140. Imagineer Ethan Reed on Animating Roz, Ursula, the Seven Dwarfs, and Mystic Manor

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I’ve really enjoyed talking with former Imagineers that worked on attractions that I enjoyed in the ’80s and ’90s. Their stories have made me appreciate those projects even more. Sadly, many of those classic rides and shows are no longer operating at the parks. It’s also great to learn more about recent attractions that are still drawing crowds today. Ethan Reed worked closely on many of our current favorites as a show animator and art director. During the past 22 years, he animated characters in a wide range of attractions and developed cool original concepts.

Ethan is my guest on this episode of The Tomorrow Society Podcast to talk about his extensive career at Walt Disney Imagineering. He studied character animation at CalArts and received an internship that ultimately led to a full-time position. Ethan’s early work included Sindbad’s Storybook Voyage at Tokyo DisneySea and the notorious Superstar Limo (!!!). Another key project was art directing all the characters for Monsters, Inc. at DCA, including the “living character” Roz. During the interview, Ethan describes that process and what it was like to update Superstar Limo.

Mystic Manor is at the top of my Disney bucket list, and Ethan animated characters like Albert and Lord Henry Mystic. He explains how that attraction developed and the way it mirrors The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. I had to ask Ethan about his designs for Duffy and Friends like Gelatoni and CookieAnn. They have become popular in Japan and are everywhere at Aulani.

I really enjoyed learning more about Ethan and his work on Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, Ariel’s Undersea Adventure, and more. If that wasn’t enough, he also shared amazing stories about legendary Imagineers like John Hench and former Disney executive Paul Pressler. There was so much to cover from Ethan’s incredible career at Disney.

Show Notes: Ethan Reed

Follow Ethan Reed on Instagram (@ethan.f.reed).

Listen to Ethan Reed’s other appearances on the Tomorrow Society Podcast on Episode 155 (with Joe Lanzisero) and Episode 184.

Check out this on-ride video of Ethan Reed describing Ariel’s Undersea Adventure to Ricky Brigante.

Listen to Ethan Reed on the Skull Rock Podcast with Dave Bossert and Aljon Go.

Transcript

Ethan Reed: It was a cast preview. So we had these cast members and these guys were bored. They’re like, I’m in line and they’re on their cell phones playing Bedazzled or whatever, a little jewel drop game. And I’m like, okay, they’re not looking at anything in the queue. All the awesome props, all that stuff, they could care less. I’m sitting behind them. I don’t remember. One of the team members was sitting next to me in the back row and these three guys are in there and they’re watching it. And then as things started happening, like when the cannon fire is off, they’re jumping. And then when we were in that Chinese salon and that wall ripped away, they’re like, “WHOA!”, my God. He screamed. And I’m like, “YES!” I get it.

Dan Heaton: That is Disney Imagineer Ethan Reed, who’s here to talk about Mystic Manor, Little Mermaid, Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, Monsters Inc., so much more. You’re listening to The Tomorrow Society Podcast.

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Dan Heaton: Hey there. Thanks for joining me here on Episode 140 of the Tomorrow Society Podcast. It’s Dan Heaton. Great to be back with another really fun interview. I’m talking today with Ethan Reed, and I had a hard time recording even my first intro after hearing the opener that I put in there because it kept making me laugh. That vibe is present throughout this interview. Ethan has a lot of really fun stories from working at Disney Imagineering for 22 years. What’s interesting about Ethan to me too is that he started out as an animator studying character animation at Cal Arts.

That was what he was kind of heading for and ended up animating figures like audio animatronics, like the Roz Living Character at Monsters Inc. at DCA or figures for Sinbad, Superstar Limo, a lot of things like that. So he kind of bridges the gap between someone who’s more a character animator just in the theme park world, and that’s why it makes a lot of sense that he worked on Duffy’s Friends like Gelatoni and Cookie Ann and we talk about that, or even his work on Lord Henry Mystic and Albert on Mystic Manor. Just a lot of cool stuff.

What I like too about Ethan, similar to Jim Clark and Daniel Joseph who I talked with this year, is that Ethan has worked on a lot of our more recent attractions. I’ve loved talking with people that have worked on early Epcot attractions or even at Disneyland, but it is fun to talk to someone that worked on things that are recent, like Seven Dwarfs Mine Train and Mystic Manor, and just some of the cool things that Disney has added in the past 10-15 years. And Ethan’s been closely involved in basically all of them.

I’d like to give a quick thanks to Jim Clark for recommending that I talk with Ethan because he’s not a name you hear all the time when you talk about people that have worked at WDI. But he’s made a huge impact and has been closely involved in so many amazing attractions. So I’m really happy I got the chance to talk with them. So this is a long one, so let’s get right to it. Here is Ethan Reed.

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Dan Heaton: My guest today worked as a Show Animator, Concept Artist, and a lot more at Walt Disney Imagineering for more than 22 years. His career has included work on attractions like Mystic Manor, Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, Ariel’s Undersea Adventure, Monsters Inc. attractions, Duffy and Friends, and so much more. It is Ethan Reed. Ethan, thank you so much for talking with me here on the podcast.

Ethan Reed: Thanks for having me, Dan.

Dan Heaton: Oh, it’s great. You’ve been involved with so much and in the past 20 years or so, most of the big attractions that I’m so interested in. So it’s really cool to have you on the show. I’d love to know just upfront about your background with Disney or even what inspired you to want to become an artist in the first place?

Ethan Reed: I think what inspired me to want to be an artist was I was watching the Academy Awards in 1984 and Clarence Nash, the original voice of Donald Duck, had gotten an Academy Award. Back then I still thought that cartoon characters were real, and I see this kind gentleman get this Academy Award and he started talking like Donald Duck. And I was just amazed by it. I just started quacking. I just started going just having fun, mimicking what I saw this cool guy doing. And then I was the class clown.

So I just kept doing that in the classroom through elementary school, and then I was able to start forming words and start speaking. Then about fifth grade after being the class clown, my grades were starting to go down and my father said to me, he’s like, Ethan, what are you going to do when you grow up?

I said, well, I’m going to be voice, right? So that’s what I wanted to do. And what happened was my dad said, well, the guy who’s the voice of Donald Duck, because Clarence Nash had unfortunately passed away, he’d been replaced by Tony Anselmo who was a young animator, and my dad knew this, and he’s just like, well, you’re going to have to have something to fall back on.

The guy who’s the voice of Donald Duck, he is an animator, so you’re going to have to have something else to do for a career. So I said, well, I’ll be an animator, or I probably said, right. So that’s what I did, and I just devoted myself to drawing. My parents were huge Disney fans, so they had a hardback copy of The Illusion of Life, which is like the animator’s bible signed by Frank and Ollie, two of Walt’s Nine Old Men.

And I just remember going through that book and I just loved it so much, and I just wanted to learn as much as I could about animation. There was one artist in particular in the Nine Old Men who did more than animation. His name was Marc Davis. And Marc Davis, I’m sure many of your listeners know who Marc is, but he animated Tinkerbell, he animated Maleficent, he animated Briar Rose, but he designed Pirates of the Caribbean and America Sings, Country Bear Jamboree, some of my favorite Disney attractions.

That’s who my idol was growing up. I went to Cal Arts, which was the animation school that was founded by Walt Disney before he passed away. I did some time in college at San Francisco State University to get my GED and stuff out of the way. And also when I graduated from high school, Lion King had just come out.

Everybody wanted to be an animator, and it was difficult to get into the program. There’s 30 slots to get into the character animation program a year, and I think the LA Times had run an article that animators were making six figure salaries, which I learned was not really true. There was probably two or three that were, and that led to all these people like, oh, I’m going to get into the animation industry because I can make money, which is never a good thing. It was kind of a gold rush mentality I felt at the time.

So I was really happy that I went to San Francisco State. First half of my friends were interns at this company called Skellington Productions. They had just finished Nightmare Before Christmas, and they were working on James and the Giant Peach. And then my other friends were at this little studio in Point Richmond, California, and they were working on a film called Toy Story.

