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When I started The Tomorrow Society Podcast back in 2015, I had few expectations about getting the chance to speak to guests that worked at Walt Disney Imagineering. I still have to pinch myself sometimes when I’m talking with such talented theme park designers. That was definitely the case during this roundtable episode. Don Carson and Joe Lanzisero offered so many great insights during this podcast.
I’ve spoken to both Don and Joe on past episodes, which inspired Don’s idea of doing a roundtable show. What I loved about this format was the chance to go beyond just their back stories. Instead, we focused on big issues with design including game-changing attractions, how the process has changed, and the future. The former Imagineers also discussed the predominance of attractions focused on IP and the positives and negatives of that trend.
What I enjoyed about this podcast was gaining a better perspective of how Joe and Don view attractions. Both have a wealth of experience with Disney and beyond in a variety of mediums. I also rarely hear Imagineers discuss what attractions connect with them at the parks, so that aspect was a treat. They discuss both classics and recent additions like Pandora: The World of Avatar and Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge. I hope to put together more roundtable shows like this one in the future.
Show Notes: Imagineering Roundtable
Learn more about Don Carson’s work at his official website, doncarsoncreative.com.
Learn more about Joe Lanzisero’s work at his official website.
Listen to Don Carson’s past appearance on The Tomorrow Society Podcast on Episode 91 (January 6, 2020).
Catch up with Joe Lansizero’s two appearances on The Tomorrow Society Podcast on Episode 75 (July 8, 2019) and Episode 95 (February 24, 2020).
Transcript
Joe Lanzisero: When I turn that corner and I get into that scene, oh, I see. I’m going to use Pirates as the example. When you turn the corner and you’re in the Mayor dunking scene, wow, the hierarchy of experience is so clearly worked out. The first thing you see is the Mayor being dunked. Then you see the guys that are waiting next in line to get dunked, and then the moment when the woman opens up the window and says, don’t tell them Carlos, but it’s brilliant if you just study that one scene. The hierarchy of the experience was so clearly thought through.
Dan Heaton: That was Joe Lanzisero, who’s back for an Imagineering Roundtable along with Don Carson. You’re listening to The Tomorrow Society Podcast.
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Dan Heaton: Thanks so much for joining me here on Episode 99 of the Tomorrow Society Podcast. I am your host, Dan Heaton. Thanks again for sticking with the show and I hope all of you are healthy and safe. It’s a crazy time. I’m just going to keep putting out podcasts as much as I can. It’s helpful for me to connect with really cool guests and have these conversations and I love bringing them to you, and that’s definitely the case this week and I have to give credit to the idea for this show to Don Carson.
I spoke with Don in December. That show came out in January. Great conversation. He’s a former Imagineer, has a lot of thoughts too about what’s going on in theme parks and theme park design. Does a really cool blog, has been posting a lot lately on Facebook and Instagram about his ideas for attractions while at home.
So I love the chance to talk to Don again, and Don had listened to my recent interview with Joe Lanzisero and came up with a brilliant idea that I really wish I had pursued sooner, but I’m glad that Don brought it to me, which is to do a roundtable with multiple imagineers and not just talk about their stories. Because what I’ve typically been doing when I talk to people that worked at Disney is how did you get started there and what did you work on? I get the backstories, how did you get into theme parks?
Those kinds of questions that you would typically ask in an interview show as you’re getting to know someone who played a key role in some way at Disney and other theme parks. I’ve talked to Joe twice, I’ve talked to Don, so there’s a lot more beyond that and some of my favorite questions when I’ve talked to Imagineers come near the end, when I might ask a more open-ended question.
What does it mean to you to have worked on these attractions or what was your favorite project you worked on, or how has technology changed in the industry? So many things like that have led to some of my favorite answers and really blown open the conversation near the end of the shows. So that’s pretty much what we’re doing the whole time during this podcast and we were able to get Joe Lanzisero to come on again along with Don Carson.
Both of them have worked together and know each other, and I think what made that click is that instead of just me asking a question and getting an answer, they’re bouncing ideas off each other during the conversation and that’s what made it really work for me. At some point, I just sat back and listened to them talk, and it was fascinating to spend a little bit of time hearing their thoughts on certain attractions that have been in the parks for a while that are newer, talking about IP at the parks and technology, so many interesting issues.
So I’m really excited for you to hear this show. I did want to mention that with three of us recording and I think the Internet is just getting weighted down a bit, there are a few spots where the audio jumps a bit. I did my best to try and make it less jarring, but if you notice that, I apologize for that. But I feel like the quality of the podcast interview is still really high. There’s just a few moments where I hated to lose a little bit about what Joe or Don were saying, but I think the overall discussion was still great. So let’s dive right into it. Here are Joe Lanzisero and Don Carson on the first Imagineering Roundtable.
