134. Disney Imagineer Chris Runco on the Model Shop, Star Tours’ RX-24, and More

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One of my favorite parts of doing this podcast is learning stories about the people that created Disney’s theme parks. Their paths to reach Walt Disney Imagineering are always so different. A perfect example is Chris Runco, who started as a portrait artist at Disneyland in 1970. Six years later, he joined WDI in the model shop alongside legendary Imagineers. His skills as an artist led him to a remarkable career of more than 45 years with Disney.

Chris joins me on this episode of The Tomorrow Society Podcast to talk about his background and work at Disney. EPCOT Center was just getting started when Chris arrived. He worked on the models and was closely involved with classic attractions like World of Motion. Chris also had the chance to interact with amazing designers like Marc Davis. His stories are fascinating and show the importance of those mentors. Chris also worked on Big Thunder Mountain Railroad during the late ’70s.

One of Chris’ most exciting projects was the original Star Tours in the mid-’80s. He designed robot characters for that attraction, including droids for the queue. Chris also created the pilot RX-24, memorably voiced by Paul Reubens. The look of this rookie on his first flight came from a wide range of sources, including junk found anywhere. Chris describes the full design process and what it took to bring RX-24 to life. He also explains what it’s like to see his creation in Oga’s Cantina at Galaxy’s Edge today.

Show Notes: Chris Runco

Follow Chris Runco on Instagram at his new account at @chrisrunco52.

Check out the TEA award-winning Marine World Carousel (Carrousel des Mondes Marins) at the Les Machines de l’île.

Make a one-time contribution and buy me a Dole Whip!

Transcript

Chris Runco: We literally picked him up when they bought off on him, and I did have a meeting that was my first time showing something to George was, I remember John Hench coming in and Marty and Randy into one of the conference rooms and we put all this artwork up and George came in too. And so I got to show him the robot and an inevitable George Lucas way, he nodded a little bit and said something like, yeah, it’ll work. High praise.

Dan Heaton: That is former Disney Imagineer Chris Runco talking about presenting his designs for the original Rx robot for Star Tours to the great George Lucas; you’re listening to the Tomorrow Society Podcast.

(music)

Dan Heaton: Thanks for joining me here on Episode 134 of the Tomorrow Society Podcast. I am your host, Dan Heaton. We are back this week with another cool interview podcast. I was super excited to talk with my guest Chris Runco about his more than 45 years working for Disney with most of that time being for Walt Disney Imagineering.

There was so much to cover and one thing I’ve learned as I’ve talked to more former Imagineers is that I tend to put together a list of the big high points that I want to talk about, and I always underestimate how many great stories there are about every step of the process, even just their background, how they got interested in becoming designers, joining Disney, kind of the early days there, and then individual projects. There’s so much more to cover and that is definitely the case this week where if you think about Chris Runco, the name is probably most familiar for several reasons.

One is through the Rx robot, of course, voiced by Paul Ruebens from Star Tours, which we totally talk about during this show. The other one is his design of Typhoon Tilly from Typhoon Lagoon and a lot of that development with the boat on top of the mountain. And it says a lot that we didn’t even get that far into his career on this episode, but I promise you there will be a future part two because there’s just a lot to cover and Chris is such a great storyteller.

Going back to talking about his time working as a portrait artist at Disneyland, beginning in 1970, then joining Disney Imagineering, then called WED, around the time of Epcot, being involved with World of Motion, working with legendary Imagineers like Marc Davis. So many things just at the start, and then of course getting involved with Star Tours and like you heard on that clip at the start, what would be a normal interaction, I think for many with George Lucas, and that’s just a small glimpse at some of the fun stories that Chris has, including going to Galaxy’s Edge now and getting to see Rx as a DJ.

He did so much at Disney well beyond his work on Star Tours and we get into a lot of it here and we will dig even further in the future. So let’s get to it. Let’s go talk to Chris Runco.

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Dan Heaton: I am excited because you’ve worked on so many cool things, but I would love to even get started before that. I’m curious, when you were younger, how did you get interested in becoming a designer and ultimately end up working at Disney?

Chris Runco: Serendipity is one of my favorite words. In fact, I read a quote from Walt, which I just saw recently where he was talking about so many of the things he and his colleagues did was involved serendipity, where you find things that you didn’t know you were looking for based on, there’s an old Persian tale called the Princes of Serendip, very ancient tale that he got that from. It’s interesting to look back at it. So I learned to draw and I learned to build things very early in life. My dad did carpentry. He was a civil engineer and my mom was an artist. She did a lot of watercolors.

So I always had those influences as I was growing up and did quite a variety of things in terms of everything from doing art projects. My mom still has somewhere, some of my artwork from when I was in kindergarten and first grade, I think I did a portrait of George Washington and Abe Lincoln when I was in kindergarten or first grade, and she saved it, which I guess was a little precocious for a five-year-old or six-year-old. Anyway, so those influences were always around and I built a lot of things.

So here’s something, and again, I’ve looked back at this and now I see the pattern to it. I studied all kinds of art or learned all kinds of art when I was in high school and well even before that, but in high school I did graphic arts, I did theater arts. I’ve designed sets, I designed floats for our high school to put in the city parade complete with special effects. I built a flying saucer, an air cushion vehicle actually, which worked like the Flying Saucers at Disneyland from years ago. I built one of my own with a couple of friends of mine. We actually had one that flew around my driveway about 10 feet in diameter, very loud. It used a three horsepower engine and an actual wood airplane propeller. So it sounded like a wood chipper, all these things.

I had no idea there was a pattern that this was leading me anywhere. When I went to college, I signed up as a physics major because I really enjoyed science, which also came in handy years later when I was in special effects, but nobody where I grew up in La Habra, California, nobody knew anything about Imagineering or theater really, that there were careers in theater design.

One of my art teachers told me, why don’t you be a medical illustrator? You like science and you like art, and that’s the best he could think of for how you put those two things together. And I’d never heard of Imagineering or I’ve gone, I’d gone to Disneyland from when I was as early as I could probably when I was about five years old, was my first trip. But those were the kind of things I was doing. A lot of artwork, a lot of different kinds of artwork, special effects, and it was all stuff I really enjoyed.

So I went to college as a physics major, got talked out of that in one semester. One semester of calculus did me in as far as being a physics major, and then I started taking art and literature classes and that’s what I ended up getting a degree in. What got me to Disney was when I was, after my freshman year, I was looking for steady work, looking for some summer job. La Habra is just the north part of Orange County. Almost everybody said maybe I could get a job at Disneyland.

So I went down and applied for a job that first summer I went in and they looked at my resume and I remember the guy looking at me and saying, oh, it says here you do caricature. Now I signed up like everybody, I said, how about being a ride operator? I thought that was very cool.

I did go for a job and the HR guy looked at me, the recruiter and said, I see here that you’ve done caricatures. Could you do portraits? And I said, sure, not really knowing if how well that would, I could, but I thought, yeah. He said, well, we need people on our Main Street art festival doing portraits, so why don’t you talk to one of them, one of the people that manages that.

