DCA Interviews: The Stories Behind the Original California Adventure

Prior to Disney's California Adventure's Grand Opening on February 8, 2001, Disney held a huge media event starting on February 5th. During that event LaughingPlace.com had the opportunity to interview a number of Imagineers about the soon-to-open park.

As we celebrate DCA's 15th anniversary, we've combined all those interviews into one article here. Our interviewees, and their contributions to DCA, are...

• Tim Delaney: Entrance and Paradise Pier
• Neil Engel: Superstar Limo and ABC Soap Opera Bistro
• Alec Scribner: Condor Flats and Soarin' Over California
• Marc Sumner: Soarin' Over California and Grizzly River Run
• Chris Runco: Grizzly River Recreation Area
• Steven Davison: Eureka! Parade and DCA Opening Ceremony

One thing you'll notice about these interviews is that many of the attractions discussed are now either gone or have been thoroughly rethemed. To no fault of the people we spoke to, the original California Adventure seemed to fall short of what guests and critics expected of Disney. Part of its failure could perhaps be contributed to the Internet where the park received scathing reviews. As you'll see from the interviews, even before the park opened the team knew that building this park was going to be a little different thanks to increased scrutiny that message boards and chat rooms brought.

15 years later, it seems like the perfect time to look back at a time before the gates were opened and when people were excited to discover what Disney's California Adventure held:

Tim Delaney was one of the first Imagineers to join the Disney's California Adventure project in 1995. Delaney joined Walt Disney Imagineering in 1976 where his first assignment was designing the Starcade at Disneyland. He's since worked on The Living Seas at Epcot and Discoveryland at Disneyland Paris including Space Mountain: From the Earth to the Moon. LaughingPlace.com interviewed Delaney during the DCA media events a couple of days before DCA's grand opening.

LaughingPlace.com: What was your specific role in the development of Disney's California Adventure?

Tim Delaney: My specific job was I was the designer in charge of the design group for the entrance complex here at Disney's California Adventure, as well as for Paradise Pier. Two very exciting, very exciting projects.

LP: Regarding Paradise Pier - two people I've interviewed already have made a point of saying how Disney's California Adventure is about now. It’s not about fantasy. It’s not about history. It’s about right now. That doesn't seem to quite apply to Paradise Pier. Can you talk about that?

TD: The thing is the way we designed Paradise Pier was not necessarily historically. We didn’t take any buildings and directly lift them. We actually took bits and pieces of them. We actually designed it nostalgically, something meant to really create the dream quality of what a seaside amusement park was meant to be. In California we had a huge history of these seaside amusement parks. Their heyday was from 1905 to 1929 just prior to the depression. They were very elegant places, had very exotic architecture, wonders of the mechanical age. They were just really wonderful places.

After that they began - after the depression, after World War II - they began to deteriorate and eventually most of them ended in fires. We only had three left, Belmont Park, Santa Monica and Santa Cruz. Santa Monica and Belmont Park are really just a shadow of what they were originally. So what we wanted to do was bring these places back. Bring it back to the nostalgic quality and the emotions and the feelings that they had. So in a way it is really meant to be; I guess timeless would be a better word rather than historical. It’s really touching on emotions about places like that. Paradise Pier is a very energetic place once you step into it. The more people you get the more sound. We get all the rides running tomorrow. Disney had a couple running today and you’ll see that there’s something so fundamental and intrinsically entertaining about it that again, that quality remains timeless with everybody.

LP: A specific question, before I forget. I know that during it’s testing the Sun Wheel had a lot of different light patterns going on. Since the park began soft openings it seems the patterns have gone away.

A: No, no, you should see them on tonight. We’ve gone through some interesting challenges with the lighting on this. It rains and they're like "oh..." It will have the full compliment of all its lighting. There is about a 20 minute cycle on the lighting and it’ll be spectacular. It better be spectacular or I’ll kill someone on that too.

LP: Can you talk about the sun icon?

A: The sun icon. The sun icon is the ultimate final statement for our entire entrance complex here. The whole idea is that we’re walking through a picture postcard starting with the California letters, going through the images of California with the mural and kind of looking through the Golden Gate Bridge. I love the idea of the bridge because of what it represents. It’s like the ultimate icon for California as well as having the Monorail go through - the ultimate icon for Disney and then at the end of that long line is our plaza here with our wave fountain and the sun icon.

The intent here was to actually make it - it doesn’t have any historical historical reference in Disney, but that’s okay. Sometimes you just want to create something on your own. You create your own images. I designed it so it had kind of a compatible size relationship with the castle at Disneyland, it has the certain height and all that. I didn’t want to have an icon which is 500 feet high. This isn't meant to be that kind of relationship. But just like everything else at Disney's California Adventure it’s meant to compliment Disneyland as well as contrast it at the same time. I was very much inspired by the Unisphere for the World’s Fair in New York in 1964, and it was built of stainless steel, very elegant, very timeless in its quality with a fountain to it and that’s what we wanted to create here.

As you well know - it’s been well documented, I’ve said it hundreds of times - icons usually face the south and this one faces north and I quickly figured that one out and I said "how do we make it interesting?" I love building and designing things that have not only what appears to be its design but also some context to it. A good example is the Golden Gate Bridge. As a gateway for this park the Golden Gate Bridge is fantastic. The fact that the Monorail goes through it and it had to live with that, it’s like "oh, Monorail, yeah." It works great. Well the sun icon, just being on its own, works on its own. But now that we add the heliostats to illuminate it, it adds another level of intrigue. It actually adds that kind of quality of California art and science. You put all that together with a little bit of technology - technology that we had a company in San Diego actually build all the software for it. It’s a neat thing. With the sun icon, I’ve been doing things - trying to create architectural gold is very difficult to do. So every time you paint it, it doesn’t look very inspiring and everything else fades away until we found titanium. Look at it, it has a gorgeous color to it. It’s a very rich, warm color. It has a kind of a timeless quality to it also. It will be timeless. It’s never going to change for the next 500 years. There are a lot of subtle colors to it. I’m hoping it becomes just as strong an icon for this park as the castle is for Disneyland.

LP: This is the first park Disney had to build where people could watch it go up. Did that make any difference to you?

A: Not at all. I actually think it’s very interesting. People do see what we construct within the theme park and with those signs, ignore our dust and all that stuff. I just relate back to when I was growing up and going to Disneyland and looking at all the other parks. There is something very, very exciting about seeing things being built, especially when Disney is building. There is an anticipation that kind of gets you saying "oh, something new." I find because of the interviews that I do, there is a huge interest in the workings and the on-goings of Imagineering, about how we do things. People really want to know. I particularly notice - you notice it here - but I particularly noticed it when I was in Europe when I did Space Mountain over there, or did Discoveryland over there. People were completely fascinated by the concept of Imagineering. People over there thought "well, Imagineering must be like four guys sitting around a coffee table thinking stuff up." Well that’s not it. When I say we have 1,500,o 2,000 employees, whatever it is, people are like wow. Then you have all these people that designed this.

So there’s this process of constructing, the people really are enthused about it. So when they actually see trucks coming in and dirt moving out and things being build, people are always looking over the fence going "hey, so what is it?" They’re always curious. Look how many planes are going over taking pictures. There were images on the Internet of like what we were doing and all that. I actually find that to be very interesting because I think people show their enthusiasm for what we do, even when there’s speculation on the Internet. At least it’s kind of interesting because they take their time to be curious and there’s people out there who are as vigilant as we are to the same standard. [They were saying] "It’s not going to be like Disneyland." My attitude is right, it’s not going to be like Disneyland. It shouldn’t be. It’s meant to compliment and contrast at the same time.

The other issue, of being able to see the outside world, to me that’s all part of the California story too. There are certain things that we have tried to block out but other things - like I had to sit and look at that Pacific Hotel for a long time and then I said, let me see if I can fix that, so I redesigned it. So now it looks great. Now it looks better. There’re certain things, you know the old Disney quote about we love doing the impossible. It’s more fun to do and all that. I think the more challenges we have the more fun it is. It’s like "okay, it’s going to be in Anaheim and we got to build this urban thing." It’s fun. It’s different. I’ve done everything else. So you can go out in the middle of nowhere like in France or like in Epcot. That had its challenges but this is something different. One thing about me, I’ll just tell you, I don’t like doing anything twice. Spend all my time design this, design this, it’s great. It’s exciting. Now when it’s over, okay, now what? What’s new? What’s next?

LP: Is there much room to add things to Paradise Pier? Do you think there’ll be a lot of changes over there?

TD: What we did is I left three - without addressing our little Paradise Bay in front - I purposely put in three vacant lots where we can add attractions and we’re beginning to talk about that. We’ve been talking about it for the last month, as to the attractions we’re going to put in those places. Just throughout the park each land has - they’re very well disguised, but each land has some what I call vacant lots to build things and we’re planning on it. We have plans for that. That’s just within the current configuration of the park. We’re also beginning to explore other possibilities beyond this too. It all takes time and we’ve really devoted all of our attention just to trying to get things going today.

LP: You mentioned Paradise Bay which is a large part of Paradise Pier. Is there a plan for that area, or is there just supposed to be a lot of water there ... or can you not say anything about that?

TD: I don’t want to say anything about that.

LP: Fair enough. Given the history of seaside parks and all you had to chose from, how did you end up with these particular attractions?

