Celebrating Walt Disney World: Walt Peregroy and Early Epcot

October 2011 marks the 40th anniversary of the opening of the Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Florida. The Vacation Kingdom has seen a lot of changes over the past four decades and the editorial staff at Imaginerding wants to celebrate the unique and rich history of the resort with a series of posts. A very special thanks to Celeste Cronrath for designing the series of logos for our posts. Make sure to follow her on Twitter.

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Howdy Partners. For your safety, remain seated with your hands, arms, feet, and legs inside the article and be sure to watch your kids. If any of you folks are wearing hats or glasses, best remove em' cause this here is the wildest ride in the wilderness! 

Julie Svendson interviewed Walt Peregroy in December 2007. The amazing (and long) interview was published in Volume 9 of the Walt's People: Talking Disney with the Artists who Knew Him series by Didier Ghez.

Scanned from Walt Disney World: 20 Magical Years.

Do you know what I did in the Kodak pavilion—Images and Imagination was the name of the ride? I also designed the banister on the stairway and colors and designed the outside of the elevator. It’s probably all gone now. I designed the entranceway into the Images and Imagination ride and I did the four-seasons mural in The Land pavilion and the Symphony of the Seed. I did the 27-foot tall, 360-degree sky in the Land pavilion. And I designed the three solid balloons in The Land pavilion that would go up and down with different foods. I designed the fountain below the balloons, but I didn’t get my way on the fountain. Jim Sarno sculpted it. Beautiful. He told me he left because the fountain wasn’t finished with the top the way I designed it. I intended that it all be different foods not only sculpted but painted.

Scanned from Walt Disney's EPCOT Center.

Every celebrity in the world has gone through Disneyland, I’m sure, and I’ve done things there but there’s nothing obvious. But the two pavilions at Epcot are very apparent. You can’t go there without seeing them. And I have this delusion—they could take any piece out of the Symphony of the Seed, very carefully lift it out and put it outdoors or indoors and, with colored lights, it could be a fantastic, contemporary piece of sculpture. But museum curators, art critics, they insult Disney and all of us who work for them saying it’s Mickey Mouse and it’s not true. That’s what they think.

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Walt Peregroy worked for the Disney Studios from 1951-1964 and 1974-1983. At the Studios, he worked on Lady and the Tramp, 101 Dalmatians, Sleeping Beauty and others. His last six years with the Company were spent working at WED on designs for EPCOT Center.

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Book Review: Walt's People Volume 10 by Didier Ghez

Most tenth anniversaries are celebrated with a gift of tin or aluminum. What do you get a noted Disney historian when he publishes the tenth volume of a critically acclaimed series? Should we get him a Tin Toy? What about something from the Kaiser Hall of Aluminum?

All Giants Among Mortal Men!

Regardless, the release of Volume Ten of Walt's People should be greeted with hallelujahs and much fanfare. Not only is the series an indispensable tool for researchers, but Didier has compiled an astounding collection of interviews with people that have worked with Walt Disney or on Disney-related projects.

The Tenth volume is special because Didier was able to collect all of the interviews that Bob Thomas did for his seminal biography: Walt Disney, An American Original. The majority of the interviews took place in 1973 when people were still reeling from Walt's passing in 1966. Artists, family and WED employees are interviewed and provide a fascinating look at working with and for Walt. It is obvious that most of the interviewees had a fondness, if not love, for their boss. The anecdotes provided are priceless and provide an insight into Thomas' writings and the direction of the biography. I would hope that this volume of Walt's People will inspire other authors and researchers to share their interviews with Didier.

Interviewees and essays:

Foreword: Diane Disney Miller
Jim Korkis: A history of the Walt Disney biography by Bob Thomas
Didier Ghez: Bob Thomas
Paul F. Anderson: Bob Thomas
Walt Disney
Walt Pfeiffer
Lillian Disney
Edna Disney
Ub Iwerks
Wilfred Jackson
Bill Cottrell
Herb Ryman
Jim Korkis: Walt’s secretaries
Dolores Voght Scott
Ham Luske
Woolie Reitherman
John Lounsbery
Ward Kimball
Frank Thomas
Milt Kahl
Hazel George
Marc Davis
Dick Huemer
Ollie Johnston
Ken Anderson
George Bruns
Larry Clemmons
Bill Anderson
Robert Stevenson
Bill Walsh
Roy E. Disney
Winston Hibler
James Algar
John Hench
Harper Goff
Dick Irvine
Card Walker
Donn Tatum
Wathel Rogers
Roger Broggie
Marvin Davis
Joe Potter
Robert Foster
Joe Fowler

Pretty impressive, no?

The majority of the Walt's People volumes focus on interviews with artists that worked on the animated films. Occasionally, you find interviews with people that worked on Disneyland. Take a look at the bottom part of the list of interviewees. Most of them were directly involved with creating Walt Disney World after Walt's passing. As noted earleir, the interviews took place around 1973 and many of the interviews focus on the plans for Walt Disney World and the expansion of the Florida Project.

I will iterate: Didier's Walt's People Series is a very important addition to the collected research about Walt Disney. Walt's People will be used for many years to come by researchers and publishers.

