[0:00] If something is in the land, the cause for it to exist must also be in the land. Like the marquee for Kilimanjaro Safaris is a billboard for Kilimanjaro Safaris with like phone numbers and address it. You know, that’s right. Like if there’s a marquee, someone inside that land, some imaginary inhabitant of the land, made that thing and put it there. Not us, Walt Disney Imagineering, to tell you that something is there.

[0:43] Thank you for joining us on a Welcome Home podcast today. Today we are joined by a literal Disney legend. As a longtime creative executive for Walt Disney Imagineering, he was the lead creative force behind Disney’s Animal Kingdom, Expedition Everest, Pandora, The World of Avatar, The Adventurers Club, Guardians of the Galaxy, Mission Breakout, and Aulani, just to name a few. He’s here to talk about his new book, Floating Mountains, The Art of Imagining the Impossible, available now. We are so thrilled and honored to welcome Joe Rohde to the show. Joe, thank you so much for joining us. Oh, you bet. Thanks for having me. It’s exciting. We both read your book and we really loved it. Honestly, it was such an interesting book. Before we started recording here, you were saying it’s for Disney fans. There’s a lot of Disney mixed into it, but it’s also just a lot about your creative philosophy. And how, you know, but even just like, you know, as not, I mean, I’m not an artist, but, you know, even just, you know, talking about how to work on teams and team building and collaboration, so much of that is stuff that I, you know, felt like I could apply to my regular life.

[1:51] I do hope that it can be used by people, anybody really, who wants to work together in a group, especially on something that has not been done before. It’s really, that’s kind of the point of the book, is not only how do we work together, but how do we work together on something that has not been done before? I definitely got that from the book a lot. I know in the book you talk about, the creative process and being a map. I feel like the book itself was a map for the creative process. Like it very much had that intent behind it that you were giving guiding points for, like I say, you know, neither Tom nor myself are Imagineers, but it’s definitely inspiring that we, like, I feel like I can take a lot of that and apply it to just things that I do in my day to day, which is just wonderful. Yeah, no, that is my hope. When we first were discussing with the folks at National Geographic what kind of book to make, they told me that we want a book that’s like your Instagram.

[2:58] And it is sort of like a giant, long Instagram post made of paper. But my thought was my actual Instagram could be about anything. I mean, sometimes it’s like 37 chapters on the history of immersive design, and sometimes it’s, look, I found a frog in the backyard.

[3:17] So the arc of the book, the arc of the book is actually what you refer to. It’s not a linear narrative of my career. It’s a linear arc of an idea about what is creativity, where does it come from, what happens to it when we nurture it, And then what happens to it when we put it together with other people? How do we manage all that interface? And in the end, what does it all mean? And why are we doing this in the first place?

[3:48] And you definitely did that really effectively. Like I could, I couldn’t put it down, honestly. I mean, I was reading on an ebook, but I couldn’t put my phone down. I kept going back to it to read it more and more. And I really love how you presented a lot of the, the, the, some of the things that have happened in your life with that had multiple people where you had all of those different, you wrote it like a play, which was really, really, really neat. So to that end, I listened to the audio book, which I very appreciated you getting all those people involved to do their parts in the play. It was as much fun as it was to read. It was also a lot of fun to listen to as well. Sometimes it just gets hard to track when you have a group of people in a text talking. He said, then he said, then he replied, she answered. So I thought for some of these, we’re just going to do it like a play, right? And the people, you know, it’s narrated by my son, Brandt. We have some of the original people who were really there doing their parts, and then playing the parts of other people. But it is like little mini plays inside the book, also because I want the book to be like what it is talking about, right? It is talking about creativity. It’s talking about collaboration. It should be like that, right?

[5:02] The collaborative work that goes into those little plays is kind of like an example of what the book is actually about. The fact that a book about creativity has weird, unusual inclusions makes the book like what it is talking about. That makes total sense. One of the questions I wanted to ask you was a recent thing, right? And not a recent thing, but something that’s been going on for a long time. And I’m sure you get asked about this all the time. So I apologize in advance for asking about it again. But, you know, you mentioned the Yeti and Expedition Everest in your book. And one of the parts of your book I really loved was how you talked about failure and how, you know, while a failure at the time may look like a failure, it’s not always really a failure, right? And you talked about the Yeti as part of that. And you famously said, I will fix the Yeti someday, I swear, right?

[5:52] And now, obviously, we just had D23. And, you know, they announced that the Yeti is going to be fixed. I’m just curious, you know, what, what changed from, you know, all these years, is it the technology has gotten better? Is it just the right time, the right amount of money, the rate of attention? Is it, you know, do you, I mean, do you have any idea of a look into that? I only know, I mean, actually at the time I wrote it, all I knew is what I always knew, which is we continue to try to find a solution. That’s what I knew. So by the time the book goes to print, it’s gone. It’s like ceramics, you know what I mean? It’s baked. That’s the book. It’s out. Then I found out that they were going to replace the Yeti. Now, to be clear, they’re going to replace the Yeti because if they could fix the Yeti, they would have fixed the Yeti.

