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Garner Holt doesn’t work at Walt Disney Imagineering, but his company has played a key role in creating many of Disney’s most popular attractions. Garner Holt Productions is the leader in building animatronics and other figures at theme parks, including Disneyland. Their work is on display around the world, but they aren’t a household name to the average guest. The reality of these magical creations remains behind the scenes.
Garner is my guest on this episode of The Tomorrow Society Podcast. We talk about how he got started building figures when he was still in high school. His Uncle Sam caught the eye of Imagineers at Disney, and he eventually started working with them down the road. Garner talks about the challenging early days and how he finally got the chance to prove his skills for the MGM Grand Adventures theme park in Las Vegas.
The first key project with Disney for Garner was the Haunted Mansion Holiday and its Jack Skellington animatronic. He talks about that experience and what it was like to create the massive dragon for Fantasmic! at Disneyland. Those attractions were just the starting point for much more work including Radiator Springs Racers at Disney California Adventure. Garner also talks about his work inspiring the next generation with the Garner Holt Foundation and advice for working in the industry. It was great to talk with such a talented figure in the world off theme parks.
Show Notes: Garner Holt
Learn more about Garner Holt Productions on their official website.
Check out a demonstration of the highly advanced Abraham Lincoln animatronic created by Garner Holt Productions as part of its Living Faces of History project.
Support the podcast with a one-time donation and buy me a Dole Whip!
Transcript
Garner Holt: We’ve done some of the smallest characters in the world. I mean little sparrows that you can hold in your hand for the Tiki Room all the way up to 45-foot dragon and dinosaurs that are even bigger than that. So that’s one of the things that’s fun about our business it’s the diversity. You never know when the phone rings what somebody on the other end is going to want, and it’s usually all over the board.
Dan Heaton: That was animatronics legend Garner Holt, and you’re listening to The Tomorrow Society Podcast.
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Thanks for joining me here on Episode 108 of the Tomorrow Society Podcast. I am your host, Dan Heaton. I hope you’re all doing okay out there; I was really excited to get the chance to talk to Garner Holt. He is the owner and president of Garner Holt Productions. They are the company that creates animatronics for Disney. So many other companies around the world.
They’ve done a lot with Knotts Berry Farm, with Cedar Fair, with upgrading those attractions. A lot of the animatronics that you love at the parks right now were created by Garner Holt Productions. So it was really cool to get to talk to him, learn about his background, hear some stories about the Dragon for Fantasmic or Haunted Mansion Holiday, some of the early projects, and just find out what he thinks about the industry.
Then he also gives some good advice about if you’re interested in getting in the industry. Garner has had quite a career and I really appreciated the chance to get to talk with him and learn more about how he got to where he is today. So let’s get right to it. Here is Garner Holt.
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Dan Heaton: So I definitely want to ask you about some of the projects you’ve done, but I’d love to start. I know you got started pretty young with really getting interested in themed entertainment and what you could create. So I’d love to know how’d you ultimately get interested just in being in this business or even just in the topic itself?
Garner Holt: Well, my entire family, when I was, from the day I was born to, I got to be probably 10 or 12 years old. My family was in the horse business. They dealt with horses, rodeo. I had uncles that were in rodeo and my parents, they had race horses. So I was on the back of a horse from the day I was born until I was about 10 years old practically.
So I think my parents really wanted me to be a veterinarian when I grew up, so I’d be able to chip into the horse family and take care of the horses for ’em. But I saw Wonderful World at Disney. One Sunday I saw a thing about this place called the Haunted Mansion. I was a big fan of the movie monsters. I’d watched the monsters and I liked Frankenstein and all these Mummy and all these different movie monsters.
I was crazy about those monsters. At night, I’d watched the movies. So this thing came on about the Haunted Mansion, and I asked my parents to take me to Disneyland to see it. I had been to Disneyland when I was about almost two years old or so. That was my first trip. Then I hadn’t been there since. And I asked them to take me to Disneyland and they did, and I saw the Haunted Mansion and Pirates of the Caribbean. I was probably 11 or 12 years old.