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Dan Heaton: I am thrilled to be speaking with two former Imagineers who are here to talk about a variety of topics on theme park design during this Imagineering round table. First of all, I have a guest who joined Walt Disney Imagineering in 1989. He was the lead show designer for Splash Mountain at Walt Disney World, other projects like Mickey’s Toon Town and Toon Lagoon. He did parts of California Adventure and worked on so many interesting projects beyond Disney. He’s also worked in the gaming industry on virtual environments and many other projects as a freelance designer. It is Don Carson. Don, thank you for returning to the podcast.
Don Carson: Hi, Dan. Thanks for having me. This is going to be fun.
Dan Heaton: Yes, I’m really excited and it’s great to have a group too. So my second guest started at Disney as a feature animator in 1979. He moved to Imagineering eight years later and was the show producer for Mickey’s Toon Town, led the creative development for the Mermaid Lagoon and Arabian Coast lands at Tokyo DisneySea, led the team behind Mystic Manor, so many more things. He also was a senior creative vice president oversaw Disney Cruise Line, plus Tokyo and Hong Kong. It’s Joe Lanzisero. Joe, thanks for coming back for a third time on the podcast.
Joe Lanzisero: I am so excited. The third time’s the charm, they say.
Dan Heaton: Well, this is really fun because I think this will give us a chance to we, both of you have talked with me about your background and your stories, and I love the idea of digging more into the world of theme parks and design and I think it’s going to be really fun. But first I want to start with just a little more about you and your interests. So I’ll start with Don. So what is it about theme parks that really drew you to work in this industry initially?
Don Carson: I’ve always loved the idea of touchable theater, things that you can actually immerse yourself into, and whether it’s doing theme park stuff or theater stuff or virtual world stuff, it’s all about surrounding yourself within a story and getting to participate in it. Theme parks allow you to actually interact and touch and also share the experience with other people. So sitting in a boat next to your family, and Pirates of the Caribbean is an experience you just don’t get to have every day. So being able to be part of that in any way is great. Then also being able to work with such amazing creative people like I’ve been able to do all these years is just, it’s a pinch worthy job.
Dan Heaton: Yeah. Joe, I would also love to hear your story because I think for me it’s interesting because I feel like everyone kind of is drawn in a bit different way, but also has that kind of pinch worthy feeling too, even though they come at it from a different point of view.
Joe Lanzisero: Yeah, as I’ve mentioned in the past, I kind of fell into it. I started down one road and kind of made this big left turn, but there were commonalities in the things that drew me to my initial love, which was animation and mostly Disney animation and the great storytelling and the wonderful characters and the legacy that Walt had created there. Then having grown up in Southern California from as far back as I can remember, I was born in 1956 year after Disneyland opened. So growing up as a kid, we always went to Disneyland every year there was that. So it was between my love of animation and not only Disneyland, but Southern California had all these theme parks.
We had Knotts Berry Farm, there was this wonderful old theme park named Pacific Ocean Park that went defunct, but as a kid I was always going this place. So I loved the experience of going to those places, but I loved animation as well, and as I’ve told you in the past, I just had the opportunity through different circumstances to move from Disney animation where I was using a certain set of skills, drawing, storytelling, and just took those same skills, but now applied them in a new way in kind of a new arena, but with the same end result now is entertaining people.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, I mean I think that is a through line throughout your career and throughout the career of a lot of people at Imagineering. So both of those backgrounds for each of you I found so interesting, but I’d love to hear more about what you enjoy about theme parks. Let’s start with Joe. So when you think about what are really the shining examples, what are the pivotal cream of the crop examples of Imagineering that really changed everything for you?
Joe Lanzisero: I’m going to go way back to Disneyland 1955. So the park itself was a game changer, but there was one attraction that was incredibly magical on opening day, and it’s still magical to this day, and it’s Peter Pan. In Peter Pan, you get to fly over London, you get to fly over Neverland. They took you and completely immersed you in a little mini story. I mean, it hit all the key story points from the film. Whether you know that film or not today, it’s still magical. You are flying through the sky, you get to look down on these magical landscapes. To me that changed everything.
Don Carson: I agree with that. Definitely Peter Pan is really high on my list. I would of course would also go with Pirates of the Caribbean and the Haunted Mansion as sort of the quintessential bar by which all other attractions are based on Pirates of the Caribbean. And yet my car used to be parked only yards away from where I was physically. The idea that I could be an Anaheim and utterly completely transported into this completely immersive world. Then I have a long relationship with the Haunted Mansion because when I was very young, I was completely utterly terrified of it.
