142. Rick Rothschild on Captain EO and the ExtraTERRORestrial Alien Encounter

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

In today’s world of immersive lands and high-tech thrills, sitting down for a 3D movie could sound quaint. Back in the mid-’80s, creating even a 17-minute attraction represented the cutting edge of what was possible. Disney Imagineers collaborated with Michael Jackson, George Lucas, and Francis Ford Coppola on Captain EO. Rick Rothschild was part of that creative team, and he returns to The Tomorrow Society Podcast to talk about the experience.

On this episode, Rick describes the process of pitching ideas to Michael and George and producing Captain EO. He also worked on Honey, I Shrunk the Audience! and describes that follow-up project. It was common for Rick to replace attractions that he helped create, and that also occurred with the ExtraTERRORestrial Alien Encounter. Rick talks about the cult attraction, which remains popular despite operating for only eight years.

Rick also worked on Star Tours: The Adventure Continues, which included 3D technology that went well beyond the early films. On a related topic, we conclude the episode by discussing technology changes and how they have impacted theme parks. Rick has been involved in too many attractions to cover in two episodes, and it was great to dig further into his career.

Show Notes: Rick Rothschild

Learn more about Rick Rotschild’s career, including The American Adventure and Soarin’ Over California, on Episode 112 of The Tomorrow Society Podcast.

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

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

Support the podcast with a one-time donation and buy me a Dole Whip!

Transcript

Rick Rothschild: I was devoted to this notion that as a kid, all kids, you go into the closet, close the door, and instantly stuff happens. These people start screaming, you see things in the dark, all this kind of stuff. And if you don’t open the door, chaos ensues. And whatever story might have been going on is completely lost because there’s just a lot of screaming. So the whole reshaping of the story really was to allow those oral moments and those moments in the dark and at the same time get control back.

Dan Heaton: That is Imagineer Rick Rothschild talking about the Extra TERRORestrial Alien Encounter. Let’s do this. You’re listening to the Tomorrow Society Podcast.

(music)

Dan Heaton: Hey there, it’s Dan Heaton. You’re here for Episode 142 of the Tomorrow Society Podcast. It’s an exciting time right now. We are rolling into June. I hope you’re all doing well. It’s getting hotter out. Things are opening, Avengers Campus, VelociCoaster, a lot of other things. I’m enjoying it. Haven’t been to the parks for those, but I’m really excited to get back there and enjoy seeing a lot of your photos and videos and everything else from the parks. Really excited about today’s show.

Returning guest Rick Rothschild was a Disney Imagineer going back to the early days of Epcot last time we talked about American Adventure, Soarin’, Pleasure Island, just great stuff and I’m glad that we had the chance to dig further because he’s done a lot of cool stuff in his career. I’m really interested in the era. We often call it the Disney Decade, which many look at as kind of the ‘90s, but to me, really it started when Michael Eisner joined the company.

You’re thinking with some of the attractions that started to come out in 1986 and everything going all the way through basically when Disney’s Animal Kingdom opened in ‘98. So that’s a cool time and I haven’t dug into a lot of those attractions. So getting the chance here to talk with Rick about Captain EO, Honey I Shrunk the Audience, the Alien Encounter, which I mentioned in the intro. Really cool to talk about some other attractions that even I get to learn a little bit about the transition to Stitch’s Great Escape, which I have not talked to anyone about that.

So that was really fun to learn more from Rick about some of the 4D experiences and then other cool attractions from around the same time. I wanted to give one clarification. There is a moment early on where Rick is talking about the team that started to develop the concepts for Captain EO and he references Richard Vaughn and then Joe Rohde, and then there’s kind of a little cut.

This was one point where our sound went out for just a moment, only time on the whole podcast. But I wanted to give clarification that the other person he mentioned is Tim Kirk. So basically with that group, he references them again later. That is Tim Kirk, who along with Joe Rohde, Richard Vaughn, and Rick Rothschild was starting to develop the concepts early on for Captain EO. I hope you enjoy the show. I really like talking to Rick and he also has some interesting info at the end about technology, kind of where it’s going and how that fits with theme parks; I also enjoy that answer a lot. So let’s do it. Here is Rick Rothschild.