I literally was so excited and so blown away that I literally still remember to this day leaning over the backseat of the car and telling them the entire way home that that’s what I wanted to do the rest of my life is to build things like that and build places like that. And at that time, I didn’t know what I’d never heard of Imagineering or anything. I didn’t know where those things came from, but I told ’em that’s what I wanted to do, and I think they just smiled and nodded. But from that point on, it’s like the only thing I’d ever thought about that is related to a career.
Dan Heaton: So when you ultimately started creating, I know you were in high school and you worked on early animatronic like figures, I think you did an Uncle Sam. How did you go about learning how to do that or even putting something very early on together?
Garner Holt: Well, I basically came home right after seeing Disneyland and set up a card table in the garage and started tinkering with trying to build little things that I went to swap meets and things with my parents, and I’d buy old mannequin parts and things like that. My first figures, the Uncle Sam figure that I did for when I was in high school, they were just made out of, I think the framework that was in the Uncle Sam. The steel was basically a bunch of pieces of fence posts that were steel fence posts in my dad’s ranch that I cut down with a hacksaw and I bolted door hinges on ’em for the knees. You know what I mean?
So it was very, very crude with somebody would do with virtually no funds. And I learned about pneumatics through a couple different sources. In my junior high school class, we had a bunch of magazines in the back of the classroom and that had mechanical design magazines and that type of thing. I saw a lot of ads with pneumatic actuators and things, and I’d learned about these things from talking to subsequently going back to Disneyland.
Before I could even drive, my mom would take me there and drop me off with my friends, and we used to talk to the maintenance guys and they would say, well, we use actuators, pneumatic actuators and that. So I saw these things in catalogs and I started to write these places and found out that there was some real inexpensive parts I could buy. Some places would, of course, I wrote saying I’m Garner Holt Production.
So a lot of ’em would even send me free stuff. So I got a bunch of junk and put it all together and made the figure work somehow. But it did work, and it debuted when I was in junior high or my junior year of high school, we did a whole thing for the Bicentennial and it was the Uncle Sam figure was the focus of that.
Dan Heaton: So how did you ultimately then, I know that you hadn’t worked for Imagineering, but you did come into contact with some people at Disney around that time based on that project. So how did that end up happening?
Garner Holt: The first Uncle Sam was just kind of a pile of junk, but it worked, but it was just very crude. So then I spent a bunch of time doing a second version of Uncle Sam, which turned out a lot better. And I designed that in my drafting class at school. I talked them into letting me do a lot of the stuff that I was doing in school that instead of just arbitrary projects, I’d say, what can I design my robot frame in drafting? I worked on the controls and electronics and I welded some stuff in my welding class.
So I basically used my shop classes as a source of shop building capability and my high school shop classes and teachers were all for it. They supported me and I was able to talk my way into doing a lot of that stuff. I built a second Uncle Sam and made it work, and my girlfriend’s mother made the costume for it. So I got everybody involved that I could, that had any talent that could help me.
So I had it functioning in my garage and I’d bring people over to see it and people coming from various places and do articles and things on it. One of my friends one day says, well, why don’t we film this? Because back then there wasn’t, video cameras weren’t around much, but we did have, in my high school class, I had a video class in high school, they had a camera and a great big old beta tape machine.
So I asked ’em if I could borrow it, and I took it to my garage and I filmed Uncle Sam, and I remember I had a blue bedspread and I hung the bedspread up behind Uncle Sam from the ceiling to give it a background, just a solid blue collar. So I filmed Uncle Sam and we got it on a VHS tape, and my friends said a lot of my friends that would come see it, they said, well send that tape to Disneyland. And I said, well, nobody’s even going to look at it. Nobody’s going to even care.
