John Hench Quotes
The show is being changed right now, by the way. Jeff Burke is doing it for the Magic Kingdom. And I think it will be better, with new birds, master of ceremonies, etc.
The park achieved a kind of reality. Like these virtual reality games the children are playing with. I told them we were doing this 40 years ago! Disneyland is virtual reality.
Mickey is one of the prime examples: Mickey has never been suspected of being an American export. It was deja vu. They gave him a local name and he's been accepted everywhere he goes.
I did what we call dry for wet effects, some of the miniatures work and two animation sequences.
What happen to the pirates we are supposed to see? Then we go down the chutes, and it's where the pirates were. But they're all gone. There is nothing but skeletons down here!
Walt's idea was that - as soon as the people who were dining got through their main course. They were supposed to all be seated, served at the same time, when they got into the dessert.
I always admired Walt's optimism. He seemed to know the direction he was going to. When I was at the studio, I remember he kept driving all of us back down to a more fundamental level all the time.
Even in China. Children there, next to the Great Wall, who had never seen Mickey Mouse responded. So the studio did have that skill to communicate with images.
Walt had a marvelous intuition. And because he understood people very well, liked them and had great respect for people, there was nothing cynical about Walt.
There were no jewelry hidden. Walt wanted this atmosphere: They were supposed to live here, they've been outside somewhere, but they could come back at any minute and catch us.
Big cities are chaotic. And chaos for humans - who have experience from their ancestors - is the last step before conflict. So, in the park, every kind of visual contradiction has been eliminated.
We were trained from cartoons. Everything who was on the screen was chosen. Anything who was not there was deliberately not there.
This music that was supposed to only come from tapes like in any restaurant. Something would happened. One bird will start to do a little jazz thing, and another bird will start to answer.
Now people don't know what it was in the Paris version, they put the skeleton at the end, not at the beginning. At least they've learn something!
I helped develop Disney's) special effects department at that time, which helped very much when we worked on "20000 Leagues under the Sea"
Nobody now is going from department to another department. Only Walt did that. I was very fond of him, really.
We don't have too much ritual in our life anymore. And these life symbols which people rely on to keep their feeling of well being, that life is not too bad after all are required more and more.
We've achieved this feeling, for instance, with the colors. The colors in the park are harmonious with each other, not like in big cities where they don't.
Walt put everything he knew about communication with images into the park, so it was very familiar.
