137. Disney Imagineer Chris Runco on Typhoon Lagoon and Grizzly River Run (Part 2)

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There’s so much to cover from Disney’s rapid expansion during what Michael Eisner named “The Disney Decade”. Beginning in the late ’80s and progressing for more than 10 years, it was an exciting time for both fans and the people that created the parks. Chris Runco was part of many of the big projects from that time period while at Imagineering. During more than 45 years at Disney, he witnessed the expansion firsthand and played a key role in that growth. On this episode of The Tomorrow Society Podcast, Chris returns to dive further into his remarkable career.

After briefly covering the Star Tours premiere, we chat about the development of concepts for Typhoon Lagoon. With the name already in place, Chris and other Imagineers created ideas for the park’s overall theme. His “Typhoon Tilly” concept helped create the formula of the detailed water park. On the episode, Chris describes the process for landing on that concept and visiting other parks for research purposes. He also worked closely on Grizzly River Run and that entire area for the original Disney California Adventure. We talk about some challenges with the initial park and how Grizzly Peak ultimately became a successful themed land.

Chris was also part of the design team for the Pirate’s Lair updates to Tom Sawyer Island in Disneyland. They faced a tight turnaround for the project, which needed to coincide with the franchise’s next big film. I also really enjoyed learning about the two Monster’s Inc. attractions in California and Tokyo. In particular, Chris’ story about updating the Ride and Go Seek! attraction in Japan was a lot of fun. The original version confused some guests, so they made some changes to explain the game play and enhance the experience. We conclude by discussing Chris’ involvement with supporting women in engineering and his key mentors at Walt Disney Imagineering.

Show Notes: Chris Runco

Learn about Chris Runco’s background, getting started at Imagineering, and designing RX-24 for Star Tours on Episode 134 on The Tomorrow Society Podcast.

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

Learn more about Chris’ work on Typhoon Lagoon and see the concept art for “Typhoon Tilly” on this Disney Parks Blog article (October 25, 2019).

Transcript

Chris Runco: And Randy Bright and Marty walked into the room to look at things and they started walking to their seats. I might’ve been lucky and been real close to where they were seated. That always helps. That’s a cue for somebody. Find out where the boss is going to be seated. But whatever the case, Randy walked and he went after he took a glance around the room, he went right to that picture of the boat on the mountain and said, wow, and that’s all he wanted to talk about. He just said, this hits the nail on the head. This is what we got to do.

One thing though, we got enough paddle boats in Florida, let’s make it a similar kind of boat, like a fishing boat or something. Marty was listening to him. I said, yeah, okay, you’re right. And it was like, that was it. It was just, we were off and running with Typhoon Lagoon from that point.

Dan Heaton: That was former Disney Imagineer Chris Runco talking about presenting the initial designs that would become Typhoon Lagoon. You’re listening to The Tomorrow Society Podcast.

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Dan Heaton: Hey there. Thanks for joining me here on the Tomorrow Society Podcast on Episode 137. I am your host, Dan Heaton. It’s been great this year to get to talk to so many cool people that have worked behind the scenes to help create attractions that are still entertaining so many of us at the parks. And I just want to actually get to the parks to see those things. Now, today’s episode is a perfect example of getting to learn so much cool information from Chris Runko who came back for part two.

We talked previously mostly about his background and then about Star Tours. He of course designed the Rx-24 robot in the original Star Tours. We talked a lot about that, and so I’m excited now to dive into other elements of his career, including Typhoon Lagoon. He was very closely involved in the development and how that actually came together. And then two Monsters, Inc. attractions. That’s some really fun stories there.

I loved hearing too about the Pirates Lair, which I know being that Tom Sawyer Island goes all the way back to the for Disneyland, that making it the Pirates Lair was not loved by everyone. But Chris has some really fun stories about what it was like to put that together and just how fast it really went. Also too, another thing that Chris gets into at the end is some efforts that were put in place to try and make Imagineering and the industry on the a better place for all people.

I found that very interesting and heartwarming, even though I know there’s still a lot of progress that needs to be made, especially coming so recently on some announcements we’ve heard from Disney about changes to the Disney look and what they’re doing there for a lot of their frontline cast members and then things that are going on behind the scenes. And it’s great to hear that from Chris. We finish with him talking about some of his biggest mentors. Chris worked there long enough being that he was there for more than 40 years, that he got to work with a lot of the really legendary early imagineers like Yale Gracey and Wathel Rogers and so many others.

So he has great stories there about getting to work with people like them and Randy Bright of course, and so many others that he gets into. I could tell there’s probably so many more he could tell, and I know there’s so many more that he could give us from that time period. This was really fun. It was great to get the chance to talk again with Chris and learn a lot more about his story from what was an amazing career working at Imagineering. Here is Chris Runco.

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Dan Heaton: I’m really excited about today’s returning guest. He started as a portrait artist on Main Street in Disneyland in 1970, moved over to Walt Disney Imagineering, and ultimately worked for Disney for more than 45 years. He was a lead designer and creative director on many projects including Typhoon Lagoon, Grizzly River Run, and the Redwood Creek Challenge Trail. Also the Rx-24 Pilot for the original Star Tours. It’s Chris Runco. Chris, thanks so much for returning to the podcast.

Chris Runco: I’m glad to be here, Dan. Yeah, I really enjoyed talking about these stories. It was a great time.

Dan Heaton: Oh yeah, there was so much last time about Star Tours and I knew there was a lot more to cover, so I’m glad we were able to do this. Well, last time we did talk about the creation of Star Tours, and one thing we didn’t mention is kind of what happened when it opened, which I know I remember they had a big premiere, Michael Eisner, George Lucas, people at Disneyland. It was a really big deal for Disney and you were there. So I’d love to know a little bit about that experience of what that event was like for you.

Chris Runco: Yeah, I happened to run across a video. I’d taken some, but I found some video that one of the guys had taken and handed out and distributed to us, and the whole team was there. The good thing was that being in Anaheim, unlike our parks across the country in Florida or overseas, we actually all got to go.

I have the video shows us all sitting there kibitzing in the fourth or fifth row and the whole team. And it was fun to see all these faces again. But what I remember is just how excited we were. And again, remember, as I mentioned before, you probably had no greater bunch of Star Wars fans in the world than Imagineers. So we were so excited to make this a part of the park and seeing George, and they did a beautiful job. Entertainment always does these spectaculars for opening.

I think we could open a churro cart and they would sell it to the whole world with all this fireworks and exploding things and dancing bands and everything else. But they did a beautiful job. C3PO was there, and it was Anthony Daniels, and we got to talk to him afterwards. He came to WDI a couple of times as we were building C3P0 for the attraction. I think the video reminded me that they hadn’t just had a ribbon cutting. They had actually done a ribbon, well, what would you call it?

A detonation of the ribbon. They used some form of lightsaber with a spark that exploded the ribbon into pieces. Then we went in and rode it. And I remember this really is one of the key things about anybody’s career at Imagineering, and I imagine at the studio too, but the day when you get to see the experience you’ve worked on, watch the guests or experience it with the guests and see them enjoying it, there’s nothing like that. I had that experience many times. Thankfully, Typhoon Lagoon, when that opened up, I’ll never forget that day, but this was another one of those days where it just, I think of all the things, the spectacle, the excitement of the day, all the Disneyland folks were so hyped up about having this ride and all, everybody there was also super excited about it, all the Disneyland staff.