My first couple of trips through it was under a raincoat, and I got to the point where I became really quite phobic about going to Disneyland because I knew that I was going to be asked to ride Haunted Mansion, which scared the bejesus out of me. And so I decided to take the scientist approach and I decided to try to just figure out how all the effects were done and we were supposed to go the next year.
It ended up being two years, so it was two years of thinking about how all the ghosts were done. And so when I finally wrote it bravely and was able to see it from that perspective, the behind the scenes eyes, I also noticed this tremendous amount of attention to detail the pattern or doorknob or grate over the door that hadn’t been thought about, that hadn’t been there to support the experience of what was happening inside the Haunted Mansion.
I survived that trip and then I walked outside of the Haunted Mansion and realized that that same attention to detail, that lavish sense of design was applied to every single surface in the park. And I’d say that at that point I was hooked. I didn’t at that point know that it was a job you could have and get paid for, but I knew that whatever I did in my life, it was going to be doing that kind of work.
Joe Lanzisero: Don, you mentioned something I think is kind of an underlying appeal of the parks and maybe people don’t think about so much, and there’s a couple of things there. One is this idea of rite of passage and the idea of meeting your fears, which is I think is also part of the rite of passage. I think all of us remember that time when they were finally old enough to ride Space Mountain or Big Thunder, and it was the same thing; I remember waiting in line and my heart pounding in my throat and getting on the ride vehicle and incredible sense of relief and victory achievement.
I met my fears and I think that has an amazing, incredible effect on people. John Hench always talked about that one of our deepest instinctual fears is death, and these things kind of set up this idea that I could die on this thing, but you’re never really going to. But the fact that you met your fears and you came out the other side victorious, and I think that happens in a lot of places. Your fear was the fear of the Haunted Mansion. Mine was the fear of the coaster, but it also had to do with that rite of passage, getting to that age where you were finally able to, either you were tall enough, old enough, brave enough to do it and meet that fear and come out the other end victorious.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, so it’s so interesting to me that you mentioned Don, you mentioned both the Haunted Mansion and Pirates, which those ones always come to my mind first. They opened so close together, they were both being developed by the same group. Even Peter Pan was earlier, but still so many classics like that for those two to come out so soon, why do you guys think that if you said, what are the two signature attractions of Disney? Those might be the first two people listed. What was in place there or at imagining, how did those, a better way to say it’s? How are those classics that have been able to last for so long, I guess is a better way to ask it?
Don Carson: Well, I don’t know the answer to that. I think sometimes there’s golden eras. For Christmas, my wife bought me the two volume set of Marc Davis and I am a huge Marc Davis fan, so I feel like building an entire shrine and lighting candles in front of it. I leave it open on my drawing table and just turn a page and absorb the page. But since the entire book is done in his words, when you hear him talking about working on those pivotal attractions, we had this idea in our mind that designers had a vision and then every step of the way they were going to achieve that vision.
It was really much more like, well, Claude’s doing this stuff and I’m doing these gags and Claude didn’t get all my gags in, and there’s this sort of weird serendipity, this accident after accident after accident that sort of added up to this amazing product. And then if you were to take those men aside and ask what their feelings were about the attraction, oh, my favorite gags didn’t make it in, or Claude might’ve said, oh yeah, I had this design for this upside down room that didn’t made it in. It would’ve been so much better if it had. I think that a good movie and a really good attraction are sometimes accidents.
Joe Lanzisero: Don. I don’t know if it’s so much an accident as much as a product of the process. At the time, Claude and Mark, all those guys came out of animation and the way an animated film was made was on a storyboard. In those days they drew the individual frames and they pinned them up, and often story sequences would be moved around completely or within a sequence you would take a drawing and move it.
Then I think when they moved to Imagineering, the model I think took the place of the storyboard and the model had the same fluidity and the same flexibility as the storyboard. In fact, I read where I think at one point the auction scene was later in Pirates and they moved it around. I am sure that was the case with many of the attractions and the way those guys worked.
And there was more, I think as Don said, it was a little more organic than we imagined. And I think that was also a product of the process of making animated films and then moving that same kind of thinking into theme park design, where as you got into it, you may find, oh, this character is a little more interesting than that character or that scene now is more important because I’ve developed the scene after it and realized that may be better if we play it a little different way.
So I think that time in history, well, first off, the main thing that was driving all of that incredible creativity at the time was Walt. And I don’t know if he knew that his clock was ticking or what, but it seemed like the amount of output between the time of the New York World’s Fair and when he died in ‘66, I mean you just look at all that came out of that period.
So I think a big part of it, of course, was Walt, but I think it was also a process that they had in place. I don’t know if that process is lost. I think a lot of people still think sequentially. And I had a conversation with Dave Cobb about some work that he did on the park in that indoor park that they did the Warner Brothers Park in the Middle East, and he was talking about how they approached it like a television show. I think it was the Scooby-Doo attraction.When I heard him talk, oh, that’s great. It was kind of a throwback to the way they worked in the old days of coming up with an idea then letting it naturally grow and play with it until they came up with the final product.
