112. Former Imagineer Rick Rothschild on The American Adventure and Soarin’ Over California

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Theme park attractions are usually locked into a particular time. Even the most popular attractions eventually fade. Two exceptions are The American Adventure and Soarin’ Over California. Both examples generate a strong emotional response from guests. Former Disney Imagineer Rick Rothschild created those and a lot more during his 41 years working at Disney.

Rothschild is my guest on this episode of The Tomorrow Society Podcast to talk about his amazing career. He originally worked in theater before joining Disney in 1978. His arrival coincided with the creation of EPCOT Center, which was an exciting time at Disney. After working on other projects for EPCOT, he became the show producer for The American Adventure. In that role, Rothschild worked closely with Randy Bright to develop the park’s signature attraction.

We also talk about concepts for Pleasure Island, which dramatically changed the nighttime experience at Disney World. He describes the process that led to clubs like The Adventurer’s Club and Comedy Warehouse. Finally, we close the podcast by discussing Soarin’ and other FlyOver projects. After leaving Disney, he worked on more flying theaters around the world. This was a really fun conversation, and I hope to talk to Rothschild again in the future.

Show Notes: Rick Rothschild

Listen to Tammy Tuckey’s chat with Rothschild on The Tiara Talk Show (May 18, 2017).

Check out Rothschild’s appearance on the Defunctland podcast (October 12, 2018).

Transcript

Rick Rothschild: A story about the dreamers and the doers of America because it is this partnership, not fully left brain, right brain, but it is in a way that coming together of the physical tenacity and the creative energy in individuals and groups has really in part pushed America forward.

Dan Heaton: That was former Disney Imagineer Rick Rothschild talking about the American Adventure, and you’re listening to The Tomorrow Society Podcast.

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Dan Heaton: Thanks for joining me here on Episode 112 of the Tomorrow Society Podcast. I am your host, Dan Heaton. I hope you’re hanging in there. Summer’s almost over. It’s gone by in one sense, really slowly, but also fast. Time is moving in a very strange way right now, but regardless, I hope you’re staying safe, finding ways to have fun, and just we can all hope for a better future as we head into the rest of this year and then move on to 2021. I’m very excited about my guest today.

I talked with former Imagineer, Rick Rothchild, who has such an extensive career. He worked for 41 years at Disney. Started in 1978 when Epcot Center was in full swing, ultimately got involved with the American Adventure. Did so much for that as a show producer and has, he’s one of those guys like Tom K Morris, Joe Lanzisero, and others who had way too many things to ever cover in one episode.

But I’m really excited with what we did cover. We talked a lot about the American Adventure and then Soarin’ over California and the technology of flying theaters, which has gone well beyond just Soarin’ since it originally arrived at DCA. And another thing that I really enjoyed was getting to talk about Pleasure Island and how that concept came together, which still really interests me.

I had a lot of fun there when it was really in its heyday when we went in the late ‘90s, early 2000s. Very cool to talk to Rick and learn more about his story, and I definitely hope to talk with him again in the future. Some of the attractions he’s worked on. I mean, we didn’t even get a chance to talk about the Alien Encounter and Star Tours and so much more. He’s done a lot. It’s a real treat to have a chance to connect with him on this show.

So I had to pinch myself a few times during this show just because of how much Rick has done and how down to earth he was about everything. It was really cool. So let’s dive into some amazing classic Disney attractions. Here is Rick Rothschild.

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Dan Heaton: I know I’ve heard you tell this before that you visited the New York World’s Fair in 1964 when you were younger. I’d love to hear a little about that visit and how did that really drive your interest in themed entertainment?

Rick Rothschild: Well, it was not at the time, but it was sort of a seminal moment ultimately. And it actually goes back to the fact that even more so, my mother, who I talked to a little bit about grew up there in St. Louis. She worked at the World’s Fair in 1939 in New York and worked in one of the houses of the future. So she was intrigued too with my father, who was also a New Yorker, to take us back from California, visit family and spend several weeks there and go to the Fair several times.

And obviously, as we all know, the extraordinary collection of shows that were there and exhibits and countries and so forth was rather extraordinary. And in particular, the Disney shows that were there, which I believe I ended up seeing all of them. In fact, I’m certain I did several of ’em more than once.

