127. Disney Imagineer Daniel Joseph on The Hatbox Ghost, Trader Sam’s, and Phantom Manor

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Few Disney Imagineers take the same road to finding their careers. I’ve learned how many stumbled into their roles and discovered unexpected talents. The path was different for Daniel Joseph, who created haunted houses in his basement as a kid. His passion for creating effects and illusions fit perfectly with Walt Disney Imagineering. Daniel’s interest in The Haunted Mansion and Yale Gracey also helped drive his journey to WDI. His innovative effects and designs help make the attractions work.

Daniel is my guest on this episode of The Tomorrow Society Podcast to talk about his extensive career. We discuss his original interest in working at Disney and participation in the Imaginations Design Competition. Daniel has worked on many cool projects for Disney, including Trader Sam’s, Test Track, and Phantom Manor. He also helped create The Hatbox Ghost, added to Disneyland’s Mansion in 2015. I loved hearing the stories of how the Imagineers designed this effect.

Beyond specific attractions, Daniel gives helpful advice to younger artists hoping to become Imagineers. He works for Disney today and has experience joining as a young designer. Daniel also chats about his favorite theme park attractions, Yale Gracey’s inspiration, and what excites him about the future of theme parks. I really enjoyed the opportunity for such a deep dive with Daniel about his story and Disney career.

Show Notes: Daniel Joseph

Learn the background of the Hatbox Ghost from Daniel Joseph and other Imagineers on this clip from the Disney Parks Blog YouTube channel.

Watch Daniel talk about the creation of the Hatbox Ghost at the Scare LA panel on The Haunted Mansion in 2015.

Follow Daniel on Instagram and learn more about his inventions. He also creates inventive effects on his free time at home.

Photos in this post are used with the permission of Disney and Daniel Joseph.

Transcript

Daniel Joseph: Having the ability, whether you’re in a company or in your garage or in your parents’ basement to come up with an idea and then follow through with a finished result is a huge, huge step forward in your viability in this world. I mean, COVID has proven that we all have to be productive at home just as we do in the office, and I think some of the students I’ve talked to recently are kind of worried about the job market and everything out there because of the pandemic and everything that’s going on. But what I think is wonderful is that shouldn’t stop the innovation part, and once you kind of realize that the innovation doesn’t have to be connected to just a specific company or even a specific place, you can kind of do it anywhere. Then the ideas just flow and soar.

Dan Heaton: That is Disney Imagineer Daniel Joseph, who’s here to talk about his career, creating illusions and special effects for Walt Disney Imagineering, including the Hatbox Ghost at Disneyland’s, Haunted Mansion plus effects for Trader Sam’s, Test Track, Phantom Manor, and so much more. You’re listening to the Tomorrow Society Podcast.

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Dan Heaton: Thanks so much for joining me here on Episode 127 of the Tomorrow Society Podcast. I am your host, Dan Heaton. I’m really excited to bring you this week’s show with Disney Imagineer Daniel Joseph who has just such an interesting story. If you’re new to this podcast, one thing that I really enjoy doing is talking with people that have worked behind the scenes at Disney or just in the industry in general because I think their stories could be inspiring to someone who maybe wants to work at Imagineering or even just some other related creative field.

Hearing how someone like Daniel who spent time in his basement creating haunted houses and putting together various gadgets when he was younger, ultimately was able to use those skills and become successful at a really large place like Disney. So it was really cool for me to hear Daniel’s progression going from where he started working at a local haunted house and then ultimately finding his way to Disney and getting involved with so many cool attractions.

I mentioned a lot of them in the intro, like the Hatbox Ghost, but also there’s others like Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom, the Coco Effects, which I think are super cool at the Mexico Pavilion where you walk in right there. Daniel’s been involved with a wide range of attractions, even more than we were able to cover in this interview and beyond the specific things he’s worked on. What I also think is cool about this show is that he talks about what excites him about the future of the industry, gives advice to aspiring Imagineers, and then just talks about some of his favorite attractions and his inspiration from Yale Gracey, who of course was so involved in the effects for the Haunted Mansion.

You may notice slight differences to the sound quality in this. We did record this over two sessions, however, I think the sound quality is still good. I just wanted to mention that in case you’re wondering about some switches in between, I’m just really happy to have the chance to talk to Daniel and present his story to you on this show. So let’s get right to it. Here is Daniel Joseph.

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Dan Heaton: I’m really excited given all the things you’ve worked on and just I think you have an interesting story too about how you ended up getting to Disney. So I’d love to go back even to the start before you joined when you were young, how interested were you in Disney and the parks? I mean, were they a big thing for you when you were growing up?

Daniel Joseph: Well, when I was young, I grew up in Delaware in the northeast of the United States and it certainly was always on my radar, but since we were so far away from both Disneyland and Walt Disney World, it wasn’t something that I was able to go to that often. We went to Walt Disney World maybe about every five years or maybe even a little more time, but it really mostly got into my life through serendipity, I would say, with my own interests, and then bringing the aha moment out was Disney finally.

But I as a kid always loved taking things apart and making things, and as a really little kid, whenever anyone would ask what I wanted to be, I would say, I want to be an inventor. And it’s like, what does that mean? But it can mean all kinds of things, of course. I got into ultimately at a very young age doing little haunted houses in my basement and charging 25 cents for people to walk through and giving the money to the Humane Association in Delaware just as a kind of a nice philanthropy type little thing.

But it taught me a lot about the theatrical magic process and things like that that I was super interested in. It gave me a creative outlet too because definitely at school I was not always the top of the class. I grew up with some learning differences and some dyslexia and found that having a creative outlet at home, like making haunted attractions or little haunted houses really gave me something that was special for me and gave me a sense of confidence.

So fast forward a few years, I would say till I was about 11 and we were down in Walt Disney World for a family vacation and the first aha moment was riding through Horizons in Epcot Center at the time and just being in awe and absolutely what I was seeing and the sense of optimism and just the sense of euphoria, euphoria that I had after riding that riot and needed to ride it several times to really get that out of my system.

Then a day later going on the Haunted Mansion, I like to say is kind of my moment of clarity, my nirvana moment where I went through that attraction of course the whole time looking around, looking above, looking behind the doom buggies and looking at everything as much as I could and realizing I remember getting off of the attraction and saying to my parents, there are people who made this and they probably got paid for it. I’d do this kind of thing at home for fun. I want to do this.

At the time I had no idea what an Imagineer was, but I was absolutely tunnel vision determined to find out and from I would say that Haunted Mansion, first trip of thousands of trips around the Haunted Mansion down the years was the thing that sort of set me on this path. And from then on out I just went to the library and the infant infancy of the Internet had just kind of started.

