Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed
Ray Spencer has a love of railroads and an interest in Walt Disney, and that passion has carried over into his time as an Imagineer. During his 19 years at Disney, he worked closely on many great attractions. This included updates to classic rides and shows from the early days of Disneyland. Ray returns to the Tomorrow Society Podcast for this episode to dig further into his career. Last time, we talked about Buena Vista Street, Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, and how he got started in the industry.
We begin this conversation by talking about the Carthay Circle Restaurant and how it functions as the centerpiece of Buena Vista Street. Ray describes the importance of the theater to Disney history and the layout of the space. We also discuss Ray’s work on adding the Hatbox Ghost to the Haunted Mansion alongside Daniel Joseph and other Imagineers. He explains the challenges with adding a new figure to the attraction while it was operating.
Ray also talks about the updates to the Disneyland Hotel and the origins of Trader Sam’s Enchanted Tiki Bar. He worked on a lot of projects in California, including updates to the Matterhorn and the Pirates Lair at Tom Sawyer Island. Another fun project was Seasons of the Vine, a short film that played in the wine cellar space during the early days of Disney California Adventure. Ray covers what he enjoyed about that project, which was a quiet gem in the park. Finally, we discuss Ray’s inspirations for his art and approach to his career.
Show Notes: Ray Spencer
Listen to Ray Spencer’s first appearance on the Tomorrow Society Podcast in Episode 154 (November 29, 2021).
Watch Ray Spencer talk about the inspiration for the Red Car Trolley with the Orange County Register.
Support The Tomorrow Society Podcast and buy me a Dole Whip!
Transcript
Ray Spencer: It was interesting too because we did a lot of work at night. It was sort of a day and night thing, and the night work was interesting because we’d have to work around Fantasmic and so you’d be working away and then all of a sudden there’d be this mad rush of people running around the island and things happening and things blowing up. It was a lot of fun.
Dan Heaton: That is Imagineer Ray Spencer, who’s back to talk about a bunch more projects he worked on, including the Hatbox Ghost at the Haunted Mansion, Tom Sawyer Island and the Pirates Lair, Trader Sam’s, the Matterhorn. So much cool stuff. You’re listening to the Tomorrow Society Podcast.
(music)
Dan Heaton: Thanks for joining me here on Episode 169 of the Tomorrow Society Podcast. I am your host, Dan Heaton. Hope you’re doing great out there. It is awesome to be back with another Imagineer interview. We took our detour to Walt Disney World, spent some time at the Swan and enjoying the attractions and everything else there, but now we’re back digging into more stories with former Walt Disney Imagineers. Ray Spencer is back. He was here on Episode 154 back in late November of last year. We talked about his work on Buena Vista Street, including the Red Car Trolley and the Storytellers statue, lots of DCA content.
Also his updates to Big Thunder Mountain Railroad at Disneyland, Soarin’ Over California, Turtle Talk, so many other attractions. That was really just the starting point to talk more about some big projects from his career. This time we’re going to talk about the Hatbox Ghost at the Haunted Mansion, more on the Carthy Circle Restaurant on Buena Vista Street, Tom Sawyer Island, and the Pirates Lair. We’re going to talk about the Matterhorn, Disneyland Hotel, and Trader Sam’s and also a cool little gem called Seasons of the Vine that I never got to experience in person.
I’ve kind of fallen a bit down in the Internet rabbit hole watching YouTube videos, reading about it, and I’m like, man, I know it’s just a short film, but it would totally have been up my alley. It reminds me of a lot of the Land pavilion in the best way possible. It’s great to get a chance to talk to Ray about that and just so overall thoughts about his career at Imagineering and beyond, including his work on the Saturn 5 Rocket show at Cape Canaveral. I always love stories about Cape Canaveral as a huge fan of the Apollo program. Lots to cover in this episode. I am thrilled that Ray came back and was willing to dig even further into his career. I think you’re going to enjoy this one. So let’s get right to it. Here is Ray Spencer.
(music)
Ray Spencer: Dan, it’s a pleasure. Happy to be here and I enjoyed our previous discussion. I’m looking forward to today’s discussion as well.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, there’s still more things to talk about, and I still feel like no matter how much we talk about, there’s probably other things, but it’s a good list today, so I’m excited.
Ray Spencer: Excellent.
Dan Heaton: Alright. Well we talked a lot last time about Buena Vista Street, but I noticed as I was listening back that we didn’t talk that much about the Carthy Circle restaurant, which I’m interested too just on the choice of that as the centerpiece because it totally changed the vibe of the entire entrance. So I’m curious, when you and the team were going about choosing that as the, you could say weenie or centerpiece or something, how did that come about?
Ray Spencer: Well, I mean the restaurant is a different entity than the shell of the theater and the shell of the theater from a story point of view made sense because that theater is where Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs premiered in 1937. And really, as I probably mentioned before, the success of that film funded the building of the Walt Disney Studios in Burbank and the success of the company.
So from a questionable beginning making that film and the risks involved in doing that, great things came. That was the reason for that building. In our street and as kind of a weenie at the end of Buena Vista Street, much like the castle is to Main Street the restaurant as we were developing the interior programming for that space and programming is a term. It’s like what do you put inside this thing? Then they call it programming. It’s what goes in there.