So I got to head over there, hang out with the people working on Toy Story, and I was just like this kid of this friend who was a render wrangler on the movie, and I would just hang out and they’d give me toys and things like that. Then I’d go back and work at the Disney Store in San Francisco, which is where my part-time job was. I actually worked in the Disney Gallery, if anyone remembers the Disney stores in the ‘90s, you had the regular Disney Store, but then you had the Disney Gallery.

I think the first one was in Santa Ana, and then the second one was at the post reach store in downtown San Francisco on Union Square. So I helped open that store as a cast, and it was just lovely. I mean, we’d have artists like Eyvind Earl come in, we’d have just Mary Costa, all the different voice talent, all the classic films. So it was a really cool place to be at the time. I got to see different forms of animation. And then I went to arts and focused on doing traditional animation. One of the first things I did with my girlfriend was who’s now my wife, who all the Disney Store cast member was.

We got annual passes to Disneyland in Southern California. How can we not have an annual pass? So we were some of the very first APs in Southern California, and we would go all the time. I mean, I was working minimum wage at the Disney Store. She had just started, she was working at Film Roman where they made The Simpsons and she was doing computer graphics for, they had a video game division at the time. So she was working on that. And we enjoyed going to Disneyland. So Sunday afternoon at 2:00 pm, we’d hop in the car drive down and we’d just go explore the park.

One of my favorite things to do, and I used to talk to John Hench about this after I started at Disneyland or Imagineering, is I would love to just take out my sketchbook. When you’re an animation student, you have your sketchbook with you and you bring it everywhere with you. I loved sitting on benches on Main Street, especially up above by the train station. There’s a couple benches there. It’s also a great place to watch the parade from.

I would sit there and I’d just open up my book and I would just sketch people quick sketches, and you learned so much by watching these people around the park and I was developing my drawing skills, but I was also looking at the guest experience. That’s something I don’t know many people have done. John Hench did it because he and I talked about it. So I got the opportunity to do an internship. It was right before my last year at Cal Arts, and it was like the summer before my last year. I had an internship and it was supposed to be six weeks, and it lasted until just very recently. So I had the longest internship ever.

Dan Heaton: Well, that’s quite a story, and I agree that I think just having been there at Disneyland I’m sure played a role in just your interest and also probably in you being there for so long at doing so. Well, I’d love to hear too about just some early projects because you arrived at a time when you have, it’s the late ‘90s, you have DCA, you’ve got Tokyo DisneySea you’ve got so much going on at Imagineering. So I’d love to know from you some of your early you worked on and what it was like to be there at that time.

Ethan Reed: Yeah, that’s a great question. So I started out at 1401, the main headquarters of Walt Disney Imagineering. I started at the Tujunga facility and the Tujunga facility was in North Hollywood, which was not far from my apartment, which was super convenient, and it was a magic factory, is the best way to describe it; I remember that’s where I went for my interview. And I was interviewed at Arts First at this event, and then I went to the actual facility for the real interview, and I had to meet with different animators, audio mechatronics animators.

What I was brought in to do was to learn how to animate audio mechatronics, not something you just pick up on the street or even a place like Cal Arts and a very specialized, so I went in there and I mean, we had this figure finishing department and there was like 40 people, and they were sewing Winnie the Pooh costumes for Pooh’s Hunny Hunt for Tokyo Disneyland.

Then you had another table in the figure finishing department, and they were making mummies for Indiana Jones Adventure for Tokyo Disney Sea. And I kid you not, I mean, I’m a huge Disney fan and I love watching old specials like Disneyland Showtime, and all those great behind the scenes things with the Osmonds taking you through Imagineering, how the stuff is made. I felt like I had been transported into the 1960s somehow and was in the middle of one of these great old Walt Disney Presents.

I’m going around and there are guys on the machine shop floor, these guys who were building the figures, and I was introduced to a couple of these guys, and they were older gentlemen, and they all knew Walt, right? So that was cool. It’s like I was just, even if I hadn’t have gotten the internship, I was already happy that I got to go hang out there for an afternoon. So that was enough for me. Then they said, oh, you can come in. And then I’d come in two days a week, and then I got to meet Marc and Alice Davis and had lunch with them. It was basically the animators in the department and Mr. intern boy with my giant stack of books.

It was like I had come in because I had missed seeing Mark at Cal Arts a week or so before, which was super sad. And then it was like when “You Wish Upon a Star” song went off and it was like, oh, like a bolt out of the blue, faith steps in and sees you through. So I got to meet Marc Davis, so that was cool. And I just, I need to get all these books signed. And I had this one book, it was Chanticleer and the Fox. Are you familiar with Chanticleer and the Fox?

Dan Heaton: I am. Yeah. I know it was something he really wanted to do and couldn’t get a push forward.

Ethan Reed: Yeah, I had a teacher at Arts. Dan, he was my animation teacher, and he loved Marc Davis stuff, and he would put up slides from Chanticleer and the Fox and things like that. I remember getting that book and I was so excited. But there was one sketch and it was right towards the front of this book that Disney Publishing had put out, and it’s like, it’s a really cool drawing of Chanticleer. But I didn’t understand the pose. I never understood it; I always thought it was a great drawing, but I didn’t understand what was going on. I hand mark the book to sign and he is like, oh, you’ve got one of these.

Marc opens the book. He’s like, yep. He’s like, can’t be the pen sign. I’m like, okay. So I hand mark the pen and he goes to this Fox sketch and then he adds the cigarette back in. So it was like they had photoshopped out the cigarette. I guess they probably used white out. It was probably before Photoshop, but he added the ashes and then he signed it. And I just loved that he did that. It’s like, I’ve got an original Marc Davis sketch in my book, so thank you to the publishing people who took it out.

But I mean, it was just moments like that that were so magical and got to meet Ward Kimble, John Hench would you’d go into John, his office at 1401, and he’d tell you stories. John Hench told me this great story. I think I had just finished animating Abraham Lincoln at Disneyland, and I had done already done Tokyo Disney Sea. I was one of the lead animators on Sinbad and I, I’d already done Superstar Limo. So my treat for my manager for finishing Superstar Limo was to do Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln, which I really appreciated.

So I got to animate Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln, and I have great memories of Marty Sklar coming down on the weekend, coming into the theater. He’s down there with his family. I’m in the attraction working overtime, just trying to get through it. And here’s Marty, he pops in, he is got his little fishing hat with all the pins all over it. He’s wearing shorts, and he is like, Hey, Ethan. He’s just totally down to earth, just this amazing guy. I love Marty. So I remember going back to Glendale after finishing up Lincoln and talking to John, and he’s like, oh, he did a great job, Ethan.

Then we got to talking, and he told me this story about the World’s Fair Lincoln. It was this story, and I don’t know if it’s been told much, but the Abraham Lincoln attraction opened, right? It was like two weeks late opening with the Fair. But what John told me was there was guys from, I guess MAPO, right machine shop basically, that were stationed out there in New York during the Fair to make sure that everything was operating properly. So John tells me this story that these two guys who were supposed to be watching the figure making sure it was working, they went out for a long lunch and they didn’t do the show check before the 2:00 pm show or whatever, or the 1:30 show.

They came back and they couldn’t get it running. They tried to do a test. Guests are coming in and they’re like, what do we do? What do we do? According to John Hench, this is right from John Hench, these guys, they locked off one of the drapes in front because when you watch Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln, all these drapes reveal it’s this big amazing thing. So they locked off one of the drapes, and then they took another chair and they set it in front of the drape where Lincoln was.

They took the costume from Abraham Lincoln put it on, one of the guys put the beard. So basically they faked it, but the audio, all that stuff was running. The show starts, the pre-show, and then the curtain opens up, the other one doesn’t open up because the figure’s back there, and then the light comes down on maintenance guy dressed up as Abraham Lincoln, and he’s sat there for, what, two months at this point?