Just overall, that left me rather enchanted as a young preteen teenager, right at that sort of cusp in my life. So seeing Mr. Lincoln was extraordinary, seeing any of the AA figures, I think I fell in love with the AA figures there, and that’ll play into some of what we probably talk about later. The idea though of how technology came together in so many different ways and provided so much fun and entertainment was not only as just a kid and an audience member really fun, but it also really fired me up to all of what all of that meant in terms of how you take technology and you take creativity and you put it together.

Certainly, it lit a fire in me in one form or another, I think. Growing up in California, I’d been to Disneyland well in advance of that time as well. So I was well familiar with the theme park and the current state up to the point of the World’s Fair. But what a leap really, when the World’s Fair came with the four shows that Disney produced for the Fair.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, definitely. I mean, the fact that those, most of those in a way were able to move on to Disneyland and really changed that park for the better was such a big deal. So I’d love to know too, I know you ultimately joined Disney, but kind of when you were going into school and then what you studied, how did that basically propel you forward where you ultimately ended up working at Disney right before Epcot?

Rick Rothschild: Well, I left high school thinking I was going to be a chemistry major, and at the same time had the most fun in high school. Being in the drama club, being principally the set designer, set builder, lighting designer type kid in that environment arrived at the university that I went to, which is Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. For whatever reason, I wandered over to the theater shop the first day that I was there to see what was going on. And before I left, several hours later, they’d offered me a paying job to work in the shop there.

So that was like, cool, I’ll do that. Well, I’m going to be a chemistry major. Life is good. Well, chemistry lasted, I think a little more than a semester, and I realized that was not where I wanted to go with my life. So I continued to enjoy theater and working in the theater department and the camaraderie and fun of all of that.

I started taking classes in theater and switched to being a psychology major, which I think did serve me well in my ultimate pursuit in life. So the combination of pursuing the major in psychology, I worked at the radio station as well that they had there, which is a big FM radio station back in those days, which was fun, really focused on lots of theater classes, but had no specific intent in that being my major.

And then along about the halfway through my junior year, a friend of mine from college who graduated several years before I had, who was living up in Minneapolis and with whom I would back in those days, it was rather different situations so you could hitchhike pretty much anywhere in the world and feel reasonably safe. So I used to go up to Minneapolis quite often and visit him over weekends and so forth, and he connected me with an opportunity for a job at Chanhassen Dinner Theatres, which is still, I believe the largest dinner theater complex in the United States.

That’s just outside of Minneapolis, very near where Prince’s studio was. So I ended up, interviewed for this job, was given this job as the technical director of this theater complex, and went back to the university and talked to my psychology advisor and said, I think I’m going to go do this. So he said, well, I think that’s a good idea. You should go do that. So I did that for six, seven months. I was really enjoying myself, and I got a call from my psychology professor who said, how’s it going? And I said, it’s great. I’m really enjoying myself. He said, fair enough. He said, I’m not saying what I’m about to say to encourage you to come back to school, but as your advisor and as a friend, the longer you stay away, the less chance you will come back to the university environment.

So just give that some thought. It’s really a matter of what does it mean to you whether you want to get a degree or not. Obviously, it’s not absolutely important and what seems to be where you want to go, I wish you would stay in psychology, but I understand where you’re going.

So I ended up taking his advice and thought about it and went back to the university there and finished up, made up the semester I had missed and several more and graduated on time with the rest of my class with honors and all that kind of stuff, but as a theater major and came out with a degree in theater and a minor in psychology and circumstances led me to end up, I was going to go to Cal Arts actually as a graduate student. That was sort of the next step in my life.

That was when Cal Arts just was moving into coincidentally where about two miles from where I live now in Santa Clarita, California. The school was in total disarray because it had just literally was going to open that fall that I was going to be starting graduate school. I took a look at the school and I came back to California, went, there’s no way. The theater was completely unfinished. It was like, why am I paying somebody to go to school here when the facility’s already been really ready to do much? So I ended up one way or another through several connections, about six months later in the early winter of what would’ve been ‘79, I’m sorry, not 79, ‘72, I ended up at Oberlin College working on staff there in the theater department as they were engaging and building what they call the inner arts program.

The Arts program was a combination of a formalization of a dance company that became Oberlin Dance Collective that eventually moved as a legitimate dance company and still exists in San Francisco as a formal dance company, but modern dance, Twyla Tharp and other young choreographers were part of this back in those days, A theater group that was headed by Herb Blau, who coincidentally had been the provost at Cal Arts when I was going to go to Cal Arts, but then had been fired in the interim and ended up at Oberlin as part of this new program, brought all of his graduate students with him, which included Bill Irwin, Julie Taymor, and several others that have gone on to have extraordinary careers in the arts.

