91. Imagineer Don Carson on Splash Mountain and Mickey’s Toontown

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

When I’ve talked to former Disney Imagineers about colleagues they admire, a name that comes up frequently is Don Carson. His expertise in theme park design is evident through his diverse career at Disney and well beyond. Carson joined Walt Disney Imagineering in 1989 and quickly began work as the lead show designer on Splash Mountain in Florida. That project initially seemed like a clone of Disneyland’s version, but the reality was much different. Carson worked for several years on a classic attraction that guests still love 27 years after it opened.

Carson is my guest on this episode of The Tomorrow Society Podcast. We talk about his interest in themed entertainment design, his start at Disney, and a lot more. Carson also worked on concepts as a show designer for Mickey’s Toontown in Disneyland. That striking land goes well beyond just providing a place to meet Mickey and his friends. Carson’s original design for Mickey’s house ended up setting the mold for uses in other mediums beyond the park.

Carson’s six years at Disney have only been a small part of his career. He has also worked in the video game industry and has designed virtual environments. Carson also worked as a freelancer in developing concepts for numerous projects including Cars Land and the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. I loved getting the chance to ask Carson broader questions about the industry and how it has changed during this episode. He also provides excellent advice if you’re interested in becoming a part of the industry today.

Show Notes: Don Carson

Learn more about Don Carson’s work at his official website, doncarsoncreative.com.

Check out Don Carson’s blog and learn more about his approach to theme park and virtual world design.

Note: Photos in this post were used with the permission of Don Carson.

Transcript

Don Carson: To be able to stand there, and every 30 seconds, this wet boat of laughing and smiling people go by and knowing that for the last 27 years, every 30 seconds that’s been going on is very satisfying. Whether or not I get to see it or not it, it’s one of my favorite things I’ve worked on.

Dan Heaton: That was Don Carson, lead show designer on Splash Mountain at Walt Disney World, and you’re listening to The Tomorrow Society Podcast.

(music)

Dan Heaton: Thanks for joining me here on Episode 91 of the Tomorrow Society Podcast. I am your host, Dan Heaton. Welcome back. I hope that you had a great holidays and a Happy New Year. I hope that you enjoyed the look back at some previous Tomorrow Society Podcast episodes with Bruce Broughton and Peggie Farris, and both of them I think were really important for me in terms of where I want the podcast to go, and also just great stories that I enjoyed so much, and that’s true again this week where I was thrilled to have the chance to talk to former Disney Imagineer Don Carson.

Don worked for Walt Disney Imagineering for about six years, starting in 1989, which was such an important time for the company. Michael Eisner and Frank Wells were well into the Disney Decade and everything they were doing on that front. Pretty soon after he started, Don became the lead show designer for Splash Mountain at Walt Disney World, which became quite an involved project.

He also worked on Mickey’s Toon Town and beyond what he did at Disney, Don also has a really interesting perspective on the industry. He’s been involved with the industry for a long time. He’s also worked in the video game industry, has worked as a freelancer, done roles for Universal, including some concepts for Harry Potter and a lot of other work for Disney after he left in 1995. So what I appreciate too about this conversation is that Don talks about some of the changes in technology and even gives what I think is some really good advice if you’re interested in getting in to the theme park world.

So I’m really excited for you to hear this interview, which I did back in mid-December right before the holidays with Don, who was really cool about answering some broader questions about theme parks, the kind that I want to ask more of with my guests as we roll into 2020. And I can’t wait for so many of the shows that will be coming up this year, so let’s get to it. Here is Don Carson.

(music)

Don Carson: Well, I was one of those kids that started drawing and just never stopped. The fact that I was able to turn my passion into something that made money was always nice. Really, my goal was to be a cartoonist when I was a kid. And my first semester in college, my first class was a cartooning class, and the teacher informed us that there’d be no way on earth that we would make a living as cartoonists. So I went, oh, okay. Well, then I transferred to the illustration department and graduated as an illustration major about the same time that commercial illustration was kind of dying as a viable full-time job.

So I was out in the world with the artist portfolio and a love for Disney, but I had no idea that there was Imagineering or that you could actually get paid to use your art skills to make rides. So I went off in the world. I ended up becoming the Art Director for the Renaissance Pleasure Fairs in northern and southern California. That created a portfolio that was a nice mix of illustration and then environmental theater. And it was also a lucky break in the late eighties when Michael Eisner came in that they were doing a big hiring bonanza at Imagineering. With a lot of nagging on my part, I was able to get a job there, which was amazing.

Dan Heaton: So when you were younger too, I mean, you mentioned that you didn’t know much about Imagineering. Were you very interested or did you know much about Disneyland and even theme parks when you were younger? Was that a big part of your childhood growing up?

Don Carson: Yes. My grandparents lived only a few miles from Disneyland. So we would go down from San Francisco where I grew up a couple times a year, and those trips always included a trip to Disneyland. For me, even as a kid, Disneyland was sort of touchable, tangible fantasy theater that I could really immerse myself in. So we went there as kids, and then I think in 1983 when New Fantasyland was about to open at Disneyland, they did a special and they interviewed a producer. And that was the first time I realized that it was a job you could have. From that point on, it was like, I need to get that job. Really that’s what I need to be doing, is working for Disney and designing rides for them.

Dan Heaton: So how did that happen? I mean, you mentioned that they were doing a lot of hiring that was kind of getting set for the Disney Decade and everything that Michael Eisner was doing, but how did you go about getting that job and how challenging was it to interview and actually join Imagineering?

