71. Former Imagineer Bob Baranick on Disneyland Paris and Indiana Jones

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It’s easy to look at Walt Disney Imagineering as a small group of brilliant designers that put their amazing dreams into the parks. However, the reality is a lot more complicated and includes so many contributors across a variety of disciplines. On The Tomorrow Society Podcast, I’ve barely scratched the surface of the talented individuals that bring attractions to life. A perfect example is Bob Baranick, who has worked in the industry for more than 40 years including 13 at Disney. His list of projects includes many favorites at both Disneyland and Walt Disney World.

A Diverse Career at Disney and Beyond

Baranick is my guest on the latest episode of The Tomorrow Society Podcast. On this show, we talk about how he got started and delve into his projects for Disney and other companies. Our conversation includes these exciting topics:

• Why was it a challenge to get approval from Disney for Phantom Manor at Disneyland Paris?
• What was it like to work with Rolly Crump on updates to The Land, including Living with the Land?
• How do original concepts for Indiana Jones connect to what Disney is currently doing with Rise of the Resistance?
• What excited Baranick about working on the replacement of the Swiss Family Treehouse with Tarzan’s Treehouse at Disneyland?
• Why was it difficult to make changes to classics like Pirates of the Caribbean, especially with the “politically correct” update?
• What made him interested in designing the “boutique park” Whirligig Woods in North Carolina? Why didn’t the park work out?

I really enjoyed the chance to talk with Baranick and learn more about his work on remarkable attractions. In addition, we discussed cool experiences that he worked on like the Six Flags Power Plant in Baltimore, Hershey’s Chocolate World, and the Monster Mansion update at Six Flags Over Georgia.

Show Notes: Bob Baranick

Learn more about Bob Baranick and his work at bobbaranick.com.

Read the WRAL article on the decision to not proceed with the Whirligig Woods park (March 26, 2018).

Transcript

Dan Heaton: Hey there. Today on the podcast, I talk with former Disney Imagineer, Bob Baranick about his work on Frontierland at Disneyland Paris, Indiana Jones, and Tarzan’s Tree House at Disneyland, the Land Pavilion in Epcot, and his attempts to build a theme park in North Carolina. You’re listening to the Tomorrow Society Podcast.

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Dan Heaton: Thanks for joining me here on Episode 71 of the Tomorrow Society Podcast. I am your host, Dan Heaton. One of my favorite projects to learn more about is the creation of Disneyland Paris. The development really took hold in the late 1980s, and you had so many talented young Imagineers that were really starting to take over the company and make a difference in how Disney made its attractions and parks.

These were people like Tony Baxter and Tom Morris and Eddie Sotto and Tim Delaney, Greg Meader, who was a guest on this show a few months back, and the guest of this episode, Bob Baranick, who joined Disney in the mid eighties and pretty quickly got involved with working on Frontierland at Disneyland Paris. That area is so interesting to me, especially because of Phantom Manor, which is a really cool take on the Haunted Mansion.

What surprised me was learning that it was actually a pretty big challenge to get Phantom Manor in there at Disneyland Paris. Bob also worked on so many other cool projects, including the refresh of Epcot in the early nineties with Rolly Crump, the long saga to have the Indiana Jones Adventure built at Disneyland plus Tarzan’s Tree House, the changeover from the Swiss Family Tree House at Disneyland. Bob also worked on some other projects outside of Disney like the Six Flags Power Plant in Baltimore, which is a very odd project that didn’t last for too long.

And his project Whirligig Woods, which was Bob’s attempt to build a boutique theme park in North Carolina that unfortunately didn’t come to pass. Well, I really enjoyed talking to Bob. He had a lot of fun stories about many classic attractions that I love, so it was really fun to learn a bit more about these attractions. Here is Bob Baranick.

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Bob Baranick: I probably had more school than most of my friends did because there was no such thing as a theme park designer when I was in college and I had four or five majors and minors just because I had studied what the original Imagineers had done and I put together a background of art and theater and architecture and all kinds of fun things.

Dan Heaton: When you were younger, it sounds like you were a fan of Imagineering and Disneyland. Was that something really early on that you wanted to do and get involved in as a career?

Bob Baranick: It sure was as far back as I can remember. My family used to tease me about it, but they were really good and they would take me to Disneyland all the time. The big turning point for me was when Disney put out the book about Pirates of the Caribbean, the Making of Pirates of the Caribbean, and showed all these old guys with white shirts and thin black ties and they were building models and artwork and it was Marc Davis and Herbie Ryman, Claude Coats, all these wonderful designers. I just knew exactly what I wanted to do for my career, and I dedicated myself to that even all the way through high school.

Dan Heaton: So how did you end up getting started working for Disney after you had done all that preparation; how did it work out?