So I waited there a little bit and the manager from the art festival came over and told me the kind of thing that they were looking for, and he said, why don’t you go here? I’ll take you over. We’ll get some of the materials and you go back to your and drop some samples for me and bring them back in a couple of weeks. So I got the chalk and I got the paper from ’em and went back to school and drew everybody, all the guys in my dorm.

I drew pictures of them. One of ’em still has one of ’em at least, and to me it looks terrible now. But nevertheless, I did a whole bunch of them, brought ’em back a couple weeks later, and he took one look. He thumbed through the pictures in about five minutes and went, okay, when can you start that summer? This would’ve been maybe a month later, I started at Disneyland. And one little interesting side note about that is, so I start on my first day, they called me in, and this was literally like two days after I’d left college that year.

They called me in and put me in orientation because I was in the merchandise department meant learning how to use cash registers. So I was sitting in a meeting with all these new Disney employees learning how to use a cash register, which was boring as heck. And I had the good fortune. About 10 minutes into it, 10-15 minutes into it, I got this tap on my shoulder and it was the guy who was the supervisor out at the art festival. He says, we’re shorthanded today. Can you start now?

And I went, yeah, fine. Anything to get away from this cash register class. So I got up now, he says, there’s one problem, you have a mustache and you have long sideburns. You can’t do that. So we’re the first stop is the costume place, and then we’re going right over to the barbershop. I don’t even know if they still have a barbershop backstage, but they had a barbershop. So I got my costume and a smock, and I went over to the barbershop and the guy took one look at me and he just handed me the razor and said, you do it.

So I sat there in the barbershop, shaved the mustache off, trimmed up the sideburns, which were down to my jaw. They could only be to the middle of the ear, got shaved up. The guy handed me my tray, my chalk. I went out and started to work. The good thing about that was I had no time to get nervous. I just sat down and I started sketches.

And that’s how I started at the park. It was great for somebody who was interested in art because it was basically, I was working each day doing life drawing for eight hours a day. People would sit down in front of me and I would draw their portrait and then the next person would sit down and I’d do another one. So I did that for four summers, right? All through college. My dad was very happy because he basically didn’t have to give me any spending money for college or any money for books.

I was covering it with my job at Disneyland, and it was great experience. I loved it. It was a great place to work. I think I started with night shifts the first year, but after that I did day shifts. And like I said, I also appreciated the fact that of the jobs at Disneyland, you got a chance to actually sit down and talk with the guests.

They’d be there in front of me for 10 to 15 minutes with their family usually, or friends around me. So I’d have this conversation. I had great conversations with people from all around the country with people from other countries as well. I had the good fortune that I would get requested a lot when you came up to art festival. You could just hand ’em your money. There were at most, maybe about 11 of us working at a time, often down to maybe three in times, but often up to eight or 11.

But if you saw somebody whose style you particularly liked, you could request them. I got a lot of requests and that was good because it kept the business steady. You wouldn’t have to wait around very long. I wouldn’t have to wait for a long around very long before another person sat down. So I kept a steady income going. We were getting paid by the portrait, and so the more portraits you did, the more money you made. So that was my first job right there on East Street on that little side street on Main Street. At the time, the Market House had the waltz collection of player pianos both inside Market House in a special room and in the store.

They had one out on the street next to us, which was fun because anytime somebody dropped a diamond at, we would hear these great ragtime hits coming out of this player piano. The bad thing was because it was outside, it got out of tune often. So often we’d be sitting there listening to Scott Joplin, but kind of out of tune. So no, I really enjoyed that. It was a great location. We’d get busy in the morning and then in the evening as people left were our busier times. It was a good start.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, I can imagine that. And like you mentioned, it’s different than something even if you were doing ride operations and you were just doing the same thing over and over and just telling people to sit down or whatever, you’re actually able to have interaction. So I’m sure that made it more interesting. But I’m curious how then from that you ultimately, it was six years later, but then you moved on to Walt Disney Imagineering and then ultimately got to work in the Model Shop.

Chris Runco: So there were a couple of steps to this. The first thing is, like I said, I did this for all the years through college and after college and then became permanent that summer after college. I had kind of a broad art major. I was an art and literature major, which I kind of fabricated at the last minute with the help of the dean of the school. I’d gotten a little more art experience, not very much. I also did cartoons.

I was an editorial cartoonist all through college and got a lot of plaudits for that, and I still enjoy doing that today. So anyway, after college, I needed to find, they made me permanent, but when you started out permanent on art at art festival, you got a total of maybe 8- 12 hours a week. You would come in on the weekends because it wasn’t busy enough during the day, during the week.

I was just not making ends meet with that few hours in a day in a schedule. I did a little bit of freelancing, doing the portraits elsewhere just around town. But that wasn’t a great way to make money either. So I was interested in finding something else, and I love how analog this is compared to today, but one day as I was leaving that first, after the first summer, so this would’ve been early ‘74 I think.

So I’d been there as an art festival that long. Anyway, in ‘74, I’m walking out past the Harbor gate where all the employees went out and we had time clocks where we clocked our time card out and next to it was a bulletin board where they had the latest deals, people selling cars, apartments for rent, et cetera, et cetera. I’m looking at it and I noticed a 3×5 card there, and it said, wanted model builder for small Disney company to build props and models.

I thought, oh, that sounds interesting. That might be something I could do. So I called them up and the next week they had me come in for an interview and the guy I interviewed with, a wonderful guy who originally, he was from Imagineering actually. This was a little company called McGlasson, and their stock and trade was, they built shooting galleries or they maintained shooting galleries, like the old shooting galleries at Disneyland was part of their work. They provided all the lead pellets and they maintained the guns and all that kind of thing for the shooting galleries.

They were starting to do electronic shooting galleries. I think that’s about the time that we had put in electronic shooting galleries into Disneyland, into Adventureland and Frontierland. Most people don’t remember. There was one in Adventureland too. Anyway, and they were building props for those galleries and they were also building arcade machines.

Anyway, I went in and interviewed, and what they’d done is they’d brought a couple of Imagineering people down to help them kind of develop their design work and their prop building skills. So Jim Elliott, who ran the carpenter shop at Imagineering, he was down who was originally from Thailand. He was the Model Shop supervisor there. So I interviewed with him and he liked my stuff even though it was sort of just a box full of props and sketches and things.

I had an animator’s table that I built for myself with the carpentry. So he was impressed with and some paper mâché, a little paper mâché. So he liked what he saw. And the boss, he introduced me to the guy who ran the place and they hired me. So I started work there, quit at Disneyland and was transferred to McGlasson. And I was there for a few years and I did get to work with a handful of people who had come. People would come there temporarily from Imagineering for a few months to work on projects.

So I got to meet some of these folks. Some of these guys told me, you ought to think about getting a job up at Imagineering. At WED, we called it WED, most of the time, you ought think about getting a job at WED, the Model Shop is adding people because we’re about to start this big new project called Epcot, and so they’re starting to build up. So after a couple of years at McGlasson, I took their advice and I called up and I’m arranged to go up for an interview. I sent in an application and I got an interview arranged kind of on the spur of the moment. The guy called me up and said, can you be down here Monday at eight? Wow. And I’m like, okay, fine.

