by Jim Korkis
WDI concept designer Joe Lanzisero and Coltrin laid out the course and then handed it over to Bob Kamerlander, the production manager from Disney Development Company, who had to transform the two-dimensional drawings into a three-dimensional reality while maintaining the tight budget.
Kamerlander, who mentioned that there had been conflict on projects between the two departments in the past, explained:
It turned out that we were all looking to achieve the very same thing: a first class product, delivered on time and on budget. A lot of that had to do with the personalities involved. There was very little ego. I believe our relationship demonstrated the strengths of each organization: the creative talent that dreams up the Fantasia Gardens and the development expertise that transforms the concept into a terrific guest experience as well as a financially viable asset for the company.
Lanzisero and Coltrin worked together to create a list of gimmicks and scenes referencing the iconic images from miniature golf courses but with a Disney spin. About Hole 7, Coltrin said:
This is your standard windmill with a new take on it. It’s from the scene from the film in the “Nutcracker” segment with all the spinning snowflakes. You can try to putt right through the middle of the snowflake, or putt the way around this one.
There were new additions as well. About Hole 18, Lanzisero said:
The whirlpool is a parabolic bowl. No one’s ever done this before with a miniature golf ball. If you get it in the top hole, it shoots it into this whirlpool and it makes about five or six revolutions before it falls through the final hole.
Everyone went the extra mile to get things that we thought might be out of reach and we ended up with one of the finest miniature golfing experiences.
Golf Courses
Fantasia Gardens 18-Hole Verses
For those so engrossed in not exceeding the six-stroke limit per hole, or so entranced by the audio or visual treats that getting the ball in the hole might produce, you might have missed the entertaining verse written for each hole by Imagineer Robert Coltrin, the concept designer for the course:
Tocatta and Fugue
Hole 1: Our musical game has just begun/And here comes treble for everyone/Up to the top the ball must run/For any hope of a hole-in-one.
Hole 2: The notes upon the staff you see/May seem quite lovely musically/But now as you begin to play/You’ll see they may get in your way.
Hole 3: Before our little fugue concludes/The music swells and changes mood/Avoid the rests and you will hear/Chimes a-ringing sweet and clear.
Nutcracker Suite
Hole 4: Spring is here and just beyond/Blossoms float upon the pond/The open bud should be your goal/Its dainty petals surround the hole.
Hole 5: These lively mushrooms circle ’round/While one is hopping up and down/At the feet little Hop Low/Is where you want the ball to go.
Hole 6: As winter arrives, the fairies create/A frost-covered pond where they can skate/Their path on the left is where it should roll/Then watch as it waltzes down to the hole.
Hole 7: And so this musical suite we close/Amidst the flurry of winter snows/Weather the storm where snowflakes fall/Or easily putt around them all.
Pastoral Symphony
Hole 8: Within Mount Olympus this opus unfolds/And what mythological creatures it holds!/When putting the ball, be careful to go/Straight through the pillars to the caverns below.
Hole 9: The impish faun loves to tease/As he plays his pipes with ease/So if you putt straight and true/Perhaps he’ll play a tune for you.
Hole 10: In all of the land there’s no one more raucous/Than this fellow here, the infamous Bacchus/He’s poured you a path that you simply putt up/Hit it just right and it spills to the cup.
Dance of the Hours
Hole 11: You will notice in a glance/These graceful ladies love to dance/This bird ballet is lovely, but/They may distract you as you putt.
Hole 12: And there, the dance grows even greater/Enter now: Ben Ali Gator/With hippo high, he strains beneath/Now simply putt between his teeth.
Hole 13: After they dance their amusing duet/Hyacinth Hippo will now pirouette/Carefully watch as she spins here for you/Time it just right and the ball will go through.
Hole 14: Twilight brings a mood of romance/The perfect time for an elephant dance/So while she strikes this beautiful pose/Aim for the path beneath her toes.