I said, okay, well, I didn’t feel like it was worth doing, but I did it, sent it to Imagineering, and a couple, maybe three weeks later, phone in the house rings and my grandmother answers it and comes into my bedroom, says Garner, there’s somebody from Disney on the phone. I about fell out of my chair, I couldn’t believe it. So I went and talked to ’em and they said, we want to send some Imagineers out to see your Uncle Sam figure. That was how I got ’em to come out, and they came out and looked it over and we talked about it and it was probably one of the greatest days of my life at that point.
Dan Heaton: So after that point, you mentioned Garner Holt Productions, which I know at the beginning was a way to get started, but what were some of the early years in the eighties and early nineties for your company when you were just kind of getting rolling and trying to do some projects?
Garner Holt: Right after the Disney people visited me, the first thing I said to them was, you got to see my workshop, which was in the garage. I said, can I see your workshop? So they said, well, sure. So I had a day long visit with Imagineering, and I decided at that point I wanted to be an Imagineer. I wanted to work at Walt Disney Imagineering, which was WED at the time it was called WED Enterprises. I focused really hard on doing that, and it just never came about for various reasons. It never ended up working well. They wanted me to go back to school. So I thought, well, I’m going to make my own operation work and then if it doesn’t work, I’ll just go back to school and work there. I was kind of disappointed it wasn’t working out me working there.
So I started tinkering with things in the garage and I started doing some things for malls, and I continued to work on haunted houses that I was building in malls throughout Southern California. I did animation for haunted houses, and I did some mail order stuff, and I did this and that. So pretty much through the eighties from the ‘79, ‘80, probably up until ‘87, ‘88, I moved out of the garage. I moved into a little small shop on Sierra in San Bernardino, and I pretty much lived there, practically slept in a sleeping bag on the floor a lot of the time, and I was the only employee for probably six, seven years.
My friends had come over at night and helped me work on stuff with, we’d have pizza and that, and I barely made enough money to keep the lights on, and it was pretty much a struggle up through the eighties, but it was real tough. But I did things, all kinds of different projects and small projects of different sizes through malls and mall Christmas trees and haunted house stuff, and Halloween decorations and mail order stuff. It was pretty big struggle, but it worked. It was the beginning.
Dan Heaton: Totally. It’s impressive that you were able to do enough to kind of keep it going, but ultimately, I know you were able to start to do some big projects like I’d love to hear about the MGM Grand Adventures theme park that and the Grand Canyon Rapids Ride, because I never experienced that, but I love those types of theme parks and really wish I had, but I’d love to know how you got started on that.
Garner Holt: I knew I needed, while I was working in my shop in the eighties, I was just saying, I basically decided I needed something that would really demonstrate my abilities. I had to do something and everybody else had a singing bear with a guitar or somebody had some figure that did something, and I thought to myself, I need something really spectacular, something that does something that nobody else has ever done before. And that’s where I came up with a character called Wendell the Unicyclist.
So Wendell was a character I came up with and I started trying to design how a figure would ride it. It looked like he’s riding unicycle with no visible means of support. It was kind of a mechanical magic trick, really is what it is. I developed it over a couple of years. I built the entire figure pretty much myself except for the costume. Again, I still could have somebody help me with that, but I sculpted it and did all the plastics and mechanical electronics and everything, and it continued to evolve. As I built it, it got better and better. I changed it as I kept going and learned ways to make it do other things.
So that was my calling card. So I threw a whole series of strange events. I finally got in to see the MGM people who I found out were building a theme park in Vegas at the time. It’s no longer there, but it was there for 10 or 12 years I guess. But I basically got able to bring my tape of Uncle Sam into the Fred Benninger who is running the entire show. He was the lead guy at MGM and I finagled my way into 10 minutes in front of him, and I showed him the tape and I said, Mr. Benninger, if I can do this character, I can do anything that you want in your show, which was called the Grand Canyon Rapids.
It was a rapids ride with a bunch of characters. And he agreed. He said, wow, that’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen. So I was able to get that job to do those characters. That was the first theme park job that I had, and literally hired 10 of my friends, the ones that were working at night, hanging around, and I literally hired them and we spent the next six months building all the characters for the largest ride in the park.