TD: There were a couple of things. First of all, we knew that the backbone of the entire land, the whole district, was going to be the coaster. We designed that coaster. Pat Doyle and I sat down to design that coaster from scratch. We actually literally write a script of how we want the coaster to go. Where the high spots are, when the intensity is. We actually designed it so you actually can relax as you go to certain areas.

Then I have to say, regarding the wheel, the Sun Wheel, it’s the only thing I hate to say that I borrowed from New York, from Coney Island. I just said if we’re going to do a Ferris Wheel we've got to do something totally and completely unique. And I’m not a big lover of Ferris Wheels. I find them to be not very interesting. But I said, if I’m ever going to do one, this is the one we’re going to do and it took us a long time to try and find somebody to build one but we did and they did a great job.

Then, like for example the Golden Zephyr, the Zephyr is a cable rocket swing ride from the beginning of the 20th century. There were 400 of those in the United States. This one we have here is the only one in North America right now. And what we wanted to do was bring back - a little bit like the Sun Wheel is from New York, that was built in 1927 and most of the rocket the swing cable rides were built like in the 20s. So I wanted to bring back some of those lost rides. More family oriented, just variety, just different.

In terms of the Maliboomer, I just love that ride and it’s proven to be enormously popular. It’s incredibly popular. It is what it is. In both the case of the coaster and the Maliboomer, I’m very, very intrigued about putting our guests on stage, making them part of the show. So for the coaster launch we put it right so it flanks the Boardwalk. You can’t see it now because of all those [media] tents that are out there but usually people hang on that edge and they watch people’s faces. I insisted it must come to a stop, no rolling start. It must come to a dead stop. Sometimes people go, "hey," when it stops then as soon as it starts they’re like "hold on!" It’s funny to see their faces. And the same thing with the Maliboomer. We raised the platform up so you can watch people’s faces.

My feeling about Paradise Pier and all the attractions there is that I consider Paradise Pier one attraction. It’s got a number of rides. My concern with the attractions is everything about it - the music, the sound, the food, the Boardwalk. If you don’t even want to go on the rides you can be entertained because of the energy in that place. And if you want to go on the rides, it’s great fun and it’s great fun for everybody. It’s like it says - "fun under the sun for everyone."

I think the coaster is kind of typical of what we did. I wanted to create something that was a real family Disney thing. It was meant to be fun. It’s not the tallest, not the fastest, not any of those extremes. It’s 6,000 feet long. We want to create it so as soon as you get off you want to ride it again and that’s what we’ve done. I’ve had so many comments, literally hundreds of comments from people who even their little kids, six or seven years old, will ride the thing eight times because it’s so smooth. That’s what we wanted.

To answer your question specifically, I chose rides that I felt would be most appealing to all audiences. After 25 years here, I feel like I know our audience very well and I know what they like and what they want to do. So we tested a lot of things but those are the ones... I wish we had more rides.

LP: Have you been confident this whole time that this park would be able to please Disney guests?

TD: Absolutely, no question in my mind. Absolutely. The reason is because of the combination of the way it’s laid out and the art direction, everything about it. I am also confident because I’ve worked on other parks, other Disney parks, where when you think about the references here in California people reference Disneyland. I love Disneyland. I have pictures of myself here. I love it. It’s just great. But I also know because I worked on Epcot. I worked on all the other parks. There is another quality. It's a different subject but there is the same quality of Disney entertainment. I like Paradise Pier. I knew it would be challenging but I knew we could do it. I knew that there was something there so I had to fight. It’s a fight.

One of the things is when you see that place all lit up at night. I told everybody we’re going to make this place like the city of Oz almost. It has to be so with the rides around you, and it’s something so basically entertaining, fun and energetic about it, that I knew people would love it. They’re going to love it and this is how I felt about this entire California project from the very beginning. Barry [Braverman] and Rick [Rothschild], just the moment we started I was there. I said I want to do this because I knew it would have an impact on Anaheim.

I love it when people properly speculate and are concerned. I think it’s great on the Internet. I think they have every right in the world to do that. I don’t think they have a right to make up things that are untrue. But I love taking people on tours here. Not so much now because it’s easy now but six months ago taking people on tours and they’re going, wait a minute, wait a minute, there’s something wrong here. "Oh what’s that?" This looks kind of good. It’s going to get better too.

Then on this side of Paradise Pier you’ve got not the Boardwalk but what I call Paradise Beach and the Jellyfish and the Orange Stinger. As I mentioned, the Boardwalk area where the coaster is, it’s mostly nostalgic but there’s another side too to the beach area. There is another side to the beach environment. And there are other subjects such as there’s the surfing context and then there’s kind of a, and we’re going to explore this more in the future. There’s a bit of a car culture going on with the Dino Jack's Sunglass Shack, kind of a California Crazy architecture experience that with the giant Burger Invasion. In California there’s a period of time in the 20s and 30s where California Crazy was a big thing. Los Angeles in particular was a car culture and a bunch of people kept saying "gee, how do we get people’s attention" so they used to build these big things - Randy’s Donuts and Boulevard Cafe and all those things, so we want to kind of capture that too. So that’s where that spirit is. Then we put it right in the middle of Mulholland Madness which being a wild mouse ride is kind of like a car ride, but it’s also the slowest most terrifying roller coaster you can go on. I mean I’ll go on the coaster a hundred times before I go on that. It’s scary. I feel like it’s going to fall off the track.

LP: One thing I found interesting is there are very few Disney characters in this park but there happens to be King Triton’s Carousel.

TD: That is a little inconsistent. There’s also a little bit of inconsistency, although I’m thrilled by it because I did it myself, with the mouse ears right there where the coaster goes through and that wasn’t meant to be Mickey in terms of a Disneyland Mickey. It’s meant to be Mickey as a symbol of Disney. I knew there were going to be a million photographs taken of this coaster and one of the first sketches I ever did I had that loop and we had the loop right through the mouse ears. I had a presentation with Mike Eisner. He looked at it and said "yeah!" and so we just did it.

Unfortunately I didn’t get to see the entire TV special [the DCA special that aired February 4th on ABC], but I saw the other night there were some beautiful shots for the loop going through right in front of the mouse ears with the light changing and all that. It’s an instant icon. I kind of design stuff from a marketing approach. That’s why you see the Golden Gate Bridge and the Sun, mouse ears, sun face and all that stuff because I know that’s what people want to see and it’s fun. You can make things anonymous but I actually design everything as a photo shot. So you can stand in front of something, "oh, I was there."

LP: My favorite little detail, so far anyway, in Paradise Pier is the water fountain that looks like a beach shower. Do you have a favorite one?

TD: My favorite place in Paradise Pier is just the launch area for the coaster because it’s shared by so many people and also the wave. The wave machine that we have over there. We have 90 feet of wave machine kind of working its thing over there. Just keep that on. I like that. Keep it on. Actually there’s another area. I like that part near the Maliboomer where people walk through there because you got the coaster going around and the ride going up and people are laughing.

I like the whole place.

Neil Engel was the show producer for Superstar Limo and the ABC Soap Opera Bistro at Disney's California Adventure. Engel was also project set designer for Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland Paris and Splash Mountain at Tokyo Disneyland and he was the ride producer for Jurassic Park - The Ride at Universal Studios. On February 6th Engel talked to LaughingPlace.com about the Hollywood Backlot Pictures district in general and Superstar Limo and the ABC Soap Opera Bistro in particular.

LaughingPlace.com: Can you tell me about the Hollywood Pictures Backlot District?

Neil Engel: Sure. The Hollywood Pictures Backlot is Disney’s take on a contemporary Hollywood which is kind of a new one for us. Classically, you see a lot of people talking about Hollywood in terms of the golden age. Everyone does 40s Hollywood. But like the rest of the park here, this is contemporary, so what we wanted to do was create a Hollywood that is up to date. It does pays tribute to the classic architecture of Hollywood because it’s still there. But the attitude is very much more in step with, like, E! and Entertainment Weekly and Entertainment Tonight. It’s really supposed to be very much about today and very much about you. You being a part of Hollywood, walking in it, being part of the thrills, being part of the fame, because classically, the typical guest is an observer of Hollywood and the Hollywood glamour. This time we wanted you to be part of the glamour.

LP: Can you talk a how it is similar and/or different to the Hollywood of Disney-MGM Studios.

NE: It’s hard because I didn’t spend a lot of time down there in Florida so I’m not really too familiar with it. But I think, kind of what I was mentioning, is that this take on Hollywood is kind of two-fold in that it is contemporary and it’s supposed to be very hip. But also, that if you look down the center line it’s all complete until you start looking at it obliquely and stuff starts to fall apart just like the movie set. Again, our version of Hollywood is - it’s kind of a veneer. It’s like this is Hollywood, but it’s all just like Hollywood is. Set up individual shots that are for a very specific perspective and the minute you start to get off axis it starts to become a little bit of an anomaly which is kind of neat because a lot of people like to see what’s on the other side of a set.

LP: Are there any famous Hollywood landmarks people should be on the look for there?

NE: Oh gosh, we've got references to a lot of classic architecture in Hollywood like Crossroads to the World, the Pantages Theater, The Max Factor building, as well as typical sound stages and of course the Los Angeles theater. The front of the Hyperion Theater is a reference to a theater that’s still down there in downtown.

LP: Speaking of the Hyperion can you tell us about that theater a little bit?