Don Carson: It’s amazing how much that the model as a tool helps us because when we’re thinking on paper, we aren’t necessarily thinking about line of sight as you’re turning a corner and you’re seeing something and an idea that just sounded so good on paper or even in plan architectural drawings, once you get down to the level of that boat moving through the water and you turn the corner, all of a sudden you realize that the way that you were thinking about laying something out is completely different. That may cause some really good gags to get lost and other ones to rise to the surface. There are only so many of those choice locations where those things unfold.
Dan Heaton: Wow. I think we could just do a whole round table about those attractions. That’s it! Let’s just forget the rest of the questions, but no, we shall go on. And I’d love to flip it because I think, like I mentioned, a lot of us just can’t believe those attractions and how well they were put together, especially the original ones like Pirates at Disneyland and everything. But I’d love to flip it a little bit. Let’s talk about, I’ll start with you, Don, the unsung heroes, the attractions that maybe don’t get as much attention but are also really important are also just really well done.
Don Carson: One that’s high on my list is Winnie the Pooh in Tokyo Disneyland. I was out on a job with Joe and some friends had worked on it. I didn’t know anything about it. So I decided just out of solidarity, I would go check it out and my expectations weren’t super high. It was a little teeny ride in Fantasyland, but I have to say I was completely blown away. I was utterly taken away from myself.
And when you get to that room where the vehicle and the room bounces, like Tigger, I couldn’t believe it took the art form of what we do for a living to another level. I felt that it was on par with a lot of my favorite attractions as far as its ability to transport me. So that definitely is as an unsung hero, certainly anybody who’s experienced it would feel that way. But there’s a lot of people in the west that don’t get a chance. Go to Tokyo and see that attraction.
Joe Lanzisero: I kind of have a crazy one, not crazy, but maybe not one you would expect, but it’s the Rivers of America. I remember I really got to appreciate it more in Tokyo than in California, although I do remember I did have that moment, like Don mentioned a moment ago when he was talking about how he knew his car was parked just outside and he’s in this amazing world.
I remember that moment as well in Anaheim a couple months ago. And I was on the freeway next moment, and this was back when they had the, I was a very small child, they had a little Indian encampment there, and I’m sitting there watching these Indians dance next to a teepee and across the way is the Columbia going by and there’s the canoes also going by and there’s this moment where it’s like I am completely immersed in another world.
I think Tokyo, they actually have even a higher appreciation for that because they live in this incredibly gray, dense metropolitan city. Even more so you get off the freeway there after being in big Gray Tokyo and you walk out into Frontierland and there’s the Mark Twain waiting to take you on this trip out into the country, which this American West that was recreated out on landfill in Tokyo. So to me, I think it’s those kinds of things we often think about the bigger, like the Spidermans and the Don mentioned Pirates of the Caribbean and those, and I think those are all important, but I don’t think we should discount that is really deep environmental storytelling and how all those elements worked together, lose yourself in that place kind of moment.
Dan Heaton: Those are great answers. I think especially Disneyland with having the Columbia and the Mark Twain when they’re both operating, especially being on the Columbia for some reason because they don’t have that in Florida. I just remember being there and thinking like you said. Wow. And just somehow the way it’s all put together in Disneyland, because I feel like the river is such a central part of Frontierland even more than in Florida. It’s right there and they have Fantasyland and there’s so much there. It’s great to hear that in Tokyo that’s so popular.
I want to ask you, Joe, I know you’re very closely involved with Tokyo, and I think the most common thing that I hear from fans of Disney that go to the parks in the US a lot is always looking to Tokyo and going, oh, just like with Pooh or with the Monsters Inc. ride they have there and DisneySea and all of that and so much, I mean, having done both, I mean with Tokyo, what is it beyond just the Orlando land, what is it about, you mentioned just the interest of guests and everything that makes those parks so special and almost drives people to just create such amazing things there.
Joe Lanzisero: I know, I think I might’ve mentioned this last time we spoke or one of the has to do with the culture, the Japanese culture, they were an island nation, so they spent centuries looking inward and they go deep into things like the tea ceremony and Ikebana and many of their arts are very, very deeply considered experiences. And because that, I think if they quickly picked up on this Disney experience as having, it wasn’t just an amusement park where you went and you rode a carousel, you went on a roller coaster, you went into a story and as Don was talking earlier, everything was considered, the level of detail was considered.
