115. Dave Cobb on Men in Black: Alien Attack and Warner Bros. World

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It’s interesting to note how many theme park designers start with different ideas for their careers. They often work on movies, animation, or theater before taking an indirect route to the industry. A perfect example is Dave Cobb, who started on the Studio Tour at Universal Studios Hollywood. Everything changed when he took a job as project coordinator on Back to the Future: The Ride. It was the start of a diverse, successful career in theme parks.

Dave is my guest on this episode of The Tomorrow Society Podcast to talk about his background and some key projects. After working as a show writer and designer for Landmark Entertainment Group, Dave took on the massive role as creative director of Men in Black: Alien Attack. We focus on that remarkable attraction, which was developed and completed in just over two years. Also, Dave explains why Men in Black remains so popular 20 years later.

I loved the chance to ask Dave about Survivor: The Ride, which he designed while working for Paramount Pictures Licensing. I never had the chance to experience that attraction, but I’m a diehard fan of the TV show. We close out the episode by talking about the Warner Bros. World in Abu Dhabi. Dave was the primary park-wide creative director, and the indoor theme park looks incredible based on what I’ve seen online. It was great to have the chance to speak with Dave about his awesome career.

Show Notes: Dave Cobb

Learn more about Dave Cobb and follow him on Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

Watch the Men in Black: Alien Attack Livestream Q&A for the attraction’s 20th anniversary.

Check out the pre-show video with Ethan Zohn and Jenna Morasca and see ride footage of Survivor: The Ride from 2006.

Transcript

Dave Cobb: I had somebody tell me like Haunted Mansion opened…if it opened in ‘68, it’s 20 years old when I was 18 and a tour guide. I’m going to Disney and first in that park and I think back and go, there are kids with MIB within those first couple of years now bringing their kids, and thus the cycle continues.

Dan Heaton: That is theme park designer Dave Cobb talking about the incredible Men in Black: Alien Attack at Universal Orlando and you’re listening to The Tomorrow Society Podcast.

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Dan Heaton: Thanks for joining me here on Episode 115 of the Tomorrow Society Podcast. I am your host, Dan Heaton. I hope you’re all doing well as we roll into September, if you can believe it. My girls are actually in their third week of school all virtual here at home. I hope you’re all hanging in there and I just want to say thanks for taking the time to listen to this show. I hope in some way it helps to give you a minute to maybe not think about everything that’s going on right now.

I’m really excited about this episode. My guest is Dave Cobb. His name is probably pretty well known to you. He’s very active in the fan community and just a proponent of the industry itself. We talk about a lot of the projects that he’s worked on including Men in Black: Alien Attack, Back to the Future, so much more.

He’s worked on a lot of movie-themed attractions including things like The Italian Job and Tomb Raider and a lot of things for Paramount back when they had parks and we also get into Survivor: The Ride, which is something that really means a lot to me as a longtime fan of Survivor. Getting the chance to hear some behind-the-scenes stories about shooting the pre-show with Ethan and Jenna and so much more. It was a real blast to talk to Dave about that.

I just really like his attitude about the industry and then his story of working at Universal and ultimately getting into the industry is also very interesting to me. Before I get to Dave, I wanted to quickly apologize for the sound quality of this interview. We had some connection issues and unfortunately there are spots where words drop in and out. I still think there’s a lot of cool stuff there.

I just wanted to let you know upfront if you’re missing a few words are here that that was just something that happened with the recording that hopefully I will get the chance to talk to Dave again in the future with better technical circumstances. He’s got a great story and I was really excited to have the chance to talk with him. So let’s do this. Here is Dave Cobb.

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Dan Heaton: You’ve done so many interesting things and more than we could possibly cover in this show, but I’m really excited to dig into a lot of it and I’m just curious upfront, I know you studied film production at college and I’m wondering how you got interested in working on movies and then ultimately in theme parks.

Dave Cobb: As a child of the seventies and eighties of the sort of early blockbuster era, the first generation to start having videotapes at home, early VHS and Beta and I was just inundated. My dad was a big movie nut and so I became in the eighties a huge movie nerd and one of my first jobs was working at a video store in about 1985. I was like 15 and so I saw living in Los Angeles you have plenty of exposure to the fact that the film and TV industry is a career.

My dad had worked sort of in industries around TV and movies and not so much in it, but I was aware of it through him, so I instantly thought that would be a path for me. I mean in junior high and high school I had aimed more at acting. I was in a lot of theater. And then by the time I went to college, I realized I had this passion for urging world of special effects and particularly special effects cinematography.

I loved Cinefex magazine and Starlog Magazine. And then all through my tweens and teens and early twenties led me to go to film school. I went to Cal State Northridge and was planning on hedging on what to do in the film industry.

So I was studying writing, but I was also studying sort of general production with a focus on cinematography, but the goal of getting out of that and working for at the time, there were a number of really big effects studios in Los Angeles, like Boss Films and Dream Quest Images, and so I had thought, oh, that’s the world I want to get into. Meanwhile, while I’m studying this, my day job is at Universal Studios as a tour guide. I started there right after I graduated high school and was there every summer in Christmas and spring break during college, and so I was working at a park, but I didn’t really see it that way.

I saw it as an inroad to, oh, I have access to the Lot; I can go down and pound the pavement and try to get production jobs, et cetera, et cetera. Something really interesting happened, and this was about early nineties where a couple of big effects movies came out, namely Jurassic Park and T2 and The Abyss. All of a sudden computer graphics are sort of the next thing and all the shops that I had been planning to intern with in LA were starting to close or starting to focus more on CGI and I was like, I am not a computer science grad.

That is not my jam at all. At the time, it wasn’t even object-oriented programming, it was all like numbers. It had to be math and I was the worst at math ever. And so the writing on the wall was like, well, maybe this isn’t for you right now, and on top of that indie film was exploding. That was the other part of it. It wasn’t just effects, it was that you didn’t really need to have this free. What came out when I was in college Sex Lives and Videotape; you can go out and make an indie film and have it released at Sundance. So I dropped out with the goal of recentering myself and figuring out what I wanted to do.

Dan Heaton: So I’m curious a little bit about, I know you mentioned you were a tour guide there and ultimately yeah, you had a goal to really get into films, but I’d love to know too just what was the atmosphere like in the ‘80s working as a tour guide and the Studios because it’s much different than now where it’s the tours one part of it, it was the main thing. So I’d love to know a little bit about your experience there.

Dave Cobb: Yeah, well, when I started working there, it was called the Universal Studios Tour. It was not called Universal Studios Hollywood. That was a change that came later when they added some other attractions and rides, but I grew up very close to the tour and so back when I was a kid in the past program at the tour was ridiculously cheap. It was something like $30 or something or 15 bucks.

It was really dumb when I was a kid, so it was like, oh, well I’m just going to do that, and I would go and just ride the trams over and over and over again. So I was a big fan of the place already and particular what they called animations and the animations were the things along the tram route like Jaws and then later King Kong and Earthquake and the Ice Tunnel and Battle of Galactica.