(music)

Dan Heaton: My guest today is the Founder and Chief Creative Officer at Far Out Creative Direction. He joined Walt Disney Imagineering in 1978 was the Show Producer on the American Adventure at Epcot Center. His long list of projects with Disney include Soarin’ over California, Captain EO, Alien Encounter, Star Tours: The Adventure Continues, so much more. It is Rick Rothschild. Rick, thanks so much for returning to the podcast.

Rick Rothschild: Oh, thank you very much. I’m glad to be here today with you.

Dan Heaton: Oh yeah, I had a lot of fun last time when we talked about Soarin’ and about Pleasure Island and we talked about American Adventure. So it’s cool to dig a little further into your career because you’ve worked a lot more than just those things and we’ll still probably barely scratch the surface. I’d love to start with fitting in time. You had done American Adventure and then a little bit after that in the mid ‘80s you got working on the development of Captain Nemo, which I know started after Michael Eisner and Frank Wells arrived and the company changed so much. So I’d love to know how you got involved in that and how that project started to come together.

Rick Rothschild: Well, as you said, the change that came to Disney with Michael and Frank coming to the company was dramatic to say the least in many, many ways. And for at least the first 10 years, it was dramatically upwards. So at the beginning of that upward climb, it was really waking a sleeping giant as they both referred to it.

I think in the early days there was such potential there and they were simply recognizing the vast amount of potential there and really re-energizing the potential and re-energizing the company and the theme parks and everything that we went with it. So in those early days, I mean they came in ‘85 and we started almost immediately within it seems like maybe six months of them arriving if that they had started to look at what they could do to bring things more quickly. They’d come one to learn that I think doing projects at Disney.

And it was constantly frustrating image, frustrated, all management forever, probably frustrated Walt even though things were done faster when he was around it seems. But it took a long time to get a major project started. So one of the things that we’re looking at is how do we bring some energy more quickly? So one of those was as a result of the connections and the growing connections with George Lucas as well as previous relationships I guess, and connections with Michael Jackson in one form or another.

Michael had reached out to Marty Sklar, who was the creative head at that time of Imagineering and said he wanted to come over and talk about an idea yet, and I guess gave Marty enough to think about who Marty thought should be in the room to listen to what Michael had to say. So I was one of those that was asked to be in that room as a creative executive back in those days, just beginning my creative executive career. So Michael said three things or three names, he said basically think about George Lucas, Michael Jackson, 3D, I’ll be back in five days.

Wow. Wow. Alrighty then. So a small group, there were others involved as the idea actually got launched, but at its inception, the group that we pulled together was myself with Richard Vaughn, who is a designer and now lives down in New Mexico, Joe Rohde (Tim Kirk). And so the four of us basically jammed on different ideas and those ideas fostered or the creative sessions really fostered three ideas, three concepts. One of them clearly took advantage of our understanding.

Michael liked the Pirates of the Caribbean. Second one, he liked Peter Pan. The idea of mixing that with the fact that obviously we were looking for a vehicle for him to enjoy performing, not simply acting, but performing his music and dancing. This was back in the mid-‘80s, so Thriller had happened. He was very focused on choreography with large groups of dancers and all the rest of that kind of stuff.

So the three ideas that ultimately popped to the surface, one was with the idea that Michael goes to the park late at night and sort of sneaks into the Pirates of the Caribbean, and has this whole adventure within the Pirates world. The second one really focused on borrowing liberally from the Ice Queen stories and the idea of a frozen world. And he enlivens that world a little more, Peter Pan, a little more fantasy. Both of those didn’t have the George Lucas component. So I was like, okay, so yeah, there’s Michael Jackson, there’s 3D and oh, there’s George.

The idea of, so there’s George being the third request, and that one netted what we call the “intergalactic music man”, which you can tell from the story evolved into Captain EO. So five days later, Michael came back and said, what do you got? And we pitched the three stories with sketches that the team had done for all three of them just to begin to give him a sense of character and Michael’s character and the characters around him and that kind of stuff.

