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Yariv Padva:
How do you see the relations between the author/director from an external IP (Intellectual Property) and Imagineer. Can you speak about how George Lucas was involved in Star Tours? How was his feedback incorporated if at all.

Tony Baxter:
Going back to that time, Disney was not doing films that were of a popular nature enough to build IP around. So, you’re talking about films like Robin Hood and The Fox and The Hound and Basil of Baker Street and things like that, that you couldn’t go and build an attraction and have millions of people wanting to come do it. So, the danger is that Disney could be out of touch with the generation if you didn’t find the things in the park that you loved as a child growing up. So, if I was a young person that raised in the late 70s and the 80s, I wasn’t in touch with the Disney films, but I was in touch with Indie and Star Wars and E.T. and all of those things, which were the films of that generation. So, we approached management, saying, “I’d love it if Disney had the films that we could use, but we don’t.” Our feeling is, we need to get involved with people that are in touch with popular cultures that children are growing up with, so when they come do Disneyland, they’ll see their childhood in the park.” That was great for my generation, because Sleeping Beauty and Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan and all those were things that were around when I was a little kid, but now you’re 30 years after that, and there wasn’t anything.

So, it’s a part that was connected unless we created our own, which was Big Thunder. That worked, because that was a Disney brand. In the case of Star Tours, we had a choice between Spielberg and Lucas. If you went with Spielberg, you got E.T. and Jaws and whatnot; if you went with George, you would get Star Wars and Indiana Jones and so forth. Instead of Spielberg, who was connected with Universal, we thought that George’s films had more emotion to connect to. So that decision was made. We came up with some ideas. The company agreed to bring George in to look at the ideas. He was very positive about Disneyland; telling stories about being a child, getting to go there, how much it meant to him. He said he saw his products as first-class and he thought Disneyland is first-class and he felt comfortable that two first-class, quality organizations working together and then we went forward with that. He had the definitive ideas that he wanted to inject into it. Like in the first show (Star Tours), we had a scene at the beginning where the vehicle didn’t go the way it was supposed to go. It went into a maintenance door. I remember he said, “When I was a kid, I’d come here and I’d always try to open those doors and went somewhere I wasn’t supposed to go, and I would love to have the ship at the beginning go that way.”

So, there were things like that where he would have a specific thing he’d want to add to it. Then he was very vocal on the director of the film on the first (Star Tours) one. I didn’t work on the second (Star Tours) one. That was Tom Fitzgerald, the redo, but on our first one, I remember I wanted the trench shot that I told you (about) earlier. I’ve always wanted to do this. Well, I was speaking for myself. I wanted to go down into that trench. ILM didn’t want to do it again. They didn’t want to film something they’d filmed again. So, George became the vote on that, and they presented why they didn’t want to do it. I said I felt people would feel cheated if they didn’t get to have (that) one moment that they dreamed about in those movies and they need to feel that experience. He agreed. He said, “I want to put my backing here behind my affiliates.” Then he thought, “I won on that, but everyone was mad that I won because everybody had to do the work.” I’m glad we did it, because I think that was a high point in the show. So, I’m going to say he worked from coming up with ideas for it, to listening to both sides of the story and then voting and being that vote that cast the decision that we went with, to not being involved at all in other things where he just trusted us to do it. Indie was more a case of his trusting us, because we had already done Star Tours. So when we got to Indie, we said, “Okay, we’re going to take that kind of approach with the movie simulation system, but we’re going to put in on a truck and drive it through an experience like Pirates of the Caribbean.” He got that right away and he saw exactly what we’re doing.

So, he left us alone until we had a working prototype that you could ride on. He was also, when we explained we’re going to try to put some interactivity in it and make it unpredictable so then when you ride it, different things will happen, and he understood that right away. I remember, I think it’s in the book, (a story) about the snakes. Maybe not. Maybe it isn’t in that book, but he had a hard time thinking in theme park world, where you have no control of the camera to focus people’s attention, which is the world he’s familiar with. When we got into the snake scene, I wanted a 50-foot snake, and he wanted real-world snakes. He said in the Indie films, we never break that window of reality. It doesn’t go into a fantasy or whatever. That 50-foot snake wouldn’t be realistic, and I said, “But you have the advantage of, when Indie is threatened by the cobra, the camera zooms in on that cobra head, and it fills a 50-foot screen and the audience is shocked by that shot of that thing jumping out. We can’t do that. If a put a regular cobra across the room, it’s 25 feet away from you. You’re not even going to see that it’s there.” So, what was funny is, we put 1,000 snakes for George in that room. There’s 1,000 real live snakes and then the one 50-foot snake. It’s funny, because nobody ever sees the other snakes. They’re only looking at this big, threatening snake. I think that was a case where he came out of that understanding, a very major difference between the staging of something for film and the staging for something in an attraction.

So, it was a great relationship. We never had arguments or fights. Generally, the things he added, we’d go, “Oh, that would be really neat. Let’s change it and put that in.” Then, occasionally when there would be internal battles between different people on the project, George would listen to everyone’s opinion and give us his judgment and we’d go with that. Then, other times, like one time I won because I was insistent, I said, “It’s not going to work that way if we do it that way.” I think in the end; he came around to understanding that view. So, it was good.

Nicht Indy, nicht Star Wars, aber Disney Themenpark. Soweit ich weiß, war ILM dort auch eingebunden:

https://disneyparks.disney.go.com/...is-summer/

Disney Imagineer Ted Robledo then offered a never-before-seen look exclusively for D23 EXPO guests at the in-progress Hong Kong Disneyland attraction, Iron Man Experience. This adventure, the first Marvel attraction at any Disney park, is being created with the combined talents of Walt Disney Imagineering and Industrial Light & Magic.

Ich habe den Titel des Threads geändert, weil mit den neuen SW Filmen auch neue Star Wars Attraktionen in die Disney Parks kommen.