So I found a few little things out there on the Internet about Imagineering and discovered in the back of one of these Disney books about animation, this guy Yale Gracey who just became my Michael Jordan. I like to say other people. My friends would have pictures of Michael Jordan on their wall from the Bulls as their hero. I had picture of Yale Gracey on my wall and that kind of set me on a path ever since then to find out everything I could about Imagineering, about Yale Gracey and what I could do to do that kind of work in the future.

Dan Heaton: So with Yale Gracey, what was it? Because Yale Gracey had the amazing effects that he created that were so inventive, which definitely applies to what you were doing as a kid, but what was it about him or about those effects that inspired you so much and made you want to do this for your career?

Daniel Joseph: I think the first thing was the pictures, the press releases that had been done, which were just a few of Yale Gracey in the ‘60s where he had this lab coat on and he was either posed with one of the ghosts from the Haunted Mansion or working on something for Pirates was so cool. I mean, it was the mad professor to me that this person was like, that was a real mad scientist and that was super intriguing to me.

Then the second thing, which I would say is more of a second read and it got me even more into him, was learning that this person has had a fine arts background, was very much literally a designer and a painter, and at the same time had this other side of the brain where he would just take things and make them into other things that were spectacular and the things that he would use.

There’s stories out there, the one that really got me excited was the bent hubcap story where he found an old chrome bent hubcap in a parking lot, and because of Yale’s mind and the way he would think, he put it on a motor, put a special light source aimed onto it with an image projector and basically created an animated moving special effects fixture that ultimately got refined and was put into many attractions through the years.

That kind of almost MacGyver notion of taking something that’s totally garbage for some people or ubiquitous for some other people and making it into something that’s this high tech thing that people look at and say, what am I even looking at was that was true magic to me. The part of that that really enchanted me was, Hey, I have access to bent hub caps. I have access to little electrical things and stuff like that.

This isn’t stuff that you can only get in a NASA laboratory. This is completely accessible to me, this little kid in Delaware in his parents’ basement. So I grew up, there was this place near us in New Jersey called Edmund Scientific. They’re now a mail order catalog, but they had this back room where they had motors and mirrors and prisms and lights and all these things from surplus parts that were taken apart that they were selling.

And my grandparents would give me like $30 for my birthday to go and spend in that back room, and I would pick up a bunch of just weird and eccentric items in there and make stuff and not have a goal, but ultimately have a result of something that would do something whether it was a primitive strobe light or some kind of weird fan device or some kind of model tram ride. That was for me, me kind of recreating some of the Yale Gracey type design process. So that really is what got me excited about him is this resourcefulness and also the accessibility of that resourcefulness that I felt I could be a part of.

Dan Heaton: Right, because a lot of the effects he was doing were not the super high tech, most modern things. They went back to theater productions from the early 20th century or even earlier. So they were things that people did when they didn’t have modern technology. I know that you ultimately went before Disney started working at the Eastern State Penitentiary, the famed haunted house, which is called Terror Behind the Walls. So how did you bring some of that tinkering at home and that ingenuity into when you actually started working at a place like that?

Daniel Joseph: Well, it was actually, it was kind of funny. I was in school in Philadelphia at University of the Arts for Industrial Design, basically product design, high-end furniture design or appliance design, high-end type stuff, and there’s this organization called ISDA Industrial Design or IDSA Industrial Design Society of America, which I was part of the student chapter and one of my professors who knew my kind of different background and design.

I had friends who were designing refrigerators and things like that while I was on the same design project, designing refrigerator that could become clear and used things so you could see inside of it techniques from the Haunted Mansion to make this refrigerator work and do weird things. So my professor knew this was a little out of the ordinary, but he knew my real passion was themed attractions in Disney and had a friend that he had met that worked at Eastern State.

They were just starting. They were looking for people to bring in for the summer. So he suggested me. I interviewed and got the job as kind of their animatronics technician and special effects designer, and I was thrilled. This was like, okay, this is my first time working at a professional haunted attraction where as a kid it was always my little one in the basement.

So this is my opportunity, and I really enjoyed how they though I was a kid in college, they really trusted my opinions as far as like, okay, how are we going to mechanize this character with sensor and what are we going to do to centralize the fog machines and make the fog go out throughout the whole attraction from one central source? What kind of cool laser scanning effects can we do that might be a liquid floor or a liquid tunnel effect that hadn’t really been done in haunted attractions at that point yet.

So I found myself building by hand a bunch of these things that I just pitched to them and they’re like, go ahead, try it. And they let me, and I was super excited, but I found this new side of stress of the things that I would build in being afraid that they’d break because they had to run for sometimes hundreds of hours for all these guests to go through.

So that was kind of a new feeling for me. Then not to mention this Eastern State Penitentiary is a real old prison that’s not my parents’ basement, and that place is genuinely scary. Running around at night, turning things off for the shift is over and everything. That was for me, sometimes a little bit of a spooky experience in trying to get out of the building as fast as I could. No one else was there, but it was a lot of fun and a lot of cool learning a experience to do it for the big guys.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, that sounds like great background for what you did further on, but yeah, I am not sure I’d want to be there late at night regardless of if it had the extra effects and everything too. So that probably helped a little bit. I think that was something, a scary experience. So you ultimately then around the similar time I think, but was the Imaginations competition where I know you were part of a team that developed a project that then gets submitted for a competition with Disney. I have not heard individual stories about this, so I would love to hear what it was like for you to be part of this competition and how that process went.

Daniel Joseph: Yeah, so the Imaginations competition, I call my second senior thesis because in school I did have a senior project, but I certainly concentrated on Imaginations the same or more than my school project. The way the Imaginations program was run back then was actually, it was interesting, it was six groups were brought, flown out to California that were the finalists, and there were generally three groups of teams and three groups of individuals.

So it was individuals against teams and six group lump sum, and then ultimately one would win whether it was a team or whether it was a single person team. They were all kind of pitted against each other. So that was definitely interesting and daunting. Actually, I didn’t have a team. It was just me because though I tried to find other people with similar interests and I certainly had a lot of friends, a lot of people didn’t want to give the time commitment that was required for it.

So I just said, okay, well, I’m going to just go for it and do it myself this time and we’ll see. Before then, I had actually tried a few things in the matter of getting into Disney through different backdoor family, friends, this and that, none of which had really panned out. I met some interesting people, but nothing really got me in the door, so to speak. So I finally said, well, I’m just, I’m going to do this Imaginations program. It’s going to kick my butt. It’s a lot of work, but I’m going to go for it.

