The Imagineering Story

The most important thing I think

that we can invest in a project,

is the emotional relevance to the audience.

The concept, the story, you know, the relevance, the people,

All of this needs to come first.

And then you can ladle on these layer upon layers of detail

on the right thing.

It's really easy to start putting the detail in when you haven't focused.

So you don't know where the detail belongs or where it should be eliminated.

So you can come up with something that is scattered all over the place.

If it's not emotionally rich and filled with heart and feeling,

it's not gonna work.

There's been a management shake-up

in the Magic Kingdom of Disney.

The first-time outsiders have been brought in at the top.

The Disney board of directors chose Michael Eisner

of Paramount Pictures as Chairman,

and Frank Wells of Warner Brothers as Chief Operating Officer.

On September 22nd, 1984,

after seven months of corporate turmoil and a hostile takeover attempt,

the new executive leadership was installed.

Michael and Frank met with Theme Park personnel

and attempted to calm their nerves.

Thank you very much.

Last time I was here, I waited an hour for Space Mountain.

It's a tremendous pleasure to be here.

Since I have come to this organization a week ago,

I wanna say that the selection of Frank and myself,

to work with you in this company,

we think, as an indication, that the board of directors

have decided that this company will be led from a creative point of view.

If there's anything that Michael and I stand for,

it is to keep this company the way Walt Disney laid it down,

decades ago.

We pledge that to you. We are thrilled to be here.

And to welcome ourselves with you as part of the Walt Disney family.

Thank you very, very much.

Michael and Frank inherited a company

struggling with stagnant film production,

a disgruntled animation department, and another hostile takeover attempt.

Once they restored peace to the Magic Kingdom,

Michael and Frank vowed to hire A-list celebrity talent

and turn Disney into the most powerful film studio in Hollywood.

But what they thought of WED Enterprises remained anyone's guess.

They didn't know the first thing about Imagineering.

They didn't know any of us at all.

We weren't movie people and working on films,

we were park people, if you will.

And they had no experience with the parks.

When I arrived, Disney was under siege.

What happens when you're under siege is you shrink down.

So, the Imagineers who were shrunk down, were pushed to the back of the bus.

Unfortunately, they were so out of sight, out of mind that when we're driven there,

a driver who was a senior member of the Disney Organization got lost.

That's how infrequently people visited the Imagineers.

We thought any day the hammer was gonna drop

on Disney and Imagineering specifically 'cause of the economic environment.

And one day, we were all summoned out to the patio here at 1401.

And we thought, "Okay, this is it."

They walked out and introduced themselves.

And with big booming voices, and made a comment

that they had felt that Imagineering was really the crown jewel.

We're like, "Are you talking about us?"

You know we thought... we thought we were about to get,

you know, get the axe.

I just gave a sigh of relief and called the vice presidents together and I said...

"We're alive. They're not gonna close us down."

If something good comes out of something bad.

And the fact that we were almost destroyed as a company,

united our company even stronger than I think it was before.

You couldn't walk through Theme Parks...

and not recognize that they lacked contemporary development.

But when Frank and I walked down Main Street, for the first time,

Frank turned to me and said, "There's so much here.

"There's so much we can do."

You couldn't walk through the theme parks and not know the potential.

Everybody, before I got there, would say, "What would Walt do,

"what would Walt think?"

His picture was, like, pinned to the wall everywhere.

He can't be replaced.

So, I'm just gonna have to do what my instincts tell me to do.

Michael came in and he announced very confidently,

"I know so little about this business that I brought my son Breck

"who loves gong to amusement parks to give feedback

"on what he thinks will be good about what we see today."

And my mind is going, "Great, my career depends on a 14-year old."

But then I realized, I've always thought of myself as a 12-year old.

By sixth grade, I was kind of the pip squeak.

The last guy picked for the baseball team and whatnot.

So, I had to find an outlet to be successful

and I could come to Disneyland and have a whole day,

and immerse myself.

One of the highlights was the summer of '65

when Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln opened here at Disneyland.

It was so impressive to me

that I said right then and there, "I've got to work for this company."

To a 17-and-a-half-year-old kid, the only way I could work at that point

was as ice cream vendor at Disneyland.

I've tried to keep that naivete that gets beat out of you

as you become an adult, because it's so important to our business,

I thought for the first time in my life,

in pitching to Breck, I'm gonna be talking to an equal.