Bob Baranick: Well, like a lot of designers, I tried to get in the door maybe three or four times. The closest opportunity I had was unfortunately right after 5,000 people had finished building Epcot and they were really intrigued with my portfolio and the skills I had, but they were letting people go because this major project had just finished. I remember this one week where I was from the San Francisco Bay area, and I came down to LA and had all these interviews all over town and the manager of the model shop, Mike Morris at the time said, you ought to go talk to this Gary Goddard guy.

I had never heard of Gary, so I just took my portfolio over to Gary’s office that afternoon and I was hired on the spot. So I worked for Gary Goddard for a few years until Disney geared back up to do Disneyland Paris, and I was one of the first people they hired for that with Eddie Sotto, who also worked at Gary Goddard’s at the time. So it was kind of a natural thing. It just took a long time. Like so many Imagineers have to go through a very, very typical story.

Dan Heaton: I can imagine that once you got there, especially with Disneyland Paris in late eighties, early nineties with Michael Eisner and Frank Wells and all of that was such an exciting time.

Bob Baranick: It was a renaissance. We were thrilled; we knew it at the time. We knew that as we were doing it. These were the good old days, so we enjoyed every bit of it. When I walked in the door, they had five projects they were getting off the ground. One was Splash Mountain for Disneyland, one was Pleasure Island, one was Typhoon Lagoon, one was the Studio Tour and the other, I can’t remember what the fifth project was, but everybody in WDI was working on those. So I was assigned to Splash Mountain because of my whimsical style. The real intention at WDI was to put me on Disneyland Paris, which they were waiting for all the T’s to get crossed and the I’s to get dotted in the contracts with France. As soon as it happened, we were up and running.

Dan Heaton: So Splash Mountain, I love that attraction. It’s still one of my favorites. What did you end up doing on Splash before you went to Paris?

Bob Baranick: I was on the model. I got to work primarily on the finale and this is the Disneyland Splash Mountain. So I was working with John Stone and Tony Baxter and Bruce Gordon. Jeff Burke was the producer of Frontierland for Disneyland Paris, and he asked me to be his model builder for Frontierland. My background is the Old West. I came from Frontier Village in San Jose, and so I love the old Western TV shows and France was really in love with that style. They loved the Southwest and they loved the Marlboro Man and Bonanza and all that stuff.

So Frontierland was a hit from the get go. We had to fight and battle to get some of the attractions like Phantom Manor. We always knew it was going to be a Western, but the problem was the overall budget of the park and how many they could have. They knew they weren’t building Jungle Cruise, but we had to lobby pretty hard and I think because we did such a nice job with Phantom Manor, we had beautiful models and a lot of artwork and stuff. I think Michael and Frank were very impressed with it and decided to put it into the program for opening day.

Dan Heaton: That’s crazy to think about because I went to Paris in 2006 and Phantom Manor is an incredible attraction. I love that Frontierland, especially with Big Thunder out on the island and you go out to it. It’s so unique even compared to the other parks, but it really interests me to think of Phantom Manor as not being just a shoe-in and that it’s the one you had to fight for. It’s interesting to me. Why do you think there was such hesitation to do that?

Bob Baranick: It was money. We really had the confidence that we were going to get to build it, so it was integral to the whole storyline of Frontierland, Thunder Mesa, and the characters and the time period and all of it worked together as one place. The design team really believed in it and thought we were always going to get to do it, but we did have to sell it. I mean, we had to convince corporate that it needed to be in the opening day program, but some other things fell out like Space Mountain had to back off a little bit.

Pirates, oddly enough, was another one that the guys had to really lobby hard for because the park was going to be much smaller than it actually ended up being on opening day. Then ironically, they ended what they call an added capacity program, I think within the next year or two years later, where they added a lot of walkthroughs and different attractions, secondary attractions throughout the park.

Dan Heaton: That’s interesting because that whole side of the park, Pirates and Phantom Manor and Big Thunder, but those two especially I feel like anchor the park on that side, so well, it’s hard to think of them not being there. In terms of Phantom Manor, I know that obviously has more of an old West theme from the Haunted Mansion. What was it like with Jeff Burke and others kind of working on the different thing?

Bob Baranick: We had so much fun. Jeff was able to go see Phantom of the Opera when it opened in London, and so he was really into the storyline and that whole mood of it. I was kind of bringing in the Western elements I brought to project a lot of the Marc Davis stuff from Western River Expedition and just the things that ended up being the mythology of the land and it fits so well together when you talk about how it fits with Big Thunder Mountain and the town of Thunder Mesa,

Pat Burke, who was the prop designer for the entire land, and I think Adventureland as well really created a lot of that backstory. He was so involved with Big Thunder. I think he and Skip had worked on every Big Thunder that they had built. So the team was really close knit and really believed and had a lot of passion in our project project. We thought Frontierland was really, really strong.