I decided to basically redo the People Mover that is in California that became Rocket Rods and do a retrofit system that fits on top of what was already existent there from Rocket Rods and make this ride system that can bank and turn as it goes around Tomorrowland, and at the time, Mission Space in Epcot had just opened.

So I kind of tied it into the story of the Mars mission in Epcot being the West Coast version of that in Disneyland, and since I’d been studying Disney for all these years, I really wanted to put my all into it. So as far as checking all the boxes and things that I knew I could contribute, I designed uniforms or in costumes for the cast members.

I wrote a musical score for the attraction and even did special effects mockups for in my college dorm room, which some of which set off smoke detectors, so I don’t suggest doing that, but no, they proved to be some good pictures and videos that I was able to add to my presentation and really show the thinking of this because the Imaginations program, just to give a little background, was created by Marty Sklar in the early ‘90s to bring in different kind of diverse thought into Imagineering, whether it’s back then there weren’t as many female Imagineers as there are now.

And to the credit of the Imaginations program, there are quite a bit of wonderful female Imagineers we have as well as people from different backgrounds, different schools, and parts of the country and parts of the world from different ethnicity backgrounds and things like that that were really necessary to bring into Imagineering because our guests are diverse, so Imagineers should be diverse as well. So that’s why the program was created.

I kind of used that idea as number one; I’m not in a typical place where Disney tended to draft from Philadelphia area rather than the LA area or near Orlando typically are where they were at that time. A lot of Imagineers were coming from and also my background having some learning differences and things like that. I sort of thought, Hey, well that’s a diverse way of thinking that I think I could benefit the company.

So I kind of went all in and went I think a little over the top with coming up with this people mover version two thing and put it on big poster boards and made videos and all this stuff and sent it all in because it wasn’t really digital at the time. It was an analog transaction, which is kind of funny. We had to FedEx everything out and have them review it.

The executives that Imagineering reviewed my entry along with a bunch of entries from all over the country and Canada, and I was one of the finalists. So I was just absolutely blown away. I couldn’t believe the end of my senior year the thing that I’d worked so hard for specifically going to college to be an Imagineer maybe was going to come true. So they flew me out to LA right after graduation and I met a bunch of two other individual finalists and three other team finalists, and we all of course became fast friends because very similar interests and passions and got to tour Imagineering and meet real Imagineers to which at that point I had only dreamt of doing the big thing.

Walking in those hollowed walls of 1401 Flower was surreal and and then presenting to a whole bunch of executives, I guess I was 22 at the time, presenting this idea that I’d come up with in a dorm room and standing up there alone in front of all these people to ultimately sitting our last day of the trip there sitting at a round table for lunch with Marty Sklar and being very starstruck and very, very nervous sitting next to this person and then come to find out the reason why I was sitting or seated next to Marty was because my entry and my presentation won.

So just from that point on, it was a dream come true. It was everything I’d wanted up to that point, kind of culminating right then and there. So I moved out to LA with a backpack and a few hundred dollars, and then a few months later, about a half a year later, I was able to start an internship with Walt Disney Imagineering Research and Development. So that was a six-month internship and that was almost 15 years ago.

Dan Heaton: Wow. So I want to ask you all about your work at Disney. I have to ask one quick question about the People Mover and Mission Space. So was that, I mean, did people wear 3D glasses or was there some sort of screen or how did you connect the People Mover track beyond the part that goes past Space Mountain and everything? How did you connect that to Mission Space while you were doing it?

Daniel Joseph: Well, it was mostly in the pre-show getting you through the queue and understanding why you’re about to go on these really strange vehicles, and the way I tied it in was Mission Space is sort of a test pilot mission in Epcot to train you on how to get to Mars from Earth, how to fly a rocket to Mars, and then the PV two or People Mover two is now another training system to kind of train you on how to get around Mars once we’re colonizing it. So the vehicles to make you feel like you were in a lower gravity environment had kind of a bogey that went along the People Mover track and then an arm that cantilevered off of it with the vehicle with the people inside and inside the vehicle.

You were able to pan and tilt this arm as the vehicle is moving horizontally through space on the track, so you would get this kind of soaring flying feeling that you were in charge of and the conceit while you were at Disneyland and why you’re still on earth doing this that I kept coming back to is this is kind of a training test track for the system that’s going to be on Mars and we have the first article of it here at Disneyland and we need you to try it.

That was kind of the story conceit; my connection to Mission Space, the story-wise aspect of it, but it allowed me to not have to go with any kind of 3D glasses or anything like that inside because if you see Disneyland and you see Tomorrowland, that’s appropriate. You are in Tomorrowland, you are in Disneyland, just like in Mission Space in Epcot, you’re in a test vehicle, you’re not actually going to Mars. So it was kind of that, but it was a blast and I think the thing with all of Imaginations, all of the Imaginations program, which it still is going on and it’s still great and living on in Marty’s legacy, I’m on the board and help kind of champion some of the initiatives with it as I have since I got in the company.

We’re not making these attractions really. This Imaginations is very much, what’s so wonderful is it’s like an extended interview and a way to have new talent directly make a portfolio piece that is targeted for Disney’s consumption, and it’s like in so many words, you want to be an Imagineer, huh? Well show me. And rather than showing in a portfolio pictures of things that maybe don’t necessarily fully relate to Imagineering and all that stuff, this is a way for students and certainly it was for me to directly show what we can do if we were real Imagineers.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, I think it’s a great program and like you said, it’s a way to, I mean, because you could tell from your idea, which I still think would be amazing, but your idea was it showed the ingenuity and the work ethic that you had created this. So you went on and you started as an intern at Disney and ultimately got a full-time position. So what were some of the early projects you worked on after you joined WDI that set you on the right path?

Daniel Joseph: Well, when I started, I was in the Research & Development group for a year, and that was really interesting because it is a really neat department that is very much free thinking and coming up with things that are way out five years, 10 years in the future that nobody’s even thought of yet. Coming to the end of my year in R&D and opening and kind of a need showed itself in the Special Effects and Illusions group at Imagineering, which was really kind of for me, I like to call it the bullseye within the bullseye of Imagineering of where I wanted to be. I mean, that is the Yale Gracey department, I want to go over there. So something opened up and I weaseled my way over there and was able to get in and thank goodness they were all open to it.

