145. Imagineering Roundtable with Chris Runco and Don Carson

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Some of my favorite podcasts have been the Imagineering Roundtable shows, which explore a variety of theme park design topics. They’re also so much fun to record! This episode of The Tomorrow Society Podcast brings together two of my favorite past guests. Both are former Disney Imagineers that worked on many classic theme park attractions. Don Carson returns for his fifth appearance, and he’s joined by Chris Runco for another great conversation.

During the episode, we discuss small enhancements that don’t generate headlines but make a big difference at the parks. It’s those little touches that keep us coming back to amazing places like Disneyland over and over. Don and Chris recall stories of updates that Imagineers often do without the fanfare. We also cover what makes effective concept art. I enjoyed learning more about how much goes into new ideas, including marathon brainstorming sessions.

We close this Imagineering Roundtable by looking to the future and the impact of new technology on theme park design. Classic attractions will succeed in any era, but guests’ tastes change over time. Don and Chris also talk about how the COVID-19 pandemic might impact the parks in the future. I’m not ready to hang out in massive crowds even today, and it’s a common feeling. I really enjoyed the chance for to hear so many cool stories from two great artists.

Show Notes: Imagineering Roundtable

Follow Chris Runco on Instagram at his new account at @chrisrunco52 and listen to his interviews on The Tomorrow Society Podcast in Episode 134 and Episode 137.

Check out Don Carson’s Environmental Storytelling Museum on Facebook Horizon, subscribe to his YouTube channel, and follow Don on Instagram.

Listen to past Imagineering Roundtable episodes of The Tomorrow Society Podcast with Don Carson & Chris Merritt, Don Carson & Joe Lanzisero, and Andy Sinclair-Harris & Don Carson.

Transcript

Don Carson: I said at the time, I wish I was Tony Baxter; I wish that I would just show up at Disneyland and they would just say, Tony, it’s Main Street. What should we do? And Tony would go, I don’t know, maybe that building could be blue and there’d be someone and they’d go, go, oh, blue, blue, blue. Then when I left, I thought, that’s never going to happen, and I just really have missed the opportunity of ever being in a situation like that.

But then we did the enhancements and we’d be on Main Street and they’d say, Don, we’re on Main Street. What color should that building be? I go, I don’t know, blue. And they’d go, oh, blue. I actually had to leave and do the enhancement work before I received this idea, this mantle that I thought was only given to a rare few people.

Dan Heaton: That is former Disney Imagineer Don Carson, who’s back for another Imagineering roundtable with Chris Runco. It’s going to be awesome. You’re listening to the Tomorrow Society Podcast.

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Dan Heaton: Thanks for joining me here on Episode 145 of the Tomorrow Society Podcast. I am your host, Dan Heaton. I’ve really enjoyed doing these roundtable episodes because while it’s great to talk about attractions that Imagineers have worked on how they got into the industry, that is all awesome. I love it.

But you don’t always get the chance to dig that much further into concepts related to theme park design, and that can lead to cool stories and ideas of what’s going to happen in the future and so much more. And that’s what we can really do on these roundtable episodes and especially when you get two really talented smart Imagineers in there, they’re going to bounce off each other, and that’s definitely what happens this time. Really excited to bring back Don Carson once again. He’s been a part of all these roundtables. Really it was his idea to do this.

I wish I had thought of it sooner, but I have to give credit to him this time. I bring in Chris Runco. He was on the podcast for two episodes this spring talking all about his career, and both of them know each other well. And what I found so interesting here is that we really dig into concept art and the role it plays in attractions and what really makes a good piece of concept art and all the other things that go into it where I just see the finished Typhoon Tilly with the boat up on the mountain, and you don’t think about what went into that, how many sketches were there before the one that Disney released.

Beyond that, we talk about small enhancements they’ve done because that’s something too, I often dig into the big ones. But what about some smaller projects that were still really important that just help them make the parks what they are. That’s a big topic that we cover. We talk about technology and the future and what makes an exciting theme park attraction that lasts so much more. It was such a fun conversation. I hope you enjoy it and I’m going to get right to it. Let’s do this. Here are Chris Runco and Don Carson.

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Dan Heaton: Welcome to another Imagineering Roundtable. I’m really excited about this one. I have two great guests here on the podcast. My first guest joined Walt Disney Imagineering in 1989. He was lead show designer on Splash Mountain at Walt Disney World. He also created designs for Mickey’s Toon Town at Disneyland and developed concepts as a freelancer for projects like Cars Land and the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. He’s back for his fifth appearance on the podcast. It is Don Carson. Don, thanks once again for returning on the podcast.

Chris Runco: Well, thanks for having me. Always enjoyable to be here.

Dan Heaton: Oh, definitely. And I’m excited too to have you talk with my other guest here who started as a portrait artist on Main Street at Disneyland in 1970. Moved over to Walt Disney Imagineering in 1976. Worked for Disney for more than 45 years. He was a lead designer and creative director on many projects including Typhoon Lagoon, Grizzly River Run, and the Redwood Creek Challenge Trail; he designed the Rx-24 pilot for the original Star Tours, so much more. He is back for his third appearance on the podcast. It is Chris Runco. Chris, thanks so much for joining me again.

Chris Runco: Hey, very glad to be here. I love having a conversation with you guys and my old buddy, Don. This is, it’s great. I was going to tell Don how much this means to me. So you’ve got a friend in me. You got a friend in me. It’s not me, it’s not in tune.

Dan Heaton: I’m going to play that for every guest. Now I’m just going to cut in Chris saying that and just say, Chris, he appreciates all of you, but especially Don. Thank you for that, Chris. So I want to, we’re going to add, talk about some bigger topics related to theme park design and a lot of cool questions before that. I wanted to briefly ask each of you about something you’ve been doing recently, Don.

So I know I’ve been following your YouTube channel for a while and I really enjoy some of the things you post there about theme park design. Recently I noticed you’ve been doing some videos where you’re kind of putting things together with a VR program called Facebook Horizon. I admit, I know almost nothing about this program. I learned about it mostly this week. But I’d love to know what interested you about this tool and what you’ve been doing with that.

Don Carson: Well, Facebook Horizon is in invite-only beta and has been for a little over a year now. And I joined probably seven or eight months ago. It is meant to be when it is released, a VR location where you can meet your friends, but it has a creator component and it’s a very simplistic sort of Lego, like take primitive shapes and erect it into various things. But one of the things it has is the ability to add music, theatrical lighting, and various other effects.

I’ve been using it as sort of a teaching tool for the principles that we use in theme park design by using these blocks to build these environments. So even though the things that I’m building can only be viewed in Horizon, I’ve been using it as sort of a very, very quick way to talk about principles of design in a very visceral way, grab a light, move it and see how it changes the feeling of an environment. It tickles my relatively recent interest in VR as a way in which for us to communicate the designs that are inside our heads.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, I thought it was really interesting. You set up several where you were like, you called it a museum of environmental design and you were kind of using it as a way to show how different elements of themed space interacts. Is it particularly good for doing that? Is this a good tool for presenting that in a way?

Don Carson: I think someday a tool will exist, hopefully that will allow us to do this. This was not designed to do what I’m doing with it, but it’s a really nice way to describe what is otherwise kind of esoteric ideas about environmental design. And also it challenges me to do these principles with super simple shapes, big sphere in a room, getting larger in the next room is a way to talk about how the presence of objects can change how you emotionally respond to it. Stuff that I’ve been writing about for years, but you can try to draw it, but there’s just nothing quite like being in the same room with this element to go, oh, it really does make me feel differently to be in this space with this design choice.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, it’s really interesting to me, especially as somebody who’s not a theme park designer, I found it was very helpful just to learn about some certain concepts. So I think it’s really cool. So Chris, I’ve also really enjoyed on Instagram you’ve lately been posting a lot of just great sketches and photos. You showed some art from Shark Reef, a blueprint from Typhoon Tilly. There’s a lot more than that, but I’m just curious, you started it up pretty recently, a few months back. What really got you interested in kind of starting to post some of this material that you’ve accumulated over the years or that you have?