NE: I can tell you about it from a design standpoint. I’m not real familiar with the show inside. What we wanted to do was create sort of a sound stage being dressed out to become a set. So when you walk in, again, it’s almost like you see "oh my gosh this is like this really super ornate looking interior." It’s very baroque looking interior with lots of drapes. Then you look at it again and it’s like you go these are just indications and you can almost see through them, in fact they’re perforated, did you know that?

LP: No, I didn’t know that.

NE: Yeah, they’re perforated because we wanted to make them very friendly to sound proofing. So apparently perforated metal surfaces are much better for sound attenuation than big heavy planer surfaces, so if you look at them they’re actually perforated. But you know, we wanted it to be a comfortable theater. It’s really a first of its kind for Disney which is an indoor, light controlled auditorium. Very comfortable for the Entertainment Division's kind of entertainment.

LP: The Disney Animation Courtyard is something everyone is talking about. On the surface it looks like it’s not that complicated, but I suspect it is more complicated than it looks.

NE: It really is (laughs). But you know that’s the hallmark of Disney in that we go to a lot of pains to make something look very simple, just like an athlete. You say he makes it look so simple but there’s really nothing simple to it. It’s really a marvel of synchronization and visual harmony and I think there’s a lot of ways you could have pulled that off, but I think what makes it Disney is that we do spend that kind of time to be sure that the colors are going from warm to cold very softly and the music is working with it very completely and we go from one world to another with a strong contrast in-between so that again, it’s not just this sort of jarring - we didn’t want it to be a jarring thing. We want you to go in and appreciate animation, appreciate the art of animation, but also to be a very friendly place where you can just sit down and watch it for 20 minutes, a lot of people are doing that.

LP: Many times I've done that.

NE: Which is funny because when we were laying these spaces out we said, well, this is kind of like the holding area where they kind of wait for the shows to come up and people are just spending whole afternoon in there. It’s great.

LP: In your bio it says you worked on Super Star Limo?

NE: Super Star Limo was my show and ABC Soap Opera Bistro.

LP: Can you talk about Limo a little bit?

NE: Limo is a Disney turn on Hollywood, again the hip, contemporary Hollywood, that was really designed to be a show for the whole family. When you look around DCA, one of the things that we wanted to include in it was something that had its roots in classic Disney, black light rides, color and kind of a crazy driving of a pretty, pretty car is a hallmark of a lot of our shows. So we said how can we do that and still be contemporary and still be Hollywood? So what Super Star Limo is is a chance for the whole family to experience the inside of Hollywood. What is it like for you to be the star? For you to experience the 15 minutes of fame everyone supposedly gets according to Andy Warhol - all in 3 1/2 minutes? So what it is, is our pastiche on Hollywood and in a sense we overloaded it with lots of scenery, and lots of visual gags because you’re driving through a city and a city by its very nature is oh my God what’s that, oh my God what’s that, you know? So it’s really supposed to be kind of like in your face and oh, I’d have to ride that ten times to really see what’s really going on. It was really on purpose that way.

LP: What is the technology of Joan Rivers and the agent? Are they puppets?

NE: Yeah, they’re puppets. We worked with this team of puppet designers and makers and it actually takes four people each to run each one of those. We wanted to keep them very similar in look to our caricature profiles inside the ride so we kept that same sort of caricaturized, kind of Hollywood goony kind of feel.

LP: Soap Opera Bistro - can you talk about that a little bit?

NE: Soap Opera Bistro is a really fun project. It’s funny, this building, that it was about 99 percent designed and we thought, "gosh we got to put something in there. What is it going to be?" And we knew we wanted this to be a restaurant and when we were going into the design on this it was just about the time that ABC and Disney were getting together. And television is such a big part of Hollywood and we said, there are so many good things about ABC and - you’ve been to lots of theme restaurants. And a lot of them have that sort of I saw it once, it was really great but why would I want to go again? So we really took that into consideration this time.

One of the ways we did that is we arrived on ABC daytime properties because they don’t have reruns. They make 360 shows a year and also because they have a very interesting fan base, crazy people that are just nuts in love with soaps and also because it’s very different and we keep it alive because every time you visit, we've got people up to date on everything that's going on in the soaps. The host and hostess are always trying out for a role on the soaps. They desperately want to be an "under five" which is under five lines. They want to be an under five some day. We’re going to have a lot of celebrity visits. Port Charles and General Hospital are taped right here in Los Angeles so we expect to have them come visit and make a surprise - can you imagine sitting there and having your lunch and everything and hear, "I’m going on break now, your next waiter is going to be bringing you your dessert" and maybe Luke Spencer comes and brings you your dessert? Can you imagine what a fan would do? They’d go nuts. So that’s why we’re really looking forward to it because unlike a lot of theme restaurants, we have a chance to really keep this alive, exciting and always something different when you visit.

LP: Is there anything in particular, maybe a little detail or something, that’s really your favorite part of the Hollywood Pictures Backlot District?

NE: That’s a good question. Let’s see. I think what I like about Hollywood Pictures Backlot is that it really - I think all the lands in this park are going to expand. We have things on the board for all of them. But what I like about Hollywood is that it really has got something for everyone to start. The Muppets are immensely popular. Animation is the hallmark of Disney. The Limo ride is great for little kids and parents with kids who want to see what it’s like to be a star. The Hyperion Show is going to be a great song and dance fantasy. As a start, it’s a really well rounded land and I think as it expands, and it undoubtedly will, it’s just going to become a real hot bed of excitement and up to date, contemporary stuff.

I think also that what this park is all about, not just our land but all of them, is about contemporary, is about now. It’s not a period piece where when you go in like you go under the train station at Disneyland it's like I’m back in time. This is now. This is today. So in that respect we’ll have entertainment that is really up to date. We’ll have new shows that bring it up to date and that’s a challenge of course as well as fun. It’s not like looking in history books and saying what was real hot in 1910. You’re going what’s hip now? I think it really keeps it alive and has a chance to keep it be a real item.

LP: Do you think because the park is set in the "right now" it will be changed even more frequently than other Disney theme parks?

NE: Ya know, that’s a good question. I think that this park, because of its contemporary nature, is really going to want that. I think - like the parade, have you seen the parade? It’s real contemporary. It’s real now. I think that is a challenge because that means you've got to keep it hip, you've got to keep it going. Everyone that’s been associated with the park from the beginning, and that’s over five years now - well I’ve been with it for five years now, some people have been with it for seven - everyone seems really committed to it. It’s funny because most of us, we finish a job and go on and work on something else. But it’s like all the producers associated with the park are saying what’s going on now? What do they like? What do they think is fun? Should we give them more of that? It’s really unique. It’s not like 1910 is 1910 and there’s nothing I can do about it.

LP: Do you keep up on reaction from the previews to your two shows?

NE: Oh absolutely. In fact, I don’t think it’s any different from any show that anyone opens. We design for the people that are here, plunking down their money to see Disney, and despite the fact that we’ve had a lot of preview audiences, that really begins on Thursday (the grand opening on February 8th). That’s when we get to see the real people that are coming here to see what this whole park is about. Everything gets looked at. We look at it very carefully to see what’s really working, what needs work and I think you’ll see a lot of little tweaking here and there because every park needs it because when you start a new one there are so many unknowns, the people dynamics. It’s like I was telling you about the Animation Courtyard.

I think that also helps you drive what this land needs now is a "blank." What that's land needs now is a "blank." Because it’s all on its own. These shows are here now. It’s really time to give it some careful thought because it’s not another Magic Kingdom. It’s its own identity. I think, so far, the California theme has just turned to to be really fun and exciting. When you stroll through here and listen to music you watch the people singing along with the Mommas an the Poppas and stuff. It’s like it just happens. It starts like a musical in a Broadway show. It just draws you in. California is about trends and hip settings and everything.

LP: Have you gotten positive feedback from your shows?

NE: I’ve actually gotten a lot of positive feedback about both of them. There are some things I’m sure we’ll be working on to make certain things clearer and certain things easier to hear and more things easier to see, but it’s all valuable input and we really welcome it. And it’s really exciting to see that there are so many people that are interested. Like when you work on a show for as long as we do on these shows, we get to the end and say "I wonder if anyone is going to even care." Then you go "Wow! They noticed that’s really cool."

LP: Did you feel any pressure because you were doing the one traditional dark ride in the park?

NE: Pressure? I would say yes and no in that of course you've got this bastion of material that people have loved for millions and millions of years and then you’re going I’m going to start there and then I’m going to go (he makes a sound indicating he's going completely off the board).... so yeah, you’re going out on a limb but with any new show you’re doing that because that’s what’s exciting. If we were just copying the same things over and over, I mean that’s why attractions are all kind of one of a kind and you learn things from them and you find, wow, that really went over so much bigger than we thought or ya know, I thought this would go over bigger than it did. It’s really a great experience to get to be with the show from the beginning to the end and then see how it’s going. Thinking hey, this really works, what about this, maybe we should try something like this now. I think you should stick around. I’m sure there are people that are going to be here every day for the next 30 to 60 days and that’s great because they’ll start to see the things you don’t see until you’ve been there three or four times.

LP: Are there any specific future plans for Hollywood you can mention at all?

NE: Nothing in particular that I can mention but I can tell you that what I have seen up on the drawing boards up at WDI is really exciting. Stuff that you will not want to miss, trust me.