So he knows the show. He gets up and he’s lip syncing whatever Royal Dano and say, I guess they don’t say that that was the Gettysburg Show I did. But he does the Lincoln speech, and what ends up happening is the audience just erupts and applause goes, oh my God, it’s so lifelike. And supposedly, according to John, he went out, this maintenance guy was so excited he had all these people cheering for him that he went out into the audience and started shaking hands with people.

Dan Heaton: Oh my gosh.

Ethan Reed: When John told me that part, I’m like, really? I mean, I want to believe it. I really do. So I really hope it’s true.

Dan Heaton: I was with you until the guy walked out in the audience.

Ethan Reed: Right. That’s what I felt too. Yeah, that’s what I felt too.

Dan Heaton: I felt on board until that point. That’s such a great story. So I don’t know how to follow that story. I dunno what to ask next. So DCA, you mentioned Superstar Limo, and it was an interesting time for the company when you were working there. And I mean, great things came out of DCA like Soarin’ Over California, love California Screamin’. There’s a lot of really cool stuff even from 1.0. But I know that that was kind of a challenging time, curious what it was like to work. If you want to talk about Superstar Limo, that’s great. Then also just your experiences with some of the attraction to those early years there.

Ethan Reed: That’s the thing. I lucked out; I spent probably six to seven months training at the Tujunga facility, and I was working on A-100 figures, which are the humanoid advanced animatronics at the time. I would just get to animate different pieces of park audio, which was just super fun. Then I went on to Sinbad for Tokyo Disney Sea, and that was a lot of fun too.

We had hundreds of figures, we had lots of animators up there, and we had lots of young animators. So some of the young animators, I was one, a great animator, Dave Gottlieb, he actually went on to animate on films like Bolt and Tangled. So he’s a fantastic animator. Also my good friend Sean Jimenez, who was the art director on the most recent version of Ducktails. He also animated Pooh’s Hunny Hunt for Tokyo Disneyland. So we had a good time.

We had skateboards. We were in this big giant warehouse in Santa Clarita, California, like miles away from, I mean, it was a good 45-minute drive on a good day from Glendale. So we basically had the run of the building. There was a few people there, but we got to sit there and animate scenes. You had all the set work for Sinbad, and when we took breaks, we would get on our skateboards and run skateboards around this big show building, and it was just so much fun.

Bought Nerf guns, had a great time. Of course we all loved seeing photos of Wathel Rogers, who was one of the original animatronic animators, in fact, I would say he invented the art form of animating them. He always had a pipe hanging out of his mouth. All these photos, I think if they were to release, they don’t release those photos anymore.

They don’t want to promote smoking. There’s probably a good reason why they do that, because us young impressionable animators were like, look at Wathel, he’s so cool. He’s got that pipe. And of course, we went out to lunch, and then there’s some cigar store because in the mid-90s, cigar stores were everywhere. We’re like, let’s go buy some pipes. So stupid us we’re sitting behind the consoles with pipes hanging out of our mouths for photo shoots for ourselves.

So I don’t think those pictures exist anymore, but we had a good time. But yeah, DCA was a project. It was going on like David Gottlieb and Sean, they were both on MuppetVision 3D. So I mean, MuppetVision’s a really fun attraction, and the figures are great. Bean Bunny, the Penguin Orchestra, and I got to work on the Penguin Orchestra, and there’s a really funny story about that Penguin Orchestra.

So we’re in the field at California to venture, and we’re trying to get everything finished, and I was the only animator in the facility that day, but on a job site with Imagineering, and if you’re doing something really technical, you can’t have a bunch of construction and stuff next to you. It’s like, I can’t have someone jackhammering next to me when I’m working on a figure hydraulic lifts. There’s things, it can be dangerous. You need to be focused, you need to concentrate.

Sometimes we’ll go on night shift. So there’s this horse trading that goes on for control of the attraction. So this one day we had control of the attraction. I’m sitting in there animating the Penguin Orchestra and my show programmer, who was relatively new, an older guy, but a big, he worked out right, this guy, he was buff and you did not want to mess with him.

He could be intimidating, super nice guy, but if you didn’t know him, you’d be intimidated. So I’m sitting in the attraction, and we were told not to go into the pre-show because the pre-show was complete. So management was so happy. Oh, the pre-show is complete. We’re going to have a party in the pre-show of Muppets. It’s dust free. It is the first finished thing at Disney California Adventure. So Paul Pressler, who I believe had just been promoted to the head of Parks and Resorts, was at this party, and he’s the head of Parks and Resorts, and he wants to see what’s going on.

So I just remember sitting there animating the penguins, and I see the door open up and in walks, Paul, he wanted to see what was going on, and my show programmer jumped up, charges over at him, and he was like, get out. This is our theater. And just kicked Paul Pressler out, had no idea who he was, right? And Paul was, he was like, oh yeah. Oh, I’m sorry I let you guys get back to work. But it was like the door closed. I’m like, you realized you just kicked the president out of the attraction. So that was hilarious.

Dan Heaton: That’s a great, oh my gosh, I’m trying to picture that because yeah, you’ve got this guy who runs the tight ship as the program guy and he doesn’t care. That’s crazy to think about. Well, like you said, there’s competing forces at work between management and with your animation and then everything else. So for DCA, I know one thing that you were involved with closely is Monsters Inc attraction there, which did replace Superstar Limo, but ended up being what I think is a pretty cool attraction. Then ultimately they went ahead and created an even, I mean, I hate to say even better, but just a different type of attraction in Tokyo with Ride and Go Seek.

I know you were involved with that too. So I would love to hear what it was like. I know you were involved with the Roz Living Character, which was a really big deal. So the characters in, I think the strongest thing about Monsters Inc. in California, the characters are really cool looking and really believable. So I’d love to know what that experience was like for you working on that, and then maybe even in Tokyo too.

Ethan Reed: Well, I think what happened for me was I’d been pitching a bunch of different ideas, like some different holiday overlays and things like that with my good friend Jim Clark, who I think you had on the show before. Jim and I would pitch different things and we’d been pitching a specific holiday show and we’d been pitching to imagineers like Kevin Rafferty who just retired, but Kevin’s a great guy and a great teacher.

So I think what happened was Kevin, I think Rob’t Coltrin, I think they saw something in my work and they asked me to help out on the Monsters attraction. And I think part of it might have been I had worked on Superstar Limo. So I animated all the celebrities, and I was a little bit disappointed. Neil Engel, who was the Creative Director on that attraction, who also did Jurassic Park for Universal, he is very talented.

He got to meet Cindy Crawford, the actual Cindy Crawford, and I was very jealous of that. So anyhow, but they did this whole making of DCA thing, and I think you can find footage of Neil and Cindy Crawford talking about Superstar Limo somewhere, somewhere out there. All I know is I had worked on animating all these celebrities, and when you build an attraction, it’s like a certain amount of, they cost something, you pay for it over time, so the park has to pay for it over time. If you were to, so let’s think about this. Superstar Limo was open for nine months or something like that before it was closed.

You’re still paying for all those figures. Audio animatronics are expensive. You are not going to take those audio animatronics and recycle them or toss them. You will recycle them. So I think the first thing I was brought on for was how do we use the existing celebrities in this Monsters attraction?

So my first job on that attraction was coming up with CDA agents. I knew the functionality of each of the characters. I knew how to draw; I had been around production for three, four years at Imagineering, so I knew what the process was. So I worked with Larry Nikolai and Rob’t Coltrin, and we developed what the CDA agents would be. So I know which one is Cher. I know which one is Whoopi Goldberg, and I know who voices who. And a really fun thing is each of the CDAs, they’re numbers on them.

So the numbers that are on the CDA agents at California Adventure, those are important dates to many of the core team members. So the one that was previously Tim Allen is my wedding anniversary, so, so that was fun. And then Larry Nikolai and I would go to the sculpture studio and go through sculpting, and then Larry went off the project, and then I was tasked with art directing the production of all of the animated figures for Monsters.

