Travels With Figment on the Road in Search of Disney Dreams by Marty Sklar

Author:Marty Sklar [Sklar, Marty]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781368023122
Publisher: Disney Press
Published: 2019-11-05T08:00:00+00:00

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Our good fortune as Imagineers has been the opportunity to work with some of the greatest talents in our industry. In my time, one of the most significant relationships we enjoyed was with George Lucas, creator of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones films—two of the movie industry’s all-time most loved and successful franchises.

Long before Disney, under the leadership of Bob Iger, acquired George Lucas’s company in 2012, Imagineering built a solid working relationship with George Lucas. I asked Tom Fitzgerald, Imagineering’s senior creative executive and the point person in our dealings with Lucas, to write about that creative relationship.

In the early 1980s, we invited George Lucas to visit our Imagineering headquarters in Southern California, to discuss whether we might work together on projects. We were, like the rest of the world, huge fans of George’s Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark films. And George, we discovered, was a huge fan of Disneyland, having visited the park at its opening back in 1955.

As part of his tour of our WED (now Walt Disney Imagineering—WDI) facility, George saw various models and artwork for projects under consideration. One that immediately caught his attention was a storyboard outlining how a new motion-base simulator would allow guests to experience lifelike sensations as never before. George sparked to this as an ideal ride platform for a Star Wars adventure.

Before long Tony Baxter and I were headed to London to test-ride the new simulator system. The simulators had been designed by a company that built flight simulators for airline pilots, but we instantly saw the potential for a Star Wars space adventure and returned home to brainstorm potential story lines.

Of the various ideas we later presented to George, he picked the “Space Tour Company” concept as the best fit for Disneyland. As the show developed, George championed the idea of combining comedy with a thrill ride, and the now-classic story line “where something goes horribly wrong” and we get pulled into a heroic adventure. He also encouraged us to capitalize on ideas that would read quickly in our short-story medium, saying, “Don’t avoid the clichés. They’re clichés because they work!”

Throughout production, George would review film dailies with ILM (Industrial Light & Magic, the originators of the Star Wars visual effects magic) and check in on programming of the motion base at Imagineering. George was on hand to cut the ribbon—with a lightsaber, of course—at Disneyland in early 1987, and at other Disney park locations around the world.

When George began work on the prequel Star Wars films (Episodes I–III) we felt it was time to refresh the attraction and developed a branching story line to allow us to incorporate as many adventures as possible. During the production, George worked with us intimately on the 3-D sequences, helping guide the action and impact of every moment. He pushed for deeper audience interaction with the story line, which resulted in the Rebel Spy gag (where an image of an audience member appears on the screens in the cabin as part of the show).

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