“It’s a Party and That’s Kind of a Wonderful Thing to Think About”: Bob Weis and His Books “Ghost Dog” and “Dream Chasing”

I now have a whole new look on a classic Disney Parks attraction.

Imagine, just for a moment, that you’re a kid who frequented Disneyland back in the late 60s, and were invited to a special preview of what was happening inside that long-awaited haunted house on the hill? Well, the former head of Walt Disney Imagineering himself takes us on an adventure that puts us in that very predicament, only it's not one of those three hitchhiking ghosts that follows a young man home, but instead that of a faithful canine companion.

In Ghost Dog, by Bob Weis, we follow a fun, fantastical adventure set in the late 60’s at Disneyland (and beyond!) and try to return this ghost dog back to where he came from. Written beautifully by Weis, who injects a lot of fun trivia and detail into the narrative as only someone with his expertise could, this page-turning adventure (complete with illustrations by Oliver & Company director George Scribner) takes us to a wonderful time and place in Disneyland and WED’s history.

I had the chance to sit with Bob for a bit and talk about this book, along with his decidedly different memoir, Dream Chasing, both of which are available now.

Tony Betti: How often did you go as a kid? The book is set with the time and place in 1969 when the Mansion opened.

Bob Weis: I grew up in Southern California, so, we were there sometime, probably, during the year that it opened. Ghost Dog was really written out of love for the Haunted Mansion. Having spent my career at Walt Disney Imagineering doing projects from, you know, all over the world, my favorite attraction ever is the Haunted Mansion. I kind of realized, ‘you're never going to do anything that good.’ Those guys were so incredible. The men and women who produced the Haunted Mansion originally for Imagineering, are WED and I was like, well, I can't ever do anything. I can't do the Haunted Mansion all over. So the one thing I could do is I could write a story about it to express my love for it, and I also have a tremendous love for dogs. I've had lots of dogs in my life and they mean so much to us and I just thought well, “what if you combine the two? What if that great scene at the end of the Haunted Mansion, when they say a ghost will follow you home? What if a ghost dog follows you home?” and that was really the premise. I just stayed with it. It was during COVID, I was doing Zoom calls for Imagineering, 18 hours a day and I needed a creative outlet and that's when I wrote it and I I had a great time writing it.

TB: I love the illustration at the end too, of you as a dog just typing at the typewriter.

BW: Well, George Scribner was the first person I reached out to after I wrote the book, who I've worked with so many times and so many projects around Imagineering. He directed Oliver & Company when he was at Disney Animation, so obviously he's really good at doing dogs. And I asked him if he would maybe do a cover. Maybe one or two illustrations and we couldn't help it. I think we ended up with about 32 illustrations that George is so great at and captured those moments.

[Ghost Dog] is kind of a young adult book. It's not really a children's book. But we decided, pretty much at each chapter heading, we did an illustration and they're just wonderful. Whenever I do signings. In fact, we got one coming up pretty soon again, but. George and I often do it together. And I'll sign. And he signs and draws dogs inside. We have a great time.

We did an event here in Los Angeles. There's a beautiful place called the Los Angeles Arboretum, and they have an annual event honoring and fundraising for the Los Angeles Pasadena Humane Society. And it was the one day a year you can bring your dog to the Arboretum. So we had a dog signing and we signed for dogs all day and we have all these pictures, these great pictures of us with all these Bulldogs and retrievers and who knows what, all of them standing there as we're as we're signing their books. It was great.

TB: You've said with George Scribner, you've collaborated with him a number of times at WDI. On what? 

BW: George has been a really amazing Imagineer in his career after an amazing career at Disney Animation too. He is a great storyteller and we often would call George in on a variety of different projects. Usually if they had some kind of animation storytelling associated with them, but not always. So he's on just lots and lots of projects in the early stages… A couple times I brought him in when we were building Shanghai and he came over, I think six or seven times, and he's an amazing painter and he would set up his easel on site and paint. He did like nine images of the Shanghai Castle in construction over a course of two years. He's just an amazing artist. Wonderful collaborator. I love working with him. So this is kind of our thing. We're gonna do another one, so we're gonna keep this ghost thing going for a while.