[6:41] And in the book, I say this as well. You have to understand that the solution, to the problem is not necessarily doing over what you just did. That’s what the whole chapter is about, right? Is brand and adapting and moving and sliding around. So, Um, the purpose of the Yeti within the context of that story is to establish that it is alive. That is its job to establish that it is real and that it is alive. Uh, and in order to do that, it needs to move. Yeah. Right. That’s really the core story point of it. What it does is immaterial to me. Uh, um, and so we’ll, and I don’t actually know what it’s going to do. I only know that they believe they have found a solution. Now, the problem, the reason this takes forever, it is exceedingly complicated to be able to come up with something, that you can afford to do in a window of time that is expedient to do it, right? Yeah, yeah.

[7:56] That does not present the kind of challenges that are going to impact schedule, because if you miss your schedule, now you can’t do it again, right? It’s really, really complicated. And that’s all beyond the logistics of getting the old Yeti out and a new Yeti in and all that stuff on a ride that, frankly, is very popular despite the fact that the Yeti doesn’t move, right? All that factors in. And what that does, you just have to picture it like a whole bunch of different clocks, all set to different speeds, all rotating, but sometimes they all hit 12 noon, right? And so you have to find this time when they all hit 12 noon, go there, that’s the opportunity. That’s great. You say clocks, but I’m envisioning complex gear ratios. Yeah.

[8:49] It is. It’s like, it’s like, um, it’s like the Mayan calendar, you know, where it only comes setting like every 270 years or something like that. That, that makes sense. Yeah. I have to say like, like to your point, I expected that they were going to replace the Yeti. Um, I was fortunate enough that i actually got to ride expedition ever since 2006 so i got to see the yeti as it was supposed to be and i’m very curious to see, i like you i’m not i’m not so interested in like is it going to be the same as what it was but it’s like how is it going to change right i think that’s more the mindset that you’re trying to emphasize is you know don’t expect it to be yeah and also people say as it was supposed to be but if it broke and you can’t maintain it, then that’s not the way it was supposed to be. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I just hope they consult with you on it when they, whenever they redo it. Cause I, that’s the tired. Nobody owes me anything. They might, but they don’t, there’s no obligation. I wanted to ask you a question, uh, this, uh, uh, and to be fair, if you don’t have an answer to this, that’s totally fair. Um, but you were talking your book about, um, uh, Marty Sklar trusting you on, uh, on projects that you were doing do you remember if there was a specific moment where you realized you had earned his trust because it like just the dynamics of working in a company like disney i feel like.

[10:15] There had to have been a point where you realized that like they’re trusting you with a lot right well yeah i mean this especially relates to disney’s animal kingdom right because it’s, not been done before. There’s so many factors. It’s so strange, right? It hasn’t been done before. It’s not exactly on a business plan to be done because you can’t predict that you’re going to do it if you don’t even know what it is. So you can’t put it on a plan to say, oh, we’re going to do this and it’s going to open it, blah, because you don’t even know what it is, right? Right?

[10:54] And so we’re allowed, in a way, to work on it. We’re allowed to explore it. And for some period of that time, it was not 100% of our job. We still had other assignments, even though, if I’m not mistaken, many of those assignments also did not come to pass. Right? Because this was a fantastically experimental era when we’re working on all kinds of things. So we’re working we’re working, we’re working. And I think, the key was our ability to enlist the trust of others. Like, okay, you have gotten this thing past the point where nobody thinks it should be done, right? That then is like, okay, we’re going to treat you like this could be real, as opposed to we’re going to treat this like an exercise. I would say that was probably… A year or so in. And then you start, everyone’s very serious. Marty’s very serious about, okay, if you’re going to do this, think about this, think about that, look at this, look at that. But at first, it’s almost more like it’s an exercise. Let’s just think about this.

[12:19] But what we did, and this is probably why we earned the trust, is we did think about it, but we didn’t think about it creatively. We thought about it from a feasibility point of view. Everyone thinks this can’t be done. Not that it won’t be cool. That’s not what they’re thinking. They’re thinking it can’t be done. So the first thing we need to do is think about what makes this thing possible? What combination of features makes this thing possible?

[12:51] And once we describe that, anything creative that we volunteer has to fit within that paradigm. For example, it can’t be 100% all live animals. That will make it not possible, right? Yeah. And so there’s a whole series of things we had to figure out first to make it feasible in order that the ideas that we thought about that would go into it would also be feasible. And you went into that quite a bit in the book, the process just to get to the concept, right? And I’m actually curious, do you think, based on the thesis of humanity’s relationship with nature and some of the uncomfortable things that you had in the very beginning of it with poaching and the conservation things, do you think, Animal Kingdom, if you bring this today, that this gets approved in its original form? Or do you think it goes forward? Or is it maybe more relevant now? It might be more relevant now. I’m not sure. were all ideas, all ideas, regardless of what the idea is.

