74. David Snyder on Programming the Computer Systems for Walt Disney World and EPCOT Center

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We’ve all heard stories of talented designers at Walt Disney Imagineering that created iconic attractions. Figures like Joe Rohde, Tony Baxter, and countless others receive well-deserved attention for those feats. There’s another group that also played an essential role in building Walt Disney World and other parks. These individuals developed the systems that made the rides and shows possible. Without the technical support and reliability of those programs, the attractions would not function. A perfect example is David Snyder, who created the Digital Animation Control System (DACS) to operate key components of The Magic Kingdom and a lot more.

Snyder is my guest on this episode of The Tomorrow Society Podcast to talk about his background with early computer programming and his work at Disney. He began his career by rising through the ranks in the aerospace industry before joining Disney in 1968. During his 20 years at Disney, Snyder created systems that still operate the parks today. DACS was critical to making Walt Disney World succeed, and it took considerable effort from Snyder to get leaders on board.

Snyder developed a revolutionary system for shooting movie effects with the Automated Camera Effects System (ACES) on The Black Hole. The use of a computer to move the camera was new to the industry. Snyder also worked on the original Communicore pavilions and discusses the specifics of those early EPCOT Center exhibits. During this episode, Snyder speaks candidly about the challenges he faced at a time when computers were considered a threat. It’s an honest look back to a time of change when the old guard wasn’t so willing to adapt. It was thrilling to talk with Snyder and learn so much about his background and impact on Disney history.

Show Notes: David Snyder

Pick up a paperback copy of Didier Ghez’s Walt’s People – Volume 11: Talking Disney with the Artists Who Knew Him, which includes a lengthy interview with David Snyder.

Learn about David Snyder’s window on Main Street at The Magic Kingdom in this Mouseplanet article by Mark Goldhaber (July 9, 2003).

Transcript

Dan Heaton: Hey there. Today’s podcast is all about programming the systems that operate the rides and shows at Walt Disney World. My guest is David Snyder, who developed a new system that made Walt Disney World possible. You’re listening to The Tomorrow Society Podcast.

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Thanks so much for joining me here on Episode 74 of the Tomorrow Society Podcast. I am your host, Dan Heaton. One thing about doing this podcast is I keep discovering that there are so many sections of Disney history that I know pretty much nothing about. I’ve read a lot of books about it, I’ve talked to a lot of people, but still the story is so much more complicated. And there are figures that have had huge contributions where most of us don’t know their stories.

A perfect example is David Snyder, my guest today on the podcast. He was hired by Disney in 1968 to develop new programming and show controls for Walt Disney World. As you know, Disney World was going to open three years later and they wanted to put in a show system, and the show system is not the same as what’s in Disneyland.

So he worked to develop the digital animation control system, otherwise known as DACS or D A C S. And that system basically operated any types of rides and shows at Walt Disney World. Beyond that, he also worked on a system for audio animatronics for making more believable mouth movements and lip syncing, which is known as the Symbolic Mouth Action Control System. That’s really just the most basic thing. He also worked on shows at Communicore and for Epcot Center.

He also developed a new computer system, ACES for the Black Hole, which led to much better special effect shots in movies. Snyder’s Impact on Walt Disney World deserves more attention. He does have a window on Main Street, which reads the Human Dynamo Calculating Machine Company. Michael Bagnall, office manager, David Snyder, a program supervisor. But like myself, I didn’t know much about his story and I suspect the case for a lot of you, even big time Walt Disney World fans.

So I really enjoyed the chance to get to talk with David and learn more about his story. He’s extremely candid about, also about challenges that he faced. When you’re bringing new technologies into an established system, there’s going to be a lot of politics. There’s going to be pushback from people that say, we’ve always done it a certain way and it’s worked. Why are you trying to introduce new things, especially involving computers? So it was a challenge for him, and I appreciate that he was honest in talking about some of the difficulties there, but the results at Disney World stand for themselves, and I really appreciate the chance to get to hear more about David’s story. So let’s get to the conversation here is David Snyder.

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Dan Heaton: Back when you were younger, what got you interested in early computers or programming at the start?

David Snyder: Well, you have to realize that I was born in the late thirties where we grew up with radios and there was no TV, there was no Internet, there was no cell phone, etc., etc. So one of the things that I became interested in was chemistry, because my father was a graduate chemist and when I was, I don’t know what age, but maybe 10 or so, he used to bring home a chemistry set with a few extra chemicals now, and I would experiment with those and mostly make rocket ships that typically started fires on people’s property.

And all of the chemicals that would create an explosion or something were quickly depleted out of my chemistry system. So I had to go onto something else. I ended up, when I was in the Cub Scouts, we ended up with the projects of things like a crystal radio and little tiny motors and things like that.

Then I had a friend, and I haven’t said, told anybody about this, but he was into electricity, not electronics. He was into electricity and he had a thing called a Ford coil, and I don’t know if you know what that is, but basically it’s a thing that generates giant sparks. If you took it to a 12-volt battery on the front end and interrupt that 12 volts, it will create a huge spark across a gap of about almost an inch, enough to shock the hell out of you. I mean, it’s not, you’re going to get electrocuted, but it really shocks. We used to go around the neighborhood, and I don’t know why I did this, but this is what we did. We put the Ford coil on a car battery on a Radio Flyer wagon. And we used to go around the neighborhood.

We had the Ford coil hooked up so that at the top of a post, which actually was a recycled TV antenna, we would zap and make a spark at the top. And of course, you can imagine that interrupted people’s television. They were watching TV at the time, very early television and maybe radio, but early television was being disrupted, especially if we were right outside the front porch.

We would go to people and say, oh, I understand you’re having some disruption on your television and we can fix that for a dollar or whatever. And of course, we knew how to fix it, which was turn off the frigging Ford coil. That was such great fun. We earned our between that and collecting bottles and cans while bottles. At that time, we were making money being disruptors. So as I got to be a little bit older, the thing to do with for a, I’d say a 12-year-old was to go to the movies.

The movies were very interesting. Western movies were great. There’s a lot of shooting and stuff. And we had a theater in Hollywood. I’m a Hollywood native, by the way. I was born in Hollywood and one of the few left, I suppose, so we had a theater called The Hitching Post. We’d go there, and of course as kids, we had guns strapped to our sides. Those were cap guns obviously.

And we’d go to the theater and watch the movies, and I’d always be looking behind me seeing what, what’s going on in the box back there where there’s whatever it was, three or four little holes with the light coming out. One day I went up and knocked on the door and managed to ask the guy if I could look in, and he let me look in and showed me all this strange looking equipment and told me a little bit about what he did, but he really didn’t want to hang out with his kid.