Dan Heaton: It anchors the park even more than I think in some of the other castle parks. I mean along with the Adventureland area over there because it’s just, yeah, it’s so strong and you can feel, I love the connections and I know a lot of fans who the story of the Western River Expedition and stuff love the connections there because it’s one of those what ifs about what we could have had in Florida. So it’s great to see something that at least makes some nods to such an amazing idea.

Bob Baranick: One of the other fun things that the guys were able to do was the juxtaposition of putting Adventure Island with the pirate ship Pirates of the Caribbean and the transition into Fantasyland with Peter Pan right there. So you had all these pirate elements next to each other. The park kind of had that whole flow to it very much all the way around the perimeter of the park. Things just worked really well. One of the other fun things about Disneyland Paris were the arcades that Eddie Sotto worked on with. They were the back access behind Main Street, and that was a requirement for covered queue and the weather conditions. But he turned it into quite a show and it also was a wonderful transition from Main Street to Tomorrowland Discoveryland, sorry, and from Main Street to Frontierland.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, I remember we were there and it rained a lot when we were there and we walked down that back corridor by behind Main Street there that you mentioned, and I was like, this is incredible. We could have easily been here and not even seen it. So it’s really, it’s interesting too. How many Imagineers at the time that were fairly young like yourself and Tony Baxter and Tom Morris and Eddie Sotto, who now are these legends that are imparting their stories today? I mean, what was it like that time to be among that group in Paris?

Bob Baranick: Well, we really respected each other. Everybody enjoyed being together socially and at work. We had a few guys mostly in the architectural group and some ride engineering groups that were veterans from way back, and they were kind of the sages, but we were kind of considered a young group to have a major responsibility like that. But everybody was so passionate not only with their skills, but with the properties that they were working with. Tom Morris in particular with his castle, he had quite a challenge because how do you go to Europe and build a castle when Europe is castles, but he created something that’s very whimsical and very beautiful and stands on its own.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, I love the castle. It’s so striking. And yet, like you mentioned, it’s across the board the challenges to make a park in Europe, there was a lot of hesitation among just overall PR about the park for it to end up coming out so great. And I know it had struggles financially, but the park itself, the quality upfront was just incredible.

Bob Baranick: Well, the rumor is, at least our understanding of it was that the hotels were overbuilt. I guess Michael Eisner could explain that better than anybody because he wanted to work with big name architects and I don’t know who put together the program of how hotels and how many rooms they needed, but I think that was the financial challenge when the park opened. The park was a thing of beauty and people loved it.

Unfortunately for years it wasn’t kept up, but I understand in the last five years or better, maybe 10 years, they’ve gone back and really put some serious maintenance into it. I’m anxious to see what Phantom Manor’s going to be when it opens. And I think it’s within the month actually.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, it’s really soon. I know I’ve seen that weird picture of the scrim over the Phantom Manor because it’s still being redone, but it’s great to see because that part deserves that kind of attention. I know they had financial constraints, but it sounds like too they’re going to make a lot of additions to the other park there and hopefully, which needed a ton, but hopefully make it better.

Bob Baranick: And they’re great properties, they’re relevant properties that people really are going to be drawn to.

Dan Heaton: For sure. Well, I want to transition a bit back here to the States. I know I mentioned Tony Baxter earlier, and I know one of the attractions you worked on is Indiana Jones Adventure in California. That’s a great attraction, especially for people like myself who’ve more been to Florida and then we go out there and say, oh my gosh, sitting out there in Adventureland. What was it like to work on that attraction?

Bob Baranick: Well, it was a long history. It was probably my toughest battle in the company because I was working on that in the evenings while I was working on Disneyland Paris during the day. The reason for that is because Disney had this contract with George Lucas. They were doing Star Tours and they had signed to use the Indiana Jones property and they had the to use it or lose it by a certain date, and I believe that date was 1986, 1996, sorry. But they weren’t really dealing with it.

They had kind of put it on the back shelf. And so what I was doing was building models and doing drawings of what some have seen as the Lost Expedition. It’s the grand scheme for Adventureland that in included what is currently the Indiana Jones Jeep ride. It also had the mine car ride and it had Jungle Cruise reroute, and it was a big grand scheme, and I was trying to make the whole project really exciting for corporate to go ahead and get the project funded.

And it took, my goodness, five, six years of that process on the side not being funded of just getting the company excited about it, even though they had this contract to use the IP of Indiana Jones, there had been a separate development with the R&D group. John Snoddy was leading that who was developing the ride system, and that’s the system that they, that’s there in the park today.

It’s also the Dinosaur ride system in Animal Kingdom. They put us together. So we were doing story and theme overlays to his ride system, and we did a couple, three different generations of mock-ups and brought Michael and Frank in and showed them and they got excited and then all of a sudden they changed their mind. And at one point Michael said, well, we just opened this stunt show in the Studio Tour in Florida.Why don’t we just put that in?