[13:57] Are like these, so it’s very quantum physics-y kind of thing. It’s like the idea has to emerge at a time when the conditions to adopt the idea also exist. There is no validity to an idea independent of its own feasibility. They all come together. So asking whether Animal Kingdom would be approved today.

[14:29] It wouldn’t be that animal kingdom. So what’s the point? Some other idea could be approved today, but it wouldn’t be that idea. That idea happened when it happened because of the conditions when it happened. It’s just like when people talk about beastly kingdom. This beastly kingdom idea was barely a set of illustrations and two pages of verbal description. That’s what it was. It’s not like a land that didn’t get built. It was like an idea for a land that didn’t get pursued.

[15:08] So it’s good to delineate between like concepts versus like something that got to the finish line and was stopped. A lot of people assume that those are the same thing, right? Extremely rare for a concept to get to the finish line and not get built. That’s very rare. So when you think about something where you’ve invested, you can imagine the huge amounts of money and people and drawings just to get to the point of capital approval to build. It is rare to get to the point of capital approval to build something and then not build it. Whereas to think of something, that’s all Imagineers do is think of something. And there’s like hundreds of thousands of ideas that get thought of that don’t get built and don’t even get to the point of capital approval. I mentioned in the book, I can’t name the project, but we did work on a project that got all the way to the point of capital approval, probably represented, almost two years of work, but it reached the point of capital approval on the eve of the Bear Stearns stock market collapse. So then those clocks don’t line up, right?

[16:26] And now if you were going to do it, you would never do that. You would do another thing that’s different than that. So it doesn’t matter that it didn’t get done. It’s not like it’s sitting there waiting to get done. So anyway, and the book kind of deals with this. This thing about these ideas live in an evolutionary flow. They are constantly evolving towards their own accomplishment. Whether it’s an expedition or whether it’s a project, which is why I use both expeditions and projects almost equally to illustrate these ideas, because I really do think, The flow pattern is so similar. Yeah, I will say I did like how you did. I felt like every time you were describing something on an expedition, you were always relating it back to you were applying it in in stuff you were doing inside of Disney and all that. I realized like as you were talking about the book and you were talking about all these things you were doing, you did bring up dissent and discussion as like all these creative processes have those.

[17:30] Was what did that look like for the book i guess is the question because this is a book okay so the first level of the same was i presented a completely different book to national geographic, there was a completed book i think very well written book uh about a single expedition in which the arc of the book was a chronological linear narrative about a single expedition. And the lessons about creativity were a secondary thread that ran through it. And they were like, well, we love this book, but this is not a first book. We want you to write a book that is more centrally about your manner of thinking. And we want it to be like your Instagram. So that’s a form of dissent. And then once you complete the first draft, then there’s a whole editorial process, which also results in things like, I know you think this is very clear. It’s not very clear. Or you put this in this chapter. We really think it belongs over here in this other chapter. This whole chapter interrupts the flow of the book, probably should just come out of the book altogether, all that kind of stuff. And so here’s the thing. If you’re too.

[18:50] Ego invested in this idea of like, I’m the creative, whatever I’m the guy and, no one can tell me what to do. Uh, and I’m whatever divinely inspired genius person. Um, you just never.

[19:11] You might very well produce something that you’re very proud of and that it could be great, You’ll never know what it could have been by integrating your effort with other people. So you can’t really prove that it’s better than it would have been if you had engaged other people. And remember, I’ve never written, I’ve never published a book. All these people have more expertise than me. They know books. They know that stuff. Why would I not collaborate with them on the construction of the book? That just makes sense, right? I mean, the choice of font, the cover design, those are not my areas of expertise. So I’m bringing a category of creative work to another kind of team, and we’re going to work together on another kind of creative product that I’ve never done before. You talked a lot in the book about, you know, it’s interesting because, you know, a lot of people identify you with Animal Kingdom, right? And I think you may be the only person ever, maybe besides Walt Disney, that is so closely associated with one particular theme park.

[20:16] But, you know, you take great pains to mention, you know, you don’t do these things alone. You know, there’s, you know, hundreds and hundreds of people that work on these things. But why do you think that you have just kind of become associated with Animal Kingdom more than any other park that has been built? I think that had to do with going back to the theme of the book, right? There’s a whole chapter in there about divergence from the normal distribution curve, from the center of the bell curve.