Chris Runco: Well, at the risk of sounding really old fashioned, I did a podcast, whatever it was about six months ago, and at the end of it, the interviewer said, so what are your socials? And I said, I don’t even know what you mean. So afterwards he said, socials like Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. And I’m going, oh, I’ll get back to you about that. So I went and started. I start with my IT support, which are my sons, and said, what do I do?

Then I started to see the possibilities. I mean, I’ve been following people and that coincided with the fact that I’m really kind of organizing my archives at home, so to speak, in that I have a lot of artwork, non-Disney artwork and files, references, reference books, photos I took during projects, just little memorabilia and all. I’ve been trying to organize those and it started to click for me that, well, I could post a picture of this and then tell a story about it, why this is important to me.

For example, I have this wonderful railroad spike that came, it’s one of the original railroad spikes from Disneyland, and I was working in the Anaheim office 2000, 2005, and that’s when they ripped a whole bunch of the track out to renovate it. We would walk over that every day and see them doing the work. One day our boss had one delivered and everybody had one on their desk with a little tag saying where it was from rusted in the happiest dirt on Earth, I think is the tag that was on it. So I just posted that picture. To me that’s a fun story, and it was two things that it’s a good time for me to organize these and also weeded it out. There’s a lot of stuff there that doesn’t need keeping and document it and secondly tell a story about it.

Plus I’ve also, oh yeah, this is important in that there’s a wonderful series of books called Walt’s People and Didier Ghez, a great writer has put that together. He’s part of the Hyperion Historical Alliance and he’s done these great books about Disney animation and those books have focused on the studio and now they’re starting to focus on other areas of the company, including Imagineering. So I interviewed with him, he’s done a bunch of Imagineers now, and I got an interview with, we talked like last year, and I think I’m supposed to be in the next issue of that, but it’s not illustrated, it’s just our conversation.

I’m a visual person, so I’m going, I love telling these stories, and it’s fun to have that back and forth and the questions you get, so how could I do that and show some pictures too, tell the story in a visual way. So it kind of was the right time to get into it, and I have a lot of fun, but it does take longer than I think. Yeah, each one of ’em I boy, it’s like, got to write it up, got to edit the picture, got to get it up there, and it’s not, yeah, I admire Don that he can manage to do all these work with all this software and even no software and keep up with it. I can’t keep up anymore if it’s not Photoshop, I have no clue.

Don Carson: How, yeah, I have the sharing bug. I can’t stop sharing. And I hope that other people will find it interesting, but I’m constantly posting really esoteric stuff.

Chris Runco: I haven’t seen the Horizon thing or the YouTube clips. I’ve got to look those up now. I’m glad you…

Don Carson: I’ll send it to you.

Chris Runco: I’m glad I came and found out about it.

Don Carson: Well, I started a Patreon page last year, and mainly I did it so that I could find a small group of people. I could have sort of the water cooler conversation that I don’t have working remotely. It has been somewhat successful in that there are some dedicated people who subscribe to it, but the conversation is not as dynamic as I would like. In fact, I think Facebook probably would be a better or Instagram. It has allowed me to post a lot of stuff that I probably would feel uncomfortable posting to the wide world or Twitter and also talk about some really detailed information that is really specifically interested to the handful of people that are there. So that’s where a lot of that Horizon stuff is.

Chris Runco: I love the fact that we can have these conversations now long distance in a really effective way, including what we’re doing here, but exactly. I love the way you called it a water cooler conversation.

Dan Heaton: Well, yeah, I mean just both examples, like you mentioned, Chris, where you’ll post a picture and write something pretty long about it. And like you said, it’s a story and me just in the middle of the country is looking at it going like, wow, that’s really interesting. I get it. Or with Don, some of the things you’ve done, not even just with Horizon, where it’s like, I’m going to teach you this for 30 minutes on YouTube and I’ll just put it on. It’s like, oh, Don’s just here telling me about theme park design.

This is great. As you get so used to it and it’s like stuff we didn’t, it’s amazing what we can do with some of these things. I mean, how well we can be connected and like you said, just like we’re doing right now, all three of us are in completely different states and it’s very easy.

Well, I think we should dive into some fun questions here that both of you helped me come up with related to topics about theme park design. So I’m just going to start. One thing we talked about, which I think I probably as much someone who does this, where when I’m talking with someone, especially someone new who’s been an Imagineer, I’ll just be like, tell me about this big attraction you worked on, or tell me about Typhoon Lagoon or whatever.

What I don’t talk as much about a lot of times with an Imagineer, you’re doing smaller enhancements, little projects, and I don’t even mean little makes it sound like they’re not important, but no, just not projects that take five years and cost a billion dollars, different size projects. So I’d love to hear a little bit about that. I’m going to start with you Don, about what’s been your experience just with creating smaller enhancements for the parks and what’s that been like for you?

Don Carson: Well, one of the reasons I was so excited to get a chance to be here with Chris is that when I think of Imagineering and I think of the various roles there, Chris is the living embodiment of the sketch artist that produces the thousands of images that are the fuel for the finished product. I think that the public is kind of used to seeing the sort of finished illustration that marketing has deemed the thing that is influencing design.

But really what’s happening is that in the brainstorming sessions and in the early stages of blue sky and concept, there are these really quick, often just black-and-white sketches that are starting to throw out ideas. Chris is the grand master of getting it down, getting it quickly, and often inspiring. The most iconic things you can think about. The foundation of an attraction is based upon some of these really, really early sketches.

Even when I was at Imagineering eons ago, although I would do them, I didn’t feel as free as I could see that Chris was able to produce them. I’ve really, really fostered the skill of sitting in a brainstorming meeting and just pumping out drawings because that’s often the thing that kicks off the direction. It also is worth mentioning that these, a really good idea can be sold with a not so great drawing.

It’s really about getting the idea of the drawing done more than it is necessarily about producing a piece of art. So to the long intro into those smaller projects, one of the things that we’ve both gotten to do is they would fly us out to Florida, they’d fly us to a park and they’d say, we’ve got X number of dollars to spend on enhancing this existing park and working in partnership with operations.

You guys have to figure out how to spend the money. So some of that is my absolute favorite work. It’s wandering around a park and going and looking at garbage cans and looking at curbs and looking at the things that operations really needs to fix and finding thematic story ways to enhance those parks in ways that have no fanfare. But as a visitor, you come back year after year and you go, the place always feels like it’s evolving and getting better. And that’s due to a large part to that effort of creating all those sketches that enhance those parks. As that effort, you might produce a hundred, 200 drawings and maybe a dozen of them are the things that they base the finished product on, but it’s the act of doing all those drawings, which makes it make the parks better.

Chris Runco: I just came to hear him pat me on the back that just keep talking, Don, I’m just going to sit here and…

Don Carson: This is so great. I love Chris.

Chris Runco: That’s all I need. I was writing some down, I agree with him, with Don, that there’s an energy about a big project, which takes tears most of the time. It takes several years. That’s a long distance run that’s a marathon. And you start out and you talk about 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. It’s like one 10th of 1% inspiration. It’s like in the room or you go do some ideas, you come in and somebody goes, that’s it, and we’re going to do that.

You go out all excited because hey, this idea I did is going to happen. And then you trudge along for three years to get it built through endless value engineering where this gets taken out and this gets refined and in endless meetings. So you have to be prepared to do that and carry through. And some of the nice things about these small jobs is they’re often on a schedule where it is, okay, we’ve got this money, we’ve got to spend it in the next two months and we know we want to do something in here.

