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If you’ve enjoyed nighttime entertainment at Walt Disney World or Disneyland, there’s a good chance that Don Dorsey helped create it. During more than 45 years working with Disney and other companies, he has played a key role in shaping parades and fireworks shows at theme parks and beyond. Don is my guest on this episode of the Tomorrow Society Podcast to talk about some highlights from his diverse career as a sound designer and audio engineer. There’s so much to cover, especially at EPCOT.
Don joined Disney in 1975 after being discovered by Jack Wagner, the voice of Disneyland. He started out by developing a new approach to audio for America on Parade, which celebrated the Bicentennial. His innovative process continued with the Main Street Electrical Parade as it returned to Disneyland. Don talks about creating the fanfare for the opening that has become a highlight. His Opening Window process was also used when the parade began at Walt Disney World.
Our conversation focuses on Don’s work for EPCOT, beginning with support for Carnival de Lumiere in 1982. Don partnered with Adam Bezark to develop the next World Showcase Lagoon shows, A New World Fantasy and Laserphonic Fantasy. A big change happened with the original Illuminations, which opened in 1988. Don talks about changes to spotlight the individual countries. These steps led to the achievements of Illuminations: Reflections of Earth. We focus on how that remarkable show developed along with the Millennium Celebration. Finally, Don and I cover the long process to bring Fantasmic! to life at Disneyland. I really enjoyed the chance to learn more about Don’s incredible career.
Show Notes: Don Dorsey
Learn more about Don Dorsey’s work for Disney and beyond at his official website.
Join the “Fans of Don Dorsey” group on Facebook to learn more about his career.
Listen to other interviews with Don Dorsey on the Progress City Radio Hour, Tammy Tuckey Show, and WDW Radio podcasts.
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Transcript
Don Dorsey: When the first opening window happened at the Electrical Parade in 1977 on Main Street at Disneyland, I was on Main Street behind the audience. And when the oscillator sweep goes down and the lights go out and the tempo starts and people start clapping, that’s my payoff. My payoff is the audience really getting it and really falling into sync with what we’re trying to accomplish and having the time of their lives. That’s my payoff.
Dan Heaton: That is Don Dorsey, and you’re listening to The Tomorrow Society Podcast.
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Dan Heaton: Hey there, thanks for joining me here on Episode 191 of the Tomorrow Society Podcast. I am your host, Dan Heaton. My guest today is Don Dorsey, here to talk about more than 40 years of work on many of the nighttime parades and spectaculars that we love, starting with his work on America on Parade way back in 1975 and then Main Street Electrical Parade. He made some big changes that now we consider just part of the show, including the opening, which has become so iconic. And then we dive into a lot of shows from Epcot, starting with Carnival de Lumiere, A New World Fantasy, Laserphonic Fantasy, the original illuminations, and we focus on Illuminations Reflections of Earth, which is my favorite all-time nighttime show at Disney. It’s not even that close.
If that wasn’t enough, we finished with a little bit of talk on Don’s work on Fantasmic. And what’s crazy, as Don will note at the end, is that what we covered is just a small percentage of all the things he’s done in his career. And I really enjoy getting insight, especially with Reflections of Earth about the way it came together and Don’s thoughts on what were some of the big ideas that led to that show. Lots of great insights and stories here for Don’s career. Can’t wait for you to hear it. So let’s get right to it. Here is Don Dorsey.
(music)
Dan Heaton: Don, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
Don Dorsey: My pleasure, Dan. Good to talk to you.
Dan Heaton: Oh, definitely. There’s so much to cover, but I’d like to know even upfront, I mean, how did you get interested in working in audio or entertainment? I mean, back when you were kind of growing up and then getting in school?
Don Dorsey: Well, I was originally given piano lessons by my mother, and interestingly, the bribe for taking the piano lessons was that I wanted to get my hands on an album by Soupy Sales. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Soupy Sales show, but he had a couple of puppets, White Fang and Black Tooth, and they did a routine where they appeared through the window and he had dialogue with them. And that puppet show just sort of fascinated me, and I wanted to get the record album of that.
My mother said, well, we have this piano and you’ve been plunking out notes on the piano since kindergarten, so maybe there’s something here. Let’s get you some lessons and I’ll buy you the album. It started there with the fascination of, I guess you say show business and music and progressed through piano lessons through high school, becoming interested in music and arranging, and I played guitar, The Beatles came out, and I was fascinated by that.
So I took up guitar, I played bass guitar, I took up drums, I played trumpet, and I had to do the trumpet so that I could get into the marching band and into the orchestra and be seriously considered a musician by my high school. And so I started composing and then I started studying composition across the street at Cal State Fullerton while I was still in high school and became more and more interested and would check out scores from the library and study the orchestration.
I had arranged some halftime shows for the high school marching band after I got out and was in college. And then along came the Minimoog synthesizer, which a friend introduced me to, and I had to have it, took that home, started learning everything about it and thought, got a wild, crazy idea that maybe we could do a Minimoog in a halftime show.
