107. Former Imagineer Tom K. Morris on the Early Days of WED Enterprises

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There is so much history to uncover about Disney’s theme parks, especially the more distant past. We’ve heard many of the stories about the work of the Imagineers at WED on the 1964 World’s Fair, Walt Disney World, and beyond. But what about the time before those big moments? Tom K. Morris is working on a fascinating book project about those early days of Imagineering. He keeps making new discoveries about Disneyland’s opening years, including the location of the WED office.

Tom is my guest on this episode of The Tomorrow Society Podcast to talk about his research into the book and a lot more. He first appeared in September 2019 to talk about his career as an Imagineer and projects like Journey Into Imagination and the castle at Disneyland Paris. In his second appearance, Tom gives an update on his book and talks about what it was like to work at EPCOT Center during the months before the opening date.

The final segment focuses on Tom’s work on Splash Mountain at Disneyland. We cover the challenge to find the right location in tight quarters at Disneyland. Tom also worked with ride engineers to determine the track layout. His stories provide an interesting background about Splash Mountain and how it came together.

Note: This episode was recorded in late May prior to the current discussions about re-theming Splash Mountain. Tom and I don’t cover Song of the South directly, and he mostly describes the location and ride system that were his focus for this attraction.

Show Notes: Tom K. Morris

Follow Tom K. Morris on Twitter and Instagram to keep up with his book project on the early days of WED and his interest in Disney history.

Watch the presentation from Tom K. Morris at the Retro Magic event in October 2019 on YouTube.

Listen to the first appearance of Tom K. Morris on Episode 81 of The Tomorrow Society Podcast on September 9, 2019.

Transcript

Tom K Morris: So another eye opener was there was a WED office. So I was told on maybe the three times that I asked senior people at WED kind of like when I started, where was the WED office on the studio grounds and I would just get the weirdest answers, including there wasn’t one that everyone was scattered across the studio. And I’ve seen that written in books before. I’ve seen that kind of repeated that there was no WED office. It was just all scattered through the studio and that’s not true. There was a WED office.

Dan Heaton: That was former Imagineer Tom k Morris, talking about his research into the very early days of Walt Disney Imagineering. You’re listening to The Tomorrow Society Podcast.

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Dan Heaton: Thanks for joining me here on Episode 107 of the Tomorrow Society Podcast. I am your host, Dan Heaton. I hope you’re all doing okay out there. As we continue well into June, I know many of you are going to theme parks, Universal, SeaWorld, Disney opening right around the corner. Please be careful out there. Have a great time at the parks.

My guest today is Tom K Morris. I was so happy to have the chance to talk with him once again. We talked last year about his work on Journey into Imagination, World of Motion, the castle at Disneyland Paris, and so much more. He also mentioned book projects that he’s working on, including one about the very early days of WED. And I find that so interesting because a lot of what we knew about Imagineering comes from stories of people who worked on the ‘64 World’s fair time beyond that, and then of course Epcot and then the Disney Decade.

But there’s not as much known on people that worked on Disneyland in the 1950s and even the early sixties. Tom is uncovering so much cool information talking to people that are still around that worked at that time, and he digs a lot into what he’s learned during this show, which was exciting to find out about, including, you heard the intro clip where he talks about the Wed office, which was kind of a nice detective story.

So I was really excited to learn more about that, which I know almost nothing about Imagineering and of course known then as WED from that time period. Tom also talks a bit about the early days of Epcot Center and what it was like kind during construction and kind of his role in fixing things as kind of one of the new Imagineers. So that’s really fun.

We also talk about his work on Splash Mountain, and I did want to give it disclaimer right now that I know Splash Mountain has been kind of again put into the news. Understandably so, given its connection to Song of the South, Tom and I recorded this in mid-May and we don’t talk about Splash Mountain in terms of its history, in terms of Song of the South and a lot of racist and problematic parts of that film. What we talk about relates to where Splash Mountain will be located in the park and then the ride system.

So I just wanted to mention that just so you know that this wasn’t recorded this week and we just avoided it. It didn’t come up at the time, but it’s definitely an important issue that is worth considering what to do about that attraction. So I know Tom just did an event with the Walt Disney Family Museum. I wasn’t able to check that out at the time, but really excited about that and so much more. He’s a great storyteller, has a lot to say. He is a huge Disney fan and I’m sure you’re going to enjoy this show. Here is Tom K Morris.

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Dan Heaton: We talked last fall and at that point you mentioned you were working on two different book projects, one on the archaeology of Disneyland and another on the early days of Imagineering. So I’m curious, how are these books coming together? How have they progressed over the past year?

Tom K Morris: They’re progressing well, at least one of them is progressing well. I’ve put the other one kind of on hold, so I’m focusing on the early history of Walt Disney Imagineering right now because I ended up finding so much more information than I thought I would.

So much new information about the people involved and where they worked and how they worked and who they worked with, and it’s so fascinating and because there are still several of these folks still around, going back to 1955, I thought it would be best to focus on that and put the archaeology of Disneyland on hold. It doesn’t really, it will be a great book if I ever do it, but it doesn’t have a hard contract. I don’t have a contract for it yet. Whereas with the Imagineering thing, it was so much interest from the archives that we moved right straight into it.