Alec Scribner was the show producer for Condor Flats and Soarin' Over California. His past projects include production designer for the Comedy Warehouse at Pleasure Island and art director at the Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World including involvement in Mickey's Toontown Fair and Ariel's Grotto.

LaughingPlace.com: What were the specific California influences for the design of Condor Flats?

Alec Scribner: When we set out to design the park we wanted to make sure that we captured the geographical diversity of the state. So of course we have Hollywood that represents the city, we have Paradise Pier that represents the sea. We wanted something that represented the high desert. So we thought, why not tell the aviation story which is quite extensive - aviation history here in California. Why don’t we set that in the high desert, akin to Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert, so that’s kind of why the aviation story is in the high desert. Aviation history - it really started 20 years before the Wright Brothers flew in the 1880s when a guy named John Montgomery flew a glider off the coast of San Diego, and then it really developed from there into the building of the Spirit of St. Louis to the space shuttle and all the way up to the present day. It’s quite extensive.

LP: Did the concept for Soarin' come first with Condor Flats developed around it?

AS: Yes, it did. That’s a good question, it really did. We wanted to celebrate the diversity of the landscape somehow. We wanted our guests to walk away with an appreciation for how diverse the landscape was here in California, so we thought wouldn’t it be great if we could do that from the air? So that’s when we started thinking about what if we flew over it. and then how are we going to do that. Then we started thinking about how we were going to project it on this big dome screen and all of that. So we knew we wanted to do that. We knew we wanted to tell the aviation story also. So from there, basically the aviation story grew out of Soarin'.

LP: I already talked to Mark Sumner about the ride mechanism for Soarin'. We talked about how unique it was. Given the thought of such a unique attraction and, from what I’ve heard, such an incredible attraction, was there a lot of pressure to make sure the area around it really lived up to the attraction itself?

AS: When we design our parks we always want to do the best job possible that we can. We always have our self-inflicting pressures to make sure that everything is designed as accurately and as best as possible.

LP: Condor Flats is pretty small. Is there any room at all for expansion there?

AS: Not really. We want to respect our distance between ourselves and the park hotel. We felt that the hotel needed some breathing room so we always had a set distance that we really did not want to encroach on because it would crowd the hotel. We felt that wouldn’t be good for our hotel guests. So what we have is what we got.

LP: There is a nice segue way between Condor Flats and the Grizzly area which is a separate area. I don’t really see any other areas in DCA with that smooth transition. Was that by design here?

AS: It was kind of by design because if you think of the Mojave Desert and its relationship to the Sierra Mountains, they’re actually in close proximity as you drive up to Mammoth or to Bishop up that way. You basically go from the Mojave up into the Sierra Mountains which is exactly what we have. So our transition is actually a more natural one from a geographical landscape standpoint.

LP: Was there any one thing that stands out in your mind as one of the bigger challenges of developing the Condor Flats area?

AS: It really has to do with developing that ride. We had three challenges in developing that ride. One was to create a ride system, as Mark told you about, how we were going to get guests safely up into this projection dome and be able to have them there safely. The next one was to basically create a film which we had never done before, that format, a film - and a dome if you will - we had never done a film like that. Then finally the challenge of the projection system. This is a unique projection system. Because the film is actually a forward motion through space, what tends to happen when you film like that is you get strobing if you’re filming regular motion picture speed, and we knew that going into this. Some of us had seen the motion picture projection system by IMAX where they project back instead of 24 frames a second, they project back at 48 which is twice the speed of regular motion picture film. What that in a sense does it gives the eye much more information and makes the imagery so much clearer and all of that strobing goes away. But obviously, if you’re going to make a projector work twice as hard as it is normally used to we’re going to have to do some work to get it there. We did that work.

LP: The vehicles themselves - how much do they move up and down and forwards and backwards during the ride?

AS: They move up and down - what we call heave. It moves up and down about 30 inches and then we actually pitch you back and forth five degrees in each direction. We played with the idea of doing what’s called roll. When a plane goes into a roll it basically banks. And we found that the heave was a better decision to go with because the camera mounted on the helicopter could do all of the roll as we do in our CircleVision films. We’re not moving, but we think we are because we grasp onto that rail. So the decision to go with the heave and the pitch was the right decision.

LP: One of the best I’ve heard from some of our readers is Soarin' Over California is the next generation CircleVision. I think that’s a great description of it. I like that it’s an attraction for the whole family. It’s not a thrill ride at all. Was that by design from the beginning?

AS: Absolutely. Absolutely. We never wanted to create a Star Tours type of ride. Star Tours is a great ride. It was innovative in its time. I still think it’s a great ride. But we really wanted more of a lyrical, romantic experience for our guests. We wanted to take their breath away. We really wanted the imagery to be the show and as I programmed the ride system I really tried to make it very transparent and invisible to the guests. I wanted it to compliment the imagery that was on the film because if the guests start thinking "wait, no, I see how I’m moving," now I’ve taken them away from the beauty that is on the screen. I just decided, and I think I was right with my colleagues, that what is on the screen is the right focal point.

LP: One of the things I also hear about is the music. Talk a little bit about that.

AS: I’m a big music fan. Honestly this was one of the high points of the attraction for me. We had the great luck to hire a gentleman by the name of Jerry Goldsmith whose extensive musical career started with Planet of the Apes. He did the Mulan score for us for feature animation. We knew that the music was going to have a big role in this. The imagery was great but the music was really going to push it over the edge. I’ll tell you honestly, and I know you’re not asking me this question, but the best moment in this entire project for me was when we took we took his film score, we cut it to the film, and we put it in the theater and the first moment - I had ridden the ride 200 times by then with just a, we had dropped in a temp track. The first time we went up and we listened to that score it brought tears to my eyes. It was that powerful. It was the proudest moment I’ve ever had on a project. It was that ten seconds. It was unbelievable.

LP: The other really memorable thing is the scents. What is the technology behind doing something like that?

AS: We’ve developed for our other films as well. We have them in books we have them in our other shows. What is unique about this, we weren’t sitting in a theater, we had a ride system now. We had to incorporate the scent to work with the fans and basically deliver those scents. That was one of the hardest things we had to do. My team really had to come up with the scent of a pine, the scent of an orange. Oranges are actually quite easy but coming up with a pine that didn’t smell like Pine-Sol, everyone commented it smells like I just cleaned my kitchen. We had to go back and forth and finally it dawned on me what we needed to do was add an earthy quality to the pine to really make it feel like you were in a forest and it really made it much more organic. Once it dawned on us that’s what we needed to do then the task became a lot easier.

LP: Is there one little detail in Condor Flats, one of your favorites, that people should keep a look out for?

AS: Honestly I love Soarin' but that little flight shop, Fly 'n' Buy, I've got a warm spot in my heart for that little place. I think the story around it developed beautifully. I think the fact that we were able to get that little land speed racer in there and prop it as beautifully as we did. I’m extremely proud of the team that I worked with on that. A fellow named Jim Armstrong I think did yeoman’s work pulling all of that together along with our prop person in Marion Mcnara. They did a great job. It’s kind of an unsung hero in the land but we’re really proud of that little shop, we really are.

LP: One of the first things I bought in the park was a Soarin' Over California propeller hat from that shop.

AS: (laughs) Excellent, excellent.

LP: Is there anything that disappointed you at all about the way Condor Flats turned out?

AS: I wish we’d known it was going to be this popular. I think we would have thought about how we were going to queue people through the area and develop it a little bit differently. Don’t get me wrong, I’m really glad it is this popular but I think if we’d known we would have approached the design of the land a bit different.

Mark Sumner who was Mechanical Engineer, Ride Systems for Soarin' Over California and Grizzly River Run. Sumner has tackled difficult mechanical problems for everything from The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror to Splash Mountain to Maelstrom to the world's largest telescope and observatory atop Hawaii's 14,000-foot volcano, Mona Kea.

LaughingPlace.com: What were your contributions to this park?

Mark Sumner: I’m the technical director of ride engineering and I was involved with the Soarin' attraction and Grizzly River Run, as far as the ride systems.

LP: Can you tell me what is unique about Grizzly Run as opposed to traditional or any other raft ride?

MS: There are actually two things I would say are different, maybe three things as far as a white water rafting ride. We bill this as the tallest, the longest and the fastest, which it is. It’s unique that we have down ramps. The only other one like it is in our Disney park in Florida and in fact some of that technology was developed at the same time. We actually built a full scale down ramp in our facilities up in Tujunga and tested for about five months how a river raft acts on a down ramp because no one had done that before. We didn’t know whether it was hard to slow down, whether it would hydroplane. With something like Splash Mountain we have the ability to reconfigure the holes to help contain some of the splashing, help it slow down. We didn’t have that opportunity with the round river tube. So the down ramps are unique to it.