So I pitched that to the high school and they said, you got to be nuts. That’s there’s got to be amplifiers and wires and power and all kinds of things that we don’t do at halftime shows. Well, not so anxious to give up on that idea. I went to Fullerton College, which is the junior college in my hometown. And because I was in the Orange County Youth Philharmonic Orchestra at the time, I knew the band director at FJC and I said, how about a halftime show for you with a synthesizer?
And he said, no, there’s wires and cables and amplifiers and things that we don’t do, but we do have a concert band and if you would like to do a solo performance with the concert band, we can do that. That’s ultimately what led to Jack Wagner from Disney discovering and offering me the job working on America on Parade.
Dan Heaton: So I mean, that’s crazy that all that interest ultimately led you to America on Parade, so which is such an iconic Disney parade from the bicentennial and so memorable in that way. But when you went and worked on that, how did you go about working on the sound for that and ultimately helping to make that develop?
Don Dorsey: Let me back up just a little bit. In 1973, this is the second year of the original Main Street Electrical Parade. I had gone to Disneyland with some friends with the intent of spending all day from opening to close riding on every ride, seeing every attraction, doing absolutely everything. And one of the things that we did was sit on the curb and wait for the Main Street Electrical Parade to come along. And of course, by this time I’d already had my Minimoog and had been working with it. Down the street came this incredible experience like nothing I’d ever seen.
I sort of at that moment had an inkling, if not a vision of what my future career might entail. And though I never set out intentionally to become part of Disney, I had a bigger picture in my mind of what synthesizer work and live entertainment could entail. So when Jack Wagner discovered me and said, I may have a job for you, of course I lit up and I am thinking, okay, what is it? What is it? I want to get involved. And that became America on Parade, but ultimately led to my ability to partake in the return of the Main Street Electrical Parade in 1977.
Dan Heaton: Sure, yeah. And the Main Street Electrical Parade just being that it was returning to Disneyland after America on Parade, but it was starting at Walt Disney World, but it had already been in place. But I know you were involved in changing a lot with the soundtrack and kind of updating it for that new version. So when you approached that, what were you kind of thinking or what ended up happening were the changes you were making?
Don Dorsey: Part of my duties for America on Parade involved trying to figure out how to coordinate this incredibly long introduction that Bob Jani had devised. It was seven and a half minutes how to coordinate that with the arrival of the parade at each of the five distinct park areas so that guests would not be waiting for the parade to arrive. The overture would finish and the parade would be there. And originally I said, tell me more about what that means because in Town Square, what are people going to do when the seven-and-a-half-minute finishes, if the parade is just now stepping off “it’s a small world”?
And he said, well figure that out. So that became my gig was to figure out how to back time all of these seven-and-a-half-minute intros for five different areas of the park. So I stood on the rooftop with a headset and a stopwatch, and throughout the entire run of America on Parade was in charge of calling those audio cues eventually down the road.
This led to in my brain figuring out how to put all of this on computers so that it wasn’t necessary for people to be making these decisions when the timing was pretty much known. And the return of the Electrical Parade, of course, had no intro at that time. The original was simply a fade up in each of the park areas. That was one of the things that had struck me when I started thinking about it was how do we kick this parade off and give it a bit more showbiz, appeal an overture, if you will.
So I created the fanfare and the technology, which we call the opening window, that allows us to get into a continuous loop without being continuous and the ability to do that every minute and three seconds anywhere along the parade route that the parade happened to be approaching. So that was sort of the kickoff when I pitched that to Bob, he said, well, that’s a great idea. Let’s do that. And so they liked the fanfare and Jim Christensen approved and they sort of handed me the keys to remix the music, do the synthesizer for the new units, the new arrangements, and just went on from there.
Dan Heaton: Well, you mentioned the timing. I mean, how challenging was it, especially given the technology for the seventies to have it where it would be synchronized where this new level of sound would actually work? Because it seems like you were doing things and coming through things that were not that common for Disney parades or parades in general at the time.
Don Dorsey: Yeah, I think prior to the original Electrical Parade, parade music was basically small onboard self-contained sound systems or a live band, some sort of live music. There wasn’t any coordination between the wayside or the building side and the parade flows that came down the street. The original Electrical Parade changed that and adopted what is basically “small world” in reverse where instead of riding through different scenes, the scenes go past you and you stand still and they use 35 millimeter Mag Stripe film tape. It was sprocketed.
So they could hook up all of these loops and run them together. Then that was transferred to a multi-track tape that actually played back the parade through FM broadcast onto the floats. But those float sound systems were a little bit limited because as you know, batteries were new and they had to deal with not just sound on the floats, but all the lights as well. So they said, well, we need to support this with wayside. Jack Wagner found this tune Baroque Hoedown, and so they constructed a loop from that and built the arrangements on that, and that was the original Electrical Parade.
Dan Heaton: Well, I know after that you also worked some additions and some updates. So I mean what stands out from in Tokyo and then other areas where you were able to then go in and make changes or work on different things for the Electrical Parade?