[20:46] So when we were working on Disney’s Animal Kingdom, remember, we don’t know what it’s going to be. We don’t know when it’s going to open. We don’t know if it will ever turn into something that can be built. But in order for any of those things to be true, there is a huge, huge amount of information you need to learn, and a network of people who are not within the Disney company that you need to build and build solidarity with. So you’re doing all that as an investment in something that nobody knows yet will ever happen. By the time it does happen, myself and my team are the only people with the invested time and network. And as you know, the subject of animals can be fraught with all kinds of things. Don’t say that right. You say that wrong. Someone’s upset. You refer to something else. Someone’s upset. And we’re trying to get people to love the park and come to the park. So that means people on my team are the best equipped to talk about the project. I come from a theatrical background. I know what a camera is. I know what a director is. I know how to hit a mark. I know how to form a soundbite. So I end up in front of the cameras.

[22:01] And then that sets in place a cascade where I’m always in front of the cameras and people are used to me in front of the cameras. And pretty soon, I’m just this guy who talks about Animal Kingdom. And Animal Kingdom causes these other projects, which are similar in that they involve research. They involve extending a network beyond the Disney company. And once again, by the time you’ve invested in that, you are among the only people that can talk about it because it involves information from outside the center of the bell curve. And so again, you end up being the person who’s doing the talking, and that goes on for decades, decades, right? So it’s tied to the fact that most of my work is kind of outside the center of the intellectual property brand. And therefore, in order to talk about it and even do the work, you have to invest in all this additional information, but then you’re the person who knows that information.

[23:02] That makes sense. I’m sure it probably also helped that you have a unique look with your earrings. And I think at the time you had the mustache too. Yeah, the earrings are like a total accident of just making a simple decision early in my life and then carrying through. But it is true that people would remember they saw me. You know what I mean? Yeah, it’s very memorable. A lot of people, you know, you see people, but people can see me and they’d be like, that is the guy. That’s not a guy who could be the guy. Definitely the guy. But really, it’s true. I represent teams and teams and teams of people. And if you read the book, you’ll notice most of the anecdotes I relate are incidences in which the team is rescuing me from my own rather conservative impulses, which are driven as much by feasibility as creativity, to do something more creative than the initial thing I thought we were going to do. I actually, and sorry, Trevor, I know you probably have. Oh, go ahead. I actually thought that was really an interesting piece, especially with like the tree of life in Animal Kingdom, where you had mentioned your original, the original concept you put was for, I guess for a different part of the land and it was just like a regular size tree. And then, you know, others kind of expanded it to what it ended up being. Yeah. I mean, because…

[24:26] I’m not an engineer. I have some engineering training, but I’m not an engineer. And that was an interesting one where you’re tracking to solve one problem. In that case, in my mind, solve what we call the dead load. How do we hold this thing together so that its weight is distributed? It turns out that’s not really the… By the time you solve that problem, you don’t need the thing that I thought was necessary. Same thing happened with the floating mountains in Pandora. We spent the early part of that study worrying about the dead load, meaning the vertical weight of the mountains down. But the real problem is wind load, which is the sideways load of wind on those mountains. And of course, what turns out is the things that made it a problem for the dead load, like weight, are really good for the lateral load, which is wind.

[25:30] So it ended up being actually built of rather conservative materials when at first we were like, oh, and build them out of carbon fiber or some weird thing. But that all just makes it worse because they’re more lightweight, and the actual problem is the lateral stress. With the tree, the problem was cantilevering these branches. And so I thought, we’ll have to tie them together with this geodesic dome, right? And then we’ll put the leaves on the geodesic dome. It’ll kind of look like a piece of broccoli, but it’s symbolic. And then the engineer’s like, look, by the time we engineer these branches to hold up that dome, They hold up themselves, you know? That makes sense. I guess that is right. So we don’t need the dome. And then we have a naturalistic looking tree. I recalled, is it correct that the tree was built from an oil rig or something initially? Not from one, but from the same internal design principle. So if you strip the tree and you look at what’s inside of it, it is almost identical to the support for an oil rig. Because, again, the lateral stresses and the weight distribution, all that. It’s not like we went and bought an oil rig, but it is virtually the same design principle. If you’ve ever seen a production photograph of the early, early, early frame for the tree, it looks exactly like a rig frame. See, I’m glad I asked that because the myth was always that you took an oil rig and plunked it in there and built around it.

[26:58] But that’s not what happened. right yeah not exactly trevor if you don’t mind i just want to ask one question really quick this wasn’t something that was in your in your book and i i am curious did you when they were carving the animals into the tree of life did you get in there and carve any of them or, i know you’re you know you you’ve done you’ve done that kind of art i did i did carve some, animals in there but mostly probably worked on i’m not a good enough carver to do any of the major animals you know uh i think i did.

[27:31] Like a dinosaur head down in the roots somewhere and something else somewhere but not very much not very much it was mostly done by jolt hormé and his extraordinary team uh of carvers.