So we had to work on that for about a year, and it was kind of interesting. I think at that time George was kind of getting frustrated. George Lucas was getting frustrated. He wanted the mine car ride so bad. I mean, he had put it in the movie and he had always described this as a ride system where the guests could actually use the brake. We had developed some mock-ups and had some fun things where it was jumping a broken track and there were sparks on the rails and it was really exciting.

The company was not going to pursue the mine car because of the capacity. So anyway, we were working on this stunt show and George was, he was going along with it, but he really wanted the ride and we had developed storylines about young Indiana Jones and how it might fit Frontierland where they’re building Star Wars today and went through all this process.

The team was like, we weren’t quite a hundred percent into it. We were doing it because we were asked to do it, but we all really wanted the ride. Ginally at one point in, I guess it was 1991 or thereabouts, where Michael said, ah heck, you know what? We should just do the ride. And we got it funded and that was a huge victory. So I was put in charge of a team and we had about 40 or 50 people that developed what, and at the time we were still trying to push for the mine car ride.

We had a walkthrough labyrinth, and it was kind of involved a fun experience because very much what I believe Rise of the Resistance is where you get on a ride, you get stuck, you get off the ride, you have to find your way out and through this thing, and there’s a whole series of events that would’ve been about a 30-minute overall attraction experience. Well, it all got broken down to just the ride that was built and opened in 1995, which is great, but that’s still a victory. After all that time, that’s nine years of developing that.

Dan Heaton: It’s so interesting because I look at the ride that’s there and I think that’s really epic. Look at what they, it’s so ambitious with the queue and the whole experience. It feels like a complete experience. Then I’ve heard before about this, but the whole idea that you would’ve had multiple attractions, the mine cart thing. I know they have the coaster in Paris and Japan, the Temple of Peril and such, which does kind of use that, but not in the same way. It’s still a really neat attraction. It’s interesting how much more it could have been, and I’m glad you were able to do it.

Bob Baranick: There was one point where I was able to get Brian Jowers, who is just a wonderful illustrator, and he was on Indy with me for several years, just creating one beautiful rendering after another of all these different environments. When he did the one that we all call the kitchen sink, which is the interior that shows the cavern on fire with the train and the Jungle Cruise and the mine car and the Jeep ride, we thought that was really going to sell it. In fact, it had just the opposite reaction. It was like, oh, this is ridiculous. We can’t do this. Let’s just shut this down. And they ended up kind of working with different programming numbers, capacities, and budgets and so forth, and ended up with the attraction that they built and the guests love.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, I love it and it’s been a hit for 20 plus years and it worked out. It’s interesting you met your capacity though, because I think of Rise of the Resistance that you mentioned and how the scale and ambition and all these new attractions we’re seeing from Universal and Disney with this huge scale, but a lot of them have low capacities. It’s almost like back then, even though they pulled back on some of the fun stuff you could have done, they somehow avoided what now could happen with Star Wars with these just massive waits.

Bob Baranick: Well, when I was working with Indy, I had a number of 2,400 an hour, which is just about what the Jeep ride is, and I was really lobbying hard for the mine car ride. So what we developed as a creative team was this situation where you rode the Jeep and got stuck in the temple. Everybody had to walk through this labyrinth, with different levels and fun mazes and stuff.

Basically it was a way to weeded out the capacity to feed the mine car so that two thirds of the people getting off the Jeep were successful in escaping the temple. One third got stuck and had to ride the mine car out, and because we could change the walls and move all kinds of different paths and stuff, you really never knew which path you were going to get. So it was kind of an encouragement to go back and ride it again if you in fact wanted to get on the mine car and take another chance and get stuck to ride the mine car as the escape.

Dan Heaton: Wow, that’s crazy.

Bob Baranick: It would’ve been fun, and I’m really happy to hear what they’re trying in Star Wars. That’s a great idea, and all great ideas never really die. They get morphed into something else.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, that’s totally a common theme I always hear about Disney and Imagineering will pull up something from that, you know, or someone else worked on from 20, 30 years ago and then all of a sudden it’s a new thing.

Bob Baranick: Well, and that’s what we did with Marc Davis’s Western River by putting it into the finale of Phantom Manor in a small way, it’s a tribute to Marc and his brilliant idea,

Dan Heaton: It’s great to see fans notice that, especially people that are really into the parks, they really appreciate moves like that. So I also wanted to mention, you mentioned Pirates earlier and I know you were involved with the Pirates of the Caribbean, an update that was done I believe in the 1990s. So what was it like to get to work on that after being such a fan?