What do we want to do? And we go do it. I got a couple examples that popped in my head and I’ll bounce around, but one of ’em was a little thing. So I’m working down at Anaheim, the WDI in Anaheim, and we’re redoing the castle for the 50th. Kim Irvine came with this absolutely beautiful concept of dressing the castle in jewelry. And it’s one time where a lot of people had taken a stab at how to decorate that castle for the 50th. And Kim nailed it and she literally went off on a weekend and came back with this design and everybody said, that’s it after all these other tries. I thought this is one of those places where a woman’s touch was absolutely the right thing. She made it this wonderful like a jewelry box of gold and diamonds and so forth.

And then it was executed really well while it was going on. We had to cover it up and we talked about the idea that some buildings where you print a picture of the building and put it up, and we’ve done that lately, but this was kind of early on. So what they did is Disneyland built the scaffold around the whole thing and covered it in blue tarps.

So it meant that guests walked into the park and there’s the weenie of the park and it’s a big blue blob, and they started to get complaints you couldn’t believe I spent months saving, this is my trip once a year and I come in and the castle is a blue box. What are we going to do? So I think it was Tom Fitz and Marty at the time. But anyway, one of their meetings down, he said, we got to do something about this, but they said, Chris, Kim said Chris, try some different things.

So I played with it and the idea I came up was, what if there were characters that were part of that picture? Then I tried different ones and one of them was the playing cards because it was all going to be people up there repainting and touching up says, what about Alice’s playing cards? The painting, the roses red. So they’re all over the scaffold and they’re doing it, of course, they’re doing a terrible job and pouring paint all over the wrong things and spilling it on each other and all that stuff.

And I just did this quick sketch and it was just a little marker sketch, actually, I think I did a, took Photoshop, I took a photo and then I did drawings and then I pasted ’em in and Photoshop and I brought it to the next meeting and they literally said, that’s what we got to do.

Okay, do it right away. And I literally took the drawing out of that meeting, walked down the street to the carpenter shop in the graphic shop, said, this is what we’re going to do as fast as we can. We sat there and talked about, okay, let’s use this kind of material for that and this kind of, yeah, we can get it on there. This is how we’ll connect ’em to the scaffold and the carpenter shop. And they all said, you want it when? And graphic shop.

They said, okay, just give us the artwork. Next day I’m down there with a copy of all my drawings of the characters, they’re working on it. The installation was two nights later where we are bringing in the crane on Thursday night, get those things painted and be there at midnight, park closes at midnight, we’ll start working at one and we start installing.

So three nights later, I’m out there arm waving to get these things hung, right. And these guys are connecting them up and all that. So sometimes things happen in a hurry. And I actually got a note from Marty, the infamous notes that Marty always sent out the wonderful notes about just thanking me for coming up with a solution, making a negative into a plus because then people came and go, oh, you had to take a picture in front of the castle. It’s never going to look like this again.

It’s so funny because there’s all these characters draped all over and it’s a great team of people. And actually the Disneyland shops are really used to that kind of thing. Unlike our usual production process, those guys will frequently get somebody running in and saying, we need a new sign for this store and we need it tomorrow morning, or we need this fixed, this fell apart in front of the golden horseshoe and we need replaced as fast as you can. And so we don’t have to have cones out there or anything. So they’re used to that. It didn’t scare ’em anyway, and they were amazing craftsmen.

So anyway, that was one really fun one. I’ll throw in one more because there were several like this. So we did the overlay of the Mansion one year, and I am trying to remember if it’s when we made the ball float. I think R&D had worked that out and we’re putting that in, but they were also working on the attic scene and they’d come up with a story idea that we would put in. We would make more of a story out of the bride. And so we would represent the bride in her. They had this whole backstory about how she’s really the black widow. She’s like had six or seven husbands, and there’s Henry, but whatever it was, we in portrait and props, we would represent her and all these deceased husbands.

So I did a series of sketches of these things, and again, it was kind of quick like marker sketches and then picking the best ones. And then it was up to WDI where they created an effect where there’d be a portrait and then the husband’s head would disappear somehow. They all got beheaded. How did that happen? And of course, you see the Bride at the end, and I had a sketch of that. In fact, what I’ll do is if I find that I’ll stick that on the Instagram thing sometime soon, but she actually, the original effect was she was going to sit there and just get this creepy smile on her face and she had this bouquet of dead roses in her hand and lift it up and it would turn into an axe.

Well, it turns out you don’t really have time in there to see that in three or four seconds. You really have only a split second to see it. So it became just her interact. But that was a quick job where it was enhancements of the ride. Of course it all added some nice fun touches for things. And I agree, it’s just that sense that there’s always something fresh and always something new and the story. And also everybody would work very hard, especially with those classic attractions to make sure it fit in and did not distract from it that it still worked with the original magic. Oh yeah, those are very satisfying.

Don Carson: Yeah, those big projects are prestigious, but sometimes, like you said, it takes years before it gets done, and there’s no guarantee that something you’ve worked on for a couple of years won’t get canceled. So it’s a breath of fresh air when someone says, quick, do a sketch of this thing, and then before you know it, they don’t even have enough time to do shows that drawings, they just go build the thing.

Chris Runco: Yeah.

Dan Heaton: Yeah. It’s funny too, because I think of it as someone, I think some guests probably think more that a lot of attractions happen that way where there’s like, okay, sketch, go do it, and not all the other elements that are the challenges. So it’s probably a little stressful, but it’s nice to sometimes hear about something that happens in two days or in a shorter period of time. Because I doubt, like you said, that’s rarely the case, but so Don, you mentioned about visiting the parks and some changes. I mean, how difficult is it when you kind of come up with those changes, like you mentioned working with operations? Is that, I mean, it could be really good, but how do you balance the creative fun projects with things that are actually going to work?

Don Carson: That you’re hired to come up with as many ideas as you possibly can, and part of your job description is to work within the limitations of the budget or what the needs of operations of your a hundred drawings, maybe five of them will get built. In the case of the Florida enhancement projects, which mostly happened after I had left Imagineering and I worked as a freelancer is that each year usually Chuck Ballew and I would be partnered and we would fly out there and we would spend a week and we would go from park to park and they would give us their long list of things that we had to enhance.

Then the next year when we came back, they would joyfully take us around to show us the things that they built from the previous year. And I do have one story. We had some money to do some enhancements of Typhoon Lagoon.

So I had done this drawing of, it was one of the water fountains, drinking fountains, and we had made it out of lots of found pipes, but the idea was you’re in a bathing suit so that when you walk up and take a drink of water, it would squirt you in places that you hadn’t expected it to squirt. And so that’s great for a waterpark. So here we are, we’re all in our suits before the opening of Typhoon Lagoon, and one of the executives says, oh, you got to see this.

And he runs out there and he turns it on and it squirts water right into his crotch. Like, oh, we hadn’t actually thought that executives would potentially be using this water fountain, but that was wonderful. I have to say that the years right prior to my leaving, if someone had asked me, what would be your ultimate, how would you imagine yourself being treated as a Disney designer?

I said at the time, I wish I was Tony Baxter; I wish that I would just show up at Disneyland and they would just say, Tony, it’s Main Street. What should we do? And Tony would go, I don’t know, maybe that building could be blue and there’d be someone and they’d go, go, oh, blue, blue, blue. Then when I left, I thought, that’s never going to happen, and I just really have missed the opportunity of ever being in a situation like that. But then we did the enhancements and we’d be on Main Street and they’d say, Don, we’re on Main Street.

What color should that building be? I go, I don’t know, blue. And they’d go, oh, blue. I actually had to leave and do the enhancement work before I received this idea, this mantle that I thought was only given to a rare few people. Very funny. Some of my favorite stuff.