Don Dorsey: The Orange Bowl stands out because in that case, I had to sort of reverse what I’d done with the opening window and create a closing window because there was no potential to fade out in a halftime show. So I had to tack on the back end of Baroque Hoedown on what I had done at the front end and create an ending. And Bob Jani eventually decided that should be part of the parade as well. So we had to go back and install that in the regular production.
The other thing that happened in 1978, which was the year of the Orange Bowl, was that Battlestar Galactica came on TV and the Cylon bad guys had this electronic voice, and I thought immediately, hey, I’m going to add that to the fanfare and take that whole thing electronic and make that a new opening for the parade.
Dan Heaton: That’s great. I mean, I always just assumed because growing up in the ‘80s that that was always part of it because it’s such like the fanfare, it’s such an iconic part of the parade. And then I’ve heard the soundtrack a million times too. So the fact that that was added due to Battlestar Galactica is I had not heard that before. That is a fun tidbit and it worked out really well. I think the parade, it introduces it so well,
Don Dorsey: It seems to have caught on as sort of the standard. I mean, we’ve seen how many versions of the parade now around the world, and they all really pick up on that aspect of not just the electronic voice, but the whole fanfare process. And after we did the opening window gag with Electrical Parade, every parade since at Disney has used the same technique with an overture that segues directly into a loop that’s already been running since the parade stepped off at the other end of the park.
Dan Heaton: So interesting. So the Main Street Electrical Parade, I mean, we just saw again, a new version that ran at Disneyland last year. It has so much longevity, and to me, even when they add new movies, still feels really classic. Why do you think the parade has been able, there’s so many parades have come and gone, but that one in particular still has been able to come back and has so many people clamoring for it at any park across the world?
Don Dorsey: I think there’s a couple of reasons. I think first of all, it’s got a great tune and a lot of people think they know how to sing it when then they try and it doesn’t quite work, but they sort of have that sense in their body of what it’s kind of like, and they are attracted to that. There’s another aspect which is I think nostalgia. The original had tiny Christmas lights, and I think there was a feeling that if I had enough Christmas lights and enough willpower, I could build one of those floats myself in my garage.
It was several years before Disney sort of picked up on that in one of their advertisements for the parade, and they actually showed a family creating their own parade float in the garage, and I thought that was spot on. Then of course, there’s just the tradition of the next generation being exposed to it by their parents and there’s nothing quite like it. It’s just lights in the darkness works almost every time you try it.
Dan Heaton: I agree. Those are all great reasons. Yeah, because taking my girls and I saw it as a kid and then they saw it before, especially before it stopped at Disney World. I hope it comes back more; I mean, I like new parades, don’t get me wrong, but it’s fun to have that too, to have that balance. I think with that and the original kind of classic parade.
Don Dorsey: Enthusiasm is contagious.
Dan Heaton: Yes. People like something, other people like it. Well, I wanted to switch over and talk to you about Epcot because you worked on so many of the nighttime shows at Epcot, and just fast forwarding a little bit to 1982 when Epcot was opening, and I know you worked with another guest of mine, Adam Bezark, pitching some concepts, but I’d love to hear you talk about that because the original show Carnival de Lumiere, but I know you were pitching ideas around that time and you were very involved in some way.
Don Dorsey (16:11): Adam and I had formed an informal partnership in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, just sort of palling around and talking about wild and crazy ideas. And I had met him when he was interning at Disneyland and we knew Epcot was coming up, and we knew there was this vast expanse of water that just cried out for something because it was the focal point.
Everybody all around the promenade could look toward the center and see something, and we thought, there really needs to be a show here. We were oblivious to the fact that there were already a show in production. So we made up our own and we made a little storyboard and we threw together some music and we marched into the office of Dennis Despie, who was the vice president at that time and boldly said, we think this should happen. And Dennis politely said, thank you very much, boys.
We’re on it. We’ve got something. And it’s already well down the road in production. Shortly after that time, about three or four months later, I got the call from Bob Jani who said, it’s my show. And because I had been involved in other technical aspects at Disneyland, programming fountains and things like that, I was called in to work with the fountain programming on the lagoon show. So I was involved with audio, water lighting, pretty much all around technical helper guy.
That show had a number of problems, not the least of which was that at 600 feet distance, a standard home Kodak Ektagraphic projector isn’t going to be very successful at projecting across the vast expanse of, and indeed, that’s what happened. The images that were part of the show were extremely detailed and complex and was nearly impossible to determine what it was you were looking at.
But everybody loved the music and I thought, okay, that’s great. And then because of the poor visuals, the show was closed, we stood on the railing at World Showcase Plaza with Dick Nunis and Card Walker and all the executives who sort of looked at each other and went, well, we got to replace that with something else, and my heart dropped. I thought, okay, well, there goes six months of work on the music track. But when I came home, Adam and I had a conversation and we thought, maybe this is our chance. If they like the music, let’s throw together a storyboard and see if we can pitch it.