Dan Heaton: So after that point, you mentioned that was your first theme park job. After that point, did things start to change where you ended up doing, I know you ultimately did some work for Disney with Haunted Mansion holiday much later, but I’m curious, in the nineties, did you get a lot more projects as a springboard from that?
Garner Holt: Oh yeah, big time. That was really the beginning because I was able to show that I worked in a theme park. I mean, when I first went in there, I had no idea what I was doing. I had no clue. I’d never worked for contractors, I’d never worked on a job. I never worked at a theme park job and never built professional figures before. I mean, I had to figure all that out and do it really fast. They asked me for a bid proposal, a bid, and I’m like, what does a bid look like? I have no idea.
I had to ask a contractor friend of mine if he could show me what a bid looked like or proposal, an RFP proposal, and I’m like, I didn’t know anything. So I basically had to figure it all out. And actually Benninger told me he built a bunch of the hotels in Vegas. He was really a heavy hitter in Vegas, and he told me, he said, if you do a good job on this ride, he said, I’ll recommend you to some of my friends and I’ll get you hooked up with some other hotels.
He also looked at me and he said, you do a bad job. And he says, you’ll never work in Vegas again, and you may not work anywhere else. Again, they were known for contractors that didn’t perform, but for putting ’em out of business. So I was like, whoa, scary. So we did a good job and a lot of things came of it.
I worked on some Vegas musicals; I worked in different hotels. I got a call one day from Gary Primm who owned Prima Donna on State Line. He says, oh, Fred says, you do really good work. I have a ride that we’re putting in out here, and I’d like you to build some animation for it. I mean, it started to roll, and I got connected with Knotts at the time, and so it really was kind of a whole turning point for the whole thing.
Dan Heaton: Wow, that’s a lot of pressure to put on someone for your first project, that it’s basically your whole company’s future is riding on one thing that was unlike what you’d done before. It’s crazy.
Garner Holt: Well, I’ll tell you a quick story that I’ve told people before. So my friends and I, when Benninger was going to tell me whether or not he was going to use me for the job, they called me to Vegas and my friends and I drove up there in an old pickup truck, and in fact, some of my friends were even in the back of the truck. Everybody wanted to go.
So they were sitting out in front when I walked out of his office and my suit with my briefcase that I bought from Goodwill, I’m walking along and I was looking at the ground and I was walking slow, and they basically all thought that I didn’t get the job because I looked so dejected. And the reason I looked dejected is because I did get the job and I was walking along there thinking, what the hell have I done?
How can I build all of the animatronics and show equipment and special effects and control systems and everything for the largest ride in this MGM theme park? And I’ve never done anything like this before, and I don’t even have any employees at that point, at that moment in time, I had zero employees and I’d never done anything like that before. So I was scared to death. I could hardly sleep. But it’s just one of those things that when you get into something like that, you just got to say, Hey, I’ve got to make this successful and I’ve got to figure it out. I’ve got to figure out how to do it, and I’ve got to figure out how to pull it off and you just do it. And I did.
Dan Heaton: That still amazes me that, not that you were able to pull it off, but that you got that opportunity. It was so fortunate and seems to be ultimately led to so many other things. So I’d love to know too about when you ended up working with Disney on Haunted Mansion Holiday, which I believe was the first time they’d really worked with another entity on animatronics. I’d love to know how that happened.
Garner Holt: It all had to do kind of with some internal Disney business going on. Basically what had happened is I had started working for Disney at that point, doing a lot of characters on parade floats. So I did things that were on, I started with the Hercules Parade and did some things in the Lion King stuff, and I’d done just a little bit at a time, various characters, and Disney took note of that. Every time they’d give me a job to do parade float stuff, it would be bigger the next time because I kept doing a good job and it would get more and more work.
So all of a sudden they had this show, which was they were going to do an overlay, a Christmas overlay, and I’d already been involved with an overlay. I had already done Small World, the Christmas tree at the finale scene, and it wasn’t animated, but I just wanted to get my foot in the door in attractions. And so I did some stuff that was props, so they knew me, they knew my name and everything else. Apparently just in a nutshell, they were looking at the costs of doing that show internally, and the costs were very, very high for them to try to do it internally.