This is a culture that is considerate and appreciative of that. I think as I mentioned, I think OLC understood that and always pushed us to do the best we could and create something that had the highest level of consideration on all levels, the storytelling, the finishes, the amount of detail we thought about in everything. I think that’s why the pinnacle of incredible theme park design, they went so deep into the backstories. It seemed like every detail in that park has some consideration of a story or some design consideration in it.
Don Carson: I think if there is a western equivalent to that experience and that depth of storytelling, it is the Diagon Alley and Hogsmead in the Universal parks. There are so many examples as sort of veterans of designing within the rules of how a theme park is and isn’t supposed to be designed. It breaks so many of those rules as far as the retail spaces have small doors in, they have doorknobs. I mean that’s just not something you do. The spaces, the place gets packed full of people and those shops only hold maybe a dozen people. There’s so many things that we’ve been told that you are not allowed to do as a designer.
Then also just the sheer amount of attention to detail. It’s not in a fan servicey way, it’s done in an utter placemaking way.So anybody who’s read those books and loves those books is utterly rewarded with every square inch of detail. An inside joke, it’s almost unbelievable that that thing exists. I relish it. I could spend an entire day in there and still not be bored. There’s just so much to look at.
Joe Lanzisero: Well, Don, it works for people who haven’t read the books and in some cases haven’t seen the movies. I saw the first Harry Potter, I did not see the film that had Diagon Alley in it, I was still wholly enamored. Also, I was looking at it with a theme park designer’s eye and was appreciating all those things that you mentioned that, oh my God, how did they get away with all the level of detail and the use of color? I mean just there were so many, I think earlier when we were talking about game changers, I think in terms of current history of theme park design, probably one of the biggest game changers on so many levels for all the, it really is.
Dan Heaton: That really leads well into the next question, which is really, I mean this is a big question, but how have the theme park industry and really design and what the two of you do, how has that changed over the years? So I think Joe, I’d love for you to start and just what are some of the big changes you’ve seen?
Joe Lanzisero: I think the biggest change has been the effect of IP on parks in a good and maybe negative way. I think there’s pluses and minuses to now every park pretty much has to have some major IP that they use to, and for those of you who don’t know what IP is, intellectual property, which means a Star Wars, a Harry Potter, something based on a movie, Marvel, all the big name companies that both Disney and Universal have either bought or licensed. So they can bring those stories to life.
I think the good part about it is that people come to the park with an expectation and in some ways they’re already, they’ve seen the film, they know the characters, they’ve heard the music, so it’s almost immediately there’s some level of satisfaction that they get out of the experience. You don’t have to be a theme park designer like me to go into a Diagon alley and be blown away even more.
So if you’ve read the books, if you saw the movie, you went in there and you saw that. So I think that’s the good part that’s come out of it. The negative part is I think they depend too much on that. I think there are still great original stories that can and should be developed and told using all the same tools that you use to realize a great IP driven attraction and sometimes depending too much on the IP to hopefully drive the experience. And I think the new Galaxy’s Edge certainly has its pluses and its minuses.
I think part of the minuses is there was too much of a belief that everybody that came in there was a super Star Wars fan. And if you’re not a super Star Wars fan, again, like myself, there are things that just were lost on me and didn’t have emotional connection. And I think for the experience to really resonate and why Diagon Alley works and so many of the other things that we’ve been talking about is because it has some emotional connection, you feel connected to that experience because of either great design, great storytelling, or the knowledge of the characters beforehand. So the danger of going too far into hoping the IP is going to create that emotional connection and assuming that everybody’s a super fan, I think is a dangerous part of the current dependence on IP.
Don Carson: Yeah, I would agree with that. I’d say that probably the last 15 years have been very high IP driven as far as the majority of projects I’ve worked on. Sometimes it’s a great partnership with the IP owners. I found that in many cases the people who created whatever film or property that you’re working with are closeted huge theme park fans and are just so thrilled by the fact that you’re going to be turning their thing into a ride that they will step away and let you do your job as well as work with the material because really you’re in the position of doing an homage to the wonderful IP.
The other extreme is sometimes IPs are licensed that really don’t necessarily make for good attractions that the film that really depends upon comedy and character driven dialogue and not place making isn’t necessarily the best choice for a dark ride or for an attraction.
And there are those rare occasions too where the IP owner doesn’t understand the art of film making, they understand that way of a gag of production, and it can sometimes be a struggle to bring them back to the fact that let’s create environments that people get to go into so that they feel like they’re a part of it and then surprise them with the opportunity interactable or that they can meet in person.
So there’s good sides and bad sides. And I would say that when we were talking about Pirates of the Caribbean one could argue that their strength is that their IP lessness that they were created at a whole cloth and one can get a little sad that that doesn’t exist anymore. But Joe is living proof that with Mystic Manor that it is possible for a non IP attraction to create its own identity and own characters and be very strong onto its own.