So that was actually the first time Walt Disney Imagineering started working with Garner Holt Productions. So Garner Holt is an outside vendor that is out in San Bernardino. There had been a lot of people laid off from Imagineering after DCA and Tokyo DisneySea had opened. So Garner was smart and he picked up a lot of talent. So it was great going out there like, oh, hey, because it was old home week. It’s like, I know you. And it was so it was great seeing people that you’d worked with closely and new faces too. Garner did a great job building all those figures.

Then we built a lot of the figures, and Roz was the most complex. That was part of the Living Characters initiative. And the first Living Character was Turtle Talk with Crush. I think when we first started, we just thought she would say a few lines kind of be like E.T. from Universal, which I love the E.T. Ride, it’s one of my favorites.

But we learned a bunch of stuff on Turtle Talk. So we worked with Ralph Fernandez, who was one of the great Imagineers who helped develop Turtle Talk, and we just kept developing, Kevin Rafferty wrote all these great lines. So I’m animating the figures, I’m going down the site placing staging the figures except the ones that Pete Doctor placed, and that was Pete Doctor and all the guys at Pixar. It was like an open door. It was just like Pete would hang out in my office at Tujunga and we would just chit chat about things. One of my favorite things is he almost was an animator of audio animatronics.

I think he told me he was offered a job at Imagineering to learn how to animate figures when he left arts. And he was offered the job at Pixar. I think he really made a good decision. He did okay. He did good, but he’s so nice and just down to earth, and he’s not like I’m a Hollywood executive. So it was like if you go through the attraction, there is a poster. It’s a portrait of Waternoose, right? The villain from Monsters Inc. the movie. And I just remember Chris Runco and I were riding through the attraction and we’re like, there’s something missing here. You had a look back, which was Smitty and Needleman, and they’re punching the time clock, and it’s a fun little scene, but when you’re going through it, you naturally want to look at this wall and there’s nothing there.

So we’re like, we need to do something. We need to figure something out. So I remembered watching the movie, I’m like, oh, there’s this great portrait of Waternoose and it’s a digital film. There has to be a file of it somewhere. So I contacted Pete and sent Pete an email, Hey Pete, do you guys have this? And he is like, oh, yeah, I get someone to send it over. Sent it over.

We had someone print it up on really nice canvas. And then Chris and I looked at it and he was like, oh, we’ll cut out the eye and we’ll put the following eyes behind it. Haunted Mansion style thing. Chris did special effects for years, so we just did it right. It was just fun. And our producer, Jodi McLaughlin, she got a really cool frame. She used to be in props, and it was, so things like that happened on that attraction, which were just so much fun.

It was like community theater almost, right? You’re just like, oh, hey, we need to put on a show. Oh, hey, this isn’t looking right. Let’s put this here. And we did, and it was cool. Another fun thing that happened on that attraction is when you’re going through the sushi restaurant, there’s a background noise of all the people screaming. They’ve just exited the restaurant, but we didn’t have any money for media on the back walls and all that stuff. But if you go through there, oh, their running around.

And that was Chris and I going through the attraction like, oh God, it’d be great if we could have something there. Then Chris and I were at the backstage commissary at California Adventure having tuna sandwiches or something, and we’re just like chit chatting, just brainstorming at lunch. And we’re like, couldn’t we just do one of those little shadow projection things?

I think I just seen what was Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow movie. And they had a little shadow projection thing with a candle. Chris, because of his background and special effects, it’s like, oh yeah, we can do that. And that’s what we did. We just got an oatmeal box, mocked it up, put it in there the next day, we looked at it and then we figured out how to make it real and sustainable. But that type of stuff, I mean that, that’s true, Imagineering.

It’s like you can sit in a conference room and you can figure out things and estimate things and oh, we can do, but the ones, the attractions that don’t have all that oversight where you can just like, oh, here’s our budget. This is what we have to work with and we’re not going to go over that. We’re just going to go in there and we’re going to do it, and we’re going to have fun too.

Those are the best projects. So that’s what Monsters was like for California Adventure. And I did spend a ton of time animating Roz. I mean, I think Kevin Rafferty wrote 125 lines, and I was like, thankfully, I still did not live far from Tujunga. So I would be there all night and just animating this figure and just getting all these lines of dialogue in there. And it was fun. And then we opened it and I was so happy, and then we’re like, oh, we can plus this.

So we actually spent a lot of time, my good friend Juan Alvarez, who’s fantastic show programmer, one of the best show programmers ever. He and I spent three weeks and we added another hundred lines of dialogue to Ross to make her more interactive. So that was super fun. But that’s the thing, it’s like the first time I worked with Chris Runco was on Monsters for DCA, and then about the time I finished Monsters for DCA, I went right onto Monsters for Tokyo.

In fact, I think I had, they overlapped for me, honestly. So I was the lead animator on the Monsters attraction for Tokyo, and we had Roz, and this time was going to be in Japanese, so I’d already animated tons of Japanese dialogue for Sinbad. I knew what to expect with that, and it was a lot of fun, and I loved working with OLC. So we got all of Monsters done, and then we were off to Tokyo Disneyland working on Ride and Go Seek, and that had the interactive popups with the flashlight tag.

So that was a lot of fun. And we had, if you’ve been on the, I know you haven’t been on the attraction, but for our listeners, if you’ve been on the attraction, you’ve got the flashlight. We had one that it was connected to a little Pelican case, so a little tiny briefcase, and I’d get to walk around the attraction with the flashlight and just test things and make sure it was all working before we do our big ride throughs with executives and things like that.

Dan Heaton: That attraction is so interesting to me because of the flashlight tag, but also just comparing it, you can compare it to DCA and see how it came after and some of the differences, but it’s something really to see.

But also, you mentioned animated figures, and another figure that you worked on that I find so interesting is, well, you worked on more than just the figure, but in Ariel’s Undersea Adventure, that’s a really interesting attraction, just there’s so many figures in it, but especially the Ursula figure, which to me still, I mean, I know that attraction’s been around for a while, just is such an interesting animatronic, the way that it moves around and has its own area. So I’d love to know a little bit about that, but also just your work. I know you were so involved in that attraction and what it became.

Ethan Reed: Yeah, I mean, it was funny. We had just, all the projects seemed to just blend into each other for me. I finished Monsters for Tokyo Disneyland, and I had honestly just come back from a business trip finishing it up. That next Monday I was back in the MAPO building at the main campus at WDI, and I’m looking at the model with Larry Nikolai and Chris Merritt and team, and we’re trying to figure out the staging of the figures.

What are the figures going to do at one point? I think we have a tendency, all designers do, we put everything in and you’re just like, oh, we’re going to have this and we’re going to have this, we’re going to have this. And you have all this stuff in there. One thing that Marc Davis did so well is he knew how to stage things.

He knew how to direct the eye. He knew what was important. So if you think of the auction scene in Pirates, the auctioneer is the most complex animatronic figure. That is what the staging, it’s all focused on that. That’s just good. He did a good storyboard drawing, and then that was translated into a good model. Then all the ancillary characters, which have changed up for reasons, but even still, it all focuses up towards the auctioneer and what he’s trying to sell, be it chickens or women, which I think it’s chickens now, which is probably best.

So you’ve got Marc Davis design and then some attractions. I think you just have to think about what’s that visual hierarchy, because Marc Davis did that so well. And I was fortunate on Monsters for Tokyo to work with Joe Lanszisero, and I would consider Joe Lanzisero, I mean, Larry Nikolai, Chris Runco, all those guys are my mentors.

But I would consider Joe Lanzisero to be my greatest mentor. He had a background in animation. He worked at the studio for years, worked on a lot of the films up to Oliver and Company, I believe. I think he started the studio the same day as John Lasseter. Both went to Cal Arts together. So Joe knows his stuff animation wise, and he knows his theme park stuff. I learned from the best. So he really, when we working on Monsters, he drove it into us.

It’s like, this is the important thing, Ethan, right? This character here. It’s like, it’s Mike Wazowski. This is who we’re looking at. We’re not looking at Boo over here. She’s secondary. The main focus is this. We’re going to put our functions, we’re going to put our funding into Mike Wazowski. So that’s how we worked together, and that was really important.