START HERE

Don Carson: Well, there’s a little bit of a story that goes along with that, and that is when I left college, I was super, super shy and was terrible at cold calling clients and advertising agencies and convincing that I was talented and they needed to hire me. Also I ended up with a portfolio that looked pretty much like everybody else’s who was leaving with the illustration degree.

So I decided I needed to work on my own portfolio, and I thought, well, what kind of project would I like to work on? And I was a big fan of the work of Rien Poortvliet. He did gnomes and various other sort of sketchbook style books. I thought, well, what if I was to work on a portfolio or even a book that was a bunch of sketches that were annotated that I would paint? And I thought, well, what am I interested in?

I thought, well, I like Disneyland a lot. I loved sort of the attention to detail that goes into Disneyland. So my wife and I went down to Disneyland. I spent rolls and rolls of film taking pictures of doorknobs and lampposts and you name it. I gave myself a three-month deadline to create a book that I would submit to Disney as the Art of Disneyland, or pardon me, the attention to detail, a Disneyland sketchbook of my sort of observations as an outsider of what Disneyland looked like.

So in those three months, I did about 150 watercolors of every lamppost and doorknob and thing that I could find that I thought was a symbol of the attention to detail that the Imagineers put into their work, presented it to Disney, and it was kicked around to a couple executives. Then they flew me down to the studios, and this is probably in the middle 1984ish.

Back then the backlot was still at the studio. So I got to meet the head of publishing, and then they took me to lunch and I got to meet a bunch of other people to show my book idea to. Pretty much they just wanted to get a good look at me because they couldn’t believe that anybody would spend so much time producing so much art for a book that would never get published. While I was at lunch, they had a guy come from another part of Disney and he said, I work for this place up the road and we do other stuff for the company. I had made this promise foolishly to myself in the airplane going down. I was 21 at the time that I wasn’t going to let them talk me out of my dream project, which was this book.

So he said, it’s called WED and it’s up the street, and I have a feeling that your work would be really, really suited for a job there. Would you have some time to go and meet some people up there? So my little pea brain said, aha, here’s an example of how they’re trying to trick me out of not publishing my book. So I told this guy, I’m sorry, I’m not available. I have a plane to catch. So I turned him down this opportunity to go to this place in Burbank or Glendale where it was.

So I ended up going home. They ended up not publishing the book. I later on kicked myself realizing that the place that he was willing to take me to was WED to meet these people who worked there. So it took me about five years of sort of knocking on the door to get an opportunity to interview for Imagineering.

So I had these 150 watercolor paintings of Disneyland, and they asked me if I was familiar with their product. I just basically dumped these drawings on the table and they said, well, apparently you do. You’re hired. So this epic journey of trying to get a Disneyland book published that never happened actually became the calling card that got me the job, and there was no guarantee without it that I would have. So although it failed as a book, it definitely was the foot in the door that got me finally the job at Imagineering, which I probably would’ve gotten five years earlier if I hadn’t been such a numbskull.

Dan Heaton: Well, it’s so interesting because yeah, it’s like you created your portfolio resume whole thing, and then were able to use it five years later.

Don Carson: Yes, it still hasn’t been published. Ironically, Bo Boyd at the time said, the main reason that we’re not interested in publishing it is if you were a Disneyland or Disney employee, that would make sense that we would publish a book done by Disney. So if ever you’re working for Disney, you give me a call and tell me and then we’ll look at this book again. So once I got the job at Imagineering, I sent him a message and said, “Hey, I have a job at Imagineering now”.

He sent a handwritten note back that just said, good for you. But I think the other benefit too, that was sort of an unseen benefit was that when you produce 150 of anything, you start to develop a style that wasn’t just the style that I had received by being a student in college, and it really established the look of my work through that process. So everything I’ve done from there has been informed by those original sketches.

Dan Heaton: What do you think, I hate to just say what was your style, but what do you think it was that you developed during that led to, like you said, your style that has carried through the years?

Don Carson: Well, part of it was the people that I admired outside of Disney, certainly Rien Poortvliet and other artists, Eric Sloan, who did a lot of pen and ink drawings of old farm equipment, but in Disney, it was certainly Marc Davis who to me represented this sort of pinnacle of the art form that was Imagineering. So I was very inspired by his quick line and his watercolors, and so while a lot of my peers were working in markers, I stayed with watercolors.

I just felt as though that was the tradition that needed to be continued. So I would definitely say that Marc Davis’s style is a huge influence on at least where my drawing style started to look like it was going. Although I would say that since Marc is an animator, his stuff was very character-based and mine was very architecturally based. I liked the place making more than anything, so my work tends to be more about the place than the characters in it.

Dan Heaton: Well, you mentioned Marc Davis too, because you joined in ‘89, which was this period of transition where you had a lot of new younger Imagineers joining who had worked on Epcot, who were joining when you joined, and then you still had some of the older, legendary kind of Imagineers from WED from the early days that were still there. So what was that kind of getting the chance to be there when there was such a mix and some of the earlier legends were still there?

Don Carson: Well, that was just completely, utterly amazing because actually they were all alive and they were all there. Not all of them were working there, but they were definitely accessible and certainly willing to talk to you. They did a program called the Designer Enrichment Program, which was a series of lunches and dinners with these people, these amazing early Imagineers, all the Nine Old Men and everybody else, and we would get to sit across from them, have lunch or dinner and just milk them for all their knowledge.