I put Star Wars out there on a block first.

And after we were done, Breck says, "Dad, that's the best thing

"I've ever seen. You gotta do it." And he goes, "Okay, we're doing that."

Michael then says we have to show that Disneyland is waking up,

that there's a new vitality here.

Most of the major movie directors today,

grew up on the wonderful world of Disney

and the wonderful world of color and Disneyland.

What will happen in the next ten years is a big input from those kinds of people.

Star Tours represented a radical departure for Disneyland.

It was the first attraction based on a non-Disney movie.

But the Imagineers recognized the cultural phenomenon

and argued that the Star Wars universe from the mind of George Lucas,

held the same public esteem as classic Disney films.

George and Disney became a natural. There's a lot of the same story elements

and excitement that you find in George's films, were a product,

originally of Walt's films and are... more or less, I see there's a continuation

of the greatest in entertainment are married.

WED is a group of these kinds of people.

They spend every day thinking of ways to entertain people.

Going around the world, looking at new technologies,

figuring how to adapt those technologies to create a form.

And I hope nobody ever learns their names

so they'll go and try to steal them from us. So I won't mention them anymore.

But they are... Really are fabulous.

It dawned on me the significance,

was the day they delivered R2-D2 to my desk from Lucasfilm.

And it was like, "Wow, this is the real deal

"this is really R2-D2 sitting on my desk."

All the model builders were standing, they're staring and I go,

"Is that the real?" "Yeah, that's the real deal."

- Hey, can you play that back? - Wait, can you put a bit of Atmos

- on it? - Sure.

I am C-3PO and this my counterpart, R2-D2.

Welcome to the Star Ride's Tomorrowland Spaceport.

The ride system machinery remained a question mark

until the Imagineers discovered a rare flight simulator technology.

A sealed enclosure tilted and pitched along multiple axes.

The movement mimicked changes in G-force.

Simulators were being used to train pilots and astronauts.

We took that technology directly from the space programs and brought it in

at the very highest level and started exploring that

and the people that sold those devices were just amazed

that we would do something so crazy with them.

I was struggling with the worry that how are we gonna put Star Wars,

an endless universe, in a box.

And when I went over there and realized I could feel what Luke Skywalker

or Han Solo felt in the Millennium Falcon, I came home and I said,

"That Achilles heel of making this real is solved."

It was one of the first applications of a motion-based simulator.

And that involved some great technology that the studio machine shop designed.

A 70-millimeter motion picture projection system on a moving motion based

that was generating two or 3G shock-loads

and not have the projector fall apart was a miracle.

ST-45, you're clear for takeoff...

I think it heralded the shift of movies in the park

being pure theater experiences. Like a Circle-Vision or 3D

and started to point the way that would say,

"You know, I think as we go forward

"movies or media are gonna become more integrated into the experience."

Not so less, come and sit in a standard theater and watch something.

More of, "I'm gonna have projection combined with sets and ride vehicles

"to immerse you in different ways."

I meant to do that, little shortcut.

Designing a ride is very much like designing a movie,

you do what you like. And you hope everybody else will like it.

I think the original spark is something that,

you know, group of us sitting in a room find exciting.

On the count of three...

One.

Two.

Three.

Whoo!

With technology so advanced, coupled with characters so popular,

the response was off the charts.

Guests gladly stood in a four-hour line that extended down Main Street.

Management kept Disneyland open for 60 straight hours.

Somebody had already asked us today, "How do you top this?"

That's a fantastic way to start.

I mean, how do you top the best thing you've done?

We're already onto something else.

Within three years, Michael and Frank had doubled the budget

on updating the theme parks.

During which time they opened a teenage dance club,

premiered the park's first 3D film and launched Star Tours.

When Michael and Frank raised ticket prices 30 percent,

attendance increased.

Michael and Frank were a breath of fresh air.

They saw Disneyland as a cooler place than we at the time saw it.

They thought this was right in the cultural vibe of today.

And it paid off at Disneyland. The audience came.

The younger audience came.

Those were big shocks to the system, which is exactly what they wanted to do.

As a salute to the creative spirit of the new era,

Michael Eisner officially changed the name WED Enterprises

to Walt Disney Imagineering.

Michael believed that parks had to be differentiated.

He thought that great genius of EPCOT was that it was unlike the Magic Kingdom.