[27:45] I feel like that’s a good easter egg for me to go find somewhere is the is the is the animal that uh that joe carved into the tree, there’s like because we had this idea that down in the roots of the tree are all are kind of like extinct animals, uh and i’m pretty sure that i carved kind of like a tyrannosaurus rex head or something like that somewhere somewhere but that’s honestly i mean i was so busy i’m running around looking at everything so, i mean you you were still doing though i mean i i saw on your on your instagram you talked about how there was a painting at, I think it was Restaurantosaurus that you had just painted. So it was amazing to me that you just were like, we need a painting there. And you just painted something and put it there. Well, yeah, more complicated than that. It’s like, we can’t afford to put props over all these walls. So in order to recognize the value of the prop budget, we need to find something big that covers a big chunk of that wall that doesn’t cost us a lot of money. So if I paint it more or less on my normal hours, which are paid for anyway, then that’s a great big giant chunk of wall, that we don’t have to pay for because I’m going to do the painting and that allows us to spend more money on everything else for the rest of the walls but that’s a big painting, did you get that painting back after they took down no no I don’t know where that painting went that painting went off to the archives or who knows where, but that was a cool painting, it definitely was yeah.

[29:09] I again know knowing like all the little details and stuff like that is there anything in, animal kingdom that like that is there something that you feel like 99 percent of people walk by but you wish that well i mean you know it doesn’t get noticed right most people walk by almost everything, right true i mean that’s just true uh animal kingdom has this level of detail and realism, mainly to support the idea that the stories are chiefly set in the real world. And the real world is full of detail that you walk by all the time and never notice. You’re not obliged to notice the detail. The point is, just like with a berm, you’re not obliged to look at the berm, and realize, oh, I can’t see out of the park. It’s there, so you don’t have to think about that. And the detail’s the same way. The detail is there in case you do look closely, you’re still inside the story. So there’s no point in a detail that you may or may not have noticed. But there are tons of detail that it’s very hard to just think of. Is there a particular detail that people don’t notice? Who knows?

[30:36] I don’t know. There are areas I really like, like when you go through Maharaja Jungle Trek, there’s this area where obviously there used to be this very elegant formal garden, and it’s completely gone to seed, but there are still orange trees growing, out of the planters. How many people notice that that has a layout like a formal garden? I don’t know. Who knows? Yeah. I think, does anybody really notice in Flame Tree Barbecue that all the animals are in predator-prey relationships in all the little dining pavilions? Who knows? Oh, my gosh. No, I never noticed that.

[31:19] And I look at the – I’m one of those people that looks at the details, Joe. That’s why Animal King is my favorite park because it is the most real park. It’s the most well-designed. It’s so real and so well-done and so detailed, and I look for those details. And I go to Flame Tree every time we go to Animal Kingdom, and I never noticed that before. Go to the pavilions and you’ll notice it’s always like alligators and fish, you know, or owls and mice. You know, do people notice the little colonial details in Harambe? Like there’s a 1930s era British colonial mailbox. Do they notice that? Do they notice that there must have been some kind of revolution in 1961 because it says Harambe 1961 all over the place, Uhuru, which means freedom, 1961.

[32:09] Does anyone notice that? Who knows? Yeah, I will notice that now that you brought it up. I appreciate highlighting those. And that’s kind of why I was asking the question because I know that there is so much stuff in Animal Kingdom that, you know, I think, you know, Tom and I, we both love details. But we also walk by just as much as we notice. Yeah, that’s fine. That’s fine. It’s the same way you could go to anywhere you go in the world, and nobody obliges you to know everything. I mean, people go to Venice, Italy, have a fabulous time in Venice, Italy, they don’t know jack about the history of Venice or why that stone is the way it is or why that window has a particular shape different from the other window over here. Who are the four guys hugging each other at the corner of the Basila San Marco? Nobody knows that stuff, and they don’t have to. But it is there, and it makes the place rich and enticing enough that you want to be there. But you’re not obliged to know all that stuff. We are. It is interesting because I feel like a lot of times theme park people will point to.

[33:14] Something like what Harry Potter is at Universal as the first immersive land or things like that. But I honestly think that Animal Kingdom is the first of the very immersive theme parks because you are really immersed in those places that you’re in. And so, again, that’s why I love it so much. I do think Animal Kingdom is the first time we decided to make a land that’s more like a film set, you know, where the land is one entire place, not a, you can’t get to these, even Adventureland, you know, you kind of go to Pirates or you go to, now there’s these places you can get to from the land that.