We went through a variety of concepts from a walkthrough exhibit about Walt’s life and cafe and merchandise and maybe some kind of a little dark ride perhaps. I mean there was a bunch of ideas thrown up in the air. Really to be quite candid, it boiled down to economics because we had a fixed amount of money to do all of the work in developing, I guess they would call it DCA Two, which is Cars Land and Buena Vista Street and reinventing the front of the park and really kind of making it a Disney park when it really wasn’t perceived as that.
So literally when it first opened California Adventure, we had economics, we had a lot of things to do and we had a fixed amount of money to do it. It came down to what can we do in that building, in that shell because what you don’t want on opening day is people to walk down to the end of the street and there’s a padlock on the door, the Carthay Circle Theater that says closed, sorry, come back in three years when we put something in here. You don’t want an empty building or a locked door that’s not a great payoff too.
Dan Heaton: Not good.
Ray Spencer: No, it’s not good. So the idea of a restaurant was floated and the chairman of Parks and Resorts for Disney at the time, Tom Staggs, is a foodie. He really enjoys fine dining and the whole sort of food thing. So we appealed to him with the restaurant concept and we were able to get the funding to do it, and that’s where that came from. Then the stories within the restaurant are, if you think about Academy Awards or Oscars, we considered the spaces on the first floor.
This is a bar and some light foods and things like that lobby, sort of the pre-show. But if you go up to the second floor where the Carthay Circle Restaurant proper is, we kind of looked at that as a sort of an Academy Award, sort of a post academy awards party in a way where we celebrated all of Disney’s Academy Awards and through photographs and memorabilia.
So we thought about it in that way as kind of a one act or two act down below you’ve got the sort of the pre-show with some interesting Disney memorabilia and then up into the celebration of the Carthy Circle restaurant proper. So once we had those ideas, then we had to figure out how to fit them into the building because the building was already designed. It wasn’t like, okay, we’re building a restaurant, let’s build a building that will fit that restaurant.
We had a building and then we had to figure out how to fit a restaurant into that building with existing floor plates and dimensions and all the kinds of stuff that create a box. So how do you create an environment that’s compelling and interesting and intentional, purposeful and relaxing and special. So that’s kind of the genesis of how that restaurant came about.
Dan Heaton: Well, it’s interesting too, last time we talked about the Storytellers statue in the Red Car Trolley and some of the history behind that. Then you also have, you mentioned the Carly Circle having such an important history all before Disneyland, I mean all in that kind of early timeframe. So how important was it to have that icon all and that whole land kind of fit with something that stands apart from Disneyland but also tells its own story of Walt Disney?
Ray Spencer: Once we decided that Buena Vista Street was going to continue the Walt Disney and Roy Disney and the Disney legacy from the time Walt came out from Kansas City to California in 1923 to the premiere of Snow White in 1937, that was kind of the years that we were looking at for Buena Vista Street because obviously Disneyland wasn’t around or conceived of during those years, but the foundation and the bricks for Disneyland were being laid during those years.
That was with some of the pioneering things that I mentioned. I mean, like I said, in our first meeting, he showed up with a cardboard suitcase and 40 bucks in his pocket from Kansas City on the California Limited and had a big dream of being a director and working in films and animation, the first color cartoon, the first sound, cartoon, multiplane camera, all of this pioneering stuff that they were doing the Disney Studio was doing during that time period culminated with the first foot feature-length animated film, which was by some considered Disney’s folly thinking it would be a big flop.
And everything was riding on that film. So the Carthay Circle Theater where it premiered seemed like the perfect point to culminate that story. Also it’s really iconic. I mean, it’s a very iconic thing. We’re not going to put another castle at the end of the street, so what is it going to be? Is it going to be City Hall? Is it going to be, if you’re telling a story of early Southern California, what’s it going to be? And that theater seemed like the perfect icon for that street and that story. So we really lucked out. I mean, if it was a one-story theater that looked like a shoebox, we would’ve been making some different choices probably. But what we really lucked out in this.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, you’re not going to have your local mall, AMC theater or something there. It wouldn’t really have the same cachet. I think it works great because it’s very elegant and fits with the feels right for the time period. I mean, just from the few clips I’ve seen of Walt Disney at that time and the premiere and everything, it’s really cool.
Ray Spencer: Yeah, it was pretty cool. It was fortunate too that the Red Cars went right by there. And I actually had a doctor way back when we were designing all of that, and he told me, he said, oh yeah, he said, I would take my wife, who was his actually fiancé or girlfriend at the time, we’d take the Red Car, we’d go up to the Carthay Circle Theater and we’d see this film or that film, and I thought, okay, well that’s consistent with our story. Why not?
Dan Heaton: Yeah, it works great. Well, you mentioned a foodie. There’s another attraction you worked on that I never experienced because it was in the DCA 1.0 timeframe, but the Seasons of the Vine show in kind of the wine cellar, which then became the Blue Sky wine cellar. But at the time was, which I thought had a few, a nice setup there for this film narrated by Jeremy Irons. And I’m curious a little to learn a little bit about that because I watched it on YouTube and I know it comes out for various festivals but didn’t see it in that initial area.
Ray Spencer: That was a sleeper. And I think that in my opinion, because the park really wasn’t well attended when it opened, I mean it opened; 9/11 was shortly after opening and the park had its issues generating crowds and popularity, but that little show was a sleeper, it was a 50-seat theater, and that winery in that theater were sponsored by Robert Mondavi.