So when we got to the Mermaid attraction, it was like I came in, it’s like, okay, why do we have all of these things here? Ariel and Eric are the focus. I mean, if you look at some of the original concept art that was done for the Ursula scene, there was going to be an Ariel figure in there. We just saw Ariel, right? Ariel was like two feet back.

And it’s like having Ariel in every single scene would’ve been too much. I think removing Aerial from that scene and just making it Ursula’s moment, we put the money where it mattered into Ursula, and we’ve spent time developing it. And I’ll never forget, it’s like her arms. It’s those big silicone arms. I’m out to Tujuna and we’re checking the figure out, we’re making to make sure it’s working right, test and adjust. And the skin didn’t look right.

It was saggy and it just didn’t work. All right guys, we need to figure this out. We need to work on this. And the plastic skies and the figure finishing team at Tujunga, they came up with these bands and they came up with all this out of the box stuff, which is what imagineers do. They made this skin that’s just magical. Then Ursula is like torso. It’s like I wanted to get squash and stretch in there because squash and stretch is so integral to great character animation. They used a ton of it in the film on Ursula’s torso. So we wanted to have that in there. We didn’t do a skin there. We’ve got stretch fabric, right?

It’s like a velour or something like that. Figure finishing did it right? And they just know what they’re doing. I mean, the ladies and gentlemen who do all the figure finishing, it’s like they worked on the Yeti, they worked on the Ursula figure. It’s like, you name it, they worked on it. They worked on the Grizzly Bears we did for Hong Kong Disneyland for the grizzly coaster. I mean, it’s the same people, and it might be different vendor shops sometimes, but it’s a small industry. Ursula was super fun.

Dan Heaton: Oh, that’s the scene. I mean, nothing against any of the other scenes which work, but that scene just, it’s quick. Like you said, you’re focused, because again, it stands out because it’s not overdone with so many other things. I think that’s a great point about a lot of great attractions, the way that sometimes it’s, I mean, I would never say simple, a really complicated animatronic, but just the setup of the scene is that way. Well, speaking of complicated animatronics too, Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, which is interesting of course, because it’s a coaster.

But the scene in the middle, which is really kind of the standout scene, the animatronics for the Dwarves with essentially, and I know we’ve gone on to things like Frozen Ever After and others, but that at the time to me was I hadn’t seen anything like that at the time, and I know you were closely involved with that attraction and those characters. So I would love to know how, because they’re so different than you mentioned Pirates or something, but still work in a very different way.

Ethan Reed: I think what happens at the beginning of attraction, it’s like someone comes up with the pitch and then it’s handed off to another team, and then they develop it, and then there’s a price tag put to it, and then they start bringing in subject matter experts. So I came onto the attraction, and they already had the concept. We’re going to go through a mine scene.

And originally the plan was, we’re going to take all the existing dwarf figures from the Snow White ride at Magic Kingdom, and we’re going to put them in here. I’m like, oh, well, there’s not that many. They’re not holding pick axes. And to make them hold pickaxes, you’re going to really have to change them. And I understand wanting to reuse things. Come on. I’m the guy who turned Cher into a CDA agent. So I was like, let’s talk about this.

We talked about ’em, we figured it out, and we did reuse all of those dwarfs. They’re just in the cottage at the end. So all of those were able to be reused, but we needed purpose-built dwarfs. We needed to tell the dwarf story in the mind, and how do we start, I did storyboard sketches, I did quick sketches. It’s the same way that Marc Davis would’ve worked, right? It’s like, this is the storytelling vignette. This is what this dwarf is doing. This guy is asleep and he’s got a skunk on his head.

Humorous, not too humorous, but it’s a little humorous, and we’re going to have Doc and Doc’s going to be counting things, the serious guy. So we just brainstormed and did quick sketches and came up with stuff. And because I’d animated so many figures at that time, it’s like, okay, this one’s going to be eight functions.

This one’s going to be 10 functions. That one’s going to be too expensive. So we would have the engineers in there, we would have other people in there. I remember early on, it’s like they’re the dwarfs from the Seven Dwarfs. I mean, talk about amazing character animation. It’s like you had Bill, you had amazing animators who trained The nine old men work on this film, Art Babbitt. I mean, it’s like great guys, and you want to be reverential to what they did.

So it’s in my first wish list was, oh, we’re going to have 25 functions in the face, right? Because we’re going to make it face squash stretch, and just be amazing. It was like what you saw on Ursula, I wanted to do that more, right? She had a bunch of facial functions and it’s like, well, we can’t really do that, and you’re going by them quick.

And that’s the other thing. It’s like when thinking animation, I fall in love with it. I love animation, and then I have to remind myself to step back and say, no, I only need this. This is what I really need. But we did need to pay off on the elasticity of the face that you had in those characters. The best way to do that was with the projection. And we’d done Buzz Lightyear and things like that, and they’d been working on some mockups for some different attractions, and it was coming together and they were doing the science project of fitting the projector into something small, which is great. But from artistic standpoint, I didn’t feel it was there. And Tom Flowers, who was our original Creative Director on the attraction, he didn’t think it was there yet. So we kind of just went to management.

We’re like, Hey, we think there’s an opportunity here. We just need a little bit of development money. So we got a very small budget. And then I got Guy Fenton Burke, who was plastics genius at Imagineering, one of the special effects guys, and Tod Mathias, who was a figure finisher. And the four of us basically did this mockup. The key to it was getting black light on the character and airbrushing black light paint onto the other surfaces, like the hands, the clothing, the beards.

Because when you see Buzz Lightyear, he’s glowing, his face is glowing when the lighting is right, when the costume is right on seven doors, mind train, it’s seamless. You don’t know that there’s a break. And the big thing with the dwarfs was their character designs. I don’t think the projected faces work with all characters. I think it really worked well with the Dwarfs because we had some nice natural breaking points.

So we had a beard. So that beard created a nice soft edge. And then you had the hat that came down, which also created a nice soft edge. Then you had, I think the most important thing was the noses aren’t going to animate, right? Unless you’re doing some weird thing, there’s a fly on his nose. But we weren’t going to do that.

So you had this big fiberglass nose in front of this projected surface, which was glowing the same intensity of the projected head. It just made it all come together as one cohesive unit. So that was my job, was to develop that look, pitch it to the heads of parks and resorts, and they loved it. And yeah, we’re going to do this, and we did it, and we did it in Shanghai, and it was just fun. And I got to work closely with Walt Disney Animation Studios.

In fact, I was a shared resource with Walt Disney Animation Studios during that time, and it was just so great. And we worked with traditional animators, the Walt Disney Animation Studios on the facial animation, CG animators. We had every different type of animation you could imagine going on in those characters. So we had guys doing the animatronic animation, guys doing CG animation, 2D animation, and then we had to have bean sync with our lighting designers and our figure finishers, and it was just so, it was fun. And it was fun, and I didn’t actually animate on that project.

That was the, I’m going into art direction. That was the moment where it’s like, okay, I dabbled in art direction on monsters. I’ve been doing it. I’ve been learning art, directed a bunch of the stuff for all the figures for the Finding Nemo attraction at Disneyland. So it was time for me to hang up my console. It’s like I’m not animating on the console anymore. We’re doing digital now. I’m going to move on to other things.

Dan Heaton: That’s interesting too, because you went through a whole description, and I was right with you thinking you animated it all. But I mean, like you said, there was just everything you described had to do a lot with the art direction of it. And that scene in general. I feel like I just want to stop the coaster at some point and figure out, because like you said, I didn’t think about the fact that Doc’s nose was different than the rest of his face and all of that, because you see it so quickly, but that’s also kind of, its genius because you don’t see that much of it. You come out of it going like, wow, that’s interesting. It doesn’t really reveal it all. It’s perfect for how fast you’re moving, I guess.