Joe Lanzisero: And Dan, I think last time we spoke, I mentioned the other kind of danger of IP is that it fades and if the designers considering that when designing, you could have something that if it’s so dependent on your understanding and knowledge of those characters and stories at its core and they haven’t thought about the experience at a higher level of just creating something that’s fun and interesting, often the ride system, I think we talked a little bit about Roger Rabbit.
I don’t think no one knows who Roger Rabbit is anymore, who cares who Roger Rabbit is anymore. But it’s still a fun experience because you get to get in this little crazy cab and spin it and go through crazy environments. I think likewise, Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters, I dunno, I could actually consider Buzz Lightyear and the Toy Story characters. They’re pretty evergreen. They’ll be around forever.
But if they did start to fade at its core, it’s still a fun experience. You get to go in there. If you don’t know those characters and you didn’t see the movie, the core experience still holds up. So the good designer when working with IP has to think beyond just the IP and just the worlds and think how is this core, what is the core experience that I’m designing?
How is that going to withstand the test of time and 10, 15, 20 years from now? Because these things are super expensive and lots of concrete steel technology goes into the ground. It’s not like a movie. If it’s a bomb movie, they put it on the shelf and that’s it. It’s forgotten about. You spend a lot of money, a lot of time building these things, how this thing’s going to present itself long after the IP has faded.
Don Carson: I think that another good example is the Pandora land in Florida because here’s a film that was extremely popular now many years ago, it could be very popular again with the new films that have yet to be released. But I think the huge attention to detail on the land and then the attraction where you’re flying a Banshee, even I went in there with a skeptical eye, but as soon as I started feeling that beast breathing between my legs, I was sold. And then also I think as a dated theme park person, I hadn’t really taken into consideration that the media that that experience was created by James Cameron. So that is one hell of a beautiful roller coaster ride.
So my hat’s off to Joe Rohde and his team, because I don’t know myself, but I can only imagine they walked into that job with a little trepidation because the film was old even when they were starting to work on it, and yet they’ve created a place, even down to the dining experience, the food that you eat that is true to itself and I think is a really good example of place making and attraction design.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, when Joe was talking earlier, Don, I thought of Pandora because to me, even going into Flight of Passage, I thought, oh, it’s kind of like Soarin’, but it’s a movie. And I thought, oh, I like Soarin. And then you get on the Banshee and the screen opens and I was like, oh my gosh. So I think if Avatar never existed, that could be an interesting land. And also with Roger Rabbit, like you mentioned, we talked about Joe, Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, which is another example of something where very few people know the original Wind of the Willows or even the Mr. Toad, which was part of a package film at all, and yet the version of Disneyland still popular and then the Florida version is revered as this attraction, so many.
So it leads me into the next question, which I’ll go to you, Don, which is when you’re designing attraction, this could be IP or not, I think it goes beyond that, but what are the most important things that you need to remember or that you need to focus on when you’re designing a park or even an attraction?
Don Carson: For me personally, it’s the place making. It’s how can I bring you inside this? How can I take you away from the queue you’ve just left or the argument you had in the line getting the soft serve of ice cream? You are going to be lost in this world and every opportunity that we have in designing from the second whatever conveyance has taken you through there, have I successfully created a place that took you out of yourself and everything is different and every budget is different. Arriving and doing a Winnie the Pooh attraction is very different than doing a Big Thunder roller coaster. But you bring that same sort of sensibility and that as a designer too, creating rules by which the universe of your attraction live within and sticking with it.
The process of creating a design is so people driven. There’s so many hundreds of hands that are going to touch it is as sort of the early ringmaster of, or the champion of the design building the foundation of a conceit or a story that will help everybody make decisions outside of you that reinforce it. Often you can ride something at the end and have no perspective on all aspects of it, but having a wonderful time because you got to participate it with all these amazing talented people at coming up with this place that now is dry and concrete and painted and ready to go.
Joe Lanzisero: That’s a great answer. By the way, Dan, I’m going to answer this a little more from a technical point of view and the thing I always think about, first off, these rides and the theme park, unlike movies, again, thinking about this was an evolution for Walt from a 2D flat screen to creating a three dimensional world that he allowed people to walk into and touch and feel and smell that involved all your senses beyond just sitting in a theater and watching it.
But the difference was in the theater, you had a focused audience. I mean, they were sitting there and they were staring at the screen and there were very few distractions unless you had your girlfriend next to you and you want to put your arm around her, or you had a screaming kid on the other side who wanted more popcorn. But for the most part, it’s a very focused experience where all of a sudden in the theme parks, when you’re creating a ride or a show or a walkthrough or whatever, you’re giving up so much control or you don’t have that same control that you have when you’re sitting there walking in theater.