And so the end result of that meeting was great. Love the intergalactic music man. We’ll get George in here and have George take a look and see what he thinks. So within a day or so, George is there, and many of us had worked with George previously in one form or another. It wasn’t like the first time we’d met him, but it was nice to see him again. So George, he pitched the same three to him.

He had obviously the same reaction, which is the one that most well suited his worlds that he’d worked in. And he thought it was a great idea as well. It truly was the basic story that is told in Captain EO. We pitched. I mean, it was evolved and so forth and so on, but it was truly a world that was physically oppressed and was rebirthed by Michael’s arrival.

So a couple days later, Michael came to WDI and with George there and Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg I think was there through all of this as well. We pitched to Michael, and again, we showed him all three with the notion that he probably would fancy the one that most fancied and fit with George as well, which he did and he loved it. I remember when I was pitching the story, one of the last, if not the last line that I used in pitching was you bring color to a colorless world. And as I said it, because we’d done all these black-and-white sketches and then the last sketch was full of color, but as I’m looking at Michael, there’s this twinkle in his eye.

There was a bit of a double entendre, I think, to what I was saying. Anyways, he loved the idea and off we went. So that was really how the birth of the idea happened. And then the core team of Joe and Tim and Richard and myself stayed involved. I think over time Tim probably peeled out first. Richard was doing a lot of the character design. Joe also did some character design. So things like Fuzzball is very much a Richard Vaughn character. So a lot of that work continued along with my continuing to work as they brought the production team in, working on the overall production.

Dan Heaton: That’s an interesting project too, like you mentioned George Lucas and Michael and Francis Ford Coppola, which is three kind of gigantic people in terms of what they’ve done and also possibly egos and just talent. So working on that, how is that with such that group, I mean, it’s kind of mind boggling to think about where those three were in the early eighties and mid-eighties and them all working on this theme park attraction.

Rick Rothschild: And I should add, there were a few more that obviously those three brought in as the result of those three. Vittorio Storaro who was the director of photography who’d worked for years with Francis and who I don’t think had ever done a 3D movie. So that’s a whole another story.

Then Michael was very interested in as he was looking at costuming, John Napier, who had just had done many shows, but the most recent one at that time was Starlight Express. And there was something, if you think about Starlight Express and you think about the costume that Michael wore, which John was the conceptual designer for, there was something to John’s presence as well. John has an interesting story I can tell here additionally. And so really the process of how to help everybody, nobody really worked. I mean, I don’t think George had done any 3D movies.

Francis may have experimented with something longer or not, but it was a new thing. And to shoot in 65 for 70 millimeter projection, the idea back in those days there was an OCG, they knew it was going to be heavily effects laden, which meant a 3D hand drawn effects process, which turned into both a nightmare and an extraordinary process that her Harrison Ellenshaw was eventually brought in. Tom Smith who had headed ILM for a number of years was brought in that there was so much really sort of to the idea and the idea growing. But I think to answer the specifics of your question on those three, my sense was tremendous collaboration.

Actually, it’s very interesting. Another side note, I pulled out some sketches years ago that go back to the storyboard sketches that were done that George, who really was sort of leading the story effort and I see in the corner Brad Bird, and I remember at the time when we were doing this, not the name, obviously we all know the name very well now, but I remember George had said, I’m using this really amazing storyboard artist who’s working with me on an Indiana Jones or something, and I’ve just pulled him into this.

I’ve got him right now, and he’s great. So Brad Bird was involved as a young talent and the list goes on. I mean, you can go through the choreography and the music ancillary to Michael’s music, all the rest of it. But back to this, there was really an energy generally it was crazy and it was under tremendous pressure to do it very quickly and pull it all together quickly and using 3D, which was an art form and dealing with all of that.