We did, and they bought it. So we became the show directors for the reincarnation of Carnival de Lumiere, which became a New World Fantasy opening in the summer of 1983. Then that show became so successful that everybody came out of the shops and restaurants in order to stack the north shore and watched the show from there because it was a proscenium presentation across from Mexico to Canada, and we were told we have to do something in the round because we want people to stay in the shops and stay in the restaurants until showtime.
So that became Laserphonic Fantasy, and that evolved over three years until marketing came up with the idea of the name Illuminations. And Adam and I were called to say, okay, we have a name. What is the show? So we created the Illuminations Show from that prompt,
Dan Heaton: The idea, remember seeing, I think it was Laserphonic Fantasy because I going as a kid in like ‘86, that timeframe with the lasers and the projections and everything else, and it still felt like it was way ahead of what I was seeing anywhere else. So I mean, how complicated was it to work on that kind of technology and make it across this giant World Showcase Lagoon where like you said, it’s not like we’re standing 10 feet from each other that someone could actually see something?
Don Dorsey: Well, as we were thinking about moving into lasers, we did a number of tests, and one of the tests we did quite by accident ended up shooting a laser through some water mist and finding out that it would make an image. And so we said we got to have that in the show. That’s magical. That’s really unique. When we figured out how to put high powered lasers on a barge in the middle of the lagoon where there was no power before, we had the ability to rear project onto water screens on the four barges, and that sort of became the signature of Laserphonic Fantasy.
We of course had beams in the air and we had all of that. We had the original music track still kept from Carnival de Lumiere, but the lasers really made an impressive difference, not just in the fact that this was the first water screen use, but the fact that we were doing beams in the air on such a large scale really seemed to make an impact.
Dan Heaton: That’s what I remember as much as anything of the lasers shooting across the lagoon and up in the air and being thinking, I mean it fit with Epcot because Epcot already kind of seemed ahead of its time, but doing that was classic. Well, you mentioned Illuminations and having the name when you were trying to develop, what ideas did you have that ultimately either didn’t make it or ended up as part of the Illuminations show?
Don Dorsey: Oh boy. I’d have to go back and look through my notes for all of those things, but we very quickly arrived at the idea that it was some sort of a world tour, and then the question became what’s the best way to accomplish that? Eisner was a fan of the Laserphonic soundtrack, and so he was reluctant to change the music, but with the addition of all of the different pavilions, it really sort of required that we pay homage with pieces that were appropriate for each culture.
So the order was given keep the first and third movements that Eisner likes and make the second movement the world tour and do the individual tunes. Of course the first and third movements being synthesizer. We couldn’t do that with the second movement because it wouldn’t be culturally appropriate. So now the first and third movements became orchestrated and the whole soundtrack became full orchestra.
We did a lot of debate about how to do a world tour. Do we use hot air balloons behind the pavilions and truck them around so they’re tethered, no, that’s going to be a wind problem, a sight line problem. We ended up using synchro lights so that we had the ability to put lights in the sky and then swoop them down and point at each pavilion, and we introduced the idea of each pavilion having its own introduction in the appropriate language. So we had a multi-zoned audio track that introduced the show, and we used kids from the college program that worked at each pavilion to provide the opening to the show.
Dan Heaton: Well, that’s the part that really stands out to me about that Illuminations is that middle part with the countries, because it feels like, I mean, you had to make it so big so that people standing in Canada could see what was happening on Mexico or wherever. Was that a challenge at all to find things like a projection or something like the U.S. Capitol or whatever, that’s big enough for someone to be able to see it from anywhere?
Don Dorsey: Yeah, it was difficult and some pavilions you just can’t see from other pavilions, so we knew that some of the time people would not be able to see, and it was important that we laid out the pattern of here’s what we’re going to do. Look at this pavilion. Now the lights swoop somewhere else. And even though you might not be able to see it, that there’s a pavilion happening and you can tell from the music which country it is.
There were only a couple of pavilions that we were able to actually use a large scale projection on, and that was Germany and America and Canada. So for the rest of those, we had to add light screens, which is sort of Electrical Water Pageant technology where they would fold up on the rooftops and give us some additional graphic capability as part of each pavilion’s feature.
Dan Heaton: So basically on the top of each pavilion, you’d have a screen that would be rolled up during the day and then roll out for the show and then roll back afterwards. Is that, I mean, that’s interesting. I’m just curious.
Don Dorsey: They would fold up, they were hinged and they would fold up from the rooftop just prior to show. Interesting.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, that’s really interesting. I hadn’t thought of it that way, how you were able to do that. It’s Disney magic. I didn’t think about that side of it, but I think that’s a really clever way to do it and still be able to project, like you mentioned.
Don Dorsey: Well, it added a dimension of height that some of the pavilions did not have. It added more color because just lighting up a pavilion, it’s going to be its natural color or you’re going to have one or two color overlays, which we did, but it gave you something that you could animate. In other words, if it was fireworks, they would be animated fireworks. If it was a cuckoo clock on Germany, then the pendulum would swing and the cuckoo bird would pop out. So we had some different tricks that we were able to spread amongst all the pavilions and try and use to each best advantage.