Hole 15: Before we can finish this silly ballet/This fanciful fountain is ready to spray/So keep an eye out for each little jet/They’re hopping and hoping to get the ball wet.
Sorcerer’s Apprentice
Hole 16: Mickey’s in trouble for casting a spell/Meant to assist him in filling the well/Now armies of brooms with a water supply/Are ready to douse anything that goes by.
Hole 17: When Mickey is dreaming, he’s brave and he’s brash/Conducting the stars and creating a splash/From high on a cliff, he’s on top of it all/He’ll show you his stuff when you’re putting the ball.
Hole 18: The wave has grown bigger, with magic it stirs/When up from the bottom, a whirlpool occurs/A putt to the left will spin it, and then/We hope you’ll return here again and again!
PART FOUR
The Rest of the Story
More than seventy million people visited Orlando during 2017. Of course, the primary reason was to see Walt Disney World, but in the last two decades so many other amusement venues have established themselves in the area that it is a little surprising the number isn’t even a little higher despite its record-breaking status.
Walt Disney World transformed the area from an agricultural community dependent upon cattle and citrus for its revenue into a city now centered on the hospitality industry and devoted to serving the needs of tourists with hotels, restaurants, and amusement venues.
Several years ago, Disney executive Al Weiss said:
As our business at Walt Disney Parks and Resorts keeps growing, the bottom-line impact for Florida is the more than 160,000 jobs and $6 billion in compensation directly and indirectly associated with these jobs that help power our state’s economic engine.
The ripple effect created by our operations resonates throughout Florida as families across the state use their earnings to purchase goods and services from the diverse businesses both large and small that make Florida such an amazing place to live, work, and play.
WDW is the largest single employer in the state of Florida with well over 60,000 employees. However, statewide, the total number of jobs created indirectly and directly by the operations of WDW is roughly 200,000. It has been estimated that at least one in fifty people employed in Florida work directly or indirectly for operations connected to Disney.
While Disney employees earn over two billion dollars a year, across all of Florida earnings from jobs that can be attributed directly or indirectly to Disney’s operations total well over seven billion dollars now.
Each year, WDW purchases over a billion dollars of goods and services from vendors in Florida with almost half of that going to vendors in central Florida. Outside of WDW property, spending by guests visiting WDW totals over two billion dollars and includes hotel and lodging expenditures, meals at local restaurants, retail purchases, and transportation expenditures.
With ever-increasing gas prices and uncertainty overseas, an increasing number of families are more likely to spend a vacation at WDW instead of flying somewhere else. Disney has determined that while guests now stay a day or two longer than average they don’t travel as frequently throughout the year. Generally, a family saves for three to four years for a WDW vacation.
The Disney company directly contributes nearly thirty-five million in cash and in-kind donations to the central Florida community including schools and hospitals. These contributions include more than $5.6 million in Disney grants to 121 nonprofit organizations throughout central Florida. Following the Pulse shooting tragedy, Disney donated one million dollars to the OneOrlando Fund to support victims’ families
A $500,000 donation was made to
the Homeless Impact Fund at the Central Florida Foundation to help end chronic and family homelessness. A $100,000 contribution was given to Harbor House of Central Florida in support of its new shelter for children and families who are survivors of domestic abuse
A $250,000 donation as part of the Disney Grants program enabled Hope Community Center to open a new campus in Apopka, enhancing its education and advocacy services for immigrant families and the working poor.
In addition to money, Disney donates nearly 800,000 pounds of prepared, un-served food collected and distributed to local food banks through the Disney Harvest program. It also donates such things as clothing, industrial equipment, home and office furniture, and personal hygiene items to various organizations. Countless hours from Disney cast members through the VoluntEars program provides much-needed help to the surrounding community.