TB: So that kind of touches upon another question I had. Are we thinking another Ghost Dog, like a “Ghost Dog 2″ or something else? 

BW:  We love the idea. I won't spill the beans on the book, but the spiritual dogdom will continue… 'cause he loves dogs too. And we both love Disneyland so they will be back.

TB:  Would you keep it in the same time frame? More importantly, what attraction would you use? Especially in that era before it was all attractions based on existing properties, you could incorporate anything into them…

BW:  Well, I won't say anything about the plot or anything about that, except that one of my other favorite attractions has to do with shrinking you down to the size of a molecule. So. It could have something to do with that.

TB: You do mention that attraction in Ghost Dog.

BW: That's the first thing they go on. Also, we also both love the Mission to the Moon.  So we got some options there… But I'll tell you, I'll give a plug to Dave Bossert, who has a wonderful history with Disney. Also worked on a few things you might have heard of, like The Little Mermaid and and a few things like that. He and his wife Nancy have started this fantastic publishing company (The Old Mill Press). They do a lot of Disney related things. Did Ghost, which I'm forever grateful for. They did a beautiful book on Claude Coats. He just did a book which is amazing… on the House of the Future. They're just great collaborators and we just have a great time. We go to signings together, you know, we hang out. It’s been a really, really great experience.  

TB: Speaking of Nancy Bossert, she did the cover for Ghost Dog. 

BW:  She did the entire book design and it's inspired by the beautiful work that Tanya McKnight Harris did when she worked at Imagineering. Those fantastic wallpapers of the Haunted Mansion. In our case, it's now little Dog's eyes instead of the way it was originally rendered.

TB: And the paw prints! I like the paw prints a lot.

BW: There's also, if you put the book in the sun, it glows in the dark, so it's fun. It's just these things are really just so much fun and we went back and forth a lot with the design. And I like the size of the book, I like the way it fits in your hand when you're reading at night and stuff like that. We've got a lot of great comments on the design and it's all her. That's all Nancy. Yeah.

TB: Going back to the book itself, I like the little details you throw in there where you talk about pulling up to the old Disneyland sign with its new Roman font. I feel like that would oft get overlooked.

BW: Yeah, you can probably tell from the book, when you grow up going to Disneyland, you know it so well. Driving in, taking the tram to the main entrance. Going into the park and grabbing a hot dog and all those things, that's my youth. I love writing about it, and I also take the audience. Without giving it away – this ghost dog does follow them. They're trying to figure out “what do we do? How do we do it?” So I thought it'd be really fun if they went to WED Enterprises at the time, which was still in the same building as in one of the buildings that they're still in Glendale and visit them. A lot of that background I have from my own history at WED, but I know the history and that was fun to be able to write it in a fantasy way.

TB: And I noticed [a character in the book is named] Marc Grimsley is M-A-R-C. Is that referencing a different Marc 'cause I don't think Mark Grimsley's an actual imagineer.

BW: Good. You're doing good so far. Of course, we know that Marc Davis was instrumental in the Haunted Mansion. I'll tell you [Marc Grimsley] is inspired by the personality of Marc, and there's a lot of “inspired by”s in there, but. But you know one. And it's a fantasy book… This is something that was intended to honor someone's memory. Unless we find out that ghost dogs are escaping from the Haunted Mansion, then it’s probably an imaginary story. But I'll tell you… in Dream Chasing, which covers my 40 years at Imagineering, Shanghai. Shanghai was an incredibly satisfying, enriching project to work on. It was hard on a lot of us, primarily because we hadn’t worked in China before, the Chinese contractors never worked with Disney before, so getting to know each other, figuring out what our demands are. It was tough and there were long, long hours. A long commute back to urban Shanghai after the park after working all day. And on my really bad days, I used to plug into this great piece on YouTube which is X Atencio and Paul Frees – who is the narrator of the Haunted Mansion. It’s a recording of their recording session. It’s just so much fun to listen to, especially like me, if you love the Haunted Mansion. So once in a while, as I was on my way home, I would just listen to this session over and over again. And I think that's where the idea of doing [Ghost Dog] came from. I was just listening to those guys banter back and forth and what an amazing thing it must have been to be there at that time to do that incredible attraction.