Dan Heaton: So you referenced the music, which again, the classical music from the older shows and then everything, and just in general, I feel like what stands out to me about Illuminations too and even the older shows is they were very sublime. They didn’t, a lot of firework shows. 4th of July, wherever you feel like you’re being assaulted with fireworks, where I never felt that way at Epcot. Was that something you consider just the idea of we’re in Epcot, so this needs to have this classical feeling with the music and what we do?
Don Dorsey: Yes, from the beginning, from the very beginning of Epcot, there was a reverence or a majesty for the wonders of the world, if you will, because World Showcase was paired with Future World. We really felt that World Showcase needed to have its own character related to the world and culture more so than technology. Epcot has a natural division between the cultural aspects and the technology aspects, and both are part of life, and that’s why the park seems to work as a whole. But World Showcase to us always felt that it needed to have some acknowledgement of the universality of man, and that really informed all of our approaches to it.
Dan Heaton: Well, excellent. Well, I think that leads well into Illuminations: Reflections of Earth and the Millennium Celebration and everything evolving with that because I feel like that show kind of fits with what you were just covering. I know you were very involved overall in the Millennium Celebration, so I’d love to hear a little bit about your experience getting started on that a few years before, and then Reflections of Earth.
Don Dorsey: Well, since you mentioned the early Lagoon shows, I recently went back and revisited the imagery from New World Fantasy, which was the first really Epcot summer show. There’s a surprising similarity in the overarching story to Reflections of Earth, which I had not been conscious of at the time while I was doing it, but we’re telling basically the same story by presenting familiar images that people will connect with throughout the earth globe section. And the similarities are both astounding and amusing at the same time. The way we had to do it with slides, clunky slide projectors versus actual moving video on a rotating earth is quite striking, and yet one can’t help but recognize the similarities in the story of humanity on earth that we were trying to tell in the early days with the tools we had.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, it’s a great connection given that more technology, but still that kind of fundamental story. And speaking of the technology, I’ve heard about Don D’s Inferno, which is the fire effects. What led to creating that part of it because those fire effects are such a big part of Reflections of Earth?
Don Dorsey: Well, okay, so you asked about leading up to the millennium and my involvement in all of that, so I’m going to have to take a step back here and run up into this story. Bob Jani was always thinking way into the future. He had a five-year plan, he had a 10-year plan. He had in the ‘80s a plan for the Millennium, and I never saw it, but I knew that it existed. I became very curious because it was obvious to me that I was going to live long enough hopefully to see that. So I started pondering probably in the early ‘90s, what is the millennium all about? Is it just the number rolling over; is it just a bigger anniversary or is there some reason that we should stop and take notice of this moment?
Is there anything there? What does it mean? Why do I care? Why would anybody care? And then when Disney decided to get involved, they’re asking the same questions. Why do we care? What does it mean to Disney? What’s the association between the Walt Disney Company and the fact that we’re passing through a millennium? I was on several committees. There was an actual millennium committee with about a dozen people from entertainment and business and so on, and we tossed around ideas and we compiled a book of suggestions and things, and I did some consulting for Disney Corporate about their ideas about, are you doing around the world, small world? Are you doing around the world fireworks? We had been working on the air launch fireworks technology for a while, and it was thought that that could be a major contribution by Disney.
So I pitched a massive takeover of all the parks, all the Disney parks with air launch fireworks, and we talked about doing air launch fireworks all around the world, all kinds of millennium ideas were being thrown around. And I’m still stuck on, yeah, but what does it mean to me as a person ultimately without belaboring the point that got whittled down to the fact that I suppose what it means to me is that I’m here at this particular point in time, so many people have lived and died through the course of history and never seen anything quite like this or lived through this kind of a moment.
But what is the essence of this moment? And the moment is connecting the past to the future, which is an idea similar to marriage, it’s akin to marriage. When we went to write the song of meaning, my internal dialogue was to write a wedding song, marrying the past to the future, crossing the boundary, making a commitment. The commitment is that we should be better every day when we say goodnight and go to sleep, we wake up with an opportunity to make the next day better, to create something new, to expand ourself. And so that became my sort of internal mantra.
The millennium is about moving forward and improving, and the stark reality of humanity on a planet in the universe spinning around the sun is that we go on, we keep surviving. We’re always here to try better, to try and do it again to improve ourselves. So all of this came together in the vision for what became Reflections of Earth. How do we tell this story? How do we communicate this idea without being too rah rah, it’s the millennium about it; how do we put a feeling into the audience that makes them feel a part of the Earth’s larger story and try and inspire them moving forward to become part of the Earth’s future story? And then fire was presented as an option. So I said, okay, let’s do that.
Dan Heaton: I feel silly. That was such a good answer, and I asked you about the fire. It’s like you gave such a better answer than what I asked. That’s great.
Don Dorsey: Well, so let’s talk about the fire.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, go ahead.