I just thought, well, that’s pretty slick. Maybe that’s something I could do when I get older. Jumping ahead pretty far. When I left grammar school, went to junior high school, I got involved in things like physics experiments and chemistry experiments. It was kind of fun. That was junior high school, went on through high school. And in high school I got further interested in electrical stuff, magnetism, electronics, whatever.

Sometime in my youth when I was, this is definitely when I was in probably the first year of junior high school or the last year or two of grammar school, a friend and I, for whatever reason, I don’t know why for sure, but we climbed over the fence at the Walt Disney Company on their back lot, which was sort of unmanned, and it was kind of interesting. They were always shooting the stuff there during the day, but induced stuff at night, and we just wanted to see what it was like.

So we crawled over the fence to look around and we got, I’ll call it quote, arrested and quote by the guard the job it was to keep kids out of the place. And I thought, well, that was kind of crappy. We were hoping to have a good time. Then a couple weeks later, we decided, because we were so unlucky at Disney, we’d go try the same thing at Universal, which was about two miles away. I’m not sure how we got there. Probably took the bus and went over the fence probably a minute later than the Disney guys. We got nailed by Universal and our parents had to come and take us out.

In any case, I thought there’s interesting stuff there. I don’t know what, it’s interesting. Remember seeing the projection equipment in the theater. So time went on and as eventually I went into junior college, and I didn’t know what I wanted to do in adult life. So I took some general ed classes and I took a couple of science type classes, most specifically physics and mathematics in junior college. My parents were, I don’t want to say they were poor, but they were hardworking, lower income people. My father worked at Lockheed, my mother did some things with child, maybe photography, with the photo lab in our house, in the bathroom and the back porch. In many case, I didn’t want to do that. Photography was interesting. But in junior college, the only way to make money for me was to look for jobs.

And one of the jobs I found was a job working for Libroscope General Precision, who’s at that time was a Navy subcontractor building all kinds of Navy naval-oriented equipment, including at that time a special purpose computer. So I went to school at nights and worked at Libroscope General Precision during the days. Then I went to school with days and worked at nights. General Precision was a 24-hour operation, so I was typically working a good 40-hour shift and making what I thought at the time was fantastic big money. My job there initially was to make, I’m going to call it wire wrapping cable harnesses. You can imagine even today, almost every piece of electronics has got a big loom of cables going from point A to point B. So maybe it might be 10, 20, sometimes 50 or a hundred cables.

At that time, those cables were made by wrapping multiple cables around a bunch of pegs in a piece of plywood because they had to be bent to shape to accommodate the devices that were plugged into one side and plugged in the other side. I did that for X number of months, and it was terrible. I thought this was a crap job, but the boss on the line liked me.

He liked the fact that I was on time and I did what I was supposed to do, and I didn’t talk back. I didn’t take long bathroom breaks and I got promoted. I got promoted to work on the assembly line, soldering transistors and diodes into circuit boards. And I thought, oh, this is kind of cool because the was really paying the big bucks, and I knew what a transistor was, and I knew what a diode was, and I was suddenly learning other things about a thing like a capacitor and a resistor.

There was a learning curve between school and working there. I was learning stuff. I was good at that. And after a short while, I got promoted to a final assembly test participation where all the circuit boards that I had been soldering and etc., were being tested for appropriate function. We had some test equipment that was kind of crude, but nonetheless it did, I guess what it’s supposed to do.

That was kind of fun because I found a lot of problems and there were certain ways that we were able to isolate what the problems were. We’re talking about discrete components, of course, and I did good on that. And I got promoted and I got promoted to what was called test and adjust. The test and adjust was the area where the very final testing of all the things that had been made by all the previous workers, both mechanical, electromechanical, and pure electronic, all came together in a big chassis, made design for the Navy.

It was my job along with one or two other people to turn on the power and put it through its paces as we had a test procedure that had been written by engineers and navy personnel. When we didn’t get the appropriate answers in our test procedure, we had to troubleshoot to find out where the errors were. So we had to understand the electromechanical parts, servo mechanisms, etc. We had to understand the computer, which as it turns out, was a dual processing machine, computer A and computer B running exactly the same program voting with each other to decide if they were okay.

If one hiccuped, there was a red flag and things would stop. That machinery was destined to be what was called fire control equipment, meaning missile, missile aiming, and shooting on destroyers and submarines. So knowing the product as I did, and I have to keep telling you that sometimes I don’t sound very, I’m not sure what the word is, but sound like I blew my own horn, but I was good at this for some reason.

I don’t know why. Anyway, I was asked if I would like to join the field service organization as a field engineer. And of course at that time I was not an engineer, but that was a title, maybe the first title was field technician. But in any case, I eventually had a title field engineer, and my job then was to go out with the final products that I’d been testing and install ’em on the Navy ships, the destroyers and the submarines both.

I traveled all over the United States, coastal cities, doing that kind of work, doing that installation. In addition to the installation, going on sea trials with the full compliment of missiles, and also a full compliment of civilians, one of which I was the youngest one by far to be doing that. I had a friend and coworker, and he had specialized more in the electromechanical stuff.

I had specialized almost out of necessity on the computer side and got to be a real wiz with computers. And this is before, probably before you were born, but certainly before any computer that you ever heard of was in existence minus the hardwire. Things that were being used in laboratories itself. These computers out of necessity had to be what was called real-time computers. In other words, they were not data processing devices. You didn’t stick in punch cards and wait five minutes for an answer, had to work at high speed microsecond speed to aim missiles and shoot missiles and be accurate, etc. So there you go, all the way through to labor scope. And then I got to interview at Disney, and that becomes yet another chapter in the story.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, the things you mentioned about computers, it’s definitely, I’m 43 years old, so it’s definitely before a computer I’m used to, but it’s fascinating to me how that sort of built up. Also too, like you mentioned, you were really doing well there and had moved up to a pretty high level just through being really good at what you did. So that raises a good question because you ended up moving to Disney. How did that happen? How did you end up going from, what sounded like a really rising career, working on things like missiles and such in that industry and then shifting over to do computers and programming for Disney?

David Snyder: Well, I told you about becoming a field service field engineer and doing that for a couple years, it became a little less fun. It started to be, I don’t swim by the way. So I was out to sea a lot, which always made me nervous. I eventually left the field service department because the mathematics department, which was called the math department, they were actually mathematicians and one or two people that knew how to program a computer.

I was asked to join that department and help program the very same computer that I actually had put together and learned how to troubleshoot. And I did not know how to program the computer when I was testing them. I knew how to troubleshoot ’em, but I could not program. So I was brought into the mathematics department that could well have been called computer programming. And I was a rookie there.

