150. Larry Nikolai on Ariel’s Undersea Adventure, Tokyo DisneySea, and 28 Years at Imagineering

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It’s still amazing to think about how much Disney expanded its resorts during the early years of Michael Eisner. This growth continued through the ’90s and included the opening of Tokyo DisneySea in 2001. Larry Nikolai started at Walt Disney Imagineering during the height of this era in 1990. During his 28 years at Disney, he worked closely on so many cool attractions around the world. Larry is my guest on this episode of The Tomorrow Society Podcast to talk about his remarkable career.

This episode covers many of the highlights from Larry’s work as a Show Designer and Creative Director. Before joining Disney, his first project was the Monster Plantation (now Monster Mansion) boat ride in Six Flags Over Georgia. He learned the ropes there and went on to design animatronics restaurant shows in the 1980s. He also honed his design skills on TV and film projects before reaching WDI. His early attractions for Disney included Splash Mountain and overlays for the Country Bear Jamboree, both in Tokyo. He frequently worked in Japan and became the Creative Lead and Art Director for the Arabian Coast at Tokyo DisneySea.

One of Larry’s favorite projects was The Little Mermaid – Ariel’s Undersea Adventure for DCA and The Magic Kingdom. He describes some technological advances that were part of that attraction, including the incredible Ursula animatronic. He also had the chance to update two classic Disneyland attractions, Peter Pan’s Flight and Alice in Wonderland, for the 60th anniversary. His fandom made the experience of enhancing the classics a special one. We close the interview by talking about Larry’s work on Shanghai Disneyland plus some advice for aspiring Imagineers.

Show Notes: Larry Nikolai

Learn about Larry Nikolai and check out his artwork on his official website.

Follow Larry on Instagram and on Facebook at his Art of Larry Nikolai page.

Discover more about Larry’s story on Episode 4 of the Art of the Experience podcast with host Sam Carter.

Transcript

Larry Nikolai: I was always aware of people like Marc Davis and Claude Coats and X Atencio and other Disney legends. And even though their names weren’t in those books, I knew their work. So when I did finally know their names, I could study them a little bit more and they heavily influenced my art style for characters.

Dan Heaton: That is Disney Imagineer Larry Nikolai, and you’re listening to episode 150 of The Tomorrow Society Podcast.

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Dan Heaton: Thanks for joining me here on Episode 150 of The Tomorrow Society Podcast. I’m your host, Dan Heaton, and it’s kind of hard to believe for me that we’re actually this far into the show, and I know it’s been going on for a while, more than five years, but still the time has flown by and I think this episode fits perfectly with what I’ve been trying to do, especially more recently with the podcast. My guest is Larry Nikolai. Larry joined Walt Disney Imagineering in 1990, was there for 28 years, worked on so many cool projects during the Disney Decade and beyond, including Ariel’s Undersea Adventure, both Monsters, Inc. attractions at DCA and in Tokyo.

Lots of overlays including the Nightmare before Christmas edition in Japan, small world, he added Stitch to the Tiki Room, also worked on Shanghai Disneyland. And what I found so interesting too about Larry beyond all the Disney projects was how he got started working on Monster Plantation at the time, which is now Monster Mansion, working for pizza places that did animatronic shows, which I’m very familiar with as a kid.

Also too just how much Larry’s story crosses through a lot of the other guests I’ve had on the show like Chris Runco and Ethan Reed and Joe Lanzisero and others that worked on the same projects or the same time periods. So it seems really fitting for me that he would be the guest here on Episode 150. Hope you enjoy learning more about Larry’s story.

He’s done more than we could possibly cover, including work in Tokyo DisneySea, lots more overseas and at Disneyland, and we’ve tried to cover a lot in an hour and it was really great to get a chance to talk to Larry. So let’s do this. Here is Larry Nikolai.

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Dan Heaton: You’ve done a lot of great attractions you’ve been involved with that I’ve enjoyed over the years. I’m also curious more just about your story. So I’d love to know just up front, how did you get interested even just in theme parks and in Disneyland when you were growing up?

Larry Nikolai: Well, I guess it’s just my family took us to Disneyland. We moved out here from Kansas City when I was only two years old. The first photographs I have are of us going to Disneyland, so I guess my dad really wanted to see it and that was 56 and I guess we just made a yearly pilgrimage after that, and I grew up on the park and I was just always fascinated with Disneyland in general and the attractions. So it’s always stuck with me.

Dan Heaton: I know that when you were younger, you got interested in becoming an artist, but also in animatronics and everything. So how did that kind of progress where then you went to Disneyland and then you got interested in kind of doing more with that in your life, I guess as a career?

Larry Nikolai: Well, let me start by saying prior to 1965, the Jungle Cruise was my favorite attraction. I was always fascinated with the idea of dimensional things going through them and all that. I made a couple of cheap little paper mâché elephants for myself and the backyard that you could hook a hose up to and they would square out of their trunks. But just the crudest of materials because I’m only like nine years old when I’m doing it, but still, I had this desire to make dimensional objects and then of course I became aware of the New York World’s Fair and the fact that Disney, when you watch the Wonderful World of Color every Sunday, you were aware that Disney had some shows going on at the New York World’s Fair. One of them that grabbed my attention was Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln.

So here 1965 rolls around and oh my gosh, they’re bringing it to Disneyland. So I was so excited to see this show that had been at the New York World’s Fair and we went in summer of ‘65 just a few weeks after it first opened there, and I just remember being so I don’t know, I remember where I sat at the theater and everything, but this was new back then, the idea of a single figure on stage holding your attention for 12 minutes.

But of course Disney had put a whole show around that with the dramatic music and the lead in and Paul Frees talking and everything. So it was a complete package and it just blew me away. Of course, always wanting to make things when I came home, I had to start building Lincolns for myself and my poor family. I made these very, very crude things out of just again, the crudest of materials, but I put on shows in my garage with an old turntable and made them sit through this darn thing so many times they were so patient with me.