So again, no time for fear. So I pile all this stuff into all my resume or portfolio. I literally had a box and it had paper mache pieces and photos of things I built on these arcade machines and stuff. Oh, it also meant Sam McKim because Sam McKim designed a lot of the things for the shooting galleries and for the arcade machines. I go up and show up at the front door, and he was there to meet me.

He says, I wish I’d known you were coming. I would’ve helped you get ready for this. Oh, okay. But they ushered me into this room and I discovered what I’d walked into was the end of a meeting with all the executives of the company, and I sat down at the table with my box full of stuff, and I was surrounded by who I found out later, Marty Sklar, Claude Coats.

Let’s see, Ken Anderson might’ve been there. Bill Martin, the architect was there, Orlando friend. Anyway, it was like the top heads of Imagineering were around this table, and I walk in with my box full of stuff, and so I start pulling things out and showing off, and they’re handing ’em around and they’re looking at him. And Marty picked up this one, I never forgot this. Marty picked up one of my sketchbooks and he started to riffle through it, and I went, oh, that’s just a sketchbook, just preliminary sketches. He said, I really love to see people’s sketchbooks. It shows you how they think.

Never forgotten that. But anyway, that went on for 20 minutes, and then I piled everything back in the box and said, thank you very much and walked out. And he was shaking his head going, yeah, we should have organized that stuff, but it’s okay, whatever. So I left, and then they told me, now they may not get back to you right away, so just check in with the HR people once in a while. So about once a week I’d call up and say, Hey, so what’s going on? Anything happening? And they’d say, we’ll get back to you.

We’ll get back to you. About a month later, I got a call from the recruiter up there and he said, yeah, we’d like you to start in our Model Shop. How soon could you start? And I said, well, I should give two weeks notice. So I did, and two weeks later, which was July 1976, and that’s how I remember, I thought freedom. It was, well, let’s see. No, it would’ve been like June or July, I think it was July. So July of ‘76, 1976, I started in the Model Shop. This began that part of the journey.

I was so excited to be there. Actually, I think my supervisor at McGlasson was happy to see me go. He and I hadn’t hit it off that well, that’s another story. But anyway, of course my friends were real excited and I went up and sure enough, the first thing, well, almost the first thing I was put on is starting to build models for Epcot pavilions like the World of Motion. I did a lot of model work for the original World of Motion, which is where I got to be working with Claude Coats and Ward Kimball was there at the time working on gags with Claude.

And so that was my intro to the Model Shop. The very first model I worked on was a model of Discovery Bay, a land that never happened in that form at Disneyland. This was Tony Baxter and Tim Kirk and who was working on the circus land part of it.

But Tony had this, and you’ll see that in Tony’s artwork, the Discovery Bay with a Hyperion blimp or dirigible in the center of it, a really wonderful idea. It connected right to Big Thunder, but my very first job in the Model Shop at Imagineering was to make miniature Dumbos for that model. I think that would’ve been probably 1/16th or 1/20th scale.

So that meant these little Dumbos were about three eighths of an inch long, and I carved them out of wood with little cardboard ears and made this little Dumbo ride that was all of maybe two and a half or three inches in diameter. And that was my assignment for this model, which the model still exists. It’s a gorgeous model, and they’ve kept it all years because it’s such a great, I’ll call it, example of the creativity around the place with so, and a lot of people worked on that model, probably 20 of us.

Dan Heaton: Well, I have to ask you a little bit more. I’m such a fan of the original Epcot. I went there a lot as a kid in the eighties and World of Motion, just such a classic attraction. So I’d love to know a little more about working on that, but also just for you, what kind of it was like to join during the time that was so active with Epcot and just with the atmosphere there. Like you said, there were a lot of legendary Imagineers, but then also some kind of second generation people like Tony Baxter and others. What was that like to work during that time?

Chris Runco: For someone like myself who has always been a very curious type, it was heaven. It was like I was working in the middle of a place where the walls were covered with artwork that changed every week. It was like working in an art gallery with all this beautiful art, and there were new ideas and there were ideas that had been up there for a while. Marc Davis’s office, they had what they called the Gold Coast, which is in the front of the building, the windows on the first and second floor with windows out to the outside.

That was the Gold Coast on the bottom floor, and that was Marc Davis and these guys all had offices down there, and Marty had one in the corner where he stayed through his whole career, and you could go anywhere, and people were very open, and I would wander around those halls anytime I wasn’t in the middle of a project, and Marc’s office always had big storyboards.

The 4×8 storyboards covered with his artwork, and he was always pitching something like that. I got a kick out of it years later. One of the things he had on his wall during that period was the Snow Queen. He had these wonderful thematic sketches of a ride that he was interested in doing that. They just called it the Snow Queen. It was these beautiful sketches of polar bears and penguins, ice skating, and this beautiful queen with a shimmering outfit all made with snowflakes and things.

Of course, these are ideas that if you go back and look, the crew that did Frozen, they picked up these sketches to do that. They’re part of the reference they refer to about how they designed the movie because this is a ride that Marc never saw built, but he loved the idea. So he kept it kind of as to keep people it fresh in people’s minds.

He still had artwork from the great Western River Expedition, which was going to be a western version of sort of a Pirates out in that you’d go out in the Model Shop and here were remnants of it, like model the one inch to the foot models that you could walk through. They were up on platforms at head height, and you could walk through it and see this beautiful work, which is the same design tool they’d used for Pirates and Mansion. So here were these wonderful models.

There was a model of Mineral King, one of the iterations of Mineral King, the Disney effort to build a ski resort up there. At one point, they’d kind of shove ’em off in the corner and they’d sit there gathering dust for a few years. Then finally maybe they’d pack ’em away. And unfortunately, a lot of ’em, they would just destroy ’em rather than save them.

But that’s the kind of thing that was around on every wall and in every corner. Of course to this day, the sculpture shop is like a magnificent museum. There’s two sculpture shops, and this still happens as we would have our drawing classes in there, and you’re surrounded by cabinets on the walls that are full of models. The original models that were used that were done by Blaine Gibson and Adolfo Procopio and these wonderful sculptors that worked with them, and it’s literally you’re looking at the models from Mansion and Pirates, and then the Epcot models are in there now and more recent projects, but they still use those as a sculpture shop, and they still have wonderful sculptors working there.

But if you look at, there’s some clips in one of the recent Imagineering videos that they posted on social media where they tour, or one of the young designers watch you through briefly into one of the sculpture shops.

But we could walk in at any time you walk in and go, Hey, Blaine, what’s going on? Adolfo taught me, one of the next projects I did was working on Big Thunder. That was like the project where I got to build models for it and then do special effects later. So I was working on those models and Tony Baxter carved the original quarter inch to the foot model of the, well, first he did a small, I think, 20th scale model of Big Thunder.

He’s the concept designer that came up with it, and then we build a quarter inch scale model of that. I was working on the model with him. Well, he carved ’em out of clay, and then Adolfo showed me how to build plaster model plaster casting to cast those clay models into plaster, which we did because that’s the way we figured out rock work.