But above and beyond all that, it was just so amazing to go through that ride with the guests and get off and hear that wonderful laughter and chatter and applause and people trying to get back in the four hour line and do it again. But yeah, it was beautiful and it came together. I can’t recall if we had ridden it all assembled, but too much before that day. We all worked on pieces of it, but that day we all got to write it in unforgettable. Just beautiful.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, I mean, I didn’t get a chance to ride it until it was at Florida, so I know for Disneyland it was such a big deal. Just the connection with George Lucas and having a movie that was not a Disney movie property. I mean, this was like Michael Eisner’s one of many big moments from those early years. So I’m sure that was super exciting. And you mentioned Typhoon Lagoon too, and I would love to know, because I know you were very closely involved in that from the start, and I’d love first just to know the research that was involved because Disney had River country, but Typhoon Lagoon was a different step from that completely. What was it like to prep for that and be part of the research to ultimately bring that to fruition?

Chris Runco: That was a fantastic experience. It was really with Rx and Star Tours, I’d started to do show design having been a special effects designer, and then the Model Shop before that. But Typhoon Lagoon came along and it kind of crept in the back door. What happened was the River Country was a huge success. I mean, basically all summer long they would close that. It’d be full by 10 or 11 in the morning every day. And in Florida, there is no better place for a water park than Florida in the world, I think because you can swim in balmy weather just about that.

There’s only a couple weeks practically in January where it’s cold enough where you shut it down. So it was a great place to put a water park. And at the time, the resort division of Disney was separate from Imagineering, so the resort people took charge of that and worked up a scheme for a waterpark.

They’re basically connecting it to some hotel development. Apparently the management at the time saw it and went, eh, this doesn’t really have the magic we’re looking for. So they talked to Marty and Marty Sklar and Randy Bright and the group and said, okay, Imagineering should take a pass at this. So I got a chance with a bunch of designers to go in and get this presentation talking about what they needed, that the demand was huge in Florida for water parks and river country had been such a huge success.

And it was really the first, River Country was the first themed waterpark that wasn’t just iron ride water park. And it is fun. It was really fun. I really enjoyed River Country a lot, going and trying everything out. I think I’d spent some time there while I was working on Epcot any chance I could. So they told us that this was the idea they had for water park with a certain list of attractions.

They had a plan, they kind of had a plot plan about how the different attractions would go. They were talking about the idea of putting in a wave pool and trying to make it really unusual and a bigger wave than ever. But they didn’t have a theme. They had a name.

They had the name Typhoon Lagoon, and they didn’t really know what it was going to be. So we were all handed the assignment, okay, just go think about it. Just what would you do for this? So I don’t know that I researched too much before that. I just started thinking about the water park experiences I’ve had and about what Typhoon Lagoon meant. And this is one of those brainstorms we all get. I literally had this studio at home that was sort of the back end of my garage, a little shed on the back end of my garage.

I was in there sketching one night on some old animation paper. And I thought, well, what would say visually Typhoon Lagoon? It’s got to be fun. It’s got to be something exciting. What would you do with the name? Well, what tells you there’s been a typhoon? Well, something in the wrong place. And so I drew up a boat, stuck in a tree. It was like a Swiss Family Robinson tree with this fishing boat or some kind of boat stuck in the tree. I think I put a power boat, I think it was a power boat in that case.

I wasn’t thinking big enough at that point. And I also stuck a woody in a tree figuring, hey, they’re all about waves and surfing and stuff, so what about a woody wagon stuck in a tree. Somewhere along the line I thought, well, wait a second. Let’s just go big and put that boat on top of a mountain. So I did this little thumbnail sketch. I still have it someplace, and this literally just a few inches by a few inches of the size of a postcard. And it was this boat stuck on top of a mountain. I thought, oh, you definitely, when you walk up to that, something’s happened.

So I started working on that and working on that, and I went and researched boats. My first thought was, okay, this is this crazy place in Florida. So the first thing I did was found a bunch of research about the Everglades and about the Florida environment. The first picture that I did from the thumbnail sketch, I did some bigger ones. What I did was I used a paddle boat is I had this stern wheeler stuck on top of the mountain, and that was the first little thumbnail that was now the size of tooth postcards.

And then I did another rendering, maybe 20 by 18 by 20, something like that. And again, it was this mountain with water leaking down 20 ways from it, which became slides and things. Up at the top was this paddle boat. So that was my pass at it. And so we got back together, this is probably two weeks after the first meeting, and we go in a conference room at WDI, and we all put our stuff up and one guy had come up with a logging camp.

It was all log flume rides. It was all like a lumberjack themed. One guy had come up with a World War II theme where the whole thing, it was sort of like the Bermuda Triangle idea. This was all, somehow we’d found a Bermuda and all these lost airplanes and everything from World War II were there. Whoever got stuck there had built all these crazy contraptions out of it. And then there was one that was a Mayan temple going, well, I’m not sure why Typhoon Lagoon and Mayan temple go together, but hey, it’s kind of cool. What the heck?

And Randy Bright and Marty walked into the room to look at things and they started walking to their seats. I might’ve been lucky and been real close to where they were seated. That always helps. That’s a cue for somebody. Find out where the boss is going to be seated. But whatever the case, Randy walked and he went after he took a glance around the room, he went right to that picture of the boat on the mountain and said, wow, and that’s all he wanted to talk about. He just said, this hits the nail on the head. This is what we got to do. One thing though, we got enough paddle boats in Florida, let’s make it a similar kind of boat, like a fishing boat or something.

Marty was listening to him. I said, yeah, okay, you’re right. And it was like, that was it. It was just, we were off and running with Typhoon Lagoon from that point. Anyway, that was a pretty exciting day for me. And then I went and researched fishing boats and finally came up with a one that, in fact, I still have, what is that book called? It has a great name.

Oh yeah, there’s one of the old books that was in the W When I say research, I was basically researching at the WDI library, which is phenomenal because it’s a library that’s compiled of all the stuff the designers used to build every Disney park. And that included is now in recent years, the library of all the stuff the art directors used and the animator used to design their animated films at Disney. So this is one phenomenal library, I tell you.

So I went in there digging around, and I found this book, and I love the title. It’s called Fish and Ships, not to be confused with Fish and Chips, Fish and Ships. And it was like from the thirties or something. It had all these great old fishing boats. Sure enough, I found one in there. I said, that’s it. That just looks, I love the lines of that. That’ll do it. So I based my boat on the mountain on that old fishing boat, except it was a little cuter scale than the original one. Then we started rolling with the models. I was doing sketches like crazy. I must’ve done hundreds of ’em. We just started incorporating that idea into the buildings.

Everything was a metaphor for, hey, a big storm went through here, but we’ve recovered. We’ve made lemons out of lemonade. So there’s a big coconut palm that’s fallen on the roof of one guy’s store and bent the roof almost in half, and he turns it into a sign and hangs his sign up there on the tree. And Singapore Sal had this absolutely the first sketch of the merchandise building.

I have a tugboat, slammed the middle of the merchandise building, and you went inside the ship as part of the store. It was like it was a thatch tot with the ship stuck in the middle. That one changed because we didn’t have enough money to go buy a tugboat. I actually looked at ’em. There is such a thing as a used boats newsletter that comes out. I literally went through all these used boats in Florida and what is that called for cars?

