Among the men and women who knew Walt best, there's general
agreement that he was rarely happier than when he was visited WED
-- the predecessor to Imagineering, which he founded to help design
Disneyland. Walt appreciated and enjoyed the sense at WED that everything
was possible. With Disneyland's anniversary having just passed --
July 17 -- it seemed appropriate to feature the following excerpt
from "Inside the Dream," by Katherine and Richard Greene.
To order a copy of the book, click
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Walt contemplates the model for the GE Carousel of Progress
designed by WED for the 1964 World's Fair
"When Walt wanted to build Disneyland, he realized that he
had to form his own design company," recalls long-time Imagineer
Rolly Crump. So Walt gathered together a small band of prized studio
employees and dubbed the new entity with his own initials -- WED.
Walt financed WED in part by charging the Disney Company for the
right to use his name, and giving the income to WED. "At the
same time," says Mickey Clark, an early WED executive, "Walt
arranged for a license agreement with Walt Disney Productions in
which WED received royalties for the use and sale of the Disney
characters. That was the first form of income that WED Enterprises
had."
As time went on, and the Disney Corporation became the owner of
Disneyland, WED continued to design attractions for the park. But
Walt wasn't interested in making profits for his little firm. Clark:
"He charged labor costs plus his out-of-pocket expenses. He
just wanted to get the job done."
Walt loved WED. While the studio had grown large and somewhat bureaucratic,
WED was a place where he could have fun. It was a small company
doing what it wanted to do. According to Bill Cottrell, Walt's brother-in-law
and first president of WED, "Nobody had to ask anyone at the
studio for permission. If you wanted to start developing a thing
like Audio-Animatronics, you'd do it as long as you had the money
to do it. And by this time, Walt had the money. He had borrowing
power. WED was a wonderful thing for Walt."
He called it his "sandbox." Others called it his "laughing
place." "He sort of hung out," remembers model-maker
Harriet Burns. "He seemed to like to relax at WED because he
didn't have meetings like the ones that were scheduled in the animation
building. He could be just one of us, and kick stuff around.
"When we'd be working on something he could hardly stand it.
If I was soldering something, he'd want to solder it himself. When
I was trying to get air into polyester to make permanent bubbles,
he said, 'Let me try it.' He was always intrigued."
This hands-on attitude could lead to the occasional problem, as
when Burns had left out an intricate stained-glass window for soldering.
"I had 358 pieces of lead, and he came in and picked it up."
Of course, the window splintered into 358 pieces. Burns: "So,
finishing that the next day was out."
In assembling his staff for WED, Walt drew upon some of the most
creative talents at the studio. Crump recalls hearing WED referred
to as "Cannibal Island," because it "was gobbling
up all the people that were in animation" -- people like Marc
Davis, John Hench, X Atencio, and Bill Justice.
"In those days," recalls Bob Gurr, who worked on a number
of Disneyland attractions, "Walt was sort of gathering people
almost like instruments in an orchestra. He put us all together
but he never passed out the music. Oddly enough, I think he was
the only one who knew where he was going to go. He knew the different
skills that all the different folks had. And he put them all together
and only he knew what the outcome was going to be."
Once the artists chosen for WED arrived, they were often put to
work on projects unlike any they had encountered before. X Attencio
tells a typical story. He had been an animator at the studio until
the day Walt called him up to his office and asked him to move over
to WED. "I went over to WED," Attencio says, "and
nobody knew what I was supposed to do over there. About a month
or so later, Walt called over and he says, 'I want you to do the
script for the Pirates Ride.'
"I had never done any scripting before, but I had done story
boarding at the animation end of it, so I said, 'OK.' I put on my
pirate hat and I researched all the pirate stuff I could get hold
of. The first thing I worked on was the auction scene, and when
I was finished I sent it over to Walt. 'Fine,' he said. 'go right
along.' So, I went with it. And when the scripting was finished,
I said to Walt, 'I have an idea of a song. A song would be real
good in this.' I had a melody in mind and sang it for him -- it
started with a 'Yo Ho Ho Ho, a pirate's life for me.' And Walt said,
'Hey, that's fine. Get Joey to do the music for it and we'll put
it in the show. I thought he was going to say to get the Sherman
brothers to write the words, but he didn't. So, after becoming a
scriptwriter I became a songwriter."
Rolly Crump tells a similar story: "When Walt wanted to do
the Tiki Room, he asked me to design some of the pre-show Tikis
that you stand and listen to before you go in. I did some very crude
little pen and ink sketches and showed them to Walt and he said,
'Great. Let's go with those.'
"We only had one sculptor at that time and his name was Blaine
Gibson. 'Blaine,' I said, 'Walt wants us to go ahead and get these
sculpted.' I hand him the sketch and Blaine says, 'I don't have
time for that.' I said, 'Well, who's going to do this?' He said,
'You are.' I said, 'I've never sculpted before in my life.' And
he said, 'Well, you're going to sculpt now.' I sculpted about 80
percent of the Tikis in the Tiki Room. Other people were brought
in to help, and none of us had ever sculpted before.
"In those days we did a little bit of everything, which was
marvelous. I did ticket booths. I did trash barrels. I did Sunkist
on Main Street. I did the Bazaar. Walt had never built a theme park
before so we just made things up as we went along."
Flexibility was a valued requirement in WED staffers. Walt was
not particularly patient if his WED employees -- who would come to
be called Imagineers -- hesitated about jumping into something entirely new. John Hench
experienced Walt's impatience first hand: "I came to Walt one
time when he'd asked me to oversee this change we were making in
the restaurants. I tried to explain to him that I was the wrong
person for the job because I couldn't understand anything that the
food people were talking about. He wasn't at all sympathetic. He
said, 'Don't expect me to understand that language either, just
go and find out about it.'
"So I took a restaurant management class at UCLA and had no
more trouble. I learned the difference between a bain marie and
a salamander. But Walt was like that. If you didn't know something
that he wanted you to know, you'd go find out about it. He insisted
on it."
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