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Feature of the Month

Book Excerpt

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 here.

Walt's WED
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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