There was also an impromptu gathering called the Dinosaur Lunch, and it was really just an informal going to some dive diner because it was always some dive and sitting across the table from Ken Anderson and Claude Coats and all these amazing former and current Imagineers and just picking their brain. The only problem was we were just so starstruck.

We just sort of stand there with our mouths open. We didn’t get a whole lot out of them, but we were just so amazed to be in their presence, and they were very giving with their knowledge. I think in some cases, a lot of them were a little befuddled by the fact that they had been let go. So there were a lot of these guys that didn’t feel as though they were ready to retire who basically said, you’re done. Thanks. It’s been great. And off they were at home being retired when I think they just as soon would’ve stayed at the office and worked.

Dan Heaton: Right, yeah. Because when you have the big projects that went on in the seventies and especially in the eighties where then I’ve heard a lot of people talk about where then they cut down so much where it sounds like though when you were there, then it was kind of building back up, but it was with a lot of younger people too. So the environment there, I mean, when you joined, and again, like you mentioned, there was all this hiring and it was kind of in the earlier days of Eisner and Wells and everything. What was that environment like even coming in with such a large crop of artists?

Don Carson: Well, we were all pretty giddy about the prospects of working there, but also it started the beginning of what Michael Eisner coined the Disney Decade So there were tons and tons of projects. Not all of them ended up getting built, but we were all super busy working on sometimes multiple projects at the same time. Later on a couple of years down the line, they would sort of wean it down to a handful of projects that we were working on. Then the Disney Decade, which I think was planning on having five new parks by the end of it, sort of softened as it went into the ‘90s. But no, we were thrilled.

We had the animators across the street in warehouse buildings producing The Little Mermaid and this new round of classics. We all shared the same cafeteria. So there was this tremendous energy and there was also a sense of you wanted to pinch yourself every day because you just couldn’t imagine your good luck that you happened to be there. At that time, I don’t think any of us knew that it was cyclical and that the good times come and the not so good times come, and then the good times come back. We were definitely in sort of a second Renaissance era as far as the amount of projects that we’re working on, the people we were working with and the projects we were getting to work on

Dan Heaton: For sure, because if you think further ahead, I mean, Paris didn’t do so well, and then there was kind of a cycle in the other direction. So it does, I mean, it is beneficial that when you were there, there was so much happening, at least for that kind of I’d say 89, four to five years and such when things were really, really going gangbusters for the lack of a better term. But I’d love to talk about your first big project, which was Splash Mountain at Disney World. So how did you get started working on that as the lead show designer when you had just joined Imagineering fairly recently?

Don Carson: Well, it was really a fluke because the day I was hired, I think four other people were hired, and we all sat around a table in the manager’s office and they doled out projects and everybody got a brand new project for a brand new park or a brand new thing. Then they got to me and they gave me the third Splash Mountain, and I thought, oh, we all get to new stuff. And I got to work on this one.

That’s the third of something, because Tokyo Splash Mountain had already started, and the goal was that I was only going to be on the project for two weeks because the idea was that we were going to, in quotation mark “cookie cutter” it, we were going to take Disneyland Splash Mountain and place it in Florida. So I joined that team really not knowing what my role was.

I knew that I was labeled the show designer, but I didn’t know what that meant. But what happened was that in deciding that wanted to make the vehicle a side-by-side seating log as opposed to a sort of in the lap single file seating, it gained capacity because it was much faster and easier to step into a boat and sit down than to have to adjust and get your mother-in-law between your legs and getting ready to be set off, which made the vehicle twice as wide and which meant the scenes were not as big, and it meant that pretty much everything had to be redesigned.

So my two weeks ended up being about two and a half years, and because it was one of those projects that there was no one else who was really vying for that position, I kind of got away with murder and I had a tremendously supportive team. My producer, Kathleen Mangum, was amazingly supportive of this super green artist. And I have to say that there wasn’t a thing I didn’t touch in one way or the other. We got to kind of tell that story again.

One of the challenges we had, and I know Mark Rhodes talks about it in your interview with him, was that while Tokyo Disneyland had their version, which was being designed by Joe Lanzisero, theirs was off of Fantasyland and they really could go hog wild, and they had a budget that was three times as much as we had, and we were right next to Big Thunder. So we had to find some way to marry that Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah cartoon world with a very rustic Frontierland. So a lot of changes were made to try to soften the transition between the more realistic Frontierland and our fantasy cartoon world of Splash Mountain.

Dan Heaton: Yeah. So how do you go about doing that? Because yeah, it’s in such an interesting place where you, you mentioned you have Big Thunder, you’re kind of at that corner, which dead ends a bit, and then you have the train station behind there, which is very kind of Western themed and everything else. How do you find a way to put Splash Mountain, like you mentioned, which is in Critter Country at Disneyland in a very different setup and make that fit? It does fit. How do you do that?

Don Carson: Well, that was the challenge. We had a big old model in the Model Shop that had Big Thunder in its very obviously desert landscape. And we had this sort of gully that went between the two mountains and we had to find a bridge that would somehow relate to both sides. So one of the first things I worked on as a designer was that train station, and we went with a color palette that was more complimentary to Splash Mountain, but we went with a rustic shack kind of appearance that would speak a little bit more to Big Thunder.

It seems to have worked. One of the other things that I have to compliment Imagineering for is that when a concept sketch is done, every possible effort is apply to making that finished product look as much like that initial spark, that initial sketch that was produced. So with the exception of the challenges of budget and time and supplies, really, when you see a concept sketch early on for the Disney attraction, the finished product looks very much like the work that went into those early ideas.