They would build another attraction or something, and somebody said, well, this guy over here, Garner Holt does really high quality animation, so why can’t we look at somebody like him? They did, and I thought, wow, this is my opportunity of a lifetime to build animatronics. So I gave ’em a really good number to do it and almost like a break even number, and they jumped at it and then did that, all the animation in that show, a lot of the props, the Pumpkin Mountain, the Spider Tree, all the animation, singing plants and all the zeros and teddy bears and all that stuff in that show.
Then shortly thereafter, Tokyo decided they wanted that same show for the Tokyo Haunted Mansion, so with a couple more Jacks and then also a Sally. So we built that show. That basically got me hooked up with Imagineering and Disneyland Imagineering in a big way, and they were like, wow, this stuff’s high quality and it’s reasonably priced, so we’re got other things for you to do, Garner. So I started doing a lot, and at this point I think we’ve done almost a little over 450 characters or animatronic figures for the Disney parks worldwide, literally virtually all the parks.
Dan Heaton: Wow, that’s a lot. I’m curious too, because especially early on when you’re creating characters that are live in another medium, they’re coming from a film or something related. I mean, what’s that like to try and recreate them? The standards, unlike something that doesn’t an IP associated with it, how challenging is it then to create something where you’re trying to match a character that people already know?
Garner Holt: Well, it is a challenge and we’ve excelled at that basically, and we’ve spent a huge amount of time honing our skills to be able to do that. We’ve worked with IP characters for everybody. I mean Disney and Pixar and Dreamworks and Illuminations and you name it. That’s one of the things that they’re very, very touchy about. Dreamworks comes in and says, okay, you’re going to do a Madagascar ride like we did in Singapore; we did all those characters.
We did over a hundred characters there in that Singapore ride, and basically you’re basically dealing with their children in a sense, and it’s like they are very critical, and I’ve just amassed some really incredible talent here. We have some sculptors, both CG sculptors and regular hand sculpting that between the two, we nail ’em every time, and that’s why they keep coming back to us over and over all those kind of companies because they know that we can nail it.
I mean, I have probably, oh, we’ve got about 80 characters out in the shop right now that are all IP characters, and we’ve got about 40 more that aren’t, but we’ve got about 80 characters that we’re building right now, and every one of those 80 is exact likeness of an IP character that exists in a film. They have to be right on the money, and they’re very critical about that, and it’s a challenge. We like that. I mean, all the fabrics have to be perfect and all the costume, all the colors have to be perfect, the shapes, the sizes, everything else, even the movements. We enjoy working with companies doing that.
Dan Heaton: Oh, definitely. And you can tell that the fact that you’ve done so many projects that you’ve been able to do such a good job with it. One of the things I know that your company worked on is the fire breathing dragon for Fantasmic, which to me is still one of the more impressive figures that I’ve seen anywhere. I don’t know if you could talk a little bit about that project or even maybe how that came together and what was involved with it.
Garner Holt: That was a big project. It was huge. It was the Dragon’s 42 feet tall and there’s an elevator that lifts her out of the island. We had to build the elevator as well, and it was a very difficult project. There was a lot of challenges, and it was something that even getting the dragon over to the island was a challenge. I mean, it was literally carried over there a couple hundred feet in the air by a helicopter and lowered into the, so you can imagine the dragon flying through the air and some morning and the helicopter carrying it.
So it was a big project, a very elaborate project, and turned out well. It was, she’s an iconic piece, and we got something that breeds fire about a 40-foot flame, and I remember setting it up in the back parking lot of my shop and lifting the head up on a forklift and shooting fire out of it, and a bunch of my guys put a bunch of weenies and marshmallows on a stick and everything burst into flame, but it was quite a project, but she’s still there to this day.