I’m trying to think of what that newsletter is. That’s the name. Yeah, I’m trying to think of what I’ll think of it. Anyway, and it was literally black-and-white pictures going, needs some work 50,000 miles. And this is in Daytona Beach. So I went through, but we finally decided, we found out the amount of work it would get to get an actual tugboat sized boat over there and put it in and renovate it. You’ve got to deal with asbestos and rust and everything else that wasn’t going to be affordable. I’m jumping ahead here, but we had started to do, as the designs came together, we started to do some design, some prop hunting and stuff in Florida and California. I found this enormous buoy. I didn’t realize this things are so darn big. It’s like 12 feet in diameter and 25 feet tall seagoing buoy.

I just thought, well, wait a second. That would look kind of cool. So we redesigned the building to have that big huge buoy in the front. And then at the same trip, the used maritime equipment dealer, we talked to, you think they used to call them pirates, but this fellow in Long Beach was like, he was the fellow that found nautical surplus for anybody and everybody that needed it, like for restaurants and stores and things, for monocle theming. So he took us on this trip.

That’s when we found the buoy and a big lifeboat, which is sitting, I think it’s still there along the river in Typhoon Lagoon, big metal lifeboat. He said, by the way, I’ve also got a guy who’s got a tugboat and he’s taken the whole superstructure off and building a new one. So would you like the old one and the cabin?

He took us to the docks and here’s this top of this boat. He says, yeah, they’re going to cut it off from here. I said, we all looked at each other and said, how much? And he said, quote, some price. It was ridiculously low for what I’m thinking, like, oh, five grand or what? I dunno what it was; I can’t remember. I just remember going, oh, and we went, yeah, well, we’ll take it.

So we got this, they shipped that out to Florida and we made that into the dressing rooms. It is the real deal. It’s the cabin off an old tugboat. Then we renovated it. Of course, we had to lower the doors because ship doors, they don’t come to the ground. The sill is like a foot tall, so you have to step over. So we had to change stuff like that so we wouldn’t trip everybody.

But that’s how the story. And there again, everything hued back to the story. This gets back to that idea of a lot of what Imagineering does. We come up with a back story, and in this case, the back story was as simple as that wonderful poem that Randy Bright himself wrote, that is on the signs coming into the park, A furious storm went roared across the sea, catching ships in its back in its path, helpless to flee. That was the story is that the storm had come through and then left all this wreckage, and somehow those folks resourcefully made it all into fun.

Dan Heaton: Well, that’s really it. It’s interesting to how the concept came together. I’m also curious too, because Typhoon Lagoon at the time, I mean there really still aren’t that many that feel that similar. I mean, Blizzard Beach and then some others like SeaWorld and Universal. But in general, at the time, there still weren’t water parks, were still fairly generic. Did you look, you mentioned the wave pool, but as designing, did the team look much at actually go visit water parks that were around at the time and try to see, okay, we like that. We don’t like that. We want to build, take that and build something different. Was there a lot of looking at other water parks to see how Disney or how you wanted to incorporate the story to it?

Chris Runco: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, because everything that we do, it’s a combination of art and technology and there were people out there, not only river country, but there were lots of places. Wet and Wild has some great parks, the iron ride parks, and we talked to the different vendors. There were a couple of major vendors in the world that pros slide in Canada and some others that do. They had state-of-the-art and they were always coming up with new things.

So we talked to all of ’em, and you really have to, we don’t do this enough. We try, but sometimes things you can’t do everything you want to, but we went to every water park we could. I went to, of course, everyone around here, I went to the one in Knotts Berry Farm, has a wonderful little one. Magic Mountain, had a large one and everything gave us lessons, which slides were the most fun, which were the hardest to maintain.

I love it. There was one ride that I did in an Atlanta water park there, and it was a double drop. It was a body slide and a double drop. And so you went over two bumps on the way down and you really went fast. You went so fast. In fact that on the second, well actually both of ’em, that first bump, I caught air just like I caught air. And then I hit the second one, I got even more air and I came. I thought, wow, this is phenomenal.

So the next time I talked to the ride vendors, I said, wow, that one’s really exciting. I caught air on the lip and they looked at me and said, yeah, we don’t do that anymore. I said, why? They said, because we found out that’s not really safe. I went, oh, great. We don’t build them like that anymore.

Okay, this is okay. We won’t write that in, but to the scope. But no, that’s so important to get the feel. I’ll give you one specific example. So I went to the water ride in Magic Mountain and the one in Knotts, and I remember some other ones, but those two in particular, and when we rode, an interesting thing happened. The raft was bouncing along down the river, and then it caught the edge. It bumped up against the flume on one side, the rock work on one side, and it made the raft spin and then it spun and then it bounced up and down somewhere.

Then we bumped the wall again and it had spin. And I said, that was fun. And in fact, that could be even more fun if you spun a lot. I thought the kinetics that were great. So we had a meeting with the right vendor, and I said, one thing I love about the rides I’ve been on that you’ve built in the past when you touch the wall and it causes the whole raft to spin.

And they said, yeah, we don’t do that. And I went, well, why not? They said, well, because just like a tire, I mean, a raft is basically a big oversized tire with a little fiberglass shell inside to sit in. It says you wear out the tire. And most of the parks we work with, they don’t want to wear out the tire, so they don’t want it to bounce off the walls because it would cut, take mileage off the vehicle. I went, well, we want to bounce off the wall a lot more fun.

Anyway, so we took that idea which was derived exactly like you’re talking about from riding the experience of riding it. And the other thing we said was we actually thought we had more fun on the smaller diameter, like the 12-foot versus the 18-foot diameter, or is it, well, I guess they call ’em just a different dimension. They’re called an eight foot diameter and a 12-foot diameter. I think there were two basic sizes we thought for our story, we like the small one because it bounces around a lot, even though it’s lower capacity, the other one holds 12, this one only holds six.

We like the smaller raft. So we designed our ride around the smaller raft. So all these lessons were taken from the experience of going to the other parks. And I’ll tell you more about the spinning later because that ended up playing a part in several parts of the ride. But anyway, yeah, you’d be crazy. I mean, that’s just design 1 0 1. Go research everything you can find out on the subject before you start and put it all in your head and then get cracking and you’ll go a lot farther that way.

Dan Heaton: Just the idea of taking what’s come before that team seems to really fit for me too with Grizzly River Run, because the idea of the raft, every park, I mean, most parks now have that type of raft where you kind of either get soaked or there’s the danger of getting soaked. So when you’re designing that, and obviously you want to make it something that’s like that but different. So I’m curious just upfront with that one, how that project got going and how you work to make that its own thing.

Chris Runco: Grizzly, yes, in particular. Yeah, sorry. I jumped right around from Typhoon right to Grizzly because of that commonality of the research involved. Grizzly was interesting because there I had been working on Animal Kingdom and there was a point where it was going to the field and I wasn’t going to the field with it. So I was looking around for the next assignment and they put me on California Adventure and in particular, we were going to do something with a Tom Sawyer Island kind of feel and outdoors Sierras kind of feel. So I started working on it and the first idea that everybody was going for was the idea of doing some water slides.