Just this whole thing got me interested in Lincoln and that became a lifelong thing with me. So that was kind of the start of really wanting to make attractions. So when Pirates opened, that really just changed my life. Now I’m 12 years old and going on Pirates for the first time, and when you go down the second drop, the second waterfall off to the left side, you could kind of get a glimpse down behind the scenes there. It was just fascinating to me. I wanted to see all that stuff backstage, but of course the idea of multiple Lincolns in this dimensional attraction that you were going through again blew me away.

So now I’m building Pirates in my backyard. It didn’t last that long, but I built a bunch of very crude figures and once again, the family was forced to walk through at night with me carrying a tape recorder that had the wonderful World of Color show on it, reel to reel that I had, and I would put on a pirate show. It’s just always been with me up until high school before then I got interested in film, but that’s kind of the back story on me with attractions.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, I mean, it makes a lot of sense. You were the perfect age too, being 12 and getting to ride Pirates. I mean, I can’t think of especially given what it was. I mean it amazes me now, but in 1967, that’s something special. Well, I know you ultimately then were working, I believe at Magic Mountain and then ultimately ended up working on Monster Plantation, which we’re jumping ahead a bit, but getting to kind of work on that attraction, which is now Monster Mansion, but it’s still in Georgia, which to me is kind of a fascinating little attraction. But how did you end up actually getting to go do that and work on that in the corporate engineering role there?

Larry Nikolai: Yeah, I mean, it started with me working at Magic Mountain, started there in ‘73. The park was still very young and new and everything. During that time I was still going to school. I was getting my degree in art and I was still going to Disneyland. But a weird thing was I never put the two things together in my mind. I was aware of WED Imagineering and one day at Magic Mountain, it just kind of gelled in my mind that, oh, I’ve got an art degree I know about wed, I love Disney, I should go try to work at WED.

So in ‘78 I started trying to get hired at WED, which was practically impossible because these were Epcot days, and I’m not going to say it was a limited staff there, but they were already staffed up well into Epcot and they weren’t hiring. You really had to be special to get hired by them back then, and I didn’t have the kind of experience they wanted. So I stayed at Magic Mountain, but fortuitously, I met an ex-Disney person there. He used to be the vice president of MAPO and he had left Disney and he was working with Six Flags because he was fixing Colossus, taking the zero Gs out of it because there had been an accident on it.

So he had come in as an engineer and fixed that, and then they hired him. His name was David Gemba, and he became my mentor and friend and almost a second father to me. But he was doing the dark ride for Atlanta, and I showed him my portfolio. I was introduced to him by another friend there at Magic Mountain, and he saw my portfolio and he said, well, I’ll tell you what, we’re doing an attraction in Atlanta, a dark ride, and if it goes through, you can come on and work with us.

It was as simple as that. He saw one little sculpted maquette that I had done of a raccoon where I was trying to add some things to corners of Magic Mountain, just trying to bring a little Disney to Magic Mountain. That was enough for him to say, you can sculpt all the cats and work on the bottle with us. And still to this day, I’m not sure what made him take a chance on me, but I’m sure glad he did because he lifted me up out of the merchandise department where I was.

And that’s how I got flopped down into corporate engineering because that’s his department and certainly I’m not an engineer, but it was where I had to be in order to work with him, and things just took off from there. Monster Plantation did get approved and I stayed with it through the entire process.

We put that whole thing together in nine months. You talk about small world, they’re always talking about nine months. Well, Monster Plantation was nine months also, and I went through every phase of that project and then contributed to most of the processes along the way from the early designed to the model to actually building the monsters and then installing them in Atlanta. So it was this baptism by fire that I went through and it was the best learning process anyone could have had because here was the first major animatronic attraction being built outside of Disney at that time, and I got to participate in it. So it was great.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, that’s so fortuitous, like you said that you were able to do that. Then how challenging was that because not, I mean you’ve created everything in your backyard and everything, but learning that on the job, how, I wouldn’t even say challenging, but what kind of experience was that getting to learn as you go on something that was so new in a way?

Larry Nikolai: Fortunately, I was already doing sculpture since a kid from an age anyway, so I mean, that was kind of a step-by-step process. That’s what I was brought in to do something. I did know what to do. The funny thing is they probably brought me on to do all the maquettes for the model because it ended up being a hundred plus maquettes in three months, but I didn’t know that I couldn’t do it. Let’s put it like that. If you had brought in a professional sculptor who had done this stuff, there’s no way they would’ve done a hundred in three months plus it would’ve cost the company an arm and a leg, and I was cheap. I was already on the project. So that was how I got my foot in the door.

Anyway, when we got to production, then there were others doing the full size sculpture, but I got to observe that, and I sort of became a de facto art director between the production design company that had designed the attraction and AVG productions who were building it. So that kind of built on there to where I gained experience directing and letting that happen. The other things just sort of fell into place, placing speakers, placing lights. When installation came, because I had gone through the process up to that point, I was probably one of the best people to have on the site because I had the whole thing in my head, all of it. So I was able to direct and work with at that point, just translating the model that I had worked on into the full size attraction.

Dan Heaton: I mean, that makes a lot of sense given your role going through all of it. Well, I know that after that you ultimately worked on, what I remember as a kid were very big in the 1980s, which is the restaurant animatronic shows, which, I mean, I only saw the ones here, which was like Showbiz Pizza, but I know they were all over. So how’d you get involved with that, and what was that experience like to work on something that was fairly new to the time but was really evolving as it went?

Larry Nikolai: Right, but it was a huge trend. I mean, Chuck E. Cheese was so popular that everybody else started jumping on that bandwagon. AVG productions had built Monster Plantation, and when I left Six Flags because they really had nothing for me to do after Monster Plantation, I went to work full-time at AVG Productions, and they of course had clients coming in who wanted these pizza restaurant shows, and the first one was Circus Playhouse, which was a group back east that really didn’t take off much.

But the funny thing was these people would come in saying, we want 100 shows. We’re going to build a hundred restaurants. They were all very ambitious, and of course, none of that ever happened. Circus Playhouse was the first. It became a little controversial because I’m just going to say the clients weren’t always on the up and up there.