Dan Heaton: So speaking of the Imagineering book, which is really exciting for me, you mentioned that some people that worked at ‘55 and around that time were still around. I’d love to hear a little bit more about some of those connections you made or even just what you’ve maybe been surprised by or learned as you dug further.

Tom K Morris: Yes, there’s at least a handful of folks around that go back to ‘55 that you could say walked in the halls of WED enterprises at that time, including of course Don Iwerks. But I’m finding here and there, others who we’ve never heard of, but some of those that we’ve never heard of kind of became famous in their own way. So one of those is Dean Tavoularis, who is, I think he’s now 87 or 88 years old, and he started just like I did as a draftsman, like an apprentice draftsman. He was actually working with animation in the animation department in between and he couldn’t stand it. And this is 1954. So he let his supervisors know that it really wasn’t his cup of tea that his last day would be Friday. And they said, well, wait a minute.

We know that you’re very talented. We’ve seen your portfolio with lots of architectural sketches and renderings. We’ve got another project going on on the other side of the hall here in the animation building that you might be interested in. So he left animation on Friday. On Monday, he joined the team at Wed Enterprises as an assistant drafts person, and he proved himself so good that he made the cut.

After Disneyland opened, they had at one time about 60 to 70 drafts persons working on Disneyland, and they had to let most of them go at the conclusion, but they kept Dean and a handful of others, and for the most part, that handful of others went on to become art directors for film. So Dean is one of them. He’s won an Oscar for the Godfather Two, and he was the production designer on every single one of Coppola’s films.

He has been named Screen Actors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award. And I think the same thing with the AFI. He’s still around, his memory’s really good. He remembered all of the key players over there at WED. But in addition to Dean, there was William Tuntke who went on to become an art director for all of the Walt Disney live action pictures. Not all of them, but maybe half of ’em through the late, well, I would say early sixties through the early seventies, including Mary Poppins for which he received a nomination, an Academy Award nomination William Tuntke.

And after Disney, he went on to do some other films who worked for Robert Wise on the Andromeda Strain, etc. Then there was Stan Jolley. He was also a young draftsman just like Dean and Stan went on first. Well, first of all, his first thing after opening Disneyland, he stayed on with WED, he was identified as a keeper.

All of these were identified as keepers. And so Stan Jolley’s first job after Disneyland opened was to assist Ken Anderson on Storybook Land, and he actually drafted up every single building on the Storybook Land attraction. So Ken did kind of the inspirational sketches, but then someone had to sit down and make them real, all those little buildings, and that was Stan Jolley, and he was selected when Disney started doing more and more films on the back lot. Stan designed the Western set, which was a pretty comprehensive back lot set at Disney, one of the best ones in Hollywood, as a matter of fact, not the biggest, but in my opinion it’s the best because it’s kind of like New Orleans Square.

It had all these little nooks and crannies and corners and different kinds of facades. It’s very unique and flexible. It was flexible enough that it could be a Victorian town at the turn of the century, which it was for the Toby Tyler film or it could be an authentic western.

So Stan Jolly designed that, and there were a handful of others that were kind of identified as keepers and eventually were taken on to become art directors or assistant art directors for the live action films. So that was one kind of eye-opener. But the other eye-opener was related to that, which was there was no back lot at the Disney studio in 1955.

So this idea that Walt borrowed from his backlot set designers simply can’t be true because they didn’t really, the only show they had done on the lot that was live action was 20,000 Leagues, and that was all done on a sound stage and the outdoor water tank scenes were done at Fox. So there was no back lot. And as Disney got into television, I think that was the first thing that kind of was the impetus to build, to start building some backlot sets.

And so rather than Disney borrowed from his backlot designers to design Disneyland, it was really the other way around. Walt Disney borrowed from his Imagineers to design many, if not most of the back lot sets that were on the lot for so many years that would include the Western town, the Zorro Town, and the Residential Street. And I think the Residential Street may have been designed by a guy named Carroll Clark, who was a very famous art director going way back and was brought on by Disney specifically to be the head art director for live action at the studio.

And that wasn’t until around ‘57 or ‘58, and actually the film division would occasionally borrow from the, WED draftsman vice versa. WED would occasionally borrow people like Carroll Clark, who Walt wanted to lay out the walkthrough for the Haunted Mansion around 1962. So he did some work on that. They were all in the same office in the animation building, so it was easy for the drafts people and the art directors to kind of go back and forth. Some of them were paid on WED payroll, some of them were on productions payroll, but it didn’t matter what payroll they were on, most of them were always working. There was always work to do for WED at Disneyland. And then as motion pictures ramped up, they eventually moved that department out and separated it.

Dan Heaton: It’s really interesting to me because it doesn’t surprise me that a lot of the people that worked on early Disneyland and around that time went on to become very successful in Hollywood. And even with Disney, like you said on live action because that park, there’s so much that feels like really well-designed film set or back lots, especially Frontierland in some of those areas. So it’s interesting that we didn’t know more about it and that you discovered so much, but it’s not surprising to me just given the more I think about Disneyland, how well it was put together.