The other thing that is unique is usually when we design a water ride what we like to do is put them on the edge of the park. That’s because we have big noisy pumps. We like to have a reservoir that usually is out of sight. We didn’t have that luxury here because the bear ride is right in the middle of the park. So we made our pumps totally submersible so they’re about 12 to 15 feet under water right in the middle of the park where they don’t make so much noise. The other problem we had was where to put a reservoir. There wasn’t lots of space available. We looked over to Paradise Pier and saw a big lagoon that was very tantalizing so what we ended up doing is taking a portion of the that. There is actually a wall underneath the Paradise Pier bridge and one-half of that Pacific Wharf is actually the reservoir for the raft ride. The only problem is it is 300-feet away from the raft ride. So we ended up building an underground water tunnel that people won’t see that’s about 14 feet wide and 8 feet tall, you can drive a couple of pickup trucks through it. And the challenge for our creative folks then was when we start the raft ride up and start filling up the mountain with water, the water in the reservoir drops about 2-1/2 feet. So they were scratching their heads and said what do we do. Then they had the idea to treat it like a tidal basin. There’s a bunch of rocks in there, it looks like a tidal basin and what happens in the morning is the tide goes out as we turn the ride on and then in the evening, when we turn the ride off, the tide comes back in. So if you’re ever out there having lunch and the tide is coming in you’ll know there’s a problem and the raft ride is shut down.

LP: This was one of the first times a raft goes down a drop. Can you talk about that?

MS: It was a little bit surprising simply because we didn’t know how they would act and what we found out is they actually slow down probably a lot faster than say a log ride like Splash Mountain. We spent a lot of time developing what the water depth should be and what the profiles for the rail should be, so we learned a lot. Funny story - we did this for this ride and the team that was developing the one in Animal Kingdom had decided they were going to do that and when they saw what we were learning they ended up taking over our test facility and doing testing and making some changes to their ride. Doing the early testing made a big difference and when they put their ride in it worked right off the bat and the same thing here. We made very, very minor changes in doing the test and adjust on them because of all the knowledge that we gained a year and a half ago was very beneficial.

LP: Was the spin a challenge?

MS: It was. There’s a good story behind that too. Originally our idea was to do a spiral down ramp and we were thinking about doing a 360 degree spiral. When we built our test facility what we found out is that it just had more friction than we expected and that we couldn’t get - with the height that we had available - we couldn’t get 360 degrees, we only could do about 180. Everybody kind of said "that doesn’t seem very fun, what else can we do?" So when we had this test facility, we thought "I wonder what it would feel like to spin going down a straight down ramp?" So in the early test I’d stand up there and hold the edge of the raft and we would cut the rope that would let it go and we would give it a little spin. People said "hey, that’s really a lot of fun. How can we appropriate that?" So we spent some more time on this test facility and figured out on how to make the ramp spin going down. It’s a subtle thing but it makes a big difference. It catches people by surprise. They’re not expecting it.

LaughingPlace.com: Soarin' Over California is an amazing attraction. Did you come up with the concept for the way the ride vehicles would behave?

Mark Sumner: Yeah. This is sort of a high tech, low tech story. On the high tech end, the first thing we needed to do was find out where the people should be up inside the dome. So we used the Imagineering Research and Development lab to build a virtual reality dome for us where we could put on a set of headsets and we could actually sit in different seats and put them in different places. We could watch a little movie and you could look around and see the different seats. Once we decided where the people needed to be we had to figure out how to get them there. How to fly them up into this 80 foot diameter dome. Most of the early concepts involved multiple floors of a building and we were going to fly them out on a dry cleaner rack or a hydraulic boom or something - just shoot them straight out. But it became too complicated to get people up and down on different levels because now you have to have all kinds of escalators and you have to have elevators. You have to have operators on all the floors and so we said, you know, the only way this is really going to work efficiently is if we can load everybody on one level. We didn’t know how to do that.

It was shortly before Thanksgiving holiday in 1996 and we said let’s go on holiday and when we come back we’ll tackle this problem. Most Imagineers, they don’t leave their work in the office, and I got to thinking a little bit about it. I sketched up a mechanism and thought this might work but it’s going to be really difficult to explain how this works on paper. So I got out my 50s era erector set, and I built a working model where you can turn a little crank and three little seats go up in the air and I brought that in a grocery sack to the next meeting and everybody said we’ve got to tackle this problem and I said how about doing something like this and I put it on the table and cranked it up and everybody said, gee can you do that full size? I said, I don’t know, give me a little time and I’ll do some engineering on it and that sort of kicked it off. The mechanism that’s out there is exactly like the model I built. We get from the high tech, the latest virtual reality technology, to the low tech which is 1950s kid’s toy.

LP: Is the mechanism that’s there really unique in the theme park industry?

MS: It is. There’s nothing like it. From the ground up the whole attraction was meant to be unique. The basic idea is we want people to get the experience of hang gliding. That was probably the one attraction in the park that was the least defined about how we were going to do it when we started out. We knew what we wanted to achieve but we really didn’t have a good idea of how we were going to do that. As we worked along through the process we ended up with the ride system you see today, the great 48 frame per second IMAX film which is crystal clear, good audio system and the special effects, the wind and the scents.

LP: The thing that I really love about it is that it’s not a thrill ride. It’s a ride the whole family can enjoy. Was that the design from the beginning?

MS: Yeah, I know Barry Braverman one of his favorite quotes is "I want an attraction that I can put my grandmother on." Again, you can put your little kids on there and you can put your grandmother on and I think they’re both going to enjoy it. That’s sort of unusual to find an attraction that will appeal to such a wide range of people.

Chris Runco was the senior concept designer for the Grizzly Peak Recreation Area. His prior projects include the African-themed areas of Animal Kingdom, model maker for Big Thunder Mountain, special effects for World of Motion and the American Adventure. He was also the lead show designer for Typhoon Lagoon.

LaughingPlace.com:What specifically did you do at Disney’s California Adventure?

Chris Runco: I’m the senior concept designer for the Grizzly Peaks Recreation area, so the raft ride, the Redwood Creek Challenge Trail, and the Rushin' River Outfitters.

LP: Grizzly Peak is a lot more elaborate than many expected it to be. Can you talk about some of the unique features of Grizzly Peak.

CR: The heart, of course, was in the spirit of this park which is celebrating California - the wonderful aspects of California. Grizzly Peak is a celebration of the California wilderness which, to a lot of us who worked on it, is very special and personal to us because we grew up going to the Sierras and going to the Redwoods on vacation, places we loved when we were kids, so it was a real pleasure to work on something about that same subject. And of course the research involved going to those same places and taking a closer look. We were actually out there with the painters and the sculptors and the rock work sculptors on a couple of the research trips like in Yosemite and walking around with paint chips taking pictures and holding paint chips of the redwood trees and to the rocks to get the colors to use on this.

Then we built it around another good California story, white water rafting. California has some of the best white water anywhere in the world between the Kern River, the American River, the Towe, the Klamath and the Trinity. So we went white water rafting. I took my family white water rafting, one of those vacations where I’m taking pictures constantly for work. It’s just amazing to do that, a wonderful thing to do. We tried, in the story to bring that back. The story here - this is contemporary - the story behind the raft ride which I think is a very unique aspect of it is it’s an abandoned gold mine, looks a lot like you find in gold country, and these rafting enthusiasts got together and started their own little rafting company - Grizzly River Rafters - and they took over this abandoned gold mine, did a little tweaking with the machinery, took the old ore chute that used to bring ore down the mountain and now they take rafts up the mountain to get to this great white water.

So you go into that old mine, then you go up through it and that just sets you off on your whole adventure on the ride itself with all the different effects that we’ve got. Another aspect of it, from a technical side, is that we started with an off the shelf ride, a raft system, a round raft that a lot of parks use is the core of it. But then we made it an eight passenger raft. We added the decoration we have there, the expedition with all the gear attached. Then we also invented a drop. Nobody ever put a drop on one of these rides before and we really didn’t even know if we could do it. A round raft, we didn’t know if we could send it down a drop and if it would work okay. We made a full size mock up after we came up with basically what we wanted to do. In our topography facility we built a full size mock up where we could hoist the raft to the top and then drop it down at various angles and came up with this drop and it worked out. When we got the right angle it just worked great. On the first drop, which is called Bear Claw Falls, when you get to the bottom there’s a huge wave of water that comes up in front of you. It does not drop in the boat. It just comes up to the front, very important. We said, this is great. It works really well. So then we incorporated it into the ride in two places and the second drop is even taller and gives you a little surprise because you go down and something catches on the raft and sends you spinning like a top. That’s a very unique feature for a raft ride plus, like I said, we took you through a lot of different kinds of environments. We believe it’s the tallest, fastest and longest raft ride anybody has ever built. There are the drops, in particular. and we also think we've got a whole lot of really fine elements along the way.

LP: My favorite, of course, is the spin you just talked about. Was that a difficult thing to do?

CR: The spin. Our engineers made it look easy. I should tell you this wonderful story about how we came up with it. The mock up I was telling you about with the straight drop. We had done that a bunch of times and figured an appropriate angle. We lift the raft up and drop it down. Originally we intended to do some kind of like circular drop to see if we could take you around a big spiraling bend or whatever. The mock up told us that wouldn’t work, that we could not do the right angle to make that happen. But we really loved the idea of getting some spinning action on the raft. And we noticed one day, just going down the thing, that something caught the raft and just made it - it started spinning and we said, "this is very cool. This is a lot of fun. Is there some way we can do this?" The lead engineer on it says "I have an idea" and he went up on the mock up. We pulled the raft up to the top the mock up with us in - this is Mark Sumner by the way - and he went up to the top and there was a tow rope on the raft to get it back to the mock up to the top each time, just a rope. He put a pair of gloves on, put a safety belt on around himself, strapped himself to the structure and he held onto that rope and said, "okay, let it go." And the guy popped the latch and that raft started plummeting and him holding on to one side. That thing started spinning like a top and he held on. Then he had to let go because it was taking his arms right off - not really - but he let go and in a few moments that thing started spinning and when we got to the bottom we said "we have to do this. We have to find a way to do this. This is too much fun." They went looking at it and figured out a way to do that mechanically so it recreates. We jokingly call the turn you do down there the "Half Sumner." You do a "Half Sumner" drop in honor of his heroic exploits making it happen.