There were these little stops where the tram would pull into a dark ride basically and have a scene. I loved those. It was like, oh, they’re showing off movie special effects, but I’m seeing them in real life. That was their whole shtick. Being there at the tour and working there was great. I saw that it’s great. We did get a sort of bit of access to the lot itself and we got screenings and we got Q&A with filmmakers and stuff.

And I networked the hell out of working there trying to get a job in film and so that part of it was what I really first was enamored with. I worked there again, I started to feel like, oh, this is a whole other thing. This is also this big operation. By the time I had a few years an actual theme park and I was also a child at Disneyland.

I grew up in Southern California, so I hadn’t made that connection between the two until I started working there and it really opened my eyes to, oh, this is an industry too. This is a really weird one, but it’s industry like you said, it’s very different now than it was then. Back then it was the Wild West. If people want a really great read about the history of Universal as a book called Jay Bangs and named after Jay Stein, who was one of the main executives for the tour and he had a very, very big personality and very known for in creative meetings saying that attraction doesn’t have enough Jay Bangs in it or he wouldn’t say it.

Basically he would say, I want fire here and I want this there and I want that there, and all of his craft basically affectionately dubbed them. And so it’s a beautiful book that is a really great look into that time period because it was pretty special and very different than the sort of corporate-driven theme park world that it is now.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, I talked to Sam Gennaway a while ago when he wrote that. It’s cool because it filled in the gaps because I’d always be like, why when I go on all these Universal rides, am I always getting water in my face and fire and everything and it’s like, oh, it all makes sense, especially in the ‘90s with Earthquake and Kong and all of those kind of early, it’s like why I don’t understand and it totally made a lot of sense. But you’re right, it was a completely different era.

I mean I was pretty young, but I remember going to the tour as a kid and Battlestar Galactica and the Frozen Tunnel and everything. It was a blast and then just kind of built from there and that book is a great guide for it. But I’d love to know, like you mentioned, you got more interested in being on the creative side and ultimately got involved with Back to the Future: The Ride, which was an incredible ride, especially at the time it opened. So how did that happen and how did you get involved there as a guide?

Dave Cobb: You sort of move up the ranks there from regular guide to VIP Guide and to do VIP tours there and a lot of those ended up being for executives actually met people like Jay Stein’s, matter of fact, the tour guides. A little side story – tour guides used to be sent to Jay Stein’s office in the infamous black tower at the front of the studio to answer phones when their assistants were on lunch. And so I actually did that once and heard behind closed doors a giant argument with every curse word you could think of, just someone with the mouth of a stevedore just yelling and screaming at some other poor executive. Then they came out calm as day, we’re going off to lunch and we leave. It was Jay Stein and Ron Benson who was another one of the big executives there.

So I sort of saw a little behind the curtain there, but got to know sort of the inner workings of the studio from giving tours to executives and there was one guy in particular, this guy named Warren Holcomb and he was like a business development real estate guy, so he helped to expand the tour, really nice fellow and he used to ask for me, I would do tours specifically for him and his family or guests that would come in from out of town.

So I got to know him pretty well and he would always ask me in the middle of Jaws or Kong when his family was enjoying things, he would lean over and go, so what are you doing for work? Tell me what you’re aimed at. And he would be very, very encouraging and I remember asking him, I had heard in, this is going on ’91-‘92, wait, gosh no, my brain is fried. It’s way before that. This is like ‘89, he’s hearing about Universal Florida under construction. I was going a, my family’s going on a trip to Florida.

He said, well, lemme set up something for you and this is when the park was still under construction. And I get there and I call him and he gives me a phone number and I call and it’s a person on the construction team and I get a tour of the model. Basically the site was still mostly just steel and mud and not a lot built yet, but I see the site a little bit and I saw the model for the park and it kind of, oh, this is cool, this is how these things get made. So I was fascinated with the park.

I was fascinated with how it was going to be different than the Studio Tour and I went back home and to work and told him and went on for a few years and then about two years later, I think ‘91, I went back to see the park myself and that was after Back to the Future had opened. Keep in mind I had driven through Hill Valley approximately 1,500 times as a tour guide.

I had seen Back to the Future in 1985 when I was 15, probably 10 times I actually worked on Back to the Future 2 for a couple of days as a camera assistant, as a freelance camera apartment guy during the 2015 hover boarding sequences. I lucked out on that and it’s not a big part of my resume, but it was two or three days that really, really incredible that I was there. So there’s all this future stuff floating in my head down and see that ride. And my dad was a Navy pilot. I remember going with him opening weekend in ’87 to Disneyland. I had Star Tours, it opened on my birthday.

We were actually there in our car and got in line at three in the morning. It was when it was the shortest, that kind of thing. It was that 60-hour party they had and he was jazzed to see it like, oh yeah, it’s flight simulator technology. I’m going to see a lot of this familiar with it and I wasn’t and rode Star Tours and it blew my mind, alright, go on Back to the Future and not only is it an escalation of what a flight simulator can do, just from a visual standpoint, it’s much more aggressive, it’s a wider field of view, it’s all those things.

It also was like this is a sequel. This isn’t retelling me, the story of Back to the Future, the Fantasyland dark rides, this is Star Tours, this is another adventure that I’m in and it leverages what you know about the films and story and so my brain just exploded with who does this, who comes up with this? So I came back to LA and I called up Holcomb and said, oh my God, I just got back from Florida and I’m blown away. The park is incredible, but who did this Back to the Future?

He’s like, well, I got to set you up with a lunch meeting, sets me up with this person and then I go have lunch and it’s one of the producers at Universal Planning and Development is what it was called then not Creative. And I have lunch with somebody and they asked me all about Back to the Future and what I liked and I sort of nerd out all over them for like 45 minutes over lunch to the commissary.

I’m just bliss and a complete, complete nerd and I don’t really think much of it. The lunch is fine, I go home and then when I get home there’s a message on my answer machine from this person saying, Hey, we are hiring an assistant project coordinator. You’re basically going to be the office coordinator for your knowledge of Back to the Future and you’ve done production work. All of that is a really good fit. If you want the job, it’s yours. And so I just took it. It was particularly minimum wage, but I would’ve done it for free and it was my first and my first exposure to nothing in the ground to opening day was a major theme park attraction,

Dan Heaton: That attraction. I remember riding it in Florida I think around when it opened and it was a bit much for me. Even I was like a teenager and I just remember being like, whoa, whoa, this is different because it was something entirely over the top. But I can see why working on that would then kind of given your experience, would then drive you forward to want to kind of do that. Was that the case where you worked on that from start to finish and then we’re like, okay, I really want to do this as a career, as a designer and creative side of it?

Dave Cobb:  Yeah, absolutely. And at the time it was a little bit more the Wild West. It wasn’t the best juggernaut, it was a much smaller team than they would normally have an attraction. Then they thought when it’s a lift, it’s a lift from another attraction. You don’t need as many designers, which is not entirely true. The building itself is different shape, but still everybody on the team was a much smaller team. Everybody got to wear a lot more hats.