So we ended up having to let that show go after only four or five of ’em that we built. But at the same time, this is when I met Rolly Crump from Disney because he brought some shows to us when he was working for Steve Wynn in Las Vegas. And somewhere along the way he had been approached by Castle Parks. I don’t know how they knew him or knew of him, but they approached him to design a show for their pizza restaurant, which was Tex Critters Pizza Jamboree.

So AVG took that show on too, because we were working with Rolly on other things. And then after that, Bullwinkles came along because the company that was building the Bullwinkles shows also was not able to fulfill whatever contract or whatever plans that Bullwinkles had. So AVG was approached on that, and we took on Bullwinkles, and Rolly then wanted Rolly, I’m sorry, Rolly for AVG Productions.

He wanted to create a little show on his own that could be sold as a standalone unit to smaller venues without building these huge stages and big pizza restaurants. So that’s when he gave us the chance to do a show that we called Bullfrog Bayou Revue. A lot of people don’t know about that because the only place it really landed was Six Flags in Atlanta of all things. It was there for a number of years, and some people know about it, but that was the last of the pizza restaurant shows that I worked on. But again, it’s a progression. One client comes in and then another one comes in and it just kind of builds.

The weird thing that I’ve discovered now through the Internet and being contacted by people is this huge fandom for those shows, people that actually have bought the animatronic figures and are restoring them and actually want to get the shows up and running again, and Circus Playhouse and Tex Critters mostly, but there’s some collection of the Bullwinkle shows as well, and I’m just astounded at the enthusiasm that the people are putting that kind of money into that, but I guess it’s part of their childhood, so they’re just trying to resurrect that or rebuild it. Some of them have done pretty good jobs so far.

Dan Heaton: That’s interesting. I mean, I mentioned people that are around my age who grew up in the ‘80s, maybe they didn’t get a chance to often go to Disneyland or Disney World, so that how they started animatronics was at things like pizza restaurants or even like you mentioned at Six Flags Over Georgia or anything. So I think it’s similar to, in a way, to people that got really into Pirates or something else. It’s like their variation of that in a way.

Larry Nikolai: Yeah, because everybody who wasn’t close to the parks to where they could go all the time. So yeah, this was bringing a little bit of Disney, even though it wasn’t Disney, it was bringing a little bit of that animatronic magic to your hometown.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, totally. Well, I know you also, before joining Disney, you worked on some TV projects for animated shows and some film projects. So I’d love to know from you just how you got involved in that, or maybe just what some of the highlights were or what it was like to work on those.

Larry Nikolai: Well, there was a step in between AVG Productions and all of that because after I left AVG Productions, again, my boss, David, was hired as president of Advanced Animations back east in Connecticut, and there was a number of shows that they were doing there, and I got involved with that. I moved back to Connecticut with my family, thought we were going to be there for five years, but it ended up only being one because we were owned by a subsidiary of Warner Communications.

Warner Communications went through its own problems to where they ended up offloading our company, and I came back to Los Angeles because I didn’t want to start commuting to New York, trying to do any kind of work there. Anyway, that was an interim step to where I was hired just by Ruby Spears Productions. When I came back to Los Angeles, I had no experience whatsoever with TV animation or animation at all other than dimensional animation.

But I was lucky enough, a friend of mine introduced me to Joe Ruby. I got hired on the spot, and now suddenly I’m into cartoon animation. But a lot of my friends that I have met along the way were also back in Los Angeles, and they were dealing with motion pictures and television and things. So I started doing freelance with them. So aside from Ruby Spears Productions where we did the standard, that was my full-time job doing Alvin and the Chipmunks, Punky Brewster, Mr. T, all those great shows from the eighties that are kind of hard to watch now.

But anyway, that was the full-time job. But I met the gentleman that created Alf and I ended up working with him on a number of projects, a lot of magazine illustrations for Alf Magazine, and then designing a couple of shows for him. There was a show called The Wickedest Witch that was a standalone special on one of the shows, and I designed all the characters on that for him. I was introduced to Doug Beswick, who was a major stop motion artist by a friend, and at the time I met Doug, they were doing Aliens for James Cameron on, and they were building a miniature of the alien queen that ended up doing the miniature shots for the movie. So Doug asked me to do other things.

After that, a couple of Nightmare on Elm Street movies, I ended up working on a virus first movie through Doug, and again, it’s this networking thing that happens. You do one thing for a person and then you end up doing other things for that person, and then you meet somebody else through that person and they have you do something and it’s a building thing. My friend Randy Simper was doing a lot of TV puppetry, so I designed a number of puppets and costumes for him that he did for various TV shows. I mean, that’s kind of what it was. There were a lot of individual shows, motion pictures, and tv.

Dan Heaton: Those are all great examples though of I’m sure you were learning things that ultimately helped you when you went and went to WDI. So I’m just curious for looking back at it, how did that help you to just kind of grow where then you would ultimately end up joining Disney in 1990, but just as you did these as you were heading in that direction?

Larry Nikolai: In 1978, when I first tried getting hired at Disney, I was not qualified. I really wasn’t. It was just a shot in the dark. The desire was there, but the great thing was for the next 12 years, I met the right people at the right time, and I worked on the right kind of shows that gave me the knowledge and the experience for the kind of things that Disney did. So by the time I did get hired in 1990, I had a whole bunch of credits under my belt, and I had worked on numerous animatronic shows, which is of course what I ended up working with at Disney plus character design that I had learned at Ruby Spears Productions, working with Disney people and great artists there.

It was just all, again, a building process to where 12 years, I was lucky enough to learn this stuff while getting paid for it. By the time I did got to Disney, the Disney Decade was underway, so they were hiring, and instead of me pursuing them like I did for so long back in the early eighties, they kind of pursued me when I finally brought in my portfolio with all these credits in it and getting hired there just went really fast.

Dan Heaton: Yeah. Well, I mean that’s such an interesting time because Michael Eisner joined with Frank Wells, and that was like the heyday, obviously before Frank Wells passed and things changed, but in like you said, the Disney Decade. So when you joined, what was the atmosphere like? You’re joining as someone new, and I’m sure they just probably, you ended up jumping onto a lot of projects, but what was it like getting started there?