TB: It's not a spoiler if it's the first chunk of the book –  you mention a recording session, and it is what you open with. I'm assuming it's that one.

BW: It is that one and it's fun, a little more magical, a little more mysterious. As if something magical was really happening. Happening and who knows, maybe it was like – like Leslie Iwerks wrote for my back cover – it's all about what if? What if it did happen? You never know, so it's just so much fun to do it.  To have kids and not just kids, but adults who spent their childhood like I did… riding Haunted Mansion. It’s such a part of our culture and our storytelling and the way we think about things, it's great. Just fun.

TB: Now you, as the former President of Walt Disney Imagineering, have access to a lot and a lot and a lot of documents and things. And you reference the building plan for the Haunted Mansion and you have about a couple of paragraphs about it. How accurate is that? Or is it just completely made up?

BW: Well, the book is a fantasy, right?  As President of Imagineering, I can walk down to the archives and pull out a plan of the Haunted Mansion any time I wanted to. But this is a particular part of the story, where this young boy Herbert has suddenly found himself with a dog that’s a ghost and his friend trying to find out what it is. Where did he come from? What are they supposed to do with it? So they actually go to the Anaheim Building Department to try to find out, something, anything. That eventually leads them on the trail to Walt Disney Imagineering. So you know…

Your short answer is it’s all made up, it's all fantastic.

TB: Is Herbert's dad inspired by your dad? Perhaps even your—

BW: I'd say Herbert's Dad is one part my dad, a part me, I guess. A hard working guy who finds inspiration by going to Disneyland. And I was educated as an architect. He loves the storytelling in architecture. I'd say when I went to school, it was not as much about storytelling as it is today. It was more rigid, more modernist, and he's kind of an oddball in that sense. Yeah, I'd say that's inspired probably more by me than by my father… My younger days are probably the kid and my older days are the dad. I get to fill both roles.

TB: Now we mentioned Dream Chasing, which is decidedly different from Ghost Dog. One is a fictitious novel in a fantasy world and Dream Chasing is more of a memoir. And you did these both at the same time?  

BW: I started Ghost Dog first during COVID. And then I had some ideas for a book about my own career. I never intended to do an autobiography. I wanted to write about projects and how sometimes they are great. Sometimes they're successful, sometimes they're difficult, sometimes they're not. You know, great success. It's this up and down process that we all travel through. I wanted to kind of capture that in some case studies and things like The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror that I worked on for quite a few years. And it was tough. We kind of had a good idea but we didn't know how to do it, you know? So I started writing a few notes and Wendy Lefkon – somebody you may not know who it is,  but if you've ever read a book about the parks, she edited it. She’s edited like 400 books about the parks in the last 25 years or so, going all the way back to the Birnbaum Guidebooks… Then she came to Disney, where we had met on the big, thick Imagineering book [Walt Disney Imagineering: A Behind the Dreams Look at Making the Magic Real]. We were working on [another book] and it was taking us a long time because we had discovered all this stuff and she said, “well, why don't you write a book and we'll introduce that at D23.” I was like, I don't know if I ever wrote anything but an e-mail in the last few years. We gave it a try. She was a huge supporter. I wrote it. I don't have any ghostwriters and she didn't write any of it. I wrote it. But she said you have to write 250 pages. If you can do it, we can publish the book. And I wrote whatever it is. 470 or something. But once you wind me up, I had a lot to talk about. I tried to also make that a fun, exciting, page turning journey about what it takes to do these things. So it was fun.