Bob Baranick: It was tremendous stress because it was the so-called politically correct Pirates of the Caribbean, it’s where we changed the chase scene where pirates were chasing women. I got to be honest with you, the reason we were doing the project in the first place is because they had closed World of Motion in Epcot, and they had all of these figures available which were created from original pirate molds. So they were the perfect scale and the perfect caricature, and so we just redesigned some of the vignettes to show them.

We always thought that the chase scene was the weakest scene because it was just some static pirates going around in on turntables. Well, it turned out to be this politically correct thing that hit the media and it really got blown out of proportion, but it was kind of stressful for me, but at the same time, it was an honor and a privilege to be working on this project that was so near and dear to Walt. One thing I really loved doing, which is no longer there, but we were able to add a bookend scene to Pirates where the pirates are trying to get the treasure out of the ammunition cachet before it blew up. That’s since been replaced by Johnny Depp,

Dan Heaton: Which I understand why, but that’s too bad because that was a neat way to change the scene. Yeah, it’s interesting with the politically correct changes, just because you’ve seen it again with the Redhead scene and I completely understand why changes are made and I’m not somebody that’s going to get out the pitchforks or whatever for a change. I totally get it, but I’m sure that had to be kind of changed the nature of the update for you when that kind of came out and became such an issue.

Bob Baranick: I have always maintained that change is okay if you make it better, and I honestly thought that getting rid of the turntables and doing some vignettes with better animated pirates was making the scene better, and I really felt that the finale with the two pirates trying to take the treasure out was certainly better than what it was before. I don’t know that I have a strong opinion about the auction scene. I think they’ve done a nice job with it. Had that been the original scene, it probably would’ve been okay, but I think it really ruffled some feathers.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, like you said, the animatronics look great, and that’s what the most important thing is that the ride still looks high quality and that’s amazed me. They’ve done so well through your updating down the road with Pirates and Haunted Mansion is they still look so new and classic. I know you worked on an update to Haunted Mansion too. Is it fun to go in and kind of deal again with another classic attraction?

Bob Baranick: It’s somewhat stressful for me because I really idolized the park the way it was and the way Walt had designed it himself. So I’m here I am this kid fiddling with these things, but I really took it to heart and tried to do some of the best things I could with it. I think one of those is probably Tarzan’s Treehouse. It was very difficult for me to tear out Swiss Family Robinson because I was such a fan of the film and the original Treehouse, certainly the water wheel and all that.

But it was one of those things where it was becoming irrelevant to the audience and with the film Tarzan, when we saw that it was so emotional and such a beautiful film that we thought, well, this actually will be the right thing to do, but I’ll tell you what, it’s just tough being the guy that goes in and tears these things out. It really puts the pressure to make something better.

Dan Heaton: Right, because I still appreciate though that, and I’ve heard the story about how it was close to being removed completely. I look at it as this saved a Treehouse that has a lot of history, even if it’s different,

Bob Baranick: That’s exactly what happened. They would’ve torn it down.

Dan Heaton: Beyond the challenge of just changing the Treehouse, how tricky was it to find ways to incorporate Tarzan into the similar spaces?

Bob Baranick: I thought it was really easy. We worked with the film guys. They talked about how they were inspired by Swiss Family Treehouse in the first place. It was a natural flow for the story with the tiger scene and the heart-wrenching piece with the mother with Nala, I think I have the right name, I’m not sure. Nala’s Lion King. Sorry, Kala. It was a long time ago.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, it was 20 years plus.

Bob Baranick: Anyway, we thought it fit really well and it was kind of fun to reverse the flow. I mean, that was another thing that we thought was an improvement was with the suspension bridge and whatnot. It kind of gave Adventureland a bookend and it gave it an icon as you were walking through the land. So being able to walk up the one tree and across the bridge and go through the treehouse in a different flow, it was a simple thing to do and it made a big difference.

Dan Heaton: And that tree being now with the music playing from Tarzan and such, it’s kind of like you mentioned, it anchors multiple lands where you’re in one side of it and you’re like, oh, the tree’s over there and then the other side. So I think it succeeded and I actually, and I appreciate even the trees, the scenes itself with the drawing and everything, some of the effects you used really worked out well.

Bob Baranick: It’s kind of fun because we weren’t building it from scratch, and so we had a lot of added show and a lot of added lighting and audio and stuff, and we were debating about do we bust the tree open and run all this conduit stuff through it? I was just telling the guys, no, let’s just drape it and we’ll dress it out and it’ll be like jungle vines. So a lot of those that you see hanging through, weaving through the branches and stuff are actually electrical conduit and show control, and it saved a lot of work to have to feed that all through the cement trunk and branches. I mean, that would’ve been a lot of work to do that. And actually I think it actually helped the look of it.

Dan Heaton: You don’t look at that and say, oh, that looks exactly like the Swiss Family Treehouse with the few Tarzan things. People are just looking for that, but if it looks different and well done and with care it does, I think it works out.