Dan Heaton: I’ve noticed that even from looking at some sketches on your website and how sometimes you put up some of the concept art, I’m like, that looks really familiar. A lot of that sometimes comes together, not always, but a lot of cases, even with what you did with Toon Town and with Splash Mountain, there’s totally a correlation there where you think it’s not just complete Blue Sky. We’ll never actually make this come to fruition. There’s actually often a real world component to it. So I think that’s great.

Don Carson: Without a doubt. And I’d say that both Splash Mountain and Toontown were built in an era where there were some really high profile attractions that were happening and being designed in the building at the same time, Indiana Jones being one of them. So these two projects were kind of happening in the background. And so there wasn’t a lot of effort or scrutiny by anybody that it should be any other than what we had designed. We had to deal with budgetary realities, but pretty much what we came up with, they built Toon Town being a shining example of we didn’t know how we were going to approach it, and we came up with a model that showed these sort of wacky air-filled and deflated buildings, and that’s what they built.

Dan Heaton: It’s great to hear that, and I definitely want to ask about Toon Town, but I wanted to, before we missed it, you talked about how the Disney World Splash Mountain, about how basically because of the way the ride vehicle was that it changed the size of the show scenes and all of that, and even the layout. Is that a challenge then to design? Because I know you’re at least working in general off of the original Splash Mountain, but with that space being so different, did you have to make a lot of adjustments to make all that fit correctly?

Don Carson: We definitely did. Sometimes the greatest gift for a creative mind is to be given limitations or given a small box that you can then just really push on the sides of. Also being handed an attraction that already existed gave us the perspective of being able to visit and wander around the Disneyland version and sort of make decisions as to, okay, if we were given the opportunity, what would we do differently? So Splash Mountain at Walt Disney World was an opportunity to sort of ask the question, what are opportunities that we could bring to our attraction?

A couple of them were, one was we really wanted to define the difference between when you’re in Frontierlaand in the physical, real human world, and when you sort of dive into this Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah cartoon world. So we wanted to have that be a strong transition. Also we wanted the story to be something that at the very least, you knew there was a good rabbit, a bad bear, and a bad fox, and the good rabbit got away whether or not you knew the Uncle Remus stories or had ever seen Song of the South.

So with those in mind, we just attacked the building we were given then using sight lines, what space do I have? What can I put in it? What are you going to see when you turn your head? What’s you going to see next? We made it work. I think probably the most obvious area that is the most constrained is that once you dive into the first building, after the how do you do scene and you get to see Brer Rabbit leaving his home, you go down this long corridor before you get to the drop through the tree stump, and there’s not a lot there, but walls and a walkway sort of an egress.

We did our best and we also didn’t have enough budget to actually have figures in that space. So there’s really nothing going on in there, but we made it a lot of eye candy with the scenery to just make do with the fact that we didn’t have a whole lot of space in there.

Dan Heaton: Well, I think part of it too though, is if you don’t have as many figures, it gets a little ominous because it’s like a sense, wait, when’s something going to happen? So if you design it well, it almost, if it’s not as busy, you’re kind of like, well, especially someone who hasn’t ridden it, it’s just like, when is the drop coming? What’s happening in this middle part?

Don Carson: Well, and also it’s a water ride, so it’s kind of like going into your YMCA pool, there’s a lot of moisture in there, and all the scenery, with the exception of standalone things like trees are concrete sculpted concrete, so it has a potential of being a very dark cave-like space. So we worked really, really hard to create this sense of layering multi-plane depth. So there was a sense of blue sky was just beyond any place that you were even in that little corridor that you’re going down before that next drop.

Dan Heaton: Yeah. So you can make it, like you mentioned, it’s a cave. You can make it darker if you don’t have as many things to use there. Still, like I said, it kind of has this feeling of anticipation, I guess.

Don Carson: Yes, that’s what we told ourselves.

Dan Heaton: I’m selling it. I could feel it. So Splash Mountain at Disney World is just so popular now still, I mean, after 27 years since it opened at Disney World, I mean, why do you think it’s been able to just have that longevity for so long?

Don Carson: I don’t know. I mean, it’s just a fun ride. I think the greatest satisfaction I had after it was open was that because of the layout of the ride at Frontierland, we ended up having to build this big sort of horseshoe walkway or bridge that goes around the very, very end of the drop loop, where at Disneyland that kind of sticks out into Rivers of America. We have this big old wooden bridge that was there that we were sad that we were going to be taking such a big bite out of Frontierland and the Rivers of America.

But that ended up being my absolute favorite place to stand because you can actually stand and just sort of gun barrel look all the way up the drop, and to be able to stand there and every 30 seconds, this wet boat of laughing and smiling people go by, and knowing that for the last 27 years, every 30 seconds that’s been going on is very satisfying. Whether or not I get to see it or not, it’s one of my favorite things I’ve worked on.

Dan Heaton: Because that way that bridge is set up mean, especially in the summer when they kind of turn on the extra cannons and people could stand on that bridge and they feel like they’re being splashed from the ride. It’s not really that way, but it’s still really cool. Yeah. You mentioned Toon Town. I talked to Joe Lanzisero over the summer about Toon Town and kind of how Roger Rabbit has this Mr. Toad’s kind of crazy zany feeling to it, but I feel like that whole land has that where you mentioned that you were able to do so many things because it wasn’t the top project, but I still look at that and think, how did this land get built? How is this in Disneyland? What was it like to work on that?

