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Designer Times
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14. More Animated Gags and Animals

From 1958 to 1963 Walt had many ideas for animated creatures of all kinds for a number of Disneyland Attractions such as the Jungle Cruise, and the Natures Wonderland redo of the original Rainbow Caverns Mine Ride. Marc Davis painted many of these creatures into logical scenes, and Roger Broggie would then have them built and installed in the park.

Design efforts were shared by both the mechanical fabricators on the shop floor, and by a number of draftsmen upstairs in the Studio Machine Shop drafting room. We all worked together on these animations. Sometimes a mechanism was drawn then built, others were built then drawn up afterwards......really a full co-op deal using the talents of the fiberglass, plaster, wood, paint and electrical departments at the Walt Disney Productions Studio in Burbank.

In August of 1961, Walt moved most of the WED Enterprises (now Walt Disney Imagineering) folks over to nearby Glendale so WED could be a stand-alone operation outside of the Studio, even though the Studio Machine Shop continued as our main animation factory. Walt could wander thru the shop, and also drive over to WED many day a week to keep tabs on all the animation development.

During these years, a ton of new ideas popped up on everyone’s bench and board, with Walt as the “pollen bee” dropping in on all his “flowers”. These were the years we progressed from simple timing cam motorized and air cylinder mechanisms to the first real Audio Animatronics. We progressed from the Jungle Cruise wiggling hippo ears to a theater filled with hundreds of singing birds we called “Bird Cafe”......The Enchanted Tiki Room of 1963.

I was asked to design many of these animations, some of which gave many problems and which also gave me a terrific education in which things worked.....and which things didn’t. I think I remember the unsuccessful ones better, since they gave the the most useful learning knowledge. Here’s a few:

The 1958 Alice Ride had a room full of tall flowers swaying to the music. I made the tall flower stems out of aluminum rod, which were mounted on flexible rubber bushings. Dozens of these 8 to 10 foot tall flowers were animated by one electric motor and lots of push rods. After a few weeks of testing while we installed many more mechanical animation gags, some of the flower stems were breaking and falling over. Soon, about half were busted. Aha, fatigue cracking......I never knew about fatigue cracking before, but now I did.

What to do? Choose a material that is light and fatigue resistant, one that can bend all day.....a fishing pole! I drove down to the Silaflex Fish Pole Company in Costa Mesa and got them to make a whole bunch of plain fishing poles with no eyelets. These things worked forever after.

A whole bunch of new animations were built in 1962 and 1963 for new scenes in the Jungle Cruise. I was assigned the job of a designing the Charging Rhinos, conceived by art director Vic Greene. Two Rhinos were to charge forward at the passing boat, then turn and run back into the jungle.

My mechanism design was such that both rhinos rode on the ends of two interconnected horizontal booms operated by one air cylinder. When the air was reversed, the rhinos, which pivoted on the ends of the boom, had “tail wheels” which ran free in spring loaded return tracks. Problem was, the tail wheels sometimes backed up on the “out” track rather than run in the “return” track, and vice versa.

Guests were treated to the most unpredictable animals in all of Disneyland.....the random reverse charging rhinos. They were eventually put out of their misery and replaced by some well behaved apes playing with an overturned Jeep. The big lesson was to NEVER depend on random dynamics.

For the Natures Wonderland, Walt wanted a Bounding Deer and a Walking Mountain Sheep. The deer was supposed to run on a hillside in a triangular path about 100 feet or so. It was easy to make a leaping deer action with a wheeled carriage that had rocking legs supporting the deer’s body. Using the principle of a cable driven railway, the carriage was propelled by a wire rope drive, one drive wheel, and two as idler wheels on the turns. We made a scale model to show Walt. It worked great.

But when the full size mechanism was installed, it would only run a week or so at a time. Seems the cable splice required for this job could never be refined enough to last much longer. The park just shut it off one day and that was that. In 1990 I was doing a job for a Disneyland vendor and was on the old bounding deer mountain. Oh my gosh.....the concrete foundation was still there after almost 30 years.....sort of a lost grave of great Gurr ideas that never worked.

But the Walking Mountain Sheep was absolutely the greatest animation I ever did. Not only was it convincing to humans, even the live ride animals knew it was real. The sheep was staged so that it would pop out from behind a big rock right near the passing guests riding the pack mules on the Natures Wonderland trail. The mechanism was simple and worked very well during tests after installation.

The very first guest-carrying mule came to where the sheep was waiting. It went into action.....and so did the mule! The poor creature reared back, slipped and fell down the steep slope into the river, taking all the other mules and guests with it.....they were all roped together into a train. Everyone got a dunking.

The mule skinners waited a week before putting that same mule back on the ride. When he came to the sheep’s location he stopped and would not budge any further. The park turned off the sheep that day and it never ran again. Of course it never wore out either. That was my best animated creature.

oOo

Next month: 1959 - Four Big Projects - All at One Time

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-- Bob Gurr

The opinions expressed by Bob Gurr, and all of our columnists, do not necessarily represent the feelings of LaughingPlace.com or any of its employees or advertisers. All speculation and rumors about the future of Disneyland and the Walt Disney Company are just that - speculation and rumors - and should be treated as such.

-- Posted June 13, 2001

 

 

 

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