Bob Baranick: Well. We must’ve done a good enough job. It’s one of the main things they added to Hong Kong for opening day, so that’s very telling. I mean, that’s the icon on the island and well done there too.

Dan Heaton: Definitely. Speaking of kind of refreshes, I know you worked at Epcot and kind of came in and I believe worked with Rolly Crump on some updates for that. What was that like?

Bob Baranick: Well, Rolly, he’s a hero and it was such fun. I mean, he’s a kick. Everything you can imagine when you look at his artwork and there’s been a few Rolly Crump shows out around. Rolly is everything that you would hope he would be. He was a delight to work with. He’s whimsical, he is fun, he’s easygoing. He originally worked on the original Land Pavilion and came back to the company for the renewals that were the 10-year thing where they had to change sponsors. So he was able to bring in a couple of his hot air balloons that he wanted to do the first time around and some fun stuff. He was a ball to work with. I thoroughly enjoyed that project.

Dan Heaton: So were you involved at all with some of the changes to the attractions, Listen to the Land and Kitchen Cabaret that changed?

Bob Baranick: Yeah. Jim Steinmeyer was Rolly’s sidekick who is a magician and a heck of a writer, and Jim created Food Rocks with Renny Rao, who was the original stylist on the film on the show. She also I think worked with Rolly and Jeff Burke on Kitchen Cabaret, but she came in and restyled the set and Jim took all these contemporary songs and rewrote them and worked with the artists and it did a magnificent job.

I’m sorry that show isn’t still there. I mean, I realized they had to add Soarin’, but it would’ve been nice to keep that show. I thought it was really fun. And they brought in Abbey Holmes who was a lighting designer for rock concert tours, so she was perfect for that show. They just let her go and she did a magnificent job with that show. She brought it to life.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, I loved Food Rocks and I agree, I like Soarin’ a lot and I know when they needed the queue space I guess, but it feels weird when you walk in that pavilion, even though it’s been a long time and I’m like, this is where this is. We’re waiting in line and this is where Food Rocks was.

Bob Baranick: I think there would’ve been a way to save a show and still have a queue to another attraction.

Dan Heaton: Oh, I agree it was shortsighted. I guess also too with capacity, because as you know, the parks grow and get more popular, and shows like that, you might say, oh, it’s just a secondary show. I wouldn’t say that, but those shows are important for crowds to go to.

Bob Baranick: Listen to The Land was fun because Roy worked with Carl Hodges, again, who was at, I think Arizona. He was a horticulturist and he came up with new ways of producing agriculture and getting an environmental message across. So we were able to fix that ride, bringing it a little more up to date. That was a lot of fun. I had a lot of fun creating the rain.

Dan Heaton: That’s a great scene because I’m so used to, I saw I went on the original as a kid, but I’m so used to the one now and given what all the things like you mentioned, World of Motion, others that have left having that boat ride still there and be so good, it seems better now because there aren’t as many other things like it.

Bob Baranick: I’m very anxious to see what they do with Epcot. It definitely needs a big, big plus. It needs a lot of work. I’m curious whether they’re going to keep the science factual thing or not. I’m supporting them and really looking forward to seeing what they do.

Dan Heaton: When I was a kid, Epcot was always my favorite park, and again, going in the eighties and nineties and part of me, I mean, one, I’m really excited. They’re doing so many things for a while. They didn’t do anything there, they just kind of let it go. I’m a little nervous with some things, like I’m still trying to wrap my brain around Guardians of the Galaxy being there and such, but we’ll see. It’s a giant building. We’ll see what they do with it.

Bob Baranick: Yeah, I’m keeping an open mind on that stuff.

Dan Heaton: Me too. I’m trying really hard, so I’ll be excited to go and see everything. I know you did so many things at Disney and eventually moved on to other projects, and I wanted to ask you about a few of the other projects, if that’s okay.

Bob Baranick: Sure.

Dan Heaton: Most of these I haven’t been to, but I’ve read about them and I’m very curious. So one of them is the Six Flags Power Plant in Baltimore. I

Bob Baranick: Loved it.

Dan Heaton: So tell me about that.

Bob Baranick: Well, that was one of the first ones that Gary Goddard and his group got to do, and it was a way we could play with Jules Verne a little bit. It was an interesting project and a little bit frustrating because Six Flags did not want any rides. And Gary in particular, Gary’s a theme park guy too. We all were like, oh, you got to have something in here. Eddie Martinez had designed some rollercoasters and there was some different stuff, and all they wanted were shows. They were trying to get a different thing for, they were known as the rollercoaster parks, and it turned out that Six Flags’ strategy was not very good because that park closed about a year or two later. But it was a lot of fun to work on. It was an art director’s dream.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, it’s too bad because I feel like maybe if they could’ve done a few rides and balanced it out, it would’ve worked. Maybe it sounds like something that might work today with all the themed restaurants and different things you have.

