Another early morning call and we were up bright and early! (ABD trips are not for the faint of heart!) We had breakfast at the buffet in the restaurant Twist in the hotel – which was actually very good! I really enjoyed the hotel and was impressed with the staff. Before going down for breakfast, we had our bags packed and tagged and ready to go.
Following the excellent breakfast, we met in the lobby and then boarded the bus to head to:
WALT DISNEY IMAGINEERING
This is the area of the company responsible for the magic – the ideas for the merchandise, parks, movies, and television shows all originate from these buildings! This was one of the events I was most looking forward to, as touring this facility is uncommon (Unfortunately, we were not able to take pictures during this part of the tour, so I will try and describe as best I can, and fill in with pictures taken by our guides).
Notice the building "name tag"?? Walt Disney Imagineering!
We received name tags and walked through the halls filled with pictures of old and new attractions. For those of you who are WDW Disney Mom fans, you will appreciate this picture, that I saw hanging on the wall as well as in the Imagineering video – featuring the fabulous Laura Spencer and her prince!
We walked down a short hallway into a room hung with heavy curtains and a watched a short film describing Walt Disney Imagineering and its accomplishments, and the current and future projects. It was amazing, and I was humbled being surrounded by such creative people.
After the film, we had a surprise visitor - Lucky the Dinosaur! This was a true animatronic marvel – was so very lifelike!
Karen and I visiting Lucky:
After the movie we split into groups and visited a couple of rooms. The first room I visited was a sound room where we had a short demonstration of audio techniques (not terribly dissimilar to the unfortunate “Sounds Dangerous” at Hollywood Studios.)
The next room contained hundereds of 3 dimensional models that the illustrators used when they were drawing their animations:
and more:
Another surprise was located in the room….
Visitors to Disneyland will recognize the marble statues of Snow White and the seven dwarfs (picture from Disneyland Photopass Gallery):
These statues were delivered in 1961, and much has been made of the fact that the dwarfs are nearly as tall as Snow White. One of the common legends indicates they were modeled after a popular line of soaps at the time, thus making Snow White only slightly larger than the dwarfs. The truth came to light a few years ago when paperwork was found that showed they were actually ordered incorrectly. For years they graced the Disneyland grotto, but after showing signs of wear were moved back to WDI and replaced with replicas. They were in storage for a time, where they met with an unfortunate accident, when someone driving a forklift accidentally knocked over the crate containing Snow White, breaking her arm.
The original statues are in the model room:
As a final surprise, our guide activated a fun animatronic of Joe Coker. I found this video on Youtube which looks to be the same:
I’ll continue with the rest of the day in the next post – stay tuned!