LP: Are there ways to control how wet you’re going to get depending on day or night or cold or warm weather?

CR: We have a cool weather setting where we tone down the geysers and the leak stops. The leaky parts magically stop leaking so that it’s not so wet for people in cool weather like this. Summertime we’ll pour all it’s got.

LP: Are there some details people should keep an eye out as they're speeding by?

CR: There are a lot of details along the way. You’ll see some interesting graphics. You’ll notice when you get to the top, if you look over, you’ll see the Grizzly Summit sign of to the side, elevation 1401 [Imagineering officers are at 1401 Flower St.] and then you go whipping through the cavern. When you go through the cavern there’s kind of a rush of wind that becomes the roar of the bear, kind of the spirit of the mountain following you out. There’s some ancient petroglyphs along the way. We studied petroglyphs up north and looked at various places, so there’s a little touch of that. And if you look after you go on the ride there’s a rock out near the load area that has the legend, this little legend that we put together based on Native American characters that goes with the mountain. So you’ll see those petroglyphs along the way. And then there’s just a lot of little business here and there with the gold mining machinery that gives a lot of fun that we found in various places around the state and tried to use it here.

LP: Moving away from Grizzly, Disneyland has Tom Sawyer Island a vast kids’ play area. Was it important to have something like that here as well?

CR: We thought it was real important to have that kind of activity in this park too. All of Grizzly Peak at one time had that type of flavor until we put the raft ride into it and that worked out very well. But the play area was - again, we were looking for a combination, something that would be a great place for the whole family because we know at the different parks that works great. Honey, I Shrunk the Kids studio tour in Florida. DinoLand at Animal Kingdom and Tom Sawyer’s Island of course at Disneyland where it’s not just the kids but the parents get to go along too and do these things. So we said we really want to create a great play area and we want to theme it to California and we came up with the theme of the national and state parks and put them together. We did a lot of research at different parks and found elements that we really loved, like the net climbs are one thing and the bouncing log that you go through and the slides that work. Little bit of rock climbing area, the cable slides were a big thing, we really enjoyed that. And we said, okay, how can we put all these together into this story. That was at the heart of it. We got these elements. Here is what we want it to look like. How can we lay this out in layers and in the space we’ve got which is tight. We always have to be very efficient about the way we use space. This is what we came up with. This kind of over and under and around and through, up one bridge, down the other, down the slide, over and up the other tower and it’s gone over real well. I’m real pleased with it. My family enjoyed it very much too.

LP: Does this area have any room for expansion or is it pretty well filled out?

CR: There is a little bit of room, but not much to work with. I’m sure that we may find some room for some little additions and enhancements along the way but the hotel is pretty close and Soaring is right next door too.

LP: Other than the Grizzly Peak area what would you say is your favorite attraction in the park?

CR: I love the roller coaster. I think this is a wonderful roller coaster. It’s got great character. There’s roller coasters that have these superlatives like tallest, fastest, scariest, whatever, but this one is just fun. I really enjoy the music. I enjoy the pace of it, the various features, the camel backs, the loop is wonderful. It really makes you feel like you’re swooping upside down. Some loops seem like they happen so fast that you hardly know you went upside down. This one you really feel it. I took my sons and my dad on it. We all came off and said we got to go do it again. It’s terrific. I’d say that’s a highlight.

Steven Davison was the creator of Eureka! A California Adventure parade at Disney's California Adventure. He's also worked on"Believe...There's Magic in the Stars", "Believe...In Holiday Magic", "It's a Small World" Holiday and others. During the opening of Disney's California Adventure, Davison talked to LaughingPlace.com about Eureka and some of his other Disney projects. The first half of this interview is below. The second half will be presented in the new few days.

LaughingPlace.com: Tell me about Eureka!

Steven Davison: Eureka is the essence of the California golden dream and what we did was kind of build upon what Barry Braverman’s group did which was to create the different districts of California. And what we decided to do was do the people piece, because WDI [Walt Disney Imagineering] is fantastic at building fantastic places to visit. Entertainment is great at putting life into them. So what we did was look at California Adventure and go "what if we did kind of the ethnic lifestyle piece and bring that to the plate as well?" So when the park opened it would basically cover pretty well the essence built around the California dream.

So we dove in and said, "what do we want to play off of" and we jumped into the idea of the golden dream and how people came to California - like Walt Disney when Walt came here to build the studios - and have that whole dream come to life and that dream to build on this. So many people have come to California because, as they say, it has everything under the sun. So if you come here and you have that ambition you can really make life different for yourself, if you choose to.

So we started with that theme and then we started to play with the word "Eureka" and the whole idea that you can find it or "I found it!" What we wanted the guests to do was find these different communities, these different pockets of California that you might visit, you might see come to life. Different people that kind of embrace this fantastic life they can have in California. So that’s where it kind of started.

And then we created what we call the essence of Eureka or the essence of that golden dream. And if you look at the parade you’ll see Eureka appear as that Folklorico, but if you look at the design, the design of her dress bleeds into the stream and becomes those flowers and becomes the community around her. So all that Eureka represents in the parade, that kind of statue in the middle of the town that everyone embraces, and we kind of just developed her as the spirit that’s woven through these communities.

From there we kind of just started to develop things out. We started with the sun. I thought, there’s a big sun icon. There’s a Eureka icon and the major icon for the parade is that opening logo which is her as the embodiment of the sun and the energy of that golden dream. Gold is the primary color of the whole parade and it threads it. So we open with that kind of - what we call the energy of the sun or bringing that world to life. And all the logos in the opening float represent the places we’re going to head to. So we’re going to head to a kind of Pacifica thing with Eureka winding herself inside the waves. We’re going to go to Chinatown with giant dragons. So it kind of gives you a precursor and it gives you the first beat of contemporary music - something that we decided to do to create a new experience. Because my whole thing was, you go to Disneyland and you’re going to do a very specific experience. It’s all about fantasy and magic. Like "Believe.." is. "Believe..." wraps itself in that. If they asked me to do something like "Golden Dreams Fireworks" in the sky here, I would do it totally different because I would want the experiences to be different. So when you come to California Adventure it’s just wild. It’s all about that word "adventure." And we’re going to take you through this community wash thing but you’re going to have an adventure. You’re going to see stuff. It’s really going to get you excited - that was the biggest hope - you go "wow what’s that. What is this?"

So we started the Eurekas - going back. I jump around a lot. So we developed all the Eurekas. So we have the Eureka that’s the Folklorico. We have the Eureka that is that angel welcoming you into the City of Angels. We then jump into Pacifica where she’s buried in the giant sand car that kind of represents a lot of iconic things that people think about California and the beach. And then we created her as like a Chinese opera goddess as the Phoenix rising up into the sky before we end with the sun icon with her as the golden dream coming to life. Then we started to build all the community pieces.

So we worked on the parade with Michael Curry who did Lion King on Broadway and who originally did the Lion King Parade here. We worked very closely with Michael because he understands me because I’m very kind of out there with ideas and thoughts and feelings, so I can walk in and say, "can we do a Golden Gate Bridge walking down the street like Chinatown’s bringing San Francisco to you?" The theme was really tough. When you have to take the word California and try to iconically represent it in the parade it’s not like doing an animated film, like if we were going to do the Hercules parade or Aladdin parade. There’s a whole set of synergistic products that come along with that. California is a little different because now you’re picking things that people have to instantly understand and get. Usually, by the time a parade hits at one of the parks you know the characters, you know the style, you know the feeling. With this parade you’re starting from scratch. People have their own vision of California and what we played with was kind of a 50/50 what people expect to see and kind of the dream aspect of it. Then we did it all with that theatrical world.

Because if we truly went after the Latino community and not made it theatrical we would get broadsided because they’re all different in a sense. What we did was kind of just take pieces of it and essences of it. We always talked about the parade being a tapestry and as you went along this road that’s a tapestry you pull little threads and these little threads would be different pieces of communities. And if you look at the parade it’s 50/50. You’ll see a very kind of fantastic side of it, a theatrical side and then a traditional side. Even in Folklorico, when you enter Fiesta of the Birds you’ll see we have Folkloricos but we hyped up the color a little bit, but at the same time we have 18 foot skeletons and we did that and a lot of people were terrified of that in the beginning. "You’re going to have 18 foot skeletons? Aren’t people going to get scared?" I said, "yeah. I hope so." I said what I want is people to look at that and go "my God what are those" and start to train the cast to tell them what it is. "Oh that’s the Day of the Dead celebration" and really, it was kind of my version of "read more about it." When you see that community or even Watts Towers, I hope it really inspired people to go see the real one or read more about it or find out about that community and find out what it’s all about.

LP: You mentioned tapestry in a couple of different ways. You certainly seemed to be influenced by Tapestry of Nations, with the puppetry and the drums. Was there any direct influence there?