There’s water slides, we call ’em dry for wet. There’s a good one up at Magic Mountain, or I haven’t checked lately, but what they are, they’re a slot. You get on a raft that’s basically just a big piece of plastic, but you go in street clothes and it’s a water slide, which is just creating an inch of water in the slide to keep it lubricated. Then you go plummeting down, holding onto the handles and sliding down. It’s a little like Bobs sliding, but on water.

That’s what we were talking about before. At first we were talking about having a mountain or a hill of some kind, and that was going to be part of our play area. So I did some sketches of that type of thing, and along the way I’d come up with this idea of turning with the California theme, turning the mountain into the semblance of a bear, of a grizzly bear up there.

So anyway, I’d done some sketches along those lines. Now, somewhere in that early design, everybody got excited about the idea of, well, why don’t we go forward and instead of making this part of the play area, why don’t we make this its own thing and do one of these raft rides? Because several people had said had gone to visit them. So we started working on that idea and that’s when the research came up and that kind of thing. Then we sat down and started laying it out. In fact, I have this folder buried in my files of I think 25 to 30 ride layouts for that over and over again because the whole park was in flux.

We were designing all the pieces and everybody was being a little territorial. The Condor Flats folks were gradually saying, oh, we need a little more room. We need a little more room. We go, wait a minute. That’s part of our mountain. And the hub folks were saying, no, we need a little more room. We need a little more room. I’m going, guys, we’re trying to build a mountain here. You’re going to make it into a mole hill. But literally all the boundaries were shifting. So we had to keep revising it and we found things we could do and things we couldn’t do with the space we had. So we were working on that aspect of it. Now, one of the best parts of this for an Imagineer is the people you get to work with.

We had on our, for Grizzly Peak, we had a phenomenal engineer. One of the best engineers Imagineering ever had, Mark Sumner. He also, he was working on several attractions. So he and I became partners in designing this raft ride because I would sketch something out and then I’d go, are these radio going to work for the ride? I wanted to bounce off the walls like I told you.

And he said, okay, well if you do that, it’s definitely going to bounce off that curve if we tighten ’em up. So we tighten up all the radii on the ride, which helped us fit into the space better. But at the same time, Mark was designing something else. He was designing the Soarin’ attraction, and you should talk to him sometime. He’s a character. But I can tell you a great story about how he devised’ Soarin that I love that involved lots of erector set parts.

Dan Heaton: Yes, I’ve heard that story. They bring it out for the video, but it’s a great story.

Chris Runco: Oh, it’s a great story. It’s a great story. He and I are, I don’t know if there’s anybody else, but the two of us have designed things at Imagineering and used erector set parts, what we grew up with as kids. I used erector set parts on Rx when I was building him.

But anyway, no, he did this phenomenal thing and the guy is just, oh, also, so we’re designing this ride and he’s explaining about the slope it has to have, which is actually very small to get water moving. He also explained to us how you make what they call a hydraulic jump. A hydraulic jump is where fast water hits slow water and literally it’s like it hit a brick wall, and so it creates a bump in the water. So you can intentionally do that, and that way you’re going along and then you get kicked up in the air and then you get kicked up in the air again wherever you create one of these hydraulic jumps.

So he was teaching us physics while we’re designing this ride, and he even came in and brought in a wave tank. I remember having these in physics class in high school, this four-foot-long plexiglass tank that he filled with water, and then he created waves in it, and he showed us how waves are made and how the slope works and all. So we got a hands-on demonstration. That was so fun to work with him on laying that thing out. And anyway, and then it took several steps, including my favorite part was with a point where we decided we were going to add drops in our ride. Nobody had ever done that with a water ride before, and we weren’t even sure we could do it, but we said, let’s give this a shot. Mark was very excited about trying to make that work.

So I was designing in the storyboard of ideas. There were a slew of ideas. One of ’em, we were going to go down through a whirlpool. We were going to literally circle around and then drop down through a tunnel. It was a whirlpool. That one didn’t pan out for various reasons, but we came up with the spinning drop at the end between us, and he’s the one that invented, well, I shouldn’t say him alone because nothing’s everyone person, but he and the engineering team came up with a way to make a conventional raft ride go on a drop, and I think that added an awful lot to the ride to the ride experience. I think I saw that somebody now has finally built their version of that, but up until recently, nobody had ever done that on any raft except us.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, Silver Dollar City in Missouri, I have not been on it this last year, released one, which apparently was the biggest drop that’s ever been in a raft ride. I forget the name of Mystic Falls I think, but again, it’s one I saw. So I mean I’ve heard it’s really neat, but still, I mean we’re talking almost 20 years later to do this then when most barely, like you said, most of them it was, there’s one in St. Louis that’s Six Flags that it’s basically you spin in circles, you go down a little bit and then you go under waterfalls and stuff and get very wet. This was very different.

Chris Runco: Oh, there’s another good one, and that is SeaWorld has some really good ones and they have a wonderful one here that’s very themed. It has some really beautiful pieces, and you also float by the critters. There’s places where you’re floating down a quieter part of the stream on there’s, and you literally look next to you and there’s like a pond with turtles in it or fish that’s maybe with a clear plex wall between you, and they had some very nice things. That was one of the best ones that I saw anywhere was that one. But yeah, I’ll have to, of course that just put Silver Dollar City on my list. I’m going to have to go. I want to go see it anyway, I’m going to have to go see it to see this.

Dan Heaton: Not to veer us too much off, but I will very quickly say that it’s a really cool for a regional park. It’s got a lot of theming. It’s really neat. I went there in 2019 most recently, so it’s cool. Well, speaking of theming, I feel like the Grizzly Peak area in general, given that, I mean like you mentioned around it, you have the entrance and Condor Flats and then of course like Harbor Boulevard and Disneyland.

The fact that you can build this mountain in there that also feels like it has its own area, and then of course you have the Redwood Creek Challenge trail right there, and you could somehow make it seem like you’re in this national park. How tricky was that to basically get the design where it can kind of feel self-contained while being pretty much surrounded by every other land in the park?

Chris Runco: We were lucky, I’ll attribute it to luck. No, that was our intent all the way along. It was difficult in some ways in that park because we had to be frank, there were a lot of things that we did on California Adventure when it first that didn’t work, and there was a lot of discussion about it, heated discussion about it. One of them was the berm, as simple thing as that. One of the simplest things that makes the magic of Disney, of Disneyland in particular to begin with, but then is used as a model everywhere else, is the idea of a berm.

And always said that the cheapest tool we have in our arsenal of design tricks is dirt, Disneyland. I loved what they accomplished with the berms in Disneyland, and that was the brilliant landscape, people that did it. Bill Evans, and I assume Ruth Sebhorn was part of that and whoever else, I have to dig into that really and see where maybe Marvin Davis, one of the original architects was part of that, but that idea of the berm that set it apart from the world around it, that’s so important.

And that was dropped off the list for California Adventure. This is a park about today and about California, so there’s no reason to put up that berm. And there were a lot of us that felt very queasy about that idea, and I think it compromises some parts of the park. We were lucky when I say we’ve got lucky because they put the hotel next to us, the Grand Californian. Now, I was terribly concerned about the Grand Californian because basically we’re building a mountain that’s scaled down the Sierra’s.

