Walt Disney Parks and Resorts Chairman Jay Rasulo (left) and Financial Secretary of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government John Tsang (right) take to the stage for the dedication ceremony.
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LM: So why add the Disney characters for the first time?

JM: I had been waiting for that question.

TM: We thought long and hard about this. We wanted something special for Hong Kong that was more than just a new city scene. The park doesn�t have a whole lot of attractions or places where you get exposure to the characters. We thought it�s a small world was a good place to introduce that in a careful way. It could have looked gratuitous.

JM: Like product placement.

KO: Or subliminal advertising.

TM: Exactly. There were many concerns from an artistic standpoint. These are two different worlds � that of it�s a small world and that of the Disney characters � and even each character lives in its own stylistic world. How do you reconcile that?

JM: We tried to make it unobtrusive. We didn�t create a lot of new sets and worked them into the existing sets and original designs. We were not trying to do a huge overlay. The characters are just part of the scene.

LM: As if you had replaced a it�s a small world doll with a character?

JM: That is exactly what we did. We had x number of dolls and we had 40 Disney characters to work in as dolls and toys. So we took out dolls from the relevant country and replaced them.

LM: Toys?

JM: We call them �toys� � they are the simpler papier-m�ch� components of the Disneyland show.

KO: The whole show is meant to look like it was made by kids. I didn�t know that until I worked on this attraction. The look is that of children�s craft materials like construction paper and glitter. It uses simple shapes. Obviously we can�t make the show out of papier-m�ch� but we can use fiberglass to create the look.

TM: The solution was a lot easier than any of us thought. Why not make them look as if they had been designed by Mary and Marc? it�s a small world already had legendary, mythical and literary characters represented � some were abstract like Don Quixote while some more realistic like Cleopatra in Egypt. We wanted to keep it within that range. To be honest the animals were much easier to fit than the human characters. We then had to decide if they were dolls or toys so we went through them one by one. We actually did Photoshop simulations. Cinderella and the Prince are traditional dolls � she is in her blue dress and we have even put in the castle which Mary Blair actually designed for the movie. It just seemed like the right setting. I should add that all of the characters are in geographically appropriate settings.

TM: The other thing is that this is the first show we have done in Hong Kong that features Audio-Animatronics�

JM: And it has 284 dolls!

TM: Right. We did do some Audio-Animatronics for the Jungle Cruise but we have to use manufacturers in the region for these shows and it is about gradually increasing the level of complexity that we can do for the park. First it was the crocodile and bull elephant and now it is the it�s a small world dolls. Despite being near-identical all of the dolls have different articulation and movement. There is little replication and so it was a good opportunity for the vendors to cut their teeth on figuring all this out.

JM: It was a good learning curve for them.

KO: Don�t forget there are also 234 toys! Some of them are still the originals down at Disneyland.

JM: We didn�t actually have much documentation for the toys so had to go down to Disneyland and photograph and measure them extensively. Then two artists had to redraw them from the images. The drawings were converted into colorboards for Katie to work on. We did buy a lot of the figure finishing in the US as we didn�t know what was out there. The vendors also weren�t well versed in figure finishing so we had to do hands-on workshops to show them how to apply fur, yarns, sequins and that stuff. They did a great job as they have retained that handcrafted look from the original.

TM: They almost had a second sense about the dolls and toys in the end � the show was rushed in �63 and so there are odd things there. The contractors were able to look at them and make improvements as necessary.

KO: I remember seeing a water jug that a doll carries and kept asking myself why it was such an odd shape. We just copied it for the show.

JM: I remember feeling the same about the island scene with the boomerang boy and his dog. The dog is just so big! It looks like Kujo!