SD: Michael did Tapestry of Nations, Michael Curry. What I loved about Tapestry is that it kind of jumped off the page and got things to move in huge proportions without motors and that’s what I really wanted in this parade. What I pushed for was to create kind of an A-B-C kind of format. So you have these really fantastic floats coming at you but within them are pieces of puppetry or moving scenery and then costume pieces down below it so it really builds upon itself. So it’s not just one thing or two things, it’s really kind of a very harmonious design that kind of pulls at things and makes people go, "yikes, wow." It’s like "how do they do that or I never knew you could wear a costume that size."

I really started to play off what Michael started with Tapestry and then really kind of bent it a little more as we played in Oregon because Michael’s shop is up in Oregon. And it’s just fun because you’re sitting around and you create. You basically just say what ifs, what if we do this, can you get the Golden Gate Bridge to walk down the street. Can we get these giant sun fans with faces and just have them be a piece. The jumping stills are the same thing. They were kind of brought to us and I was fascinated by them and I threw them at the choreographers and it was a challenge.

Even the lighting and even the sound for this is really sophisticated and there were big challenges to overcome and the hardest part is it’s a brand new park. So you don’t have a sound system that’s been working for 20 years - it’s all new and the lighting is all new. So you go through those growing pains. You kind of had to take big breaths and you sit there and it took a lot of time to get everything up and working. It’s always nice to have this month of previews just to change and say, "what if we did do this, what if we played with this number." We moved dancers around. We moved costumes around. We got rid of all the spandex in the parade. Edwin Pinski out of Las Vegas did the costumes and I loved the original sketch but as we got into it, it actually never kind of fulfilled what I wanted it to. People spent more time looking at the spandex in yellow than they did watching the opening dancers. Then the opening dancers got self conscious and we said, "you know, let’s change it. Let’s just change the look. Let’s change the idea."

And so we just started to play with that and implement that. So as we go through the parade we’re actually re-developing some stuff and making it fit better, making it work. Because I think that’s the big deal. If you watch something and something distracts you - a great example is the spandex. Here’s spandex 101: If you look at the fish type dancers, the spandex doesn’t bother them. Nobody ever mentions it because they have a puppet device and b) the fabric is so varied in style and texture that you don’t react to it the same way as a giant yellow shape coming at you. So we started to play with that and slowly change out. We still have another week to do change outs and stuff. But we didn’t give up color - that’s the big deal. The opening is still bright yellow and bright red and very eye popping colors like this.

Colors are a big, big, factor in that parade. I think that we tried to get very specific as we hit different units. Even like the lighting design. If you watch the parade at night the lighting travels through the parade. It’s very sophisticated. Like when Pacifica comes out, it’s a very different pallet than when Folklorico comes out. They balance between warm and cool colors. Then when we hit the stop moment it all unites itself and becomes one piece. But we do it so hopefully you’re not watching the lights all the time or looking at this or even how sounds transition in the parade.

LP: With this being a new park, were you able to do some things that you couldn’t do at Disneyland?

SD: We got to be contemporary. We got to be very theatrical. A lot of people questioned, initially, if this was a character parade and I said you know, it’s not. And the biggest thing that I love so far is no one has asked. People watch the parade and no one leaves it going "I didn’t see Mickey or I didn’t see Minnie" and what I tried to teach the people is that the minute you influence a parade with a character overlay you have to change the whole piece. If Mickey and Minnie were in the parade as it is today, they would feel very disjointed because it’s not toonish, in a sense. They don’t have a reason for being there and we really wanted to stay pure to those communities. That when you see it, it really feels like a community. It kind of speaks to that. Minnie in a Folklorico outfit wouldn’t do that because you’d spend more time sitting there going "oh, that’s cute" and we’d have to have her talk. It’s distracting to me. So I was very gratified that they let us go that route. They had faith in us to do it.

LP: What about technically? Were there things you couldn't otherwise do or special challenges?

SD: Huge challenges to the point of - I remember our first technical meeting on lighting and sound and I took the technical designers through it and they just looked at me in horror. And after we heard the music the first time they said "we were terrified that you were going to ask to do what you just asked us to do" which is travel lights down the route, make lights interact with music and honestly, we don’t do that at Disneyland. They did do it during Light Magic but they Souped-up the entire system to handle it in two show stops. Here we are asking all 33 zones in the park to manage itself. Then when we got to the part about when we do the stop, I wanted the whole route to change into one color. They were like "oh my gosh." They had to completely re-write the programs on how we do it. Jim Holliman literally recreated how we think about this. They tested it at Disneyland one night and had some great reactions and then it was laborious. It’s literally laborious to get the computers to sync up because if you imagine we have six units and every unit has a different sound track so every sound track has to link within itself. All the songs work together on a continuous loop beginning to end. As they travel from zone to zone they all have to switch in the computer, plus all the lighting has to switch in the computer, plus all the animation is controlled by the computer, plus all the floats are RF so that’s another challenge. And then when we get to a show stop, everything has to stop take another cue and switch. That’s a monstrous task, and for me it’s like "can we do this, can we do that?" Because I think that way. I think about "oh this would be cool if we can do it" and I really push our people to go for it. I said, I’d rather go for it and cut it than not try it. I said, it’s not going to hurt us, we've got some time, let’s try it and they really worked like dogs to make that happen.

LP: Were they able to do most of what you asked them to do?

SD: Yeah, it took us a couple of weeks after we opened to finish the lighting piece because we were still in day rehearsals or day performances. Holliman would come in every night and he’d pull the floats out and they would just go through it again and again and again and really work through the bugs in the system and they finally got it. It all talks to each other now.

LP: How long was the development process for you then?

SD: I started on Eureka about two years ago as an initial thought and which way to go. In fact I developed several different parades for Paul Pressler. There was the character parade which was the epic California where the characters were going to tell you the making of California. Another one was the Latino Community. The third one was a tourist point of view of California where they brought in an artist from Mad Magazine to actually recreate like traffic jams and we had the Miss Natural Disaster Pageant. We did an ocean section about communities being in the oceans. Paul loved the Latino community piece and thought it would fit well but we expanded on that idea. Then moved it past that and developed the Eureka piece. A year ago, we met with Michael Eisner, took Michael through it and Michael liked it and we went into construction. Probably, starting in June, we were officially building steel and we pushed and pushed and pushed and got it through by November.

LP: Did you do one of your famous live pitches?

SD: Actually I did. Eureka is a hard pitch because - "Believe" is a lot easier because you’re going on a single sound track from A to Z and it’s a story. Eureka has seven sections and it was always my goal at the end of that presentation to always get that standing ovation. Can we move people and get them excited enough to be overwhelmed by the product. That’s the hope. I try not to say things that aren’t really in the parade. If people react to it positively then I feel really good about what we’re doing and not try to second guess it. [Ed. Note: See the Related Links at the end of this article for a link to video of Davison doing his pitch for "Believe...There's Magic in the Stars".

LP: Is Eureka supposed to run every day?

SD: It runs every day from now on until it doesn’t. As of right now it’s probably going to run for three years. That’s kind of the shelf life of it. Usually after three years - parades are developed not to be like work horses. Attractions are built to last for tens and tens of years. Parades, because of their moving nature and the chassis they’re built on, have a lot of stress problems. Even Lion King Celebration, after the third year, it was really hard to keep it going but they did. I think after that, because of our local guests they’re ready for something new. We move onto something else.

LP: Will it ride in inclement weather?

SD: Depends on the inclement weather. We've played with that for the last month. If it’s a heavy rain we probably won’t run the parade. If it’s a misty light rain and it just rained and the rain has stopped we’ll do a modified parade. We send it out but we may cut some objects. We have inclement wind problems because some of the pieces do have some wind limitations so we might pull pieces off. Even people that know the parade - things might disappear from it and they don’t know because it’s so impactful visually. Your eye doesn’t know.

LaughingPlace.com: There certainly are some California stereotypes and ethnic stereotypes in Eureka. Is that something that has worried you at all or that you've been extra careful about?

Steven Davison: We are very extra careful. To the point of focus groups, in a sense, in that we would do designs and run it past a few leaders and say "what do you think?" Eureka and the sand car changed and changed and changed a lot based on that and how people felt because we didn’t want to do Baywatch. We didn’t want to do what a lot of people really stereotype the beach as. So we middled it in a sense and made it very athletic and very different. It’s all about that whole idea of her melting into the sand and like kids came and made this giant sand car around her and that’s like the whole beach cruising thing and everyone lives in a convertible in California.

Even the Latino piece, that is one of the hardest communities to get into. There were certain things I thought were great to speak about and they actually embraced the whole thing because they were just so proud of Disney actually celebrating their culture. Watts Tower went through the roof with us. We met with their artistic directors and said we really want to do this and they were so proud, again, that Disney would almost honor them. What my hope was - it’s such a beautiful monument but no one goes there. Everyone is afraid to go there, so why don’t we put it out there and really honor it and get it back on line. It just went through a four year renovation and they’re going to reopen it again - I think it has reopened now - and really get people to it. Get people back into that community and really use a device that we have here to help out other people at the same time.

LP: We talked about the jumping stilts at the end of the parade...

SD: The jumping stilts - they’re called Power Stills actually - they’re from Germany. Danny Castle, one of our stunt coordinators from Fantasmic!, brought them to us. We were just fascinated by them.

LP: You also have some skaters and bikers. Is that specially difficult to have to deal with in the parade?