I had a great boss who took me under his wing and started showing me tricks of the trade of how to do programming. You have to realize that the things you may know as higher level language did not exist at that time. Higher level languages did not exist with one or two exceptions, specifically COBOL, which was being used for data processing and payroll, etc., and Fortran, which was being used for mathematical calculations, for whatever. So I learned to be a programmer as a programmer, and I’ll just say I was like the number one or number two programmer. I used to get called on; I was in a couple of organizations. I was active in a thing that was called a CM Association for Computer Machinery. And I was kind of active in that.

I forget when that was. There were one or two other smaller groups of nerdy techie people. One day a guy came to me and said, hey, Snyder, we understand you’re doing these programs over there and shooting missiles and stuff like that and doing mathematics and real time stuff. Why don’t you come over to Disney? We’re going to do some really cool stuff. And it was interesting because my office, which was at 800 Flower Street, I think, I’m sorry, 800 Western Avenue in Glendale, my office window looked out across the street at the very first WED Enterprises Disney building, little tiny building. I used to sit at my desk and sometimes go to the window and look over there and it said, Walt Disney Productions, WED enterprises, nothing else. And I would say, what do you suppose those guys are doing over there?

I don’t know what they’re doing. As it turns out, what they were doing, which I later found out, was they were working on the World’s Fair and thinking about how to make their products better, how to make shows better, audio electronics, better, whatever. But it was World’s Fair time, and that’s what they were doing. And I was looking out the window and when the guy came and said, hey, come see us, I thought, well, Jesus, I can use the same parking lot. It’s only a couple miles away. I hate driving. What’s to lose? Oh, I have to back up one step right near my career. And most of the time at Libroscope, I did not have a degree.

I had a two-year degree in electronics technology or whatever it was called. I finally got my final degree in electronic engineering about a year before I left Libroscope. And my boss, his name was Harry Ford, I said, Harry, I’ve got this opportunity to interview across the street. They’re going to do some cool stuff. I don’t know what it is, but Disney, Disney, Disney. Suddenly the Disney name was magical, even back then, especially for basically a kid. I was still very young, and I went across the street and interviewed at a different building, not the one I had looked out the window. I can tell you about the interview or not because the interview itself is sort of a story.

Dan Heaton: Oh, yeah, I’d love to hear about the interview.

David Snyder: I went over to what then was called WED, Walter E Disney, WED Enterprises, as you know now called Walt Disney Imagineering. It was at the 1401 Flower Street Building. I went into a conference room. There was a survey guy who a hotshot, there was a mechanical engineer. There was one or two employee type employee relations, hire fire people. And there was an architectural genius there. There wasn’t anybody that knew what a computer was if it jumped up and hit him in the face. These guys were asking me, basically, I’m going to use the word stupid. I mean, they were naive. They were asking naive questions, questions that did not hit the mark for what I thought they wanted to do. It was hard for me to ascertain exactly what this group of bozos wanted because they were unable to articulate it.

I thought to myself, Harry Ford knows I do a good job. I’m not going to work for these guys. I can do a bang up job or a crappy job. They won’t have a clue, and if I do a crappy job, they’re going to fire me. Anyway, they offered me a year’s position with a potential of follow-on work if I was a good guy. I actually stood up at the interview and said, listen, gentlemen, I need to decline.

Your offer or salary is attractive. I mean, you’re right across the street. I can park where I used to and walk over here and the stuff I see on your wall is pretty cool looking, but none of you has a clue what you want to do. You can’t articulate it, and I don’t want to have any one of you guys be my boss, because nobody here in this room will know if I’m doing a good job, average job or a crap job, and I need to work with somebody that knows something about what I’m doing.

So I left and basically walked back across the street to Libroscope. My boss, Harry Ford, said, well, how did that go? I said, not well. I said, I’m not going to be there. The guy that had enticed me in the first place called me the next day and said, David, what is your problem? I said, I don’t have a problem. What are you talking about? He said, you’re turning down the chance of a lifetime, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Work for the mouse, do this, do that.

I said, yeah, that sounded great, but I can’t work for any of those guys. They seem like nice people. Maybe they know how to do survey work, and they knew how to do mechanical engineering, and maybe they knew how to do I don’t know what, but they weren’t doing anything that I knew how to do. He said, well, I want you to come back and have another interview.

I said, well, there’s a point at which I’m going to have to charge you for this because I’m taking time off. And Harry’s not happy with me. I went back, had another interview, but this time they had the Chief Information Officer, actually maybe he was the Vice President of the corporation. His name was Michael Bagnall, and he was in charge of all the data processing and computer stuff at the studio, which meant payroll, inventory, blah, blah, boring stuff. Okay. Non-real time stuff.

They had a room full of people punching punch cards and timekeepers writing out sheets. And Michael Bagnall’s people did that, but at least he knew when a computer was. There was another gentleman with him whose name I believe was Tom Foster, who was the hands-on computer running the computer guy at the time. Tom Foster actually asked me a couple of interesting questions.

What do I know about bits and bytes, so to speak? I said, I know, know about that stuff. I liked them. They offered me more money than the guys did the day before, and they said, come work here for a year. You’re going to love it so much. You’re going to stay forever. So I resigned from Libroscope once and for all and started for working for Disney in 1968 as a one-man department under the auspices of the data processing group, which was called Management Information Systems. Actually at the time, Michael Bagnall, Tom Foster, and then a guy by the name of Jack Cornwell. I had an office at the studio and I had an office at WED Enterprises. So that’s how I got there. There’s a chapter for you.

Dan Heaton: 1968 too is so interesting, as you know, because Disney World was going to open in three years. And like you said, you were a department of one person. Disney World had a lot of systems that needed to go in place. So I’d love to know, I know eventually it led to the Digital Animation Control System, but when you came in, how did you get started in what eventually became that system and actually creating something that would work for such a massive place?

David Snyder: Well, in some respects, it was easy, and I’ll tell you why. Disneyland was up and operating and making lots of money. The World’s Fair had been incredibly successful. Walt Disney was proud of the World’s Fair, and he caused Disneyland to open and be successful, and Disneyland was being run on a show by show basis, Show A would be run with technology, a Show B with technology, Show C with technology, C and D from the School of Popular Mechanics, as I typically called it.

Almost each show was being run by a, I’m going to call it a system, but a different Rube Goldberg to tell you the truth. These things broke down a lot. When they broke down, because each one had been often designed by an individual. So if it broke down, the other guys didn’t know how to fix it, and more than likely, there weren’t any spare parts for it.