Tom K Morris: Oh yeah. I mean, I’ve been studying all of many of the original drawings and there wasn’t a lot of rework that was done very little. They got it almost all on the first shot, unless they didn’t build it at all. But there wasn’t like two versions of Main Street or all these different versions. I mean, at the very beginning, yes, they were exploring the different approaches, but once they sat down to do the actual construction drawings, there was very little rework and very little correction.

I’ve been looking at some of those original drawings and they’re done. They don’t really start doing the drawings for the facades of the buildings until January of ‘55 with Main Street. The work that was done in late 1954 was mostly with Wheeler and Gray. The consultant, the structural consultant that consulted on every other engineering aspect.

Those drawings were done in late ‘54. Then in January they started the actual construction drawings of what you finally see in the park, not the foundations and the structural steel and the framing and all of that, but all the good stuff. So when you think that they were doing that, I mean at the latest or at the earliest, they were doing it in January, but a lot of these drawings are, a lot of the castle drawings were done in March and April, and the Tomorrowland drawings are done in May and June. It’s really crazy.

So that was another huge eyeopener. I knew that some of it was cut close, but I didn’t know that none of it began until January of ‘55. The Archives has been kind in letting me go through some of the phone directories, which is a good way to pinpoint both names of people where they were, but also kind of the onboarding and offboarding and where it peaked, where the workforce was at a peak.

So that’s also been very enlightening and it really, really doesn’t get off and running until the end of 1954. And there’s some preliminary work, but they don’t even buy the site. They don’t even obtain the site until I think the spring of ‘54. Then they’ve got to do some studies, all the kind of civil engineering studies and soil studies and all of that. And I don’t think they actually broke ground, like they say, I’m not positive about this, but I don’t think they broke ground, like they say one year before.

I think they may have driven a trailer onto the site on July 18th, 1954, but I don’t think they started cutting until August. There are other people that are more expert at this particular topic than I am, but they didn’t really start clearing the ground until August, and so they couldn’t really begin the actual civil drawings then until about then.

Some of those civil drawings are at UCLA, they’re not at WDI don’t ask why, but another eye-opener is that there’s a lot of material on college campuses and other collections, archival collections all across the country that have very interesting things that aren’t at Disney because they didn’t know in 1954, ‘55 that any of this would have any interest whatsoever. So the original civil engineering drawings are at UCLA and they show where all the original trees were and what trees to keep and which ones to take down and where the homes were and all of that. So that was another big eye-opener. More the archaeology of Disneyland. But it does tell you about the timeframe that things were done at WED Enterprises.

Dan Heaton: It’s crazy to me to think about that, how quickly everything happened. I mean, I don’t think it was very probably good for the people that did it having to work so crazy in that amount of time. And obviously when it opened, it still had a lot of things to fix, but in one sense it’s even more remarkable to think about what they accomplished then. So I know you said you made a lot of progress with the book and you’re learning a lot more. I mean, do you have any target date for when you think it’ll be finished or is it kind of depending on how much more info you gather?

Tom K Morris: It’s a little bit depending on how much more info I gather. I’m actually beyond the scope of the book in terms of number of pages right now. But I’m trying to get in touch with a few of these folks that go way back, and that isn’t always easy. Also verifying who’s who and who did what. I’m also mapping everything out very precisely.

That’s probably what’s taking the most amount of time. I basically have the material now for this book and a couple things I need to do. One is to verify some of the names and what they actually did or cross them off, get pictures and bios of as many of them as I can. But I’m also mapping because interested in the who and I’m interested in the what, but I’m always also interested in the where, and that’s kind of like the archaeology part of everything that I do.

So where was all this done? Where was the WED office? Where were all these pictures that we see all the time taken? So another eyeopener was there was a WED office. So I was told on maybe the three times that I asked senior people at WED kind of like when I started, where was the WED office on the studio grounds and I would just get the weirdest answers, including there wasn’t one that everyone was scattered across the studio.

I’ve seen that written in books before. I’ve seen that kind of repeated that there was no WED office. It was just all scattered through the studio. And that’s not true. There was a WED office, but then on the couple of people that I asked, where was that office, I got very unusual answers like, oh, it was on Zorro lot or it was in the box car, or I never got, was in the animation building.

That’s because the building names are kind of subject to they’re subjective, let me put it that way. And so there was a Zorro building and there was a Zorro lot, but the Zorro lot wasn’t there until after Disneyland opened, but there was a Zorro building, but it also had three different names. So that was part of the confusion. I think I found the office, good job. It still exists and it still exists almost exactly how it was through the mid fifties till the time wed moved out in 1961.

One wall has been moved back in order to widen the hallway, and then some of the doors have been moved. Not all of ’em. It’s almost exactly the way it was in 1955. I’ve gone in there now and I’ve matched up photographs nd now, and it’s amazing. The sprinklers and the electrical outlets are in the same place.

So that’s very surprising because I’ve told a few people this now and they’re shocked. They also heard that there was no office or that it was on this world lot or something like that. And thank God for folks like Floyd Norman. So Floyd Norman was not with WED, but he was just down the hall and he remembers exactly, he remembers it. He remembers the people. So it’s really good to get someone really clearheaded like going, oh yeah, you’re right. It was right over there.

