Condor Flats Imagineer Interviews
Page 6 of 6

 

Mark Sumner

LaughingPlace.com: Soarin' Over California is an amazing attraction. Did you come up with the concept for the way the ride vehicles would behave?

Mark Sumner: Yeah. This is sort of a high tech, low tech story. On the high tech end, the first thing we needed to do was find out where the people should be up inside the dome. So we used the Imagineering Research and Development lab to build a virtual reality dome for us where we could put on a set of headsets and we could actually sit in different seats and put them in different places. We could watch a little movie and you could look around and see the different seats. Once we decided where the people needed to be we had to figure out how to get them there. How to fly them up into this 80 foot diameter dome. Most of the early concepts involved multiple floors of a building and we were going to fly them out on a dry cleaner rack or a hydraulic boom or something - just shoot them straight out. But it became too complicated to get people up and down on different levels because now you have to have all kinds of escalators and you have to have elevators. You have to have operators on all the floors and so we said, you know, the only way this is really going to work efficiently is if we can load everybody on one level. We didn’t know how to do that.

It was shortly before Thanksgiving holiday in 1996 and we said let’s go on holiday and when we come back we’ll tackle this problem. Most Imagineers, they don’t leave their work in the office, and I got to thinking a little bit about it. I sketched up a mechanism and thought this might work but it’s going to be really difficult to explain how this works on paper. So I got out my 50s era erector set, and I built a working model where you can turn a little crank and three little seats go up in the air and I brought that in a grocery sack to the next meeting and everybody said we’ve got to tackle this problem and I said how about doing something like this and I put it on the table and cranked it up and everybody said, gee can you do that full size? I said, I don’t know, give me a little time and I’ll do some engineering on it and that sort of kicked it off. The mechanism that’s out there is exactly like the model I built. We get from the high tech, the latest virtual reality technology, to the low tech which is 1950s kid’s toy.

A Cessna offers scenic air tours
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LP: Is the mechanism that’s there really unique in the theme park industry?

MS: It is. There’s nothing like it. From the ground up the whole attraction was meant to be unique. The basic idea is we want people to get the experience of hang gliding. That was probably the one attraction in the park that was the least defined about how we were going to do it when we started out. We knew what we wanted to achieve but we really didn’t have a good idea of how we were going to do that. As we worked along through the process we ended up with the ride system you see today, the great 48 frame per second IMAX film which is crystal clear, good audio system and the special effects, the wind and the scents.

LP: The thing that I really love about it is that it’s not a thrill ride. It’s a ride the whole family can enjoy. Was that the design from the beginning?

MS: Yeah, I know Barry Braverman one of his favorite quotes is "I want an attraction that I can put my grandmother on." Again, you can put your little kids on there and you can put your grandmother on and I think they’re both going to enjoy it. That’s sort of unusual to find an attraction that will appeal to such a wide range of people.

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-- Posted March 20, 2001

-- Interview by Doobie Moseley
-- Pictures by Rebekah and Doobie Moseley