Nobody paid attention to things like spare parts and commonality of fixing stuff and how to start it and how to stop it. It was spread around through a bunch of Popular Mechanics guys. There wasn’t one engineer in the park in terms of electronics, and they had guys that knew how to plug in electricity and turn on lights. I don’t mean to demean those people. They were super important, but in terms of electronics, there was not.

So I walk into Disney and they say, oh, David, and by the way, we’re opening this park in Florida on October of 1971, and we want you to think about all these different systems that we have at Disneyland, and maybe one of those systems is the one we should use for all those shows and rides, by the way, at opening of Walt Disney World. So I thought, man, it doesn’t sound very good to me, but I went down to Disneyland in the freaking traffic, it was, it’s like 40 miles away from the office.

I would visit each of the, I’ll call backstage areas, and I’d see Popular Mechanics here and Popular Science there. I would talk to some of the old guys, and most of ’em were old, by the way, really old guys. I’d say, oh, how does this work? Oh, well, you know, got a lever and a push button and a rubber band, and it all works. We’re not sure exactly, but it was in Popular Mechanics a couple years ago, and I’m exaggerating, but basically that’s what it was.

After about three trips down there, I came home and I thought, this ain’t going to work. There is no frigging way that they will open a 27,000 acre park in ‘71 running all these Popular Mechanics rides, Rube Goldberg rides. So the guy that hired me and I, we started writing down and brainstorming an idea that why don’t we have something that’s central, centrally located and out at each show area will have common equipment.

So when common equipment dies, the central spares will have the stairs, and there you go, your downtime, which at that time was called 101 time, your downtime would be minimized and things would be under control. Well, that sounded great. Oh, okay. How are you going to do that? Well, Disney Imagineering had exactly zero computer or electronic people. I was it. They had a great department of electrical engineers doing power distribution, a thousand volts here and there and all the way down to 220 and down to 110 so that you can turn on lights and cook food and whatever. But not one electronic engineer, certainly not one computer person.

Dan Heaton: How do you build a team that way? I mean, where do you start?

David Snyder: We decided that the answer to the problem would be a central situation where one or two computers would be running everything. Obviously, when you started thinking about the scary part was if one went down, everything, the whole park is down. That wasn’t a cool idea. So we decided that it had to be distributed so that there would be central computers. Those central computers would only be sitting around monitoring the health of all the distributed processors. So we wrote a specification about basically what if you understand what a functional specification is, it’s different than a technical spec.

Functional spec just says, here’s what we want to do. We’re not going to tell you how, but here’s what we want to do. And by the way, here’s when we want to do it. Oh my God, you’re kidding. So we did that, and this functional specification went out to some of the biggest names in computers in including RCA, because they had a handshake with Walt Disney and people like Honeywell, and I’m forgetting the names of our computer companies back then, but basically probably 10 computer companies. It got the functional specification.

We said, what we want is your response in this period of time with a technical spec. You know what we want. Now tell us how you can make it happen. So several companies responded and said, no chance, we can’t do it. What you’re asking for is right next to impossible, especially with the timeframe audios. But a couple of them came back and said, here’s how we think we could do it.

Their thinking was kind of along the pots of ours thinking. And so we went back to them again and said, okay, we’d like your ideas. How much will you going to charge us? It’s a three-step process. Functionality will be first, technical implementation, second, and of obviously cost. And within cost, we have budget and schedule. My recollection is three companies responded. Data General is one of them that responded or UNIVAC responded, and they were going to do as a stuff with a giant mainframe.

We just said, no, that’s not going to happen. We had a lot of pressure to use Sperry because there was some business relationships going on between Disney and Sperry at the time. There was a company in Orange, 45 minutes away from Disneyland. They had a great technical specification or technical response to our request for quote and a pretty decent cost. Said, yeah, we can do this. By 1971, I said, well, wait, we didn’t tell you the whole story. We open in 1971. We have to have all these shows going by 1971, not that your machine’s going to work work way before that because it’s got to run all this stuff and help us program all these shows. They said, oh, well, I think we can do that. And they started and we gave them money.

We gave them a chunk of money, and in about 1971 or ‘70, thy started falling on hard times. They had built some equipment custom-tailored for our use, including an animators console as we were going to drive four consoles at one time and some other stuff. They were a very well known aerospace company. And they did all kinds of cool stuff for the military. They did go into bankruptcy.

Because of my history at Libroscope, I had made sure that our company had put customer furnished equipment tags on everything we had paid for it. The sheriff came in and locked their doors. We had CFE tags, we went down with a moving van. Sheriff opened the door. We walked in, said, see those tags? All that stuff there, that’s ours. Okay, take it. So we took all that stuff and we took it back up to Glendale too and installed it such as it was installed it in the building that was called the Maple Building.

Basically, we had, I’m going to call it a bag of parts. It was better than that, but it was a bag of parts. Nothing worked, just actually nothing worked. That’s all I can tell you. So you could plug it in. There were some lights that went on, but there was no way that you could program a show. Here I am not familiar with the computer that was finally chosen, which it turns out was a 16-bit Honeywell computer.

And I’m by myself and I’m thinking, boy, I think I should have stuck with Libroscope. So I hired a guy that had been my closest working partner at Libroscope, at which point Harry Ford swore at me yet a second time for stealing his second best guy. Then I took his third best guy and his fourth best guy, and we set up this little department and I recognized that we still didn’t have enough manpower.

So I went on a hiring spree and started hiring programmers, real-time programmers, guys out of aerospace, guys that really knew the nuts and bolts about computers and to write code such as it was at the time with long days and weekends and etc. We got the system up and running so that animators could animate a show in real time and play a show back with one of the distributed devices and have it played back time after time accurately each time.

We had commonality of parts and a commonality of people that knew how to fix stuff. There we were with one exception. That, as you can imagine, when you first bring up a system that’s never been rung out, we had animators sitting at the console and they would do work for 5, 6, 7 hours and all of a sudden zap, oh my God, what happened? It’s like, oh, we have to reboot.

Let’s reboot. Well, when you reboot, so to speak, all their data’s gone. This is exaggerating the nuisance of it all. But nonetheless, data would be gone. The animators would sit around and fidget and swear and whatever. By the way, it was a job in itself to get the animators, the old-time animators that had been brought over from the studio to, I’ll just say relax and buy into the fact that there was going to be a computer that was going to let them animate shows instead of the electro or the Popular Mechanics, ways that they’ve been used for World’s Fair and Disneyland.