The idea originally was to have a bunch of different wineries participating, so you could have the ultimate kind of wine tasting experience from a variety of California wineries, but Mondavi at the time wanted to sponsor the whole thing. And so that’s what they did it is through a corporate, they call it corporate alliances. They get somebody to host the attraction. You see those sides hosted by so-and-so or company, but Seasons of the Vine. We wanted to tell the story of the seasons of wine making and the vehicle was a barrel room, so the walls had wine barrels and it had kind of a rough stone texture.
Then at the stage end there was sliding barn doors that would open onto a view, a vineyard, and the view was of course a film, but the perspective was such that it matched the perspective in the theater. So the illusion was you open the doors, you see the vineyard, and then depending on the season that it actually was, you would see that season outside the door if it was autumn or if it was winter or if it’s summer.
Then the story of winemaking would be told with a beautiful score. I wish I had a soundtrack copy of that. It was a beautiful score and through our research we spent a fair amount of time up in Napa Valley and some of the other wine regions and we got kind of a crash course on wine making and the nuances of that growing wine, they call it through Mondavi and others.
It was just a neat little show. I really enjoyed it and I was sorry to see it go, but again, it didn’t have the traction at the time to warrant keeping it around because you have to have a certain number of staff running it and you have to have a certain number of people going through. It was a low throughput probably, and I’m just guessing here, I can’t tell you for sure, but I think by the time you get X number of people in there operating the show, it could be a little bit labor intensive for the number of people that would see it and it didn’t ultimately make the cut. Sorry to see it go, but it was a neat show. I really enjoyed that show.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, I actually first came upon it through the music, I believe there was a years ago, a CD about Disney California Adventure soundtrack, and it was on there and I was like, what is this? This is really, really nice. It reminded me a little bit of an Epcot pavilion or something with the background music, and I think it’s out there, but it’s definitely worth hearing even apart from the film, but I didn’t even realize about the seasons. That’s a nice touch. You have the guy in the vineyard who’s like, Hey and everything and talks to the person who’s doing the show at the start. It’s the kind of show that I wish there was more of because it doesn’t do too much, but I mean it’s kind of a little gem.
Ray Spencer: I really miss it and I really enjoyed it, and it was fun to go on location when it was being filmed and see the people and how much pride they took in their work and the people that crushed the grapes, the people that pick the grapes, the people that prune the vines, the people that test develop the wine and keep their eye on when it’s ripe and how to barrel it, and great people, all passionate unsung heroes in every step. And I shows like that, that have some meaning and passion behind them, and that was a neat show.
Dan Heaton: Well, excellent. Switching gears to something completely different, which is I talked to Daniel Joseph a few times and he’s the illusions expert, but I talked to him partially about the Hatbox Ghost, about putting that together and I know you worked very closely on that team or were involved with the whole project. So I would love to talk to you about just starting with how that even came about with this kind of legendary figure that was only in the Mansion for a short time and then ultimately was brought back for the big anniversary.
Ray Spencer: Yeah, it was something like 60, was it 63 years? It was gone, something like that. Some incredible length of time It showed it was there for a few days or a week or…
Dan Heaton: From the beginning in 1969 on until 2015. So yeah, I mean 45 plus years. Just crazy.
Ray Spencer: I inherited that project. Anaheim resort had me, well, WDI had me working on three projects down there simultaneously. One was a Hatbox Ghost, one was the Matterhorn and the new animatronics, and the other was changing Condor Flats in Grizzly Peak Airfield, which is part of California Adventure. So I was working on all three of those at once and I don’t know if it was a matter of economics of, well Ray’s down there, let’s just get him on Hatbox Ghost as well.
It was something that I love Daniel and I loved working with him and we had a ton of fun on that. There was a couple other people that were very passionate about bringing Hatty back and I wasn’t involved in those initial sort of enthusiastic dreams. So I can’t say that I really followed that too closely because once I got involved, the wheels were already turning.
Some early sort of thoughts were developed on where he might show up and how it might play out. So I inherited a project that was already, I wouldn’t say it was funded and really rolling, but the idea was there and the interest was there and the timing was there. So I got involved and I learned a lot. I learned a lot about, first of all, I didn’t really realize the depth and scope of the Hatbox Ghost history and how much of a cult following the Hatbox Ghost seemed to have through images and fan sites, and I didn’t realize the depth of that.
I mean, I was aware of the character and I was aware that what happened, but I didn’t know that this cult following was something that was part of the Disney fandom. So for me, it was a lot of fun once I started really studying it, then it was really fun to get into and understand and of course appreciating Yale Gracey and the pioneers that worked on that originally, Rolly Crump, the people that really got involved and developed the iconography of that attraction.
It was humbling and fun and working with Daniel who’s super excited and a few others, Vinny Logozio, a mechanical engineer at the time, some of the people that got involved in that, it was fantastic and it was fantastic. The character was built in Glendale, which was more rare in recent years than in the past. So that was a neat thing. Mark Goldberg did a lot of the machining and assembly and it was just fun and people were very enthusiastic about working on it.
So the trick with that was where does he go? Is it in the attic? Is there a place there? And there wasn’t really, so as you may be aware, once you exit the attic and you’re on this little veranda area, he’s right outside the attic scene and behind him and you’re overlooking the graveyard. So he’s sort of off to one side of the ride vehicle.