One of these days when the pandemic settles down, we’re going to walk through and I’ll get some stories from him about some of the folks. So yes, so there was a WED office and it was there first, it was in what was called Zorro Building in 1953. And then in 1954, they moved into the animation building.

The reason it was called Zorro Building, that’s why WED Enterprises was formed, was initially for Walt’s other miscellaneous interests that he was getting interested in, and he wanted to do some of his own things. And so the first thing was to get into television. And so he had bought the rights to Zorro and he brought on board Bill Cottrell to begin writing it or assembling the writers together.

He also hired a guy to handle publicity for this Zorro series, and that’s why he hired Richard Irvine. As a matter of fact, it was at first for Zorro, not for Disneyland, and then the Zorro thing underwent some complications having to do with the networks wanted him to do an expensive pilot, and Walt didn’t want to do a pilot for it. He was confident enough in it that it wouldn’t need a pilot.

They switched Walt’s concurrent interest during this whole time in doing it across the street flared up and it’s like, okay, let’s concentrate now on this park instead of Zorro. So that’s why it’s called the Zorro building. I think they even started procuring props, if I’m not mistaken, because there’s props that do show up and some of the photographs for Zorro, but they didn’t begin Zorro ultimately until 1957 and on the back lot.

Yeah, so WED basically, you could say it started with about six or seven people in the middle of ‘53 I think is when they got serious about Disneyland and started. Then they hired on Marvin Davis and Bill Martin, and there was a guy to handle kind of administrative things, and that was it. That was just a small six- or seven-person group.

So let’s see. You’ve all heard about the long weekend or the last weekend, however you want to describe it with Herbie, and that was later in the summer or September or something like that. And I think that’s when the ball got rolling. They ran out of money right before that, and they had to let Bill Martin go temporarily. So he was the first furloughed Imagineer. They ran out of money to continue the design. Walt could only afford to pay Irvine and Marvin Davis out of his own pocket. But after the Herbie rendering and they sold the idea to A,BC, then they started bringing people on and Bill Martin came back, and then in the middle of or early ‘54, they moved into the animation building.

Dan Heaton: I feel like you have enough information already for five books. You’re finding so much good stuff.

Tom K Morris: It’s pretty weird. Let me say, it’s very fun afternoon in an archival collection going through nothing but black-and-white photographs and yellowy pages of documents.

Dan Heaton: Sounds great.

Tom K Morris: Yeah, there’s nothing better than a pandemic to just go ahead and jump into all of that and get it over with.

Dan Heaton: On a related note, since we last talked, you I know played a decent sized role in the Imagineering story, Leslie Iwerks series, which I really enjoyed, and again, that even had some images and clips that I had never seen before from Imagineering, and the first episode of course is on Disneyland. But I’d love to hear from you, what was it like to be part of that project and actually to be a pretty big part of it?

Tom K Morris: Well, I loved it at this time in my career, and this all started around 2013, I think for me. She started a year or two before that even. But around 2013, because I was one of the senior guys at that time, this kind of historical legacy steps began just organically falling in my lap just by virtue of the fact that I can remember some of the things that went on back in the eighties. And I did some work for the D23 Expo, for the Imagineering pavilion for a couple of years.

And through that I gathered a lot of information, a lot of material, let’s say, and learned a lot that I didn’t know. I had already been kind of gathering stuff on Haunted Mansion and Pirates. I just had that personal interest in New Orleans Square and the attractions there. But then there were some other initiatives that came up, internal initiatives that required someone with some historical knowledge.

So I started getting more and more involved, and that’s when I heard from Leslie and her group and began working with her. So I basically was able to just bring her attention to certain collections and certain areas that hadn’t been mined so thoroughly yet. There’s a lot, by the way. So here’s how I think in the corporate world, basically, here’s how it works. You’ve got a collection of stuff, but it is somewhat expensive. Companies have to commit to spending some resources to manage a collection.

It’s great that Disney has done such a good job of it over the years. What happens I think is as people write books, magazine articles are written, movies like Saving Mr. Banks and Tomorrowland and such begin to come into fruition. Those collections get more and more in demand. But what happens, I’ve noticed, is that they begin to gather a collection of photos on a particular topic, and that’s the collection of photos that then begins to get cycled through all of the projects because it costs money to dive deeper.

You got to pay the people running these great libraries that Disney has several, there’s a photo library at every site, and then there’s a WDI office at every site that’s got its own documentation collection. And then there’s the Walt Disney Archives, and then there’s the Imagineering Art Library, which is incredible. All of these people are doing a great job at preserving and documenting what they have. But it costs money if you want to have someone dive and look for something.

So invariably what happens is you can have the, here’s the dossier here on that topic that the last person went through. You want to go through that or do you want to dive deeper? And people, I guess tend, it’s not put that way, but I mean that’s basically what happens is for whatever reason, they choose not to dive deeper or they’re not aware that they can dive deeper.

So you see the same photographs over and over in the same material over and over, and you don’t realize that you’re only seeing 5% or 10% of the entire photo library or art collection. So that’s something that’s really great because there’s a lot of material still to be discovered and curated through various things like shows or books or exhibitions. There’s a lot of information that also really requires curation.