But I felt a tremendous spirit of collaboration and it was really fostered by Michael and Jeffrey as well. When it started, and I’ll go back to John Napier. John was really intrigued. He came over and he wanted to understand, he had no idea. He’d never been to Disneyland, had no idea what Disneyland was. So we were introduced to him because we were the Imagineers.

And I took John first to Disneyland and spent a day with him experiencing Disneyland. Also he got quite intrigued with Imagineering because as a designer, he was not only a costume designer, but a very well renowned and went on to do many more set designs and started at really his career as a sculptor, which is why his costumes are so sculpt or sculptured in their essence, and his sets are so extraordinary, the Les Mis set with all of its movement and dimensional shapes that it could take and so forth. So he was really intrigued with Imagineering, and he was also intrigued with 3D.

He said, I want to spend some time. So just getting to know WDI and working with the design team and so forth, and out of that energy came this idea of how do we break the boundary of 3D beyond just what 3D can do, but how do we physically break it? There was a lot of, he had this notion of could we, in graphic art quite often to give a sense of 3D, you’ll put an inner frame and then you’ll have an object, a hand, or some object that breaks the frame to give it that sense that it’s coming forward.

So he said, could we come up with some kind of flexible frame around the screen that could do that? It’s like, well, yeah, but no, but that’s a really interesting idea. That led to conversations that eventually went back to Michael and Jeffrey and they got along with Francis and George and Michael Jackson of like, well, what can we do to enhance the 3D experience beyond just what’s going to happen on the screen?

So that led to what we all now the world refers to as 4D. We didn’t have moving seats, so we didn’t have 5D yet, but that fourth dimension really to me it’s just sort of adding a more enveloping, more immersive 3D experience. So out of that came what we ended up doing, including the infamous 3D star field with all the fiber optics that went from 2D to 3D, and we knew that the screen was going to be there.

So how do you not put a big curtain, it just opens on the screen, but do something more magical. And it was a lot of those kinds of things. The whole idea of which was as much for me was this idea and objects on screen emanate light. And naturally, if you’re in an environment where that’s really happening, that light would come out into the audience and interestingly enough, it would hit the front of the audience, which you wouldn’t really see.

But we did some experiments and it led to this whole idea of putting light on the back of the audience so that people in front of you became more connected with the motion of light and tone of light and a bunch of other stuff to just further that sense of immersive experience. So all of that kind of stuff really grew out of John Napier who was brought as a costume designer, which is the classic Imagineering collaborative kind of idea. You throw a bunch of people in a room and you get more than you counted on. And as I say, Michael and Jeffrey were exceedingly interested in making this extraordinary production, and they saw this as a further opportunity.

So they then went on to say, and of course we’re going to open this at Disneyland and Walt Disney World on the same day, which I think recently Disney did that again, but this was the first time I think ever that Disney had done two attractions that were destined to open on the same day. And quite honestly, because so much was going on, we had two teams working in both of the spaces. The production team was evolving, so things were changing. And I was doing a week in California, a week in Florida, sort of back and forth, and sometimes we’d do experimentation or discover something new that we wanted to do.

We’d figure it out in Florida, and then I’d come back to California and it’s okay, now we got to implement this here too. So it was a chaotic, crazy fun. I mean, in some ways I came out of theater before I went to Disney. It was a lot of my background and production in theater is depending on overall, but once you really get started, maybe 16 weeks, 12 weeks, I mean, it’s a very intense schedule to bring together. I mean obviously a lot of planning before that and so forth.

This was more like that because things were constantly going on. Things were literally changing from what they were discovering and editing and changing the effects that they were doing. Like I say, Harrison Ellenshaw and Tom Smith were brought in, they set up a group of over 200 people at the Tojunga facility, which was part of the Imagineering production facilities at the time. They took over a whole floor up there and they were doing all the 3D animation, literally cel by cel. Think about that today with what we do with CG.

