Designer Times
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Designer Times is a continuing column by legendary Imagineer Bob Gurr on his experiences in the early days of Disneyland to benefit the Ryman-Carroll Foundation. If you missed any previous columns, click here for the list.
11. Disney Studio becomes a ride and show manufacturer
Disneyland opened with a number of rides which were based on prior amusement park ride designs, such as the familiar dark rides and trackless rotating rides. Disney built many of the special rides, such as the Disneyland Railroad, Jungle Cruise, Autopia, and the Mark Twain Riverboat. But the more conventional rides like Mr. Toad, Snow White, Peter Pan, Dumbo, and Tea Cup were built by an experienced manufacturer, Arrow Development in Mountain View, California.
After our post-opening learning experiences, we began to see that we could design and build our own rides and show action equipment. We learned a lot during the Tea Cup redesign and gained confidence that when Walt wanted something special, we could deliver it. So by 1956 Walt Disney Productions became a full fledged ride and show manufacturer. The Studio Machine shop led by Roger Broggie became the manufacturer, and Disneyland became the customer. This business situation steadily expanded right thru the next 40 years. Disney even created a special company for this effort.....Mapo located in Glendale, California.
The first new ride engineered and built by Disney was the 1956 Rainbow Caverns Mine Ride. This was an electric railroad using a Mancha battery powered mine locomotive disguised as the tender, which actually pushed the decorative-only locomotive. I designed the wooden bodied cars to look like ore cars. The rail car chassis was easy to design.....I would use store-bought springs and axles from the local trailer supply, Hadco Engineering. The railroad wheels, couplers and such could be picked out of a neat catalog of rail parts from the C.M. Lovsted Company in Seattle.
Another ride was the new Motorboat Cruise to replace the ill-fated Phantom Boats. This new boat ride would use an underwater guide to steer the boats. Admiral Joe Fowler took a personal interest in all Disneyland watercraft, even a little boat with a one-cylinder engine. He wanted the boat to have a front drive pulling propeller. This was a weird arrangement where we had a rear mounted inboard industrial motor transmitting power thru a Vee drive to a prop shaft going down thru the bottom with the prop under the nose of the boat. I knew nothing about boats, so had no objection to engineering such a goofy proposition......the little boats worked....sort of.
Walt wanted to add a lot more “gags” to the Jungle Cruise. There’s a lot of jargon used around a movie studio. Cartoonists would describe a quick little scenario in a movie cartoon as a “gag”. And so rides would have pieces of show equipment referred to as gags.
One such gag was the Dancing Natives, which have been jumping around in the same jungle circle now for almost (45) years. Walt would go see Bob Matty, his movie special effects guru, and ask him to build up a new gag.....this one for (6) ferocious looking guys with big spears doing a war dance. Bob built one native machine which had a great action. But like movie stuff, it’s only supposed to last thru a couple of movie shots.
Roger Broggie took me over to Matty’s shop to see the thing dance. It was a rickety thing with open air parts just rubbing away in the breeze with a guy squirting oil on it to keep it running. Roger said Walt liked it and I was to engineer a permanent machine with (6) jumping guys on it. Bob Matty was never upset to see one of his studio gags get turned into a full production lifetime Disneyland piece of proper show action equipment. Bob figured out a lot of stuff for Walt......He later went on to build Bruce the Shark for Steven Spielberg’s first Jaws movie.
I was able to design an aluminum casting which would enclose all the dancing motion in an oil-filled housing with the natives bolted to the outside control arms. Six of the housings were attached to a rotating base which created a meandering path for the dancers......all using my favorite automotive tie rod ends and U-joint parts. This kind of stuff is real cheap, strong, and lasts forever.....just like an old truck in the jungle. I later made a ton of show action stuff out of car parts.
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