Any real mountain is thousands of feet high, right? We’re going to do a mountain like the Matterhorn. Matterhorn is 142 feet high, 145. Ours was going to be like 85. We’re about the same height as the castle. So I’m scaling down doing force perspective tricks to scale the mountain down. And right next to us is a hotel that’s scaling up to seven floors.

I’m going, oh my God, how are we going to make this work? Well, the fact of the matter is, first of all, it was very, the people working on the hotel, the architect on this turned out to be, it was such a blessing. He was on the exact same page we were Peter Dominick, who did the Wilderness Lodge, fantastic place in Florida.

Later on, he did the Animal Kingdom Lodge, and he flat out was using the vocabulary of these wonderful national park lodges, the Yosemite Lodge, and the, what is it, the Yellowstone Lodge. That was his starting point. So one, he was going to do this beautiful job of the architecture. Secondly, our vice president of color, Ron Esposito, we actually had at the time a vice president of color, a vice president of or paint a vice president of rock work, a vice president of architecture.

I want to have a business card with that kind of title, like Vice President of Paint. Anyway, Ron Esposito, fantastic scenic painter who led a lot of the work around Disney for a long time and had come from the studio. So he knew every trick in the book. I got to work with him on the boat house that we put in Jungle Cruise, and he aged the heck out of that too. Anyway, Ron was working on both parts. So he was talking to Peter, he was talking to us. So he made them very compatible in color and all. And the third thing was we grew a lot of trees. We planted trees that it kind of veiled the hotel.

And the last thing I note, which I didn’t realize till we really had kind of built them mountain out and all that, there is actually no place where a person can look at the scale of the mountain and the hotel at the same time. When you’re in the land, you have to look to the left to see the hotel and to the right to see the mountain. You can’t get in a place where you can get ’em both in the same photo. There’s no place to do that, so you can’t really compare ’em. On the upside, the hotel became a berm for us.

That’s one of the reasons it has probably the most thorough sense of isolation from the rest of the park and for Anaheim is the fact that we have a berm. We have the berm of our mountain itself, and then we have the hotel and trees at the ends for Redwood Creek. So we really were able to create that enveloping kind of environment that Disneyland was known for. Some of it was by effort and some was by serendipity. We got to build it that way.

It was really tough in places like the Redwood Creek. I actually, again worked with the hotel. I helped ’em design some things for the hotel pool. They have a redwood slide there. I got to design where the water slide, it comes out of a redwood tree because it’s literally only a few feet away from the back of Redwood Creek. So we had to make that joint as compatible as possible. But yeah, we had to do fencing and careful planting and stuff, but we were fortunate in a lot of ways.

But the other side of it that’s very important is Grizzly Peak was built by people who loved the Sierras. Growing up in California, a lot of us, I used to go there, go camping every year with my family on vacation. The team we got together, virtually everybody were the same. One of the guys had literally gone to Yosemite every year of his life.

So when we did a research trip, he was the guide for the whole team on the west side of the Sierras. And I was the guide for the team on the east side of the Sierras where I spent my vacation. But that love comes out and any great project and has, it starts with how much you really are passionate about what you’re working on. We had a bunch of fans of the Sierras working on that, and everything is incorporated in that part of California. We’d loved putting every bit of that in there from the pine cones and the trees to the rafting supplies and the names and everything.

Dan Heaton: You can really feel the attention to detail. Like you mentioned with the hotel and the way that with that special entrance, it’s like you come out of this hotel and it feels really natural to walk up and there’s the peak and it’s right there, and it’s almost, it’s separate from everything else. So I think your point about luck, but also about passion for it in both cases probably makes a big difference. Well, I want to shift to something entirely different and ask about a few other projects you worked on.

One of them is Monsters, Inc, and this is, I actually was curious, I mean, I know you’ve worked on multiple ones, but the Ride and Go Seek in Tokyo, which I’ve never experienced. I’ve never been out to the Tokyo parks. I would love to get there someday, but that’s such a unique attraction with how you interact with it in a different way and how, I’d love to know a little bit about what it was like to work on that and just Monsters, Inc. in general, just how putting that together.

Chris Runco: I love the Monsters characters. I love the Monsters stories, the movies, and it was just really, that was a bucket list item to work on. The one, especially the one in Tokyo, first of all, I art directed the Monsters ride, field art directed the Monsters, Inc. ride for California. Now, that was a rescue job. It literally is coming to the rescue. We had an attraction, which it will remain the attraction that shall not be named, but it was an attraction that had not done well from the opening of DCA and was one of those things.

They immediately said, we’ve got to change this. And Rob’t Coltran and Kevin Rafferty, two of the legends of Imagineering, came up with this beautiful plan to take the Monsters, Inc. ride there, or the, I’m sorry, the Superstar Limo there. Oh, I said it, the Superstar Limo attraction and make it into Monsters, Inc., which is very popular at the time.

It had just come out, and that was very exciting. But we had just barely opened the park, and for a lot of mainly financial reasons, they said, we just can’t do this. So we waited and then a couple years later, Disneyland finally said, okay, we will go for it, and we know we need it. And Robert and Kevin had designed this beautiful ride where hardly renovated the cars. We hardly changed the track at all. We hardly changed the walls, and we created a completely different story.

And I think a lot of us, as we were installing it had this reaction. We all looked at each other and said, it’s almost like this was meant to be like somehow the guys who designed the first attraction there didn’t know it, but they were actually designing something they had no clue was coming. So it fit in there, and we were really happy, first of all, it was just so great to get those characters and that story in the park, and it really helped.

So one of the best reviews we’ve ever gotten on a ride was the day we were able to take Matt Ouimet, who was head of Disneyland at the time, and Bob Iger and take them and the other executives through the new Monsters attraction in Anaheim. And they came out and said, guys, you have far exceeded our expectations. We were hoping that this would be salvageable and that we could make anything barely passable of this. Instead, you’ve created a hit, this is going to be a hit.

And sure enough, it came out and it actually bumped the gate. I love that term. After the first year, they said, my gosh, the attendance after we opened, that jumped up by a certain percentage. That’s phenomenal for one little attraction like this, to have that much effect on people coming down to the park. And it needed every bit of help we could give it.

Years later, we renovated the whole park. But no, so that was great. And in the course of doing that, I got to meet the Pixar folks that had worked on Monsters, Inc., the whole team. And one of the art directors, I met a whole bunch of ’em, but Pete Docter came down, oh my God. I was just, we were all like starstruck. Pete Docter is coming down and he’s such a nice guy. We walked him through and he said the same thing all the Pixar guys do. They said, it’s so cool to walk through something where you built it as a film, but it’s still a film, and then somebody makes it into a three-dimensional thing. You can actually walk through the environments that you dreamed up. He just loved it, and it was so much fun to take him through there.

And I set it up for him. We were just putting the big sushi chef in installing that in the Harryhausen’s restaurant scene. So I had the guy set him up, but with the arms still detached. So when he got there, I said, Pete, will you do us a favor? We’ve got to place the arms for this guy. Will you help us do it? And he just loved doing that. So he went there and he helped him move him around.

Then he went, yeah, I think right there would work. That’d be good. So then we nailed him down where he installed them, where he put ’em, and then he and his whole family were there when we had the grand opening for that attraction. And it was so much fun to meet just a bunch of nice people. It’s kids and his wife and everybody and all the Pixar guys were down there, and they was a treat.