And at that time there hadn’t been a new hire in the group for many years, and in fact, I was the youngest new hire in the group in probably over a decade. So I had all these amazing, very, very skilled and seasoned special effects designers at my disposal who in a company like Disney or other big companies could have the attitude, oh, there’s this new kid, he’s going to try to take our job away and outshine us or any of that stuff. That wasn’t at all the vibe. Every single one of them took me under their wing and I would ask questions about Alien Encounter or Mount Prometheus in Tokyo DisneySea, and every single one of them would be open. Let’s go to lunch, Daniel, I’ll tell you about the jet engines we used in Tokyo DisneySea to make the volcano caldera work.

It was just like all the sudden I had access to these people that were exactly the people that I’d been reading about for the last 10 years. So the first project I got to work on as I got into that group was Da Vinci’s Challenge, I think it’s called still to this day, which is in Tokyo Disney Sea, and it’s an adventure game, and I did some of the mockups for some of the interactive elements that are in that attraction.

When you go throughout the park, you activate different things and you’ll see this little lava flow effect happen and LEDs flicker or just different cool gags that tend to happen throughout the place as you go through. Again, here I am right out of school only a year into the company and they were letting me work on circuit boards and work with the CAD department to figure out how to package things inside these cabinets, and all this stuff has to be designed by Japanese electrical standards.

Stuff I had no idea anything about but learned as I was going. And then the coolest part was coming up with ideas and then being allowed to mock these things up and show the proof of concepts to executives. So at that time it was Joe Lanzisero who was the head of or the portfolio lead of Tokyo Disneyland, and he would come over to our mock-up building in Glendale and I would fire up one of the effects I was working on and everyone would stand around and he’d ask questions, and then everyone would clap and everyone would go away and I’d just be like, did that just happen? That’s the coolest thing ever.

So that was the first thing out of the gate for me. The Tokyo Disneyland work from men on out kind of had this hunger that I still have to this day that just unfortunately kept me so overly busy on so many different things at once that I just worked more and more and more and had more and more projects under my belt.

And I say unfortunately just because it was something that very much kind of overtook my life even on the weekends as far as thinking about this stuff and thinking about it before going to bed and thinking about it in the shower. But that is kind of our way of life as an Imagineer is to really get into this work as more than a job. It’s kind of like a way of thinking.

So I’m trying to think. The next thing that I worked on after that was probably the next big project that I worked on after that was probably Trader Sam’s, and Trader Sam’s was initially a very small project that didn’t really have a big team at all. They gave me a whole bunch of creative latitude that the team had ideas of things we wanted to do in this proposed enchanted tiki bar, but wasn’t a lot of clear ideas yet.

So they gave me the reins to kind of go again to our mockup building and I built a full out tiki window with stuff. I went to Home Depot and bought parts and pieces and Venetian blinds to put in and everything like that and fake foliage, and ultimately did my own media for a mockup of this tiki window with an erupting volcano and birds that fly by and rain that comes down that we pitched around the company and made it into a real project.

So that was another one that I was really just pleasantly excited about the process that I was kind of given free rein to come up with what the gag was for that attraction or for that restaurant, that bar, and ultimately they let me kind of run with it, and that’s what we ended up installing in Disneyland. And then people loved it so much. There’s one here in Florida now too.

Dan Heaton: Trader Sam’s is a real marvel, and it’s actually a surprise, I forget that it hasn’t, I think about the one at Disneyland just being there forever. It has that kind of classic feeling and I’m like, oh no, it’s only been there for less than 10 years and Disney World even less. But I think it fits with your career that you worked on something like that because there’s so many kind of inventive little effects and clever nods in there that totally fit with what you’ve done before.

Daniel Joseph: You’re absolutely right. The big thing with Trader Sam’s and a lot of the work I do, but Trader Sam’s epitomizes the 1960s kitsch era of not only tiki, but also of effects work and the shipwreck effect or the windows and how they look. The aesthetic and feel of everything is very much about that kitsch and that warm and fuzzy, not about the technology behind it all. It still hopefully makes people look at it and say, Hey, how did they do that? But not in a way that is a technology question.

Yeah, Trader Sam’s was really an important one, and that Trader Sam’s for me was one of my big introductions and the start of lifelong friendship with Tom Fitzgerald, who I am very close with now. We worked on Phantom Manor together. He brought me in to work on a whole bunch of the Epcot shows that are happening now, and I accredit all that to having kind of proven myself on Trader Sam’s to him. So that’s an important project for me.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, I’d love to ask you quickly though, you mentioned Phantom Manor, which I went to in 2006, so well before any of the recent updates. So what did you do on that? Because with Phantom Manor, it is such a cool attraction. I love the take that they did on the Haunted Mansion.

Daniel Joseph: Oh yeah, me too. I mean, as I said before, Mansion in any capacity at Disney is kind of my favorite, and I’m on this world conquest. I want to work on every Disney Mansion that’s out there, and I have actually at this point except for Tokyo’s Haunted Mansion, so I’ve worked on every other Mansion including Mystic Manor in Hong Kong. But Phantom Manor, which was a 2018 project, was really a way in the spirit, no pun intended, of typical Tom Fitzgerald because he’s such a story driven designer and he has Disney storytelling down to a T.

He wanted to tighten up the story of that attraction because for many years I think it’s been a wonderful attraction, but the story is very nebulous and in a way that’s a good thing, but in another way or might’ve been a little too nebulous. So that was the first reason for doing any rehab was tightening up the story and the script a little bit. And then the second reason was since the attraction opened in 1992, the technology from a special effects and illusion standpoint has changed hugely, and that attraction hasn’t been touched since 1992. So we really needed to bring up the luster a little bit, make TTA shine again and just get some things up to snuff in there.

In doing that changing slide projections that were very old and some of them not necessarily working to their fullest, to some higher res video projection techniques and stuff like that, that all is kind of mechanical changes to the attraction or behind the scenes stuff that guests don’t see. But in tightening up the story of Melanie, who’s the bride in there, and finding out finally unequivocally that her dad is the Phantom, having him appear throughout the attraction in more of a literal sense was some of the things that I pitched with Tom Fitzgerald.

One of them I’m really proud of got in, and it’s a kind of a whole new effect in the brides, the bride’s scene, which is right before it would be the attic scene in our Haunted Mansions. But in that scene, she used to be crying looking into a mirror, and the mirror was kind of in the shape of a skull, or at least had an age skull appearance to it.

I came up with the idea, and then ultimately we made a little scale model that worked to prove this out and get people on board with the idea was to use again, some old magicians techniques, not distant from things Yale Gracey loved to do and make the Phantom appear in the mirror as if he was kind of hovering behind the bride as she’s crying, looking into the mirror. But as a guest, you’re past her and there is no phantom floating out there.