Dan Heaton: I love that because yeah, I mean, you get to be Tony Baxter and for a little bit, and then you get to go back. It’s great.

Chris Runco: Just the point Don made. That’s the wonderful feeling. But there are the 99 other drawings that don’t get built.

Don Carson: Oh yes.

Chris Runco: Yes. Or I shouldn’t say that. There’s the 98 that don’t get built. There’s the one that gets built wrong, and then there’s the one that gets built and you’re pretty happy with it,

Don Carson: Or it’s the one that gets built and then they don’t remember you worked on it. Oh, did you work on that? Yes, I did. Well, actually, after I left, you guys got the IRC, you got the computers in your office where you had access to the entire archive. So that was the only sort of saving grace was knowing that I was producing thousands of drawings and most of which would never be seen anybody, but they would be seen if a designer typed in the moon or the color blue or palm trees that if one of those drawings had one of those elements, that eyeballs would see those sketches and maybe they would influence some from future design, even though they weren’t used for what they were intending.

Chris Runco: Okay, I’m going to admit it right here. I didn’t do a thing in the last 10 years at WDI but just look through the archives and say, what did Don Carson draw? I need a good idea. Where is it? I’ll steal this one and I won’t tell anybody.

Don Carson: I would do the same for you, Chris.

Dan Heaton: Wow, that’s quite a revelation here. I’m amazed that I’m here for this.

Chris Runco: There you go. Now it’s out the secret.

Dan Heaton: It’s out in the world.

Don Carson: Stealing work. Yes.

Chris Runco: Well, I wanted to tell you about a job that didn’t quite come out since we’re on that topic. So we put Jack Sparrow into Pirates, and I love a team, Kathy Rogers, the team that worked on that did a fabulous job, and they really, everybody was scared to death of touching the crown jewel and how it would come out, but they did such a good job at integrating the pieces that every one of ’em is very enjoyable, but one I got to work on was they wanted me to figure out how to stage Jack next to the well scene. I did a whole series of sketches of Jack next to the well scene and how he would appear, because this is the first time you’ve seen him, so he’s got to kind of sneak in.

So I did one where he’s walking with a dingy over his head and he lifts it to look at the boat and then pulls it back down. That’s the thing. I did one where, let’s see, he’s like, there’s an extra little boat, and he’s behind the sail, and he literally pulls the sail down and looks at us and puts the sail back up. Everybody’s going, where’s Jack Sparrow? So where is he? And then I did one where it’s the dress maker shop, and some of the dresses are out in front of the shop, and I did it.

So when you see him, his head is on top of the dress. It looks like he’s wearing the dress. And so they’re looking at, so if they look over, it’s like one of those Three Stooges movies or something. You look over and you just see dressmakers dummies and you don’t realize it’s not a dummy, it’s Jack Sparrow’s head on top of one of them. That was the gag. So I do the sketches, they decide they like that one. I think Chris Turner even did a beautiful rendition of each one of those, the ideas that ended up in the right; I go down there after they’ve installed it, and I look, and here’s the dressmaker’s dummy, and about two feet away is Jack Sparrow.

I go, well, wait a minute. He’s supposed to be like, his head’s supposed to be on that thing. And so what happens is the boat comes around and he’s obscured behind the dress maker dummies, but when you don’t see him until you get kind of past them, and then he’s standing there with one hand on part of the dressmaker dummy, and I think there was even a discussion about where his hand should actually be placed, Jack Sparrow, after all. But anyway, it wasn’t the gag I intended to do. And I always look at that going, no, just give me a wrench. I could fix that. I’ll go in there one night and I’ll just slide it over. And best laid plans.

Don Carson: So the designer is seldom a hundred percent happy because all we do is look at the thing that could have been.

Chris Runco: Oh, yeah. Yeah. I love that. When you were talking about that and one of the last podcasts and I was going, yeah, you don’t want to ask us to critique anything because we’ll tear it apart. We’ll just tear it apart. We’ll just talk.

Don Carson: Yeah, we just opened a water park in New Jersey, and whenever anybody congratulates me, I just want to apologize. Yes, it’s fine. But oh, there’s a couple of things I’d fix.

Chris Runco: That’s the Madagascar one.

Don Carson: Yeah. Yeah. It’s the Dreamworks one. Yeah.

Chris Runco: The pictures look great.

Don Carson: Don’t screw it up.

Chris Runco: Looks perfect to me.

Dan Heaton: Congratulations on that.

Chris Runco: Right. We’re a terrible audience.

Don Carson: Yeah, we’re terrible. We’re also terrible to go to the parks with everybody else is having fun. And we’re going, how does that work? Oh, there’s some bulbs burned out over there.

Chris Runco: Yeah. What were they thinking? Did you see their color scheme they used over there? That’s just cheap. Everybody else is having a good time. And anyway, I try really hard not to do that. I try really hard. I heard a story once that Marty Sklar’s kids hated to go to the park with him because they said actually his grandkids, they said, I hate going with grandpa because he’s constantly bending down and picking up the trash everywhere we go. We can’t ever, or he’s talking to the staff.

Dan Heaton: I was thinking about last episode with Chris Merritt, where Don, you were talking about a curb that was a real challenge. So I know that that became up that same similar topic, but I don’t want to make you revisit all that pain again, but I could just ask for more stories. But I will go on to another question. But it relates to what you’ve talked about already, which Don, I know you mentioned in your intro is about concept art and just we often will see, I will see the one that comes out when Disney says, we’re going to do a new attraction, and here’s what it’s going to be.

And here’s one clip. I know like you mentioned, there’s been a lot more art put into place, some different directions. So I’m going to address this to Chris. What is really, this is the biggest question, probably a challenging answer, but what’s the secret to when a concept art is really what makes a concept work or just be effective versus other pieces of art?

Chris Runco: Luck? No, I did think about this a little bit, and I actually got something I think I’m going to put on Instagram as kind of an example. Well, I’ll give you a little background. Marc Davis was the absolute master of telling a story visually. It’s the animation training, I’m sure. I mean, if you look at the storyboard Bill, Pete, a Ken Anderson, all of ’em, that was what they learned to do.

But I couldn’t get enough of studying Marc Davis’ pictures because he told the whole story in a single shot. There was no doubt. You looked and you read it and you knew exactly what was going to happen. It was almost an afterthought when he would say, yeah, the head turns like this, and the arm turns like this because it isn’t. The animation is rarely told, or the story is rarely told in the animation.

And I think that’s partly because he didn’t have the animation tools we have now, which are much more sophisticated. He might’ve relied on them more, but at the time especially, he was just so good at framing it. There’s animation tools in that. One of them is the silhouette. The silhouette is what reads first. And animators know you designed to tell the story with the silhouette. So the arms are not in front of the body. The arms have to be where they’re readable as a silhouette, that kind of thing.

So that’s part of the trick. So animation tools help. The second thing that comes to mind is one of the things I did starting in college, and actually before I did a lot of cartooning and I did editorial cartooning, and I actually still do some of that now when I feel like it, when I get bugged enough by something going on, one of my other Instagram pages, I’ll throw up one of those, and I actually did it for local papers here in town and won a couple awards.

There’s a state contest every year, and I did it for 10 years. And that’s another tool. One of my favorite artists was Paul Conrad. He was a master of that as well. And so was Herb Block and Olohan and all these great guys. There’s still some of my favorite artists to look at those editorial cartoonists. And again, what do they have to do? The really good ones tell a story and it hits you right between the eyes.

The moment you look at it. There are other kinds that maybe have a storyline, a storyboard or different things, but the ones that really are super impactful are those ones that just the image tells the story the moment you see it. So I think that, and oh, there’s a third example that just come to mind, and that is, I remember Randy Bright talking about the art of the attraction poster, the good attraction posters.

