An Interview With Steven Davison - Part 1
Page 1 of 4
An Interview With Steven Davison - Part 1 of 2
Steven Davison was the creator of Eureka! A California Adventure parade at Disney's California Adventure. He's also worked on"Believe...There's Magic in the Stars", "Believe...In Holiday Magic", "It's a Small World" Holiday and others. During the opening of Disney's California Adventure, Davison talked to LaughingPlace.com about Eureka and some of his other Disney projects. The first half of this interview is below. The second half will be presented in the new few days.
Eureka! A California Adventure Parade
Click here for a much larger version of this picture
(1024 X 768, 80,198 bytes)
LaughingPlace.com: Tell me about Eureka!
Steven Davison: Eureka is the essence of the California golden dream and what we did was kind of build upon what Barry Braverman’s group did which was to create the different districts of California. And what we decided to do was do the people piece, because WDI [Walt Disney Imagineering] is fantastic at building fantastic places to visit. Entertainment is great at putting life into them. So what we did was look at California Adventure and go "what if we did kind of the ethnic lifestyle piece and bring that to the plate as well?" So when the park opened it would basically cover pretty well the essence built around the California dream.
So we dove in and said, "what do we want to play off of" and we jumped into the idea of the golden dream and how people came to California - like Walt Disney when Walt came here to build the studios - and have that whole dream come to life and that dream to build on this. So many people have come to California because, as they say, it has everything under the sun. So if you come here and you have that ambition you can really make life different for yourself, if you choose to.
So we started with that theme and then we started to play with the word "Eureka" and the whole idea that you can find it or "I found it!" What we wanted the guests to do was find these different communities, these different pockets of California that you might visit, you might see come to life. Different people that kind of embrace this fantastic life they can have in California. So that’s where it kind of started.
And then we created what we call the essence of Eureka or the essence of that golden dream. And if you look at the parade you’ll see Eureka appear as that Folklorico, but if you look at the design, the design of her dress bleeds into the stream and becomes those flowers and becomes the community around her. So all that Eureka represents in the parade, that kind of statue in the middle of the town that everyone embraces, and we kind of just developed her as the spirit that’s woven through these communities.