Larry Nikolai: It’s a little intimidating when you first start there, and I was told even by my manager when I got hired that it took people about two years to learn the ropes, to learn how you networked, and you met enough people to where your projects kept rolling yet after one after the other because it really was project-based there. You moved from one project to the next one and the teams always changed. So the more people you knew, the more chance you had of getting on the next team.

Again, it was a little intimidating because I mean, it’s a huge company and it was really up at that point. We were right in the middle of Euro Disneyland. Most of the design had already been done when I joined, but I was part of the cleanup crew, so to speak, the things that hadn’t been finished yet.

That’s where I did the small world post show for Euro Disneyland, but they had already started in the field. It was still just dirt when I started, but they were rapidly building the park and small world post-show, again was the first thing. And I did end up going to Paris for some meetings with the sponsor, France Telecom. So that was really cool because suddenly I’m doing international travel, which I never did before, and I was just thoroughly impressed with the amount of money that Disney spent after being at all these private companies and smaller places.

Larry Nikolai: You get to this big company like that and international travel and first-class plane tickets and settling in was interesting there. It was a completely different mindset, plus the fact that you couldn’t just do everything on a project like you did at smaller ones. There were people who did their job and you worked as a team a little more so than the private companies.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, I’m sure it was a big adjustment, especially given that time where if Euro Disney hadn’t opened where they had had so much success with so many things. And I know you mentioned going internationally. I know you also went to Tokyo and did, and I apologize if the timeline’s not totally right, but you also did the Splash Mountain and you worked on something for that. Then also the various overlays of the Country Bear Jamboree, which I know are huge hits still in Japan. So how did those go for you as you kind of got to work on some different projects like that?

Larry Nikolai: Country Bear Christmas show came first. That was the first Tokyo thing that I did right after EDL, right after the post show for small world. I was recommended to work on the Christmas show for Tokyo, so I immediately jumped to the Tokyo portfolios from there, and I kind of stayed with them through Splash Mountain. That’s right. I didn’t actually travel to Tokyo for the Bear Band shows because it was based on the Disneyland show that had been done. So I was able, fortunately, to go down to the park and study the show closely, and a lot of it was duplication. We did a few different things there, but it was just kind of carrying it through and bringing that show there. Splash Mountain again was already underway, and I did not design Splash Mountain.

But the team or the guy who had been designing Splash Mountain for Tokyo was also working on Toon Town, and he couldn’t divide his time enough to where he had to settle on one or the other. So I just took over the art direction of the animatronic figures for Splash when he moved on to Toon Town. So that’s how I followed through on that. When the offer to do the poster came up, of course I jumped at that because classic Disney poster, you bet. Do that.

And again, I didn’t travel to Tokyo for Splash Mountain at all. Others installed it and everything. I just took care of the figures here that were shipped. Coincidentally, I was also doing the art direction on Florida’s Splash Mountain figures because they were both being built at the same time, and I was asked to take over the art direction of those as well. So I kind of did both at the same moment, but still just staying with the Tokyo team.

Dan Heaton: That had to be a great start to be able to work on those figures for Splash, which has a lot of figures and they’re very detailed. So from there, I mean, just sticking with Tokyo, I want to make sure we spend a good amount of time talking about Tokyo DisneySea and what you did for Tokyo, because to me, I have not been there. I would love to get there at some point, but everything I’ve seen, it’s just an incredible beautiful park. So involved. I know you were closely involved on the Arabian Coast land and Sinbad, so I’d love to hear about that experience and then especially on that attraction, because I’m fascinated by the whole part of it.

Larry Nikolai: Well, when I was working on Euro Disneyland, I watched the guys and the people who were in charge of each land and the influence that they had and the fact that it was a really important job to be heading up an entire land. So I had told my manager that if the chance came along, I would be interested in working on a park from the ground up. I didn’t quite get to do that at Euro Disneyland. I came in mid project there, but I really wanted to be part of a Disney park from the very first.

When Tokyo Disney Sea came around, they had done some initial work and had settled on the theme of seas and had kind of picked out the lands that they wanted to do or the ports of call as we call them. But that team was just a small team putting together the initial concept that sold the project to orient a land. So when it came time for that project to move forward, I was lucky enough to be asked to work on the park, and they gave me the Arabian Coast as a land that I could head up, and this required some research on my part because I didn’t know that much about those particular stories, the Arabian nights.

So I had to go and start digging deep to learn more about it. But they had already settled on doing the Adventures of Sinbad, and they had a Magic lamp theater and they had the carousel. So now it was up to me to take those and develop them further, and that’s just how I came onto that. That was 1995, and we started from scratch on each one of those, and I followed it through all the way through when the thing opened. I didn’t do the installation, but I did do some installation on it.

I went over and then contributed, and I did do a number of trips over there in the meantime working with vendors and things. But yeah, I became the Art Director of Arabian Coast in the field. The Art Director was my partner, Chris Crump, who I worked with. He was our production designer, and he ended up being the producer of the Magic Lamp Theater as well. So he kind carried it forward in the field, and I just supported it from the United States side, but I got involved in the design of everything there one way or the other in directing.

Dan Heaton: Well, the Sinbad attraction to me, I mean, I know it has changed since the original version, but I find the original version, I mean, both versions I think are great, but just the way that it was a bit different and seemed to be more, it wasn’t like the newer one reminds me a lot of small world. I mean that in a good way, but the way that it was originally was very different, and I’d love to hear a little bit about just how that came together because I feel like it was trying to do something that is not what you might expect from that given as a Disney attraction.

Larry Nikolai: The original audience that Tokyo DisneySea was intended for was supposed to be dating couples and an older audience. It was supposed to be kind of a counterpoint to the younger crowd at Disneyland. So we were aiming at a different audience at that time, and we had been told that they knew the Arabian Night stories, so we had kind of a carte blanche to go in there and do something new, create a new attraction that had a little more edge to it, but also followed classic stories that have been around for a thousand years. So we approached it that way, and it even included approaching the music that way, not trying to do a typical Disney lighthearted thing. We wanted it to be very dramatic.