Men Who Made Walt Disney World
Owen Pope
Owen Pope and his wife Dolly made their living exhibiting horses. Owen met Dolly in December 1929 and they were married on July 13, 1935. In 1950, at the suggestion of Imagineer Harper Goff, Walt Disney caught one of their shows at the Pan Pacific Auditorium in Los Angeles and was impressed, especially by their small ponies that he thought might be a good addition to his Disneyland project. In March 1951, Walt asked the Popes if they would be interested in training horses for Disneyland.
A week after Thanksgiving, Pope moved his thirty-foot-long trailer onto the Disney studio lot. The Popes became the only people to ever live there, and eventually ten stalls were built for the horses. The Popes stayed at the studio for about two-and-a-half years, with Walt visiting them every day to ask questions.
Once the horses were moved to Disneyland, Owen set up loud speakers that had crowd noise and gunshots (because of the shooting galleries) cranked up to the highest volume as he trained the horses there so they could get used to the expected noise.
In addition, Pope supervised the building of Frontierland vehicles like the stagecoach and Conestoga wagon. He was also a harness maker and a decade and a half later made the first harnesses for Walt Disney World while working at Disneyland.
As work was beginning on the construction of Disneyland, one of the houses on the land was moved to a 10-acre location behind Fantasyland dubbed the “pony farm” (and known as the Circle D Corral since 1980). The house had belonged to the Witherills who were walnut growers on Harbor Boulevard.
The Popes moved into the house three days before the opening of Disneyland and were the first and only people who actually resided in Disneyland. At one time, the stray dog that was the live-action reference model for Tramp from Lady and the Tramp (1955) lived with them as well. There were approximately 200 horses at the pony farm on Disneyland’s opening day.
As preparations were underway for the opening of Walt Disney World in Florida, Pope built the harness and riggings for the horses at the new resort from his home in Disneyland. One of those harnesses is on display in a case in the horse museum at the Tri-Circle-D Ranch. Owen Pope has a window on the car barn on WDW’s Main Street, U.S.A. that states: “Owen Pope. Harness Maker.”
In January 1971, he and Dolly moved to Florida, where Owen helped supervise the building of Tri-Circle-D Ranch. A few years later, in September 1975, Dolly became the first Walt Disney World cast member to retire, followed by Owen in October. Even after they had retired they frequently visited the Tri-Circle-D to the delight of the cast members who worked there.
Owen passed away in 2000 in Mount Dora, Florida. at the age of 90. His friends always called him “Buddy.” Family friends brought Dolly back to Texas to live out her final years. Owen and Dolly had both been born in Texas. She died in 2003 at age 89.
Men Who Made WDW
Herb Ryman
In 1938, there was an exhibit of Herb Ryman’s work at the Chouinard Art Institute where he met Walt Disney who was one of its long-time patrons. Walt was impressed by what he saw and asked Ryman, who was then working as an art director on live-action films at MGM, to join the Walt Disney Studio.
At Disney, Ryman was the art director on feature length animated classics like Fantasia and Dumbo. In 1941, he toured South America with Walt and other studio artists creating material that would later be used in the films Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros.
He left the studio in 1944 to work as an art director for live action films at 20th Century Fox and then later left Fox in 1949 to tour with the Ringling Brothers Circus doing paintings of that unique entertainment venue. On September 26, 1953, he got a phone call from Walt wanting him to do a drawing of the proposed plan for Disneyland to excite investors into financing the project.
He continued to work on Disneyland, providing concept paintings for everything from Sleeping Beauty Castle and the interior of attractions to sketches for the Jungle Cruise and Frontierland.
Ryman is most remembered for his iconic designs of New Orleans Square, the first new land at Disneyland. He also worked on projects for the 1964–65 New York’s World Fair that were later installed at Disneyland including Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln.
He later contributed designs for the Magic Kingdom in Florida. Ryman’s design of Cinderella Castle took the form of a romanticized composite of such fabled French courts as Fontainebleau, Versailles, and a dozen famed chateaux of the Loire Valley including Chenonceau, Chambord, and Chaumont.