Dan Heaton: Wow. I’m trying to picture how big and heavy and how crazy that was to set up, or even just to build, it’s mind boggling, but also too just exciting, I’m sure to be able to do something that ambitious.
Garner Holt: Well, we built it out, a big piece of it. We built outside because it wouldn’t fit in the shop. We couldn’t build the elevator and all of that in the shop. It was just really a massive piece, and we built it outdoors and had some tents and things over it, but because it was so tall, yeah, just moving all that stuff, logistics of moving it and making it work and controls and everything that goes along with it, it was a very big, big piece.
We’ve done some of the smallest characters in the world. I mean, little sparrows that you can hold in your hand for the Tiki Room all the way up to 45-foot dragon and dinosaurs that are even bigger than that. So that’s one of the things that’s fun about our business is it’s the diversity. You never know when the phone rings what somebody on the other end is going to want and it’s usually all over the board.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, totally. I mean, I think just looking at the different variety you’ve done just that you’ve mentioned so far, there’s just so much, so much to it. I’d love to ask you too, you mentioned Knotts Berry Farm earlier about some of the themed attractions. You’ve created figures I know for the Calico River Rapids, which just opened the last year and then also some of the other attractions they’ve done in Ghost Town. What’s that been like to work with Knotts over the years, but especially to kind of bring in a modern sensibility to some of these older attractions?
Garner Holt: Well, that’s been a lot of fun, especially because they’re very meaningful to me personally because I remember going through the Calico Mine ride with sitting on my dad’s lap when I was a little kid. My dad liked the western nature of Knotts and going through the log ride there as a kid. So I remember them, the log ride and the mine ride got to the point to where they were in such disrepair that they were almost talking about getting rid of the attractions. But fortunately, they gave us the opportunity to come in and we did several hundred figures between the two of them, put in new figures and new animation and new effects, new storyline.
We worked with Knotts to do a whole ton of work to get ’em back to the point to where actually better than they were originally, because when Bud Hurlbut built those attractions back in 1960, really the log ride opened the year I was born. They didn’t have animatronics per se back then. They had a lot of motorized stuff, but they didn’t have real animatronics in those days. Walt was just beginning animatronics right there with the Tiki Room that, so we were able to put things in there that they never would’ve had available before, and I think it made the rides, renewed the rides in a sense and made ’em a whole new attraction. So Knotts is very pleased. That’s why they keep hiring us to do subsequent things and we’re happy to be there. It’s a great place.
Dan Heaton: Totally. Yeah, and I remember I went on those as a kid, the log ride and the mine train and seeing them now, they do almost look like kind of this odd mix of an old classic attraction with new like you mentioned. It’s just really exciting to see them stay rather than being replaced. They can find a new way to keep the history, but make ’em new and I love that. It’s awesome to see.
Garner Holt: Yeah, those are iconic attractions. Bud Hurlbut was way before his time and some of those things like that mine ride, you go on that mine ride when I was a kid, I used to think that was a real mine. I mean, it was so impressive and so immersive as an environment, a themed attraction, and Walt Disney would go through those attractions and ride them and marvel at the immersive nature of those things and how realistic they were and everything else. There’s no doubt that Walt took a lot of that back with him and used some of Hurlbut’s designs that were like say, ahead of his time and at least thinking about those going, wow, these are kind of the forerunners of, and they truly were.
The log ride and the mine ride were really forerunners of what was to be an immersive of dark ride. There was nothing like that. The only thing like that before that was a few attractions maybe like the Santa Cruz cave train and a couple things like that that were almost like your love tunnel things they used to have when they would have boats going through the tunnel of love and all that in an amusement park, but that’s about as immersive as it would get, and these are iconic attractions that really kind of formed the whole future of immersive rides I think.
Dan Heaton: You make a great point about just where they started and seeing them around is so great. Well, I want to make sure and ask you about a few more recent things that you’ve been involved with. One that I’ve found so interesting is the living faces of history, where you came out with the YouTube video of the Lincoln animatronic and how incredible that looked, and some of the other faces that were going, just the animatronics look so impressive. So I’d love to hear you talk about that project and even some of the latest technologies you’re using.