So I worked there for four years. We were doing opera, we were doing theater, we were doing dance. Finally said, I’ve got to make a decision to either go east coast or west coast.

I’m either going to pursue theater, which made more sense to me to move obviously into New York and into the east coast area or back to California and look more into the lines of movie television, something else. So I ended up for a short time as a teaching assistant at UCLA and while I was at UCLA in the master’s program, started working with different designers. They were very good there at UCLA outsourcing graduate students when designers needed secondhand and so forth.

So I started working in Los Angeles doing that, ended up on a huge project with one designer that took me out of Los Angeles for a couple of years up in the state of Washington. It was a big historical walkthrough exhibit that had all sorts of new technology and so forth. And when that was all finished, I had one of my vendors who to become good friends with who was out of the LA area, who asked me, what do you think you want to do when you come back to Los Angeles?

And I said, look for work. He said, well, having gotten to know you and also knowing Disney who’s been a big client for us at Disneyland for years, you are a perfect candidate for them. And I went, really? That’s interesting. I tried applying there a few years ago, never got any response or anything, and sort of just left it off my list. I said, no, no, no, we know somebody.

So I came back to Los Angeles and had an interview as a result of that with a gentleman at what was then called WED Enterprises, which is now what WDI is, and it was in the fall of ‘78, late summer I guess of ‘78. The gentleman I met with said, I would hire you today, but he said, we have a hiring freeze on, but it’s only going to be on for a couple more months.

We were going to formally announce that we’re going to do Epcot and we’re going to announce it in October 1st, 1978. He said, if you can wait that long, I guarantee you I will call you on the 2nd of October and hire you. And I went, cool. So that’s exactly what happened. So I began work at Imagineering before the end of 1978. Came in as one of the early, I think all of us who came in through the next few years, all referred to ourselves as the Epcot babies.

And there were WDI at that time, I think was around 400 people or thereabouts. It was quite small in comparison to what it grew to, which was over 3,000, within a year and a half after I started there, all basically focused on delivering Epcot, and then subsequently they took on Tokyo Disneyland as well. So both of them were ongoing, but my focus was all on Epcot.

Dan Heaton: That’s a great time to arrive at Disney before those two projects. There’s so much happening. Well, I know you ultimately connected with Randy Bright and worked on the American Adventure, so I would love to hear how that came about and then what it was like to work on such a massive, complicated, cool show at the park.

Rick Rothschild: Well, it was certainly that complicated and cool, that’s a good way of framing it up and quite an opportunity for a young person like me coming into the company when I did. And over the years that I was at Disney had a number of mentors. One of the first I had, there was a gentleman by the name of Wathel Rogers, who probably someone in your audience are familiar with who was a figure animator at Disney at Imagineering or WED back then.

When I first went to work there, I worked as a departmental coordinator, I think is what they called it, and they brought me in to work with four basic departments, an audio video department, a show programming and animation programming group and lighting, and special effects. So it was basically what I came to understand was the core show programming show, soft side of implementing whatever show was going to be created that obviously there’s a huge amount of environmental design and all sorts of other dimensional design and scenic design and so forth and so on.

That goes into the parks and into the attractions, which I consider the hard side of storytelling, if you will, the physically hard. Then there’s the saw side, and this group of departments really was at the center and still is in its own way at the center of what delivers the story that is created for each of these attractions in each of these elements in a theme park or anything else that WDI does. So was obviously in the show programming, animation programming area, and for whatever reason took an interest in me.

Within about nine months I guess of starting there, I had come in to basically get these departments organized and I’d gotten ’em organized, and I’m sitting there in September of ‘79 looking around as more and more people are coming in and working on different parts of attractions and parts of the Epcot project and so forth.

And realizing that I’d done a really good job at what I had been asked to do, which was to help get these departments organized, both in growing from literally four people or three people in the special effects department, and a couple people in lighting to 120 special effects people. I mean, it was just massive growth in a very fast period of time. So facility wise, taking care of all of that and working with department managers and so forth, I’d gotten what I should have done as a coordinator to help all of that pretty much in place.

So fortunately as I’m looking around one day came and said, I think you should go talk to Randy Bright. And I knew Randy, I had participated in several different activities there that included presentations that he’d made so forth. So I knew him a little bit, but I really knew him only a tiny bit.

