Disneyland in California opened on July 17, 1955—66 years ago this week—and there are now 12 full-fledged theme parks, plus hotels, cruise ships, spas, and more worldwide. But none are ever considered “finished.” The parks are not fixed entities. There are minor to major overhauls of existing attractions taking place on a constant basis, while brand new bold ideas are incubated back at the Walt Disney Imagineering R&D labs in Glendale, California.
To celebrate this innovation milestone, Disney Parks takes us Behind the Attraction in a new 10-part series available on Disney+ starting July 21. Produced by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson (ahead of his star turn in the live-action movie Jungle Cruise), alongside Dany Garcia and Brian Volk-Weiss, Behind the Attraction is hosted by Paget Brewster (Criminal Minds, Friends), who provides a wry narrative throughout.
Disney invited us to the press preview, at a COVID-safe virtual event, so we can confirm that Behind the Attraction is a geek-level, detailed dive into the origin stories of favorite rides from Space Mountain to Haunted Mansion, and beyond. Fifty Disney Imagineers, past and present, provide a personal take on how movie-related fantasies, such as Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, came to life. They also tell us how the attractions have evolved over the years, as new tech tools became available, from the Audio-Animatronics figures to the vast transportation networks.
At the virtual event, we got to chat with Jeanette Lomboy, VP and Site Portfolio Executive at Walt Disney Imagineering, who oversees all Walt Disney Imagineering efforts and overall visioning for the Disneyland Resort (including Disneyland Park, Disney California Adventure Park, and Downtown Disney) and Aulani, the Disney Resort & Spa in Hawaii. Lomboy is a veteran Disney Imagineer, having joined the company in 1995. Her most recent achievements include launching the all-new Avengers Campus land, Pixar Pier, and Guardians of the Galaxy – Mission: BREAKOUT!
We were particularly interested in the Dish (Digital Immersive Showroom), the pre-viz technology platform that powers Disney brainstorms behind new attractions.
Lomboy explained how that works: “Imagineers are tasked to do impossible things, to make the impossible possible,” Lomboy told us. “So we employ a broad set of tools, and the Dish is a huge part of that process. It helps us understand how we might deliver them, and allows us to stand in that space, collectively, in multiple remote locations, with our partners, and make changes on the fly. We just couldn’t do that on a flat-screen.”
Lomboy, along with other team members, holds a patent on “interactive living organisms.” Is that being used in the parks right now? Or is it a clue into future fantastical iterations?
“That patent was created in conjunction with projects around Avatar for Disney’s Animal Kingdom, and isn’t being used at this time. [The technology behind it] is a way to allow nature to come to life in a way that hasn’t been done before,” confirmed Lomboy. She couldn’t go into specifics and made it clear that Disney protects its innovation via patents, but the tech doesn’t necessarily make it to the parks.
This patent, if ever deployed, would use underlying responsive environment style “magic,” i.e. bioluminescent flora on the fictional Pandoran moon could be engineered to respond to the presence of humans.
“Yes,” agreed Lomboy, “The patent would allow us to take capacitive sensors in order to trigger things like music, lighting, [into] an overall immersive environment. I hope we can use that one day.”
The patent filing docs elaborate: “[The] Embodiments…sensing system may utilize the natural conductive paths found in an organic plant to transmit an electrical signal between the plant and a user interacting with the plant [and] by directly contacting the plant or coming into proximity of the plant, the user may affect the electrical signal. That is, the electrical properties of the user (e.g., the capacitance of the human body) changes a measured impedance curve associated with the electrical signal.”
If you like this level of lab-style data, Behind the Attraction is worth a watch. You can geek out on the factoids, and find out what worked—and what didn’t. Which will make your next IRL visit that much richer.