Don Dorsey: Lots of ideas have been tossed around about what Disney was going to do in the Lagoon for the Millennium, and I wasn’t part of that. I was part of the air launch project and thinking about corporate millennium ideas and fireworks around the world and what does it mean to Disney? But the show that was being planned for Epcot for the Millennium ran into severe technical difficulties, like it was impossible to engineer. There was a limited amount of money available. Finally, Disney decided, well, given the fact that we don’t really understand what this is and the fact that there’s only so much money we want to spend, let’s concentrate it all at Epcot rather than a whole Disney company thing.
So Epcot became the focus, and the show under consideration was not doable. They needed something because I had been around all the discussions of all the events for all of the Millennium, I volunteered an idea because I had been through the lagoon show hopper with Adam for many, many years. I had a really good sense of the stage and what things cost and what the practicalities were. It was known that whatever you’re going to bring into the lagoon has to fit through the China bridge. There’s power out there now that we put for Laserphonic. What can we do with that? What can we do that doesn’t mess up the view during the day as much as possible?
So we put all of these in my mind, all of these ideas came together. We’d need a centerpiece. We had a fiber optic globe that never really did much, never really shined the way that we had hoped it would, but now we have the capability to build an actual globe and have it mean something, have it tell its own story. We’ve never done fire in the lagoon. We could do fire. And as I’m thinking about all these things, the story sort of fell together.
Well, you start with the creation of the earth and then you present the earth and then you talk about where the earth is going. It just became so obvious that that’s the story we need to tell. And in the course of doing that, if we can bring people in by showing them familiar images, not say anything about it, just let them recognize it and go, oh, I know that. I recognize that; I recognize that. I know we’re moving through history; I get it. Then add the torches and add the 20th torch at the end. Now maybe subliminally people are figuring out what’s going on and symbolically recognizing that it’s the millennium and then hopefully becoming inspired by the song and the finale and all the voices coming in. The song at the end is the first time you hear voices in the show.
Dan Heaton: So well done the song, I mean, you referenced it that I know you were closely involved as “We Go On”. So brings everything together so well. And I don’t want to jump past the globe though because I feel like the fact that, I mean that globe though, it looks small in the lagoon, is very big, very big. I’ve been there where you stop in the path and it goes in during the day in front of you. Being able to take a globe like that and project images that we can see from all over. I’m sure that had to be another step too, because that’s something that we hadn’t really seen at least on a show before.
Don Dorsey: When we started developing the show, it was 1997. This is 25 years ago now. The technology was really quite primitive. LEDs were new. You may have seen them on free t-shirt signs along 192, we brought a bunch of different LED technology out to Disney World and looked at it from 600 feet away to see what was bright enough, what had enough resolution, what sort of images could we communicate at that distance.
We really looked carefully at those choices and we decided we had to build our own sign. If it’s going to fit on the earth, it’s going to be one pixel at a time until we create the earth. And there was a whole design process where we created a four-foot-diameter styrofoam ball and painted it to look like the earth so that we had an artistic interpretation that moved the continents further south where they don’t actually live, but where we needed to put the images.
Then we debated whether the images were going to be in the oceans or on the continents. And I insisted that be on the continents because that’s where people live and that’s where these things that we’re going to show are going to happen. The size was pretty well determined because of the China bridge, so it was going to be this big, it had to be able to drive for the first time we were going to have a barge that moved during the show.
We’re going to have a moving set piece that meant there had to be a driver who was going to be in the middle of a lagoon during fireworks. So there had to be a place for him to hide. During that part of the show, there were all kinds of things to think about, including how fast is the earth going to rotate, which direction is it going to rotate?
Well, that’s got to be the right direction. And as we thought about the resolution and trying to communicate, we realized that there’s a persistent division effect with a rotating globe where there’s a blurring that happens in the brain in the eyeballs, so you don’t have to worry quite as much about the resolution because there’s a natural blurring that happens in people’s perception. And that worked to our advantage. The minute the globe stands still, you start to see all the dots, but while the globe is spinning, you tend to see the images.
So then it was just a question of what’s the highest resolution that we can afford that is still functions as a communication device. And we basically arrived at 360 degrees around, so we’ll put a pixel at every degree of rotation, same from top to bottom. So the resolution on the earth globe is really only 180 by 360, which is pretty low resolution when it comes down to it. And yet it still is quite effective at showing what needs to be shown.
Dan Heaton: It really provides an important part of the show and is memorable. And speaking of that, just in general, I mean, I know the show lasted 20 years basically through September 2019. How long did you anticipate it was going to last? I know it was much less than 20 years, I suspect.
Don Dorsey: Well, I’ve heard various things. Originally we were told we’re designing a show to last five years, and that was theoretically how they arrived at the budget. Five years is worth this amount of money. They had already spent quite a bit of that money on the previous show that didn’t work out. So we had to go back and beg for the rest of the money back that they had already spent. If the show’s worth this for five years, then we want that full budget back.
The fact that you spent it already doesn’t matter to me. I’ve still got to produce a show. So five years was sort of the expectation. I’ve heard from other former executives that they thought maybe two years because it was a millennium thing that they would have to change it after two years. But of course, the hardware was built sturdy enough to last five years, and in fact, it lasted longer.