That was the own sales pitch, and yours truly wasn’t the guy that got to do that sales pitch while I was still trying to write code. So I had split my days up for a while on explaining the virtues of computers and writing code at the same time, and of course, the end of the story is all as well.

We installed it in Florida, almost all the glitches were gone. Park opened in October on time, not on budget by the way, but on time, me and my crew, so to speak, were there on opening day, bursting into tears, out of being tired and just thinking, wow, we’ve made it. Basically what we did then in some cases is still exactly the same thing as running, and in most other cases, second and third and fourth generation of the very same concept is running the parks. All the parks, not just Walt Disney World, but Disneyland has retrofitted their shows, Paris, Tokyo, etc. There’s a lot of holes in that story, but that’s pretty much the thread and there’s a lot of side streets without thread, but that’s pretty much it.

Dan Heaton: It’s incredible that you and the team were able to pull that together under very tight constraints. The park was going to open on that date. There was no way around it. So the fact that you were able to do that is crazy. So when you got the system up, you mentioned it was set up where it would program for the animators. What’s it like to then have to work with them to program an attraction? Because I’m sure they’d needed a lot of hand holding and work to make that connect. How did that go?

David Snyder: Well, the first part of doing that was to win over a very small number of animators and convince them that they were not going to get canned because the computer was suddenly going to do this miraculous thing. Once they became true believers that all we were doing was making them a better tool to do their job faster and truly better and basically give them more time off, they became pretty happy. Now, only a few of the old timers that had come over from the studio, only a few of ’em ever touched the console.

The guys that touched the console, the animator console most were Bill Justice and Wathel Rogers. Marc Davis would sit next to, in many cases, me example, doing the Bear Band show. He would sit next to me and tell me what he wanted the bears to do, and I would try and get him and I’d say, come on, Marc, just turn this knob and throw this switch and then whatever, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, I don’t want to do that.

It’ll explode if I touch it, whatever. We eventually had a technician guy whose name was Jack Taylor, who had gotten a job there. His father at one time was in charge of the Sound Department, and by the way, there was nepotism run rampant. When I got there, I was one of the few people that didn’t have a true at the company. Almost everybody I ran into was a friend, neighbor, or relative of somebody else.

In any case, Jack Taylor would also sit with the guys like Marc Davis, and he would also kind of assist and run back and forth between the computer room and the programming area that we would set up with the animators console out in the warehouse. We had this big warehouse and the shows would be set up, basically a scene at a time. You can imagine how that would work, and a scene would be animated, let’s call it to 95%, and then another scene would be animated and then pond shipment and installation of Florida.

It would all come together, and we would often have an animators console out in the show area. One of your notes said something about the jungle ride doing it in the water, which was a no brainer, except that it was a long cable run and people got wet. There was no technical challenge in that it required doing that to synchronize things happening.

If the elephant’s going to squirt water when the boat goes through, you had to synchronize that and synchronizing that or anything else required a little timing. You’d set it up so that something would happen and the boat would come along and the guy was supposed to shoot a gun and the elephant was supposed to come up, but maybe the elephant came up too soon or he came up too late. So you had to change the queue, which was with the animation console was a no brainer.

The animated would say, okay, and by the way, this is really important to understand. We designed that system around the vocabulary of the film business. Everything was done with foot and frames and timing. Basically think of 24 frames per second, not 30, not like television, 24 frames per second, 16 frames per foot, blah, blah, blah. So that’s how we communicated with the animators, and it made them feel good because we were speaking their language, which we sort of had to learn, but it was no big deal. That made them comfortable, and that’s how it worked.

They got very, very comfortable with the system. We still had crashes because we were running tape machines, which you probably know are no longer in use in that kind of business. We were running fixed head discs that only had 4k memory, and we had racks and racks of fixed head discs just to handle one show. Nowadays, your desk PC could handle pretty much every show in the park.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, I think that makes it more impressive that you were able to, I mean, you mentioned even having to have a wire to cross the water and such, which none of that. Now they take their portable whatever device into an attraction and work through it. I’d love to hear about, you know, mentioned this in interviews. I read about lip syncing the attractions and how that worked, and the program that was put together for shows like the Hall of Presidents and Country Bear Jamboree, how you ended up doing that and how that works.

David Snyder: Do you have a familiarity at all with how it, I’ll say how it used to be done?

Dan Heaton: Not much, because obviously not from behind the scenes. I’m mostly seeing it from a guest perspective.

David Snyder: It’s pretty easy to understand. If you think about a two-track magnetic tape, audio tape, okay, a two-track audio tape. One track is Pavarotti singing, and on the other track you want to have a cue that turns on a spotlight or opens a curtain. You got that? Yeah. So in order to have a queue, and this is on the second track, the show programmers would have, let’s just call it a buzzer for simplicity. They would say when it says whatever, they pushed the button, the buzzer, and that track that one buzz and maybe there are two buzzes or three or whatever meant turn on the light or raise the curtain or whatever. So that’s how it had been done.

Mouth action was done in a similar way, but obviously there were multiple tracks on the tape because there are multiple audio channels in most of the, now every show practically, instead of pushing a button for a buzzer like was done pretty much with the Tiki Room, which you can imagine pretty easy to have a bird’s beak open up when he’s going to say, Tiki Tiki Tiki room. You can push the push, push, push, push, right mouth action a lot harder because the audio-animatronic figures were not digital.

The critical moves were analog moves. Analog meaning voltage controlled zero to 10 volts. And I don’t know what you know about computers, if anything, but zero to 10 volts turns out to work pretty good with an eight bit byte on a computer. One of the ways they did mouth action was Ken O’Brien, an old-time animator from the studio and some of the guys in the back room and devised. They took an old, I don’t know what it was, it was an old football helmet probably, and they made a movable jaw on his football helmet, and they had what’s called a transducer on this jaw. And so Ken O’Brien would put this helmet on and he would basically lip sync, and as he opened his mouth, the transducer would cause 10 volts to go to the figure.

As he closed his mouth halfway, there’d be five volts going. You can imagine everything in between, right? Easy. However, you can imagine even today’s singers that are trying to lip sync how hard it is to lip sync and be completely in sync for a long period of time, and the animated figures don’t respond as fast in every case. In other, you could have three different bears and bear A might have a, I’m just going to throw out a number. You might have a 10 millisecond response. Bear B could have a 20 millisecond response, and bear C could have something in between, whatever.

So if you said the word “no “with your helmet, or I’ll say better word, “hello”, where your jar comes down and sends out signals, maybe one bear’s mouth is open right away, and the other one’s a little bit behind, and maybe the other one’s further behind. I don’t know. But that’s not very satisfactory. We had to deal with that in the animation control system, and the way we did it initially was we wrote code that allowed us to take the digitized analog track and move it forward or backward a frame at a time, just like you do on a thing called an Avid or because I don’t know your technical background, it’s a little hard for me to really explain this to you.