He only is behind her from the point of view when you look in the mirror. So it’s a very, very eerie, creepy, fun gag that we got to add that wasn’t ever in there before. So there’s a few little touches like that throughout the attraction that really bring it up to speed as well as this brand new that I’m really proud of, this brand new stretch portrait effect that was just a dream to get to work on where we actually do a one two punch and we created brand new stretch portraits for that scene, just like in typical cadence with the rest of our Mansions.

As the room stretches, you see what’s really going on in the picture. In this case, you see the Bride with her suitor next to her, and as the room stretches, you notice that there’s some kind of demise below, and the Bride, as the room stretches actually disappears from each one of the pictures.

The thought is, okay, here’s what happened to each one of the suitors that went after her, but kind of a one-two punch as I explained before, where we did a reveal, typical Haunted Mansion, stretch, portrait reveal, but also then a state change, which was really fun making one of the characters in the paintings vanish right before your eyes. So that, again, another really fun gag. The other one that I’m really proud of is in the first scene, the foyer, as you walk into phantom manner and are given the spiel, which by the way now is back to one of the original tests and thoughts of the attraction was to have Vincent Price do the narration.

So we brought that back, and Vincent Price is now doing a spiel in the queue, and one of the things he talks about is because you walk into this foyer that has dingy wallpaper and there’s water staining and cobwebs on the walls, and you can see lath and plaster poking through, and as Vincent Price says, both in French and in English, but beauty lives here still, the wallpaper right in front of your eyes heels and becomes brand new, beautiful shining new wallpaper like you’re back in the glory days of this huge mansion.

Before it was a decrepit old, old manor that you had just walked in. So these kind of transformational effects were super fun and even more fun to brainstorm with Tom Fitzgerald and the rest of the team and coming up with, how the heck are we going to do these things? That was definitely a dream.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, wow. I really hope that some time I’m able to get out there again to see those because it sounds incredible, and I’m glad that in Paris in general, that with that and with other attractions, they’re able to really spruce up some of the effects since it’s been so long. Well, I want to make sure that we talk about the Hatbox Ghost speaking of updates to the Haunted Mansion. And so I know we already talked about your interest in Yale Gracey and in the Mansion, so just I’d love you to walk through how this project came together and what it was like for you.

Daniel Joseph: Well, the Hatbox Ghost has been sort of a cult classic legend ever since he was installed and then uninstalled in the Haunted Mansion. And as the story goes, the 1969 Hatbox Effect was in the Haunted Mansion for about a week or two until Yale Gracey couldn’t take it anymore because the effect just wasn’t living up to what it was supposed to do. He personally uninstalled the thing and the legend that I’ve gathered from bunch of people in the nose that the Hatbox figure stayed in the site trailer down at Disneyland, at Yale’s office for years until it was basically used as parts for the graveyard scene years later.

But the story internally with the Hatbox Ghost is Yale Gracey worked on this effect and mocked it up in Glendale and was given the criteria of the location of the dune buggy track and the lighting in the scene, and he mimicked that. Then when he went down to install his production effect in the figure, the vehicles actually were closer than he had been told or that he had understood.

Then the show lighting in that scene was a much different paradigm than he had planned for. So because of those two very crucial fundamental reasons, the effects couldn’t ever really fully work, the head wouldn’t fully disappear on the top of the shoulders because Yale couldn’t isolate the lighting as well as he could in his mock-up. Then to have guests have a closer point of view, that’s a huge deal. So that just was a shame because it’s not his fault. It’s not really anyone’s fault except for the fact that the project was just moving really fast and the right hand didn’t know what the left was doing, so he didn’t want to put something in that wasn’t 110%.

So from then on out, the figure had just been a distant memory. And then over the years, different websites published, it looks like the Abominable Snowman or Bigfoot pictures of, here’s six frames of my Super 8 video when I was seven years old of the Hatbox Ghost. People were just enamored by this thing as were all of us Imagineers. I mean, we loved the way that figure looked.

The Marc Davis design of that figure is just so cool. So I think it was 20, maybe been 2012 or 2013, a few folks, one of which was someone who I had mentored. He was an imaginations graduate. Vinny Logozio had worked on this Hatbox animatronic for D23 that they put in, and it was kind of a grassroots effort. They were like, yeah, we want to get some traction on excitement for this guy. So they put it in and then there’s all this excitement.

So then Vinny and I, a few years later, it was a year or two later, were brainstorming, and I had been working in the back of my head on ways to make the effect work. Vinny was very much an animatronic designer, guru, mechanical engineer, and I was, as I said before, on the side of illusions and everything, I had come up with a solution on how to do it that I thought might work.

So we got to work making a very crude mockup of the Hatbox Ghost with a Halloween mask and some two by fours, some pneumatic pistons, some 3D printed parts, lots of hot glue and stuff like that, very similar to things I would’ve done in my basement 15 years earlier. We had a working mockup of the Hatbox Ghost where you can stand a foot away from this thing and his head would completely disappear, and you couldn’t figure out how it was working.

So we pitched that very rough mockup to again, Tom Fitzgerald and some other executives, and they all were just so, so excited. Tom is a huge Haunted Mansion fan where he started as a young person in Walt Disney World. He was actually a host at the Haunted Mansion, so he has a soft spot for it as well. And they were able to absolutely in debt to them get it into the 60th anniversary, into the 60th anniversary scope. So we were able to then get funding and get the go ahead to make a Hatbox Ghost for the 60th anniversary of Disneyland, and it became a real project really quickly. So from then on out it was just go, go, go, go, go. We got to get this thing in really fast. And we did. And boy was that a surreal and extra fun project.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, I mean it’s so exciting to have it there and it’s so close to the track and it just fits in that little kind of nook right there as you’re heading more towards the big ballroom. It’s a really good spot and I love it there. So I also wanted to ask you about the Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom, which is kind of an interesting project, especially when it started. There wasn’t really anything that much like it. So I’d love to hear a little bit about what it was like for you to work on what was sort of a new concept for Disney.

Daniel Joseph: Yeah, Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom was especially fun. It was one of the early projects in my career too. What made it really fun was the idea of doing illusions and special effects outdoors and being able to do them in direct sunlight for guests because that usually is the antithesis of where we special effects. People like to do our work. Usually, it’s in a dark space with lighting control and all that usual stuff. But this was a unique challenge that I was actually really excited about.