I think the reason I got so into this particular project with Imagineering is as I was going through this material, I realized I might be the only person now who can connect faces to names, to locations, to timeframes, because I’ve seen so many of these photos now. I’ve read so many documents and memos that now I know that this person was with this other person when such and such photo was taken.

So I go back to that photo that we may have all seen time and time again, and now I know the name of the other person in the photo. So I just thought, oh my God, there’s no one, I don’t know. Marty was really good. I was working very closely with Marty on some of this, not so much directly on Imagineering, more on the archaeology of Disneyland, but a little bit on Imagineering. I’d send him a photo whenever I saw a new photo with someone I didn’t recognize, I would get a really quick response from Marty on that.

Now with Marty gone, there aren’t very many people left. Orlando Ferrante has been great. And he goes back to ‘62 and basically Marty went back to ‘62 because that’s when Marty started at WED, he was at Disneyland before that. So Marty never worked out of that office at the studio, nor did Orlando, and nor did Bob because Bob Gurr worked out of the machine shop when I started to, I had never seen a photograph of the WED office.

There must be one somewhere. So the archives cooperated with me in going through some of the old photographs. There’s no book that says old WED office. You have to kind of think about where a photo might show up. So there’s photos of VIPs being taken around the studio, and that’s where they pop up. They’re taken into the WED office, and there’s a couple photo moments that are taken in there.

I don’t think anyone who’s looked at those photos has realized that that’s the WED office might look like a random office in the animation building from those photos have been able to figure out where all the rooms were and where the models were done. A lot of the drawings were made kind of like the war room, if you will. I’ve been able to match them up now to fire sprinklers and electrical outlets and things like that. So it’s a little obsessive, but what’s spitting around in my head is if I don’t do this now, there may not be anyone who can connect all the dots later.

Dan Heaton: You mentioned even Marty, I mean that was great to see him on the Imagineering Story and just given that he was gone and then Bob Gurr and Roy Crump and others that, like you mentioned, Orlando Ferrante, that they’re gone. Then the information, no matter how good you are at figuring it out, you need somebody to confirm what the picture actually is, or at least to help you with that or it’s not going to work. So that’s a big part of it.

Tom K Morris: So I know I kind of drifted off of Leslie’s documentary, but that was a fantastic project. I got to put some of that detective work to use, and it was such a refreshing kind of project that knowing that it was going to be a real documentary and not just a corporate puff piece because the real story is so fascinating. Why make things up? So I think that’s why people have really gravitated towards it and why it’s gotten such acclaim is because it’s a real story and you get to see behind the scenes stuff.

I remember growing up as a kid watching Walt show you stuff behind the scenes of the Tiki room and the World’s Fair and Pirates of the Caribbean, and I was not psychologically harmed by that. It only made, it actually kind of helped plant a career seed in my mind.

So in recent years, the company has shied away from any kind of behind the scenes things because they think that it’s going to destroy the magic. So it was so refreshing. I disagree with that strongly. There’s a time for it, and there’s a time definitely not to do it, but you have to take kids. It’s being much more intelligent as they are, and after they’re past the age of five or six, they realize that these aren’t real things and that the story behind it is just as interesting sometimes.

So I was really glad that the studio agreed and that Imagineering agreed with that approach with the documentary, and that’s why we got to see a lot of really cool behind the scenes stuff and also really cool just vintage footage of Disneyland in the fifties and sixties, and there’s a lot of that footage still to go. You saw the tip of the iceberg in terms of footage that you haven’t seen.

Dan Heaton: You bring up a really good point because I’ve watched enough of whether it’s something on the Travel Channel, Discovery Channel, whatever, different things on DVDs, and been so frustrated sometimes because you feel like you’re on the cusp of learning something really cool and it doesn’t always happen. It’s like there’s a wall. Okay, we can tell you the usual stories. So that’s what really attracted me to it. I didn’t go in for sure thinking that. I went in thinking, well, this’ll be interesting, but did not expect it to be even sometimes critical of things that happened, which you never see. So that was something that was really positive for me was that not that I want to see attacks, but that it was honest about some challenges.

Tom K Morris: Right, absolutely. And I think people are intelligent enough to know when to suspend disbelief and when to accept the fascinating true story.

Dan Heaton: Yeah. I want to make sure we have a little time to ask about a few things that you worked on here. I know there’s more than we can cover, but last time we talked about World of Motion and Journey Into Imagination and a lot of your work with Epcot; I did want to ask one thing about Epcot. Just I’m curious even you just mentioned earlier about Disneyland and how it went so quickly and how they were just scrambling, and I know that was kind of the case with Epcot, so I’d love to know your personal experience just being there in that August, September timeframe for Epcot and just how much had to be done and what that was just kind of being part of that.

Tom K Morris: It was stimulating and it was really wonderful. It was great learning experience. I was thrown right in there with George Head’s group doing all the field necessary immediate field drawings that are the result of something either overlooked or not installed or constructed properly. So the first thing isn’t to just go, okay, Mr. Contractor, you can clearly see in this drawing you did it wrong. Now you go back and fix it. That isn’t always practical from a timeframe standpoint.

So sometimes it’s like, can we live with this column in slightly the wrong place and if so, what do we do to mitigate it? So it’s kind of part of a triage in a way. I was in an office with six or seven other people basically every day you’d go out into the field, you’d get a call on your radio such there’s a pipe in the middle of the scene or whatever.