Again, to look at this, I look at it now and I feel like an old geezer. I go, yeah, back in the day. But the way we did build Big Thunder is we built this quarter inch to the foot scale model of the whole thing beautifully painted and everything. Then I made these plaster casts of the mountain. We sliced the plaster cast every inch when we sliced one horizontally and then one vertically north south, one vertically east, west. Then we drew those contours onto paper, and then the architects took those all very manual process. Now, this is done by scanners. We have a room.

You roll the mountain into a room, the laser scanners whip around it a few times, and you have the whole thing digitized, and then the whole thing can be designed, the steel and everything can be done. So I go back there and Adolfo showed me how to use plaster and silicone and make these models or make these castings of the model parts to go forward.

So we built Big Thunder for Florida, and right next to it we had the model of Big Thunder for California, and I jumped back and forth between the two, and that’s where I got to do my first design work too. Imagineering in general, there were no harsh lines between skills, between skill sets. And what I mean by that is there were oftentimes where the designers would say would be down there and like a Claude or Tony did it and Mark and all of them, and they’d say, okay, you have some ideas, or how could we handle this? You go, well, let me try.

And they’d have you make additions to it. So I’m working on Big Thunder, and Tony came to me one day and said, we’ve got these characters. Remember we went on, we walked. That’s another story is I got to walk over Disney.

We walked the Nature’s Wonderland ride over and over again before we pulled it out or before we demoed it, because that’s where we were going to put Big Thunder. And so I was very familiar with it. Well, he came to me one day in the Model Shop. He said, we have these leftover animals from Nature’s Wonderland. Have you got any ideas about what we could do with them?

And so I sketched out some ideas, little vignettes, using this little napkin sketch of this little dynamite shack with these skunks around it and this goat eating dynamite. And he really liked it. He said, okay, let’s do it. So I sculpted those characters and I put ’em on the model. And so that’s how the Big Thunder goat started. So that was my first design work. The other thing I did was I was building the model of the load building, and he had originally designed the load building for Florida, and he said, I’m still having problems with this.

Something here doesn’t work. So I did some architectural design of some additional shade elements and props and things on the building, and he really liked it. So then he sent the architects down. I think Ahmad Jafari was working on it, one of our great architects. But the architects came down to look at my model to put the design work I’d done into the architectural drawings. So I got to do a little architectural design, did some, I carved rock work on the thing.

Like I said, I did character vignettes, so I got to do all kinds of things and that ability to try things to kind of say, Hey, how about this, that we had a lot of people who went from the model shop into design work because of that reason. Because I mean, Joe Rohde’s one of ’em, Skip Lange was another, Kim Irvine started in the Model Shop, and she’s been Art Director of Disneyland for many, many years.

Just an awful lot of people. That was like our training ground. That was Maggie Elliott, who was also Maggie Irvine. Originally. She was Dick Irvine’s daughter, and she became manager. She worked in the Model Shop. Years later, she became our manager in the Model Shop, and years later she became vice president, one of the vice presidents of Imagineering, vice president of the creative division. And I believe she might’ve been the first, if not one of the, not the first vice president, female vice president at Disney actually. Maggie used to say, the Model Shop is the heart of our design process. So I was right there. So yeah, I was a kid in a candy store. It was hard work at times and a lot of pressure at times, but we were just surrounded by all these layers of art and design and the process.

It was a great education. That was my postgraduate degree was Imagineering university. Totally. And everybody was so open. They often talk about this when our group gets together of folks that have retired from Disney and say, weren’t we lucky to work with those people because they were all so nice. They were all so open.

One of my favorite memories of all time is, like I said, I would go lurk in the hallways looking at all the artwork anytime I could, a couple of times I’d go in and I got a chance to talk to Marc Davis. One time I sat there and he just literally showed me how his process for drawing his drawings, any artist who has to crank out a lot of drawings has to come up with a process for that where he’d do a sketch, then he’d lay down a piece of paper and do it in ink partly.

Then he would have that paper mounted, and then he would do his watercolor and then come back and touch it up with ink. I was sitting and he was describing it to me and showing the pens he used and the paper he used and so forth and so on. He was my hero. It’s like if there’s ever anybody who designed I wanted to imitate and borrow from as much as possible as Marc, we were surrounded by so many wonderful artists.

You could just soak it in if you were open to it, roaming around everywhere he went. Not to mention walking across, walking across the walkway to the north and walking into the MAPO building where you’d walk down Pelican Alley and surrounded by pieces of a Lincoln and squirrels and ghosts and all this stuff where they’d actually built the monorail, the original monorail, and where they were building in this great building, building animation, the animation for the parks. My God, it was, and it still is so rich in all the design work that’s done by all the tremendous talent that’s there.

Dan Heaton: Oh yeah. I mean, I can’t imagine just being able to work with so many talented people from the past, like you mentioned Marc Davis and so many others, and you referenced the Snow Queen and Western River Expedition. Both. I recently read the book about Marc Davis that Chris Merritt and Pete Doctor did. And the info on those attractions is so interesting. I mean, they’re look spectacular and wow, it’s too bad. I mean, I know there’s so many projects that Imagineering has had that have never been made, but it’s too bad that those didn’t totally come to pass.

But I would like to ask you, I know like you mentioned, you moved into design work and ultimately then during the ‘80s, were doing more on that side of it. And a big one, of course is getting to work on the original Star Tours, which such a cool project, first really big project. I mean, there was Captain EO, but first really big Star Wars with George Lucas and everything else that I would love to hear from you too about that project and of course, what it was like to work on the Rx-24 robot pilot.

Chris Runco: Well, yeah, this was one of my favorite times at Imagineering. I remember actually when Star Wars came out and there was this rumble about it in the model shop, everybody going, you got to go see this. You got to go see this. I will never forget seeing it for the first time. It was such a wonderful combination of unique storytelling and great technology. The people that did that, I got to meet some of those folks later on as we were working on Star Tours, people like Richard Edlund and Dennis Muren and George himself at some point.

But so we were fans, we were all Star Wars fans, and it was kind of a break that got me, well, we can talk about that later. But I had this little side trip, which is I was in the Model Shop, and at one point the special effects had shrunk down to a handful of people and they were trying to build up too.

They came over and asked Bob Sewell, who ran the Model Shop, have you got somebody you can loan to us? Because we need some folks to build mock-ups. And he volunteered me. So I went over to work temporarily in special effects doing mockups. Well, after I’d been there about six months, Bill Novi and Mark Fuller who were running the place came to me and said, we really like you here. We think you fit in really well. Can you stay? And I went, well, yeah, I’m enjoying it. Let’s do that. I’ll stay.

So I ended up spending eight years in special effects and spent most of Epcot designing special effects for the different attractions, which was huge in a lot of ways. But to go on, let’s jump ahead to the Star Wars thing. So Epcot, we complete Epcot. I’m literally down in the trenches when we’re working on Epcot.