What we had to do is we had to modify the Dune Buggy track so that they turn and they’re controlled by a rail that controls an arm that moves the Dune Buggies to the rider or to the left and spins them around one way or the other. We had to change the railing and the timing so that the dune buggies would face the character and stay facing the character until a certain point. Then it would turn and you’d go down the ramp into the graveyard.
So a lot of that was technology. And then the other thing was the exterior of the Haunted Mansion is one architectural style, but when you exit the attic, it’s a different architectural style. You have different roof lines. You don’t have the same architecture as the exterior in the front, so I don’t know why that was, but how do you make any sense of that and have it work?
It was a challenge from that point of view too, because you don’t want to give up too much. You don’t want people to be aware of that and really study that. So part of our goal is to make what you don’t want people to pay attention to recede and make the stuff you do want people to pay attention to come forward. And then we did that, and then also this is such a special character, but you don’t want to light it and make it so special that it’s different. It’s completely different from the rest of the attraction. So part of the goal too was to not make it so special and iconic that even though it is, you don’t want to make it so different that it feels like it doesn’t belong in that attraction.
We had to look at that too and also hide it when we were installing it because the ride was down for a while that allowed us to do a lot of the infrastructure work, but the ride was up when we were kind of putting the finishing touches and installing it and it was there. We had to hide it; we had to hide what we were doing; we did that. I don’t know how successfully, but I think we did. We might’ve raised some questions in people’s minds, why is that wall there? Why is that thing there? But it wasn’t obvious, I don’t think that we were doing Hatty.
Dan Heaton: How challenging was that to keep the whole thing a secret? Because I’m sure there was lots of speculation on the Internet. Like you said, people are so into the Mansion. I feel like so much more even now every year it gets to be bigger, but just how do you find a way to do that without somebody slipping, whether it’s a family member or a friend or something? Nobody really knew.
Ray Spencer: It was tough and we had a two-dimensional cutout that was freestanding that represented where the hat box was and the key spots that you would want to look at it, and it was to scale, but it was themed completely different. I think we called it Jose Skellington because it was a cape and a guy holding something and it had a duck’s head on it. I mean, it was the craziest thing. It was this assembly of pieces and parts that absolutely, if you looked at it, the last thing you’d think of was Hatbox Ghost, but it gave us our points that we need to focus on, and so we were able to kind of get that in place and bring it up and set it up when we needed to and take it away.
And I don’t think anybody was thinking, oh yeah, that’s the Hatbox Ghost. There’s no way you’d think that looking at it. So we had to come up with a very interesting disguise for that piece that led us stage the scene and then the rest of it was done under tight security at WDI when it was being built. So we had a blacked out space in a seldom used warehouse, and we tried to keep it quiet, as quiet as we could. We just did the best we could with what we had.
Dan Heaton: You mentioned the technology, because to me that would seem like the big challenge. I mean the attraction is, like I said at the time, was 45 years old and I mean, how tricky was it? You’re going into this classic attraction that everyone that most people love, it’s so much history and then you’re putting it something new. Was it a challenge, like you already mentioned to technologically make it all flow together? I mean, was there a lot needed to be done there?
Ray Spencer: Well, I do know that the figure itself, it had some pretty simple mechanics in it in terms of its particular motion. And if you think about mechanical engineering, the cane or staff that he holds and the hat box and his legs, if you think about just simple articulation of mechanical pieces, the engineers did a brilliant job figuring out how to make those very simple yet look like a lot more was going on.
Then I don’t pretend to understand the mechanics of the head disappearing and how that technology, I understand how it works because I’ve seen it work, but having it work in such a quick fashion and combining that with lighting effects and the things that need to happen internal to that, it’s very technically complicated and all of the pieces have to work for it to work. So it’s not a simple thing like the original, which was turning a light on and turning a light off.
You turn the light off of a face and you turn the light on in the hat box. It wasn’t nearly that simple because it’s dimensional. It’s dimensional that head does to disappear and it’s pretty amazing. But you think about classic card tricks and shell games, it’s that too. It’s like you distract the viewer by one thing and then something else happens and they’re not paying attention to it. The guy pulls the coin out from behind his ear, how’d that coin get there? Well, it got there because you were looking to the left and he was doing something else and it got there. So there was a lot of that going on too.
Dan Heaton: It’s like the essence of how the Omnimovers and the theme park attractions work where they turn you one way and you try and look the other way and it’s all, you don’t want to do that because it’s best to look where they want you to look.
Ray Spencer: That’s the thing. I mean, if you think about it and having some experience with film prior to my Disney days, the ride vehicle is a camera and the camera looks where you want people to see, and if the camera turns around and looks where you don’t want ’em to see, I mean if a camera and a feature film turned around and you saw a bunch of people standing around in lights and director’s chairs and that’s not what you want to see. So thinking about people as cameras, it’s helpful to design something thinking that way.
Dan Heaton: Totally. Well, you also mentioned the Matterhorn, and I know that you were involved with updating that attraction with, like you said, the new animatronics and the other edits. What was it like to be able to work on another kind of classic early Disneyland attraction?
Ray Spencer: Well, again, what’s interesting about Disney is that each piece of Disney’s history and each step along the way, there’s a soft spot in people for specific moments and specific things, and it’s meaningful. Those moments resonate in a very personal way. So with the Snowman, the animated Snowman, the original they called Harold, which was more or less static, I think it kind of brought back and forth, moved its arms and had red light bulb boxes, that kind of thing. There’s a certain number of people that identified with that, and it’s part of their experience growing up and experience of the Matterhorn. So a couple things were going on there is okay replacing the animated figures, so they were more animated and a little more lifelike. That’s one thing. Number two is setting up the story of meeting this character earlier in the attraction.