So for me, it was always about thinking about the hierarchy of the experience, and those early dark rides were great learnings for me because they didn’t have a lot of money, but they knew, and that’s I think why the Disney Dark Rides evolved the way they did and they used the black light because they could really focus your attention. You knew what to look at and everything I tried to do and when I stopped being able to draw and actually really designed it was just directing other people.
The thing I always tried to do was help them understand the hierarchy of the experience and what they were doing fit into that hierarchy of the experience because when you’re doing a scene in a ride like Don was mentioning, we build the model. The model is important, but even when you’re down in the model understanding what is that key storytelling piece that I want to make sure is there and people see it, then what is the secondary things that support that piece, and then what’s the third or fourth elements beyond that still, it all works together.
The whole is greater than the sum of the parts, but you still have to have, when I turn that corner and I get into that scene, oh, I see I’m going to use Pirates as the example. When you turn the corner and you’re in the Mayor Dunking scene, wow, the hierarchy of experience is so clearly worked out. The first thing you see is the Mayor being dunked. Then you see the guys that are waiting next in line to get dunked, and then the moment when the woman opens up the window and says, don’t tell them Carlos, but it’s brilliant if you just study that one scene, the hierarchy of the experience was so clearly thought through.
For me, that’s the one thing I always try to think about and still do when I’m designing whatever, how is it going to play out to the guests and how am I going to control and what are the tools that I have to control the experience? So it’s very clear of what I’m trying to communicate gets across the way it’s in my head or on the paper, and they’re going to see it and experience it.
Don Carson: Joe is definitely a grand master of that. I think a lot of that comes from your animation background. One would say the same for Marc Davis and when we’ve worked on projects together, I would always defer to your character placement because not only do you focus on how you approach a scene and the hierarchy of how they’re arranged, but also their body language and also a sense of humor. You can look at even the poses of the characters and have an understanding of their emotional state in that moment, even if they’re doing something relatively mundane.
I think that the two that illustrate that for me the best is the Monsters Inc. Attraction in Disney’s California Adventure compared to the Monsters Inc. Attraction in Tokyo Disneyland, which you directed. If you sit on YouTube and watch those two attractions and specifically look at how the characters are posed, because one could look at both attractions and say, I see similar characters. I see they’re all standing around and doing things, but the Tokyo one, there’s a dynamic aspect to the way that they’re posed, and I think it’s because of that sensibility that Joe brings to a project. While the ones at Disney, California Adventure are certainly fun, but they seem to lack that hierarchy and that emotional connection in the way that their position posed.
Joe Lanzisero: Thank you. Don, check’s in the mail. Okay. No, we were trained, I think, and I’ve said in the past, not to compare myself with Marc in any way, but if there were any lessons that I learned from him and that he brought to his work, I think it was that idea of being able to pose a character and stage the character. Two things. It’s one, to find the right pose that is going to communicate the way that that character is feeling, and then knowing how to stage it so that it works with the bigger environment as well. And he was the absolute master at that, and those were skills that we learned in animation because you had 1/24th of a second to come up with a pose that was going to be able to communicate to the audience how that character was feeling.
Don Carson: I did notice when in the Marc Davis book that if you thumb through the hundreds of pages that many, many of his poses are, if they have an animation, it’s a one-two animation. It’s a two frame experience. One character looks up the other one turns, and I think he understood the economy that he was having to work with. It’s too easy to sometimes get a character that’s flailing its arms around and gesturing has a long bit of dialogue, but the most successful things are often ones that have very limited animation or because budget is actually demanded that they have no animation, maybe their eye moves, and it is possible to have that be a dynamic scene despite the fact that it doesn’t have a tremendous amount of functions in the character.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, that’s a brilliant example of just both of you talking back and forth, the things that I’ll go through that scene like you mentioned Joe with the dunking, and it just works. And even someone who thinks about it, I don’t always subconsciously it’s all working in the way you describe, but easily we come through and they’re like, wow, this just feels right. This just seems to fit together, and I think that’s the case with a lot of the best attractions. So kind of on the flip side, Joe, you’ve mentioned already probably some of these, but what are some things that people don’t think about but that are really important to making a theme park attraction succeed?
Joe Lanzisero: Oh, it’s a long list roundtable unto itself. It’s such a complicated art form. I think that’s, if there’s a big underlying takeaway from what Don and I have been talking about, I think it’s that there’s so many things that come into play, all the things Don was talking about, thinking about the total environment that you’re creating and how everything has to work to tell the story and how all the details have to work together. What I was talking about a moment ago about having a visual hierarchy within the scenes or within the rides so you understand what the important things are and the not important things are. Finding those things that are going to create emotional connection, whether it’s IP and tapping into those trigger moments from a film or the music or whatever.