In 1976, during the Bicentennial, when I was in college…I was an ice cream and popcorn vendor, which you can read about in Dream Chasing. I can tell you that working at Disneyland at that time, Space Mountain was under construction at Disneyland. WED Enterprises was kind of this mystery.  Nobody knew anything about them. What they did. They knew they came up with the attractions like Space Mountain, and that it was a very special part of Disney. But nobody knew them at all. Occasionally you'd see a little piece on a TV show about them. But it's really only since Leslie Iwerks produced The Imagineering Story,  [that] it’s since then that people know who Imagineers are and what they do. Frankly, I credit Leslie because had she not made that series, I don't think I could have written Dream Chasing because everything was kept under wraps, and it was an opportunity to talk about a lot of projects, how dreams are important, but the ability to follow through on them with big groups of people for years worth of work is the hard part. So you know the mystery, the mystique of Imagineering was certainly there back then. And I played that up a lot in the book.

TB: I think of even when I was a little guy, I was going to Disneyland… and I remember knowing someone created these things, but not necessarily what Imagineering was? Because this is the late 80s, right? Splash Mountain. But you didn't know much about what was coming unless you were there and you saw the wall and it had the concept art displayed. It wasn't four years of  “they installed a new steel beam! Oh and it has paint on it!” or something like you have all over the internet now.  So it was definitely more mysterious and magical back then, I’m sure.

BW: Well, it was great. There were four years when I was working there, even when I was an employee, I used to go on my days off. If I was there, I'd go to see the preview center, which was part of the Walt Disney Story,  And you can look at the things and what was going to be coming. That was all exciting. But I think there's a specialness between the audience and the Imagineers in that the Imagineers are always trying to do some kind of new magic. The audience is always interested in what that's gonna be and that relationship is continued. I Find that as I do book signings, either of Ghost Dog or Dream Chasing, it's a little moment with people where they have a book they want you to sign it. Then I sign it. But I know what it's really about is that kind of wonderful moment where they talk about their Disney history and to talk about my Disney history. I find myself tearing up with people or hugging perfect strangers, hugging their books, because of what we've shared together as a Disney culture. That's what seems to be so meaning coming back to the books after being retired, but I’m not retired at all, 'cause I'm writing all the time, but retired from Disney. It kind of reminds me how important those years are to us all and to the guests, there's a strong emotional connection between Imagineering, and all of Disney, but especially Imagineering.

TB: Yeah, I also think fans take a lot of ownership over things. So when they meet someone like you, who's connected to that part of them, it's like, “Oh, you had a huge chunk in this part of me.”

BW: Oh Lord. I think that one of the things I realized… that fans have complete ownership over the parks after they open and we as Imagineers are more stewards than anything else. We are people there to steer the parks into the future. And it's really important that we realize that's a big part of the role.

TB: To that point, with Ghost Dog, there are a number of Haunted Mansion Facebook groups and social media groups, and I know my wife (who used to be a Haunted Mansion cast member) is in them.

BW: I know that they will be the ones who appreciate the book. It grows from a love of Haunted Mansion, absolutely. And a love and respect for the Imagineers who put that project together, which I love so much. That's where it comes from – a place in my heart, a place for somebody who's ridden many, many times in their life, combined with a love for dogs or pets…I think part of why we love the Haunted Mansion is because we think that there are people in the afterlife who are having a great time, right? People in Haunted Mansion are having a great time there. The people going when you go through the graveyard scene, it's a party, you know, and that's kind of a wonderful thing to think about – that there is an afterlife where people are just playing tricks and having fun and stuff like that. That’s what I wanted to capture… that sentiment that the Haunted Mansion has. I truly hope that people who love the Haunted Mansion, and love that history will love this story.

Bob attends many book signings, and soon will be appearing on the Disney Treasure in January as part of a DVC cruise, signing copies of both of his books – Ghost Dog and Dream Chasing. You can pick up your own copy of Ghost Dog or Dream Chasing, both of which are available now. Bob also does the audiobook narration for Dream Chasing (also available now) with an audiobook for Ghost Dog due out in the future.

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Tony Betti
Originally from California where he studied a dying artform (hand-drawn animation), Tony has spent most of his adult life in the theme parks of Orlando. When he’s not writing for LP, he’s usually watching and studying something animated or arguing about “the good ole’ days” at the parks.