I mean you see some stuff outside and out in the queue. You see the footprint, you see some things and then you hear some roaring and things like that. But we were looking at ways to kind of plus it and create some anticipation without being obnoxious because it’s a classic attraction like you said, and we wanted to respect that. I think you look at the things that maybe aren’t so strong.
For instance, going up the lift hills, there was some windows in the rock work, I’ll call them windows, but when you look as you’re going up the lift hill and you see the snow falling out the window and it’s an effects projector doing effects snow, and it doesn’t look like a lot of any, it doesn’t look as much like snow, it doesn’t look, what is it? So those areas that could be plussed we wanted to take advantage of.
So we created some fake ice walls that had some transparency but act as kind of a funny lens that would distort what’s behind it or exaggerate what’s behind it. We did a lot of testing and figured that out, and then we created some animated film clips of our snowman that would behind this ice wall, it wouldn’t be really evident that it wasn’t particularly three dimensional. It was a 3D computer generated image.
So we were able to start setting that up with a little bit of noise, and if you look at the right angle at the right time from a certain car, you might catch a glimpse of the snowman behind the ice. And so we were able to start telling that story that way. The trick with that is that you have two tracks going up. The lift hill, you have what they call the A track and the B track, and the cars are moving at different times, they’re dispatched at different times.
And how do people get a glimpse of what’s in the ice windows? There are windows on the right and on the left side of the tunnel going up the lift hill, and how does everybody get a glimpse of that with all the timing being so different? So you have to find kind of your optimal case scenario. It’s not a case where everybody’s going to see that, but how do we create this? So the most number of people can get a glimpse of that and then pay it off with seeing the dimensional snowman.
The trick with the dimensional snowman is that he’s much bigger than the original. He’s much bigger. The goal there was to get him closer to the vehicles just by a scale, because he’s in the same location as the original snowman was located. That attraction, as you know, was I think it was built in 19, is it 58? I dunno.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, it opened at ‘59 with the opening.
Ray Spencer: It was built in 58. So there’s a lot of history in that building and a lot of water and a lot of things have gone through there. And so there’s areas that it’s really difficult to retrofit, very difficult because the condition of the steel and the way things are built, and there’s some kind of precarious things where you can’t really reinforce too much without making a major structural change to the attraction. So we had to work with what we had, and so fitting the snowman in there and getting ’em in, there was severe space limitations. The reason that you don’t see the snowman’s entire body is the scale of the snowman is up from behind an opening and kind of leaning into the scene.
That was a real challenge. And each track both tracks the A and the B track, see the animated snowman at the top of the hill when you’re going down the mountain, as you come close to the end of the ride, you get a glimpse of the snowman once again from both A and B tracks. Those are separate figures, so they’re not the same one that both tracks sees, but the illusion is that once you’re on it, you don’t know if there’s another one around there. It was a challenge. It was a real challenge.
Dan Heaton: Oh, I can imagine. Just given the timing of that being such an early attraction of that type, I mean really the first one like that at all.
Ray Spencer: Well, and the other thing too is with the Snowman, the issues they’ve had with the Yeti at Expedition Everest and the engineering of something that is going to shake and cause some real issues with it structurally, and we didn’t want that with this one. So all of the arms and the joints are all pinned so that you don’t have any crazy weight that’s going to tear the thing apart over time.
It’s all pinned together so that the motion, and we had to work hard with that too. So there’s a lot of things that go into these things that it’s not just that we decided to put an arm here and put an arm. There are reasons that those things are done sometimes that it’s not obvious that we have to do it for the longevity of the character or for structural reasons or who knows what. There’s a lot of decisions that go into this stuff,
Dan Heaton: And you’re always learning too, like you mentioned, because Everest, I rode it early on and it was like, this is incredible, but they didn’t know it was going to happen, but so you have to constantly be learning as you go when you do all these, especially updates like you said, to something that’s older.
Ray Spencer: And the thing is, I mean, once they stopped moving, we joke about putting a strobe light on it. Well, that’s what happened in Anaheim with the characters. At the end of the ride, you get a strobe light. They don’t move anymore.
Dan Heaton: Disco Yeti as they call it.
Ray Spencer: But it was very satisfying to do that.
Dan Heaton: I feel like we’re just going through all the classic attractions you’ve updated, but I was going to move on to Tom Sawyer Island, which Chris Runco about Pirates Lair, which I know was one of the changes you made and just how short of a timeframe it was to put the Pirates Lair in. So I’d love to know, because I know you closely worked on that, about working on a classic attraction that people love, updating it, and doing it in a very short time.
Ray Spencer: Well, I had two stints on Tom Sawyer Island. One was after Fort Wilderness was torn down when it was being dismantled. I went to some of the powers that be and I said, look, we’ll take this stuff out, but if we’re not going to add or augment or give something back that seems kind of dissatisfying to our guests, I did a little concept for some play stuff and some interactive stuff on the island and specifically on the rocks and things like that.
So we did that over one summer just to make it a little more fun and engaging for kids and our guests. The fun part about that was they decided that all of the rocks that lead into the caves and the things that kids scramble up and some of the things, all of those, they wanted them to be sort of more compliant with traditional stairs and things like that.