There were so many different things that it could be, or sometimes it’s like we forgot to design something for this space that wasn’t, occasionally there was something that you didn’t want to see that you saw that wasn’t caught in the model or on the drawings or some space that was underestimated how large of an expanse it was with nothing there. So it was a combination of all those different things. Every day you’re doing some drawings and sending them out as a bulletin, I guess before there was email and even the Xerox machines were crappy and would break down, run out of paper, run out of ink.

You couldn’t even do anything like, it was very hard. You had to redline a drawing, but then if you’re xeroxing it, they couldn’t do the redline. So you had to make sure all your directions were extremely clear so that they wouldn’t be misinterpreted because eventually it would come out as a black and white fax. I think I might even have some of the originals still. Everything went out as a fax, I believe, because you had to copy certain people on it.

Everyone had to be in on the loop. So you try to redline something or describe something, and sometimes you found out you’d find that you’d have to just be really good at describing something. You’d always be available to go out there and explain it. But then if you had four explainings to do, you couldn’t always get to everyone, so you just had to make sure everything was very clear. The instructions were very clear on how to add or delete or fix the problem. So it was very good, very good instruction about how to communicate face-to-face with contractors and other Disney team members, but also how to communicate verbally.

Dan Heaton: Right, because there was just so much going on to try and get it done. I can’t imagine what that was like just given how many new technologies and like you said, just things being put together at the very last minute.

Tom K Morris: It wasn’t as challenging as it was in Paris. Paris was mostly challenging because of the weather. You wouldn’t think that cold weather would be a problem, but it really is, and you can’t move your fingers so much. I am born and raised in Los Angeles, so I’m not used to having a longsleeve shirt, even let alone layers of jackets and scarves and things like that. So Florida was easy in comparison. It was long hours mostly, but it usually wasn’t weekends maybe until the very end, the last month or two.

It was amazing that there was so much still to be done in August. You may have seen some of the pictures I’ve posted from my own personal collection of photos that I took. I didn’t necessarily know that it was late or not. I mean, I thought pouring in front of the Imagination Pavilion a few nights before it opened was late. There was a lot of work still on the promenade as I recall around World Showcase. China had a mad dash of people around it. I think even CommuniCore was still pretty busy through August and September.

Dan Heaton: I just figured there’s just, it’s so much to do and that always just astounds me, given just how much had to be done. I know some things got like imagination got pushed back, so that’s not a shock. I wanted to ask you too about, I know you worked a bit on the early side with Splash Mountain at Disneyland and kind of how that got put into what then was Bear Country and kind of how that came together.

Tom K Morris: Yeah, well, I was in on it from the very beginning. It’s not a project I followed through on because I was on Disneyland Paris. So when it was time to get serious with that beyond the conceptual stage basically, although I engineered the track alongside of the ride engineer that was brought in, so I went, it’s similar in some ways to Bob Gurr’s story about the Matterhorn that I sat side by side in an office with a hydraulic hydro engineering guy.

There were rules, not rules, but there were physics involved that were new to me that you wouldn’t have in a dark ride or in a typical boat ride like Pirates or small world. But that all started up in ‘84 after the big layoff I was kept and Tony took me on to help design all of the Disneyland expansion ideas, which included a new Tomorrowland.

So I don’t know how many Tomorrowland layouts I did and sketches I did, but there were a lot. And then at the same time, Splash Mountain came up because Dick Nunis had been wanting to do it for quite a long time. There was another team that had worked on it. I’m not even sure who they were, and I’m not sure why it was decided that maybe it was just Tony unilaterally deciding since Tony was in charge of Disneyland creatively at the time, he didn’t like that approach, but there was kind of a Hatfield and McCoy’s approach to it with Bears in Bear Country about where I guess it would be where the Hungry Bear Lodge is.

Or maybe it was out behind. I don’t know if I saw a plan of it. I saw some sketches of it and it was basically Hillbilly Bears shooting at one another and you were kind of sometimes in the crossfire.

It was kind of an interesting idea. I wasn’t in on whatever management discussions took place about why not to do that. So Tony wanted to look at another location and another idea. I was the guy to look for locations and do layouts for it. So what we zeroed there was talk about, there’s always kind of this weird thing where, well, we opened up, we haven’t done anything in Fantasyland in a long time, and so it’s time for Fantasyland to get something big.

So there was talk about putting it in the meadow there. And neither of us thought that that was a good idea because I think we had, both of us probably had ideas about something more magical that might go in that meadow. So we looked at New Orleans Square and where would you put it in New Orleans Square while there was space behind, kind of behind the train station in one plan you could relocate the chiller.

There’s a bunch of utilities infrastructure back there, air conditioning and water chilling and filtering and electrical substations and that sort of thing. It’s expensive infrastructure to move, I guess. Not anymore. They tend to move that stuff now like Legos. But back then that was like, well, don’t touch that. I think I did one plan that moved it and it was a non-starter that would be directly behind, directly behind the New Orleans Square train station.