The combination, I guess of all of that led to conversation I had with George. It was the last time he saw the show, sort of two days maybe before opening. Of course things never go, and so something broke. So we’re sitting in a theater at Disneyland for a while pulling time. And so I said, so George, what’s this experience been like for you? He goes, well, he said, boy, were we naive, Francis? And I started off thinking, okay, we make our 90 minute, hour and 20 minute movies. We’re making a 20-minute movie, so that should be about that proportional amount of effort. He said, when all is said and done, he said, there are more effects in Captain EO than there were in the first Star Wars.

Dan Heaton: It’s crazy to think about that, just how much was packed into that, especially today looking back and because now we take a lot of the CGI for granted, and that what went into that was, it’s kind of mind boggling to think about how much went into a show that came back with the tribute but wasn’t intended to play nearly as long as it did, at least from what I know.

Rick Rothschild: No, Michael said, if we get two to three years out of this, that’s what we’ll be happy. And it got eight to nine somewhere in there before it closed the first time. So I mean, it was never intended to be a forever, ever at Disneyland. Like some shows are hopefully intended to be. This was clearly more of the movie attitude, which is get the movie out there, let the audience enjoy it, and after a certain point it will no longer have a life to live in the park. They exceeded it by three times. I think their expectations, maybe even four.

Dan Heaton: Oh, I’m sure. Well, on a related note too, since we’re talking about that theater, you also worked later on a Honey, I Shrunk the Audience, which I know had more innovative 4D effects at the time, which I found very entertaining. I’d love to know too, especially given that you worked on Captain EO going in and doing something based on a property and very different with different effects. What was that like?

Rick Rothschild: It was an interesting project, and obviously I was asked to get involved because of Captain and my connection to 3D and the experiential theater and so forth. So I had been in concept development doing a lot of different ideas early on with the theme park team, production team, and so forth. And before it sort of evolved into, oh, this is the property that we should go think about working with.

But there was always this idea that we kept exploring, which this naturally gave us, which was how do we do something where the theater captain tried to taking him into an environment where the theater went away in a sense. And even from the starfield, just the darkness and the little twinkling lights and so forth, and no boundaries, no shapes, and this one was all about what can we do where the theater is acknowledged as a theater and something happens.

So that ultimately was the one lingering piece of the early concepts that carried his way into what became Honey I Shrunk the Audience. I give, again, tremendous credit to Randall Kleiser who the director who came in and really embraced the whole notion of working in 3D and the idea of the theatricality of it because shooting a movie and there is a point where it actually is more of a movie, but the rest of it’s he’s shooting a stage play and with a lot of effects in it. And he totally embraced that.

So I guess again, it was this combination of finding the right people to embrace the idea that we’re not doing what they traditionally do, but it’s borrowing very liberally from what they are experts at and then giving them an opportunity to step into the theme park world where I think over my years there, working with many people who were in the mainstream media always once they got to know Imagineering and goes, you guys have the coolest job because you never do the same thing twice.

We make movies and we make new stories. So every story is different, but still got a camera, still got a second unit. There’s a lot of the same stuff. It’s still fun obviously, and we love doing it and we make great stuff and great movies. But this idea of working in the theme park and that’s I guess why all of us as imagineers really enjoyed it. It was almost a fresh start. Marty’s blank piece of paper truly meant you were launching into a whole new opportunity, a whole new territory of who you brought together, what the disciplines, what the stories, and just sort of the delivery of the experiences different each time.

Dan Heaton: Well, speaking of a new opportunity, something that was very different at the time, which I know a lot of theme park fans look back on like, oh man is the ExtraTERRORestrial Alien Encounter because it’s so beloved yet really, I mean it played for eight years if that. So I mean, I would love to hear from you how that came together because especially in the mid-‘90s at the Magic Kingdom, that was quite a move by Disney to put that into Tomorrowland.

Rick Rothschild (26:08): Yes, it was. It sort of was the Rocky Horror Picture show of Disneyland. I think in some ways great show, right show, lot of fun, probably the wrong park. So I was actually working on Honey, I Shrunk the audience at Walt Disney World as the team who had been hard at work on a previous incantation of Alien Counter, had been working on it for a number of years.