Stairs have a certain amount of rise, the vertical part to the tread, which is the horizontal part, and it’s hard to make rocks that look like stairs. I mean, it’s hard for stairs to look like rocks, I mean, you know what I mean? And it’s like nature doesn’t create rocks that look like a staircase.
It doesn’t happen that way. So the guys would pour concrete in the morning and then in the afternoon they jackhammer it all out to start over again. So this went on for quite a while and we had some successes and some not so successful, but we had a lot of interesting times trying to do some of those things that would update from a technical point of view. The rocks, the Pirates Lair was that was in response to the premiere of Pirates of the Caribbean. I think it was either two or three, I can’t remember which one it was.
I think it might’ve been three, but that was held at the park. In advance of that, our chairman of Parks and Resorts at the time, Jay Rasulo, came to us at Imagineering and said, okay, we want to put more pirates here. Here’s X million dollars and you have six months to do it. You mentioned Chris Runco. I worked with him and Chris Merritt. So we just got to work. And the interesting thing was we saw some of the original structure on the island. There’s a couple of rock structures, play structures. I think it was called Castle Rock. I’m not confusing that with Castle Peak, but I think it was called Castle Rock. But it was the stuff that was done when Walt was involved originally, and it was the first time any of that had been cut open since the park was built originally.
The interesting thing was as we cut into some of that rock work, the stuff that would require a team of structural engineers today was nowhere evident. You’d have two by six boards laying on the ground and all this crazy stuff. And the interesting thing was none of it was really damaged by time or insects or anything. It was shocking to me because I worked on Big Thunder Mountain in Anaheim where we had to completely rebuild the town of Rainbow Ridge and all of those buildings had to be replaced because they were all termite ridden and completely gutted by nature. So just from one little part of the park to the other, I didn’t see any of that damage. And so we went in there and we went into what was called Injun Joe’s Cave, which was a cavern that goes through the island.
We added some interactive elements in there that were pirate themed, we added, and Chris Runco was of course involved in the interactives heavily, and he did a great job. We did a lot of work with concrete and creating pieces of pirate shipwrecks and tying that into a history that would make sense with Tom Sawyer Island was the challenge. It’s like, okay, Tom Sawyer Island Pirates, what do these have to do with one another? I mean, how do you resolve, resolve that and haven’t make any sense?
So we did some research and we found that kind of obliquely, there was some pirated activity down around New Orleans and up the Mississippi River there you could find some sort of oblique connection. So I don’t know if we really completed that circle, but we did the best we could. And that it’s tough too because like you said, I mean it’s a classic, again, it’s an original classic and how much do you mess with it then how much does it enhance the guest experience versus compromise somebody’s memory and somebody’s warm, fuzzy feelings about it?
Dan Heaton: I think you did a good job. And also I think too, I mean, yes, it’s changed, but it would be different if they just blew up Tom Sawyer Island and started over and built a giant building and Jack Sparrow. It was something kind of gaudy where this is, it’s a way I think to preserve it because the alternative would be losing it and that we’ve seen that happen with other attractions in most cases. I think people would rather have something that might be different, but still kind of feels similar.
Ray Spencer: And it was interesting too because we did a lot of work at night, sort of a day and night thing. And the night work was interesting because we’d have to work around Fantasmic and so you’d be working away and then all of a sudden there’d be this mad rush of people running around the island and things happening and things blowing up. It was a lot of fun.
Dan Heaton: Never a dull moment. Well, I want to ask you about one more Disney attraction, which is, I’ve talked to Brandon Kleyla about this, about Trader Sam’s Tiki Bar, which such a fun place at the Disneyland Hotel, and I still sometimes can’t believe it’s only been open for a little more than 10 years. It feels like it’s been there forever. But I’d love to hear a little bit about that, about your work there and just kind of what it was like to get to be involved with such a cool place.
Ray Spencer: They were remodeling the Disneyland Hotel when I got involved in that project. So the towers had gone from sort of a 1890s, I had a little bit of Victorian and oak and wallpaper and very dated kind of a thing. They were remodeling those that the color palettes were going blue and the balconies were going away and they were becoming much more sleek. So when I got involved, it was like, okay, well this is going on, so we’re going to rename the towers and what is the theme of this place now?
What is it; what do we do? What do we do? And I was specifically involved in the courtyard, the spaces between the towers because the tower architecture had pretty much already been established the way it was going. The final color selections and things like that weren’t done at the time, but what does that courtyard become with that kind of mid-century tiki escapism thing?
There was a nucleus in the architecture that was already there, at least with the convention areas and the public areas besides the towers, but the nucleus was kind of there. It kind of made sense to sort of go back and infer in a modern way the roots of Disneyland and looking at it from original things. I worked on several, we had several creative executives working on that over the time period that I worked on it. So I did a concept for the Monorail pool tower that’s sort of in the center of the pools there.
It’s got the old Disneyland sign on top and then the Monorails are on the slides themselves. I think Tom Fitzgerald was involved in that at the time, and I think it was, he may have come up with the idea of the Monorails. I don’t really recall. But anyways, that concept was done and then we had another creative executive that came along and hated that idea.