Dan Heaton: Sure. I would just be as straightforward as you can.

David Snyder: Well, okay, so here’s an analogy for you. You take a piece of 35-millimeter film, which I know you’ve seen, and instead of cutting it in half, cut it longitudinally and just take a one-foot piece and cut it longitudinally so that you’ve got sprockets on the top and sprockets on the bottom, right? Yeah. Okay. So now pretend that you have somebody singing on the top track and you have these zero to 10 volt signals on the bottom track. If you’re lucky, the bottom track lines up with the top track and everything works nicely. But if you’re not, and the mirror opens his mouth too soon with the thing we just described, you can slide it physically and this case, slide it forward or slide it backward to accommodate the lag in the system, the hysteresis in the system. Pretty cool.

Dan Heaton: Wow. I’m still amazed that hearing you describe it, what you’re able to accomplish with those shows for the opening and after. Is it even more amazing to me how it was done?

David Snyder: Well, there’s parts of the story that you don’t know, and there’s a whole other story which has to do with the resistance that we got from the studio to do what we were doing, including your note here has the black hole mentioned and some other things. We had such resistance. It was pathetic, mainly because the union people at the studio were worried that us computer guys are going to make things happen so fast that the union people would be seeing smoking and not eating lunch too much and they’d all get fired. That was an uphill battle. That’s a political battle that it’s a whole hour to explain.

Dan Heaton: I can imagine, because whenever there’s new technology, you’re hearing about it now today with things being automated and AI and everything. So back then it was probably a similar deal, but in a different sphere. So I could totally, I can get it though. I’m sure that didn’t make things easy for you.

David Snyder: Well, it made it incredibly difficult because you had not only call it a quality schedule and budget issue, but you also had a political issue. So you’re out trying to be your best salesman, and basically what you’re doing in some cases is begging for money. I’ll give you a specific example. The people that did data processing and punch holes and cards and did your payroll and inventory, those people got paid, I’m going to just rough it here, but they got paid 200 bucks a week.

People that were doing real time process control like I was doing, were making $350 and $400 a week. Now, when I went to the compensation board and said, oh, here’s a guy I really want this guy. He knows this particular stuff that we really need. I need to pay him $500 a week. There were times when I was told, you cannot hire that guy because he’s going to make more than you do, meaning me.

And I said, guess what? There’s a good reason he should make more than I do, because he knows more than I do. He’s older, he’s, he’s more experienced, he’s done this particular thing, and I haven’t, it’s worth it. It’s going to take me six months to get there. This guy can walk in the door and in one week he can solve my problem. It’s worth it. So that’s an argument and a long one, and a screaming and shouting argument. These are not pleasant issues. So you lay the union issues on top of compensation issues. I get em upset just talking about it. I’m going to tell you one little story. You go, everybody’s heard this story but you, and here it is. Do you recognize the name Ed Catmull?

Dan Heaton: It sounds familiar. Yes.

David Snyder: Well, Ed Catmull is the genius that brought computer-generated imagery to the Walt Disney Company and Pixar. Look him up. C A T M U L L. I tried to hire Ed Catmull and was told I couldn’t because of his salary demands. And so what do you think happened? Disney lost them and they lost the edge of doing computer animation for years until Catmull came back, and now he probably makes half a million year or something knows. I don’t know. Ed, with his experience at the time and his thoughts for his own personal career was asking for, I don’t know what, a hundred bucks a week more than I was being paid.

And the compensation people, there’s no way. We don’t allow that to happen. The boss gets the highest pay and everybody else gets less. I had to fight that, and I won a couple times. I hired a couple guys that got paid more than I, but the grief and aggravation I had to go through was silly and stupid. And I could have been doing much more fruitful work instead of arguing about salaries. Good people are worth a lot of money. That’s all I can tell you.

Dan Heaton: And I think that’s the case in any industry. So it it’s understandable, unfortunately.

David Snyder: There’s a slogan. The slogan is simple. There’s nothing more expensive than cheap help.

Dan Heaton: Yeah. Because then you end up with extra training, rehiring, the whole deal. So I also wanted to ask you about Epcot Center. What kind of programming did you do for Epcot and the Communicore pavilions?

David Snyder: Here’s the deal about Epcot that you should know. Epcot didn’t have a central computer. Epcot wasn’t run at all on the digital animation control system, and Epcot was not hardly even a part of what Walt Disney Imagineering did. Every show in Epcot was done with two people and the people they hired. One person was me, the other person was a guy by the name of Paul. Disney had a major construction company out of New York. It was called Tishman. Tishman Construction, one of the biggest construction companies in the world.

And it was Tishman’s responsibility really to build Walt Disney World, meaning that’s called all the brick and mortar stuff, if you will. So suddenly we have a system that can animate shows smoothly, other people can run it, other people can turn the knobs on a console, other people can school up the data and put the data where it needs to be and do all that stuff.

But there’s nobody to do anything on Epcot. What the hell is Epcot? What is it and what are we going to put in there? Nobody knew what to put in there. This whole thing about experimental prototype community of tomorrow was down the tubes. That wasn’t going to happen. Certainly not for opening day or ever as it turns out. So what happened was yours truly was given the ball and they said, David, work with whoever you can and come up with some ideas for Epcot that looked kind of futuristic, whatever.

I thought, well, I don’t know. It’s not a futurist. Paul from Tishman was in my back pocket every minute to make sure that I didn’t spend too much money or contract for something that wasn’t going to happen or whatever. A really good guy, we got to be super duper friends. I went back and forth to New York and all over the country with Paul, but everything you remember in Epcot was a standalone run by itself entity. There was some very clever stuff there.

The Future Choice Theater was invention from the get go, all that polling stuff, and either four projectors, putting real-time data from guests up on the screen, all from scratch, implemented by a hole in the wall company out of Louisiana that nobody had any confidence in, including me. But I couldn’t find anybody else that thought they could do it. They came through and working with the functional specification, which I wrote on about three pages of notebook paper, probably by hand, as I recall, a scooter computer is a little different, but Build a Rollercoaster. I don’t know if you knew that one.

Dan Heaton: Oh yeah, I played that as a kid.

David Snyder: Yeah. Build a Rollercoaster was 100% my idea. That was run with a standalone video disc, an interactive video disc. At that time, you may remember that video discs came out with video on programs. But a video disc could be programmed with very simple if this, then that type programs. So that was done that way. No central computer, nothing like a whatever. The travel port, same idea with this television stuff, and with a beautiful aesthetic design by a car designer by the name of Kurt Brubaker, all standalone stuff.