You walk up and you instantly know what you’re going to experience and how much fun it’s going to be. It’s all about how exciting it is. You think of the Peter Pan poster, and there’s the boat flying over London, and you’re in the boat surrounded by stars, Dumbo, just those great original posters are the quintessential image. Secondly, this is not a place to go read a novel. It’s not the kind of experience it is. The audience comes in, it’s sensory overload. There’s a million things to see.

You won’t see ’em if you come a thousand times. There’s still new things to see. So you have to direct ’em with the tools, the architectural tools, like the Target, the Castle, the Weenie, and those kinds of tools. But secondly, it’s all quick reads. It’s the nature of it. It is not a novel. It is quick reads.

It’s like cartoons. And it was built by cartoonists in many ways. So to me, the concept art, it tells the story and in the audience, in that case, it’s all about knowing your audience. Your audience is not, the first audience you have is not the guest. The first audience you have are those executives, the decision makers and the art directors maybe altogether, maybe separately.

But you’ve got to put stuff on the wall. And when they walk in, my object was always to tell the story with, before I say a word, I want ’em to know what they’re going to get. Then I embellish it with telling the story and kind of laying it out. But really, I put it up there with the idea that if they walk in and I don’t say a word, they will look and they’ll get it what they’re going to get. So that directness, I think it would help us sell things, and that would also help, because that is the way the guests will experience it too.

Don Carson: Were you part of that junket that went to Florida to do the brainstorming for Blizzard Beach? Were you in that?

Chris Runco: No, but I did work on it afterwards.

Don Carson: Yeah. Well, there was a week-long brainstorming session, and that always seems like really we’re going to brainstorm for a week, but it definitely falls into the category of a sausage being made. But we all got together and we basically, we toured all the water, we toured the water park. The idea was that Typhoon Lagoon was so incredibly popular that it opened at eight and closed at nine because it filled to capacity for the day. And so they desperately needed another Typhoon Lagoon.

And so they got a bunch of us to go, and Ben Tripp was there, and Julie Benson was there, and we were just all piled in this big room. But the Disney resorts, people wanted to be embedded into the room with us to see what it was and how we did it. What are these crazy people doing, and how do they come up with these ideas?

Well, when you have that many people who are being fed and being told to fill boards rooms full of concepts, by about 2:30, you get really silly. And so you start just coming up with, you’ve got some concrete stuff, everybody’s working, but after a while, you get really, really snarky. And with Ben Tripp in the room too, you would some incredibly politically incorrect stuff. So there ended up being boards for each of the potential water park ideas.

I think we had three boards for ideas that had potential. And then we had a fourth board. That was everything. We couldn’t show anybody, and so we just actively would fill that board. So finally, we ended up having a presentation for Michael Eisner, and I think we had a Little Mermaid, entire Little Mermaid waterpark. That’s kind of a no-brainer. We had an Acapulco one because that would be easy to do, and we’d do a good job.

Then we had this weird idea of having a blizzard in Florida of all places. And then we had this other board of just ridiculous stuff. And so Michael Eisner looked at it and he said, you could easily pull off the Little Mermaid and you could also pull off the Acapulco one, but you’re Imagineering, if anybody can pull off a snow covered mountain in Florida, you can. He green-lit Blizzard Beach at that moment. And then he looked to the resorts guys who had been mute the entire time, and they said, okay, you were in here. Tell us spill the beans. What was it like? And the guy shook his head and he said it was sheer madness. He said, I was two days into this process. I went, these guys are crazy. Why do they pay these people to come up with this stuff?

They’re obviously just having way too good a time, and they’re coming up with completely unusable ideas. But he said, but it magically came together into these amazing concepts, all of which would’ve been made into wonderful water parks. And one added little twist to it was that the head of the resorts at the time had given us tours of Typhoon Lagoon and their shark reef, which is a fantastic experience of being able to swim with the sharks, but it has the lowest capacity of anything they’d ever done before.

And so as far as the operations was concerned, it was considered way too expensive, way too much staff. It was no way. So he made a point of telling us, I don’t care what you come up with, but whatever you do, do not come up with anything that is at all like shark reef or operational reasons.

He made such a point of pointing this out to us that we thought that was hilarious. So before the meeting was held, we created a fifth park called the Shark Reef Resort, which we did. We created nothing but fake ideas for an all shark reef resort. And then Eric Jacobson had t-shirts printed where every one of us wore, and it said, ask me about the Shark Reef Resort. When the head of resorts came in, he came into entire room with everybody wearing nothing, but ask me about the Shark Reef Resort with an entire presentation board for that. And then of course, we let him know we were pulling his leg.

Chris Runco: What does his face look like?

Don Carson: Oh, he was completely shocked because he had really quite made it fool of himself demanding that we never, ever do anything like that.

Chris Runco: Yeah, that’s the fun, the craziness and what you mentioned. Oh, and then pulling together. Yeah. Oh, I know the point I was going to make. And that is the impossible ideas are very much in a very critical part of the whole thing. I had a couple times where we had kind of new show producers that we’re working with hadn’t beaten ’em into shape yet, so to speak. And I remember we’re sitting there and we’re brainstorming and we’re going off on a tangent and we’re flying all over the room, and they were getting so flustered going, we’re supposed to get this job done, and you guys are out on left field.

I’m going, it’s okay. We can never build that. I’m going, but you never can tell what it might everything until, and it is like, relax. It’s going to be cool. And because often it’s funny because there’s these books that we’ve put out a long time ago, The Imagineering Way, and I think that’s exactly, I have a page in there, and it’s exactly what I said is think crazy for a while. The old improv technique, you take things that make no sense together and you slam ’em together and you get something new and a lot of ’em fail, but then you’ll get one that’s just a jewel that really works.

Don Carson: You get so punchy about 2:30 when their lunches finally hit your brain and you’re about to fall asleep. Everybody gets silly and punchy and really feels that they’re done. And one of the rules of brainstorming is there are no bad ideas. So at that point, you end up coming up with sarcastic. I go, well, what if it’s this? And it’s that moment where everybody goes, that’s terrible. Wait a minute. And then before you know it, we’re all drawing a version of that. Then what if there was a boat stuck on the top of the mountain, and then every so often the geysers are shot through the chimney? That could not have happened without that sort of absurdity and wonderful. What if that happens deep into a brainstorming session?

Chris Runco: Well, it’s a snow covered mountain in Florida.

Don Carson: Yeah, that’s so dumb. Yeah.

Chris Runco: You’re going to do what?

Dan Heaton: I was going to ask the question right before you said that I was going to be like, how many times does the impossible weird board actually lead to the real attraction? Does that happen every once in a while? I mean, because I can think that sometimes too, the ideas can be so straightforward and so obvious that they don’t hit. You have to almost, it’s somewhere in the middle probably. But to those impossible ideas, I guess they do sometimes end up hitting it pretty much.

Don Carson: Well, there’s also a weird dynamic that happens. Marie Miller, who we both worked with at Imagineering, she was brilliant at coming up with the perfect idea two minutes into the brainstorming session. But the problem with that was that nobody had gone down the road that she had gone in her mind. So she would come in and she would say, I know what it is, it’s owls. And everybody would look at her and go, okay, that’s interesting.

And a card would go on the board, owls, and then about four hours into it, someone would come up and say, what about owls? Then everybody would go, oh my gosh, owls, that’s the perfect thing. And Marie would look over to me and say, didn’t I say owls? The first thing when we came in here? And I said, yeah, but it took us this long to get to where you were. She did that time and again where she had deduced the exact place we needed to go, but it would take the rest of the room the entire afternoon before we all got there.