Don Carson: Well, people often ask, what is the hierarchy of who comes to you and says, we need a ride, or do you just come up with stuff and recommend it? That was one of those examples where it sort of form follows function. Disneyland knew that they needed a new attraction at the year that Toon Town opened. They had big attractions coming like Indiana Jones. One of the complaints that they got the most from guests was that they came and spent the entire day at Disneyland and they never got a chance to meet Mickey.

So we needed to create a summer worthy big attraction. It had to devour, I think 5,000 people an hour. So it could be one giant attraction or it could be lots of little attractions and whatever happened, you had to be able to meet Mickey Mouse. About the same time, Walt Disney World had Mickey’s Birthday Land to celebrate Mickey’s, I think it was his 50th, or I think it was his 50th, maybe the 60th.

It was a temporary showpiece that ended up being up much longer than it was built to withstand the Florida weather. So we used that as a pushing off point that say, okay, what if we did a Birthday Land like at Walt Disney World? We knew it was going to be beyond the berm because that was the property they had available, where could we go with it?

So we started there and we knew that since Roger Rabbit had come out several years earlier, that it had established this idea of Toon Town being a place where cartoons lived. Well, maybe that’s where Mickey lives. But reviewing the film, we realized that Toon Town is the place where humans die. Things can fall on you, and houses have big faces and are very scary. It’s not a place people want to go to. So we thought, okay, let’s consider where Mickey would live.

We thought, this is going to be a piece of cake. We’re just going to go watch these old classic films, and we’re just going to basically recreate the houses and the environments that the early Disney characters lived in. We quickly realized that pretty much Mickey and Goofy and Donald lived in Pasadena. I mean, the backgrounds were not funny, and there was no sort of continuous Mickey House that they would live in.

So we thought, okay, how can we bring this idea of going into this cartoon world, but not terrifying people with giant faced, googly eyed houses that animate and also not drop pianos on people. So that’s where Toon Town evolved from. Also we had Disneyland operations was really motivated to have everything be as interactive as possible, which was not traditional for them. Usually a lot of expensive interactivity is something you see from a boat that’s happening away from you that you can’t touch.

They wanted to fill this land with things that you could actually pull on, make explode, press buttons, step on things, and have the land feel very interactive. So we had that as marching orders too. We also, under Joe’s creative leadership, we had a whole lot of show designers that were working on, and I was just one of many. So we all threw ourselves into designing all the various pieces and did our best to make an entire land.

The one other thing that came, it was that rides tended to take upwards of five years from concept to opening. Since Michael came from the movie business, he didn’t understand this taking forever to make something. So we had a 23-month deadline between concept and opening. Amazingly we did it, although Roger Rabbit did open up, I think nine months or a year later. So the attraction itself came a little bit later, but the land itself was sort blew itself out of the ground. Once again, it was one of those fast track projects that nobody was messing with. We kind of got away with whatever we came up with.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, it’s, I mean, I was looking at a concept art you did for the outside of Roger Rabbit’s Cartoon Spin, and it looks like it had a second level for it. Was there even more grand plans for the outside of that and how it would work?

Don Carson: Yeah, that’s an interesting story. Originally, the idea was that the attraction was two levels that you would go up, and then if you look at the Toontown downtown area, there’s a definite balcony area up there. The idea was that this vehicle that was going to come careening and spinning would pop out of the electric company, would smash through I think the glass factory pop out again and then go back into the gag factory. So a lot of the exterior stuff had to be designed before the interior ride was its designed was finished. What they realized once they started to lay the attraction out, the amount of ramping it would take for that vehicle to get from the ground floor up to the second floor and then back down again meant that the entire square footage was nothing but ramps.

The entire ride would be going up and going down. So the structure had already been designed, so that building is much taller inside than the amount of scenery that we ended up putting in there because it was built for two stories. The balcony is there and is actually structural. The steel is there for that vehicle to ride up there on the balcony. Ironically, when Tokyo Disneyland decided that they wanted to have their own toon town, they wanted it exactly. So once again, we recreated that balcony despite the fact there was no intention of there ever being a second story part of that attraction.

Dan Heaton: That’s so interesting because yeah, those buildings kind of stand up. I wouldn’t say loom over you because again, that goes back to having pianos dropped on you or something, but they’re up really high. Then like you said, it’s more of a, I wouldn’t say standard dark ride, but it stays flat on the ground, so it’s an interesting thing. So I know you also did some concepts like you mentioned for where Mickey lives. So I wondered if you could talk a little bit about that kind of how that house or your vision for what the house would be.

Don Carson: When the project just started out, when we were just started to think what could this place look like? Joe asked me to draw Mickey’s house. So I just drew a yellow bungalow pulling from his colors really to a red roof and yellow walls for his buttons. So I did the initial sketch and then I went off and started working on the downtown area. Then a very talented, Imagineer then did five or 10 different versions of where that house could go as far as where did Mickey live. Does he live in a mansion? es guy? And they went through many iterations of what his house could look like. And then finally they went, well, why don’t we just go with Don’s first sketch? That was about all that went into it.

Jim Shull ended up being the art director for it, so he adapted the house to his style. But once again, it looks pretty much like that initial sketch. In fact, there’s actually a US patent for Mickey’s House that is that design. It’s nice to see that whenever toys come out that depict Mickey’s House that they’re pulling from that building as opposed to anything from the past.