The Flag Game was programmed in a friend of mine’s garage, the equivalent of a Radio Shack TRS type computer that was equivalent, so to speak. Not that bad, but it fit in, fit inside the box. It didn’t have to have any central control, but we invented stuff the public had never seen the opportunity that I know of to use an interactive touchscreen by touching a screen and having something happen.

The Flag Game, as an example, you know, build a flag for whatever country by touching little parts of the flag. That touch device, which had been invented by a guy in Chicago, was put into first public use, as far as I know, in Epcot Center. Now, one thing I should mention is that there were things not only in Epcot Center, but in other parts of the park that were being monitored for correct operation by the central computer. When it was not busy programming a show, it was looking for correct operation of stuff.

If the stuff didn’t operate correctly, I’ll just say a bell would ring, if you will, excuse me. But a bell would ring, and there were two girls sitting at the console, and they would dispatch by radio a person that area to find out what happened and fix it. We had a 16-station interactive thing that we did for Exxon that was meant to find out while people thought about the oil business. We had to set it up so they didn’t know what they were really, why they were really answering the questions. The best thing in Epcot was a guy by the name of, he was a singer, Michael Iceberg, and he had a thing called the Great Iceberg Machine. Have you ever seen or heard it?

Dan Heaton: No. This is all new to me, which is saying a lot for Epcot.

David Snyder: Well, Epcot had a thing called Tomorrowland Terrace. Remember Tomorrowland Terrace? It wasn’t really part of Epcot, it was out in the corner there in the park, but that was what it was called. Tomorrowland Terrace and Michael Iceberg. And the Iceberg Machine played there for, I don’t know, years. You need to look up Michael Iceberg and see what he did with synthesizers way ahead of his time. He was one of the greatest one-man entertainers that I had ever seen. I used to sneak off and watch his show.

Every chance I could get, I would sit and watch his show and just shake my head saying, how can this guy do that all by himself? I have no idea. And sweat would be running down his face and oh my God. He was funny as hell. And in any case, that was something people hadn’t seen either. Nobody had seen the Iceberg Machine or anything like it until they went to Tomorrowland Terrace and had lunch or whatever.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, well, I loved mean all of that. It’s interesting. So you mentioned Astuter Computer, which became Backstage Magic. A few years later where you’d go in and you would see all those computers from up above. So obviously they weren’t controlling a lot. You mentioned that it was kind of doing checking on operations and such, but was a lot of that for show for the guest because to see all that.

David Snyder: It had a twofold goal. There was a contract with Sperry to provide computers for data processing after the RCA 301 computers left and the RCA agreement with Walt became null. So it was for show number one, and it did a little bit of stuff, but the monitoring that I mentioned, it was all done through the Honeywell 16 machine, the 516 machine in the Fantasyland basement. The computer, the Astuter Computer, was strictly a gag to appease UNIVAC. That was the same for American Express with Travelport. It was the same for Exxon sponsoring their stuff. Basically everything in the park was paid for sure by United States Industry.

Dan Heaton: That was still kind of the World’s Fair model and early Disney model with a lot, I mean, they still have sponsors now, but especially the way that they did that.

David Snyder: Yeah, well, it worked out pretty well.

Dan Heaton: Oh yeah, it’s great. It was great. I love that park, especially as a kid. Future World blew my mind. I was the right age for it in the eighties. It was something. All of it that Communicore, all the pavilions I was in, I like, I think I went in ‘84 and I was eight years old, so I was into space and everything. It was the perfect age for it. So we spent a lot of time at Communicore.

David Snyder: The way it was supposed to be. I don’t know. Communicore had that much that I remember it opening. I know a lot of stuff got put in later, but I left the company in end of ‘88. Things were still growing and changing and as they should and as they needed to be.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, for sure. But I do remember in the eighties before it kind of shifted that it was still a lot of the things you just talked about, the Travel Port and the Coaster and everything was really impressive. Well, I want to make sure you mentioned it earlier. I want to make sure we get to talk a bit about basically something revolutionary that you helped create for The Black Hole, the camera system, the ACES system and how that works. So I’d love to hear a bit about how that came to being and what that was.

David Snyder: Well, about year two of my tenure at Disney, I had spent a lot of time going back and forth to the studio and I got to know people and I got to see how things were done. Every time I saw how something was done, I realized that it was the old hand crank approach to whatever people were using, free and flexor writer calculators to do math, which you probably never would ever want to see one of those. So my mind used to wander and think about, God, just put a computer here and run that thing, run that, have a computer, do this.

I wanted to have a computer draw pictures; I drew pictures of the computer on a CalCom plotter and I showed it to people at the studio and they said, oh, that’s cute. I said, this idea is something that in, I don’t know, five or 10 years, computers can do animation. This is how you do it. It just x and y and dots on a thing, and computer can do that and do it really fast. It can do it in color, can all. So yeah. Okay, thank you David. Let’s have another lunch.

Someday. I proposed, I had a document, it was probably 50 pages and it was called the Automated Stage. What I had proposed was all kinds of ways to automate a stage, automate lighting, the placement of the lighting, the lighting cues, the movement of cameras, everything you can think of on a stage or having to do with pre-production, and then also having to do with post-production. I sent that to the president and vice president and I made a presentation with all the appropriate storyboards, and they said, oh, that sounds like fun. Thank you very much. Don’t call us. We’ll call you.

I probably did that three times and I finally thought I got other stuff. I think about that time I was thinking about having a family, but my son was born in ‘72 and I had other things to do. Then one day I got a call from the president of the company, I think his president, his name was Don Tatum, and he said, is this Snyder? I said, yeah, David. He said, get over here. I said, where’s here? He said, this is Don Tatum. I’m the president. Get over here in my office. I said, well, when he said, well now, okay, fine. I got in my car and I drove over and went in a Don Tatum’s office and really nice office, lots of expensive furniture, and there were four or five people sitting around and one of the people was guy by name, Art Crookshank.

Crookshank was in charge of special effects for the studio. He was the special effects wizard. Art was known as a practical effects guy. In the special effects world today, there are two types of effects. One’s called a practical effect, like an explosion where there’s really an explosion or a car crash where there is really a car crash. And then the other world is the digital doorway, and where there’s this computer model crashed the car. So that’s Art was a practical effects guy at the time. Ron Miller, who had married Walt’s daughter. So naturally he was the vice president and I used to see him up in the, there was a men only lunch club. That’s a whole other story. But anyway, Ron Miller was there and a couple other guys, and he said, oh, okay, we’re making this movie called The Black Hole.