Ethan Reed: Right? It’s the old showbiz thing. Leave you wanting more, right? You want to spend more time with those Dwarfs. It’s like, I love that you slow down there and you get to spend some time. If you could do an entire attraction like that, it’s like if it had been twice as long, it would’ve, that’d be really nice. Maybe one day.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, you start to go up the hill and you’re just like, oh, wait, we’re already at the end of the scene. It’s too short. But I don’t mean that as a criticism because really, like you said, it’s very rewriteable. Well, speaking of something completely different, before we finish, I have to ask you about, I was lucky enough to visit Aulani a few years ago, and I mentioned that because something that is very big there among a lot of the people that visit is Duffy.

And I learned a lot on that trip about Duffy’s friends like ShellieMay and Gelatoni and StellaLou and so many others. I know you were involved not with the original Duffy, but with the friends and very closely worked on those. I have to ask you about it because I am not going to have another chance with someone who was involved with Duffy’s Friends. So please, in all seriousness, I would love to hear about it.

Ethan Reed: Yeah, it’s funny. Part of the reason that I wasn’t animating on Mine Train is I was on so much, I was art directing that stuff. I was helping out on developing a bunch of stuff for Shanghai, a lot of the Fantasyland stuff like Peter Pan. I was helping design a lot of those vignettes. Then we had this little thing called Mystic Manor. That was the last attraction I animated on.

I designed all the characters on Mystic. And again, I was working with Joe. So I loved it. Mystic Manor was my favorite attraction that I ever worked on in my career. And I flew back from finishing Mystic, Daniel Jue, my friend who took over the Tokyo portfolio from Joe Lanzisero, when Joe was so focused on the Cruise Line and the Hong Kong Disneyland development. Daniel asked me if I would come in and join him for some brainstorms before the Duffy franchise.

And I knew who Duffy was. I had little kids; I had a kindergartner and a toddler. I mean, he was like, my youngest was like two at the time, I think. Yeah, he was pretty young. Duffy. We knew Duffy, and we loved taking photos with Duffy at Disney’s California Adventure. So he was the thing, I’m like, of course, I’ll go to a brainstorm, right? I was a little jet lagged because just got back from Hong.

And I go to this meeting and we’ve got one of the original writers of the guy, Scott Hennessy, who came up with the story of Duffy. He was there. He also wrote Kitchen Cabaret and so many wonderful things at Imagineering over the years. I love Scott. So he’s in the room, another writer, Charlie Watanabe, who’s another great friend, and we’re all in this room. And Tom Child was another writer in there and a very talented artist. Leia May, who is one of our imagineers in Shanghai.

We’re all in this room and we just start brainstorming stuff and just coming up with what could this new character be? And we’re doing research on different animals and all this stuff. I think the first sketch I did of Gelatoni, he was, I suggested a pirate cat, so he had a tattoo on his chest. And very Duffy, to be honest, it’s like I didn’t really understand the whole Duffy thing at that point. I knew Duffy from California Adventure, but there was also some great designers from Oriental Land Company that we would chat with and some other meetings. And basically we came up in those meetings. I mean, Gelatoni came from those meetings. StellaLou came from the meeting. ‘Olu Mel started there. We had a sea turtle and we also had a dog. His name was Pancakes.

And that’s how it was so funny. The way the dog who was a chef came about was I asked my four year old who wanted to be a chef at the time. He’s in kindergarten, or maybe I don’t, he was like four. He was super young. And I said, if Duffy’s going to have a friend, this is before I’m tucking him in. I just read him stories and I’m like, what kind of friend would Duffy have? He’s like, oh, he’d have a dog. He’d have a dog friend. I’m like, oh, that’s cool.

And well, what does a friend do? Well, he’s a chef. Like, oh, that’s good, chef dog. What’s the dog’s name? Pancakes, because my son loved when I made pancakes, right? So it was Pancakes the Dog. So he goes to sleep, I take out my sketchbook and I draw pancakes, the dog, and then in the meeting the next morning, like pancakes the dog.

And it stuck there for a while, but we passed on it. But it came back and became CookieAnn, which is a chef dog who makes waffles, not pancakes, but similar. But it’s so funny, there’s so many stories with Duffy and Friends. It’s like the hang tag story, which Charlie and I developed. It has this meeting of Duffy and Cookie. They run into each other and they have that Reese’s Peanut Butter moment.

If you remember the ad from the eighties, it was like you got your chocolate bar in my peanut butter, right? That was my inspiration for it was that commercial, because I grew up in the eighties and I loved that commercial. And so that’s kind of how that came about. But it’s like the cotton candy waffle sandwich. It’s like at one point it was chicken nuggets and a waffle, and at another point it was a hot dog and a waffle, and it was a hot dog and a waffle for a while.

And I drawn it in the hang tag, and I wasn’t feeling it. I’m just like, that looks weird. We need to get rid of the hot dog. So we got rid of the hot dog, and we had a whole meeting, and I drew different things on the hang tag for what the food. Then I came up with the cotton candy waffle sandwich, and we bought some cotton candy at the store, and I made waffles, and I’m like, here, kids, we’re going to have a cotton candy waffle sandwich. And it was delicious. So if you haven’t tried it, I suggested the cotton candy waffle sandwich, it’s more sugar, right? Sugar goes good with everything. Everything goes good with sugar, right?

Dan Heaton: It’s a great tip. I’m going to do that soon, I think.

Ethan Reed: But yeah, so Gelatoni is an artist and he was based on my son who was taking art classes. All the Duffy Friends are about four years old and it’s, I loved working on Duffy and Friends. Duffy was designed by Cody Reynolds as the Disney Bear, and Joe Lanzisero and Scott Hennessy came up with the story of Duffy, a very talented designer, Mark Page who I believe he just started at Netflix animation. He was at Imagineering. He designed ShellieMay. And so then I designed Gelatoni, StellaLou, CookieAnn, and then I oversaw the design of ‘Olu.

Dan Heaton: Wow. That’s impressive. Sometimes when I read the stories of Duffy and his Friends and the way they met, and I’m always just like, huh. And the idea of the brainstorming and coming up with those doesn’t really surprise me. I think it sounds like a fun project that, especially in Tokyo, I know is still so popular.

Ethan Reed: Oh yeah. It’s like last project I worked on for Walt Disney Imagineering that, well, that opened, I mean a lot of it is still going on now. In fact, today I was very excited. They announced the Cinderella for the Atrium for the Disney Wish. So I developed that concept for the Atrium statue and art directed the maquette sculpting and also the stern for the character and the stern character is really fun. I helped design the stern character for the Disney Dream. Chris Runco worked on that as well. And also Mark Page did the one for the Fantasy, which was Dumbo and the other two were done by John Hench. So very little group of people who’ve actually had the opportunity to do that. So I feel like I’m in very good company with Chris Runco and Mark Page and of course John Hench.

Dan Heaton: Oh, that’s a really great group of people. Do you mind if we go back for a minute to Mystic Manor? Could I ask you to talk a little more about that? Because I did talk to Joe Lanzisero about it, and he described it basically as his crowning moment of his career as a designer. And I don’t disagree. What interests me, and I know a lot of fans. One is an original concept. It has a few connections to Haunted Mansion, but very different. And then of course the SEA and the trackless ride technology. And there’s just so much to it. I would just love to know a little more about your experience on it with designing or working on some of the characters like Albert and Lord Henry Mystic.

Ethan Reed: Yeah, it’s so funny because the way that a lot of these projects come about, it’s like Rob’t Coltrin started Mystic Manor and I’d worked with Rob’t on Monsters and he worked on Monsters for Tokyo. And then I was on Toy Story Mania. I art directed the development of the Mr. Potato Head figure. Then I was the lead animator on the project and we worked really closely with Pixar Animation Studios, but we had a lot of animation footage to produce on that. We had as many animators as we had on Sinbad for Tokyo DisneySea working on Mr. Potato Head. So it was that complex. And I had been animating Potato Head, I want to say, for six months solid. It was a lot of work and we had a lot of footage to do and everyone, I think everyone at Imagineering knew Ethan’s busy.