So we had Buddy Baker, who was a legendary Disney composer, come up with a score for us that was much more theatrical or more motion picture oriented, more like a Bernard Herman score. So little, like I was saying, a little bit darker at times, because Sinbad was going to encounter all of these, I’m going to call ’em monsters along the way, adversaries the way, because that’s what the stories were about. And that’s how we approached it. After the park opened, suddenly Oriental Land decided that, no, that’s not the audience. After all, we want more families here, and this is too scary for people.

Plus, there was some pushback from some executives at Disneyland or Disney about the music because it was dark and ponderous. They worried that it wasn’t lighthearted enough for a Disney attraction. So that’s kind of how the change started. We wanted to change the score, so that was fine. But then because Oriental Land decided that now people didn’t know the Arabian Nights stories over there, they were confused about things. So we started in on trying to enhance the scenes immediately, and I did work on some of that, just trying to bring a little more clarity to the story to where, okay, this explains it a little more because maybe you didn’t know what was going on here.

But then things got weird again, and Oriental Land decided that they wanted to get a fresh new approach on it, and I was taken off the project and it was given to somebody else, and they brought Alan Menken in to do a theme song and a lighthearted score, which was very good, by the way. I thought that was actually a good move. But then when they started changing the monsters to all being friends to Sinbad, then it got a little away from what we were doing because they had to physically go in and change the show.

I would say that 80 to 85% of what’s there is still what we designed, but I feel a little vindicated about what we did because we were showing the show one day to our Pixar creative partners, and we were showing them the changes that were going to happen and turned to us and said, what do you mean you’re changing the show? That was our favorite show at Tokyo DisneySea. So I was standing in the back of the room feeling a little bit vindicated that way. Okay, fine. I’m not the only one that thought it was okay, but the changes were already underway at that point, and I was not involved in them after a certain point.

Dan Heaton: Well, yeah, I mean, it sounds like what you did was, I mean, really, they just changed what they wanted from it, but what you did was this really interesting different take on kind of a Disney attraction

Larry Nikolai: And that was the idea. We wanted to do something different and new and most of Tokyo DisneySea is different and new, and it was in line with that thinking when we were designing it.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, well, totally. Well, speaking of just changes that you were involved with also sticking in Tokyo, a couple of these I thought were really cool, one, which is that you were able to do the work on the Haunted Mansion updates in Tokyo, and also well, small world updates too for holidays, and then adding Stitch to the Tiki Room. A lot of those just seem, I mean, Stitch to the Tiki room is a little more permanent than the others, but I think all of those are kind of fun ways to me at least.

I grew up with Disney World where beyond Country Bears, they didn’t do the other types of changes. I mean, they had the Under New Management of Tiki Room, but in terms of the holiday overlays, so I think it’s really fun that you were able to work on these different variations. So I’d love to hear how you got involved in updating some kind of attractions to be slightly different, or at least for this temporarily.

Larry Nikolai: Well, it was after Tokyo DisneySea, or even from the beginning of Tokyo DisneySea. I just sort of became part of the permanent Tokyo design team in the United States. So one project just sort of led to another in between. I did work on Flik’s Fun Fair, but I was still always part of the Tokyo team, and these projects came along, and because I was one of the key designers on the team, I either requested them or I was just assigned them.

The first one was the Christmas show for small world, and a lot of that ended up being new because small world in Tokyo is based on the Florida small world and not the one at Disneyland. So the scenes are different, the sets are different. We were able to repurpose some of the things that they had done at Disneyland, but I kind of jumped on that because it was an opportunity to do some new things again that made it different from Disneyland’s.

That’s kind of the theme with all three of these shows, small world, Haunted Mansion, and Stitch. It was the opportunity to work on a classic Disney show, just the chance to participate in them and to learn about them. Also along the way, the small world Christmas show was great. I did install that. That was very successful, and I know that they’ve redesigned it since then. I’m not sure what it looks like now, but at the time it went over very well and overlapping. That was the Haunted Mansion Holiday Nightmare. I actually worked on them both at the same time because they opened one year after the other, and we had to be in production on both at the same time.

Haunted Mansion, really, that’s one of the top three in my mind of the things that I worked on over the years. It was just very gratifying to work on it. Again, we were repurposing and replicating a lot of what Disneyland had done, but there’s a few extra scenes in Tokyo, again, based on the Florida version of Haunted Mansion that I got to design new scenes for, and I had always felt that Sally needed to be in there. So here was the opportunity.

Now we got to insert Sally in as an electronic figure in at least three different places. So it was gratifying to work on it that way too, and I did the installation on that as well, and it was just so cool to be, again, I mentioned that whole thing about wanting and Pirates to look at that backstage stuff, but I got to wander around backstage on all of these things, so it was like a geek paradise.

Dan Heaton: Oh, yeah.

Larry Nikolai: Getting to see all the things. Mansion. Stitch came along afterwards because Tiki Room kind of fluctuates in its popularity over there. It wasn’t the first overlay that had been done. I wasn’t part of that one, but they had changed the show at one point. But after Lilo & Stitch came out, Stitch became a huge character in Tokyo because he fits that mold of being a small, cute character that they love in Japan, and Stitch just became a real merchandising juggernaut for them.

So they wanted to get Stitch into their show somewhere, and Tiki Room was up for another renewal to try to bring attention back to it again, it’s based on the tropics in Hawaii and all that, and Lilo & Stitch is in Hawaii. So it just kind of came together. The Stitch figure had already been done in Florida at Stitch’s Great Escape or whatever it’s called.

So we already had the figure, basically we had to build a new one, and we did modify him a little bit. We took away two of his arms because four was a little too much, didn’t need it. I made his ears a little bit smaller because we had to for him to fit into that base that we put him in, but they were also so big that they were a little bit in the way, but you only needed two arms to play a ukulele with, and I mean, how can you miss a Stitch in a Hawaiian shirt with a ukulele? I mean, what’s not to love there? So that was a fun show and again, went over really well. As far as I know, it’s still operating there.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, when I went to Aulani in Hawaii, I was amazed at how popular Stitch is especially with Japanese tourists. The lines for Stitch were the longest I saw for any character, longer than Mickey or any of the others. So it doesn’t surprise me, and it does seem like he would fit well in that Tiki Room. Well, before we, we have a few big projects I want to get to, but I wanted to ask you because I really enjoyed visiting the Adventurers Club at Pleasure Island, which I’m sad is no longer there, but had a good run, and one of my favorite characters animatronics was the Colonel, kind of the centerpiece there in terms of animatronics, and I know you were involved with that, so I’d love to hear a little bit about how that came together.