Chris Runco: Yeah, everybody to have to catch up. Unfortunately, that’s also a common thing that women run into where in fact, I heard this echo, this strategy that women have learned, which is that they’ll often speak up, say something, it gets ignored way too often. Of course, not at Disney, but somewhere else. They learn to echo each other that one woman says it, and then a second one immediately says, that’s a great idea, and repeats it, and a third one repeats it. And after about three times, the men room finally gets through their thick skull and they catch on. So it’s a combination I’ve said. Yeah, and unfortunately, that’s probably happened many times.

Don Carson: I hope that that’s changing. I know that when I speak to SCAD or some of the students that are the up and coming talent, when I look over Zoom, I’d say a good 80% are females. So I think that we’re going to see a shift in that, but us old farts, that was definitely true at the time.

Chris Runco: Yeah. No, there’s been a huge transition. Like I said, we talked about it. I was there a long time. There was, when I look back, I even see the distance of it, but I’ll make a joke about when I started at Imagineering, and I was in the model shop where I’d go to a production meeting and there’d be 20 people in the room. It’s all guys. Half of ’em were smoking, and the only woman that would show up in the room was Marty’s secretary to bring him a note. And 30 years later, when I’m working on things, things had changed.

We finally had some wonderful women designers who were part of our group, like Renny Rau Marquez and Karen Armitage and Nina Ray Vaughn. And so we had more and more women be a part of it. But by the time I was done when I was working in Shanghai, I sat down in a room once in a production meeting on our team, and I looked around, the show producer was a woman, the writer was a woman, the coordinator was a woman, the associate designer was a woman. It was like, yep, this is a different, and nobody was smoking either.

Don Carson: Yeah, no one was smoking. Thank God.

Chris Runco: Yeah, and you’re right. And thank heavens, because you got more views, more richness to the stories.

Don Carson: Much more diversity too in the cultural makeup of the people too, which is only going to make it better.

Chris Runco: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, that’s great to hear. I know we talked about that, Chris, when you were on the podcast, but it’s always good to hear because like you said, I mean for a lot of different reasons, but even so, it’s going to lead to better output, better parks, everything. But I mean beyond, there’s so many other reasons why it’s important too.

Chris Runco: It has already. I’ve seen it many times in the projects in that last 10 years, especially things we did on Shanghai, and it was just we had a great team and just great women leading the team and some great designers to choose from and to work with. And yeah, our range of skills had much bigger, and like you mentioned culturally too, for sure.

Dan Heaton: Well, speaking of kind of things that are going more in the future, I know that also design the type, like we mentioned it upfront when I was asking Don about Facebook Horizon and VR and everything that, I mean, that’s not exactly an example, but it’s one example of how technology’s evolved. And I know that 3D design tools are becoming a lot more prevalent, and even just how attractions are done is a lot different. So I’m curious, I’ll ask you Don first too, just, I mean, I know it’s changed a lot, but how has it really impacted what we see with attractions? So not as much just what has changed technologically, but the finished product. How does that end up impacting it beyond just what you do as your job?

Don Carson: Well, one of the things that is reflecting on the way we did business before is that a handful of professionals had the ability to decipher the hieroglyphs of an architectural drawing. It’s not necessarily, everyone is born with the ability to look at an elevation or look at a plan and immediately understand what the 3D space is doing.

Especially as we’re starting to work internationally, that something that Chris and I could draw and look at each other and go, I know exactly what the size of that is. I know what it’s going to be like to be in it, the clients. So there’s a demand now to have you even really early on in the design process, take them to the place that you’re designing. And so I’m often having the discussion of, does this mean that we’ll never draw a drawing again? And absolutely not.

I always reach for pens and paper first. That’s the way I think best. And if I were to reach for the 3D tools first, sometimes that can suggest that the design is further along than it really is. And so I’ve been starting to try to do this sort of hybrid where I do a rough sketch and I bring the sketch into three D so that it’s the right scale, but the client is understanding that what they’re looking at is just as rough as that sketch, but they’re getting this three dimensional information that they wouldn’t have had before.

As an example, one of the ways that when we used to do theme parks, when it came to when we were going to put up a castle, we were going to put up a mountain, we would do a visual study where they would take weather balloons and they would fly them out in the actual park, and then usually John Hench would walk around and see where he could see the weather balloon to understand what the visual noise was of that themed element when you were on Main Street or in Tomorrowland.

Well, nowadays, as the part of the brainstorming process, you can take something as loose as a bubble diagram or a really, really rough scale sketch of a master plan and draw a two dimensional mountain with whatever theming is on top of it, and then bring it in at scale, and then jump into VR and get the same experience John Hench was getting when he was standing in the park looking at weather balloons, even in the roughest form. So those initial sketches are just as valuable as they always were, but now they’re packed with additional information, which was what does it feel like to stand at the base of a mountain that’s 300 feet tall, even though it was done on flimsy with a felt tip marker?

Chris Runco: I love the fact that you’re doing the hybrid, the hybrid kind of product because I ran into the same thing, the advent of Photoshop and not to mention the 3D tools, I noticed it all the time. There’d be a mistaken impression that we completed design and we were in concept and because it’s right there, you can see it in 3D and you can walk through it. Okay.

You guys have it all figured out. And the fact is that we’d be not any farther along than we’d have been if it was a foam core model, a rough foam core model. It just gives that impression and it’s partly because it’s photorealistic if you want it. And so yeah, I would do the same thing as mix drawings into Photoshop and or Sketch over Dimensional, get some dimension down in 3D and then sketch over it. So the end, the product is a sketch just to make sure it’s clear that there’s a lot more work there to do.

Don Carson: Yeah, no, it’s super important. The thing is that I’ve discovered that clients actually appreciate that because it reminds them, the other thing that’s happening, this is where I’m going to be old, old “get off my land” guy, is that there’s also a push to do what is called photo bashing, which is they’re taking lots of photographs and this is actually being trained and a lot of people, illustration world, they actually want this. It’s a very fast way to get a lot of imagery done.

So you’re grabbing images off of Google, you’re cutting them out, and you’re basically doing a montage and filling it full of people. This is often also done in the architecture world where they want you to see how incredibly diverse the audience is and how they’re all milling around the architecture. But the problem is that often in the act of the speed of photo bashing, they are losing some of the rules of good storytelling, composition, light, and dark.

Even the consistency of the way the light’s hitting the individual people in the crowd in service of it being a fast image. And what it’s done is it’s kind of trained the clients to ask for bashed images, but what you end up doing is you end up creating a picture that’s sort of lying to you about what the finished results are going to look like without necessarily the design of how it’s actually going to function. So you’ll see a lot of stuff out there, not often the marketing pieces, but internal stuff that is thrown together in a way to give a really quick idea of what it feels like, but often before anyone’s really figured out what it is they’re predicting.

Chris Runco: Yeah, I’ve also seen a lot of that and I’ve seen some people that are particularly adept at it. I remember in Shanghai they had a couple of artists that came in who were freelancers and did big beautiful renderings of these atmospheric pieces, and it was clear that they were doing that, and it’s a good tool for some things.

But like you said, it’s like Tom Gilling used to say, once you get the values and the composition, the color doesn’t matter. It was like you got to have those basic elements of design strong to really get a good design and you can lose it in the technology. Secondly, that’ll likely, in some ways, that’ll be a fad where that’ll be popular for a while and then it’ll lose its attraction because people have seen so much of it. And then the people who have spent years training themselves to do that, where are they going?

Don Carson: The entire art of book for Game of Thrones is 300 pages of photo bashing. Now, granted, they made that amazing series based upon those images. So it is a tool, it’s an iterative tool, part of the conversation of design, but in some cases it ignores some of the rules of visual storytelling in the need to get it done quickly.

