Behind the Magic Conference

It has been inconvenient to post in the last week, as my laptop has been in the shop because the week prior it was crashing every 5-20 minutes. They sent it back, unfixed, and it's in for the second time. But so much has happened that I should post.

Last Friday the Disney class made its second trip to the Henry Ford. This one for the Behind the Magic conference. By far the most exciting part of the day was seeing Marty Sklar, head creative exec at imagineering, and more importantly the strongest living link to both Walt and Pre-corporate machine Disney, and the write of Walt's words for many a show, including the introduction of the Florida Project. What Marty actually had to say wasn't all that thrilling, however. He made mention of several original imagineers and played a video about the imagineering process. For most, it was nothing we didn't know or couldn't look up. The highlights were the few anecdotes he gave which were mostly in response to questions, such as one regarding the financing of Space Mountain.

We had a few other speakers, who were hard to sit through when Marty could have been talking. I noticed he dosed off a litle during some of them. One speaker gave a history of Walt's life we already knew, and another gave a pretty interesting lecture about the effects that the environment in the park has on visitors. She went through a list of human needs, and explained how D fans and critics see each side of them in the park. Not a great speaker, but I think she made that connection between theory about Disney and the concrete way it affects us that has been missing in much of class.

Karal Ann Marling, whose book is reading for class, was a fantastic speaker. It was a very interesting talk on the relevance of D today and some of WD's philosophy in the parks.

We did have some, but not a lot, of time to go back through the exhibit before Tom Fitzgerald spoke. He gave a polished CEO type recounting of Imagineering recent projects and some of the directions they are going in the future. For example, more interactive elements, ie space or buzz lightyear, and randomness, such as multiple drop schemes for ToT.

The afternoon ended with a Panel of all the speakers answering questions. Questions were passed on notecards, I asked one regarding Epcot that didn't get read. Marty was suprisingly open, making a joke about the French's attitude to their Disneyland and a small stab at Eisner. Unfortunatley, because of poor planning we had to get back on the UM culture bus a little early but it was a fantastic day.