Bob Baranick: Well, and I think you’re going to see stuff like that because of the malls and malls are really struggling with retail dying. Basically they’re, they’re going to have to figure out some kind of a live work place situation and what to do with the malls, and that’s going to bring in some entertainment. I know that there are groups out there that are addressing that right now. So we might be seeing that kind of thing.

Dan Heaton: Well, it would be exciting for me because I feel like, well, I love going to Disney and Universal and whatnot, but having self-contained little, I wouldn’t even say little but self-contained parks that are themed well and that people that have worked on theme parks like yourself and others can do. It seems like it would be a lot of fun in different cities people can go to in their own towns and such

Bob Baranick: Very regional based.

Dan Heaton: And I know you also worked on another attraction, the Monster Mansion.

Bob Baranick: Yeah, that was a ball.

Dan Heaton: Six Flags does not do that many dark rides anymore, especially my local St. Louis park. We only have one, so it’s fun to see something crazy, kind of crazy like that.

Bob Baranick: Well, and the honor for me is that I got to work on that one twice. I got to work on Hershey twice, and I got to work on Busch Gardens Enchanted Lab facility twice very rare. They were all with Gary Goddard. Gary did Monster Plantation, which ironically was a replacement for the tails of Okefenokee, which is very much like Splash Mountain. It was Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox. Then basically our Monster Mansion was a refresh. We went in and rehabbed it and added a lot of fun effects and different things. It’s very popular.

Dan Heaton: So what’s it when you’ve already, I already asked you earlier about refreshing classics, but what about one you’ve worked on? What is it like to go in and are you trying to fix things?

Bob Baranick: Well, it’s funny to go in and you tear out your own sets. That’s really weird. History is most things that anybody works on gets changed by somebody. It’s rare that you change it yourself. I’m not sure I would have to say that Enchanted Lab, Busch Gardens was a much better show than Secrets of Castle O’Sullivan. We always thought Enchanted Lab was one of the greatest theme park shows done, but they wanted to change to Ireland.

So we were involved with converting the entire land. We rewrote a show that was basically the same kind of magic show with live actors and effects for the same theater. Then the other one, of course was the Chocolate Factory. We had worked on two or three, and it’s just gone through another generation of it. So the, the Hershey’s Chocolate World Chocolate Tour has changed several times over the years, and two of those generations were something I was involved with.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, that’s interesting. I have not been there, but I’ve seen that attraction. I’ve watched, I guess the video that was not the latest version because it’s getting changed. But that’s such an, I’m not going to say odd in a bad way. It’s such a unique attraction. I love the fact that they’re doing something that’s kind of commercial based with Hershey, but also has all those kind of classic dark ride elements to it.

Bob Baranick: Well, it’s all about the fact that they could no longer bring guests through the real factory. In fact, I believe the factory’s gone by now, but when Chocolate World opened, it was a visitor center because they needed to sell products and they could not bring people with health codes through the factory. So they created an artificial factory tour and it was very sterile. It was a fun little ride, but just nothing really interesting to look at. And so the second generation that we worked on was built around the song, it’s the Milk Chocolate, which is what Milton Hershey’s story was. And it had the three little cows and the whole fun song. It got to be very popular. And it’s since changed. I haven’t been on the update, but I hear it’s okay.

Dan Heaton: It’s cool. I love the fact that there are dark rides that that are completely their own thing. And like you said, were kind of created out of a necessity that they didn’t expect they needed and have kind of morphed into something else really. It’s got to be fun to work on things like that.

Bob Baranick: Yeah, I’ve been so lucky and I’ve been doing it a long time too.

Dan Heaton: Yeah. So if it’s okay, I wanted to ask you briefly, I know you had tried to create the Whirligig Woods Project in North Carolina, and it sounded like a really cool project and it sounds like it’s not going forward, but I would love, if it’s okay, I’d love to hear about it.

Bob Baranick: Sure. It did not happen because of the investors. I had a couple of bad business partners. It wasn’t going to happen to the level that it really needed to be. I was going for a certain quality, albeit very small scale. I grew up at a little park called Frontier Village in San Jose, and it was very charming and it was a 40-acre park, and it was a beautiful little kind of, a little western park had a train ride and whatnot.

So it was a great childhood having tree houses and haunted houses and train rides and stuff in my backyard. I just wanted to create that experience for another generation. So that’s what Whirligig Woods was going to be. It had the added value of a tree resort that was in the middle of the park. So essentially my castle would’ve been the tree houses, and they were all themed.