There were rebuilds. We rebuilt the fountain barges again, the same fountain barges that we started with for Carnival de Lumiere, just on their fifth generation. So we were all kind of surprised when it hit 10 and we had a party and I brought together all my creative team and we celebrated that we made it to 10 years. And then we thought, okay, so they’re working on something else. And at one point I had been approached by Anne Hamburger at Disney Creative to come up with what she called a refresh, but was actually turned out to be, she wanted a new show, and we pitched that to the Walt Disney World executive team and they said, oh, this is fantastic, but of course there’s no money, and they didn’t do it.
So we kept running and running and running and made it to a full 20 years, even though there were pieces and parts that had to go out for rehab, we lost the Inferno Barge for a couple of months due to a mishap. Other things happened, fireworks got replaced, and the show sort of evolved a little bit over the 20 years, but it remained at heart still the same.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, well, I had heard that you mentioned you actually got to see the final showing. I went in that September, but earlier in the month, not for the final one, but so what was that experience like for you to go and I believe with some other people who worked on it and actually witnessed the last show of a show that I think even now, I know we mentioned it lasted longer, but a lot of people look back and they’re like, man, I would wish I could still see that show.
Don Dorsey: Well, it’s on YouTube.
Dan Heaton: Yes, it is.
Don Dorsey: There’s some great 4K video on YouTube. One of our biggest fans, Cliff, who runs a cliffflix channel, has been shooting the show for 14, 15 years and has quite a library of footage, and he has assembled probably one of the best looking video presentations because he’s a true video technician and brings 4K and 8K cameras and does the show the way it should be done.
On the last night, we did a couple of things with the help of Walt Disney New World News today. Gavin Greenaway was there and talked about how we evolved through several iterations. Kellie Coffey was there and she sang live, and Gavin performed live for “Promise” and “We Go On”. We had Eric Tucker, the fireworks designer, talk about our challenges in that regard; we had Steve Felder, one of the barge engineers, talk about that.
We covered everything from behind the scenes and people could ask questions, and then we had an autograph signing session; we had special posters made, and it was a great day. Then everybody went out to see the show. After the all day event for the fans, I went to the Seas Pavilion and hosted a dinner for our production team, and it was mostly the same production team that we had celebrated with at 10 years. We had lost a couple, which is inevitable over time, but through the entire Epcot lagoon show history, starting with Carnival de Lumiere up through Reflections of Earth, many of the team members were the same. These were people that I had worked with for not just the 20 years of Illuminations, but the 15 years, 15, 20 years proceeding.
So it was a very emotional sort of reunion celebration, and then of course, a farewell to a show that we all loved and that many of the guests loved. And watching the earth globe leave the lagoon for the last time, I was just stunned at the amount of cheering and applause and reverence for the final goodbye. It was a very emotional evening and something that will never be forgotten, at least by me, and I think by everybody else who was there.
Dan Heaton: Oh, yeah. I mean, it was such a powerful show that connected with so many people and so glad it had such a long run and was able to play for such a long time. Well, I wanted to make sure to ask you a bit also about Fantasmic, which I know originated before Reflections of Earth, but it seems like it’s more in the consciousness now because at Walt Disney World, it just returned in a slightly new form, and I think people appreciate it more now.
I mean, they appreciate it then, but now I think people are having another, you mentioned nostalgia maybe, but it’s really cool that it’s there. But I know you got involved in developing a show way back in the ‘80s for the Disneyland version, and I’d love to know a little bit about that, about working on ideas that ultimately became fantastic much later.
Don Dorsey: Well, here comes Adam again. After we opened Illuminations at Epcot, we were approached to try and figure out what could possibly happen at Disneyland as a large scale event, something that was a little more hip, a little more on the edge, something a little less like Epcot and more like Disneyland. So we started thinking about where in the park would you do this? And of course, Main Street was tied up with parades and fireworks. So we thought, okay, the river area, we got a large viewing area, we got an island out there, we could create something staged on the island, what would it be? And we came up with the idea of the ghosts coming out of the Haunted Mansion and crossing over to the island and taking over the island in search of the 100th happy haunt. So we developed this show.
We had it fully storyboarded. We had a narrative presentation with music, and it went up the executive chain and up and up and up and just never stopped. And we did. We had the fire in the water; we involved the Columbia, we involved all of the effects that are in Fantasmic. We had pitched all of that. And then one day it was all shut down. It was like, no, we’re never going to drain the river. We’re never going to build an inlet; we’re never going to do that. We’re never going to do that. And so it laid dormant for a little while, and then one day, Barnette Ricci had the opportunity to pitch a river show to Michael Eisner.
Of course, on the back of all the research that Adam and I had done was all this knowledge about the watercraft that you had to have and the inlet that you had to make, and the river that you had to drain and the fire on the water and everything. She turned that into a more Disney theme show, which was of course appropriate for Disneyland. And so it became a different show, but it was coming out of a couple of years of research and development that Adam and I had done to get that started, get that kicked off, and get people thinking about doing a larger scale presentation with the island as the focus.