So I went and talked to Randy, and this was back in probably December of ‘79, and he said, I’m taking on a new responsibility. Marty has asked me to step up and basically be the creative lead on all of the writing, all the script writing and show writing for all of Epcot. He said, so I know I’m going to be overwhelmed and I know I’m going to need somebody to just occasionally rely on to help me with things, but I can’t tell you anything more than that. Do you want to work with me?

It was like, huh, let me think about that over the weekend. And of course it was like, what a cool opportunity to go to work for somebody in the position that he was in relative to all of what was going on creatively with all of Epcot and not have a job description. It was like, okay, let’s see where this goes. One of the shows that Randy had been intimately involved in writing early treatments for and developing was the American Adventure, which was in obviously early, early design when this conversation between he and I came about. So as I then took of course the job and we started up sort of pretty much full on by the return from the holidays in early 1980.

So one thing led to another. I was working on a number of different things for him and in a number of different of the attractions, did some work with the teams with American Adventure obviously, and Kitchen Cabaret, a number of the theatrical, more theatrical kinds of shows I was sort of involved with as well here and there. But the American Adventure was steaming along and it became really clear that with all of what Randy was doing, it was not easy for him to give the day-to-day attention that that project and that project team needed.

So one of the things that I got more and more involved in was becoming the creative connection or conduit or whatever you want to call it, with that project. With him, he was also writing at that time and developing the final story beats and ultimately then the scripting. So he was working with Alan Yarnell who was a historian at UCLA and they would have evening sessions, and as that was going on, he’d occasionally ask me into those.

And one thing led to another and I became more and more actively involved working with him. I was helping research material and script material for some of the different scenes. I then started to work with him and writing some of the dialogue as we kept going along and continuing to connect with the American Adventure team and all of the other low projects I was doing for him.

That all went on for probably nine months. And somewhere in the latter part of 1980, the team came to Randy and then ultimately Randy having conversation with Marty, the project management team, and the show team basically said, we need someone on a more full-time basis to function as you don’t know quite what to call it, but let’s call it someone who can help act on Randy’s behalf and help answer all of those show related integrative questions.

So the team came to Randy and said that they understood that he was doing his best, but the team was in certain ways needing more attention and more daily attention. The net result of that was that Marty and Randy decided to asked me to take a role, which after a lot of discussion, I basically said, well, it’s show directing. That’s very simple. Then Marty said, and I learned through the years working with Marty, Marty was the word master, and Marty goes, that will confuse people in this culture because we’ve always had art directors who’ve sort of led projects, and you’re not an art director, and I get what you’re saying, I think we shall call it show producing.

I went, okay, you call it what you want and we’ll get started. So I became the first show producer within WDI. Funny side story of that was within nine months I think of that, there was a memo release back in those days, everything was on paper in memos and mail delivered twice a day around the company and all this kind of stuff. There was a memo that came out that introduced Barry Braverman as the show producer working with Tony Baxter on the Imagination Pavilion. The humorous part of that was, and it was an email or an email memo from Marty, and Marty introduced Barry was going to take this role and he went on to describe Barry’s duties as the similar duties to what Rick Rothchild is doing with the American Adventure period.

That was the definition of what Barry was going to be doing, which both of us thought was rather amusing, but together we did similar but very different jobs, I think servicing those two projects and those two teams and working with the creative part of both of those teams. But that sort of put me into this position of working full-time and I kept a few of my other little jobs with Randy, but I really over the next probably six months, moved virtually full-time into being the show director producer for American Adventure, and that’s how that came about, The American Adventure.

Dan Heaton: It’s a big job to try and present the history of the United States in a show. What do you think was kind of the key to unlocking it to be able to put together a show that kind of flows and makes sense? Because I feel like there’s so many different ways that show could not work and it still works almost 40 years later. It’s crazy to me.

Rick Rothschild: Well, it’s interesting. I mean, all of the credit must go, certainly for the most part in response to that question to Randy. Randy had a vision for this show, and quite honestly the story that he told me as I was getting to know him and know the beginnings of my involvement in all of this was that he’d actually written a treatment for a show about America or the American experience or whatever they were calling it back then, several years previous, and it never really quite lit anyone’s fire. Then they brought in Ray Bradbury, they brought in John Decuir who was a famous art director.

They brought in a number of different people to take three more stabs I think. I dunno whether Stan Freberg was one of them or not, but I know Ray Bradbury was one of the ones that brought in anyways, and each time they would take it to a certain level and it just wasn’t making everybody completely feel comfortable.