My fond memory of opening day at Epcot was that I was underneath World of Motion at the time working on the fog boxes in the finale scene. And we’d, we’d get a credit card and slide ’em through the nozzle or we’d clam out to keep ’em running. Well, and we’re in there in the dark below this platform with flashlights. And my friend, special effects designer John Brockmeyer, says to me, or is standing right next to me or sitting right next to me because he couldn’t stand up and we’re cleaning these things.I looked at him and I said, Hey, John, it’s nine o’clock I’ve got just opened. And he goes, that’s great. Hand me a wrench.

It was a few weeks later I got to be at the grand opening, but the day it opened, I was inside trying to get things fixed. I had spent, and actually I just wonder little, the sidetrack here is that I had actually art directed that scene, the construction of that scene for World of Motion, the finale scene. And so Bill Novi laughed one time. He said, we’ve kind of got our own in-house art director here, which is nice because since my background is mostly art with some science, I was working at these great technological geniuses.

Bill designed the first fog boxes. I built them for him and then helped them install ’em. I learned how to do projection and I would do the artwork for the projections. And so they called me their in-house art director. And actually one of my friends, Craig Wanger, he said, yeah, art director, another term for that is you’re our random number generator.

I guess that’s an engineer’s way to look at it. So I was doing this hybrid. I was a special effects designer, but I was getting to do some, I would art direct the mockups. I would build props and design the mockups so we could show off the effects like lava and things that we’d come up with so people could see it in their context. So that also led into the background. Well, so Epcot is built.

We hit this kind of a nadir where we started off kind of with work and losing a few people, but then we hit one of the lowest points that Disney company’s ever had where it almost got sold off; we ended up with very little work, and most of Imagineering was laid off. We went from special effects, went from approximately 150, 200 people as a department down to 10 over the course of about six months.

And I was one of the 10. So there were this whole handful of us left in special effects, so few of us that they actually moved us into the Model Shop, which had also shrunk. So there I was working in the Model Shop again, but as a special effects designer. Well, in the middle of that, one of the things they did is they had a contest, and the contest was to design walkaround characters for Epcot.

So I threw in some ideas and I won. I designed a couple of walkaround characters. So as a result, I got to be, first I won the contest, which was very cool. But then I got to build a couple of mock-up robots to take to Epcot. One of them, he looked like kind of a salt shaker. We actually borrowed one that a small company had built and then dressed him in an Epcot costume and had him walking around.

And it worked really well. I designed a couple others, one that looked like a rollaround TV antenna. It was like a tripod on wheels, and it had this antenna up above. The antenna would a little bit like the Luxo Lamp. The antenna would look at you and talk to you and nod up and down.

So I got to design a bunch of these. I was doing this while I was, again, I talk about the lack of barriers. And I wanted to do it. I asked. I got into it.

The contest was one in, and I started doing some design work as well as doing special effects design. I designed a couple of these roll around characters then the big day. But then somewhere along this low point, Tony was talking to us in the Model Shop one day, a few of us, and said that they’d worked up this idea about this using a simulator ride.

They thought Star Wars would be a perfect connection with us. We’d never done anything with a company, an outside product like that. But there was so much connection between which Lucas had talked about himself between Lucasfilm and Star Wars and Disney so much in common that it was sort of a natural fit. So Randy Bright was a big proponent of the simulators that they’d seen in England, fusion simulators, flight simulators. And they’d come up with this idea to combine that with Star Wars. We all heard the ske that George was actually going to come to Imagineering.

And I remember lurking outside the conference room. My recollection is that he was there for a late meeting, a five o’clock meeting. And so they were in there, and we of went and we knew where that conference room is, and we were sort of walking around the hallway, sort of looking over to keep an eye on the door, see if we’d see him.

And the meeting went on, and I think around 6:30 or something, it finally broke up and somebody said, hey, they’re out of there. So we all kind of zoomed down the hall, missed seeing George, but Tony was there and he was telling us it went over really well. George was really excited about doing Star Wars or doing a Star Wars attraction, and that he was really enthused about the ness possibilities. And then Tony said, but he has an idea. He says, one way to make this more dimensional, instead of being in a box with a screen in front of you is there ought to be a pilot. George had actually drawn this little stick figure of the screen with this little stick figure out in front. He said, yeah, there ought to be a pilot character that’ll make the experience much more dimensional.

And Tony showed that to us, said, wow, that’s so cool. Tony said, well, why don’t you come up with some ideas for it? So he didn’t have to tell me twice. So I went off and started sketching, and they handed that these ideas kept growing. They had a team of designers working on Star Tours already. So they started taking a shot at it, and I think a bunch of us took a shot at what this pilot could be.

But I went off and I did a whole series of little storyboard sketches of what this thing could look like, and I got sick, bad timing, and I was home with bronchitis, laying in bed, sketching this thing out. But I came back about a week later and I gave the sketches to Tony and they had their meeting. Anyway, he came and found me in the Model Shop about a day later and said, Chris, they want to do your robot.

And I went, wow, this is cool. I was thrilled. It was so cool to be a part of it. So I started working up a design. The first thing I did was some more sketches and about how I worked, but I built him at the time. We were also excited about robotics. And if you remember at Epcot, one of the great original shows, there was Bird and the Robot, the Bob Rogers and his company had designed a fantastic show. It was one of the big hits of opening day where a robot arm had become a character.

So we were into robotics, I’d gone to robotics conferences with some of the other effects and animation guys. Anyway, we’re onto that. So some of the early versions of Rx were more like a robot arm with a head on it and some arms attached to the arm and things.

So I had a lot of different versions, but I settled on this thing. I called it the Swiss Army knife version. And that was partly to do with the fact that he was going to be in this sort of cockpit area open on one side, but with a console and a console on the wall. So he had to reach in a lot of directions. And that’s why I kind of narrowed down to that where I thought, okay, I’ll give him a bunch of arms.

So he can tackle it all at once, but he is got to be able to look at the screen and then pivot around and look at people. He is got to have this rotation. So it was about a foot tall and the parts moved, and then I did some real careful drawings, and then I built a full-sized maquette of him out of foam and wood.

There’s a big tube of paper that the blueprint machines use or used at the time. It’s like a three-foot-long cardboard tube with the paper on it that you put in the blueprint machines, and it had these plastic plugs that went in, and so to hubs that would connect to the machine, well, those are the wrists. I pulled ’em out and they had this great shape. So I made the wrists for him out of that. I went and found junk at the local junk store. We had aerospace junk because I was in Burbank, so it was Lockheed and aerospace junk. So I went and got little brackets and things that I really liked, and that’s when I found, I just told this story to some other folks. That’s when I found this “remove before flight” ribbon. I said it was perfect for him.

I stuck him in the side of him. One other thing it had is he had erector set parts in him, because I still have my old erector set from when I was a kid. So when I made the visor, I needed something to make pivot points and all for the visor to pop up and down and for his head to rotate. I got my erector set parts, and actually his head had erector set parts for the animated pieces in him. So I built this full-size M. In the meantime, the design was progressing.

The design team was working on, we built a full-size cab out of plywood so we could literally mock up in full size what the cab was going to look like on the inside. And that was Greg Wilzbach, and Gill Kepler and Shim Yokoyama was working on the queue line, the queue area, the ride, which is going to be very important for the experience, as I’m sure you understand.