Garner Holt: Well, I did that as I kind of challenged myself because others were trying to do some things with expressive faces and people were looking at that and I thinking, I think that I can probably do better than that. And I kind of challenged myself. I’m thinking I wanted to take the opportunity to go off on a sign project and develop an expressive face technology that unlike anybody else had ever done. So really got into spending a lot of time designing that and building it, and I was really excited about it, continued to be excited about it.
We’re on the next phase of it now, or actually the third phase of our development and the expressive capabilities and really having a lot of fun with it. It’s something I think it’s going to be just bringing these things closer to the whole thing that we do at animatronics is the illusion of life, and it’s kind of like, I guess we’re equated to magicians in a sense.
You’re taking something that’s not real and not really happening and trying to convince somebody that it is. We’re taking plastic and acrylic and motors and cylinders and things and trying to make ’em look like they’re alive and trying to fool people. And it’s just kind of a challenge. It’s kind of fun, and I really have enjoyed working the expressive figures. There’s a couple of really, really good YouTube videos of our heads out there, a couple of different heads that we’ve done, the Lincoln and the Cottony character, and then we have a female that we’re doing right now. It’s kind of a fairy like character and it’s going to be really cool.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, I mean the videos I’ve seen are so impressive and really excite me about the future mean. What do you think when you’re looking ahead to the future of animatronics, what do you think are the next steps or where would you like to evolve even beyond this in the future?
Garner Holt: Well, I get asked that a lot. And we’re not really involved in anything like AI here, artificial intelligence, anything like that. It interests me, but it’s just not our line of work. There are a lot of people out there that are messing with that, that are doing really great work with it. I expect sometime maybe we’ll collaborate with somebody and we’ll have that type of capability with some of the characters. I think there’s a lot more are potential for realism and attractions that things can do. Right now, other theme parks have messed with the idea that if you have a ticket on you or a stamp or a band on your wrist, they kind can know who you are and know what color you like and they know all the things about you, your name and things like that.
So that might equate to a character someday, rather than just going by a character in the Pirates of the Caribbean and having him wave a sword at you and looking into space that they might come that the character basically as you go by in the boat, the pirate might look down at you, lock eye to eye with you and say, I Billy, step up here and we’ll have a sword fight and your name is Billy.
So that type of thing might be part of the future getting a little more intensive in the interactivity and the realism of things. I don’t know whether that’s going to, but I don’t know if it’s going to work or not because it might be unnerving, it might freak people out. So I don’t know. We just keep plugging forward and we build a lot of stuff. We do things on our own occasionally like the expressive head, but most of our business is just keeping up with what people call us and say, Hey, we want you to build this ride, and we’ve got 50 characters. And we say, okay, and then we start building it.
Dan Heaton: I understand what you’re saying about it, maybe being unsettling. There’s always that line of how interactive do we want to be here and everything. So it’s a great point. I wanted to be sure and mention that you started the Garner Holt Foundation in December of last year, I believe. I’d love to hear a little bit about the reasons for starting that and just why that interests you and what it’s about.
Garner Holt: Well, we have a thing that we called ETI here, it’s called Education Through Imagination. We started a school program to where we’re going out to schools and using animatronics to teach kids about animatronics and teach kids about science, steam and stem steam projects. So basically we got to the point where education building across the street from our main building here before this whole COVID thing happened, which is kind of a mess. We were bringing a hundred to 150 kids a day through this building, bringing ’em through on tours of GHP.
We have a thing over there that we’re going to be able to allow kids to build projects and things. So I kind of started the Foundation because the schools pay for a lot of the kids and that type of thing. But there’s a lot of kids that would like to have access to learning about animatronics and doing things that there are costs involved and they can’t afford it, and some of the kids can’t afford it and some of the kids can’t afford it. So I started the foundation thing so we could start, it’s a 501c3 foundation.