So even though I was an entry-level guy, I ended up doing things like propping out the little holding rooms. I contributed to the operations manual because they wanted it written as if Doc Brown had written the instructor that ride operators and I did a little writing, I had done a little screenwriting in college, I helped with programming. I would sit in it night after night with the programmers. They had to reprogram it from Florida. The bases were completely re-engineered. The version of Florida was tearing the building apart and re-engineered the bases and the same program couldn’t be run.

And so we started from scratch with the ride program as a Back to the Future fan. They’re like, yeah, yeah, you can help out the programmers. I got to sit there and give ’em notes. I’ve never done this before and I was just in so much space and trust and encouragement from the other people on the team in particular Steve Marble who was the producer who’s the guy I had lunch with before. So he sort of encouraged me and pushed me in directions in hindsight, see what I was good at and what I liked. And what came out of it was I really liked writing, I really liked storytelling and I really liked storytelling in an attraction Back to the Future.

Even though you think of it just as cinematic, it’s later still environmental. There’s story told in the queue, there’s story told in the pre-show videos, there’s story told in the graphics, there’s told in those holding rooms with all the props. I imprinted on that pretty hard, but what really sold it, and this is the moment that I tell people I’m out and they’re like, you must’ve been the aha moment for you. Flashback to about eight years old, my dad was a headhunter. He was corporate recruiter and occasionally it was all high tech engineering jobs. One day he picked me up at school, I’m like eight years old, so this is like 1978 up at school. He’s like, I got one more thing to go to, but don’t worry, it’s a lot of fun.

They’re going to take good care of you while I’m in my meeting. So we get there and it’s 1401 Flower in Glendale. It is the WDI campus. I have no idea what it is. He goes into his meeting, I’m eight and this nice secretary takes me on a tour of the Epcot model. Oh my gosh. Everybody goes, oh my God, that must’ve been the moment. And to be honest it, I didn’t put two and two together.

I thought it’s really cool and I’m a big fan of Disneyland and I like architecture and those shapes are really cool and that’s neat, but it never landed and so on opening day of Back to the Future, I brought my dad and because again it’s a flight simulator and his son wants to see what he works on, we go on the ride and we’re sort of, he beaming and I’m beaming and we’re sitting having a snack afterwards sitting and he’s like, you do remember that time I took you to Imagineering?

Right? Hadn’t that story I just told you I had sort of filed away. The minute he told me about it, it was like that moment in Ratatouille when he takes a bite of the ratatouille and zooms back to childhood. I literally had that moment. My God, that little nugget has been in back of my head for a long time and it really took, it needed to be forced into my face for me to remember it. But because of that and that memory and that story, I went, oh, alright, I’m going to try this. Sort of made it known at Universal even though it was a project-based job and I was going to be gone soon, I would love to help on other things. That led to a number of other relationships.

Dan Heaton: Wow, that’s so interesting. It’s, it had to hit the basically like, oh I guess this is what I’m meant to do because of that. It’s a crazy, crazy moment. I love that story. And looking at what you did when you moved on to Landmark Entertainment Group and some of the other Universal attractions, it seems it’s surprising me how quickly you worked on Back to the Future in the early nineties and before I know it you’re working on things like Jurassic Park and Terminator 2 and so much else. So I’d love to hear some about going and working for Landmark Entertainment and then really how that kind of took off when you became a show writer and started working on some of those.

Dave Cobb: So yeah, so after Back to the Future was wrapped, Universal Planning and Development hired me for a couple of concept treatments and things. Right after Back to the Future, I wrote four or five treatments, attractions that never got made, but a couple of shows and one or two rides taught myself this writing form.

I had no idea what it was, but they showed me some other treatments instead here. And one of those treatments was a treatment from Landmark because at the time Landmark did a lot of work for Universal. I used that as a sort of model and in my own way I didn’t know it, but I was sort of creating my own little PO actually sent written samples and some of the stuff I had done in college to the person who was named on that landmark, one of the Landmark scripts I was given a guy named Ty Oli and Ty was one of their lead creative guys.

I sent it to him completely blind with a cover letter saying, Hey, I just finished; I did Back to the Future. I’m doing some writing for Universal, I’m really interested in this industry and it looks like Landmark does a lot of this. Got a phone call, got an interview, got a job. And so my job there for most of my time was actually very junior level. I was just a show writer.

Those was attractions that those big name attractions, like two, they were well in production by the time I got hired. But I did a little bit of writing on it. I wrote a little bit of the queue line video for T2. One of the first things I wrote that ever got produced that was all filmed at Landmark. It looks like this high tech company, but it was all shot in the offices and it was fun because it was like, oh, my pre-show script got approved by James Cameron.

What I have written is now canon. That was just mind blowing to me and attractions, it was a very heady time for Landmark. They were like the think well of their day basically the next mini major, and they did the stuff they did for Universal was legendary like Jurassic Park. They did early concepts on Spider-Man, which were then by Universal Creative. I did some of those too. I worked on early concepts for that that were not the ride that you saw, but elements of the story that ended up in the ride that you now see.

And so it was a really crazy time. Again, I got to go on site a lot for the first time with projects there because again, it was a young and smaller scrappier company. And so I’m in my mid twenties all of a sudden I’m traveling around the world working on these international projects and getting stamps in my passport at like 24, 25, and it was that nineties boom of the theme park business on a steady boom up until the end of the nineties.

It was a great time to work there. I met a lot of great lifelong and colleagues there. It was a very unique place in terms of its structure. It was very top down from Gary and Tony who ran the place and that’s pretty legendary in and of itself, but that’s a whole other episode. But I got a really good education there in not only how attraction goes together, but the thing that I didn’t get at Universal, which is how to pitch it and how to package it, how to engage a client. It wasn’t working for the owner operator, it was working for the firm that was reporting to the owner operator. So I got to hone my pitching skills and that is what led me back to Universal in a weird way.

Dan Heaton: That’s something I assume just from people I talk with in the industry that so many ideas, great ideas for projects never get past the pitch stage. So what did you learn that really what were the skills that got you to be able to pitch things in the future?

Dave Cobb: Well, it’s about creating these libraries of ideas and if they don’t get built, you file it away. Even if it’s not a whole attraction, file that away and go, I want to use that somewhere else. And creating this library of ideas and tropes and at a place like Landmark, 90% of their businesses maybe go to production if the client gets funding for it. It’s a completely different business.

The Disney’s and Universal’s of the world, but even at Disney and Universal, tons of concept work that never happens. So it’s the same rules that apply. So I think what I learned was leaned a little bit on what I had learned being a tour guide. I mean my comfort in front of a microphone was because of sitting on a tram talking to 300 people six times a day for four or five summers. So working on a mic like that is education in and of its especially in reading a room in how to fill time, vamp what to do when things go wrong.