So this great team of people, and I was plugging along on little Rx. By the way, the other thing is the early sketches show him looking very wild-eyed. And that’s because the first version of Rx was called Crazy Harry. And the idea was that he went haywire this robotic, this robot who was steering the ship went haywire. Then that explains why we end up in all these crazy places.

After sometime the team came up with probably with George’s input, came up with, no, let’s make him this rookie pilot who he screws up because he is just starting out. And so he became Rx, and that Tom Fitzgerald was writer on this, and Tony and Randy that the whole group of them. Anyway, he became that. So I altered him to his face to suggest that, and we put the full-size Rx maquette in the full-size cab mockup and figured out the details of how his interface with the controls and stuff.

Anyway, and then we literally picked him up when they bought off on him, and I did have a meeting that was my first time showing something to George was, I remember John Hench coming in and Marty and Randy into one of the conference rooms and we put all this artwork up and George came in too. And so I got to show him the robot and an inevitable George Lucas way, he nodded a little bit and said something like, yeah, it’ll work. High praise.

He and Walt Disney, as I understand, were both known for being kind of taciturn. They’re not saying much when they that’ll work was like high compliment. So I was very excited that he liked it too. So the next step was I literally picked up full-size of Rx out of foam and wood, and we rolled him over to Maple, right into Pelican Alley.

The guys there took them and said, okay, we’ll take it from here. Then I would go over and see what they’re doing. And they literally measured off my maquette and then made metal spinnings and bought parts and showed, I told ’em where I got some of the prop parts that I got at a factory sales surplus store. And they literally went, bought parts for their first crew of Rx’s, those first four or five that we built and mounted some of those onto ’em.

Then I’d cast things, I’d carve some of the props on them are carved out of wood and then cast. And of course I had to go get some more removed before flight ribbons. But they built them over the next few months. In fact, years later when they were doing the Paris version, they called me up and said, Chris, do you have any drawings of him?

I said, yeah, why? And they said, because we have literally no documentation on him. Well, I had done production drawings of him as I built the full-size one, I have two inches to the foot I think, or an inch and a half to the foot, a drawing of him in scale from several angles and of his parts, like hands and stuff. So I made copies of that and gave ’em to him so they could make some more recs.

But it turned out they had just, that’s the way MAPO worked back then too, is they often would get mock-ups and they just get out a measuring tape and calipers and they just build to match. They didn’t go through. Now everything is designed, typically it starts off on CAD and grows from there, literally growing parts these days, but or machining whatever it takes. But back then a lot of it was kind of just a rule of thumb, so to speak.

So they started building a full-size one, and then actually I moved on to work on the queue line. I started building other robots, which I built out of LGB garden scale trains, G-scale trains, parts and toy parts. And then I got to work on the goose droids. Chris Tietz, a wonderful art director designer, had come up with the idea of taking the old geese from America Sings and turning ’em into those robots. And we had to design heads and things. So I took his sketches and I designed the head based on Chris’ sketches. So that’s what I got. And the baskets, we didn’t have the biggest budget for stuff like that and props and things. So we did get some stuff from Lucasfilm.

A lot of it was found in costume stores and dumpsters and spare parts. Those baskets were running around with this accumulation. So I designed the basket and I threw the props in, and the baskets all had a band around ’em, a decorative band and the graphics in it. We basically put everybody’s birthday on there. They all had numbers on ’em and the team. I got everybody’s birthday and all the baskets had somebody’s birthday on ’em, except we ran out before we got to my birthday. So then Tom LaDuke put my birthday on the console in front of Rx. I was in the buttons there. It had my birthday on.

Dan Heaton: Well, that’s all great. Those are such great stories, especially about just kind of the way you had to kind of put it together from stores and shops and basically to create them. And of course, Rx ultimately was removed when they added C3PO for the new version, but lives on, of course, at Galaxy’s Edge as the DJ in Oga’s Cantina. So what do you think about that, about him getting another chance to kind of appear in the new Star Wars area?

Chris Runco: I love it. Yeah. It was so much fun to find out. I was working on other projects at the time, and there was a whole new crew that was working on Galaxy’s Edge, and I didn’t know too much about what they were doing, and I felt a little bad that C3PO took over for him as much as I liked the new show. And there he was in a crate or the old version of him in a crate and the queue line, and I’m kind of close to the little guy. So I wasn’t really glad that that had happened. But then when, I think it was Tom Fitzgerald that told me one day or one of ’em said, by the way, did you know we’re going to use him in Galaxy’s Edge? I said, you’re kidding. That’s cool. What’s he going to do?

He says, a DJ. He’s a DJ. He was a pilot now. He said, DJ, how does that work? But it was exciting to hear that and characters, it’s amazing how much they mean to all of us, and especially to the guests and to all of us, because all Disney fans and guests and how long the lines get for the longest lines in the park are usually for the character meet and greets, right? Anyway, I think that what Tom told me one day, I saw him at an event actually shortly after I retired at a company event, and he pulled me aside.

He said, Chris, I got to tell you a story. He says, we just had a presentation to the staff at Disneyland walking ’em through the Galaxy’s Edge project. And then we also did one for, it might’ve been D23 folks, or I can’t remember, but he said, we walked through all these things and got all oohs and ahs, but the biggest applause I heard was when we mentioned that Rx was going to be the DJ.

I laughed. I said, well, I guess Tom, I guess we must’ve done something right. But I got down there the first time I got to see it, which was probably about a month after Galaxy’s Edge opened, before Rise of the Resistance had opened. Just that the first opening. I got down there for the first time and saw him, and of course I had to get my picture taken next to him and listened to him, and I loved the banter and the songs, and I love the way sometimes he forgets that he’s not still a pilot.

His dialogue is great, but then even more thrilling to me was I went to the little robot shop, build your own robot. The whole process is so cool. It’s so much fun. I’ve got to go back and build one, but I’m walking on and what did I find on the shelf? But a remote control Rx. He’s about 18 inches tall, and he’s amazing. He talks you can take the controller and roll him around. You can actually use him as a DJ; you can, he plays Bluetooth. You can hook up your iPad to him and have him DJ with your own music, and his head goes up and down and his arms rotate around.

There’s a little small design flaw, which they should ask me, but they design the toy, the arms bump into each other when they rotate, when they counter rotate, all the arms rotate and they bang into each other so they can’t pass. Anyway, I thought, geez, somebody should have paid attention to that. So here I am playing with this thing. So I was so excited and I bought two of them. I have one for spare parts in case I wear the first one out, but he’s sitting on my dining room table and I love to say hi to him in the morning and plug it in and he says Hi back.

Or usually really whoever wrote him, and they had Paul Rubins do the voice for him, which was such perfect casting. He does the voice for the toy. So I have this character on my table that’s the character, aside from a few cosmetic modifications they made to him to make him the DJ, he’s Rx, and it’s just, I can’t tell you how much fun it is. Years ago they did build a little toy of him. It’s about, I have one on my desk here. It’s about three inches tall and all the parts rotate.