SD: To engineer the girl in the hoop in the front of the Phoenix was amazing because of the amount of stress you have. Originally she was supposed to be up where the lantern is, but the amount of steel it took to get that point where the lantern is ended up making the candle stick like 8 inches across and I go "that’ll look strange coming out of her hand." So artistically we bounced stuff around. We start with the ultimate idea and then we work through it and still get the same impact, I think, but we’re not trying to kill anybody or have things happen. I think it’s one of those things - you kind of start here and go "well, here’s another way to think about it." We all get together as a team and just talk about it, "that wouldn’t work out, why don’t we do this" and we start working through things together.SD: Actually it is. That was a tough piece. To walk into meetings and go "I want to put somebody 12 feet in the air on a bungie harness inside a circle and have them do back flips and turns,"  those are really challenging things to actually engineer. If it was on a flat piece of ground like out here behind the Hollywood Backlot, it’s much easier because you can put stuff into the ground. We’re talking things that move which complicates things 20 times beyond what you normally would think.

LP: What kind of response has the parade had so far?

SD: Huge huge success from top down to guests. First we showed it to Michael Eisner, Paul Presler and Cynthia [Harriss], they were just ecstatic. They just loved it. I usually just walk out and watch audiences. Even like with "Believe" I just walk out and I watch the audience and how they react, and people clap along, they get into it, they get caught up in its energy. Just to hear what they say like "whoa what’s that?" or "that was cool." To really get at some ages that other parades don’t hit well, like teenagers. Teenagers get caught up in certain pieces. They love the extreme sports thing.

There’s really something for everybody. It’s really great to watch. Kids love it too because they’re just like wowed by it because of the color. It’s actually pretty sophisticated if you look at it. Like if you look in the Fiesta. It actually has the whole swallow tale in it. The whole thing about the swallows returning to the missions and there’s a whole piece actually painted into the parade. If you look at LA there’s all those destroyed murals in LA and pieces of them repainted inside of it. It’s kind of another homage to things. It’s like lost and found. Things that aren’t there any more. I think it’s tragic when art gets destroyed because people don’t care.

LP: And the Hollywood Bowl puppet...

SD: Hollywood Bowl was fun because the whole thing is about creativity and how people create things like when Samuel Ramie did the Watts Towers. He just took stuff...There’s a story about Watts Towers, that he used to pay kids if they would find broken pieces of tile. So kids would come and bring him little jars of tile and he’d give them pennies. They were going home and breaking good dishes at their parents house and bringing them to Sam. The parents had to make him stop because they were running out of dishes.

Hollywood Bowl or the whole art scene in LA is all created - it’s that creative industry - how things get brought to life. The Bowl thing was fun. We kind of drew it up and sent it to Michael [Curry] and said what do you think and then Michael actually added a puppet onto the front as a conductor. We worked back and forth in Oregon and it’s just fun to see how people react to it. It’s a very simple thing, a puppet - some guy just leaning down to an audience and controlling it. It’s one of the most popular things. Some of the smallest things can be the most popular things.

LP: You’ve had a huge, huge success with "Believe ... In Holiday Magic". Do you feel a lot of pressure now to keep topping yourself?

SD: Holiday was scary I’ll be honest about it because you had a huge hit with the first show [Believe...There's Magic in the Stars] and you don’t know. I never did fireworks in my life and they actually say we want you to do fireworks so we get to play, we get to paint, and you just try something. I’m an artist by trade so you use color and use light and you look at it completely different and you get to play with a medium that a lot of people in the business look at very specifically.

With "it's a small world holiday", the first one, it was just great to have that kind of audience response. I do feel I’m really connected with the Disney audience. Even before we opened we were scrutinized for even touching that attraction and at the end of it, it was really great to see people respond and really bring back a memory for a lot of people because they hadn’t been on the ride in years. "Oh that thing with the dolls. I rode that one when I was a kid." Then they go on it again and just by adding things inside of it you make people relive those experiences and then they have their kids and their kids are seeing it for a whole new first time.

So again, you build on those traditions and memories. That’s what Disneyland is about is that you always go there and there’s always that wishing well and there’s always those great experiences and things that you’ll remember forever. When "Believe...There's Magic in the Stars" opened, all I would have to do is go stand out there and watch it with the crowd. They told you what they thought. Even moving Tinker Bell to the end of the show which a lot of people were "my God you’re moving Tinker Bell to the end of the show." I go "yeah, because that way she’s your star." Suddenly, out of this huge pyro, you have one single object and one single memory and you’re not putting anything else with her other than her and they applaud her. I said that’s what it’s about. It’s about everyone going "oh my God, it’s Tinker Bell. Oh my God it’s her." Oh I remember that when I was four.

Holiday was terrifying, I will tell you that. It was terrifying. I agonized over that show because you’re taking something away and putting something else out there and people may or may not like that. There was a lot of negative response when people heard they were doing the show. "What do you mean? You can’t do that. You can’t take away my Believe". The great thing was it was about Christmas, or the Holidays. The biggest thing about that is that it’s filled with memories also. But we took you on a different version. When we did the first show it was about using Disney and what Disney does with animated features, in a sense, or what the park does with them, with its magic to have you recall those feelings that take you from adventure to fantasy to laughter. Christmas was all about making you go back inside yourself. So when it opened, the show is very - again, it manipulates you because we started of with that song. It talks about do you remember, do you remember going here? Do you remember this? Do you remember that? If you actually analyze the song, it’s starts out with steps. It talks about do you remember Santa, reindeer, blue and the farther you get into it the song talks about do you remember that feeling, do you remember the caring, do you remember the sharing, do you remember what’s really important about it and at the very end it says just remember one more time and we collapse you into a kid and we do the toy soldier thing. We go into Dreidel and Toyland and play that old piece, and by the end of it with Two Front Teeth you’re kind of laughing and we kind of make you feel like a kid again. So we make you that child and then we send you home.

Very simply with I’ll be Home for Christmas with those five words, just by doing that. Even originally, when we opened the show, the floors kept going like every four beats there was a floor and I said what if we just let that linger because it almost felt like they were just dying out as the next one happened. It really kind of pulled you back. So we sent you home and then we did that special piece and we kind of bounced around. I never thought I would ever sellSilent Night. I never thought it would hit the door step. The likes of an audience, that’s a huge piece of it. I said let’s try it. Let’s see what people think of it. We picked a great tune that everyone knows, everyone knowsSilent Night. So we did the star of wonder piece, which is my favorite orchestral piece by Don Harper who writes the shows for me. When the orchestra recorded it, it was amazing. Then we went to Silent Night and we’re going to end on one thing and it worked like gangbusters.

Then we gave you the spirit back The old finale about the spirit of Christmas and getting people excited and when I was working with the composer Don Harper, I said, I want carol the bells to be in a fight with Russian dance and it’s like the church choir was going to do this thing with orchestra and bell choir but they ran out of time so we told the bell choir they couldn’t do it. We basically composed this wild crazy crashing symphony piece that worked pretty well. If you watch the show it’s all about red and green at that point. When we got to the end I literally pitched there and went from red to the green, red to the green, red to the green to the red to the green, red to the green to the red to the green, red to the green to the red to the green and you wear everybody out. In the sky we do exactly that. your eye focuses on that until you explode.

We remind you one more time and all we say at the end is remember the caring, the sharing and then we send you back. We picked a grandmother’s voice - I got accused of that being Grandmother Willow. No it’s not, she's an 86 year old grandmother that we picked up off voice demo tapes. She walked in. She brought her 60 year old son and she was wonderful. We talked her through it. She just reminded a lot of people of their grandmother. It was just a different kind of approach to that. We tried different voices too.

LP: Was the snow always a part of it?

SD: Yeah, the snow was there early on. I was skeptical because I’d never seen a snow effect that I liked and the one came out of Florida and it was like, "oh." I walked out. I was late to the review thing [with the new snow] of it at New Orleans Square one night and all I saw was the street lamps with the snow going by it and I’m like "that’s it". Then we got into how we’re going to end the show. Because you come out of this big remember one more time and then we go into what Don said, it’s a whole new way to do White Christmasand there’s three bell notes and two chords. And we were recording it and I said "you know this is either going to be the hardest sell in the world or it’s going to work perfectly." I said, "I don’t know, let’s try it."

Then we put it out there, and what I loved about it, even though you know the snow comes on - it falls and you see all those kids hands go up to touch it and it’s just this whole new memory. At the end of three minutes they all just applaud because, again, it becomes a new memory to people and people talk about - it snowed.

The best night of the show, I brought both of my grandmothers and my parents - a whole slew of the family and it was the night of fog at Disneyland. We’re watching the show and the show opens with that huge wide explosion. We couldn’t see it, couldn’t see a thing and I’m sitting here with this whole street of people wondering what’s going to happen. So I’m watching and any time they saw anything they would just cheer. It was really cool to watch that even though they couldn’t see it, they could see glimmers of it and they would hear the music. It still worked and by the end of it when it snowed it was like the same experiences. When the castle went off you could hear huge cheers out in the street because you could see all the castle fire up. It’s a great experience and believe will beback.

LP: Will there be any changes in it?

SD: There’s a couple. We’re waiting for some fire from China right now.

LP: Is there anything else you’re working on past your grand opening?

SD: That new Christmas thing is coming up next season. Most likely there’ll be another holiday mixture that is sure to put the "spirit" back. That’ll be a lot of fun, a whole new thing