Designer Times
Page 2 of 2
Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride opened with typical dark ride “bashem” doors between scenes......the cars would open the doors by smacking them open! The maintenance was an ongoing problem, so I was asked to design some doors that would be air actuated just before the cars would hit them. I used more car parts.....like steering tie rods and jounce bumpers.
Gas stations used to have a hose laying on the ground so that when a customer arrived and ran over it, a ding bell would sound. I used these parts to trigger the doors. But soon found out that the hard tired Toad cars always ran over the hose in the same spot, thus ruining the hose. So we later changed over to electrical limit switches.
One of the Toad Ride gags was a pile of barrels that would tip over on the passing guests without actually hitting them. This was a simple gag made out of cheap hardware store stuff.....typical for carnival dark rides. One day the barrels did fall, so I redesigned them. I started to learn what it takes to make simple gags safe and have a long maintenance life. One by one I redesigned most of the Toad gags in Disneyland’s first year of operation.
Even though I started out at Disney designing car bodies, then car chassis, I was starting to get the hang of engineering gags. As Walt came up with more and more ride and attraction ideas, we were all getting pretty good at bigger and bigger gags......later these were correctly called Show Action Equipment.
Some gags were pretty simple but very effective. The Mine Ride had a lot of animated animals as well as some very simple birds. Right after the first birds were installed, a big ruckus was going on one morning; seems the local real birds resented the presence of the phony birds and were pecking them to bits. We now knew we were getting realistic animation.
These animations and show actions all started out as a cartoon gag sketch. Marc Davis would later create hundreds of cartoon gags which the Studio Machine Shop designers would turn into long-lived machines which helped tell many fantasy stories to Disneyland guests.
oOo
Next month: The Viewliner
-- Bob Gurr
Bob Gurr began working with Disney in 1954. He retired in 1981 but occassionally consults for the Company. Since Disney he's worked on the sinking ship at Las Vegas' Treasure Island, Universal Studios' King Kong, Godzilla for the film by the same name and much more. Among his proudest accomplishments he lists "making Walt tickled pink that some of the things he wanted to build actually worked. You could tell how proud he was when he would show off things to his friends and the press. Lincoln and the Monorail were two big ones for him."
Designer Times is normally posted the second Wednesday of each month.
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 March 14, 2001
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