Dan Heaton: Well, I guess you had it right the first time and then it just took a while to circle back to what, I wouldn’t say simpler, but with a classic feel to it.

Don Carson: Yeah, you never know. You just never know. Sometimes the first idea is the best. Sometimes it’s the 50th.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, exactly. So I believe you also worked kind of on a project called the Enhancements Program where you were kind of looking at smaller projects and doing concept for those. I’d love to hear about that if it’s something you want to talk about.

Don Carson: Sure. That was some of my absolute favorite work at Imagineering as an Imagineer. Chuck Ballew and I would once a year get flown out to Florida and we would walk through all of the parks and the water parks, and Michael had gifted each of the parks a certain budget each year specifically for enhancing the parks. The only stipulation was that we had to work with operations and that we had to decide between the two of us what to invest in.

So a creative Imagineers come in and they want bigger, more colorful new things, and operations is saying the pavement’s really bad in this area, and we need some more water fountains and the seats and adventureland need to be updated. So we would walk around and sort of take the list of the things that they would like us to do, and we came up with our own ideas, often 20, 30 different ideas for each park, and then they would vote what would get funded.

It was usually a really interesting mix of, we did the planters in Adventureland, but since we’re doing them, don’t just do concrete ones, let’s put a little sort of African motif in it. Or for Typhoon Lagoon, we need some waiting signs that have some information. Well, why don’t we make ’em look like surfboards? So every year we would go back and then we would get a tour of each of the parks, and they would point out the things that they did from the year previous. So there was a sort of catalog for each park of things they could spend money on to improve.

What was the nicest thing after doing that for several years was that even these little improvements, even though they may not have been noticed by anyone, but the annual pass holder, they always made the parks feel like there were always something new and fresh happening. They always felt like there was just something always going on toward the middle of the ‘90s, that program was shut down.

I don’t know if it’s been resurrected, but we love doing that work, and it introduced us to the operations folks at Walt Disney World. So we got to really know what it took for them to do their job, what was important. They also knew that we weren’t just people who flew in from California with big artist ideas that we’re not taking into consideration the realities of operating those parts.

Dan Heaton: Well, yeah, I mean, because it is something that as a guest, even if you don’t notice the signs or surfboards or however a shop is put together in a really interesting way, there’s something in the back of your mind that kind of senses when something just feels right or when something new is there, or there’s like you said, an energy to it, and it’s something where you feel it. It also, like you said, it makes it vibrant. I’m sure for you, it had to be exciting to kind of get a chance to just look at the parks and figure out what they might need or what they could use.

Don Carson: It was nice to be asked, what do you think we could do here? We need something in Main Street. What are your ideas for this? We would just throw out sketches. Often we would walk a park and then go back to the Imagineering offices, and then Chuck and I would just sit down with a sandwich and then produce as many sketches as we could, and they would all go into books for potential funding.

Dan Heaton: Wow. I hope they still do something like that. I’m not sure, but it sounds really exciting. Well, I wanted to talk about something you worked on that did not end up happening, which I know you did some concepts for the Disney’s America project, which still kind of fascinates me. I don’t know how much you did on that, but I’d love to hear about what you were kind of putting together for that.

Don Carson: Well, it was both Splash Mountain and Toontown sort of wrapped up about the same time. So the reality of working for a company like Imagineering kind of working at a studio where your movie is over and you’re looking for next project, there was this top secret project. It was code named Project V, and if anybody asked what it was for, it was called Project Venezuela. But the V actually stood for Virginia where the plot of land was that we were looking at. It was a small group.

It was mostly led by the Kirk brothers, Tim Kirk and Steve Kirk. And it had a small budget. The idea was to explore and see whether or not we could make something that wasn’t necessarily a traditional amusement park, but we called it a Renaissance Fair with a 400 million budget. So I had done renaissance fairs, and I knew that a lot of times we were working with a $20,000 budget.

So hey, $400 million, that’s a lot of money. We can do one heck of a Renaissance fair for that. So we wanted to see whether there was a way to create sort of a living history park where you could go and not only experience what it was like to live back then, but also to viscerally have these experiences that weren’t just a thrill for its sake. So we would sneak off to the separate building and produce sketches for what was that concept?

We did bring in traditional theme park stuff like roller coasters and big water spectacular shows in the lagoon. But the idea was that you would have a Williamsburg on the Disney budget kind of experience where you would be learning continuously from the participants and the cast members and transported back to these various time periods in the United States history.

Dan Heaton: It feels kind of like the next step after even some things at Epcot or also the Hall of Presidents and some of those earlier attractions to take it to another level. I know that some of the concepts ended up in a different form ending up in California Adventure and other places, but it’s too bad that just a different kind of park didn’t end up happening.

Don Carson: It’s not that it won’t, something like that couldn’t happen again. I think that if it hadn’t been for the loss of Frank and then the poor reception to the concept, I think the reception really was mostly for where it was being planned. Their neighbors were very powerful people. I think that probably it would’ve gone through and I think it would’ve been a good idea, but you never know. I mean, in my career, I’ve worked on hundreds of things, and I’d say that probably a couple handful went to a complete finish where you participated from concept through to opening day. It’s just the reality of the job. You’re always working on projects that could or could not get funded.

Dan Heaton: So I know we’ve talked mostly about your work in Imagineering, but I know you were there for about six years, but you’ve done so many other projects beyond that, including a lot for Universal Creative. I’m curious about of that other work, including what did you do for Universal when you were working for them?