I do just, I’m so inspired by them every time, even now that they pump out a movie, I go grab the art of book immediately to get inspired by the beautiful art and design they put into those. So that’s what got me into the Monsters franchise. In the meantime, right about that time, they were working on this other Monsters attraction for Tokyo, which was going to be a much bigger deal from the ground up. And the team working on it led by Joe Lanzisero had designed this interactive ride, and it was one of the first interactive rides we’d done, and it was going to be flashlight tag.

So they designed it. Now, there was one point of controversy on the ride as they went along, which was the Japanese management, the OLC, Oriental Land Company, management had said, the Japanese people, our audience probably won’t like to have such a level of competition.

That’s not the way they think. So we should make this just more of a game, but we don’t need scoring or any of that. We said, are you sure Buzz Lightyear works great? And they said, no, no, we don’t think that’s, we just want to be there and play the game, but scoring and all that, we don’t need. Okay, fine. So the WDI guys argued with them, but they couldn’t win. And that’s the client. So we built this attraction and it’s absolutely beautiful. You have to see it someday. It is like living a piece of the movie, the city scene in the middle of it, the Monstropolis scene is just to die for and just the trash compactor and everything, it’s beautiful. The characters are more developed and there’s more characters. It’s great. But it had one failing. It wasn’t a game.

So you got in there and you started playing and nobody understood it because they’d pick up their flashlight and they’d aim at things, and some things moved and some things didn’t. And they didn’t know what they’d caused to move or if they caused things to move. The audience was totally befuddled by the gameplay, the game mechanics, because there was hardly no game, no scoring system.

You’d literally, there’d be like five characters and you’d aim at one of ’em, and the hidden sensor on ’em would make that move. But you go, did I do that or did the guy next to me do that? Or does it do that? Anyway, it’s very confusing. Within a month of opening, they came back and said, we have a strong concern that the Japanese, the OLC company management came back and said, we really think there ought to be more gameplay in this with a scoring system or something.

I thought our guys were going to swim over there and tell ’em off. But they said, you know, you’re right. We get it. It’s interesting to see this confusion. So we know we need to go in and we need to plus the gameplay. I had just had my first experience of going over to Japan and working on some small projects, a meet and greet near the Indiana Jones attraction there.

And they said, Chris, would you lead this team to come up with an overlay more game for this? We did this. Wonderful. So I said, sure. They brought a couple of designers from the Japanese design team over who are still, I love those guys. And the three of us sat in a room and started throwing gags on the wall. It was so great because literally they could speak for the Japanese audience and they’re great designers.

So we put a bunch of ideas together, and this is fast paced. They literally said, we not only want to fix this, we want it done within the first year. So you’ve got to crank this out and get it built and get it installed by next spring went, holy cow. So we’re cranking away and we got these ideas and we basically went in and first of all, we came up with a game mechanic. That was if the way to know which characters animate and which don’t is you will look for the characters that have a flashlight.

And secondly, they’re wearing a Monsters, Inc. helmet on their heads, and it has this on the front is the sensor. So we’ll tell ’em that. We’ll show ’em that in the very first scene. Mike will explain how you aim for the helmet on the character, and that will make the helmet light up and make them do whatever they’re going to do.

So now we have a very clear idea of what the targets are and how you aim your flashlight at them. Secondly, we said the second thing is let’s put more story in. And the Japanese clearly love the boot character. Let’s really plus the boot character. So we went from a total of 23 targets in the ride to over a hundred, and we went from I think three boot characters in the ride to 15 or thereabouts. So she pops up in every scene. I know that wonderful scene in the movie where she’s in the restroom and Sally can’t find her, and somehow it’s like she magically hops just appears. Yeah, okay. We did that on the right.

She literally pops up behind one thing, giggles, drops down, and then a second later pops up on the other side of the room and she’s got a helmet on. She’s playing, playing flashlight tag with all of us. So we added that. We added in a kind of zot scoring system, which is we took a picture of the guests on the ride, and then at the end of the ride, as you get off, there’s a big board that says, congratulations to the new highest scoring players, and there’s our picture is on the wall first. What you don’t know is the minute you turn the corner, the picture changes to the next people that got out of the ride.

But as a story point, it was a lot of fun. So we got to add to what was already a beautiful ride, beautifully installed. We got to add this game layer. And the second part of it for me was just that I got to go over and not only work with the team and go back and forth probably a dozen times to Japan, get a lot of frequent flyer points, but then I spent about three months over there installing it. And I just loved Tokyo and the crew we were working with just what a bunch of fantastic craftsmen and artists and I can’t say enough for how much fun it was working with the Japanese.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, I’ve heard very similar stories from Joe Lanzisero and then others that work there just about what great experiences they had working on various attractions at Tokyo. So that’s great to hear too, hear. Well, speaking of something that you’re upgrading to, another one that you worked on that I find really interesting that I haven’t heard much about is the Pirates Lair, which is the updates to Tom Sawyer Island, which I find so interesting just because classic old Disneyland attraction, but then with some changes to it. So I’m curious to hear a little bit about what your experience was there.

Chris Runco: Okay, well, the first thing I have to do when starting this story is I got my musket. So I’ve picked up my musket and I’ve got my sword that I stole off one of the pirates there. It’s over on the other side of the room and put on my pirate’s hat. So envision that, if you will, and put me in the right frame of mind.

But you’ve just gone from, we’ve just talked about a couple of the absolute highlights of my career of the things that were so much fun to work on to another one of my absolute favorites. So Pirates Lair, we’d actually taken passes at, there was an early 10 years before there’d been iteration about how to extend kind of New Orleans Square out to part of the island and connect that and Mansion some more. It involved even putting in a tunnel, which never happened, thank God, because that would’ve been a disaster.

This is interesting. It came from Disneyland, the Disneyland management at the time, again, it was Matt, we, Matt and Greg came to Imagineering and said, we have an issue of attendance where it’s too heavy on the Space Mountain side, the Tomorrowland side, the Star Tours side of the park, and there’s not enough people on the western side of the park. And secondly, we’re really under utilizing Tom Sawyer Island and it’s kind of fallen into disrepair. And there’s a lot of things out there that don’t have, are still original equipment. Could we update this?

Secondly, is it possible we now got this new pirate franchise? Is it possible you could do something with pirates out on the island? And so they assigned Ray Spencer and myself to work on ideas for it. So the next couple months we put together a whole collection of ideas and pinned up the boards and we said, yeah, this would be, there’s clear connections we could make and this could be a lot of fun.

We did a big presentation and Matt and Greg and Marty and our management, the rest of our management looked at it and said, this is great, but you know what? We can’t fit it in our menu. So thanks for coming up with it, but maybe down in the future sometime we were disappointed, but we put on the shelf. In fact, our manager at the time said, okay, we’re kind of doing house cleaning. You can take all those boards apart and just, there’s no reason to keep ’em kind of a pack rat.

So I kept the presentation boards for Pirates Lair together and stuck ’em in a corner of my office. And about six months later we got this urgent call and it was Jay Rasulo just called up and he said, you guys, we got to have something to open day and date with the new Pirates movie, and that’s May of next year, which is only like six, eight months away.