[33:59] Aren’t logical if you were really in the land. And Animal Kingdom tended to try to stage itself as if you’re in this land, that queue line that you’re about to enter was set up by the people in this land. That marquee was put up by the people in this land. So you never have that sensation that there’s a design company somewhere designing this. It’s all, and really, I try to be very strict with the designers like who put that sign there how did they make that sign why would they put that sign there how did they ever manage, to make a sign that nice when they run a business in this building that kind of stuff right and that you think kind of, whatever made it possible for that to be a way that you could do theme parks.

[34:55] So everything is more accurate. That’s like the overarching driver. Well, everything is sourced from within the concept of the story. If something is in the land, the cause for it to exist must also be in the land. So if you think of most of our marquees in most parks, the marquee for the attraction stands out from the land. It is a designed thing. And it broadcasts, even from the clever names, you have these names that call attention to the fact that this is a designed thing. Animal Kingdom, like the marquee for Kilimanjaro Safaris, is a billboard for Kilimanjaro Safaris with phone numbers and addresses. you know, like if there’s a marquee someone inside that land some imaginary inhabitant of the land, made that thing and put it there not us Walt Disney Imagineering to tell you that something is there that’s not.

[36:06] Within the story that makes total sense i i uh i did have a question so you have uh, over your career you know early on you you weren’t really doing theme park stuff and you know you’re doing other things around the company and then you you started you know you did animal kingdom and then from there you you started managing a lot of other things and doing some other things so you’ve built things that are both ip oriented you know, and non-ip oriented and i’m curious uh, you know So do you feel like having intellectual property as your starting point, does that help the creative process and help you go deeper? Or is it better to have an original concept that you can kind of build from the beginning as far as from a creativity standpoint? Well, obviously, in terms of raw creativity, starting at zero is more creative. But I think the question of intellectual property has more to do with the treatment of intellectual property. So creatively, you have to understand that most of our intellectual properties come from film, right? So what makes a film work, the reason the intellectual property becomes valuable, is because the film is successful.

[37:24] But what makes a film successful has a huge amount to do with the aesthetics and the technology and the storytelling form of film. The fact that it is 90 minutes long. The fact that I fully, fully, fully and absolutely control the point of view of the viewer through the lens. Right? The fact that I have the benefit of emotionally loaded close-ups to cue you about the emotional tone of a reaction. I can change frame size. I can be zoomed in on a person’s eyeball to establish an emotion and zoom out to see an entire city within seconds of each other.

[38:13] None of that is true in a theme park. And so you can’t rely on the success of the film to ensure the success of an intellectual property in a park. You actually have to strip it back to its raw components and reassemble it. And that’s the creative part. It’s like to say, what is it within this film, that could be extracted from the film and made new again in the context of a theme park, That’s creative, right? Because now you’ve treated the film as raw material. If you’re just treating the film as.

[39:09] A reference, we’re just going to do the film again, then you have the problem that you don’t have a medium that is really capable of the same level of emotional intensity that you got from the film. And so you’re pirating the emotions. From the film. My preference by stripping all the way back to zero and rebuilding is that you build the emotions from zero for the moment that you’re crafting, like I think we did with Flight of Passage. Flight of Passage is not a scene from the movie, and there are no characters from the movie. It’s not even a place that you went to in the movie. It is just like the movie, right? But it’s happening to you, and it’s happening now. And it’s very emotional, very emotional. There’s whole subreddits about people, breaking into tears, because it’s very emotionally powerful. But it’s emotionally powerful because it’s built from zero. It’s built from zero, using the film as raw material, rather than reflecting upon the film as if, wasn’t it great that time when so-and-so did that thing that they did in that film that you really liked. So to me.

[40:30] The branch in the road is not between IP and non-IP. The branch in the road is between building from zero or building reflexively based on the previous success of another story. So if you’re a storyteller, you need to tell your story from zero, right? Right? I mean, nobody who’s telling a story, you don’t start a story, you start a story at once upon a time, and then you tell people what the story is, you know? You don’t start a story by saying.

[41:21] Citing. It’s not like a monograph. You’re not citing a story to tell a story. You’re telling the story. So to me, that’s the real branch. It’s not a branch between IP and non-IP. It’s a branch between how you treat raw material. Are you building a story from zero that is appropriate for the medium in which you work, which is a fully dimensionalized, non-linear immersive environment? Or are you retelling a story that was successful in a separate and distinct medium because of the nature of that medium? And you’re now trying to convert that into a new but completely distinct medium, which I think is much more difficult and fraught with, problems of presentation. Yeah, that makes total sense. And you did that with Guardians of the Galaxy, too, with Mr. Drake. Same kind of thing, yeah. And you talked about that. The building is not from any movie. They made a little tiny building in the distance in Guardians 2 that kind of looked kind of like it, but not really. Just enough to tie it into the universe. What are the Guardians like? What are they like? And can we make an attraction that is like them, the same spirit, the same spirit of the Guardians?

[42:42] Because it was very clear that there’s no money, there’s no time, and in some cases, there is no physical ability in the built world to make it be like the movie. But you can make it be like the Guardians of the Galaxy.

