on that. So we started listening to all these things and we got, holy Toledo, these tracks sound amazing. So we put a demo together that demonstrated what they could be versus what they were. And I played that for Kim Irvine and for some other people, and they gave us the money to go ahead and redo all of the sound system and the sources for “small world”.
That’s been used now in, I think all of the parts except Paris. They did a new version for Paris. So I just wanted everybody to know that somebody cares enough to really take the time. It would take hours too. I would take this stuff home and trying to read through all the documentation on it and figure out what tracks came from where and which versions, and there’s just thousands of takes on a lot of those things. But I feel really good about that. I feel good about leaving the parks in the condition they’re in.
Dan Heaton: The thing is fans and guests, if they realize it or not. I mean, as a fan, I really appreciate, especially I feel like at Disneyland, the attention to detail and the care you described, because even “small world”, I even noticed this at Disney World recently. I’m like, the sound is, it’s really sharp, which I mean, that story you told just totally gives credence to that where I think, and same with the changes that have been made to Haunted Mansion and to Pirates at both, on both coasts. They don’t sound like they were attractions that arrived 50 years ago. I think what you described is it’s great to hear there’s people like yourself and others that care to do that. So it’s wonderful.
Glenn Barker: Yeah, we added, we constantly want to keep adding things and plussing it. And so you’re probably familiar with the saga of the Hatbox Ghost, and that’s one that everybody wanted. Finally, a group of special effects guys came up with a pitch, and we got that in there, and so they wanted it to have a voice. So I did a demo, a little demo thing going that’s in there. So I’m the Hatbox Ghost.
Dan Heaton: Wow. I had no idea. I’m speaking to a celebrity from beyond, I guess.
Glenn Barker: There you go. One thing somebody said I got to tell you about, and that was, well, you mentioned I worked on all the cruise ships. We were sailing across from Germany on the Fantasy to New York where they were going to do the christening, and of course we were mixing sound all the way. Greg Lhotka was the sound mixer on that, and he was doing all of the sound editing for all the background music all over the ship and the show that plays in animator’s palette.
So we’re halfway across the Atlantic Ocean, two days out of New York, and I get a text from the cruise director saying, hey, Glenn, is there any way you can make the ship’s whistle play “New York, New York” when we pull in? I’m thinking, how long have you known that we were coming to New York? But that’s just one example of how the creative thinking, the whole creative process, I don’t know if you were like me, but you waited until the last minute to do a term paper. It’s just these things come out, and so we were able to do it, and we sat out in front of the Statue of Liberty, and they played that thing over and over again while the helicopters flew around taking videos for their TV spots and stuff. But that was a fun little challenge.
Dan Heaton: Yeah. Well, I think that’s a perfect example of probably so many types of work that have to go into a lot of the attractions over the Cruise Line, like you mentioned, where even though you can plan as much as you want, but there’s always going to be something like that that comes up. Well, I mean, I could do this. I mean, I could talk to you for probably 10 hours and have more stories, but I think this is a good place to stop. But Glenn, thank you so much for being on the show. It’s been so much fun to talk with you and cover at least a little bit of your career, and I’ve learned a lot too. So thanks so much.
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