Dan Heaton: That raises an interesting question too, which is kind of not exactly related to design, but just with attractions, because we talk, I do almost every podcast I do, people bring up, they were influenced by Pirates of the Caribbean and Haunted Mansion, and it’s a lot of the same attractions, which are classics and amazing attractions, but obviously technology’s changed and we’ve seen super high tech attractions, some that are very successful, Rise of the Resistance, Flight of Passage, Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey, whatever one you want to use as an example, as we’re looking ahead, do we see, I mean, I think there’s core components of what makes an attraction great, but I know that everyone has different ideas of that.

Do we see that technology is just going to continue to become the big push or will guests in the long run as we see more and more advances still flock to some of those original classics? I know it’s a big question. I’m just curious for your thoughts.

Don Carson: Well, I think one of the reasons that we’ve returned to the classics, granted they’re classic and they’re wonderful, but at the same time, if our experience as children was infused with that, those attractions, even the ones that weren’t maybe the top tier e-ticket attractions, we have a huge emotional connection to them. It’s kind of like cafeteria hamburgers when you’re in elementary school. There was nothing about those things that was good. But every so often I’ll have this desire for a really cheap cafeteria hamburger utterly rooted into my childhood experience.

I question things like, for whatever reason, the choice is to remove the Bug’s Life land you are taking away for whatever the reason you are taking away some quintessential childhood memories in the choice of removing it. Disneyland will never be finished, so it’ll always be changing. And that’s just the reality of it. I think that that’s great, but at the same time, I think we can also fall in love with non-class things, truly because they are so rooted in our childhood memories of having experienced them. Certainly, Monsanto’s Inner Space was one that I think probably not a lot of people would ride today, but I have super fond memories of having experienced it as a kid.

Chris Runco: Yeah, that’s such a wonderful, it’s just magic. It was magic.

Don Carson: It was magic, pure magic.

Chris Runco: Whatever it is, eight minutes of magic, all kinds of things going on there. Not to mention some of the stories the operators would tell us about what people were doing in that room. It could only be seen by the infrared cameras. But no, there’s so many fond memories and it’s always that balance of nostalgia is a wonderful thing. On the same time, you don’t want it to lock Disneyland. I remember we had this discussion about Tiki Room, and Disneyland’s not a museum.

We don’t want it to turn into a museum, so how do we refresh these things and bring new things in it and more interest, and especially because it is such a powerful memory and experience for people. Each park has that, these absolutely priceless memories from their family having their kids there. And so you have to kind of walk that fine line or walk that line and go, okay, what do we keep and what do we don’t? We did that with Tom Sawy’ers Island. I actually got yelled at. We went down to start that project, which was a rush.

That was an unusual thing. That was nine months I think from, in fact, not even that. Yeah, about nine months from when they said go to when we opened the door the first day we closed it down, they said, okay, it’s closing on Sunday. So Monday morning we’re down there at seven o’clock to go right at the island, work on it, and we all go out and this raft comes over and this raft rdriver is scowling at us. He’s just scowling at us. I’m going, hi, what’s going on here? And I guess he couldn’t contain himself.

He just goes, how dare you guys mess with Tom Sawyer Island? Walt worked on this island. Walt personally worked on this island. We love this island. And I looked at him and I said, I had this brief moment of thinking, can I push him over the side and then just drive this around?

No, I appreciate what he was coming from. But I said to him, everybody in this group, we are the most avid fans of Disneyland. You could find anywhere. We love the island too, and we will not do anything that will harm it at all. We’re here to make it better. So he kind of muttered and got us out to the island. We started our job three, four months later, we get it done and I had a couple of the same operations people come up to me and go, man, we really like it. You guys did a good job.

We really appreciate that you cared, you treated it well. I said, okay. Then that was definitely, okay, what are we going to keep? What is not working anymore? What’s still working? How could we make it better? We made it much more accessible. We put the story into it that everybody loved and it fit one of my favorite moments. It was my one time to really do a song and dance presentation for John Lasseter when he was had become the Creative Advisor to Imagineering and was working on so many things.

But I researched it and I’d ask people, I had these boards, I still have pictures of these things because, and it was, I read back through Tom Sawyer, I read back through Huckleberry Finn and all that. I said, do you know why Tom Sawyer went to the island and his friends Joe Harper and Huck Finn?

Do you know why they went to the island? They went to the island to be pirates. That’s why there’s a pirate flag on the raft because in the story they say, let’s go over there and be pirates. We’ve had enough of this civilization. We’re going over there to be pirates. Then they got homesick, and then there’s a wonderful speech, and we actually put it on the construction fence later on. It said, how’d you like to light on a treasure chest full, a rotting treasure chest full of silver and gold? And that was Tom encouraging Huck and Joe who were getting homesick and wanted to go back and get some good food eat. So that’s why that was always there.

There were these little things like Smuggler’s Cove was originally called Pirates Cove, and Walt did work on the place, but there was that piece of it. So we said, okay, we’ll just kind of embellish that anchor is right over there. It’s been parked there for the last few decades. That’s New Orleans Square and all that. That back story is right here in Mississippi. So we can tie these things together. And we did. It was respecting the memory of that wine, and it was named very carefully named. We didn’t turn the island into Pirates Lair, it became Pirates Lair at Tom Sawyer Island.

We didn’t change the name. So anyway, that was a lot of fun to work on in many ways. I told you a little bit about Dan. I think I told you a little bit about how joyous that was to work on it, but oh yeah, we’re fans too. That’s part of the reason we can do a good job is because we cared so much about the place. I was on Tom Sawyer Island when I was a kid and have fond memories. I brought my kids out there and now in the very near future when I can get in there again, I’ll take my grandkids out there. And that’s a really special kind of memory.

Dan Heaton: I think you bring up a early example because yeah, I mean for me, I can fall into that where I went as a kid a lot to Florida, and I mentioned this I think in our last round table, Don, but the ones that I love were all the Epcot Center things. And If You Had Wings was, oh my gosh, love that so much. Some of these things where I’m like, yeah, part of that might be a little nostalgia, but I appreciate it when there’s something I really like that maybe is still there, but in a different way or something. Like you mentioned with Tom Sawyer Island, I have to kind of check myself sometimes like, oh, but it was so great. And it’s like, yeah, but how would it be if I walked in the door today? I don’t know.

Don Carson: You’re definitely a huge fan of Epcot and even its first incarnation too. And so there are powers have been powers to change that, but I deeply miss the World of Motion and Horizons, and some of those early attractions are just, it’s a crime that we can’t go on them right now.

Dan Heaton: I know. I try to hold myself back, but I agree. Alright, well I have one last question before we finish here, and it kind of relates, I mean this is a little bit about putting on your kind of prophecy idea here, but we’re still in hopefully the latter stages of a pandemic. And obviously I’m thinking more long-term, not during the end of it here, but it’s probably going to have an impact on the type of attractions we see because I mean, we had a stretch beforehand where things like the void and virtual reality and things we put on headsets and everything were becoming big.

Obviously those basically aren’t in existence at this point. And theme parks were looking into things like let’s be more interactive beyond just playing a game. And I’m just curious for your thoughts on, and I can start with you Chris, what types of attractions do you think we might see? I mean maybe won’t have much of an impact, but I’m curious if it might change the types of things we see at a park. And I am not asking you to predict it, it’s more, I’m just curious, what do you think might happen?

Chris Runco: Mickey’s 10 Commandments, put yourself in your audience shoes. We all have this experience now, and I think every day I’m discussing it with some friends or family. This has been a really difficult time and it also strikes very deeply, this is about our survival. This is something that has endangered people, has killed a lot of people. It’s sickened even more just huge numbers of people and still is around the world. And we haven’t dealt with something like this before. Really.

We’re kind of winging it all the way along. Experts and everybody for all we know it. So we’re kind of feeling it as we go. Every area did. Florida had certain rules. California had certain rules. There’s controversy about all these things, but in the long run, what worked and what didn’t. Some of it we won’t know. We still don’t know about when you wear masks, when you don’t, how you do a queue line. So I think a lot of it’s up in the air, but the other side, it gets very personal. There’s a side of this that’s very personal. It’s like, when do I feel safe to have myself and my grandkids at Disneyland?