Dan Heaton: Well, you mentioned to the draining of the water and some of that, because that’s the thing, it’s not like Disney World with its own theater, but Tom Sawyer Island and using the ships. I mean, that’s to me a big benefit of Fantasmic, but I’m sure also had to be challenging even when you were developing that first show about how to do that, where it can be one thing during the day and something else at night, I would assume.
Don Dorsey: Yeah. Well, that was always the challenge was how do you take something that is one thing to guests during the day and transform it at night? That, of course was the magic. The fact that you are transforming the environment into something new. And transformation has always been, for me, one of the keys to any spectacular show, there has to be, for example, in Reflections, it’s the earth opening up at the end. It’s the one thing you didn’t count on happening, and along the riverfront at Disneyland, the one thing you didn’t even consider during the day was that there’s going to be ghosts or fire or anything like that when it gets to be nighttime.
So that component was always very important. And the logistics of figuring out how and when to shut down the island, how to stage cast members on and off of the ships and all of that stuff was stuff that we had started down the road to figure out, even going so far as to have a preliminary rehearsal schedule before it was deemed undoable, and then they did it.
Dan Heaton: In a different way. Yeah, but it’s so interesting. I’d love to see that Haunted Mansion show, though. That’s fascinating to me.
Don Dorsey: One of the things that you don’t get at Disney Studios in Florida is the element of transformation because you have an audience walking into a theater and they’re already primed for a show, and it almost doesn’t matter what you do. They want to be entertained, but you’ve lost that element of something magical that happens that’s unpredictable just by virtue of the fact that you’re sitting in a show presentation mode
Dan Heaton: Seeing it at Disneyland, especially even if you’re doing something else and you walk up and all of a sudden the show starts. You can’t recreate that even a little bit in World Showcase with Reflections of Earth. The idea of you might come out of a ride and the fire goes off. I mean, doing that in a park is really special.
Don Dorsey: Well, this is why atmosphere entertainment is so successful because it happens where you are and you may or may not have been expecting it, and it’s just a delight. It’s just a real crowd pleaser and a special moment, especially if there’s interaction.
Dan Heaton: So we’ve covered some of the biggest projects, but I’d love to know if there was, it doesn’t have to be Disney. It can be another vendor, not even at theme parks. Is there another project from your career that’s been a real highlight or something you’ve really appreciated that maybe you enjoy talking about?
Don Dorsey: Well, there’s a lot. Over the years, I’ve worn so many hats with my musical background, my audio technical background. I’ve worked at Radio City, I’ve had solo CDs. I’ve done a lot of work for different theme parks; I’ve done commercial soundtracks. I’m on the B side of “We Are The World”.
Dan Heaton: Oh wow!
Don Dorsey: I did session work with Quincy Jones for a couple of years, and one of the things that I got to do was be part of the “Grace” theme. It’s called Grace, which was the Olympics theme for the 1984 Olympics, and that’s on the B side of “We Are The World”. And then I did another Olympic with Sergio Mendez, and I did sessions for Donna Summer and Kenny Loggins and Stevie Wonder, and it’s been a fun 50 years of messing around with synthesizers and showbiz. I think in terms of lasting legacy, the creation of the opening window gag, the ability to start off a parade with a proper beginning and get into a synchronized loop that has now been built into every parade control system in the world at every Disney Park.
And in the last several years, I created a system for Universal Parks that does the same thing, and we are now in Universal Osaka and Universal Beijing running their daily and nighttime parades because I started on a rooftop with a stopwatch and a headset and figured out what it takes to make a parade function down the route in multiple areas for multiple people who have all different perceptions. I’m kind of the guy that does that. There’s nobody else who’s been doing it as long or has had as many opportunities to observe and analyze and build into a software system as I have, and I don’t know that that means whether or not I can retire because somebody’s got to do it.
Dan Heaton: Never. You can never retire.
Don Dorsey: Oh, please. It’s really fun. I think the most fun is, and I’ve said this many times, when the first opening window happened at the Electrical Parade in 1977 on Main Street at Disneyland, I was on Main Street behind the audience, and when the oscillator sweep goes down and the lights go out and the tempo starts and people start clapping, that’s my payoff. My payoff is the audience really getting it and really falling into sync with what we’re trying to accomplish and having the time of their lives. That’s my payoff.
Dan Heaton: Well, Don, I think that’s a perfect place to end. This has been so awesome to talk with you and learn a bit more about your career. Thank you so much for talking with me. This has been great.
Don Dorsey: My pleasure, Dan.
Dan Heaton: Before we finish, I did want to mention Don has several albums out, especially wanted to note busted, because while that has a lot of classical music, one thing that is really cool on it is you have the Festival of Festivals, which is the music that was used for shows like A New World Fantasy, Laserphonic Fantasy, and then portions for Illuminations, which wow, that is a throwback to go back and hear that. So you can find those anywhere you buy music. Don has multiple albums that I think would be awesome for you to check out if you want to check out more of this show.
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