When you go from creative portfolio executive to creative portfolio executives, very subjective. One guy’s going to like something, one guy’s going to hate something. And what I learned in my experience over the years is that don’t take anything personally. If I can help, even if it’s a binary decision, stick a drawing on the wall, I hate that, and then it goes in the trash.
At least it helps get closer to the next whatever the evolution is and the solution. So I was very good at that In my earlier involvement, I spent a lot of time doing quick sketches and that helps people focus and make decisions. So with Trader Sam’s, Hook’s Point was the restaurant where Trade Sam’s is located now. Originally when I came on board, it was called Hook’s Point and it had sort of a Pirates had a pirate ship and a skull, and the pools were more Peter Pan themed.
The restaurant needed to be rebuilt and for various reasons using the existing footprint or foundation was economically and strategically the best decision at the time. According to project management, we had a footprint we had to work up with. Then what’s this thing going to become and how does it support this kind of carefree sort of ‘50s tiki vacation throw your cares away lifestyle? And again, it was Tom Fitzgerald who had the idea for a tiki bar.
For me, it was just being consistent as the creative executive for that project, getting the right people together who would execute and do it in a way that reinforced the story and made it better. Because really on that project, I wasn’t, besides doing the original sketches and working on the special effects and things like that, I was encouraging and counting on people like Brandon and Emily O’Brien to design the interior to take it and make it something special.
So there’s a lot of people involved in this that stepped up, and Brandon did an excellent job with the storytelling and all the details and the props and things like that. He really made it that much better. And Emily did a great job of the interiors. I worked with Daniel Joseph once again on the special effects windows, and I have some actual photographs of him and I painting blacklight paint on the volcanoes.
So we spent a lot of time going back and forth with the effects and trying to make that work and keeping it fun. It needed to be a fun place. That was sometimes things get very serious when you’re designing something and especially at WDI where you get 30 people in a room and we’re talking about special effects, and you think about, you have to back up and say, okay, who’s Trader Sam?
And what would he do if he wanted a lava effect? Would he take a red light bulb and shine it on crinkled foil? And that’s the law. He might do that and it’s great, but WDI has a way of saying, oh no, we can’t do a red light bulb on crinkled foil. We have to go out and make a $250,000 CGI precious thing that might be spectacularly beautiful in the cinemagraphic world, but if you’re not thinking about who created this place and what it is, it’s out of place.
So for me it was like how do we keep the story straight and the personality straight so that the place has, its fun and it’s a little tongue in cheek and it doesn’t take itself too seriously. So I think it was a success from that point of view. It’s really surprising and humbling how much people seem to enjoy the bar there. It’s small, it’s a tiny little place. Yeah, it’s interesting. Really interesting.
Dan Heaton: That’s a good point about just the story because yeah, you can have the most spectacular thing, but some of the best effects or best places or attractions or locations, that’s not really what people rarely come home and say, wow, that was so cool because of X. It’s because the whole experience is cool. And I think that’s why Trader Sam’s works so well.
Ray Spencer: I’ll tell you a story about the little marquee that’s over the entrance there. It’s a barrel that says Trader Sam’s on it, and it’s got some, well, there wasn’t enough room to do a fully round barrel, so in my sketch, I squished it. So if you look at the top of the barrel, it’s kind of an oval, it’s an oblong, it’s a very weird shape. And I thought, well, I think we can get away with it because it looks dimensional and I don’t think people are going to sit there and analyze that barrel. So I did the sketches and we worked with the graphic designers who came up with a marquee, but fortunately later I found that there are actually squished barrels. So it is prototypical.
Dan Heaton: Totally normal thing. Well, I wanted to quickly ask you just about something that wasn’t at Disney about Cape Canaveral, which is you worked on an Apollo Saturn 5 rocket show, and I’m just curious for you too, I mean, you’ve worked so much at Disney on so many attractions, and I know you’re interested in history to work on something that connects to real life history and something so monumental. I mean, what was that like for you?
Ray Spencer: Well, it was in my pre Disney days and I was working for BRC Imagination Arts at the time, and I worked for them not as a five-day-a-week, 12-months-a-year employee, but a project by project hire. So I did quite a few projects with them, which was a lot of fun, great company to work for. At the time, I think I was officially the Show Designer or show, I dunno, I’d have to look at the credits and see what I was doing, but at that time was I was again doing concept sketching, concept art, and then trying to be pragmatic about it so you could kind of build it, or at least it had some pragmatism that you could use as a pointed departure or wasn’t the greatest artist, but at least I could sort of help get there.
And one thing that I did with BRC, and Bob Rogers told me this a couple times, and I listened very carefully because when you’re doing work like that, and especially early on in a career, you have some choices to make. If you’re not the greatest artist, then what can you do? You either do it faster or cheaper, and if it’s either better, faster or cheaper and maybe a little bit of all mixed into one. So there has to be a reason. And I know he told me once that I would be involved in these charettes where they would bring somebody in like Robert Ballard or an astronaut or somebody, they’d bring somebody in for these charettes about some attraction that was telling a story about something very profound.
I would sit in the meetings, he told me about somebody that would sketch in real time. I forget who it was, but I thought, you know what? I’m going to do that. I am going to do that. I’m going to sit and sketch in real time while these charettes are going on. I would draw and I would draw and I would draw, and people are talking, we’re all talking, I’m drawing and sticking stuff on the wall as the going on. And it was pre-digital, so I wasn’t working on a tablet or anything. And the beauty of it was at the end of the day, you’d have a wall of sketches, and like I said before, they may not be a solution and half a lot of ’em might end up in the trash, but it helped focus and get a direction.
