MAKING THE RIDE – PAGE TWO

Long had Disney yearned to explode the conventional boundaries of animation, and the creation of Disneyland was his daring experiment in living animation: richly detailed, three-dimensional environments which envelop guests in his fairy tales, historical adventures and futuristic visions, immersive in ways no film could offer. Clearly Walt's unfettered imagination was bound only by the practicalities of money he had (more often, the money he didn't have) and the technology available. The latter rarely stopped him and his team of Imagineers, but even their inventive use of burgeoning technologies was confined by available funds.

Undaunted as always, in the early '60s Disney developed new attraction concepts by developing new partnerships with major corporations (and the State of Illinois) to create exhibits for the 1964-65 World's Fair. With this additional funding, Walt and the WED crew embarked into uncharted territory of dimensional animation: the lifelike recreation of a human figure - and not just any human, but none other than our 16th President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln. Walt already had his Lincoln project in the works, but estimated it was five years away from becoming an engineering reality to construct the figure. Yet World's Fair developer, Robert Moses, visited Disney to learn how his Park grew into such a phenomenon, and upon seeing the plans for Mr. Lincoln, insisted that Walt build the attraction for the Fair . . . a little over one year away!

Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln, in the Illinois pavillion, superceded by far the comparatively simplistic animation of other Fair presentations such as Pepsi Cola-sponsored it's a small world, and the Primeval World created for the Ford Magic Skyway. Mr. Lincoln even bested the human figures populating GE's Progressland (later dubbed the Carousel of Progress for Disneyland) - especially when the President stood up from his chair to address the audience. Even more especially when Imagineers finally got Mr. Lincoln working correctly about a week into the World's Fair!

In Anaheim one year prior to the Fair's opening, Walt Disney opened The Enchanted Tiki Room in Adventureland, a 17-minute musical revue featuring lifelike animated birds, flowers and statues - Disneyland's first true audio-animatronic attraction. But despite its achievements and entertaining show, the animation therein was also a much simpler challenge than bringing Mr. Lincoln to life.

While all of these shows employed a mix of technologies new and old - basic cam discs to "program" repeated physical movements, coupled with then-sophisticated electronics to sync sound and action - Mr. Lincoln was the ticket to Disneyland's future. It's one thing to program a tiki hut full of exotic, robotic parrots and songbirds, or create a fictional family to depict American home life, but it's quite another to animate the spirit, emotion and dignity of an historic human being people recognize upon sight.

Alas, developing these four New York hit shows spelled the abandonment of Marc Davis's designs and research for the pirate museum walk-through back in Anaheim.  Mr. Lincoln proved to Walt, his team and the world (or at least the World's Fair) that believable, sophisticated three-dimensional human animation was both possible and entertaining for audiences. The WED team also learned a great deal at the Fair about high capacity attractions and how to move large crowds through a show. These breakthroughs, added to the revolutionary flume propulsion system engineered by Arrow Development for it's a small world, prompted Walt and the WED crew to redesign their pirate show from stem to stern.

Indeed, during his research and concept creations, Davis also realized that relying on historical pirates' lives and events limited the show's potential as badly as would static dioramas of these rogues. Thus Disneyland's walk-through show was scuttled as the WED team and Walt returned to their home port in search of a truly animated pirate adventure.

THIS BIG HOLE IN THE GROUND

With construction of New Orleans Square well under way, the cavernous layout for the Pirates walkthrough attraction was built into - or rather under - the riverside district. The stately antebellum façade of the Haunted Mansion stood silently at the far end, not to be occupied by its 999 happy haunts until 1969. Walt's pirate show was destined as the centerpiece of his highly anticipated new land, and all his team's energies were directed to redesigning the show as the innovative spectacle now expected after their World's Fair success.

An Imagineer details a model of New Orleans Square, featuring the Pirates Show Building 1 in back.

This left him with a big hole in the ground built for an abandoned show concept, a hole now too small to host his expanded flume ride idea. Imagineer and Pirates' Show Designer, Claude Coats, measured the walk-through space for the new ride-through boat channel: the passages were far too tight and short for a flume ride, and expanding them to allow water navigation meant squeezing the show area down to a crowded fraction of their intended footprint. Both the pirates and the flume boats could not fit in the same building and yield the high quality show Walt desired.

Typically, Walt opted for show quality over financial risk, and ordered a second, budget-shattering show building, even larger than the first basement already built. With no room in New Orleans Square to host it, this second show building would stand outside Disneyland's berm boundary (another Park first). In a single decision, Walt more than doubled the size of the pirate show . . . and with more than a little serendipity at work, assured that Pirates of the Caribbean would evolve into a truly - and literally - groundbreaking attraction the likes of which no one had ever seen.

THE TRANSITION TO BIGGER THINGS

While designers and writers refigured the bulk of the pirate show for a larger building, they also realized the geographical reality facing them: this newly drafted show would exist in two very distinct structures located fairly far apart. Thematically as well as physically, how would they connect the two show segments without interrupting the story?

Since most of the action scenes originally created for the show would now be installed in Building 2, this left the original basement open to reinvention of both story and design. The situation reminds one of the adage that the Chinese symbol for crisis is comprised of two other symbols: danger and opportunity. In a master stroke of creative opportunism, Coats, Davis and team invented a new preamble to their pirate adventure, which also happened to serve as a moody, atmospheric transition space between the boisterous world of Disneyland above and the seafaring 17th century fantasy awaiting guests below. Imagineers would magically remold this 'empty' basement into the Pirate Grotto, a labyrinth of aquatic caverns, waterfalls and stony hideouts where ocean winds whispered of piratical conquest, betrayal and cursed treasure. Finally, an utterly darkened corridor of winding rock, dubbed with the utilitarian handle of the Transition Tunnel, connected the haunted lair of decaying pirate remains to the historic recreation of living pirates.

The final course mapped out, Walt and his crew began their task of building two eras and worlds which would define the cutting edge of Disneyland entertainment and Walt's own creative legacy, standards against which all future rides would be compared.

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