The emphasis on French architecture was because the Disney animated feature film Cinderella was based on French writer Charles Perrault’s popular version of the tale and not the one from the Brothers Grimm.
Although it’s not often officially acknowledged by Disney, Ryman was also influenced by the blue-tipped turrets of the Alcazar in Segovia, Spain, and included references from the castle in Cinderella as well.
He did renderings for Liberty Square and the Hall of Presidents at the Magic Kingdom. The wooden bridge at the entrance was researched by Ryman to be similar to the one that Paul Revere darted across on his famous ride. He told Imagineer Eddie Soto:
Eddie, bad taste costs no more. That bridge can be either relevant to the story by researching it and giving it meaning, or just an expensive generic bridge.
He felt that by embedding his concept drawings with real history, even subtly, that guests would sense its reality.
Ryman retired in 1971 but returned in 1976 to do work on Epcot including concept art for the interior of the Mexico pavilion that set a festive but moody tone, the China pavilion, and American Adventure. He also contributed concept paintings for Living with the Land, Horizons, and Spaceship Earth.
He did the original concept art for Epcot when it was meant to be a city with the Cosmopolitan Hotel rising high from the center and then later the concept art featuring Spaceship Earth.
When Ryman died from cancer in February 1989, a group of Imagineers in the dead of night planted a small three-foot spruce tree as a memorial to him by the side of Sleeping Beauty Castle near Snow White’s Grotto. While they were not allowed to put a plaque on the memorial, they included a horticultural tag that read: “Genus: Artisticus. Species: Rymanus.”
Ryman said:
I’m most proud that I had the privilege and the opportunity to participate in the development of Walt’s dream. I would have had a very limited audience, but at the Disney parks it’s a world audience, so what better showcase could an artist have?
Men Who Made WDW
Tony Baxter
Tony Baxter, who ended his forty-seven-year career as senior vice president for Creative Development at Walt Disney Imagineering (WDI), was responsible for overseeing the developing of Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, Star Tours, Splash Mountain, Journey Into Imagination, and many other projects.
He began his Disneyland career in 1965 at the age of 17 as a sweeper, quickly working his way up to the role of ice cream scooper at Carnation Plaza Gardens, and finally, a ride operator on Autopia.
Baxter and his family lived in Orange County and went to the park the first summer that Dis
neyland opened. As he once told me, “And from that moment on, it has been a major part of my life.”
For five years, he worked at the park while, at the same time, he was majoring in three areas at college: landscape architecture, architecture, and theater design. In later years, he pointed out that the study of all of these subjects tremendously benefited his work as an Imagineer.
In the summer of 1969, Baxter was working as part of the Submarine Voyage crew when he submitted his portfolio to Imagineering. His dream job of working in WDI began the first week of January 1970 as an apprentice model builder assigned to Imagineer Claude Coats, who was like a father to him and mentored him in the way to create environments in attractions.
Unlike Marc Davis, who used characters in an attraction, Coats’ strength was in providing the background atmosphere in attractions like the Submarine Voyage, Haunted Mansion, and Pirates of the Caribbean.
With Walt Disney World set to open in 1971, Baxter was sent down to Florida to help with the installation of the Fantasyland dark rides and, in particular, the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea attraction. He was only 23 years old and was supervising construction workers twice his age.
When he returned to California, he started developing Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, his first big project that led to many other achievements over the past few decades.
Although primarily connected with enhancing Disneyland, such as the 1983 renovation of Fantasyland and the 1998 revision of Tomorrowland, Baxter also contributed to Walt Disney World including being involved with the installation of several attractions he had developed for Disneyland.
He was the creator of the characters of Dreamfinder and Figment for Epcot’s Journey into Imagination pavilion which he designed.
He said:
When Epcot opened, the public loved Figment. It was number three or four on the sales of plush animals. In WDW, it was like Mickey, Minnie, Donald, and then Figment.