Larry Nikolai: Yeah. Well, I mentioned my friend Randy Simper before who built a lot of puppetry and things for tv. He had somehow gotten the job to do this, and the Colonel isn’t really an animatronic. He’s totally a puppet. There was always a person back behind there operating him.

Dan Heaton: Oh, wow.

Larry Nikolai: Randy got that job, and I had worked with Randy on a number of other things, and this was actually prior to my working at Disney. It was like it was either ‘88 or ‘89, I don’t remember which one now, but Joe Rohde was the lead on the Adventurers Club, and he came by my house one night because this was his design, what he wanted.

And we sat down and just went over what he was expecting for the Colonel, and then I drew him up for there. From there, Randy only had two weeks to put this puppet together. It was the most amazing thing and the most amazing thing when he gets started on something, he just works like a demon on it. One Sunday he called me up and the head was sculpted, but it wasn’t quite done yet, and he needed help getting it done.

So I went over there at the last minute on a Sunday morning and helped him finish sculpting the face on it, and then he took it from there and did all the castings and everything, and his sister did the costuming. But Randy is the most amazing puppet builder. I mean, these things are built to last. He actually built two Colonels, and one of them was never used because the other one just lasted and lasted and lasted.

It was so well built, and I guess it was just backstage that whole time. It looked great. I did get to see him in place and take pictures and everything along the way, but that was my total involvement with just doing the drawings and helping a little on the sculpture.

Dan Heaton: That’s crazy because I mean, it was there for essentially, I think it closed in 2008, so you’re talking basically almost 20 years, and that’s crazy that every night being used that it lasted that long.

Larry Nikolai: I might be wrong, but I just remember Randy saying that they never actually used that second puppet. So that may have been halfway into the run, though. Who knows? Later they did start using it.

Dan Heaton: Well, I know you referenced earlier that one of your favorites was the Haunted Mansion. Well, I believe one of your other favorites was your work on the Little Mermaid: Ariel’s Undersea Adventure, which ended up starting out DCA also went in the Magic Kingdom, but I believe they were created concurrently. It’s a really cool dark ride, especially just it’s being more modern; it’s not from Fantasyland. It’s so much newer, and I’d love to know how that came together and just your experience doing it.

Larry Nikolai: Well, you probably know from the Internet and everything, a Mermaid attraction got kicked around for a long time. Originally there was going to be one at Disneyland Paris, and they had done a full mockup on one of the scenes and everything that I actually got to see. But that project got canceled at one point, and then there was some project work done on it as if it was going to into Florida, and then that never happened either for one reason or another when California Adventure started running into trouble and they needed new attractions there and new things to renew the park.

Mermaid was brought up as a possibility for Paradise Pier because it kind of fit in with, you probably know that a seaside attraction on a Coney Island type of park would have that kind of facade and that kind of building to it with the arch and everything.

We needed a dark ride at California Adventure; Superstar Limo had shut down. It didn’t do that well, and there was no dark rides there, and it seemed like a perfect fit for the seaside attraction. So others started that before me and they knew it was going to go where the Golden Dreams Theater was, but that footprint is very small. So they had already laid out the basic track configuration before I came on, and even the basic scenes that were going to be in there, and rather than trying to go through and tell the story over and over again, they decided to just base it on the major musical moments from the film.

That’s basically what you see there. At one point, Chris Crump, again, who I worked with on many projects, aside from Arabian Coast, was the production designer for that, and he saw the need for this thing to keep moving forward, and it kind of stalled at one point. Chris is one of those guys who wants to keep things moving, and I was kind of still on the Tokyo team at the time, but feeling that my time there was kind of coming to an end, and Chris knew that. So he said, if I can get you onto the Mermaid project, would you want to do that? And I just immediately raised my hand. I was like, yes, yes, please. I would love to work on that.

That would be a great dark ride to work on. So Chris managed to work his magic and get me onto the project. So from that point on, I was the Art Director, the Show Designer for it, and I took what had already been done, which was still good, but I did change just about every scene in one way or another. I shrunk some and I made some bigger and changed the way the some were approached. So I still feel that as the show designer, I had a huge influence there. But just like everything at Disney, it’s always a team effort. So I didn’t start the project, but I developed it and helped to finish it.

Dan Heaton: One thing I like about that is just, there’s just so much packed into some of this. The Under the Sea has so many figures, and every time you go through it like, oh, I never even saw what was going on over there or something. A lot of figures. Yeah, there’s just so much. And then the Ursula figure is totally different where it’s like the centerpiece where you just focus on that. So I don’t know the technology too, I mean, I don’t know how many advances happened with that, but it definitely seemed like, especially with Ursula, that at that time I hadn’t seen animatronics on that level. What were you able to do there that maybe was different?

Larry Nikolai: Well, there were a lot of advances we actually did on Mermaid that people are not aware of because they’re just backstage technical things about how we created the figures. A lot of this stuff was we started doing it. She was sculpted traditionally, but then we brought her figure into the computer to work out the skin and the shells and the eye movements and all that. And doing that, we were able to get much tighter tolerances on the eye blinks to where we didn’t have the huge gaps that you would sometimes get. They were also able to work out her mouth functions to where she could lip sync the things by doing the animation in the computer first.

On Ursula, we did some stretch and squash on her, which is a 2D animation thing. We were able to bring to that figure just by how we worked, I don’t want to say worked it out, but just the way that we approached her movements, we were able to make her bounce a little more to where she had a little more bounciness while she’s doing her song. So that was her major changes other than doing the new skin technologies and things.

Dan Heaton: You mentioned too that there wasn’t a dark ride in DCA and I know that you had some involvement and what ultimately replaced Superstar Limo, which is the Monsters, Inc. attraction, which again, was then expanded on in Tokyo for a really cool different kind of version. But I know you worked there, so I’d love to know a little bit too about that because especially in California, it was interesting how it to, it was almost like an overlay, but entirely different.

