Story time with five Disney Legends

The Disney Legends

The IAAPA Attractions Expo held many surprises for me, but none as gratifying and mind-bogglingly amazing as a panel session very aptly titled “Disney Legends: working with Walt”.

The Disney Legends themselves were Marty Sklar (story man), Blaine Gibson (artist), Bob Gurr (mechanical wizard), Richard Sherman (composer) and Harrison “Buzz” Price (numbers man), all sitting side by side and brilliantly moderated by Bob Rogers.

The whole point of the session was for them to share their stories about working with Walt Disney (as in the man, not the company), though of course we were all hoping for them to deviate a little bit into sideplots in order to get the best stories that these men could tell. All of them having helped build what Disney is today, it wasn’t surprising to find them all to be brilliant storytellers and effortless entertainers.

The panel kicked off with small introductions and, barely ten minutes in, every single soul in the audience knew they were in for an incredible ride when Buzz uttered the words “I remember the last thing Walt ever said to me. He grabbed me by the shoulders and said: take care of my school” (referring to CalArts). The audience breathed deep and respectfully clapped. This sort of thing only happens once in a lifetime.

Walt Disney was, it turns out, pretty darn amazing. At least according to these guys who (did I forget to mention?) helped define what we know today as the themed entertainment industry. Buzz, for example, was the one guy to single out Orlando as the destination for Disney World when most of Walt’s other advisers were pushing for different locations, some even way up north. I have transcribed below some of the stories told by these five amazing individuals in the hope that some of them might inspire you as they have no doubt inspired me. Apologies to them for paraphrasing most of these.

Marty Sklar

Marty shared with us a story about Pirates of the Caribbean that says a lot about how Walt used to communicate. As he recalls, when Walt developed the script for the ride, all it said about the animatronics was that they would “sing and do things“. This is how you knew something great was cooking inside his head, says Marty, because he would use the word things to refer to something that simply could not be described.

The five of them would pretty much agree in that you could not say “no” to Walt. Not for fear of his reaction, but because he knew that you were capable of doing what he asked of you. If you didn’t say “yes”, says Marty, Walt would certainly find someone else that was willing to take the chance.

Blaine Gibson

Blaine proclaimed himself the oldest guy on the table and effectively dissipated Buzz’s doubts about the matter. One of Walt’s greatest assets, he said, was his enthusiasm. You could not be negative about the project around Walt.

Blaine also told us about the experience of modeling the Lincoln animatronic and about a time when Walt, during a TV interview, brought him on air to talk about the animatronic.

Bob Gurr

Originally an Industrial Designer, Bob eventually became a master of all things mechanic thanks to Walt’s assumption that if he could draw a car then he could design the insides as well. After designing the vehicles for Autopia (both inside and out) only two of them out of forty survived the initial week. Walt approached him and asked how the ride was doing, to which Bob replied that they could use a couple mechanics to help fix the cars. Shortly afterward Bob was surprised at the ride by a truck dragging a white house - Where do you want your damn garage? asked the driver.

About this, Bob commented that Walt did not care about your experience or certifications: he cared about what he believed you were actually capable of doing. Bob went from not knowing the insides of a car to designing the Disney Monorail. His thoughts on that: God, I’m not certified to do any of this!

Richard Sherman

The most charismatic of the bunch, Richard worked closely with Walt on composing songs for the rides back then.  Along the same lines as what all his fellow legends had to say, Richard told us that Walt had a great intuition about what each person was capable of achieving. He would ask you to do something, says Richard, and the right answer was always “yes! I can do that!”.

Richard also pointed out that Walt had a very strong presence during meetings and that he cared a lot about positive feedback. If someone concentrated on the negative aspects of a project, he would reply “I don’t care if you don’t like it! What can we do to make it better?”.

One of the best stories of the panel came from Richard’s experience of composing the theme song for the It’s a Small World ride. The ride, designed for the 1964 New York World’s Fair, originally featured all of the dolls concurrently signing their national anthems. When Richard hopped on the boat with Walt to ride it for the first time, Walt asked to stop the music because of the ensuing cacophony. Then he turned to Richard, saying “you’re going to write me a song that’s going to explain all this, right?”. Richard remembers that after writing It’s a Small World (After All) he proposed to Walt during a car ride that they donate the song to UNICEF. Walt, pulling the car over, told Richard “are you crazy? That song’s going to put your kids through college!”.

Buzz Price

Besides being “the man that chose Orlando”, Buzz had a very particular relationship with Walt, mainly because he was never officially a Disney employee, which meant that he could perform studies for Disney without needing to go through all the hoops of the company’s bureaucracy.

Buzz warmed all our hearts when he shared with us the moment when Walt asked him to take care of CalArts. He also reinforced the general opinion that Walt was a great intuitor, referring to his great intuitions about people. He said that when Walt asked you to do something, you always had to “give him a ‘yes, if’; never a ‘no, because’” - even if initially you sensed that the job was out of your expertise.

It was an amazing session, and it really had the air of a once in a lifetime experience. In my awe, though, I completely missed the piano that was sitting in a corner of the room and so was totally shocked when Richard Sherman told us he would end the panel by playing us some songs.

He played The Tiki, Tiki, Tiki Room, There’s a great, big beautiful tomorrow, Imagination, Magic Journeys and It’s a Small World (After All) in a slower tempo version which he told us he adopted after performing the song on 9/11. After the recital, however, he was asked by his fellow legends to perform Walt’s favorite song, Feed the birds. And so he did.

It was an emotional journey and I suspect it wasn’t so just for the audience. It’s thank to these men, along with many others, that the entertainment industry is what it is today. And I am very grateful to them for choosing to share their experiences with us in the hopes that we take the industry a step further towards the goal of helping everyone’s dreams come true.

You may listen to the panel here. And listen to Richard Sherman’s performance here.