They all different themes. One was haunted and one was fantasy, and one was kind of adventure. And you take, if you had reserved a tree house for the night, you would get on the railroad and you would go around to take the tour around the park and get out at your own private depot and be escorted to your tree house. Then you had full run of the park that day and the next day. Well, the investors didn’t come through, and I just decided rather than to do a half-baked job, I was just going to pull the plug on the project. I’ve since figured out a different way to get my stories across. So I’m working on that right now.

Dan Heaton: Well, it’s too bad that it didn’t work out because I read up on a lot of the articles that came out when you were planning it and some of the, it just sounded so exciting. Like I mentioned earlier, I love the idea, I think you described it as a boutique park that can work regionally. I don’t mean that as a negative, I mean that as a positive and really uplift the culture of the area.

Bob Baranick: It was specifically for the triad and the triangle of North Carolina who they desperately need a quality family experience. It was targeting the younger crowd. This wasn’t going to have rock concerts at night and big giant roller coasters. This was kind of honoring the trees and the land that I have found and very intimate, very sweet and quiet and kind of sincere, just a nice little park. It’s beautiful land and I still have it, and I’m not going to turn it into a public thing, but I’m going to kind of create my own little artist retreat here, which will be studios for writing and drawing and painting and stuff, and invite some folks in that want to spend some time here, and we’ll make it a magical little place.

Dan Heaton: Well, that sounds great too. I’m glad you’re found a way to use it, because I know that it’s a really attractive area just describing, I mean tree houses and all that you were going to do, but just the land itself that you found another way to use it to a positive way.

Bob Baranick: Well, it’s going to be a private thing rather than a public thing. I think that’s also good for the local communities. There was some concern, although be, it wasn’t very overwhelming. It was about 80 people that naturally were concerned about noise and traffic. You would be, because this is very serene out here, it’s very pastoral. This land in particular used to be a dairy farm, but it’s very magical. It’s got a lot of springs and little beautiful water things. So that’s where I was going to landscape it and make it a very nice place, very nice experience for picnics and barbecues and birthday parties and stuff like that. Well, we’ll do that on a private level.

Dan Heaton: Sure, that sounds great. So I’m curious, beyond just this park mean we don’t see overall, I mean a lot of new parks, independent parks being built in the United States, it just seems to be a real challenge. What do you think is the challenge beyond money? What are the big hurdles do you think for parks like that to open and maybe are we going to see change down the road?

Bob Baranick: Well, I think everybody’s focused on China, certainly, and Indonesia quite a bit in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, there’s a lot of hope in South America. So the big companies, the big money is going international. There are local groups, and I was involved with some of them. They’re local media outlets and developers and stuff that are interested in creating the kind of thing that I was talking about doing. So I suspect somewhere, sometime we’ll do that kind of thing in North Carolina and perhaps somewhere else. It’ll be very small scale. The market’s very saturated. You there. You won’t see any big Disney World resorts or anything like that. There’ll be little things like I was trying to do.

Dan Heaton: That makes sense because you do see so much of the, well, even Disney, Shanghai and then Universal’s putting one in Beijing. There’s just so much like that happening right now. But it makes sense because those are growth markets and we’re kind of in a mature market here in the United States, but that’s not totally bad. Still a lot of investment happening in some of the bigger parks right now going on from like we mentioned with Star Wars and whatnot. But I wanted to ask you too, just in general about your career, and we’ve talked about a lot of projects you worked on, but what’s kind of a favorite project maybe that we haven’t discussed yet that you really enjoyed doing?

Bob Baranick: Great question. I’d have to say my ultimate favorite was Disneyland Paris. I mean, that was a pinnacle.

Dan Heaton: It’s okay. I didn’t mean to put you on the spot.

Bob Baranick: No, it’s hard to say because I feel like I’ve done been able to be involved in so many great things. What I’m more focused on is the next thing I’m doing, and so I get very passionate about that. For instance, when Whirligig Woods went down and I pulled the plug on it, I’ve converted more to writing some books and creating a little mythology of some of the stories that we’re going to be told in the park. It’s a different way to get that story out and kind of inspire another generation. So that’s where my next focus is writing these books, doing these pieces of art and these models, and I’ll get a website, maybe some YouTube stuff going and people will be able to experience it in a different way.

Dan Heaton: Well, that sounds amazing, and I’m looking forward to seeing what you do next. If any of my listeners want to learn more about your work you’re doing online, is there a good place to go?

Bob Baranick: Well, they can go to bobbaranick.com and there’s a website on there and they can reach me. I love to talk to people. I spend a lot of time with students and encouraging them and finding what their true passion and their skills are, and I feel privileged to have worked so hard to do what I wanted to do and achieve it and get to be a part of these things, and I want another generation to have that same success.

Dan Heaton: Well, excellent. This has been awesome. Just speaking of, you have so many good stories and it looks like you’ve worked on so many cool things, so I really appreciate the time and that you talked to me.

Bob Baranick: Thank you, Dan. It’s been a joy.