[42:58] But that forces you to then think, well, what are they like? What is the nature of the Guardians of the Galaxy that could become the nature of an attraction? That to me is creative work and that again to me is starting from zero and with the team we would do this where I was like look I want, I want to answer questions like this. Like, I walk into a space. Clearly, there are things in cages, things being kept against their will. Things are being collected. A thing comes on a screen. There’s a guy with white hair. Nobody likes him. He must be some kind of bad guy. Then there’s these other people. They’re funny. They seem to have… They are spunky. I like them. And only one of them is trying to even get out, and that’s the little raccoon guy. He seems spunky. We go into a room. Oh, there’s the raccoon guy. He must have gotten out. You know, I don’t need to know anything. I do not need to know anything. The same way you don’t need to know anything about Tibetan art or the history of Africa to walk through the lands at Animal Kingdom. They’re perfectly fine, right? You can enjoy knowing anything. The same way you should be able to go on Guardians of the Galaxy or any other ride and know zero, nothing, zip, zip, nothing, and have a fully rewarding emotional experience of the ride.

[44:26] I just have one last thing to ask you. Just talking about all the expeditions that you’ve done, is there anywhere that you’ve been so many places and seen so many things? Is there anywhere that you haven’t been yet that you’re like, is there maybe still like a bucket list that you haven’t been to? Oh, yeah, there’s tons of places I have not been. There are multiple expeditions I have in mind or in development. There are particular places in the world I’ve always wanted to go. We’ll see whether I ever get to them. I’m fascinated by this. Ruins of this Pacific culture on this island called Nan Madol, N-A-N, capital M-A-D-O-L. It’s like this weird stone canal city on these Pacific islands down in kind of like Micronesia. Wow. That’s really cool.

[45:26] Built out of logs of basalt, because when basalt cools, it forms these hexagonal logs, and they harvested these logs, and then, like a Lincoln Log City of basalt logs through by these canals. That seems interesting. I would love to go there. It’s rather difficult to get to. Lots of places in Africa I haven’t been, barely been anywhere in South America. Um… There’s a lot of places that I would like to go in the remaining time I have to do expeditions. I have to be mindful as I get older to pick expeditions I can do. That is fair, yes. Yeah, Trevor was wondering if when you were doing research for Dinoland, he’s up in Canada, in Alberta, and he’s got a lot of the dinosaurs in those areas. If you guys went up there to look at any— We did. I didn’t go, but we sent other people to Drumheller. Drumheller, yeah. One of the guys up there. Oh, yeah. All that dinosaur stuff was just as well-researched as anything else. And by the way, all the Tropical Americas stuff, same thing.

[46:35] The team working on Tropical Americas, which I have barely anything to do with, at all, are doing a spectacular job of field research. And that will be a spectacularly vivid land, you know, full of the same level of underlying reality that makes Animal Kingdom stuff work. I was actually, it’s funny that you mentioned that because I was just going to ask you about that. Because you’ve talked on your social media about the South America, about having a concept for that at one point. What do you think’s the challenges of bringing a land that’s based on those areas into a park that’s dedicated to conservation and about animals? No, it’s always the same. How do you make this thing relevant to Animal Kingdom? How do you make Encanto relevant to Animal Kingdom, for example? Right? Because ostensibly, the story of Encanto doesn’t necessarily connect to Animal Kingdom. But this particular treatment of Encanto is very focused on Antonio and his, you know, connection to animals. And so the focus has been moved then, right, to a sub-theme, but a sub-theme that is relevant, right? So you go through this ride, and yes, it connects to Encanto, but the focus is animals.

[48:00] I mean, it’s an Indiana Jones ride, but the focus is this fantastically rich representation of Mayan culture, which really nobody has done justice to. I’m so excited to see it. All represented here. Yeah, Trevor, I think you were going to ask, Joe, if you had anything to do with the Indiana Jones ride, because we know that you’re a Maya expert, and it seems like they’re doing a lot of Mayan. Well, I mean, here’s the part. We have tried, really, for probably, I shudder to think that it’s 20 years, but it’s probably 20 years, probably is nearly 20 years, to come up with a version of a…

[48:43] Tropical America’s land, almost all of them involve the Mayan culture for many reasons, because it’s very visual, it has sculpture, it has murals, it has carving, so it’s legible. You can recognize it because it’s in the rainforest where most of the interesting animals are, because it’s not really been done justice to previously, so you can do something unique. A lot of reasons why. Version after version after version after version after version. One, another, another, another, another. None of them ever took off. We’d develop them. They wouldn’t happen. One of them was in that project that got canceled right on the eve of the Bear Stearns collapse. But of course, you’re building a network and you’re building a foundation of knowledge the whole time that’s happening. So by the time the team that Joan Hardwick put together to pursue another version, there’s this backlog of knowledge that comes with it and a network of people that comes with it. So you’re not starting from scratch. You have all this stuff to work with.