So then I did another plan that went behind all of those utilities and we decked over that infrastructure because more or less low buildings that are right behind that berm there. And so grand, I did a couple plants, I think one was a grand staircase that went up and over the tracks like Main Street, Main Street Station, you’d go up a grand staircase. This was going to be more iron work, lacy rod iron.

So it was a little bit more airy and porous and there would be a bird cage elevator that you could take also to get up and above because it was felt that that train station was not that sacred. The little building behind the tracks there, that was the original train station. It’s a very sweet building and we’d want to keep that and use that somewhere. But the main structure is just a shade structure that you enter and weight under.

It was felt that that was not really sacred so that this staircase and landing up above at a higher level would kind of be a new weenie or facade if you will, both to the train and to the area pine. And so I did several layouts back there and they all just came out to expensive, by the way. There was also, there was a tunnel at one time that went underneath the railroad tracks.

The idea was it was designed for the New Orleans Square and it was designed with some flexibility in mind in case they wanted to either expand New Orleans Square or bring back Holiday Land. So there you can see it in some of the models. I think if you look carefully, there’s an underpass that goes next to the French Market and underneath the train tracks, it’s about a 20 foot wide tunnel.

So they had kind of kept this right of way, the right of way is still there, but the tunnel has now been filled up with mechanical equipment, let’s say, so it’s no longer usable. But back then I don’t think it had been filled up. So that was another idea that you’d have either one staircase that went up and then an underpass that went under and that eliminated the underpass, eliminated the need to do it all of there anyway, all of those options were still too expensive because we would just paint for staircases and area development and stuff that you didn’t need.

So all of these different plans came out too expenses, and I think Tony was ready to throw in the towel. He didn’t want to build it in the meadow was also, there was really no place. I don’t know why we didn’t think about putting it in where the Festival of Fools thing eventually went in, but there was some reason we couldn’t or didn’t use that space.

Maybe Tony was still thinking of Discovery Bay at the time, so he didn’t want, that’s probably it. So we didn’t want to use that plot. I said, I think there’s one more place that we could try squeeze it in. He’s like, he was very skeptical where, and I said, well, that berm where the Sleeping Bear is between Haunted Mansion and Bear Country. And he’s like, there’s no way you could get anything that’s just a skinny little wiener of a piece of land.

I said, no it’s bigger than you’d think. Then it opens up behind. So we had all the metrics from the nuts, dairy Farm log ride, someone had a layout. It might’ve been Tony or someone had a layout and mechanical engineering layout of the log ride. So we knew what the metrics were. So we weren’t going to push those metrics.

We would use those metrics because they knew that they worked. By metrics I mean things like the turning radius, minimum turning radius minimum, maximum incline of a lift, same with a drop, vertical curves going in and out of the lifts and drops and there’s a whole bunch of other kinds of metrics. So I just used all of those metrics and found out a way to intertwine a track on that little piece of land and it would go under the railroad track and over the railroad track.

We wanted, the thing about the objective was Knotts Berry Farms got a really great log ride. So whatever we do, it has to be twice as good. It can’t just be incrementally better, especially if it’s to be marketed in a big way. So we wanted, the Knotts Berry Farm ride had two drops, so we wanted three drops. It had two lifts, we had two lifts I guess, but we wanted it to be long and we wanted lots of animatronics and the drops had to be at least one drop had to be much more thrilling than the one at Knotts Berry Farm.

So I figured out a way to get that track to twist and turn around that piece of property and then go out to the back behind the Haunted Mansion. The only thing that was sacrificed really was the restrooms. And Tony always had this thing about those restrooms like why would you, restrooms should be hidden around a corner or tucked incorporated otherwise into a building, not its own freestanding bathroom building.

I think he was happy to get rid of that building and oddly Disneyland was also happy to get rid of that building or was at least open to getting rid of that building because as space became available underneath the Hungry Bear restaurant that had been used for food storage, but it was determined that it was not really a good place to do food storage.

So now there was this big empty void space under Hungry Bear Lodge that was plumbed. That ended up not being too much of a cost. You would think it would be an infrastructure, high infrastructure cost, but I guess it was maybe a moderate one, but somehow it tinsel out at this site was economical to do. And so we went to work at designing this and John Stone and did a lot of the work in terms of staging I did as well in terms of what are the basic beats, like where would this go?

Where does a drop make sense? In some cases you’ve got to put a drop here, so that could be you drop into how do you do would be kind of fun. Then they brought on board the engineer from who was originally with Arrow Development and he had worked on the boat systems for small world for the World’s Fair and Pirates of the Caribbean and the Knots Berry Farm log ride.

So we had the guy who did the log ride, he was working for another firm called OD Hopkins, and they brought him into work with me on the track layout because Tony loved the track layout and he didn’t want an engineer saying, well, here’s why you couldn’t do it. I guess that had happened on some other attractions he worked on. So he wanted pushing. The engineer basically would just give me the input about what you could do and couldn’t do.

So there was some hydro engineering that I was totally unaware of having to do. Its speeds and velocities that don’t apply on “it’s a small world”or Pirates because those are flat attractions that are propelled by water jets in the canal and you can prescribe whether you want the boats to go two feet per second or three feet per second when you’re coming off of a lift or going into a drop. There’s no prescribing. There’s only the real physics.