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• Walt and Libraries (imaginerding.com)
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Walt and Libraries

Walt's People, Volume 10 is about to be released by Didier Ghez. This collection of interviews focuses solely on the research that Bob Thomas did when writing his astounding Walt Disney: An American Original. Page 18 features this wonderful quote about Walt Disney and libraries.

He told me that when he got into a problem and couldn’t figure it out, he would go to the library to find out what the answers were. He continued to do that all of his life. He would either go to the library or call people who would be able to tell him what he needed to know. And in the reverse he was available for people who wanted to question him about their projects. It was a very interesting aspect of his life.

The Walt's People Series is a must-have for Disney enthusiasts of every interest.

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Margaret Kerry Dishes on Why Tinkerbell is at Disneyland!

The Walt's People series by Didier Ghez (nine volumes released so far) is a fascinating collection of interviews from people that worked with Walt or were heavily involved in the Disney Company. The fact that Didier has been able to compile so many interviews that would otherwise sit in the private collections of researchers is astounding and a boon to Disney enthusiasts, historians and researchers. Most of the interviews focus on animation and the art from the Disney Company; occasionally, you find an amazing nugget that relates directly to the theme parks.

Margaret Kerry, live-action model for Tinkerbell, was interviewed by Jim Korkis. From page 185 of Volume Nine:

Image via WikipediaTinker Bell was just going to be a fun secondary character that Disney was going to have in one movie. Then all the things changed when Disneyland started. 

I’m told that so many of the people at the Studio thought Disneyland was going to lose money or even go bankrupt. So they went to Roy and said, “Roy, would you tell him that we’re asking him not to use our big characters that we can license and make money off of, so when Disneyland flops, we can get the money back?”

Roy evidently talked to Walt in a much nicer manner than I just did, and Walt understood and got back to Roy and said, “Tell ‘em I’m going to use Jiminy Cricket and Tinker Bell.” That’s why when Disneyland opened you saw Jiminy Cricket and Tinker Bell everyplace. But you didn’t see a lot of the big licensed characters. He also made Tinker Bell the one who came in to everybody’s household once a week and took children on a magical trip to someplace on the Disneyland television program. Kids got to know her, and before you know it, there were all these books and merchandise.

Fascinating to think that Tinkerbell and Jiminy Cricket were minor players, once, and that Disneyland was a complete unknown.

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Sounding Fantasia

On page 515 of Volume 9 of the Walt's People series, we find the following quote from Tom Sito concerning the differences in the recordings for the scores of Fantasia and Fantasia 2000:

Then the other issue people had was when you work in the original footage, because our film was going to be done in the modern screen format of 1:85. And it’s also six-track Dolby digital stereo and the original  Fantasia, even restored, still was in the 1:33 original aspect ratio, the old cinema aspect ratio, plus they had all kinds of problems with the stereo.

In 1949 they transferred the original tracks from the original recordings on the nitrate strip. And they went to magnetic tape. The new invention in the 1940s was magnetic recording tape, so they wanted to go to mag-track on it, and the best labs in the world at the time were at NBC TV. So they wanted to transfer the Fantasia tracks to magnetic tape, but in so doing they transferred them along telephone lines and by doing that they lost a lot of the high and low registries, some of the high notes and some of the low notes. And it has always been part of the problem when they digitally re-mastered the sound: It always loses a little something, because some of the parts of the performance were lost in the recording. The preservationists go crazy trying to figure out: They had scientists working on it full-time, like John Carnaughan and Alex Rannie. It was interesting, because every couple of weeks they would have us into the Studio and they would say, “I think we licked it. Okay, let’s play the modern stuff and then let’s play the old stuff,” and then they would say, “Can you hear the difference?” We would say, “Yeah, you can hear a difference.” [Laughs] They still sounded different. To their credit, they were not going to make the mistake of getting rid of Stokowski’s soundtrack.

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Don't Say Anything to Roy...

Jack Cutter started at the Disney Studio as an assistant animator in 1929 and eventually worked his way up to Head of the Foreign Department where he retired in 1975. His role was to ensure that Disney films could be released to the overseas markets with proper dubbing by appropriate voice actors. In the following excerpt from Walt's People - Volume 9, Jack is interviewed by Christopher Finch and Linda Rosenkrantz:

That’s how it was. Walt was never one to deal in half measures when he was interested in something. For example, I learned to fly some years ago and when Walt found out I had bought a plane, he talked to me about flying and said he would like to take it up. So I asked him to go flying with me. He did and was enthusiastic about it. When we came down, he said, “Don’t say anything to Roy because he will have a fit if he finds out I am interested in flying.” Walt never learned to fly, but some years later when he decided to have a Company plane, even though Roy was concerned about his flying, he started with a Cessna Queen Air and then a Turbo King Air, and finally a Gulfstream. Before he died he had ordered a Jet Gulfstream and was talking about going around the world in it. Walt was never one to think small. He always did things in big scope but never did anything foolish or extravagant.

Mickey One parked backstage as part of the Backlot Tour at Disney's Hollywood Studio.