Ethan’s busy, and I think my boss at the time kept pushing people away. Leave Ethan alone. Leave Ethan alone. He needs to finish Potato Head. What happened was we had, we were showing off Potato Head, right? We hit a deadline and we were at a certain point and we wanted to show a bunch of the team members. So we had a little wine and cheese thing, I think, and everybody came over from 1401. And then I think Rob’t came up to me and he’s like, Ethan, I’ve been trying to get you. I want you on Mystic Manor and Grizzly Gulch and all this expansion stuff for Hong Kong Disneyland. I was like, well, that sounds really cool; I really wanted to do something other than Potato Head because it was fun at the beginning, but after six months you’re like, can I do something else?

So I finished up Potato Head, but instead of working 60 hours a week on Potato Head, I went down to like 45 and the other five hours I can work on something fun, something new. So that’s kind of what happened, and that’s how I got involved with Mystic and Grizzly Gulch. I was super excited about Grizzly Gulch because bears and I love my Country Bear Jamboree, and it’s like, Ooh, I get an opportunity to design some bears for Disney. So ultimately, I mean, it’s me, so I always go cartoony first. And Rob’t and team was like, Ethan, pull it back, pull it back. These are real bears. These are real bears. And we ended up with, I think on Grizzly Gulch, we ended up with a very nice hybrid. They’re stylized, but they still look realistic, but there’s still a sense of caricature to them.

So worked out all the gags for that show. So the bear that’s rubbing his back on the track switch, in fact my wife worked on that attraction too. There’s media eyes of the Bears when you first go into the first tunnel. So she did all that stuff that was cool to work on a project with my wife. So that was great. And then Mystic Manor, it’s like it was super realistic originally, and we were developing the figures and on every attraction we do what’s called scrubbing, right?

It’s like you scrub your estimate, it’s like this is going to cost too much money and you want to fulfill the creative guy’s dream, but you change things. The best way to do it, which is what we did on Mystic, is we changed things, but when we changed things and if we descoped something, we made sure that it made story sense.

So I think the best example of that is on the finale completely changed. We storyboarded that entire thing. Originally you were going to go into the finale room and that whole room was going to be going crazy. Every single, the suit of armor was going to be more animated than it was in when you were in the catalog in your room the first time. Everything was going to be nuts, which meant lots of functions, which meant lots of man hours, which meant we’re going to spend so much money animating every single thing in here, right? It’s going to be a can of worms, right? And when we did the math and we did, this is what this is going to have to be, it was just too much. We had cut some stuff in the Chinese salon, which is the room before it.

And then this designer, Keith Gallo, he was our interior designer. He and I were tasked by Mark Schirmer, who was our overall creative director and overall the producer of the attraction. And I’d worked with Mark on Monsters for Tokyo, and he’s fantastic. He asked Keith and I to just come up with some options for the finale because when he came onto it, he felt like it wasn’t working.

We descoped so much from what the original intent was. Keith and I are sitting in my office and I just remember saying, Keith just need to rip the roof off of this place. That’s what needs to happen. And he’s like, yeah. Then just the two of us started feeding off each other, and that’s how the best ideas happen when you’re partnering with someone. And we didn’t end up ripping the roof off, but we ended up ripping that sidewall off.

That is the most unexpected moment in that attraction. And the story conceit was this music dust has gone so far. The way that Rob’t laid it out, it’s like the music dust was you start in the music room and it was bringing these things to life that were nice. A harp’s going to come to life, who cares? It’s not going to kill you. Right? A suit of armor, like a samurai armor, it’s going to chop your head off. Then it got progressive each room, like tribal arts rooms, it’s like you’ve got guys throwing spears.

It got worse and worse and worse for Albert, but then you got to the Chinese salon and you’re just like, okay, there’s a monkey king. But it just didn’t have that, oh my God, Albert’s going to die. We’re going to die. Right at that moment in the story where everything goes wrong and there’s no way of getting out of it, right?

Ripping that wall off. And we had Jerry Rees, he was our media director. I did some little storyboards and Jerry did this beautiful animatic and then worked with the studio that produced all that media. And it just, that scene, every time I go through it and I write it, it’s just like, even though I know it’s coming, well, I said, hey, let’s rip the roof off the place It gets you. You’re just like, wow, that’s so cool. And the first time I rode through it with guests, It was a cast preview.

So we had these cast members and these guys were bored. They’re like, I’m in line and they’re on their cell phones playing Bedazzled or whatever, a little jewel drop game. And I’m like, okay, they’re not looking at anything in the queue. All the awesome props, all that stuff, they could care less. I’m sitting behind them. I don’t remember.

One of the team members was sitting next to me in the back row and these three guys are in there and they’re watching it. And then as things started happening, like when the cannon fire is off, they’re jumping. And then when we were in that Chinese salon and that wall ripped away, they’re like, “WHOA!”, my God. He screamed. And I’m like, “YES!” I get it. Right.

So I think the best part of that is of the story that we set up there, and Joe and I have talked about it a million times, a theme park attraction that you can do your book report, the Monsters Incorporated attraction for California Adventure. That’s basically a book report of the film. Mystic Manor, we didn’t have a film to base it on. So it’s like when you know the property like Monsters, you’ve seen the film, you’ve been with these characters for two hours of your life.

It’s something like Mystic Manor. You don’t know who these characters are. So the designs have to read. You have to know, oh, this is Albert, he’s cute, I like him. I want him to succeed. Lord Mystic, he’s a bumbling idiot. He doesn’t have a clue that his monkey is getting into all this trouble in his house under his nose, and the place is ripped apart, right? He’s clueless. So all that stuff had to be in the design. It had to be caricatured so you could read it quickly.

So when I think of that attraction, it’s really a retelling of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”. And I think the main difference is at the end of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”, Yensid comes in and saves the day, the sorcerer in Mystic Manor. Albert takes the, he closes the box, he does the hard work, he realizes what he did was wrong and he puts it right. So it’s very similar to “Sorcerer’s Apprentice”, but we told a new story with it, right? There’s only so many stories you can tell

Dan Heaton: That’s really interesting. And just too is to having that at a park in Hong Kong where, I mean, just like you said, I can see a YouTube video on my phone and see those characters, and I can know right away what it is, and it’s only going to be stronger in person. I think I’m just glad that was able to be made given, like you said, how trends with a lot of attractions coming off of movies and off of things that we know so well, it’s still really cool how it came together.

Ethan Reed: Yeah, I think it’s really great. I mean, I think they’re still doing that stuff. I was, one of the last attractions I worked with before I left Imagineering was the Jungle Cruise, so I worked with Kevin Lively on that. It was super fun going through the Jungle Cruise in Florida, looking at things, doing sketches. We even got to go on safari at Animal Kingdom, went around with one of the wardens. So Kevin and I and one of our coordinators, we were in this truck and we’re going around the savannah at Animal Kingdom and we’re stopping and doing sketches of different animals and so much fun. That’s the stuff that I’m going to miss the most at Imagineering is getting to meet the different cast members and stuff like at Animal Kingdom and things like that.

Dan Heaton: So you mentioned the Jungle Cruise. I know you’ve worked on it very recently. I’m just curious, just if there’s anything more you can reveal, not like a secret, but just about that experience for you.

Ethan Reed: I’d worked on Jungle Cruise before Chris Runco had come up with the idea for the, I think we redid it in 2005 at Disneyland. So I animated that. I reanimated the show. I came up with the piranha gag for originally for Hong Kong Disneyland. So Tom Morris and one of my favorite Imagineers, Skip Lange, who no one really talks about Skip, but Skip was the rock work guy, the rock work guru. He built Mount Prometheus at Tokyo Disney Sea. He did Big Thunder Mountain.

And he’s another one of my favorite mentors. And I really, he’s passed, but I love Skip and he had so many great stories like working with all the original Imagineers. So we came up with that piranha gag for Hong Kong Disneyland originally, and then it made its way to Anaheim. So good ideas never go away. I hope that I haven’t been on, I don’t know, I don’t know what’s been going on at Imagineering for a year.