The use of color and light is so important. Color has a huge effect on how people feel and how you manipulate color and how you manipulate space. Going from a big space to a small space to a medium space, from a cool room to a warm room. But it always should be in the service of the story, understanding what’s the big story I’m trying to tell? What’s the mood of the story? What’s the feelings that are going to be key to people walking away from this and feeling satisfied? And then how do I take all those various tools that I just spoke about and use them in a way to service it?
Don Carson: Yeah. Well, I don’t have a background in animation. My background’s in illustration, so I tend to approach the layout of an attraction in a more illustrative way. So in college, they trained us in composing illustrations based on the arrows and pathways that lead your eye from one thing to the next, and what are the opportunities in the architecture of the structure that allows you to pay attention to something and then leave that attention, leave that, and then go to the next thing.
It’s very tempting to just fill a place full of lots of things to look at, and I think that small world does a great job of that. It’s like being in a giant music box, but if you’re trying to tell a more subtle story, you want to be able to feel as though you’ve had a quiet moment. And then it’s also in a more film making metaphor, it’s like establishing shot pan to establishing shot.
And you see that in film all the time where you have something that you arrive at, everything is composed for you to look at and understand what’s happening, and then you get this sort of moment of blur as you move to the next establishing shot, and then you have a sense of arrival. It’s kind of the thing that you hear photographers say. They all of a sudden know when all the pieces have come together, and that perfect picture is happened in some ways in designing an attraction, you’re linking perfect moments together so that it creates a story that then is populated by those characters that are in poses. But it’s just one of those weird parts of this job that’s kind of unique to theme park design.
Dan Heaton: There’s a lot to that. I want to ask so many more things, but we’re starting to wind down. But there’s one big question that I feel like would be perfect to kind of summarize a lot of things or to look ahead, which is I’ll go back to you, Don. So do you have predictions for where the theme park industry might evolve in the future? Because obviously there’s so many new technologies, there’s IP like we’ve discussed so far, but what’s the next step in terms of where attractions or even where the parks might be going in general?
Don Carson: I don’t know. I think that every day we end up with a new normal. I think that in the end, no matter what technology we’re using, whether we’re leaning more virtual, whether we’re doing more projection mapping, that we’ll be successful when the experience is a shared one. It’s the thing that you can’t necessarily currently have in other forms of entertainment. When you’re sitting next to shoulder to shoulder with your friends and family and getting to experience and get wet and hear things and be surprised and laugh because you’re a little scared that you might be killed, that that will be consistent. But I think technologically, I think we really can’t say what the next thing will bring. I just hope that we’ll be using the same tools of storytelling to do whatever those new technologies allow us to do.
Joe Lanzisero: Yeah. I will just pick up on that and start by using a quote that Marty always used of Walt and he said, Walt had one foot in the past and one foot in the future, and the foot in the past was the foot that understood his understanding of the brand, that shared experience. I think that’s key. That’s never going to change. It’s why people, when TV came around, they said, that’s the death knell of movies.
No, it wasn’t because people are always going to want to go out, and I think that’s probably one of the biggest tragedies and biggest pain that we’re currently going through right now. I think it just shows what social creatures we are and how important that shared experience it is, and we’re being robbed of that at the moment. But so that I think is always going to drive the business.
People are always going to want to be together. They’re going to want to share the experience together so that foot in the and foot in the future, it’s exactly what Don was talking about. It’s what that new technology was going to be. I mean, Walt embraced, he created the animatronics. He was the first to use Stereophonic sound and in movies and animation and color and so many of the innovations. He was always looking at what’s that great technology that’s out there, and we don’t know what that next great technology is going to be, or like, as Don said, right now, it’s projection mapping and the use of projection. And as Don mentioned, maybe sometimes it’s for the good and sometimes it’s a little bit of a distraction for me because it’s too obviously a film. But what’s the next great thing?
There’s a couple companies that I’ve seen some really interesting things that they’re doing with sound technology, what’s going on with different kinds of projection techniques. So all that’s exciting to know that that’s going to continue to evolve. Then there will be, as Don said, what will be the new normal, but I think we always have to bring it back to it’s going to be a shared experience. It better be grounded in a great story, whether it’s an original story or an IP story, and in the end, something that’s going to have deep emotional connection with the audience.
Dan Heaton: Yes, I totally agree. I think that’s a perfect way to end. This has gone by way too quickly. We’ll have to do this again. I feel like we’ve barely scratched the surface, but both of you, I mean, thank you so much for being on this podcast. It’s been a blast to just dig into more of the issues and how things work with theme park design. So thank you both so much.
Joe Lanzisero: Thanks. It fun. Great to be with one of my favorite designers in the world, Don, and share this time together.
Don Carson: Ditto.
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