What can you do? And so our management called up. In fact, our manager at the time, John George has called us up and said, have you got any of that stuff you presented before? We should show that and see if, because they really absolutely want to have something for the opening of the movie. And so I just said, I’ll see if I can get it together for you. I literally went over and dusted the boards off and brought them out.

So then we were on this super fast paced project line where things we usually took a month to do, we were literally doing in three days, okay, you’ve got the sketches. Okay, get ’em estimated. Okay, let’s put ’em on a plan and let’s get that estimated. And then because Jay had said they knew that the only way we were going to do this is to do it with everybody going like full tilt.

So within a month we were standing in front of Jay Rasulo presenting these ideas and giving him a ballpark estimate and everything else. And he was literally sitting there in the meeting just going, yeah. Then it was almost like a guy at a car lot with his checkbook in his hand going, okay, where do I sign? He said, I’m in. Just let’s go for it. And an interesting thing is we actually presented to him like a phase one, phase two and phase three. The phase one was to be built in six months for the movie, and then phase two was going to come down the road and many Disney projects, phase two and phase three disappeared into ether. So they’ve never happened.

Then we got everybody on board and we were rolling with Pirates Lair, and then everybody had to think about how to work in a different way in order to accomplish that, because there’s Disney is set up, Imagineering is set up to develop really very ambitious projects with a lot of detail, a lot of research, careful attention to every aspect of it, possibly some new technology that you’ve got to test all these things. I was like, guys, we don’t care what you do. It has to be there in six months the same day the movie opens. Okay, there’s no way around it. That’s when it’s got to open. Wow, okay. And so that was the target and everybody on our team jumped up and made it happen.

Dan Heaton: So what was some of your ideas from phase two and three that never actually ended up happening?

Chris Runco: Well, the big one was we were going to build a completely new fort that was going to be a pirate fort. The old fort we knew was in pad shape and we said, well, why don’t we build a pirate fort? If you go watch, I can throw some research at you. If you go watch Kidnapped or the original Treasure Island movie, you’ll see some pirate forts that they threw together out of trees and things. We were going to have a pirate it. And secondly, the pirate fort was going to lead to a passageway that took you to another cavern, a whole separate cavern, which we’d hide on the back end of the island.

So we had all these illusions in this second cave that were part of this pirate experience. And again, a lot of ’em were going to relate to the movie. So basically in a nutshell, that’s kind of what a phase two might’ve been, but there’s a lot more ideas tucked away in the imaginary archives than we’ll ever see light of day. It’s just the nature of the process. But we got to do a lot of the things we dreamed up. We got to do whatever we could get done in six months.

Dan Heaton: No, and I totally understand that. There’s always the bigger attraction or the other part that doesn’t get made that every once in a while comes up again in some other spot.

Chris Runco: Exactly. Somebody will dig that drawing out some point in the future and suddenly there’ll be in a park where we never thought of it. Somebody will do a pirate for it and some of the stuff.

Dan Heaton: I wanted to ask you about, something a little unrelated attractions, but I think really important, which is, I know you were co-chair of the Disney Women’s Inclusion Network, which was designed to encourage young female engineers and designers in their careers, which I think is really important. And I’m curious to know a little bit about that project and your involvement there.

Chris Runco: Sure. One thing I’m very proud of is all the proactive programs that Imagineering put in place over the years. In particular, you’re probably aware of the Imaginations project that Marty Sklar started like 25 years ago or whatever, which was reaching out to colleges around the country. And keep in mind at the time, virtually nobody had a themed entertainment kind of major.

We were all people who’d had art majors, theater majors, media majors, movie majors, that kind of thing. Nobody had mechanical engineering architecture. Then we pulled it all together into what we did, but there was nobody studying that specific or almost nobody. And so he wanted to broaden the pool of people that we got into Imagineering, because diversity, especially for creative projects, is a huge benefit. You get more widespread ideas and the audience is more diverse and continues to get more diverse all the time.

You want to reflect your audience, you want to know your audience from Mickey’s 10 Commandments. So Marty started that many years ago, and several of my friends, including Daniel Joseph that you spoke with, my buddy Daniel, he came out of that program, but also Dexter Tanksley and a whole host of people, the list is too long to name, but we have a lot of people that got a chance by winning the Imaginations, doing a good job in the Imaginations contest that’s opened up to colleges around the country presenting their work, and then got jobs as interns.

And a substantial number of those folks ended up finding a job in the industry, and a good number of them also became imagineers. So terrific programs. Anyway, and the other thing was that our company also started these efforts to make women more part of every part of a project. I mean, literally when I go back to when I first started at WDI, so we’re talking 1976, I would walk in a room from the Model Shop to go to a meeting about a project, and everybody in the room was male. The only female that showed up at that time would be Marty’s secretary, bringing him a message, and half the people in the room smoked. So that’s what that was, corporate America back in the early seventies.

By the time I left, I was working with every kind of ethnicity, people from all over the country, people from all over the world, men and women in every kind of role. I worked on a Shanghai team that was led by a woman show producer and show writer and woman show coordinator. And several of the designers I worked with were women. So we came a long way, but still there were hurdles.

There are to this day, I’m sure just like the rest of the country deal with. So some group got together and said, and proposed to the company, we should start a program that’s there to encourage women in these call non-traditional roles. It shouldn’t be called that anymore, but that’s what it was. I went to some of the meetings and I said, this is great. I’d love helping out in any way I can.

They say, well, we’re going to start several committees and would you like to lead one of those? And I said, yeah. So I was a co-chair with one of the young women designers of this other committee, and we had four or five committees. So I was one of probably 10 co-chairman. It was really eye-opening for me because then I sat in on meetings and I heard these young people’s stories that I wouldn’t have gotten any other way.

One day a bunch of us went to lunch and one of the women engineers, it was a young lady who was in ride engineering, and she had gone to college for that. And she’d studied hard and she’d done really well. She was top of her class, and she was telling me how hard it was at Imagineering at the time to be a woman in engineering.

She said there were just all these things about the way they did things, and I would do ’em and they’d say, no, no, we don’t do it like that. I go, well, why? And she’d say, why? That’s the way. And they go, well, we’ve always done it this way. You go, well, that’s the way a guy would do it, but a woman would do it differently. Some of the discomfort, I mean, I sat in rooms where some of ’em really got choked up and about how hard it had been at times.

It was shocking to me to hear these young women talk about, well, I thought we were pretty progressive from everything I’d seen, but their view was they still had a lot of hurdles that they saw that needed to be worked on. So we did presentations, we’d have talks, we brought in people to have talks outside experts. And as far as I know, that’s still going on. It should be maybe in a different form. But no, again, it was just terrific to be a part of that and help out in any small way.

I mean, one of the things I really loved in the last longer than five years, maybe 10 years or more of Imagineering, actually probably from the beginning, we all got a chance to mentor. I mean, we were mentored by wonderful people, all those wonderful guys for me, Marc Davis, Sam McKim, Herb Ryman, Harriet Burns, Leota Tombs, John Hench, Randy Bright, Marty Sklar.

Now I’m just name dropping. No, but I love those people. So to turn around and pass it forward to mentor people over the years, Daniel’s one of the guys I spent time with, just lunches and things. And then they actually had a formal mentoring program. So there were people I informally mentored who would just like to come over and we’d chat and other people in the specific program, people would ask for you. We started a relationship and then for six months we’d mentored.