It was so cool to see this little toy of him, something you’d drawn up to become a toy. But then this toy that I can actually play with and make it his head goes up and down kind of slow. That’s one thing I did with the maquette was I figured out, we figured out things like how fast everything should move, including how fast his head and his visor should pop up and down, and his head goes up on the toy, his head goes up very slowly.

Here I am picking the toy apart to design the toy apart. I got to talk to those guys, those toy designers. But no, he’s so cool. My grandkids, of course, love him when I let him touch him, when I let them touch him and they drove him around, he runs around the floor. He is like a remote control car. You can make him go around and spin and it’s terrific.

I especially love the music and his dialogue is so cool. And like I said, this little bit of forgetting, he’s a pilot. He has these great lines in it, and one of them is, you look familiar. Did you ever take a ride to Endor? So yeah, what a great combination. So yeah, it is such a honor and a privilege to have been part of these things. But that one, I got to tell you, that was too much fun. Just too much fun for any human being going. And they turned this into brand new character and he’s as lovable as always.

Dan Heaton: Well, I love the fact that they made this toy because to me it’s great that Rx is living on, but the fact that you, I didn’t realize till I heard you talking about another show that they even had a toy like that. The fact that it talks to you and the music part is just because I was listening to it like a playlist of the Cantina the other day, that Spotify, and then you could play it through Rx. To me, it’s amazing. I love it so much.

Chris Runco: Which reminds me, I got to look up that playlist.

Dan Heaton: There’s a few of them out there. They’re all great. It’s amazing.

Chris Runco: There’s a real cool Easter egg on the toy. Okay. When you push the button to chime, that used to happen in Star Tours when they’d have the announcements. There’s the little chime first on Star Tours when you push the Bluetooth setting that happens on the toy. Oh my gosh.

Dan Heaton: That chime is great. Richard Bellis did the chime. It’s perfect. Oh my gosh. Alright, well, I will say, Chris, that we have so many more things that we could cover and I think we’re going to do another part. I know if you’re down, we will do a second part where we’ll talk about Typhoon Lagoon and Grizzly River Run and so much more.

But I want to finish with kind of, well, a big question which I like to ask a lot of people that have done Imagineering and become successful designers is there’s a lot of young people, and I know the industry’s kind of uncertain right now, but especially when the industry starts to ramp back up, who were interested in becoming Imagineers and working in the industry. Just given your experiences, I’d love to know some advice you might have to give to young designers about things they should study or even just the overall approach they might want to take.

Chris Runco: Sure. Let me start with, I love this industry. I got into it by a series of happy accidents, like I said, and there are no accidents, right? But there’s a lot to this industry. What I love about it is we are creating three-dimensional movies, okay? That’s what a theme park is. It’s experiential, these keywords, experiential, immersive. One time we had one of the desires from a really well-known video game company, and I’m forgetting his name off the top of my head, but he’d done some of these super popular games and people were talking about. So he did this presentation to Imagineers.

And at one point he said, I got to tell you, basically the reason I got into this business is because I wanted to build my own Disneyland. That’s what I’m doing. Disneyland is the model for my games. And I thought, that’s right.

The experiential, the fact that a whole world is open to you and you can go in any direction. I love that. And to me, whatever the state of the economy is now, there’s a medium here and we’re getting more tools all the time to get into it. VR, augmented reality, virtual reality, the advances in robotics, just the advances in video technology, all these things give us new tools to create that immersive environment and an immersive experience in ways that we’ve never seen before.

And still, it relies on the basic things. It is a theme park and park is very important. Landscape, land, develop the landscape. And our landscape architects were, I loved working with the landscape architects because these were not, it wasn’t just horticulture, like knowing what plant would work good, great and great in what place. I got to spend time with the inimitable, Bill Evans, the original landscape architect along with Ruth Shellhorn.

I’ll throw in her name that very few people know, but these people who designed Disneyland and their story’s great. And again, so many happy accidents. Bill worked for his dad, who was a renowned landscaper in LA, and Walt hired Bill to do his yard. And when he saw what he could do, he said, bill, I’ve got, would you like to come work for me? I have some projects going on.

Bill ended up being the quintessential designer of landscape for Disneyland and then for further Disney projects. That’s how the landscaping begun. So this story of happy accidents and events, we all are a part of that. But what I was going to say about the industry, so I see tremendous possibilities in this, in what there is. I mean, aren’t you all ready to go with the child and with the Mandalorian, right? Stand next to the Mandalorian and you see, and secondly, the industry has mushroomed.

When it started, when I started back in the ‘70s, Imagineering was a one of a kind out. There were people doing theater, there were people doing opera, there were people doing planetariums, there were people doing movies. But here’s a place where we kind of put all that in one place. And then Universal came along and got bigger and bigger, and a lot of Disney people ended up working for them. And we became this nice rivalry, which rivalry is good. It makes people work harder.

So that rivalry was a very friendly rivalry and still is. But now this is a worldwide industry. The first thing I tell everybody who’s interested in this business is as a student, whatever, the Themed Entertainment Association, TEA, their website is teaconnect.org, if I remember right. I hope it’s not.com. Anyway, look it up. And the Themed Entertainment Association, this again started, it was actually a friend of mine, Monty Lundy and Rocky Hall.

A couple of these guys started and some little companies. What happened after UP Epcot, a lot of these folks left. Disney started their own companies. Mark Fuller started doing fountain design. Monty and Rocky started conventions and concerts and things. All these little companies started, they formed this industry association to make connections and help each other. That grew and grew.

Now it’s a global thing. Now we have our version of the Oscars every year, the Themed Entertainment awards, the Theas, and we have a convention every year. We have a program called NextGen, TEA NextGen, again, which you can find mentioned on the TEA website. And it’s for students in colleges in particular who are interested in this business to make connections. They have an intern program with a lot of these companies. There are now schools around the country and around the world that focus on themed entertainment.

It’ll be part of an art department. You can tape themed entertainment classes at a place like Art Center and others around the country. I’m sure there’s many more I’ve mentored at classes at USC. Friends of mine run a themed entertainment class at USC. So now there’s a farm club. There’s colleges that have people focused on what this form of entertainment and experience is, which combines so many things. But the bottom line is, so those are great connections. You can find those companies.

Look at TEA, you’ll find out what companies in your area focus on this kind of work. It may be that they’re design. Another thing is restaurants. There’s themed restaurants. There’s now a immersive theater, which is more experiential theater where you go with the actors through spaces. And I’ve designed some of those myself. There are all kinds of possibilities because we’re all building the Holodeck.

Imagineering now actually has kind of a Holodeck, a whole room that’s done with digital projection to help in the design process. Anyway, these tools come along and along with these tools, and you just had a conversation not long ago with Daniel Joseph, wonderful special effects designer, the heir to Yale Gracey, who I was fortunate enough to work with the original illusion.

Daniel’s talked about the technology and the possibilities, but he also mentions that there’s still these good old basic tricks, smoke and mirrors, magicians and illusionary work with smoke and mirrors, and we can still do amazing things with mirrors and projections and water and basic elements. That foundation is still there. It’s not all high tech. There’s still the art of landscape architecture. There’s still the art of good interior design, all these skills that come together to do a theme park, and they are useful. You’re designing your backyard, the backyard barbecue or an event or a huge theme park.