That’s the bottom line. When will I feel safe and what kind of things will I feel safe to do? I went there with some friends in May at an employee opening and I was perfectly happy to be there. I appreciated the fact that queue lines were spread out, that they didn’t put many, they only half filled the pirate or third filled the pirate boat and it was a limited number of people. So I was able to kind of keep a comfortable social distance or outdoors. And we had masks, so I felt good in those circumstances. I don’t know when it will be okay again to get in a crowd on Main Street pack, shoulder to shoulder and watch the fireworks.

I don’t know how long it’s going to be before I feel at all comfortable doing that, but that’s just me. Some people will, some people won’t. We’re kind of feeling our way down. And secondly, this is a good place for a plug for vaccines is the more people get vaccinated, the more the rules loosen up. So virtually you get up there where everybody’s vaccinated and the issues diminish greatly. That’s the message we’ve been getting for a long time. And that hasn’t happened yet. And some places in the world they’ve barely got it.

But anyway, we need to get to that point where I think the last thing I’ve read is when we get to the point where the vaccines plus the natural immunity and we will continue to lose people, but at some point the natural immunity from having been sick and the vaccines will get to the point where it’s not something we worry about that it’s just kind of like the flu. It comes up and it can be risky, but you’re careful about it. I think everybody’s going to, A lot of my friends my age have said, I think I was so nice not to have the flu this winter.

Don Carson: Yes.

Chris Runco: I think I’m going to get some really stylish masks and every winter from now on, but the first, the cold season starts, I’m going to be wearing a mask all around because that was kind of nice. And Disneyland has some really nicely styled masks, so it isn’t an easy answer, but you can see that the parks are working pretty successfully now with some restrictions. Indoors is much more difficult to do than outdoors. So we’ll see. But we’re all feeling our way along.

Don Carson: I stumbled on, I was looking through finally my parents old photographs from their parents and their parents’ parents and so on and so forth. And I found a photograph in front of the ferry building in 1918 of my grandmother who was a teenager and her aunt and uncle standing there with masks on because they were there during the Spanish influenza. I remember that neither, none of my grandparents ever talked about having gone through that. They talked about the wars, they talked about the earthquake in 1906. Nobody talked about it.

I think a lot of it was they just wanted to distance themselves from that time period because many more people died of that too than we’ve experienced as horrific as this been. I think there’s a part of us that just so desperately wants to go back to normal that it’s not going to get to normal as fast as we would like, but I think we are going to burst out of the gate when there’s an opportunity for us to be gathering. So there may be a little bit of amnesia five years from now. I think also the other aspect of your question too is about technology and how that is potentially going to change the way we tell stories.

I can reflect on in the mid-‘90s when video games started to get more graphically interesting and the experience got longer, that there was a real sort of worry that people were going to stay home and play video games rather than going to theme parks. So there was a gamification of some of the attractions that were happening in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s. And I think that it kind of dawned on the theme park business that, wait a minute, that’s not the reason people come here. They’re coming here to be together and have a shared experience. The other thing that they’re coming for is they’re coming for the opportunity to basically create their own adventure because everybody enters Main Street, but then once they get to the hub, they begin an entirely unique adventure in a day that can last their whole life in memories.

They’re sharing that experience with the people, with them. And I think that what theme parks will continue to give us that’s unique, that virtual reality at home will not be able to give us is that shared experience, that adventure together in a place that is meant to entertain us. And if things like VR are folded into some of the attractions, they can only be so if I never am separated from the experience of being together with others while I have that experience.

So while we sort of wring our hands at the potential of VR, at stealing away some of the interest in theme parks, I don’t think it’s going to be capable of doing that because it could never deliver that visceral, that warm body next to warm body elbows hitting each other, going down the drop in Empire, the Caribbean, and laughing and getting wet. You can have in a Disney Park.

Chris Runco: Yeah, our sense is our experience of walking around, well, just right now in the space you’re in, there’s so much we unconsciously perceive that air temperature, the air movement, the space spaces sound different. We can even tell when a space changes shape just with our ears.

You can hear that on a record. You can hear the room that the magician, the musician is in same thing actually. So yeah, for all the tools, and I just did a wonderful time with my son where we all took turns doing the Oculus Rift, and I was amazed how far it’s come from what I saw. We also got kind of nauseous afterwards, so there’s still that to overcome, but it was pretty remarkable. But there’s nothing like the physical. There’s so much to a physical experience.

I remember per what Don’s saying, I remember when we did the Star Wars attraction with the simulator and other people did simulators, and there were a lot of people at times saying, well, the roller coaster’s dead. Nobody have to build one anymore. You just build the box and then it can be one rollercoaster and then it can change and you can do infinite numbers of rollercoasters. Well, they’re still building rollercoasters. That box has its own limits and there’s nothing like roaring around thinking they’re going to throw you into the sky at any second. They’re whipping by and this music on something like Screaming Incredibles and Space Mountain. So yeah, their theme parks give us something and I think we’re already jumping back into as fast as we can and we’ll probably have our ups and downs with Covid, but it’s not going anywhere.

I also love, just one last point is that’s part of what I love about plug for the TEA, the Themed Entertainment Association. We get these designers from all over the world and they’re designing museums and zoos and concerts and things like Meow Wolf, which what the heck is that? And theme parks and all these things. They’re taking the same tools and creating new types of experiences where we do have altogether and we do. And the Void. The Void is certainly one, and we’re doing it.

Escape Rooms did that with my sons. What a great time. Their issue is repeatability. I love that because the industry is just growing. There’s constantly coming up with same, and yet it’ll still be the fun of climbing on that Dumbo ride or climbing in that pirate boat, climbing in the car’s vehicle and going through Radiator Springs or seeing that character come up. How do you match that when Mader comes up and talks to you? It’s really wonderful. I love the business we’re in and the possibilities ahead.

Dan Heaton: I agree, and that’s one thing I’ve missed the most about not being in the parks is, I mean, I can watch the greatest YouTube video of something, but it’s not the same to just walk through those areas, especially just like you said, the rides are great, but all the other elements, just being in a space with people and all that is really special. Well, I could go on forever, but I think that’s a great place to end. Both those answers were amazing. Thanks to both of you for being on Chris. You’re putting out some really cool stuff on Instagram, so I’d love to have you let everybody know where that is and anything else you’re doing.

Chris Runco: Yeah, it’s at Chris Runco 52, 52 the year that Imagineering started.

Dan Heaton: Excellent. Well, I really enjoy it. It seems like there’s something amazing there, however often you’re putting up there, but I’m

Chris Runco: Trying to do it every week.

Dan Heaton: It’s pretty often. I know. I was going to say every day, but I was like…

Chris Runco: Trying to do it.

Dan Heaton: Don’t want to hold you to that, but Don, I know like I mentioned on YouTube and everything else, but where could people find out what you’re doing?

Don Carson: Well, Instagram, it’s Don j Carson on Instagram, and I do have a Patreon page, which I do post a lot of more insider stuff, and that can be reached through my website, which is at Don Carson creative.com. Anyway, Instagram is a nice freeway to be able to see what I’m working on or have worked on in the past.

Chris Runco: Don Carson creative.com.

Don Carson: Yep.

Chris Runco: Okay. I’m going there right after this.

Dan Heaton: You’re all set for the rest of the night.

Chris Runco: You got some more ideas to steal. I know where to find him now.

Don Carson: Come get ’em. Come get them.

Dan Heaton: Well, thanks so much to both of you. This has been amazing.

Don Carson: Thank you, Dan.

Chris Runco: Yeah, thanks for setting this up because what a pleasure.