And one of my most fun things was I’d take ’em down a day at the park and walk around just pointing things out, going, yeah, we worked on that. Oh, that was at a disaster. See what we had to fix there or look at, let me show you the backstage part of this. And it was, I love that idea of helping pass along the things that were passed along to me.

So yeah, I was very happy to do that. If anything, I felt that was one negative about retiring as I thought, oh shoot, I don’t get to do that anymore. I’m glad to see it. And I look around the park, I just read an article the other day that for the first time this week I read an article that said, for the first time every Disney park in Florida is now run by a woman. This is the first time that’s happened. Meg Crofton, I think is the one who’s in charge of all of Disney World. And I have to say, I’m always, always mess up names. So yeah, the company’s really moving in a good direction.

Dan Heaton: I did see that too. And that was great to see. It sounds like just the project that you just described is definitely needed and also sounds like very helpful. I hope that it continues because like you mentioned, there’s still progress that needs to be made, but I know we’ve come a long way. So I just have one more question here, Chris, for today. I know there’s more things you worked on that we could cover, but I figure we only do so much each time. You’ve done so much.

But last question, you already just mentioned some mentors and people that inspired you, and I’m sure the list is very long, but I’m curious if there’s a few Imagineers whose work has really inspired you, either as a designer or also just inspiration in terms of being a mentor or helping you out. I’d love to hear from that before we finish.

Chris Runco: Yeah, it goes on too long by itself, but I can give you a couple highlights. Oh my God, more than one time I’ve sat down with my cohort, my generation of Imagineers, and said, we were so lucky. We were so lucky to be there with those original Imagineers, the pioneers. The other thing that’s always takes me aback is to talk about them. And we’ll be talking about ’em going, yeah, Sam McKim, remember when he used to come down the hall and he’d, he’d always say hi and ask how your family’s doing.

And you’d be working on something and he’d give you some pointers and things. Remember Herbie and his jokes, his constant and what a gentleman, right? And Sam McKim, what a gentleman and Harriet, what a beautiful lady. And Leota, what a sweetheart, everything we did. We would go, well, wait a minute, every one of ’em was like a wonderful person.

Talk about an amazing collection. So beside the talent, it’s just like they were all just so kind and open and sweet to us. It’s not like sparks didn’t fly once in a while. There was a big for our early, when Tony Baxter was working on Big Thunder where they had a big fur over the rock work style, and it was a pitch battle between Hench was involved and Claude Coats was involved and Fred Joerger was involved and everybody was, and Tony and they were going around, they finally came to some compromise about it.

So it’s not like we were, it wasn’t like we were all just kumbaya all the time, but those guys were, they just treated us great. Secondly, I mean now when I go down to the park, for me it’s magic because I walk around and I just go, yeah, I remember when Harper drew that up, and I remember seeing the sketch that Sam did for that.

I remember seeing Herbie’s 25th Castle drawing of that. And look, when you look at it close, you can see details there that we finally built 30 years later, 40 years later. That was wonderful. And so I could go talk a long time about that bunch. Colin Campbell, I mentioned Wathel Rogers with his pipe and just unflappable, and you’ll see him in the video wearing the crazy suit animating Abe Lincoln. And actually, I’ve seen pictures where when you see the robin in Mary Poppins hand and Julie Andrews hand in the movie, the guy that’s like three feet away from her pulling the cables to make that animate is him. And he was so unflappable. We worked through Epcot before he retired, he worked with us on Epcot with a whole new bunch of animators. And it’s just like all the craziness and all the stress.

He’d just come in and everybody would be pulling their hair out going, how are we going to do this? This is never going to come together, this and that. And he’d come in, be puffing on his pipe and go, okay, we’ll handle it. Here’s what we’re going to do, and just everybody calm down and we’d get the job done. There are people like that.

Randy Bright, I wanted to mention him because he and I were so close after when we got working on Typhoon Lagoon, he was just such a huge inspiration to me, and he had such a great feel for the Disney audience. He’d come up, he was at the park for years, like many of us, but he literally, you can probably, I have to find pictures of these. He was one of the spacemen walking around Tomorrowland in the big spacesuit, and the guy was like six two and built like a football player.

So you’d have remembered him if you’d seen him. He was also, I’ve seen pictures of him being one of the operators and doing the spiel on the Columbia as a sailor, and he just knew the park. And boy, he had a great feel for the audience you could present to him. And he just went, would go right to every time he’d go, I don’t get this. This isn’t going to work. This’ll work.

Because that’s the way our audience would react, that wonderful Disney family audience that keeps growing all the time. But he had a great feel for that. And of course, he wrote American Adventure when a bunch of scripts had fallen by the wayside. Ray Bradbury tried one, but a bunch of writers took a shot at it, and then he went off and wrote a version of it that is the show you see today with Minor, with updates.

But he wrote that show, he envisioned it, and he wrote the music for the lyrics for several of the songs, including Golden Dream. And to this day, I can’t hear that song without getting a little teary eyed because I know that’s Randy’s song. It showed how much his heart was, not only in Disney, but in the country we love. So there’s a couple of names off the top of my head, and you could get me going Yale, Gracey. I don’t want to leave him out.

I was lucky enough to Yale, Gracie taught me how to make some special effects that literally I wanted to do the hubcap effect for Spaceship Earth. He showed me how to bend hubcaps, how to create bent hubcaps, which we actually did on a plexiglass because we didn’t want to go buy a bunch of hubcaps. He was wacky and fun and just and crotchety, and he also smoked a pipe.

Now I think about it, and Harriet was a sweetheart and just incredibly creative and Leota too. I worked with her when we rehabbed the Submarines and the people at Disneyland, fawn over her, she was down there. I was art directing this wet rehab of the Submarines, and Leota was down there every day, and I’d see her often. She was working with the folks who were repainting everything, including all the fish, and she’d come up with ways to, they were trying to improve the look of the fish, and so they’d last longer and painting on the skins that they used on the sea bass and stuff, and the love and the respect in the eyes of the Disneyland craftsman was they just treated her with such high esteem.

And that’s Kim Irvine’s mother from the stories about the Mansion. So yeah, I just feel so lucky, and this is one reason I love doing this kind of conversation because I want to keep sharing how blessed we were by those people and by everything they gave us.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, I think, I mean, a lot of the names you’ve listed, Randy Bright’s name comes up so often, and of course Yale Gracey, Daniel Joseph mentioned a lot about him and Harriet and so many of the others. You always say there’s always more to mention. So it’s great to hear about that. You had such a good experience with some of them.

And Chris, this has been great, and I want to make a quick shout out to your recent Instagram account that you’ve started at Chris Runco 52, because you already have had some great photos about some of the things we’ve talked about, like the Pirates Lair and others, and I’m sure there’s going to be plenty more. And so that’s a really cool account and just in general, thanks so much for talking with me, and it’s been a blast, and I really appreciate it.

Chris Runco: It’s a blast for me too. Like I say, I really enjoy it, and I’ve enjoyed listening to my buddies on your podcast as well. Yeah, Chris Merritt and Don Carson were particularly funny because I’ve worked closely with both those guys, and yeah, it’s a lot of camaraderie there. So keep doing a great job, Dan. Thank you.