We have a website up that’s coming up here real soon. But basically what the Foundation is where people can donate to it and help tax deductible donations that they can help kids, help us fund kids to do these things in what we call Garner’s garage and learn about animatronics and that type of thing.
We also do scholarships for Cal State San Bernardino. We’re going to start kicking off a scholarship program where we’re going to start out with eight different scholarships each year that kind of relate to mechanical engineering and electrical engineering and robotics and that type of thing and try to, so I’m just trying to do it to help the community, help the kids, help the community. So that was all point of the foundation.
Dan Heaton: That sounds great. And I think education is so important just to, especially if people don’t have access to the best opportunities. So it sounds like a great foundation. So I just have one more question for you, which is really related to that. I’m curious too, just given all of your experience and how you got into the industry and what you’ve learned, if someone is young and is listening and really wants to get into the industry or do something similar, what is some recommendations you might have about things maybe they should do or even what they should study or how they should approach it?
Garner Holt: Well, it’s probably really tough to say to themselves, okay, I’m going to start an animatronic company and in 20 years I’m going to be building stuff for theme parks that might be a little out there. It’s not that can’t be done. I did it, but it’s not something that I think you want to, realistically, it’s hard to look at it that way, but what I would say is look at what your skills are. Look at what you really want to do.
If you’re so enamored with this and so excited about animatronics and you really want to get into it, figure out what part of animatronics that is good for you. In other words, do you like mechanical engineering? Do you like plastics; do you like sculpting? Do you like doing costuming? Take what part of it do you like and get really good at it.
Do a lot of either building things on your own or go to school and learn the trade and learn how to do it. Go to get a degree in engineering and mechanical engineering and college. Do whatever it takes to get really good at what you do and then start branching out from there and go to companies that need those services. Like myself, I have several engineers on board here.
I have costuming people, I have sculptors, I have CG artists, things like that, or companies like mine or Disney or Universal or other theme park companies all over the world. There’s all kinds of opportunities. You can work your way up through the business that way, and you always got to take it one step at a time. You’re not going to be able to just jump right into it and be on the top of the world.
You got to work your way up through the ranks and 20 years from now, you might end up being a project manager or running a whole attraction. I know a lot of people that started really, really simple jobs and 10, 15 years later, they’re running jobs and in charge of things and have worked their way up in a company if they’re good talent. So that’s probably what I would recommend at this point, just focusing on what really makes you happy and what career path is really exciting to you and what you’re really good at, and then honing it in, making it becoming a success in that.
Dan Heaton: I think that’s a great answer and it really sums up just how varied the whole industry is. So Garner, this has been great to talk with you and yeah, I know things are really difficult right now with Covid 19 and everything going on with the industry, but I’m hopeful that down the road things will get better for a lot of businesses and especially yours. So if people want to learn more about what you’re doing right now and in the future, is there a good place they should go to contact you or to learn more?
Garner Holt: Well hook up with us on Facebook, Garner Holt Productions on Facebook, and then also keep an eye on pinging our name on YouTube and watch some of the things that we put out there on the Facebook thing. Right now, we’ve been doing kind of a fun thing. We started a couple months ago, we started doing Throwback Thursdays and just so people were asking like, well, give us something to look at all of this while we’re at home. So we were doing a throwback Thursday to where we put little bits of past projects up there.
We had some stuff this last Thursday about Thomas the Tank Engine that we worked on and put up some pictures of inside the shop and all of that. So we’re going to do that every Thursday, and we have other announcements on Facebook about the different films we put out and everything. We’re going to do kind of a virtual shop tour here pretty soon, and that’s the best way to kind of keep track of everything going on with us. I think you can look up our website, which is kind of dated a little bit right now, but we try to keep things out there so people can see.
Dan Heaton: Excellent. Well, all of those sound like great resources. I’ve definitely watched some of the YouTube videos that you’ve put out there, and it’s just been a lot of, it’s really interesting, and the Facebook info also looks great. So thanks again, garner. It’s been a blast to talk with you.
Garner Holt: Okay. Enjoyed it very much and hope to do it again sometime.
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