So those things much more intimate scale at a place like Landmark, because I’m not pitching to 300 people on a tram. I’m pitching to people in a corporate boardroom with millions of dollars at stake. So it’s an old Bugs Bunny quote, “Think Fast Rabbit”. That was my brain at that point. I had to bridge improv skills, which was another whole other thing that I had gotten into at that time too.

And for creative people out there, even if you’re not a performer, improv training is I think the best creative training anybody can get. What you learn in improv is improv is not about being funny, improv is about being present. Improv is about, they always say it’s “yes, and” right. No, in improv you accept what your performers are giving you and you heighten and accept and heighten that is the best training collaboratively their people and pitch to. I learned quite a bit about all of that.

Dan Heaton: Well that’s interesting. Yeah, I hadn’t heard it described that way, but it makes sense because there’s a lot of people that are designers that are super talented that can create these amazing worlds but may not be comfortable with the other side of it, with actually explaining it in a way that someone who’s, like you said, that has millions of dollars at stake because they’re able to say, oh, I can see this, I can see it.

So it’s interesting. Speaking of that, it’s amazing for me to think about because you mentioned you were like 24, 25, so you were still in your twenties and you go back to Universal and soon after that are working on Men in Black Alien Attack, which is still an incredible attraction today. So how are you able to jump in while still so young and fairly new to the industry and really take on that type of project?

Dave Cobb: Timing, timing and luck and being in the right place and being present and again, the improv skills, listening and being present. It was at Landmark from about ‘90, late ‘93, no, about ‘94, mid ‘97 and other things that happened in my life during that time was I came out of the closet. I’m a happily married homosexual man for 25 years to the same guy, but at the time that was my coming out to my friends, which who all went, yeah, we know move on. So one of the things that happened during that coming out was I was recommended by a friend of mine.

He’s like, Hey, you should go check out the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles because I love to sing because he’d been to karaoke with him a bunch of times and I got some skills at that, but he’s like, you’ll love it because it’s a creative outlet that’s not work and it’s on top of that.

You’ll see when you get there, it’s a great introduction to a sort of newly out gay person and when I got there you realize it’s this 60 voice at its peak, 140, 160 men of every size, shape, color, creed, orientation, age that you can think of. So it was this instant brotherhood of people and exposure to the larger world that I had not seen at all. On top of that really gratifying creatively, I got to sing a lot.

I got to help create shows because the GMCLA does not just singing, they do these big spectacular, especially for their summer shows, big dance numbers and big puppet numbers and I was involved in those and the guy that puts those big puppet spectaculars together and look ’em up. If you look up GMCLA puppet on YouTube, they did an “Under the Sea” one, we did a Christmas one and they’re like blacklight puppet numbers that use the entire chorus.

They’re kind of spectacular. The person who put all this together is a name. You might know Phil Hettema. So Phil Hettema was the VP of Creative at for many years while I was there Back to the Future, I had pitched some projects to him. I was at Landmark, so I was on the other side of the table from him at the same time I’m singing with him in the chorus.

So I had on some of these puppet productions I held, one of the greatest parts of his career that I asked him about all the time is he worked for many years and so his puppet building skills and foam construction skills are unmatched. And so I sort of learned all that from Phil. Puppets and I perform with him and we do these creative brainstorming for the chorus then sort of mid-97 invites me to lunch and we go to lunch and I think it’s just going to be social.

He’s like, so here’s the deal. The business right now is ridiculously busy and you as a fan, Dan, if you think back to ‘97, you had DCA in progress, Animal Kingdom, Tokyo Disney Sea, Hong Kong Disneyland, Islands of Adventure, the Universal Orlando resort as a whole, everybody was working was crazy, crazy heady times where the industry was just up. Phil tells me we have this new park opening – Islands of Adventure – and I knew all about it. I’d seen it at Landmark, it opens in ‘99 and the analysts have just dropped the bomb on us that we need a major e-ticket attraction back in the studio park the following year so we don’t siphon off our own attendance and we have nothing prepared.

I have a small crew and that small crew is people like Anna who I would end up working think well, and John Murdy who’s Halloween Horror Nights, he and I were tour guides before that, but they had done a couple of concept passes for a new attraction.

Phil was like, I need a creative director and hate to make it sound like I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel and I can’t find anybody and I’m coming to you, but in doing a search, there’s so little people available, but you popped into my head, I think you’re going to be perfect for it. So he sort of pushed me the idea and up until now I had really just been show writer. I had done Creative Direction duties at Landmark, but I’d never been given that title. So I took it and it turned out to be Men in Black and it completely changed my life. But the thing that most people don’t know about that attraction is that it went from nothing on paper to opening day in two months.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, that’s crazy to me, I read that and I thought, because you think of now, I mean things that are not that complicated can take, especially I’m just talking construction could take two years or three years if you’re talking concept because sometimes concept are things we don’t even hear about at least as a fan until it’s well involved. How did that, I hate to just ask the obvious questions, how was that even possible? What was the story there?

Dave Cobb: The good thing is the blue sky work that had been done, I was hired right after Craig and John and Phil had finished a very, very rough blue sky pass. Much of that franchise lends itself to an attraction. It’s wish fulfillment, you want to wear the suit, you want to zap at aliens, a lot of that was there, but in order to ramp it up to speed to get open in time, a couple of mandates they had on building size and budget and literally dirt was being moved, the building was set and we had to fill it.

We didn’t get to start with nothing. We started with a size and they knew it had to be big because of capacity and track reasons. But the other thing that came down the pike when I got hired was the ride vehicle because they knew open on time, they could not start with something off the shelf or they could not start with something not off the shelf.

Excuse me. They could not start with anything custom or brand new. And right across the way at IOA they had two really great ride systems that they had engineered for the park. One was, which everybody knows is now also transit roving motion base and spectacular. And then the other one was Cat in the Hat, which is a simpler motion base just rotational and the original Blue Sky concept took into account the Spider-Man base made it look like the Ford from the movie and expected.

But a thing happened, one of the first things we did when I got there was we did a mockup in Spider-Man in Florida. The track was running, the ride wasn’t completely finished but it was running set up like laser tag targets and just rode the ride program and tried to shoot at things and it was absolutely impossible, the extra aggressive movement of that.

So on the surface it sounds like of course you want to use the more expensive ride vehicle, it’s more spectacular, but not for this purpose. It was a really quick lesson in what is the purpose of this attraction and if it’s not interactive ride vehicle’s, okay, but if it’s interactive you have to be something else. It’s about guest focus, not necessarily shaking them around. And so to do the same thing on Cat and the Hat, we were like, oh yeah, this works because you get the benefit of an Omnimover, like the Haunted Mansion, we can aim you at things.

And we also have this mild thrill, which is pretty cool of spinning around. We knew we could go faster than what was being done at Cat and the Hat because of the height, right Cat and The Hat was meant to be a more gentle family ride. We went and tried those at the full capable of ’em. We’re like, oh yeah, that’s enough thrill for sure had a thrill ride as well, but that was the big thing was there was a footprint of the building and here’s your ride vehicle go.