Don Carson: The reason we ended up leaving Disney was that in the mid ‘90s, my son was born and my wife said, I don’t want to live in Los Angeles anymore. So I went to the brass at Imagineering and said, hey, you’ve trained me. I’m going to be living in another state. Is that okay? Could you imagine continuing to use me? They were like, no, not really. If you leave the area, we can’t imagine potentially using you, certainly not like we do now. So I found myself sort of leaving the industry and even Universal who I talked to at the time said, no, if you’re out of the area, I can’t imagine using you. So I actually went off and started working for video game companies initially for a company up here in Eugene, Oregon, which is what caused me to move here.

Then Microsoft and several other companies doing video game stuff. During that time period, all those theme park companies that said they wouldn’t use me said, well, okay, we’ll use you. So I actually found that I was working on many, many more different projects, more high profile projects than I was just at Disney just as a freelancer. I was also able to bring a lot of this new knowledge that I had gained by working in the video game world technologically and artistically to the projects I was working on.

The biggest challenge was because I wasn’t physically there, I needed to make them feel as though I was utterly completely accessible. That also my output was even greater than if I was constantly in meetings right there in the sea of cubicles that was working. So I had an opportunity to work on just tons and tons of stuff, lots of stuff that got built and also lots and lots of stuff that didn’t. And the only drawback was that when I was at Imagineering, I had the opportunity to take it from concept through hard hat wearing to ribbon cutting at the end.

And when I was a freelancer, I pretty much just did the concept end. Often I would produce artwork and then have to wait two years to find out whether any of it got into the project, which was also a little bit like Christmas because when it finally opened, you got to see whether something took or not,

Dan Heaton: Right? Yeah. Because you’re up on the front end and then you’re like, wow, hey, look what they did. That’s great.

Don Carson: They did ironically when you were done, they may not even remember you worked on it, but you remembered, oh, I came up with that. So I did a lot of that kind of stuff very, very early on working on projects that then it sort of became the seed that then grew it into something completely different.

I did some of the really early Cars Land sketches that don’t look anything like where it ended up being or the sort of glorious experience that it is right now, but the Midway Mania, I think it was originally called, but the Toy Story Mania, some early sketches with Kevin Rafferty and Robert Coltran and early art avatar stuff, and super early Harry Potter stuff. Then I continued to do that kind of work at the Hettema Group, which I’ve just, I think I celebrate six years there next year.

Dan Heaton: Well, excellent. You mentioned that you had worked in the video game industry, and I know you’ve done some work too on VR environments. I’m just curious, given your background in theme parks, there’s a lot of talk always, like right now, there’s a thing called The Void, which does virtual reality, that kind of technology. Do you think there’s a place for that given your experience in theme parks? I mean, I know they’re trying to do gaming even with the recent smugglers run where they’re kind of bringing some video gaming, but could they go to that same level that games do.

Don Carson: During the nineties when games went from sort of pong and Atari experiences to these sort of epic 40 hour plus console experiences? There was a real fear in the theme park business that there’s no way we could compete when the longest attraction we’d ever done was 15 minutes and here was something you could play at home on your couch for 40 hours. So there was sort of a drive to gamify some of the attractions, and you see that in Buzz Lightyear attraction and any place that gives you a score.

I think that the theme park business sort of shook itself of that toward the early two thousands and realized that what was unique about the theme park business was that the tangibility of that, the group experience of you sitting next to someone rubbing elbows and being able to look at each other in the eye and point out what was going on.

So I think that the secret sauce for theme parks is that environmental piece. It doesn’t mean that we aren’t going to see, and we’re already seeing VR and those kind of technologies as part of the experience, but I think they’re going to be initially a supplementary to the experience. I think that there needs to be a physical, tangible place you walk through before you put on that headset and have that virtual experience, or maybe the virtual experience is something that it’s just a small part of a larger experience.

I think really when you look at Rise of the Resistance, it’s kind of a VR experience itself. It has lots of screens, there’s lots of stuff going on. It’s sort of tour de force collection of every possible effect you can imagine in one amazing package. But really what interests me the most about VR is its use in the design process.

So the advantage that having worked in these sort of virtual world projects was that ultimately my job description is to communicate an idea to sort of an army of various disciplines and have that initial idea come out the other end looking like the spark that started the whole concept. So while when I started out in my career in the mid eighties, the tool that I used was a pen and paper and then watercolors and illustrations.

Now, I often work in 3D models that are supplemented with illustrations, but the advantage to the 3D model is that then I can hand it to an architect and engineer sometimes days into concept and have them participate as an equal creator in that finished product. And what VR allows me to do is I can actually walk and ride through attractions at their earliest conception. One of the realities of the business used to be that you do your very, very best with models and drawings and elevations to imagine what a space will be like.

But often it is not until the concrete’s poured and you’re walking around in the thing being built that you realize, oh, that tree’s in a bad place. Boy, I wish that was two feet over. Having it move two feet over is probably a $2 million investment; in VR it takes 10 seconds. What doesn’t work? So VR is starting to let us vet what an experience will be like, and it makes me on the creative end more confident that what comes out of the final, the process of building and the expense of building will resemble that initial concept.