[49:56] To get it to where it’s respectable, where you can win the support, of people whose support you need if you’re going to say this stuff is authentically Maya archaeology and culture being represented. Then Mayans and Mayan archaeologists need to say that.

[50:16] That makes sense And I’ve always We’ve always heard You know a good idea Never dies in Imagineering Right And so That’s what I’ve always Just to circle back It also It’s not just that It never dies Right.

[50:27] But it also does not come back like some kind of weird vampire zombie in the form that it was before.

[50:36] It stays alive because it adapts and changes and responds to the needs as they emerge. So to circle back on what you said earlier about the multiple clocks, this is just another example of everything just kind of moved around to the right position and here we are. Yeah yeah let’s and and we i know we have to we’re we’re out of time with you, uh we could talk to you for hours honestly joe, but uh but we want to respect your time uh but you know to to that point we we we saw that you know uh in your book you mentioned that a dragon coaster was you know was meant for, for uh for uh potentially with the area where expedition everest was and we can’t help but notice in the new villains land that there’s a, maleficent coaster now i don’t know if that was one of those ideas that our dragon coaster had we never did an idea for a dragon that had to do with Maleficent because we constantly would be saying if you can do it at the Magic Kingdom do it at the Magic Kingdom yeah right right do something you can’t do at the Magic Kingdom or there is no animal kingdom right, so and again the book if the book is really a lot about thinking this is not a book about things getting It’s a book about things getting thought about so they can be done. And.

[51:58] The ride you’re alluding to, the dragon ride, was a Beastly Kingdom ride. It was a Beastly Kingdom ride. Beastly Kingdom never got built, but there was land down in that corner of the park. But then we built Camp Mini Mickey, so now that land’s not there. So then you’re trying to put another coaster down in that corner, but it doesn’t fit. So then you go back up to the other place where there was a rendering from 1992, showing a Himalayan mountain on the other side of the lake. But that Himalayan mountain was not a coaster. That was like some imaginary safari idea that never happened. But at least we thought, oh, maybe we could put a mountain over there. This is more like the way things happen. I want people to understand that.

[52:48] These things do not happen in a straight line. The books that get written about how things got done are written after they are done. And so they tell the story exclusively of the decision that led to the next decision that led to the next decision and the next one and the next one. But that’s not how it looks when you’re doing it and when you’re thinking about it. When you’re at the other end of that process, it looks like an infinitely branching number of threads and trails in front of you. Only one of which, and it’s not straight, is going to be the one that leads to the end. When you’re done and you look backwards, all you can see is that one line. And it gives people the impression that that’s how it happened. It’s not exactly how it happened. that’s the result but the process is branching, and to cope with that branching process that’s kind of why i wrote the book i want people to understand.

[53:53] How to cope with a collaborative enterprise on something that has not been done before because you cannot make a straight line to something you don’t know, that yeah that that makes total sense scud driver it does yeah no i I was just going to say, yeah, I definitely got that from the book. And, and yeah, like, you know, you know, like I said, it, it definitely reads more like you’re, you’re trying to share a map on how to get things done. Not just like, this is what I did. Right. Which totally not. Totally not. Yeah. And it’s, it’s not just for, you know, folks that are creatives, you know, like you that, that paint and stuff like that. I mean, I’m, I’m not in a creative field and, but I’ve all, all of the concepts that you talked about in the book, I felt like after reading it, it was almost like a self-help book in a weird way. It was like, it was, you know, because it was like, it got me, it got me thinking about things in a very different way. Yeah. Well, remember the premise of the book is.

[54:47] When you form a collaborative group, you are creating an individual, the individual represented by the group. That individual is creative. The individual members do not need to be creative. They need to function in the service of this imaginary individual that is the team, and that individual is creative. So you could be a finance guy, a systems guy, an engineer. You could be an operations person, a staff support person. You don’t need to be creative. You need to participate in the life of this virtual person who is creative, right?

[55:27] I really meant it to be inclusive in that way, that it is not an obligation that every single individual be creative. The obligation is that you work together in the service of creativity. That definitely came across in the book. and we both really enjoyed it. And yeah, so I think we’re out of time, unfortunately, Joe. All right, well, thank you so much for having me. Thank you so much for coming on. We are just sincerely thrilled. We love having you on here. We’re huge Disney fans and huge fans of yours. And so again, the book is Floating Mountains, The Art of Imagining the Impossible. It’s available now. I think it’s a bestseller already, Joe. I saw it was a bestseller when I bought it. So that’s great. Fantastic book. So thanks so much, Joe, for joining us. And we really appreciate the time. My pleasure. Thank you very much.