Dan Heaton: That makes a lot of sense, especially just given like you mentioned where I still feel like the vehicles are pretty impressive but it’s simpler but that affected the end with the spinning. It’s definitely thrilling enough for me. I’ll say I don’t need to spin it more, but what’s impressed me too is I feel like a lot of the interactive attractions that we’ve even seen recently, your Justice League kind of attractions where you’re shooting at screens, what I think is so cool about, and nothing against those attractions but about Men in Black is how much physical sets are in there and even differently than a Buzz Lightyear, there’s just so much happening.

I don’t feel like I’ve ridden it enough even in the past 20 years to really see everything. So it’s interesting to think of the timing just because of how much you were able to pack into that building. I’m just curious the development of where it started to where you ended up with so many physical sets and little gags and everything else in that space.

Dave Cobb: That’s a really, really great question. Obviously one of the first things we had to do was start figuring out the logistics of the tryout and it’s like we’ll work out the scenes later, we’ll work out the sets, but what can we do? One of the first things we figured out was for capacity reasons, it had to be dual vehicles and for a while it was going to be one track with sort of daisy chain two cars together like a train.

We changed that very quickly when somebody, I don’t know who came up in the meeting, well what if you happen side by side, you can shoot at each other and we’re like, that’s it. That’s way better than because Universal was in the mode of how do we be better than Disney, right? Yeah. So that’s something that Buzz Lightyear doesn’t do, so let’s do that.

And two tracks have their own challenges in terms of radiuses and amount of space it takes up when you take out the reach envelope and the safety envelope of each vehicle. So that took a lot of time early on and then what was happening parallel to that?

I knew I had a couple few thousand feet of track space to cover and thousands of scenic footage build and story to tell exactly what you’re talking about, the details and all the alien gags and the first thing he flashed on, and I sort of told Phil this years later, I wanted it to be my own internal logic. He said, I am such a huge fan of the Haunted Mansion and Pirates of the Caribbean and the reason we’re all big fans of those is the Marc Davis stuff. It’s gag after gag after gag that you have to just wander your eyes and see.

I said, I want this to be way more aggressive video game version of kitchen, same impact of characters and you never see the same thing twice and you have to write it 10 or 20 times to see everything. And so get that, I want to start designing alien gags like you would see Marc Davis gags in the Disney attraction. He’s like, oh, I love that idea.

We brought in two artists, one that you might be familiar with, Don Carson, Don’s amazing and is wonderful at that sort of gag. You say give me a hundred alien gags hiding in New York. And he did all these color sketches and they were another one was an artist named Cynthia Ignacio and she sort of did the same thing she from animation and so she had a really great loose style. So we spent weeks and weeks and weeks drawing hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of if there are aliens hiding in New York, what’s a gag?

So it was off of alien tropes, it was riffing off of New York tropes riffing off of some of the tropes of the movie, but we knew we didn’t have to stick to just the aliens you saw in the movie. That was really where we started and that was the most fun part was just figuring out the pacing. And I posted this to my YouTube channel a couple months back, closer to the 20th anniversary of the ride back in April. I posted video of the white model because we did this giant head scale model at that point, loose pencil drawings of all the sets.

We were still working out all the scenes. They hadn’t been committed to final drawings, they were still talking concept early schematic, blew them all up on foam core built to scale in a room and the scale was that your head was the size of the ride vehicle and the whole model was lifted off the floor and you could walk through the ride and see it at scale.

So had made a scratch track for the ride at that point, just rough dialogue and music from the film and just put on headphones and little post-its where all the targets were and I just sort of walked through the ride dozens and dozens and dozens of times and we all sort of did that and put in our two cents about easy, medium, and hard targets. Ones do we want to focus on, there is a logic there that there’s a layer of targets that everybody’s going to see the first time they ride.

There’s a layer of targets you’re really not going to see until maybe the second time you ride layer targets you’re not going to see unless you literally crane your head and look backwards. So it was very intentional because we knew the whole point of an interactive ride was to make it rewriteable as many times possible.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, that’s really interesting and it actually connects to what you said about Pirates and Haunted Mansion because part of the reason those work so well is you can write ’em over and over and they’re not interactive but it has that cocktail party idea like they described. You’re catching little bits, but here you’re catching little bits of the targets where you’re basically going, okay, I’ve shot that guy and gotten almost no points a hundred times.

I want to see what else there is and there’s those layers. That’s really interesting and you mentioned Don Carson. It’s funny that I’ve talked to Don a few times. Never about Men in Black, but he’s great. Yeah, he has so many cool things and actually it might be on the episode right before this one, so you’re pitching things well this is connecting inadvertently so well here Dave. Excellent. I like this.

Dave Cobb: The Tomorrow Society Podcast story universe is what we’re creating here.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, it’s everything’s coming together at the Tomorrow Society, but I want to ask one more question here about Men in Black, which is like you mentioned 20th anniversary and I sometimes forget how long it’s been there because some attractions, some of the ones you mentioned just go on and on and on while others can be here for five years and you have to upgrade ’em. Why do you think it’s just been able beyond what we’ve talked about, just been able to say so popular and still feel new even though it’s been along for that amount of time?

Dave Cobb: That’s a hard question to answer. I really don’t know. I mean I have my gut feeling and that is talked about. There’s just so much to look at. There’s easy answers in that. It’s very family friendly. It’s something a five-year-old can ride with their grandma and still fun. But those qualities of a classic Disney attraction just from function and form are a crowd pleaser.

It is the call to action of the attraction created an amazing fan. If I’ve learned anything from this year of sort of posting things out in the world, the 20th anniversary of the attraction is that some unbelievably rabid fan, and I mean that in a good way, but it has so many people. I found a group on Facebook, they’re called the 999 Club or MIB 900 club people who can max out the score tips and techniques and it’s a whole little Facebook group dedicated to literally pictures of their score screen in front of their car proving that they can max out.

It’s this big flex and that’s because they know all the details and they’ve literally made spreadsheets of what the scores are for things. It’s insane. I don’t even have people ask me what are the scores for things? I don’t know. We did a bunch of play tests and scores we thought would work out and even that maxing out thing was something we debated. It’s like should we max it out or should we let it roll over?

But the problem was if it rolls over, there’s no way to make it additive. The output to your photo, you know how your score is superimposed over your photo for the ride photo. The system to do that in 1999 and 2000 was not the way we would do it now. It was literally for red TV remote codes sending offboard it very lo-fi compared to what you can do now. That was the limitation. We’re like no, people are going to want to see that it’s, people don’t want to get a picture that says one to one point.