I think that’s where my contribution came in. And with the Saturn Apollo, Saturn 5, it was more specific than that. I mean, I got involved more with the scenes and the sonography, but again, it was kind of about staging something that told a great story. There’s the firing room, that’s that room with all the computers and the guys looking at the screens and all the NASA guys, and it’s very exciting when the thing takes off and then you see the blast, you see the blast light through the windows and then seeing the lunar rover, I mean the lunar module on the moon surface.
Back then, that was a huge story. And I read a bunch of books about it, about the Apollo program and the moon landing and things like that. Those were huge stories with a lot of intrigue and drama and things that you take for granted today. But that was pretty intense back then. If you think about the lunar module and the Apollo capsule didn’t have any more computing power than probably a very elementary cell phone. I mean, there was nothing going on. So those were different times and people were really smart and did some pretty amazing stuff, and there’s a very passionate story to be told there. So if I could help do that, I did. I was not there day in and day out, but I did help with the project and I’m very proud to have done that.
Dan Heaton: Oh, definitely. The entire place is great. I grew up after it. I grew up during the shuttle program, but I’ve read a lot about the Apollo program, and it’s fascinating what they were able to accomplish given, like you said, the technology and just the risk. It’s incredible.
Ray Spencer: No, it is incredible. And you think about it, it wasn’t that much. It wasn’t that many years before that when the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik satellite, and that was, I don’t know when that was, but that was what, 1960 or…
Dan Heaton: Late ‘50s I think. It was like a 10-year period basically where everything happened.
Ray Spencer: I remember when I was a little kid, I was in Nebraska and the Sputnik flew overhead. It was probably 1960 or ‘59, I don’t know when it was, but I remember everybody outside. It was like watching an episode of The Twilight Zone, everybody’s outside looking in space and seeing this little dot moving across the sky. It’s like, I felt like I was in a rod sterling thing to serve man or some weird bomb shelters. And I mean, that precipitated a whole bunch of stuff.
Dan Heaton: That’s crazy. Well, I want to ask you one kind of overall question here. I’m curious for you, just whether it’s people or attractions or anything, what were some of your big inspirations or even mentors you worked with at WDI that really played a big role in where your career ended up going?
Ray Spencer: I would say that it probably started before WDI. For me, there was a few artists that I really, really, really liked their work, and it really touched me. And I remember when I started in sort of this entertainment world, I worked for a company out in Culver City, California called Showscan Film Corporation.
It was started by Douglas Trumbull, the special effects guy, and he passed away recently, which is a shame, but he did the special effects for 2001 and Blade Runner, the original Blade Runner, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the first Star Trek movie. Just a very interesting and pioneering guy. When I was working out there, I ran across these flat files, which are horizontal filing cabinets that have people keep drawings, architects, kept drawings in them, stuff like that. And I opened these things up, and that was in the maybe mid ‘80s, late ‘80s.
I saw some sketches in there that were the simplest, most competent sketches that I’d ever seen. They were of all kinds of crazy special effects things and dinosaur things and fantasy things, and the drawings were so economical, they were just kind of single line with a little bit of tone. They told the stories so beautifully. I was very influenced by that. And it ended up that the artist was a guy named Dan Goozee. I worked with him at Imagineering years later, and I was very happy. I was excited to meet him.
There’s some people that you see their work from afar and you put ’em on a pedestal and then you meet them. Well, he was one that I really enjoyed meeting with and working with, and there were others along the way. But I had the opportunity to work with Ralph McQuarrie. Again, this was at Show Scan, and we were working on a space-themed concept, a traveling show. And he was brought in for a couple of weeks. I’ll tell you that spending two weeks with him and having lunch with him every day and just chatting was amazing. It was amazing because he was a very humble, quiet man. And if you’ve seen any of the Star Trek, I mean Star Wars books.
That guy was amazing and pioneering. And you think about, I asked him once, we were having lunch and we were walking around and I said, do you ever think about the fact that here you came up with these concepts for R2D2 and everybody, I mean, everybody walking around on the street and probably knows what those characters are. Does it ever occur to you that you did the concept for them? And all these people, millions and millions of people are familiar with those characters? No. He said, I don’t think about it.
He’s just a quiet guy, but so competent. He would do sketches the size of a postage stamp to do his first little thumbnail of what he’s thinking. These little postage stamp sketches were just so precious. What an inspiration. And then I had the chance to work with a guy named Sid Mead on another project, and he called himself a visual futurist, but a fabulous painter of science fiction and kind of future stuff, future cars, future world, future everything, and what a talent those guys were inspiration from sort of a painting thinking point of view. Then the others are storytellers. I mean, obviously Walt Disney’s story was huge and just amazing, and there’s a bunch of ’em that I could list, but those guys were just huge to me.
Dan Heaton: Well, those are all great examples, and I mean, they’re all so talented. They have done so much and that you were able to work with them is awesome. And well, Ray, I think that’s a perfect place, perfect place to end. Thank you so much for talking with me again. I really appreciate it. Time just flies, right? Loved hearing about it. Time flies by and it’s been great. Thanks so much.
Ray Spencer: Oh, you’re very welcome, Dan, and looking forward to doing it again someday if you’re so inclined.
Leave a Reply