Also I found out, which was really weird, just even in the kind of gentle areas in between drops and lifts, there were some physics involved that, so there was this weird metric that was this weird little piece of physics that was, you can’t have the boat go five feet per second. It will only go two feet per second or start up again at seven feet per second.

So you have to designate in your plan where you want it to go. I think maybe it went up to three feet per second, but there was no such thing as four feet per second, five feet per second or six feet per second having to do with gravity and water. I’m not a physics expert, I just took his word for it that okay. And that had, it was important because some scenes you didn’t want to speed through and you want to be show scenes.

So you had to kind of choose, are you going through it at three feet per second? Are you going through it at seven feet per second? So there was all sorts kind of weird alchemy like that. And so I think maybe for only two or three weeks we were together to come up with the final track, although it was later abridged.

The back building was at one time just a little bit bigger. There was an extra minute in it I think, and they took that out, which was probably fine. I think it’s fine in the way it ended up. But basically they built that from my track layout. And I remember Bruce Gordon and I went out to Busch Gardens in Florida. Tony set us out there. He said that it’s the only log ride that has this thing called a dip drop on it. It was also designed by Arrow Development and it’s got a part where the boats go down and then rise back up. And Tony thought it was a neat idea, but he had not ridden it. He was really busy with a bunch of other things. And he wanted me to go because Bruce said he thought it was a dumb idea, I guess.

So he wanted me to go to get at least two opinions on it. So we went and rode it and I thought it was fun. I mean, I could imagine it being inside as a surprise element. And I don’t know, Bruce didn’t like it because Bruce always liked kinds of things like that, but it was kind of noisy and it was kind of like for a moment it kind of takes you out of the element because you’re floating on water and it’s very quiet and then all of a sudden there’s like there’s on metal all of a sudden on a roller coaster and then back out.

Maybe it was that lack of continuity that Bruce didn’t care for, but I thought it could be a lot of fun. And so we came back and Bruce said, I don’t like it. I said, I do. And Tony said, well, Tom wins.

Hey, I guess Tony needed to hear was it was fun. I thought it was neat. Then I didn’t work on it too much after that. I think I did iterations of the plan and I did iterations of the area development plan of how we didn’t know at the time we would change the name from Bear Country, but even the name of the attraction was the Zippity Doo Dah Zipper for quite a while until Eisner came on board in this process and said, call it Splash.

From that day on, it was Splash. He also was like, we had designed this big drop at the end. It was like Knotts Berry Farms was 35 feet, so ours had to be 50 feet and theirs was on a 30-degree angle, so ours had to be on a 40-degree angle. Michael said, no, ours has got to be 60 feet or no.

He said, what’s the tallest water drop at any park right now? And someone looked it up and it was 55 feet. So I said, okay, yours has got to be 56 feet. I’m unsure of the exact numbers right now. I’m sure I have it somewhere in my files. So there was some rework there. Then I think as soon as I was done with that and delivered the final layout, then I was on to Indiana Jones and Star Tours and Videopolis and all these other things. I did not participate in the construction of Splash. I wasn’t there at the opening; I was probably in France. They did forget to send me a jacket, a team jacket. I was forgotten altogether. But anyway, that’s just part of a job.

Dan Heaton: I’m glad you got to tell the story here so that you can get the credit you deserve for this. This is important.

Tom K Morris: Also, the other little piece that I added to it was Chickapin Hill up at the top. Tony probably remembers it differently because John Stone built a model of it, but he put it on the model from my drawing, from my idea. I remember driving home with Tony because we both lived in Orange County, and I said, what if he did that little, I didn’t know the name of it, but I remembered in the film there was that log, that funny looking log.

Part of my, what little training I had in college was communication design, product design, package design, logo design. So I was always very like, whatever you design has got to be memorable. It’s got to work as a logo, it’s got to be a strong profile. And just doing a hill is going to be another blob out there. There’s got to be something that you put on the top of that hill that makes it signature.

So I said, that log, that’s in the story. I thought he might think it’s a dumb idea because why would water be coming out of the log, but he likes the idea. So I drew something up and then I gave it to John and John built the model of it and everyone loved it. So that was the other little thing I added, but maybe not remembered. And then I was on to other projects.

Dan Heaton: Well, cool. Yeah, I mean you just listed a bunch of other attractions that you went to next that I want to ask you about, but I think we will have to save that for a future episode, which this was so much fun. Tom, I’m super excited about your book projects and I love hearing the stories about the old classic attractions. So thanks so much for being on the podcast. If people want to follow you social media or learn more about your projects, you post a lot of really cool stuff. Like you mentioned those photos. I love catching up on some of those and some things you find. So where should people go?

Tom K Morris: I’m getting low on inventory. Because even though I still have quite some inventory, but I have some really great things, but they’re for the book and they’re not to be shared on social media. I have so many things I’m dying to post because oh my God, here is this thing that we’ve never heard of or this person or these people or this office. There’s just a lot of amazing things that I’ve collected. But you’ll have to wait for the book. Yeah, I’m on Twitter, Tom k Morris, and Instagram too. There’s a link.

Dan Heaton: Well, thank you. This has been great talking with you again, Tom, and hopefully we can do it again sometime down the road.

Tom K Morris: Sure thing. I’d be happy to.