So it started out kind of early on with one of our designers, Jonathan Ackley, who was one of the instrumental folks who worked on Kim Possible and projects like that, as well as the DaVinci’s Challenge project I had mentioned before. He came to me and another colleague and basically gave us the funding and the ability to do some development work on outdoor daylight visible special effects.

It was such a cool thing because we got to build kind of this test lab that we had in California, and then we moved all of our stuff to Florida to a lab there that we got to try out some of the stuff as well and integrate everything into the new kind of magic band technology that was being developed and all that stuff. But it was really interesting to try do trial and error with different ideas on how to make characters appear and disappear in a magical way outside.

Some of them didn’t work, some of them worked really well, and we just kind of failed early and failed early, succeeded fast on some things and threw out things that didn’t work and moved ahead with things that did work and presented the special effects to executives who all got really excited about it and let the project go forward and it became source of the Magic Kingdom.

But yeah, it was a really interesting one, and since then I haven’t actually gotten to work on anything really that large in scope because we had 22 locations all throughout the magic that needed custom installations, and because of that, the installation times were only at night after hours, so after guests left for the day and before guests came early in the morning. So it was always working on what we call third shift, and in these really usually retrofitted old parts of buildings that go back to 1971 and trying to get all these new effects and illusions into them was pretty wild in its scale. So for that one, that will make it extra memorable.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, I mean, how difficult was that when you were trying, because like you said, there’s 22 locations, they’re all different, there’s different windows and different areas. How tricky was it to figure out upfront even how to make it work in these different types of structures and like you mentioned, lighting, they might have different shade and different, a lot of different areas that you could run into.

Daniel Joseph: That was exactly the challenge. Every single location was so different and so unique. And also you think of the Magic Kingdom, which again, it’s open 1971, but there have been so many changes and improvements and buildings have been altered over the past at this point 50 years just about. And in those 50 years it’s just different change after change as far as walls being moved and all this stuff, which made putting in these custom installations really difficult and having to do archeology to find drawing sets from When was the last construction project here? Oh, we’ll find, here’s one from 1973 that’s hand drawn on this old style blueprint paper that we have to decipher, and that was amazing.

Then to your other point, the sun and different shade issues with southern exposure versus different things, the way the sun would move through the sky versus different parts of the year was something that we ended up modeling a little bit in SketchUp and figuring out where our light and shadows would be. So I could do some of these special effects and count on either full sunlight all the time, or at least a little bit of shadow sometimes because some effects really require at least some kind of darkness. So some of that we were able to figure out upfront, but a lot of it we really had to just go out the there and test it, do it in person.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, I can imagine that had to be a very difficult, but it ended up working out really well. I know another project you worked on, which was around a similar time, I believe, was the updates to Test Track, which I believe also was late 2012 when it reopened. I’d love to know what you were involved with for that and kind of what it was like to update something that was existing.

Daniel Joseph: Test track. I look back at still to this day, I mean, I’ve worked on a ton of projects all over the world, but Test Track was a dream number one. I know like a person after your own heart. I’m a huge original Epcot Center fan, and whenever I get an opportunity to work on Epcot, I really want that and take it. Then the other opportunity was I really loved the team. It was a bunch of young designers like myself at the time, and we were all already kind of good friends.

So it was a neat comradery to jump into this project. And then the last being exactly what you said, it’s an existing project or an existing attraction that already was extremely popular. Test Track was one of the most, is one of the most popular attractions on Disney World property today. And what we were being asked to do was work with Chevrolet and GM.

Again, kind of like the Epcot partnership with industry, which I thought was really cool and not change the concept and the notion of the attraction, but change kind of the feel and the aesthetic of the attraction to more mesh with GM and Chevrolet’s futuristic stuff that they were going forward with at the time, and now actually even more with their electric cars things. So my work on that was some of the queue special effects that are, there’s some projection mapping as well as multiplanar displays.

So in the queue before you get to the area where you get to design your car, there’s some neat projection mapping on this big car form that we worked on as well as this new invention that I got to create and implement in that attraction where we take these transparent LCD panels and put them in front of regular LCDs and you get kind of this 3D holographic display effect that’s kind of fun.

Then inside the attraction, all of the special effects were updated and I got to concept mockup and then ultimately install the stuff that’s in there, the transparent floating displays at the different stops as you’re going through some of the laser effects, there’s this giant lightning bolt that hits that was a really fun effect to work on and create. There’s, I don’t know if people see them as they go through because they’re going really fast, but there’s these neat stars that are on the ceiling and things like that.

So really kind of the icing on the cake type things in there I got to work on and install and really loved, especially that working on that attraction because the building is just incredible. That show building being a 1982 original classic from World of Motion is an incredible scale. It’s a huge building with just huge everything in it, and there’s still a lot in it from even the original Epcot Center days that you can find, which is really neat to walk around and discover as we are working on it.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, I mean, I loved World of Motion and still one of my favorite kind of classic ones. I will say that Test Track and especially even the update is not an example where I go like, oh my gosh, this is terrible. I think that the effects in the update, like you mentioned, the lightning bolt and some of those I think are really cool and kind of fit with the Epcot aesthetic, but so I have to ask you before we move on to another attraction, what have you found of World of Motion that’s still in the building? Could you tell me, is there something like a tidbit or something that’s in there?

Daniel Joseph: There’s a few little, and honestly, in a lot of our attractions, there’s little tidbits that either on purpose or because of posterity or left behind, I don’t honestly know, but I just love finding them. But in Test Track, they’re behind a curtain. There’s still a brick wall that it’s a painted brick wall with a faux finish on it. That’s from the train robbery scene in World of Motion, and yeah, it’s still there as you’re flying through right after the climate chambers and into the speed area where you’re going around turns. It’s just behind a curtain in there. So nice little kind of hidden homages and links to Disney history all throughout the place.

Dan Heaton: Well, excellent. Well, I wanted to ask you too about something else at Epcot, which is at the Mexico Pavilion, which we really liked seeing the illusions having to do with Coco that were kind of, when you walk into that giant structure, I thought those were really neat effects as something just kind of an added touch beyond a big large scale bride. So I wondered if you could talk a bit about those and kind of how that worked.

Daniel Joseph: Well, the Coco work was, I had just moved to Florida. I’d been in California at Imagineering for about 10 years and then got transferred to Florida to start this illusionary and illusion development group, Florida, and was working on some invisible ultraviolet kind of illusions and effects that are basically a way of printing special inks and working with a manufacturer to make them.