I got a call from Imagineering from I think Tom Fitzgerald or Marty or both of them, and saying, we’d like you to take a moment and go over and experience what’s going on in that show that they’re still in rehearsal and so forth on. And it was supposed to open, I think originally it was supposed to open even before or around the time we were opening, which was around Thanksgiving time. So anyways, I went over, took a look at it and the next step was Michael really likes the concept, but he doesn’t like the delivery.

It’s not working. So it wasn’t five days, but it was basically when you get back to California, which was early December, you have until the end of the holidays. Then Michael wants to know what we should do to maybe reconceive it and deliver a more exciting show or a show that he feels will be more successful. So again, I had that relatively short period of time and I also was working with a group of people that was where I got to work for the first time with Jerry Rees, who was on it as the media director that had been ongoing.

He and I enjoyed a tremendous partnership through the process that I was involved with and a number of other team that had been a part of that show. But you can imagine, and it was not an easy thing for a team that had been so focused and so devoted and so strongly believing in what they were doing to find the boss didn’t quite like it, but still like the idea, the core of it.

So I was asked to come up with a what do you do with it to help that? So the net result was that we pitched to Michael in early January, the rework, and many of the team stayed on and graciously and devotedly stayed on to work. The reshaping and resculpting of this idea and the show, a few left, but I pitched the show to Michael. Michael said, great, how quick can we do it? I want it by summer.

So it was again, a theatrical experience I have to say. It was like, okay, number one, we’re going to gather a core team together and Imagineering and all that process leave us alone that will do nothing to help us succeed. So allow us to pull the right people together. And Bran Ferren who had come into the company fairly recently was intrigued with it and through some of his people from at that time, the R&D group.

So it was a bit of R&D, some out of his group that was part of the R&D group now, but it was in New York, wasn’t even out in California. A number of engineers, people in Florida, people that I engaged and brought in. So six months later, five months later, we’d birthed this new show, which was really sort of tearing it all apart, rescripting it using aspects of what was there, but doing a lot of new work.

And ironically, I mentioned Rocky Horror Picture Show, the British actor Tim Curry ultimately ended up, we cast as the voice of the robot, sir. So it wasn’t intended, but it’s sort of ironic in a way that a little bit of Rocky Horror actually did get into our show maybe. But you’re right. I mean I was devoted to this notion that as a kid, all kids, you go into the closet, close the door, and instantly stuff happens.

People start screaming, you see things in the dark, all this kind of stuff. And if you don’t open the door, chaos ensues and whatever story might’ve been going on, it’s completely lost. Just a lot of screaming. The whole reshaping of the story really was to allow those oral moments and those moments in the dark and at the same time get control back and let the story evolve a little bit more.

So that came with Jerry’s work as well, but that brought in the live actor, which I don’t think had ever been done in a theme park where you’re literally cycling a show, two theaters, and you’re cycling the show every 15 minutes. So imagine what the horror, and up to that point, whenever we’d brought up, let’s put a live actor in a show, everybody went, no. So that was a devoted group that cast that did that role was amazing for the period of time that show ran.

It was really pushing the boundaries of, in the same way that I guess we had pushed the boundaries of how do you bring nightclub, adult, nightclub district, and Disney together? So it’s pushing the edge of Disney but not going over that too far. I think that was the same with this one is like how do you push scary and still have a story, still have something that takes an audience on a journey as opposed to what was happening in the old concept where people were really sort of losing control and they had no way to get it back. So as I said when we started talking about this show, it really was a great show in the wrong park.

If it had been in probably Studio Tour, I think it would’ve had longer run. But ultimately, like we mentioned, I reworked Captain EO into Honey, I Shrunk the Audience in the same spaces in a couple of locations after we did Alien Encounter, I was asked to go back and go, okay, now it’s got to be a kinder, gentler story in the same place. So I then had to go in and we had to figure out how to use the Stitch in there. So I think one of the other side notes of my career is that I in some ways have probably replaced more shows that I created with new shows than just about any other Imagineer. And I don’t know whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

Dan Heaton: Can I ask you the challenge with taking what is designed to push the edge of what Disney does with Alien Encounter and then to bring in Stitch, and yet still a lot of what that attraction was with the audio and a little bit of scare is the same. How challenging was that for you to kind of make that sort of fit within that framework?