Larry Nikolai: We essentially gutted that attraction. The only thing that was left was the ride track of the vehicles. Honestly, it just didn’t work out. It was a very unusual attraction, and we had gone through a couple of iterations of trying to come up with concepts of getting Disney characters into it at one point, and I actually went through an overlay where we were putting Disney characters into it, but it just didn’t work out. I’m not quite sure who decided to do the Monsters there, but others did the design on it, and I basically did the characters because of my experience with animatronic characters now and getting the right pose for the right character. They all had limited animation.

I followed through on the sculpture on those, but I didn’t follow through as, yes, I did do the production of it. I’m trying to remember because the two of them get confused in my mind because it was all Monsters all the time for several years. But I did not install that attraction. I just did the Monster designs and worked out the animation for the characters, but then the Tokyo version was much more involved and very little reuse of the characters there because the scenes were so different, but much more involved and a lot more characters.

Dan Heaton: I mean, I’m still, the way that it was, I wouldn’t even say changed because I think it’s a different attraction, but just with the flashlight, that whole setup that ended up being there for the current version, it’s just a really cool idea for an attraction, I feel like, to put that.

Larry Nikolai: Yeah, making it interactive. Sure.

Dan Heaton: Alright, well, I know you also made a few updates and were involved with some changes to two classic attractions at Disneyland, Peter Pan’s Flight and Alice in Wonderland, which I always love to see when they can take the kind of, I know that those were the updates from ‘83 and there have been earlier versions before that, before the New Fantasyland, but it’s just cool to see that. So what was it like to get to go in and make tweaks to such original or at least classic dark rides?

Larry Nikolai: Oh, it was just again, that geek in me coming out the chance to work on, first off Disneyland attractions, which up to this point I hadn’t done any Disneyland attractions. So to work on them and to work on a couple of classic ones like that was great. The new changes, it was mostly in line with bringing that new magic to it. They had already done something in Snow White with projections and mapping of scenes and projections in there. It was kind of an expansion on that idea.

The team down at the park actually had initially put together the Alice thing, and I just took over as Art Director on that and followed through with the vendors and the installation there where I spent a lot of time in that memorized that attraction all the way through because we spent a lot of time in there wandering those buildings. But again, the idea was to bring the new magic in with new projections to enhance it, repainting everything because black light does fade, so you had to do all that renewal. And then when we got to Peter Pan got a little more involved in what was going to change there, what they wanted to do with the kids in the nursery needed some adaptation.

So I got more involved with designing the characters in there and what they looked like and then following through with Neverland. I mean, it was a lot of repaint and a lot of rehab on an existing attraction, but Peter Pan was even more so because just walking through these spaces that you knew that Walt Disney had walked through and a lot of the original layout is still there. I mean, the track did change and get enhanced in the 1983 version, but up to that point, a lot of it was still the same. It was just very satisfying to work on those and to know you had contributed to something as historic as those two and bringing something new to them.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, I feel like when you’re able to do that, and especially with those where it’s respectful to how it was but enhances it and they still feel classic, even though they have these new effects, you don’t immediately go, that’s the old effect, that’s the new effect. It all just kind of roll together in a really cool way.

Larry Nikolai: The new effects that we especially brought into Pan was the way we treated London when you flew over it. We had more animation going on in the river, and then when you got to Neverland is we had animation in the lagoon that the ship was floating in and just a little thing, I don’t know if people notice, but we have the crocodile actually circling the ship. If you happen to catch it at the right moment as you fly over, I know it’s fast, but as you go over, you might just see the crocodile swimming around the ship looking for Captain Hook. So we were able to do that kind of thing to bring some added animation to it.

Dan Heaton: That’s always great to hear. Well, I want to ask you about one more project before. We have a few questions at the end, and that’s the very recent Shanghai Disneyland, which is of course the latest new Disney resort and has now been open for five years. And I know you worked on the hotel and a bit on Adventure Isle. So what was that like for you to work on a new resort and a few parts of that?

Larry Nikolai: Well, I worked more on the hotel in the end than I did on Adventure Isle. I was brought in, I’m going to say halfway again on Adventure Isle to where we already knew what the attractions were and the river ride was already in model form. So all I did on that was help to solidify the story that was going on a little more because it wasn’t exactly clear at the time, but it was all well underway. I contributed a few things there, some designs in the area development.

I kind of designed the main entrance gate, got very involved in the interiors of the shops and then just all of the various venues within the park. The nice thing about the venture aisle was we got to do a research trip to Peru, which was just fantastic visiting Inca Ruins and everything, and then bringing that back as a design, bringing that knowledge back so that there’s some authenticity going on there.

But the hotel is a whole different matter. I had never worked on a hotel before, but there was a desire to bring a heavy Disney character overlay to this hotel more than they had originally paid it. So the creative lead, my boss, Bob Weis, asked me to come in as the Art Director for the hotel of the character overlays. So I took that on to where we decided where the different characters and who would go into different parts of the hotel, including in the rooms, the swimming pool area, the restaurants, and the main lobby. One of the biggest things I was able to do was when you first come into the lobby there, which is done in an Art Nouveau style, which was new for Disney, the statues there, the bronze statues of Mickey and the characters. I got to design that whole thing,

Which was really kind of neat, this really neat standalone bronze thing. And the way we approached it was we decided that it was the more modern musical shows that our Chinese audience would be more acquainted with other than Fantasia, which was spread around as well. So we ended up with Beauty in the Beast in the restaurant, and it became Lumiere’s Kitchen, and it’s got a heavy dose of characters in there. The pool seemed perfect for Mermaid, so we brought Ariel in as mosaics there as the overall theme, and the wedding venue outside became a Cinderella thing to where we had the coach and things like that for the wedding pavilion and all.

I’m trying to think what else. Of course, Lion King, we had a water play area outside also for the kids, and we made that into the Hakuna Matata Oasis, so the Lion King characters are in along with a hedge maze to where you encountered the different figures. The kind of neat thing was that there really hadn’t been a heavy overlay of characters like this before, and having an art director for just the characters was something new and I got to do it, which was fun.