If they were all over by one point we made that a hard stop, but now there’s a whole fandom that’s literally dedicated to techniques to get you there, which I can’t tell you how that is somebody who poured their heart and the soul and this right and hundreds of other team members that we all just worked so hard on this thing. We don’t know these things fast. And to be honest, I never looked at it like this is a perennial like Haunted Mansion. I never thought that at all because you look at the other Universal attractions and there were things being phased out even then and you never really know what’s going to the audience, but when it does it’s pretty gratifying.

I had somebody tell me Haunted Mansion opened…if it opened in ‘68, it’s 20 years old when I was 18 and a tour guide and going to Disney first in that park and I think back and go, there are kids with MIB within those first couple of years now bringing their kids, and thus the cycle continues; I never thought when we were making it that it was up there with, but I am so for the fans that have put it in that echelon because kind of amazing in that park, it’s one of the few attractions that has not chambered well.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, I mean you think about it with Universal, if ET gets replaced then every original attraction, I mean some of the original attractions were Murder She Wrote and Alfred Hitchcock, great things, but you think that you don’t think would last, but you think about it. I mean Jaws has gone, Kong, so many that were part of that have been replaced. But I mean I look at the park and I mean who knows, knock on wood, whatever. But I think it’ll be there for a while because I think any attraction, especially too based on a movie because even though there’s been multiple sequels things that are based on films, that’s one reason why Universal replaces things because trying to get newer films or newer properties, that’s really rare.

Dave Cobb: And they had already did in other people’s movies and other people’s IP obviously in a huge way with IOA. That discussion about when you look at it, a lot of it had to do with the timeline they were talking in early to mid-‘97 that they need an attraction that’s in this short time span. Well, what was the big hit movie that summer? It was Men in Black.

They started those conversations literally while the film was still in theaters with Sony and it was a silly different place than it is now. It was sort of second phase to me of Universal Creative versus when I was there for Back to the Future, it was a little bit different when I was there for Men in Black because they had gotten a lot bigger and they were doing an international park and now it’s morphed into yet even bigger entities. It was a pretty seminal project for them, not just because of the kind of ride it was, but time it happened.

Dan Heaton: Oh totally. Yeah. I mean I think about from that era what really came out of it. I mean the things that are the most resonant, it’s Men in Black and from that kind of similar era and both are still going strong and have seem like they’re going to go for a while. Well, I want to make sure we get a chance to talk about a few other things you did. I know then you went on to work for Paramount Pictures licensing and were involved with a variety of projects there and I do want to ask you about one in particular, but before I do that I’d love to hear from you just about getting that role and what that job was like.

Dave Cobb: After Men in Black, my rating in the industry had gone up a little and people knew who I was and so it opened some doors, but it opened a door right back to somebody who I had worked with before, which is at Landmark. He was then working for Paramount and Paramount owned a bunch of parks in North America in the nineties, Kings Island, Kings Dominion, Wonderland, Carrowinds, the Star Trek Adventure in which I had worked on it. They owned and operated all those and had a small department doing overseas line for licensing new parks to larger international clients. They were trying to get in that business too at the time this early aughts.

So I was hired initially freelance and I was just a freelance helping with writing and creative direction on big Paramount attractions for international parks that never happened. In the midst of that, there was sort of a bit of a shakeup, the Paramount Parks company offices in Charlotte in that they let a lot of people go, some of the stuff go, this was Esparza and who went on to Hirsch and for various reasons they sort of restructured creatively how they were going to do the attractions in the US parks ended at the foot of the licensing office in studio in Hollywood, which is where I was working.

So all of a sudden I’m making regional attractions instead of $80 million, it’s $8 million. Learning a lot in how to adapt these blockbuster movie properties to that is simpler in terms of design has to have the same sort of exciting cinematic impact, but on a regional scale.

Dan Heaton: I’m sure in a way I hate to call it a box, but you’re kind of, the constraints make you get really creative with what you’re doing because like you said, you’re not able to have the same heftier budget and yet still need to make something that’s going to be unique, I guess, in a way.

Dave Cobb: Yeah, yeah, totally. And it was a good education. I mean I was okay with that constraint, do you know what I mean? I grew up with Magic Mountain too, so it was like, oh, I get to play in this world now. Alright, that’s that I can add to the resume. But I ended up working there for a number of years and did the two big attractions would’ve been Italian Job and Survivor the Ride and also a revised version of the Tomb Raider ride, not the indoor one there, it’s been dark ride, but using the top spin with outdoor fire and water effect, different scale, done tons of things there. Worked on entertainment projects and shows and retail and restaurants and all that.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, there’s a lot there. And some of them too Italian Job were ones where I didn’t get to experience and now I’m like, oh, I wish I would’ve experienced the original version. But I have to ask you about this because I’m a big since the beginning fan of Survivor and I’d never experienced Survivor the Ride, but I know you’ve posted the video on your YouTube channel and everything and I wasn’t even really that familiar with it and watching that, seeing Jenna Morasca and Ethan Zahn the whole interactive intro. Yes, it made me laugh pretty hard. But I mean that in a good way. It’s very clever and I’d love to hear a little bit about what it was like to kind of create that and take what’s a spinner attraction and add some things that make it Survivor the Ride.

Dave Cobb: No, that’s a really valid question because just the term Survivor the Ride sounds so weird. That was again, corporate synergy. CBS was part of Viacom and was one of their big hit shows. And so they had done tiny little shows in the parks. They’d done little Survivor challenges and stuff. They’d done pop-up activations I think with talent like appearing in the parks and things wanted an attraction. I kept thinking, God, I don’t know.

They said, well, we know what the budget wants to be. Again, this is going back to constraints. They knew what the budget was going to be, which was very low. It wasn’t going to be even a coaster budget. Here are some ride systems and some flats that we really enjoy and one of them was the disco and I’d been on a disco coaster before and raved about it if people haven’t ridden it.

So not a flat spinner, it feels like a roller coaster. It’s very floaty. We put one in Warner Bros. World Abu Dhabi themed to the Ridler and it’s like the sleeper hit of the park because it’s just enough thrill and it’s a really unique movement and it’s really visually impressive. So when they showed me that they were interested in that, I thought, okay, that’s a good ride. I can sort of tribal that up a little and make it look like some sort of survival Survivor icon. But the gist of the show is not thrills.

The gist of the show is competition. We looked into, can we get anything on board that’s interactive, can we shoot at targets? Well now, not with that ride system, not without costing tons of money. Meanwhile at the park, it was at Great America in Northern California and they were looking for places to put it and the Ace NorCal blog did an interview with me. People can go see some of the artwork there. Originally we were scoping out a place to put it over the rapids ride, really like this plot of land where we could literally reem the entire rapids ride as Survivor Island and have two new attractions.

One was the rapids ride and one was this all interactive like photo ops, like you were on one foot on a pole or something. It was very ambitious, but it was way beyond the money they could afford, which is why it ended up going towards the back of the park and being standalone. The thing that came out of that was this idea of mission and where do you put it? The aha moment was when I realized a flush loading attraction, right? It’s not a continuous load coaster or dark ride. It is everybody waiting that you’re going to count ahead of time.