Rick Rothschild: Well, it was personally challenging to say goodbye to Alien Encounter because I thought it worked pretty well. I guess the idea of, and the fun of both of those shows, one was obviously more adult, more mature, let’s say audience, not adult, but it required a little bit more maturity too, except that I remember the operational cast was really careful about trying to, because we had a height requirement, but that height requirement could probably be filled easily by a five-year-old.

So they would see the younger ones who were clearly younger and they would help parents. I mean it’s outside, it says this is a scary attraction, there’s loud noises, there’s all this kind of stuff. And the operators did their best too, to sort of say to parents just to remind you that this is probably on the edge of terror at Disneyland. This is at the top right now.

So just be careful with your little ones. Do you really absolutely just understand we don’t want you and still people would not understand. So that was part of what ultimately I think because Michael loved the show, he really did, and the audience in general, I mean I have nieces and nephews now who are a little bit younger than you, but of that same generation. And that was their favorite show at Disney, Walt Disney World.

So there was definitely a fan base for it, but it was that it’s in Tomorrowland, it Disneyland. And so ultimately the operational team I think kept banging on it saying, come on guys, can we do something that’s a little bit more friendly, Disney friendly? So that was what led to pushing it into Stitch. And so to your question of what was that like? I liked the idea of the whole machine in the same way that theaters are machines that give you an opportunity to stage all different kinds of things.

There was a machine here and that format that I really still liked. So it was like, alright, how do you take that format, not destroy the fun of that format, but go after a different character and a slightly different story and a slightly more friendly story. So that really became the challenge. And plus there were a few people I worked with back then helping us do that one that we had so much fun.

Again, just the group of Imagineers that were involved, Luc Mayrand, who’s very well known now as an Imagineer and worked as the designer with me on that, as did a few other imagineers that I hadn’t worked with before. So it was personally a fun experience plus working with Chris who created Stitch who did the voice, Chris Sanders, he was a ton of fun to work with, both in sort of having approval of the story and then doing the voice for us and so forth. So there is I guess a silver lining in everything.

Dan Heaton: That makes sense. Yeah, I’m glad to hear it was a good experience, at least in terms of the team that you work with and everything for that, even if you had to take out such a cool attraction with, I mean not take out, but just a cool at interaction with I encounter. Well, speaking of making an update, I wanted to, before we finish, ask you about the updates to Star Tours because I think the original Star Tours was amazing, but what they’ve been able to do.

And I mean what the team did with the initial different ways you can go and then keep adding more is just a really cool way to show how you can customize, like you mentioned the machine and customizing it, I think Star Tours: The Adventure Continues is great at that. So I’d love to know how that came together and developing such a, what seems like a complicated setup.

Rick Rothschild: So that team obviously had it at its core. Tom Fitzgerald who had been at the helm as a young Imagineer when 1986 while we were doing Captain EO, he was leading the team working with George on the first Star Tours. So Tom was at the helm creatively and conceptually on the rework. And so there was a team long before I got involved that was really conceptualizing the story ideas, the idea of the multi scene.

When I started to get involved, it was at the point that it was becoming, how does that work? How does that work with the simulator? What kinds of things can go into the environment itself? And again, it goes all the way back to I guess many of us who had done the 3D kinds of experiences where things go beyond the screen and obviously here you’re inside of a real vehicle apparent supposedly, and so you should things that happen inside the vehicle.

I’d also done something inside of a vehicle with Storm Rider over at Tokyo Disneysea as well, which had lots of things happening in it and so forth. So that’s where I then sort of joined the team more at the time of helping formulate and sculpt the experience and then help lead the team in the field putting it all together. But it really was, I think Tom and a core team, some of whom had been involved with him all the way back on the first one, and then obviously a collection of new designers and writers that were involved.