Dan Heaton: That sounds like a blast to do, especially just to get to, yeah, I mean, like you said, you got to create things artistically and really do something different rather than a lot of the other work you’ve done. That raises a question for me too. I know that you’ve done quite a few paintings of characters and created that artwork for Disney galleries and everything. We haven’t really mentioned that. That’s something I wanted to spotlight because it seems like something really cool that you’ve gotten to do.

Larry Nikolai: That was something grew out of the original concept of the Disney galleries, the one that used to be above Pirates where the Dream Suite is now. They used to bring in different artists to do an interpretation of maybe what the most current show was. Friends of mine would do things for Mulan when it came out and they would’ve artists signings because it was original artwork.

That whole thing grew, and the merchandise person I was working with there, she had had me designing some of the big figures for merchandise because again, here’s this weird progression of networking. Somebody at one point had seen the storybook land cottages that I had designed for Storybook Land at Disneyland Paris. So they wanted to turn those into collectibles, which I helped with. Then somebody at Disneyland saw that and they needed help with their big figures, so I helped to design those.

And one day she just asked me if I wanted to do a painting for the gallery, and it was something for Alice in Wonderland. And yeah, I always wanted to do stuff for the galleries after doing one signing for the Splash Mountain poster, and again, it just kind of grew from there. I did a painting, a couple of paintings for that, and then they would start doing special events with me and other artists to where we would have several of us introducing new paintings in the gallery on a regular basis.

It just kind of kept going and going, and my stuff is still there. I have a couple that are still waiting to be introduced because the pandemic put everything on hold. I’ve actually had two brand new paintings that have been on hold for almost two years now that I’m still waiting for them to end up in the gallery. I’m looking forward to it.

Dan Heaton: Wow. Well, hopefully that can work out soon, but that sounds like just a great experience to be able to do. I mean, completely different than a lot of what you’ve done, but seems like still connected even to what we just talked about with Shanghai. Well, I just have two more questions kind of overall type questions to finish up, and one of ’em is more, you worked at WDI for 28 years and then have done so much else. I’d love to know you already referenced some mentors that you had in your career or even inspirations. I’d love to know just for you, who were some key figures or people that inspired you or helped you out?

Larry Nikolai: First and foremost is my mentor, Dave Goetz, because he came from a Disney tradition and I learned a lot of the Disney tradition from him. But when I was growing up, of course I had the full color booklets that you could buy on the attraction, so I was always aware of people like Marc Davis and Claude Coats and X Atencio and other Disney legends. Even though their names weren’t in those books, I knew their work. So when I did finally know their names, I could study them a little bit more and they heavily influenced my art style for characters.

When I worked at Ruby Spears, I worked with artists who had worked on Sleeping Beauty and I learned a lot about character design from them. It’s that kind of, see, I’m not a natural character artist. I never learned character design. I didn’t get it in school; I just picked it up along the way looking at other people doing it. So all of those people I mentioned were a heavy influence for me.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, I’m amazed how many people I talk with who referenced the Pirates of the Caribbean book you could buy and how many were influenced just by that book, not even just by the attraction, those types of, they were so rare at the time too.

Larry Nikolai: But these guys were my heroes and I didn’t know it. I didn’t know who they were, but they were growing my heroes.

Dan Heaton: Yeah. Well, kind of a flip side final question, given that you had such a long, good, great, amazing career with Imagineering, I know there’s a lot of young people that want to be designers that want to either work in Imagineering or there’s a lot of other companies too. If you had to give some advice to them on how to get into the industry or even more just how to do well or thrive, I’d love to hear some kind of tips you might be able to pass along.

Larry Nikolai: Well, I’ve got one first and foremost tip that I really believe in. I believe if you want to be a designer in the theme park industry that you need to have worked in a theme park. My theme park was Magic Mountain, and I even worked at Busch Gardens in Van Nuys for a while. But you have to work in a theme park on a daily basis with the guests, and I mean not just for a couple of weeks.

You really need to get the experience of what it’s like to operate a theme park and the kind of damage that can happen over time as well, and the kind of renewal that attractions need and when new attractions go in, how it’s handled. I just think if you don’t have that experience, just go to school and get the, here’s how you design an attraction.

You’re just getting it theoretical. You don’t have the experience of being in the park and knowing what it’s like to install an attraction or to, like I say, work on a daily basis in a park. That’s my primary advice is to do that, go out and get that experience. I think it’s great though that a lot of schools now have courses in theme park design, but again, to me it’s theory and if you do get hired in one of the design groups, Disney or otherwise, you’ve got to be willing to work your way up.

You can’t just drop right in and say, I’m going to design a theme park direction because you’re going to be working with veterans or people who have the experience and you need to learn from them and work as a team and not worry about getting that first attraction within the first month of you joining the thing.

Also, if you’re going to try to work at Imagineering based on current news, you’re going to have to be willing to move to Florida because that’s where Imagineering is moving. I mean, it’s pretty confirmed. So if you don’t want to move to Florida, it doesn’t sound like you’re going to work for Imagineering unless you work at the park, which it’s the park base of Imagineering is going to be limited. So something to consider.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, I think that’s a great advice about working in the parks beforehand because like your story you said kind of totally fits with having that background and then being able to take it from there. Well, Larry, this has been awesome to hear your story about all these great attractions. I know that your art is available, I mean out there to look at online, and I’d love for people to be able to do that. Is there place they should go to look for what you’ve done?

Larry Nikolai: Well, I do have a website that kind of covers my whole career. It’s just larrynikolaiartist.com. You just run it all together, larrynikolaiartist.com. I can’t put my Imagineering stuff there, I’m afraid because the mouse says it’s copyrights. There can be a little bit of that now and then, but I do put my gallery stuff on there, and I do have stuff from previous projects I worked on and a AVG Productions and Advanced Animations and Ruby Spears, so if you want an overview of the things I’ve done, that’s a good place to go.

Dan Heaton: Well, awesome. Well, I’ll definitely post a link in the show notes for this so everyone could check it out. But thanks so much for talking to me. This was so great to talk with you.