So after these four attempts with Randy having made the first of them, Randy grabbed hold of it again in ‘78, early ‘78 I think, and birthed the idea for this show that became the show we know, and the idea number one, and they had a presentation they did in part because all of these major shows needed sponsorship back in those days. The way Disney was going to do this was not all with their own money.

So they built a presentation that was taken to New York with several of these attractions, including the American Adventure and mounted a long-term presentation center back there to present to a number of big clients, the American, Coca-Cola, Exxon, so forth and so on. So American Adventure, the way Randy envisioned it, they presented it as what became known inside the company, at least as the three-head show Blaine had sculpted Randy.

Randy basically saw the show as being narrated as much as it could be by personalities that existed in history rather than sort of having a narrative where there was a narrator who told the story of America’s history. He wanted the words of real people as much as possible to speak in interesting ways in a theatrical way and present the story. So that was sort of an underpinning of the core of this idea from the beginning. He had chosen, and I think this was obviously working with Marty and a few others, but fundamentally chose Ben Franklin, Mark Twain, and Will Rogers as the three spokespeople of the 18th century, the 19th century, and the 20th century.

So they built…Blaine Gibson, who was the premier sculptor back then, sculpted the three heads. They turned them into audio animatronic, the most sophisticated at the time, new generation of animated heads, and there were these three busts that sat on this high bureau type table and came to life and started to carry on a conversation and sort of told a little bit about how this story was going to be told.

That was a part of what Randy saw was using real words from real people to tell as much of the real story as possible. The second piece of it was, I think he was really interested in what drives and is at the core of the spirit of being an American, what is at the core of the spirit of America and its people.

And he coined a phrase, don’t know that it was his, but it certainly got attributed to him through our work of a story about the dreamers and the doers of America because it is this partnership, not fully left brain, right brain, but it is in a way that coming together of the physical tenacity and creative energy in individuals and groups has really in part pushed great part pushed America forward. And the last piece of this going back to the spirit was that he was looking at what are examples of the different kinds of spirit?

Because there is no one single spirit within the American culture and within the history of America, there is a variety of different things that we could look at as attributes and ways people have contributed to building America and to what America had become at that time. You can see that early notion of even spirits eventually manifested itself much later where we went back and said, all right, let’s take and define 12 of those spirits, which became the spirits that are sculpted and celebrated around the theater itself.

But basically with that idea and then realizing he needed somebody and he couldn’t use a committee, he needed somebody who represented the academic and historically accurate side of things as best as one person can do. And so that’s where he found Alan Yarnell, who was part of the history department at UCLA. So he was local and his specialty was American history.

So he and Alan started to work on this and Alan would, they would have, I know well before I got involved, lengthy philosophical discussions about how to answer these questions of what makes up the best examples of the spirit of America and the best example of the approach to how you tell about dreaming and doing in America, so forth and so on.

All of that ultimately led then to these specific points in time and specific individuals in time. And as we are all familiar with the show, some of them are very famous, some of them are not famous at all, but are simply examples of our typical American individuals at different points in history. It was this combination, again, of all of that looking at how you then put that into some form of a theatrical presentation. They had, I think, looked at theatrical kinds of presentations before they looked at rides.

They looked at a number of things, and it all came back to this really is most well-suited as a theatrical presentation rather than a ride. That it really wanted to feature the AA technology at the time. And so that was a real challenge. You were not creating caricatures as were created for something like the General Motors ride back in those days, or you weren’t recreating animated Disney characters. You were out to create viable representation of real people and of humans.

So ultimately a cast of 35, quite sophisticated for its time animated figures, then came the whole development of how to stage it as Randy was starting to think about these different collections, these moments in time. And so that led to bringing on the design teams and starting to really look at how do you begin to translate his story beats because the dialogue hadn’t been written by then, but it was for the most part, the majority of all the story beats of all of those points in time had just stated to a point where the design team could begin to assess how you tell that story and support the story.

And it became clear too that you’re not going to just do it with animation. So there was a real push to use media and obviously looking at it, we all sat there as we were working on this going someday they’re going to do this with something other than film. But the task at hand was to do it all with 70 millimeter technology and a bunch of other rather amazing challenges that were met by tremendous ingenuity and collection of different talents within Imagineering to figure it all out.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, it’s an incredible show. I mean, the fact that it still holds up so well today, while a lot of things at Epcot are not there anymore, I feel like that mix of animatronics and film and music and everything works so well. I want to take a chance to ask about a few other things you worked on. One of them has nothing to do with the American Adventure. It’s on a completely other end, and that is Pleasure Island, which I’m also interested in because now it’s gone really because Disney Springs has taken over and all that. But I found it to be going there in my twenties and what in the nineties and two thousands, a really fun place to go. But I’d love to know a little bit about how that developed into what we ultimately got with that space.