You know exactly how many people you need are waiting, watching the ride as people ride it. Your activity, your two teams, one is riding one, it’s doing something that affects their ride. Couldn’t affect the ride program at all, but the universal guy in me went, wow, we can do fire and water. Let’s do that. And so hot video games at the time was Dance Dance Revolution. So I came up with this crazy idea that we come up with a very simple stomping, clamping, stomping, clapping, chanting like tribal theme, people waiting in the little corral that have been counted out before the ride starts that they have to do and a video segment.

You can again see this on the YouTube channel that it shows that there are three points of success or fail and if you succeed, you spray the ride vehicle with water in these giant tribal masks set up next to the track and then if you get the third one, you’ve won the tribal challenge just like in, oh, and that of course means given fire.

So at the front marquee of the ride, the flames would go up if you won. So it was a silly little bit of interactivity that people really seem to love. I have people come up to me all the time telling me that, oh yeah, I did that when I was a kid and I’m so sad it’s gone again. One of the things that’s interesting about that is how simple the technology was. There was no hardware, there was no buttons or switches in the deck or anything. The loading deck was this giant wooden, wooden planks in a giant box, basic concrete box with wooden planks on top of it. Our engineer went, let me box something up and his laptop and he put in a couple of microphones underneath and we tested stomping and clapping and it registered.

He came up with an algorithm that looked for a certain amount accuracy to a beat and a certain amount of volume and that led us get past fail moments across a timeline, but it was literally just microphones nothing else and a very smart programmer. That then tied into the video system, which would change the playback of the clips with Ethan and Jenna, and it would go to the effect system that would blast out the water. So it’s very simple attraction that we tried to get the flavor of the series in a group way.

Dan Heaton: It’s funny because I look at it and I laugh at the video and stuff, but I’m like, if I went there I’d be totally down for that when they had it. I would’ve been like, yes, especially being a fan of the show. But one more thing, Ethan and Jenna had both won and it was still early on. I think the video shows up to the eighth season or so with the logos. So how did you end up with Ethan and Jenna as the representatives for it?

Dave Cobb: They were recommended by the show actually. So we reached out to find out who we could use and a lot of ’em were available, but the show creators in CBS were like Ethan and Jenna are great, both winners and they’re a couple at the time I think. So we were like, yeah, that actually works really great and they’re both so great on camera and just in person, but again, we’re making this with a skeleton crew of me and two or three other people that wasn’t shot in some fancy soundstage.

If you know that park, there are a bunch of covered event spaces that are basically big open air tents where they do picnics, dressed that out with tea balls and torches and a couple of plants and shot at there at the park. The whole thing was done for $5 and they were totally game for it and really cool. So yeah, it actually came from the network.

Dan Heaton: Well that’s interesting. Yeah, I think you got the right people because they kind have that enthusiasm for it that maybe some of the other winners would be a little too cool for school or something. Alright, well I want to ask you about, of course you already referenced it, your Warner Bros. World in Abu Dhabi, which I know you went and worked for Thinkwell and obviously probably wasn’t the only thing you worked on there, but that indoor park, I mean obviously I have not been to Abu Dhabi.

I don’t know when I will get there, but I see videos of that. I’ve watched a lot of the ride videos and everything just looks incredible and I’d love to hear about that project where you were the primary park-wide creative director, what it was like to lead such an ambitious project and entire park.

Dave Cobb: It was a once in a lifetime thing, obviously it’s what I was hired for at Thinkwell actually Craig, after Paramount Park sold back to sold to Cedar Fair, right? So debranding all the parks and Paramount wasn’t going to continue with the North American licensing anymore. That was my cue to elsewhere. I ran into Craig Hanna, my old pal from Universal who had now been at Thinkwell running for five years. As a matter of fact, I hired Thinkwell at Paramount once I freelanced for the while in the early days and then I hired them at Paramount to do some concepts and then in 2006 is when they sold the park. So late 2006, early 2007 I ran into Craig and he’s like, so how’s Paramount? I’m like, I dunno, I just left. And he’s like, what?

We need to talk. So we had this meeting and he’s like, we’re working on this giant indoor in the middle, it’s going to be Looney Toons in DC think. And I’m like, I could not say yes fast enough. I mean those are my childhood, Looney Toons in particular, and I knew that Warner Brothers as a brand, Craig and I talked about this at length early in the process, Warner Brothers as a brand had not really been given the full sort of immersive treatment.

It had been mainly smaller scale attractions and branded attractions, Six Flags in regional parks, but not Disney of detail. And so we said, well, if we get to do that, we’ll be first to do that. That’s going to be fun. So I’m extremely grateful for the experience. It was nearly 10 years of my life because I got hired in ‘97 and it opened in 2018.

The park started with a scope that was actually quite bigger than what you even see there now. It was kind of ridiculous that mid two thousands Dubai money and we all know that there was a big financial crash there. So the project went on hold for a couple of years dead. It kept simmering and percolating and they said it will come back and eventually it did around 2011 and that’s when we started refining the original designs into the park that you see too. It was an amazing effort, I think. Well, it was the biggest project of their history and I’m lucky and great been there during that.

Dan Heaton: Oh yeah, I can imagine. I mean that’s the thing. I live in St. Louis and we have a Six Flags here with a Bugs Bunny land and they have different characters. But again, seeing what you were able to do with these immersive lands there, I look at it and go, oh man, that’s what they need. So I mean you’re creating these immersive lands based on these properties and how were you able to do that where, because not everybody is going to know these characters amazingly enough, how did you kind of approach that setting up these brands in a way that made sense to people that might not have grown up with some of these characters?

Dave Cobb: Right. Well, when you work overseas, you learn a lot about your local audience. Before you start any of these, the first thing we learned is there are some of the characters they knew quite well. As a matter of fact, we found out that Warner Bros.’ most popular character set world is actually Tom and Jerry and the reason for that is it requires no translation.

So it has been shown on every TV set on the planet for the last 60, 70 years basically. So it is what I’ve heard is even more than Mickey Mouse just because of the exposure it got from the forties and fifties cartoons in syndication bully. And so you learn things like that. You learn that they do know Bugs and Daffy, but they don’t know some of the smaller ones. They know Tweedy, they didn’t know the Flintstones or Scooby-Doo really at all.

So you learn that you need to sort of introduce a good theme park is going to introduce these characters to everybody. You can’t make something just for fans. We used to have a saying at Thinkwell that was, we called it “waders, swimmers, and divers”. That’s the three audience segments; it’s the engagement pyramid for people who work in social media and things where 90% of your audience are waders to dip their toe in. They’re not going to go too deep. They may not know what they’re getting into. They may not know the brand you’re talking about above that are swimmers, those are your average fans. Those are the people who grew up with Looney Tunes to know the characters and the divers, which are people like me who know it very, very deep and you might piss ’em off, but you’re not going to lose them.