I said, oh, how’d jolly for you. That’s sounds really cool. It said, we need some help, help with one of the key shots in the movie, a pivotal shot. The movie cannot be made without this shot and subsequent shots. I said, well, fine, there’s Art, right? Here’s Art. He knows how to do shots. They said, well, it’s a little more difficult perhaps. I said, well, okay, Art, tell me what you’re doing. He said, well, we’ve got this model that’s like 20 feet long and it has all these little pixie lights, thousands of little lights on it, and it moves, has to move, and we have to photograph it in high precision and I don’t think we can do that. I said, no, you can’t. You’re right. You can’t do that. I said, but you can do it with a computer.

Art said something like this. He said, you know what, I have a slogan I’m going to give you, which is to a man with a hammer. All problems are nails. That’s what Art said to me. I said, well, Art, I’ll tell you. Why don’t you just do it by yourself? I’m really busy over a WDI and I think you could do it with a computer, but maybe somebody else could help you. So if you guys, oh, excuse me, I’d like to get the hell back to work. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What? Tell you, how can you do this once again?

Can we do it tomorrow? One of those deals, they finally decided it had to be done a new way, and of course it had to be done tomorrow, meaning zero schedule. I said, well, okay, here’s what you have to do. I gave ’em just a quick overview and they said, well, can you do that? And I said, yeah, I can do it. Can you do it by tomorrow? Which was, I don’t know, two months or three months or something. I said, yeah. And then they said, how much will it cost? I said, I can do it for under a hundred million dollars.

I’m sorry. I got fired. I was such a smart ass. Really? And they said, don’t be a jerk. I said, well, it’s true. I can do it for under a hundred million dollars. They said, no, we need a budget. I said, well, here’s a flash for you, gentlemen. You’re asking me to do something that’s never been done before. You need to have it on this kind of a schedule. I don’t even know who I can get to help me.

I don’t work to a budget. It’s what it costs is what it costs. I’ve got to have the power to write purchase orders and not go through the mill that you make me go through every time. And if you want this done, I can do it, but you get out of my way and don’t talk to me until I’m done it. It went like that.

I mean, the words are different, I’m sure. And I’m not very well liked at that point. So we got busy and we did this prototype, and guess what? There was a studio manager, his name was Bob. Bob and Art Crookshank got together and they somehow or another went to the union, I think it was the grips or somebody union, and the union came back and said, no, we cannot do this with a computer. This is a union job. This is a job for union photographers and for union this and for union that.

I said, well, okay, I’ll tell you what let’s do, I’m going to set up a little demo here and I’m going to move this. I’ll move this camera 100th of an inch, and I’m going to bring it all the way back and I’m going to move it another, once again, I’ll move it a hundredth of an inch and I’m going to move it two feet.

And at the end of the two feet, we put a mark on the floor and then I’m going to make it go backwards, put a mark on the floor and push the button again. It’s going to go a hundredth of an inch at a time, and it’s going to take whatever, 15 minutes to get to the other point. It’s going to be exactly there when it stops. So here’s what you do. Get your grips and get their dolly, their camera dolly, and put a mark on the floor and have ’em move it a hundredth of an inch at a time and hit that mark and do it about 10 times in a row. We can’t do that. Are you kidding?

I said, well, that’s the point, gentlemen. That’s exactly the point. So get the union out of my hair so I can finish my work. So we built the automated camera effect system, ACES, run by data general computer. By the way, we got patents. It was a second motion control camera in Hollywood, and it had control of every access on the camera stamp and everything and everything on the camera, including the shutter. Know anything about photography?

Dan Heaton: Not that much. A little bit.

David Snyder: Do you know what an F stop is?

Dan Heaton: Yeah.

David Snyder: Well, on your camera you have F8. F16. That’s pretty small. F stop, right? That lets in very little light, the F stop on the ACEs camera was F64 to F128. Our exposures, some of our exposures took 20 minutes for each exposure. Why so long? And why such a tight F stop? Because the model was 20 feet long and we had to hold the depth of field was the only human way to do it.

Dan Heaton: It’s incredible that even a computer could do that with some amazing work from you and others.

David Snyder: So it was easy for the computer to do it that the computer had no problem doing that at all. I mean, it was a programmer’s job to program it, and it was the machine shop’s job to build the mechanisms that we were going to push and pull, that they had to build stuff, and then we had to go out and buy a bunch of stuff.

Dan Heaton: Well, I will say I haven’t seen that film in a while, but I’ve seen it before. I mean, the movie itself is what it is, but the visual effects and shots like that going by are incredible. I mean, they really hold up well.

David Snyder: You have to, I say 20 feet, it might’ve been 15 feet, but any case that shot, if you were to ask anybody in the film business today how that was done, if they didn’t know how it was done, they would say, oh, that’s a CGI, a computer thing, right? Big deal. Who cares, who cares. That’s make it fly. Make it go up the top of the whatever. They would be, right. But we’re talking about 19, what, 75 or so? I don’t know.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, late seventies, I think it was filmed.

David Snyder: So you know all the secrets.

Dan Heaton: That’s impressive. I love that story. And plus too, the fact that you had to deal with so many other things beyond just the work to get it done. The fact that it happened is great.

David Snyder: Well, it was technology being pushed to its limits and politics being fought to the limits at the same time. By the way, that’s a patented device. My name’s on the patent. Yeah, I have a write-up on that somewhere. It’s just a couple pages I did so people could understand easily. Pictorially. If I can find it, I will send it to you.

Dan Heaton: I’d love to see it. That would be amazing.

David Snyder: It’s a pretty slick document and easy to understand when you see it in front of you.

Dan Heaton: Yeah. Well, I feel like we’ve, we’ve been talking for a while. We’ve covered maybe 2% of your career, but it’s been amazing to talk with you, David. I, all I can say is thanks so much for coming on and telling your story, and hopefully we can dig even further sometime in the future.

David Snyder: Your choice, as long as I’m still walking around on this earth, my memory’s pretty good, not perfect. Some of the stuff I’ve said is probably anywhere from 75 to a hundred percent accurate. Actually, probably better than that. I’d give myself 90% to 95% accurate. Plus, because I lived it, it was so intense. I’ve done a lot of other things in my life, but for whatever reason, I don’t have the same intensity of memory for some of the other things I’ve done except when it comes to women. And I remember a few things.

Dan Heaton: Well, we’ll leave that for another day.

David Snyder: I think we should, my wife could be listening.

Dan Heaton: Well, thank thanks so much. This was awesome.