Rick Rothschild: Well, I have to say that was one of the most challenging projects of any project I did, and in many ways was also the most fun and the most rewarding, certainly one of the most challenging. I think the thing that started all of that was actually that when Michael Eisner and Frank Wells first came to the company and they did their around the Disney Universe, which was much smaller then the Disney theme Park universe, and it came back from their first times at Walt Disney World going, boy, the sidewalks roll up down there about nine at night or maybe even eight as soon as the fireworks go off, it’s dead down here.

So many different things were launched as a result of that. But one of them was the notion of taking the sleepy little village, as it was called back then, which was a tiny little bit of what is there now as part of Disney Springs. And there were five hotels, as I recall, that were non Disney hotels that were clustered nearby. In many ways, this was the border town of Walt Disney World, or at least that’s the way I think the team that I assembled to do Pleasure Island looked at it, and I think it was an appropriate way to look at it.

Michael had this notion of wanting to energize it with more combination of more interesting shopping experiences, more dining experiences, upscale experiences, and some entertainments at nighttime entertainment. So the project actually got launched under what was Disney Development Corporation or DDC, which was a part of the Disney company back then. They took the challenge that Michael said of, I want something like this to do what development companies do, which is treat it like a shopping center or a core development in a new city, a new town, and basically populate it with existing formulaic restaurants and nightclubs and so forth.

And so they came back with that plan and the story has it that Michael looked at it and said, nah, we’re not going to do this. I want to do something that’s much more unique and Disney. So I think Marty may have even been in the room. He said, Marty, you guys are at Imagineering. Tell me what I should do with this. So that launched what became Pleasure Island.

Marty came back and asked myself to head a small group and take a look at that, what could we do? So there was a core group of probably less than 10 of us that were involved both creatively, financially, design architecturally, and we put together a whole notion of something that eventually became Pleasure Island, but it was clearly from the beginning a Pleasure Island manifest, which was an original collection of entertainment experiences with some interesting restaurants and some unique shopping.

So the part that was really a lot of fun was once we presented the high concept and Michael said, yeah, keep going. I really like this. This is where I want to see it go. I basically said, there’s no way. I don’t believe that we are going to be able to do something that has to do with adult entertainment, even if it’s on a Disney property, and not begin to bring in some different perspectives to how we think about entertainment that is Disney.

So we built a team that was roughly 50% core team individuals that were at the time imagineers, and equally 50% who I sought out and brought in that had nothing to do. In fact, some people said, I would never even think of working for Disney except this project is really interesting to me. And some of them, quite honestly too, were from more theatrical or entertainment perspective, less kids of the kingdom, less traditional Disney theme park.

And so I think that is truly what in part made it the success it was, was this bringing together of this eclectic mix. Because quite often there were parts of the team that were pushing ideas far beyond where we ended up, but in a way pushed it far enough to really make it something that was appropriate for the Disney border town.

The other one we used to refer to, and I don’t mean it as anything negative really, but it was the Tijuana for those of us who lived in California, you go down south of the border and just party and have a good time and so forth. This was a bit of that Tijuana for Wal Disney World. So we ended up creating what we created there and with tremendous encouragement from Michael, I mean he really pushed to find what we could do there that would be uniquely Disney, both of those words simultaneously, something extraordinarily unique for Disney.

At the same time, very much of an extended sense of what Disney is. So that I had my son who’s now 35 in a week was five, I think when we opened, or four when we opened Pleasure Island. And I wanted, it wasn’t quite for him yet at four, but I think we all had in mind that this wanted to be a family, a place that family would feel comfortable coming, but that felt more adult and that the kids enjoyed being a little bit more with mom and dad or with adults and being a little more adult themselves. So that’s what inspired us and led us down the path that we went.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, I think you did. I mean, the group did a really good job, especially with things like the Comedy Warehouse and the Adventurers Club and some of the really unique areas that a lot of people I know still miss today. So it worked out perfectly, I think, at least for the time and for a while when people really went there.