So they only show up when you shine a ultraviolet light on it, and then when you take the light away, the image is completely invisible. I’d been working on that and a project team approached me about this cocoa project that they wanted to do in conjunction with the film coming out at the time. So we came up with the idea of doing one side of the exhibit as a kind of an altar, and doing an illusion I’d been working on to make different ghosts appear.

So we made, in this case, the family of Miguel, his ancestors appear around him, and then really, really cute little gag that a lot of people miss, but I love a dog person is his dog next to him, Dante, when the relatives appear, his tail starts wagging, which is really cute. Then on the other side of the exhibit space, we did the famous cemetery from Coco, which is just a beautiful, beautiful scene in the film, and we did that as a pop-up book diorama, and that’s where we really got to use this exciting new invisible ultraviolet technique that we were pioneering.

It’s basically a daytime nighttime scene, very, very analog illusion work, which is, as I mentioned with Yale Gracey, that’s my love, kind of going with less computers, more magic, if you will, and the whole scene is lit daylight, kind of magic hour at the end of the day, and then with a transition, everything then switches over to black light and all of the surfaces that were lit with white light now show lit candles and ghosts and skeleton ancestors around them and different glowing flowers and all kinds of cool stuff, and the whole scene just changes and it’s kind of very technique and materials based, less technology based, and I really think because of that, there’s kind of a tangibility to it that people tend to be drawn to.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, totally. It actually connects to what we were talking about earlier with Yale Gracey and with some of the effects and what you were interested in, and that kind of leads well into a larger question that I had for you. You’ve mentioned already a few Imagineers like Tom Fitzgerald and others that you had a good connection with, but I’d love to know for you, what were some big mentors or other Imagineers that you worked with that really inspired you that you worked with directly or even from the past?

Daniel Joseph: Yale Gracey, as I said, was kind of my guiding light, and I got into the company and a lot of people also really looked up to him, and even I was amazed to find out actually worked for him. Some folks that I eventually got synced up with were interns of his during early, early Epcot Center work, and when I found these things out, I would just immediately gravitate to these guys and say, okay, we’re going out to lunch. I need two hours of your time and I need to ask you so many questions and just so many other Imagineers, these people are just all too ready and willing to mentor and talk to the new guy coming in, especially if you know your history and have respect for it.

A lot of these people respect that, right? If you show love for something they’ve really worked on their whole life and that you do truly love, of course they’re going to really open up about this stuff. But a few of the people that specifically worked with Yale Gracey, one is Gary Powell, who’s still at Imagineering, and another is Tom LeDuc, who just recently retired from Imagineering, and they were both basically intern mock-up guys for Yale Gracey in the late seventies, early eighties.

Just hearing stories about these guys. We would go out for tacos or something somewhere in Glendale, and they’d regale me with stories of doing some mockups and playing with different kinds of ripple glass and these projectors called 10 by tens that were made at the Disney Studio machine shop back in the day, of course, because video wasn’t really available. So Disney, its own moving slide projectors, and these guys would create crazy contraptions with these different machinery pieces and optics, and then at the end of the day, go and hang out in Yale Gracey’s office and he’d sit there with a pipe and say, okay, what’d you work on today?

They’d just casually talk about it and maybe do some sketching and then call it a day or go out, have a drink somewhere. Very casual, kind of neat creative environment. So that for me was just awesome to hear these firsthand stories of Yale because all I knew about him was things I had read and devoured from the internet and books, but that was a whole new level of personal connection.

Some of the folks that really have mentored me and then have created mentoring in my life to be very important for the next generation are the folks in special effects, proper, the special effects department, and one of them, a gentleman, Joe Gutierrez, who really took me under his wing when I started in the special effects group. He is, I can say without any doubt, the authority on mirror, special effects and illusions for the whole world.

This guy is just brilliant and we joke, he and I are very close. He came to my wedding ultimately, but Joe speaks in mirror, meaning we could be at lunch together talking about reflection illusion or something like that, and he’s talking about the different bounces of the reflection and how this would be backwards, and then we make it right side up and he is using his hands while he’s describing this and then drawing on a napkin. We have a shorthand with one another, but you can’t really speak that way to just everyone because people tend to get lost, literally speaking in Mirror is speaking in reverse.

So he definitely has been an important mentor for me. And then as people have been coming in through the Imaginations program, I’ve been trying to help pay it forward a little bit and mentoring a lot of the young new designers that we get to bring in through that program.

Whether it’s kind of a formal mentoring, we meet once a week and have a coffee and talk about things or whatever to more of what I tend to even more, which is the informal thing where we’re working on a project together and I give them leeway or free reign to go and try some stuff, come back, help point them in a little more direction, have them go away and come back and keep counseling them on the trajectory of what they’re working on. That has been amazing and I’m working with a few people right now and they’re becoming amazing, amazing illusion designers and kind of this very, very niche field that is my own.

Dan Heaton: Oh, that’s great to hear. Yeah, and it sounds like you having such good mentors definitely led you kind of on a path like you said, where you’re kind of doing the same thing. Well, that relates to another question I have, which is when you’re looking at the future of Imagineering or what you do, what excites you right now about the future of the parks or even about effects and what can be done there?

Daniel Joseph: That’s a great question and a very specific to Imagineering answer I would say. And the first part of that I would say is Imagineering has always been such a unique place because so much of the work and the work, the design and the invention, and then some of the manufacturing is done completely.

And the fact that there’s a company as big as Disney and there’s these specialties people who are artificial foliage designers, people who are stained glass artisan designers or people like me who are illusion ears as Walt like to call my type is a really kind of a boutique thing that Disney keeps this in-house and keeps these cards close because we know, and Disney knows, this is one of the differentiators, this is one of the things that makes Disney special are some of these very unique things that come up inhouse and are able to be shown just in Disney parks.

I think with that it’s really important that the stuff is constantly flowing the new and the dazzling, if you will, because just as Walt would always put it, you got to keep up the park, you got to always move ahead. That’s what helps people come back. I very much see kind of the magic side of what we do in the parks with some of the illusions and things that you see throughout the park and walk past and say, how the heck did they do that? Or only Disney could do that as one of the core competencies of the company.

So I am finding getting more and more traction actually as I’m doing more and more of these edgy kind of new, how did they do that type illusions in my work and just in my lab in Florida, we’ve come up with a whole bunch of different things, and of course some of the stuff is even out there as patentable and stuff like that, but the important thing is that it’s new and that it hasn’t ever been done in a theme park before.