So I just did a talk with a bunch of students at CalArts about launching into this industry, and my advice to them was to really love the process. Because if you define yourself on the medium, if I decided that I was just a watercolor artisan, that’s the medium I was going to work in, that I probably would be out of work right now that my job is to communicate my ideas visually, and we just can’t imagine in the next 5, 10, 15, 20 years what that’s going to be or what the attractions are that we’re designing for, whether or not it’s going to feed right into our neural implant or whether or not we’re going to be put into a vat of jelly and transported to the world of pirates.

We just don’t know. But what we do know is that the skills that we have as artists and as storytellers will still be used to help communicate what that experience would be like. It’s just that the tools themselves will evolve over time. Did I answer your question? Probably not.

Dan Heaton: No. That was much better than I ever could have expected. That was a great answer. Yeah, I could take this so many different ways. But that’s really interesting because you mentioned earlier about enhancements and that group you worked on where you were kind of bridging the gap between operations and the creative side. I think what you described a little bit with the VR part of that with design is not just with operations, but with the tree example, is that you’re also kind of bridging again, that gap where things that open hopefully, I mean there’s always going to be that handover, but it’s a lot more seamless because kind of functioning in this virtual world in a way before it starts.

Now, I’m sure there’s added challenges, like we’ve seen Rises of the Resistance appears to be an incredible attraction. But again, its technology is so far advanced that I don’t just want to talk about that, but it can have challenges with still operating and moving forward. So I think the things you described probably help with that because at least you’re able to do the planning upfront

Don Carson: Without a doubt. Well, the ability to preview media that are going to be on screens while wandering around in an environment, and also the ability to create a boat ride that has all the characters that are singing and dancing or talking on either side of the boat as you’re going through it, and you can actually hear the sound coming out of their mouths as you’re going by. That’s months into the design process. You just couldn’t do that 20 years ago. But it’s all tools that are available to us, and in many cases, they’re inexpensive or free tools. We live in a golden era as far as the tools we need to communicate ideas.

Dan Heaton: So on that note, you mentioned about talking at CalArts. Kind of one last big question here, but with technology changing so fast and the industry theme park design now is much more than just Disney. It’s museums and zoos and aquariums and spaces and cities. If someone was looking to go into theme park design, I mean, what should they even do? Because I feel like everything changes so much. You could go through four years of college and it’s completely different than when you started. What advice would you give just based on what you know?

Don Carson: At Disney, there were 300 different potential jobs that you could have, and not all of them worked on the artistic end. There are many, many other positions, and I often get sort of email requests from students that are about to launch themselves into the world. My advice is always lead with your passion. Because if you’re really, really doing something you’re really interested in, it isn’t a job. And if you’re into sound design, there’s no reason that that sound design couldn’t be utilized in a theme park environment. Or if you’re a producer type person, you like to manage people and you like working with creative people and also more engineers and architects, then there’s no reason not to push that and see whether or not your skills could be used towards doing theme park work artistically.

My training was in storytelling on a two dimensional form, but we used composition and value and perspective and all these sort of theatrics that were on an illustrated surface that then we could apply to the rides we were creating. So when you go through Splash Mountain, those figures are orchestrated to be where your eyes are going to look next. And all the color choices were meant to pull you through that environment beyond the limitations of the structure that it’s in. So today, even though my tools have changed, all that storytelling stuff I learned in college is utterly used.

It’s just used in a different way. And I’d say that if we were doing VR or we were doing some other thing, the greatest gift I gave myself was those years of education that taught me the skills that I use every day. And also, I think another thing too is that you cannot guess where your career is going to go. I certainly couldn’t have guessed where mine was going to go. The job you have tomorrow could not have been done by you without the jobs you had prior.

No matter how incredibly unrelated they may have seen through your relationship with other humans and learning how to work with them or skills and tools you learned along the way. I am better today than I was yesterday because what I did yesterday, and so I am kind of just open now to whatever knocks on the door, no matter how unrelated it is, whether it’s for theme parks or museums or restaurants or whatever at theaters, because I know that I can bring with it those years of experience that I started with when I was two years old when I was sketching.

Dan Heaton: Well that’s great and I think that’s a perfect place to end this conversation. I want to make a pitch just to the listeners for your website, doncarsoncreative.com and your blog, which is a themed environment at blogspot.com. I spent a lot of time kind of looking at a lot of what you wrote there, and I think you do a great job expanding on some of the concepts that we just talked about, and so it’s a great tool for people that are interested in the topic, and it’s been awesome to talk with you, Don. This has been great.

Don Carson: Well, thank you. Well, the blog is, I was bitten by the teaching bug, so I keep wanting to share, but the stuff that I share is really obscure, and so if you want to get really in the weeds of some of the esoteric aspects of theme park design, my messy blog is sort of a brain dump of years worth of experience doing that, and I have to apologize for the website because it hasn’t been touched since the late nineties.

It’s so old that there’s even a section in it that says computer, because computers were a new thing when that was built. Also one of the things that they don’t talk a lot about is that I work in an industry that is often under NDA, so nondisclosure agreements, so much work I can’t show anybody. So there’s a lot of old stuff on my website that was from a time period when I could.

Dan Heaton: I will just say knowing the little bit I do about the listeners of this podcast, I think they’ll find some things to enjoy, and also with the blog, it’s okay to get a little esoteric or a little in the weeds because that is what I think a lot of people are looking for. So I wouldn’t apologize for that. I think it’s awesome.

Don Carson: Oh, great. Well, thanks.

Dan Heaton: Alright, well, Don, thanks so much. This was a blast.

Don Carson: Thanks so much, Dan.