Rick Rothschild: I think when we opened it, we studied nightclubs because some of us, if not all of us, had some experience with some more than others with night clubbing and all that kind of stuff. But I think when really studying it, you learn that clubs by nature have sort of an A crowd, a B crowd, and a C crowd, and then they’re dead and it doesn’t make a difference. Everything goes through that A, B, C, dead. And the key was to make sure that the A lasted as long, it had enough legs to last long enough.

Fortunately, the combination of it being a destination for many different people coming there, I mean we did have for the first couple of years there a mix of the A crowd with every other guest. There were a lot of people coming in that made a point of coming there for the first couple of years, and then it moved to a long period, I think, of the B crowd. And then finally it was over. I mean, anything. It wasn’t designed to last forever.

Dan Heaton: Well, right, because an entertainment complex that is, there’s going to be trends and different things people look for like an attraction. I mean most at attractions the same way where they either change or there’s always those kind of unicorns that last forever, but they’re more on the rare side for sure. Well, I want to ask you before we finish about Soarin’ Over California and also too, because just kind of along with that, I know you’ve done more recently a lot of other flyover type attractions, Canada, Iceland, others. So I’d love to hear a bit about Soarin’ and how that came together, but also too just what really interests you about this medium and really just the expansion of so many of these types of attractions all over the country and the world?

Rick Rothschild: Well, let’s start with that because the inspiration for me when we were first working on Disney’s California Adventure and what led to discussions that led to the idea or the concept that ultimately led to the attraction was for me, it was a combination of two things that were very much a part of me and I’m very much a part of, I guess my spirit. And one is I’m a Californian, born and raised, had traveled a pretty good amount in the state with my parents when I was younger and road trips and so forth.

I grew up on a ranch here in Southern California. So there was a part of me that just loved California as the place that it is in this extraordinary collection of so many different climate zones and cultures and so forth and so on. So the idea of doing something that would in a way pay homage to this extraordinary diversity of California, both its landscape, particularly its landscape really, and its people, but particularly its landscape was very dear to me.

The second one was all the way back to what I’m connected with, probably first of anything Disney was Peter Pan, the movie, then going to the park and riding the Peter Pan ride. There was my favorite ride before Pirates and a few other things came along, but the original Disneyland, as soon as those dark rides were part of it, the Peter Pan was like my most favorite. The whole idea of just flying to me is something I’ve always been personally enchanted by.

And I think it’s a gift that all of us humans are given that only a century or more ago, most humans never had a chance of considering being able to do in any way, which is to see the earth from a perspective other than our normal human, land-based perspective. So that led really to what became Soarin’ from an emotional, from a what drove the story, those kinds of things.

There’s of course the whole technological side of how that came to be, which great credit grows to Mark Sumner, who was the right engineer, who infamously struggling because we had this idea of wanting to put people somehow in a suspended way in front of a dome. The problem was how to get them there and get them back safely, not just under normal circumstances, but if there’s an earthquake, if there’s a power outage, if there’s an emergency of any kind, how do you get people down? All those kind of things. And that was from Mark’s brilliance ultimately came into be, which is the classic Imagineering, right?

You have a great idea, but unless you can figure out how to deliver on it and deliver it, it remains simply an idea. So that was the beginning of that. Then I guess extending that to the opportunities that have come my way since 1999, 2000 when we were creating that attraction, obviously it became exceedingly popular, which was wonderful. I’m happy that people found it as enjoyable as I did.

And quite honestly, my father had passed before we opened it, but my mother was still alive and I was able to at least take her on something like this. This is this wonderful lady who I mentioned goes all the way back to Fair in 1939. So to see her enjoy it, having spent most of her adult life in California and see it in a way that I don’t think she’d ever even seen it before, meant a lot to me.

So the opportunity that became what I’m still doing came in part within a year or two after I retired from Disney and I retired with the idea, this was in 2009. They offered early retirement and it was like, well, do I take that or not? And it’s like there’s some opportunities out there that go beyond what the extraordinary opportunities I’ve had with Disney that I will never know what those might turn out to be if I don’t give myself a chance before I’m too old to do anything to find out.

So within I guess two years of leaving Disney and I continued to work with Disney subsequent to my retirement and as late as 2016 off and on doing different projects with ’em. But a couple of gentlemen came to me who had connected with another Disney colleague from WDI up in Canada and said, we have this idea, we want to do something like Soarin’. We don’t want to violate obviously patents or anything like that, but we have this idea of doing this standalone experience that takes people on a flight journey across Canada. Would you be interested in working with us?