So just was it last week they released the image of the monkeys at the end, which is great. That was concepts that Chris Merritt and I were sketching. We were in the room doing gag sessions and monkeys. We were both doing sketches. And Chris and I are the biggest Marc Davis fans. So of course we’re being reverential to Mark and wanting to make sure that you’ve got the humor in there, but we’re updating it for audiences today.

That’s something I will say, even Marc Davis, it’s like, I think you go online and I will see the stuff and you’ll see these fans and they’re complaining about, oh, you’re changing this and you’re changing that. And it’s like Walt Disney changed the Jungle Cruise. Marc Davis changed the Jungle Cruise. And I think I mentioned early on that I, when I first started, I had lunch with Marc Davis and Marc Davis was going through a bunch of slides at this lunch for a Western River attraction.

I remember Marc stopping on one drawing and it was a beautiful drawing and it was a funny drawing, but it was insensitive. And he called it out 80 something year old man. It’s like, you know what? At the time I drew this, I thought it was funny, but I felt that it was very insensitive to Native Americans and being part Native American. I appreciated that. Right. So it’s like, I think when fans get upset about this, no artists like Marc Davis and Walt Disney, they would be changing the stuff too.

Who knows, it’s like maybe something I designed in Mystic Manor is going to offend someone in the future and another designer, another artist is going to get a crack at it and they’re going to change it. Go for it. I’m all for it, right? It’s like it is not a piece of art that’s in the Smithsonian. That piece of art that Marc did is there and it’s history, but what is in the park should be changed to reflect what guests of today are.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, I totally agree. I think that’s a great point, especially just given, I’m excited. See the updates to the Jungle Cruise and everything I’ve seen so far looks just really cool and fun and well done. Also, like you said, just reflecting, changing times. Well, I have one last question for you, Ethan. I just more of a general question, but you worked at Imagineering for more than 20 years, worked on so many cool things, and the industry of course has changed plenty in the last, well in last year, but especially even just the whole time you’ve been there. I’d love to know, there’s a lot of aspiring designers, Imagineers, animators, people that want to work in the field.

What type of advice would you give someone who, whether they’re studying or starting in their career, and I know that it’s different, this year feels different, but just in general, based on your experience, I’d love to hear some thoughts.

Ethan Reed: I think the important thing is figure out what you’re passionate about. If you want to be a writer, go to the best writing school. Marty Sklar was a writer. Scott Hennessy was a writer. Those guys were fantastic writers and they were imagineers for a very long time and they had great careers. So Marty always said, there’s over 140 disciplines at Imagineering, and it’s very true. So if you’re a video editing guy, if that’s what your passion is, then becomes the best video editing guy.

Then if you see a posting for Imagineering and it says, we’re looking for a video editor apply, and if it’s a temporary thing or a project hire or something like that, go for it. Because who knows what it’s going to lead to? Because my six-week internship, which was going to just be for me to say I worked at Imagineering for six weeks and I was going to go work on the Simpsons or something.

I got to make a career out of it, and I love it, and it was so much fun. So I think follow your passion, be persistent, not annoying, but persistent. The one thing I’m learning this year, as I am many Imagineers, we are looking for work. You have to learn how to write these resumes that go through these bots that look for keywords and all this stuff. That just blows my mind. I would talk to when I got my jobs, I talked to the person and they looked at my artwork.

I didn’t have to go through this step. So that’s very foreign to me. Hopefully things like that will change and personal at artistic organizations. If you ever heard Chris Runco, I don’t know if he told the story about how he got his start at Imagineering. He told me he’d walked in with a stack of drawings.

That’s amazing. I think that’s something that is missing that personal touch from a lot of these businesses. So hopefully Imagineering, I don’t know what Imagineering is doing, but hopefully they’re not doing that. I know they’ve got the great outreach program with Imaginations and all that stuff. And I think the big thing is that if you do land that job at Imagineering, you have to keep learning and you have to keep your mind open and you want to learn something new. Like Mystic Manor, we used ZBrush to sculpt all the characters for Albert the Monkey. And that came out of my frustration with the tiger from Tokyo Disney Sea, that tiger. I had drawn all these sketches, all these different poses, and then I think we had nine or eight or nine different versions of doing the attraction, but we only had budget for three sculpts.

So we took this hat and we took this arm and we kind of frankensteined him together. And the figure finishing covered it and it’s close, but if you were to look at my sketches, it’s like, oh, there was so much more vitality in it. It’s like his head was cocked up and that wrist was in a position just so, and on Mystic manner on Albert, we were able to do one sculpt digitally in ZBrush, and then we were able to pose it and mill it. So we started using new technology to get a better product. So we had sculptors who had never done digital sculpting before and they learned the tool. I had one friend who he was, he was just cutting mats. He was in our special services department, and I knew he was a sculptor; he was a very talented sculptor.

He and I were chatting one day, I’m like, you should learn ZBrush, learn ZBrush. And he’s still there at Imagineering sculpting in ZBrush, which makes me very happy. So I think that’s the thing. If you have the opportunity to get in, get in, do your best, impress people and keep learning things, I mean, I had this great opportunity recently to the Unreal Fellowship with Epic Games. So Unreal Engine is what’s used in TV shows like The Mandalorian, Falcon and the Winter Soldier, it’s become the thing. They are filming everything in front of these LED screens and it is just this amazing technology.

I was given this opportunity to take this class and it was a fantastic class, and we had all these students from all around the world, and it was all on Zoom and eight o’clock in the morning you’d show up, then you’d go to your lecture and then you’d work on your film. It was like being back in college and I loved it, and I produced a little film, didn’t quite finish all of what I wanted to finish, but I got far and I learned enough about it and I know I want to do more in it. But I think that’s the thing. Even everyone says, even if you’re not an Imagineering, if you’ve been an Imagineer, you’re always an Imagineer. And depending on the day, you might be a curmudgeon here. But today I’m an Imagineer.

Dan Heaton: That’s great advice. I think it shows too, not just with Imagineering, but just in so many different creative fields, how the learning part I think is such a key point because I mean, it’s like you mentioned with that technology, it just keeps evolving so fast. So I’m glad you had that opportunity with the Unreal Engine because what I’ve seen of The Mandalorian, the behind the scenes where they show the big dome, and it’s not people like Phantom Menace standing in front of a green screen, not knowing what they’re looking at. It’s mind blowing. I think technology like that is going to be used in so many different ways in the future.

Ethan Reed: Oh, absolutely. What they’re doing on The Mandalorian is cool, but just me sitting through these classes, learning, doing motion capture for the first time, really, and the funny thing is animating on the animation console is a form of motion capture and technically motion capture started at Walt Disney Imagineering with audio mechatronics in the 1960s. Those images of Wathel Rogers in that getup where he’s like controlling father from Carousel of Progress, that’s the birth of motion capture.

That was the first time it was done, and we got away from it at Imagineering. I’ve seen recordings of Wathel Rogers, it was like a fireside chat, and it was like before he retired, he recorded all this great stuff and I hope someone still has that stuff. It was like, well, we didn’t want to do the harness thing because it didn’t do what your body couldn’t do, what the character couldn’t do, what your body did, and it was uncomfortable and it would take them three hours to get in and out of the harness.

Well, it’s not like that anymore. I can use my iPhone with Unreal Engine and capture a facial performance and it looks fantastic and I don’t even have to clean it up. So it’s like I look at that and it’s like, well, I can program an entire show by myself and I can lay out the entire attraction in Unreal Engine. I can do all this stuff in this piece of software, which would’ve taken a huge team before, but I can iterate quickly and I can change things. Architects are starting to use this stuff. And it’s like, to me, I feel like I kind of struck gold learning this Unreal Engine thing, and I’m going to keep diving into it and see if I can help revolutionize the themed entertainment industry with it.

Dan Heaton: That sounds amazing. I’m excited to see where it goes. And Ethan, this has been so great. Thanks so much for talking with me and on the podcast. It’s been a blast.