So I think the possibilities are endless in the field. I encourage people to get into it and just get as broad and experience as you can in everything that relates to it. So like I said, my initial steps were, I had a mom who was an artist who gave us tools to learn art, but I also had a father who was really good at carpentry. We built things and I learned how to build things.

Very important to learn that side of it too. How to do to make dimensional things to grow them. Now with the 3D printers is one tool, but also just to carve clay and plaster, those tools are still a big part of the whole picture. So there’s great projects out, great project going on all around the world. You can tell I’m an enthusiast and I encourage anybody to get into it who’s really got the desire.

Dan Heaton: Oh yeah. I mean, there’s so much out there. And like you mentioned, so much beyond just straight up working for Disney or theme parks that I think are great.

Chris Runco: I should mention this convention that TEA does every year. It’s one of my favorite things in the world, because basically they give awards to large projects and small projects, projects whose budget might’ve been billions of dollars, right down to projects that maybe a new exhibit at a museum for $250,000 where they really had to be in creative about how they came up with things, and they give awards. There is phenomenal design, brilliant design going on in large projects and small projects all around the world. They show this off every year. And that on their website, I think there’ll be an archive of these too, that my favorite carousel in the entire world is the one which I have never seen yet. And it’s in Nantes, France. That group, I got to meet the designers that take a look, look it up online.

And it is designed, it’s sort of Jules Verne style. It’s like three levels tall, and it’s one of the most clever things anybody’s ever created. So anyway, like I said, and we’ve worked with phenomenal artists in Asia, in China, and Singapore, in Europe. The TEA opens the door to tremendous possibilities everywhere. And so the thing for a student to do is take a look at that, find other people who are interested, slip for the programs in the schools that have things along those lines, and then just go do it. Get your hands dirty and work on it. And that’s the difference. I mean, film and video games have tremendous possibilities too. But I love the fact that our pixels are concrete, as my friend Don Carson used to say.

Dan Heaton: I’m so excited just about so much of the design, and I want to see that carousel too. Looks really interesting. Yeah, look

Chris Runco: Yeah, look it up online. It’s beautiful. It’s built by the same people who did about a 25-foot tall, 30-foot-tall walking elephant that you can ride on. You climb on its back and you ride on it. Same people designed it. It’s brilliant. Yeah, look ’em up online.

Dan Heaton: I will. Okay. Well, before we finish, Chris, I just wanted to know, I know you retired from Walt Disney Imagineering ultimately, and you’re still doing some other work, which I think is really cool. So I’d love to hear for you just a little bit about what’s keeping you busy right now.

Chris Runco: Well, I have family and I’ve got grandkids that I due to the pandemic, I haven’t seen much lately, but I’m sure I will soon. And one of our, it’s been really enjoyable to share with these little guys. Some of the things have fun making things for them. But the other things I’ve done is, one of the biggest things was I started working in immersive theater. I got real excited about that.

There’s tremendous immersive theater experiences around Los Angeles put together by brilliant people. Of course, this is kind of on hiatus until the pandemic is behind us. But one of the things I got to do is I worked with a little Shakespeare company first designing sets for some of their basic productions, but then it’s called the Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles. Their director had this brainstorm. He loves Disney and he loves the Haunted Mansion.

He said, could we do, we want to do a Macbeth that’s immersive. So basically what we did was we took their old warehouse down in LA where they have their black box theater. And we turned the entire building for everything, the parking lot, the kitchen, the entire thing into the castles of Macbeth. We walk an audience, 50 people at a time through the play with a wonderful cast of actors and effects and video projection and all kinds of things; we made it into an immersive experience where you were in the middle of the battle and in the middle of the ghost scene and in the middle of everything in the play.

We did it three years in a row because this last year we weren’t able to, and it was done on a shoestring. It’s not a big production, but there’s projects like that going around to LA that are just, and in other cities as well, I’m sure, immersive theater, tremendous possibilities there of, it’s kind of like the experience of a theme park where you’re in the set, you can touch the pieces of the set and the actors are right with you.

So I got to do some of that. And I’ve done some, I designed a walk around character for our local library, Dewey the Dragon. So the Burbank Library has this walkaround dragon that shows up once in a while, events and reads books to kids. That’s been fun. And I’m working on, let’s see, what else recently that’s been a lot of fun. I’ve done cartooning for different people.

One of my other favorite, favorite things I’ve worked on lately is I decided to do a big Halloween display this year and then a Christmas display. And what I did, I turned my entire front yard into a miniature golf course, a haunted miniature golf course at Halloween, and then Santa’s miniature golf course at Christmas with playable halls. It’s, and it had a golf cart that a skeleton was riding around in and projections and flying stuff circling through the air, mechanical effects.

I had so much fun doing it, spent way too much time and too much money doing it, but it was so much fun. Our whole community does this. When I got it done and looked back at it, I said, I guess I must’ve been in the right business because I still really love doing this. So yeah, it was so much fun to throw together. So that, and I also do watercolors and illustration on occasion. I’ve done portraits for people. I keep my hands busy, and if anything, I have too many things that I love to do.

I’m also working on a couple children’s books, some related to things I’ve worked on in the past. So I’m hoping to pull that together at some point. And the more I learn about it, of course, the more I find out that’s a tough, that is a job that takes a lot of persistence, a lot of perseverance. But I’m really enthused to give that a shot too. We used to storyboard rides and a storyboard and a book, an illustrated book are very much a similar kind of thing.

Dan Heaton: Well, wow, I’m glad to hear that you’re doing so many things. And it actually said it’s perfect. Kind of fits with your advice answer because it just shows how many different things you can even be doing well beyond imagineering. And I think it’s great. So Chris, this has been excellent. I’m really excited to dig even further in the future, but this has been a blast. Thanks so much for being on the podcast. And I believe that you may be posting some of your work and such on Instagram, so I’d love to hear a little bit about that and make sure listeners know where to go.

Chris Runco: Yeah, this is something I just decided and was getting some advice from my son, my sons who of course are much better at social media than I’m, what I’m planning to have is an Instagram page, and it’d just be Chris Runco 52, 52 being the Year Imagineering started and also happens to be the year I was born. So there should be an Instagram page pretty soon called Chris Runco 52. And I’ll put up some of the things I’ve referred to in this interview and things like it that I thought might be interesting for people who have the same love of Disney and love of theme parks that I do. Thank you.

Dan Heaton: Well, excellent. Well, Chris, this has been great. Thanks so much for being on the podcast and being able to tell some of your stories from your great career.

Chris Runco: It’s my pleasure. I love sharing it. I was very lucky to have the role I had and still am. And I guess this probably digresses a little bit just to say, I realize I got to be with this great group of people that was there to work with the first generation of Imagineers who’d worked with Walt, and then be part of the second generation and then pass it on to the third. And these further generations of Imagineers all not just at Disney, but all around the world, that’s part of our responsibility is pass along the enthusiasm and the joy and the principles of design that we used to make these things happen. So I feel very proud and happy to have been a part of it.