And it was like, yeah, sounds like a lot of fun. So that birth has now become the brand of Flyover, and there is a Flyover Canada, Flyover America in Bloomington, Minnesota, a Flyover in Reykjavik that we just opened last summer, and we’re doing another one that will open later next year in Las Vegas and another one in 2022 in Toronto, and more to come after that.

So just within that particular franchise, I’ve had the opportunity to really push, I think the art form and the ride format. The ride system we use is number one, a different type of ride system, although it provides a similar, and in fact gives us more motion axes to work with. We have full capability to roll, which we can’t do with the big ride system. That’s the Disney ride system because we started this in 2013 or open in 13 with the first one, we were able to be in digital from the beginning.

We continue to push that along as both camera and projection technology keeps going. So for me at least the idea of not just flight, but the opportunity for letting people see extraordinary nature. And I think that’s the fundamental here. Other people have used the flying film format or the flying ride format to do some live action, but a lot of people have taken it in the direction of using it for fantasy based CGI developed imagery which can satisfy an audience and can satisfy a particular concept in a particular location.

But to me, the gift that this technology and overall system provides is the ability to take people to see nature that is out there that most people never get a chance to otherwise see, and certainly don’t get to see the way we take people into it to see it. Hopefully there’s a message behind that that is not trying to be overhanded with it, but is clearly that this is a gift that nature has given us. And the more you see how extraordinary these different places are, the more I think we become hopefully conscious that we should be doing our best as humans to try and preserve it in ways that we can.

Dan Heaton: I get that feeling. That’s one of my favorite things about the original Soarin’ Over California is because it was shot on film, and again, you’re there is you come out of it being like, wow, California is a beautiful place. Like you said, so many different types of land, different biomes basically, that it comes, it’s such a strong feeling. People get so emotional on that. I think a lot of that relates to what you’re saying because it’s a beautiful real place and it makes a huge difference in that anyone from five years old to 85 years old can enjoy that attraction and the technology.

Rick Rothschild: Yes, I would agree. And I would also say that we started our conversation today with the most wordy show I’ve probably ever done with American Adventure. Lots of words. It’s hard to tell the American Adventure in just music and sound effects and mime, but I think there is an elegance and a beauty to allowing people to be immersed in what the flying ride allows you to enjoy that is totally without the necessity of a word and just let you be immersed in nature.

I think music obviously plays a big part of that score is really exceedingly important. I remember Jerry Goldsmith, who did the original score for Soarin’ Over California when he came to see the rough cut, and we had the machine working, so it was probably six months or more before we opened, but it was up and running and you could see the cut of the film finished, but basically there.

We rode it a couple times and he said, I have to tell you something. He said, I’m a Californian number one born and raised. So it connects with me certainly that way. Secondly, he said, when I was a kid, my dad used to take me down to the beach by LAX and we’d watch the planes take off. I’ve loved flight since I was a kid, and I went, okay, this is like a premier composer who gets the opportunity of what this is about. And so connected to it already.

Obviously he put that passion and that spirit that ticked all the way back to his childhood into the music he wrote, which certainly further enhances the experience. But I do truly believe that there is something very powerful that we provide with these shows that, like I say, doesn’t rely on words. Now we, in our standalone attractions that we do with the Flyover group, we do have more of a, if you will, type of a World Showcase experience where there is at least one, if not two pre-flight experiences that help contextualize both the natural essential, natural story that may be of a particular place or of the culture or cultures that reside there just to give people more context.

Whereas obviously at Disney’s California, the whole park was really sort of giving you a lot of the rest of that context in a way, so it wasn’t as essential and was more just focused on celebrating flight in California and then having this wonderful journey. But anyways, that’s what Flyover brand is about.

Dan Heaton: Definitely, and I’m super excited down the road to hopefully check out some of those when travel is much easier and everything. But I totally agree about your points, just about the visuals and how strong that can be if done well and well. This has been great. I mean, like I mentioned, there’s so many things you’ve worked on. I feel like we barely scratched the surface, Rick, but it’s been amazing to hear these stories, and I would love to do it again at some point down the road to talk about some of the other things you worked on.

Rick Rothschild: I enjoyed our conversation today. I hope that it provides some insight for people that are interested, and certainly I agree, there’s more to be talked about other things, so happy to do another round with you sometime in the future. That would be fun.

Dan Heaton: Awesome. Thanks so much for being on the show.

Rick Rothschild: Thank you.