Dan Heaton: So you mentioned Storm Rider and then just those types of effects technically just given the way technology’s gone, has it become a lot easier to be able to do that or there just new hurdles as we continue to progress? And this could be beyond just those attractions, I’m just curious in general with 3D.

Rick Rothschild: Well, I would say creative ideas and creative story ideas are limitless, which is the great power of a creative mind. Being able to conceive those kind of ideas, the way you realize them in whatever art form you’re doing that in. In our case, we’re talking about theme parks. Technology clearly plays a huge part, hence the word Imagineering in a way. I mean, it sort of embodies that as Walt intended.

So my answer to your question, I guess, is that technology is continually aiding us, giving us the opportunity to challenge our own thinking about how to or how we might create an experience and if anything, the acceleration of and convergence of a variety of different kinds of technologies and technologists thinking about how to bring those things together. We obviously like to think abuse technology sometimes. It wasn’t necessarily intended for what we use it for, but I think that the convergence is happening in an ever more rapid race.

It is not just that things are getting smaller and the power of your phone is exponentially X amount of what it used to be for a desk calculator and all those kinds of things. It’s really the convergence of, and the intermingling of both the physical technologies and the soft technologies and software that have just opened up more and more opportunities and more and more possibilities.

So I mean, as a simple example of that, I remember when we were working on American Adventure saying, wouldn’t it be really cool if someday because we had put the IDA four in, which was this big huge projector, it was the largest projected video image in the world, and it was a million dollars. I think the thing was like, I don’t know, 20 by 12 by 20 or something back in those days, that’s just a gargantuan projected video image.

It was like, wouldn’t it be really cool someday to think that all of the unsteadiness that we had to deal with with that huge projected image in American Adventure, which showed itself where no matter what you tried to do with it, where you had solid sets that didn’t move and you had a projector that just had the slightest bit of movement you’re going on. So I remember sitting in a theater back in those days going, this is really cool, and the projection guys had needed as steady as they could be, but thinking, ah, but one day, one day, oh, here we are today, and look at all of what we’re doing with projection far beyond what we were able even close to being able to do with mechanical projection and film projection.

So to me, the opportunity is obviously boundless and it’s boundless because I think there are ways to find in the same way we found creative solutions with the technologies we had and we, as I say, sort of pushed to the bleeding edge and abuse those technologies where we needed to get them to try and do what we needed ’em to do and we pushed them as far as they would. I think if you look at Rise of the Resistance, that is just another example of today and the last few years just taking all the different available tools and the creative minds pushing ’em together and where do you go with that? So I don’t see that as ever stopping.

If anything, I think the opportunities are greater today to realize there’s still boundaries, there’s still limits, there’s still challenges that sort of crossing over the next threshold with, there’s probably a whole another discussion in regards to virtual reality, augmented reality, how all of that plays into this. It clearly plays into it, but I also have sort of a personal belief that it’s a part of the toolkit in the same way that movies and theater are two different kinds of performance and neither has gone away. I think the virtual reality and augmented reality is, for me at least another part of the toolkit, I don’t think it is the panacea of we’re all just going to sort of siphon down to, and I don’t think most people feel that way, but sometimes you get infatuated with new technologies.

And I mean 3D movies we launched with Captain EO, we made a few more at Disney. There was a run of theme park 3D movies and 4D things and all the rest of that stuff. And it only goes so far. It’s like, what else can you do other technologies? But it doesn’t mean that 3D has completely gone away either. Now it’s more like very selective. If somebody does something, I think generally they’re doing something with it where it’s exploring its use perhaps because of some of the technologies that are available, but using it in a new way, in a new storytelling way. So anyways, that’s my sense of how this ongoing technology and creative storytelling will continue to move forward.

Dan Heaton: And I think that’s a great place to end because like you said, there’s so much there, but still it has to fit within the attraction. Well, Rick, this has been awesome. Once again, thanks so much for talking with me about these attractions. You’ve done a lot in your career. I know there’s a lot more to cover, but I really appreciate it.

Rick Rothschild: Yeah, thank you very much and enjoyed chatting with you.