So we’re kind of like inventors, which is, as I said when I was a little kid, what do you want to do when you grow up, Daniel? I want to be an inventor. Well, we get to really strive for that every day now. I think that’s being rewarded and being pushed more and more at Imagineering is keep inventing to keep coming up with stuff that we’ve never seen before, that we can’t just go out there and buy at xyz special effects store. If that kind of thing exists. There’s a big push and urge and fostering of that, which has been great. So I think the company is wanting more and more of this and it really gives us who are in the illusionary lab and in the special effects group even kind of more ammo now to do this kind of work.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, that’s great to hear because I know with any successful entity like Disney, you could get a little complacent. So it’s exciting for me to hear that there’s so much emphasis on R&D and on innovation and that you’ve been able to do so many cool things just in your role. Sure. It’s more exciting for you.

Daniel Joseph: It is. There’s a thrill and there’s like a runner’s tie almost when you come up with an idea in the shower or before bed is my brainstorming time when I’m falling asleep and then going to work the next morning and put some foam core together and some scotch tape and mirrors or whatever it might be and stand back and you’re like, holy mackerel, that works. That absolutely works. And now at that point it’s like, okay, who do I tell and how do I explain this to get this to be part of a big project?

There are so many people at this point who are just completely out there and open and want that stuff. I’ve absolutely loved it. I think it’s giving more and more opportunity now. I know again, with COVID and the world the way it is, it’s harder to get together with people and to do my favorite thing, which is to kind of demonstrate or do a show and tell of these things. But I’ve gotten very used to doing show and tells and demonstrations over Zoom.

Dan Heaton: I just wanted to ask you one kind of very different question. I would love to know what are beyond the Haunted Mansion and all the Mansions, what are some of your favorite attractions? What do you like to do or what interests you about what’s come out recently or even from the past?

Daniel Joseph: I love attractions that have an inspirational aspirational edge to them. Things like all of Epcot still very much imparts that feeling. And I’m actually, I’m really excited about a bunch of the new Epcot kind of 3.0 I guess we could say stuff that’s coming online very shortly. I’m working on Guardians, the Guardians attraction. I’m working on the space restaurant, which all have been announced and everything like that, but there’s very little information out about them, but I can just say that they’re really fun and they’re very much in the cadence of that Epcot Center feel that a lot of us, so much love.

Dan Heaton: So we’ve talked about so much that you’ve worked on and I’m really excited about some of the things in the future that you just mentioned, but I’d love to know for you, is there another favorite project or something you’ve done big or small that we haven’t really addressed that you really had a great experience doing?

Daniel Joseph: One of the other projects that it was kind of a little gem fly by night project that myself, very close producer friend of mine, Jim Clark and a designer artist friend of mine, Brian Crosby, all got to work together simply out of passion. I mean, this was something that we did in our spare time and then became a real project was the change Portraits for Magic Kingdom and The Haunted Mansion. The Haunted Mansion shop, Memento Mori, and I don’t know if you are familiar with those, but you would basically get your picture taken, spirit photography, and then you can get a print after that of a lenticular of you changing into a ghost.

Dan Heaton: Right. I haven’t gotten one myself, but I am familiar. Yeah, those are fascinating.

Daniel Joseph: That was, again, such a neat process because I mean, the end result was unusual for us. We made a product and typically we’re making attractions, not necessarily products, but it was something where the three of us were really into Museum of the Weird, the Rolly Crump concept for the Haunted Mansion act to be. But we came up with the idea, can we do something like this change portrait as a live, as a live thing, something that can happen relatively immediately versus taking an artist hours and hours and hours to do. We did a bunch of work and did a bunch of pitches and did some testing with different techniques and technologies and were able to get everything aligned to the point where we were able to get people interested in it enough to try it out in the parks.

We had it running in the Magic Kingdom, I believe it was two or three years, and it’s not there at the moment, but there’s still a lot of interest and people still talk about it and everything, and we all kind of think it’s funny. It was just this little idea of a project nobody asked us to do, but ultimately people were really excited about in the end. And I think that just as a little cross section of WDI is an important tale because the company is definitely open to those grassroots ideas and concepts. Not everything has to be on a master plan and everything like that to be considered. So that was a really fun little project.

Dan Heaton: Well, yeah, and I think Memento Mori is a perfect example of something that kind of fans of an attraction are just so interested in the Mansion, a perfect example, but just like that next level of whether it’s souvenirs or things like you mentioned that are just beyond a t-shirt or something simple and the fact that you and Imagineering can be involved with that is great.

So I know we are almost out of time and there’s so many things I’d want to ask you, but I really just want to sum up I kind of a summary question, which is you have a really interesting story about Imaginations competition and everything you’ve done. So I’d love, I know there’s tons of young Imagineers who are young, aspiring Imagineers want to work in the industry. From your experience, what advice would you give them if they are interested, either in school or beyond to work for Disney or a similar company?

Daniel Joseph: Yeah, I think the biggest thing is that it’s absolutely attainable right now. The fact that we live in an age where you have access in your garage to 3D printers and laser cutters and all these crazy pieces of equipment that even 10 years ago were only in high-end laboratories and shops at NASA is amazing. That has leveled the playing field for innovation. I think the thing that I found moreover than anything is Disney. We are a story company of course, and we start with a story and all that stuff, but above all, we are into innovating and invention and being a student and being in design school or architecture school or wherever is all about creation.

You’re in school to learn how to either design, create, or make something, and that ultimately is the end result of what is done at Imagineering. And it’s the process sure is amazing and fun and interesting, but it’s the end result, which is a thing most likely a place attraction, a script, it’s some sort of end result thing is the end result. I think having the ability, whether you’re in a company or in your garage or in your parents’ basement to come up with an idea and then follow through with a finished result is a huge, huge step forward in your viability in this world.

I mean, COVID has proven that we all have to be productive at home just as we do in the office, and I think some of the students I’ve talked to recently are kind of worried about the job market and everything out there because of the pandemic and everything that’s going on.

But what I think is wonderful is that shouldn’t stop the innovation part, and once you kind of realize that the innovation doesn’t have to be connected to just a specific company or even a specific place, you can kind of do it anywhere. Then the ideas just flow and soar, and that’s an incredible power that so many young people, and I think people who are just getting out there in the world out of school have this incredible power to be a part of.

Dan Heaton: Well, Daniel, this has been so great to talk with you and to get so far in depth with your career. Thank you so much for being on the podcast and for just being able to pass along such great information.

Daniel Joseph: My pleasure. I really appreciate the time and I love helping to inspire the next generation of Imagineers and inventors out there. I think that is the real future of all of this stuff. So I ask everyone, everyone that’s out there that’s interested in a career at Imagineering or even just invention in some way to go for it because it really can come true.