They already know what they’re in for. Then there’s another category we don’t talk about much, which is the MER-people. Those are the people that have grown gills and don’t surface very much. Those are the fans that are going to be angry at everything you do. So what we would approach our attraction designs with is that you have to have something in the attraction close to all three of these things collectively and individually.

It created this balance of producing and celebrating the characters but not necessarily full introductions. We don’t go out of our way to say this is Bugs Bunny, right? But attraction where he is, the star is a vaudeville show with Daffy at the park. So that’s introduction to that audience, especially a very young audience as big charactersThen you get a little bit more refined when you go into animation, which is this, it’s all the Looney Tuneas characters in 3D and it’s interactive and it’s for the audience.

So it was a balance of how do you celebrate characters in a way that acknowledges all audience recognition from low to high, yet also give fan service. That’s one of the crowning things of that park that I’m so proud of because the team that worked on it so wanted to make sure that if we went there, we’d see a detail and go, oh my God, they really get Looney Tunes, right? We wanted dozens of details like that that spoke to the true fans. So it really is about a balance of that. You can’t create something that is entirely fan service, but you got to add on a layer of that to wink at the audience of these things.

Dan Heaton: Totally, and just from what I’ve seen of the park, I mean whether it’s DC characters or like you mentioned Loony Tunes or there’s Flintstones, Scooby-Doo so much, it really seems like it hit on that. Well, I just have one more general question for you, Dave, if that works for you.

Dave Cobb: Sure, sure, sure.

Dan Heaton: Almost more than anyone I’ve talked with, you’ve worked in so many different segments of the industry and really came into it so young, and I’m just curious, I know there’s a lot of people that are young and want to be theme park designers, especially in the future when parks are able to open kind of like they did before this year. I’m curious, what type of advice would you give to somebody who now is entering the industry or even in school and kind of looking at what they want to do with a career?

Dave Cobb: Well, obviously there are programs there now that were not there 25 years ago when I started almost 30 now that weren’t there 10 or 15 years ago. You started to see early, late nineties, you started to see things like the ETC, the Entertainment Technology Center, Carnegie Mellon, which was I started hiring out of that group, and so it started, the university systems realized that not only from theme parks but also video games, that a multidisciplinary design approach is can be a career path.

What I mean by that is even if you work in video games, you can be an industrial designer, you can be an architect, you can be a master planner, you can a coder, you can be a lighting designer. It’s all the same skillset even if it’s in a virtual space. So theme parks are kind of the ultimate expression of that sort of generalism and broad of disciplines.

There are of those programs. Now, when you go to any industry event at IAPA or the TEA event, TEA has a group called TEA NextGen. If people are interested in this and studying anything like this in school, if your university has a NextGen group and if they don’t start one and contact the TEA and it’ll help you start one.

There are schools all over the country now that are focusing these multidisciplinary degrees, combination of design, lighting, audio and video design, architecture, master planning, interactivity, like anything you could think of that Walt termed imagineers so brilliantly so many years ago, a contract in 10 or 15 different, and that is a sea change in industry in that there’s more people who speak this language and they seek it out. Like there’s kids who came of age in high school in the theme park boom of the nineties, who then went, oh my goodness, I want to be an Imagineer.

I want to be a Universal designer. Where do I start? Obviously, the industry is really, really strapped right now for projects. I was unfortunately laid off from Thinkwell after 12 years, no hard feelings there. Of course, it’s all business and we were both heartbroken, but it’s such an unfortunate thing. But even before these big shakeups that’s happening is to tell people in these programs that you’re lucky that you’re getting this training because the previous generation or two of designers in this industry didn’t have this access this early.

You’re really, really lucky and you’ve also picked a career that is diving onto the head of a pin is unlike TV, movie, and game industries or even toy design, those all scale up. You do one thing and it goes a million places. It’s a huge demand for content funnel to a theme park is much slower, much more site-specific and not as often.

So it seems like this big giant industry because of Universal and Imagineering, it’s a pretty small industry compared to the megalithic movie industry and effects industry and video game industry, which I’ll use sort of similar talents. So what I tell people coming out of these programs now is the challenge of keeping this generalist view this sort of wide view of what the industry is, keep that generalist view because it lets you cast a wider net for jobs.

You may find things working for a museum, find things, working for a theater company at the venue. You may find stage management jobs. It’s not always going to be in a theme park or even for Universal Creative or Imagineering. It’s not always going to start with design the inroads to this industry in a park or in a facility. I’m right. I was a tour guide. I know plenty of Imagineers that used to be Jungle Cruise Skippers.

That generalism comes at a challenge with actually getting hired, which is to have skillset that you are great at to have one skillset that you can demonstrate. Also, say I’m into all this stuff as well, but the kids that come into me from these programs and I say, what do you want to do in the industry? They’re like, I want to be you. I’m like, Dave Cobb is not a skill. What is your skill?

And I would have to explain to them that your elevator pitch can’t be. I want to design attractions and be like Joe Rohde, it’s, I love attractions and theme parks and I have learned to do this skill really, really well. Here’s my portfolio and I am a quick learner and I love interacting with all the other disciplines. You still need a cake inside of that. I sing that is like, here’s the thing I kick ass at right now.

It’s going to change, right? You’re going to get hired and you’re going to get opportunities like I did that you get to do more and wear more hats, but not an industry that hires attraction designers. The title is Attraction Designer came from set design, came from theater direction, came from ride engineering. There’s so many different inroads that you have to enter with a skill and just know that pre-Covid to exceedingly difficult industry to get hired by it is easier now than when I started is communicating and networking in the industry.

My LinkedIn is wide open and I tell people, reach out and say hi. I’m happy to chat anytime. Nobody had that in the previous generation to me or even my generation coming up through theme parks. I didn’t have that kind of access to people. They’re all on social media, Joe Rohde, retweets people, and they freak out. So my advice is have a good skillset and be a good networker and have a really, really, really good elevator pitch for who you are.

Dan Heaton: That’s a great answer. I think there’s a lot there and you hit on a lot of good points, especially now with how the industry’s going to possibly look going forward, where specializing may be so important. But Dave, thanks so much for the time and for just being able to talk with me. It’s been awesome and I know just like you mentioned, if listeners want to contact you or even learn more about what you’re doing, are there the best places they should go to learn more about what you’ve done?

Dave Cobb: I have a main sort of landing page. It’s about me slash Dave Cobb about me, Dave Cobb. Just a quick site there that has all my social links and you can see linked to my LinkedIn and my YouTube and Twitter and all of that stuff there. I’m very active in the fan community online and with the burgeoning new students coming out into the industry on LinkedIn. I’m happy to have those conversations with people. There’s lots of stuff happening in the past couple months and moving forward. A lot of us are doing workshops and online creative mentorships all happening, and you’ll see links of that in especially my LinkedIn, if people are interested in those kinds of things. There are plenty of those going on right now.

Dan Heaton: Well, awesome. Well, Dave, thanks again and it was great to have you on the podcast.

Dave Cobb: Thanks much, Dan. Talk soon.