Three Years in Wonderland by Todd James Pierce

Author:Todd James Pierce
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2016-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Aside from Arrow, most work on the Fantasyland attractions remained in-house, an edict that forced studio animators to learn even more new skills to complete Disneyland.

Bruce Bushman oversaw the refurbishment of hand-carved horses for the park’s carousel. By now, WED had received the antique Dentzel merry-go-round from Toronto, but Walt desired an elegant carousel (which featured only horses) as opposed to a merry-go-round (which included lions, tigers, and elephants). Bushman purchased additional horses acquired from Coney Island and from the amusement park owned by George Whitney’s father to complete the stable of seventy-two necessary steeds. Also at Walt’s request, Bushman surgically transformed the legs of a few standing horses into those of jumpers, so that the carousel’s herd when finally assembled would appear in vigorous motion, the overhead cranks lifting each mount, as the ride performed its laps.29

Another studio artist, Claude Coats, built a three-dimensional tabletop model for Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride because he had painted backgrounds for the movie a decade earlier. He spent days arranging the ride as a diorama, complete with scenery colored-up to match the palette of the film, which he assumed a manufacturing company would use as a guide for stage design. After Walt OK’d the model, Coats believed that he was finished with the project and could return to his regular work as a studio artist. But a few weeks later, Walt showed up in the background department, his bangs falling into his face, his eyes pinched with irritation. He explained that the damn company he had hired to paint the scenic backgrounds for the ride would not be able to do it because they didn’t understand how to properly adapt the ride’s color palette to work with new black light technology. He leveled his eyes at Coats and the other men in the office. “You guys do it,” he said, leaving Coats to experiment with new colors that, once illuminated with black lights, would evoke the original color values used in the film. “After having painted cel-size backgrounds for years,” Coats explains, “I went from a foot-high format to sets that were eighteen feet high!”30

The flat plywood characters and backgrounds for each dark ride were finished at the studio, after which the ride was mocked up on a sound stage. A quickly assembled vehicle was used to transport WED employees through the ride as the actual vehicles were not yet functional. These sets were visually impressive, admired by the entire WED team, as they had been painted in detail by the same background and layout artists who had worked on the corresponding films. Walt in particular loved these mock-ups because he could now visually take stock of the park’s progress.

But George Whitney Jr., the only man on the development team with substantial amusement-park experience, saw the underlying problems. After viewing the mock-up of the Snow White ride, he understood that Walt intended to create a dark ride with many small, nearly enclosed rooms, all of them housed in a prefab metal building. The problem was one of air circulation.

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