West of WEDWay
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Disneyland's Space Mountain today
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I joined WED in October 1975 as a Junior Draftsman. I was hired by Glenn Durflinger, the Project Designer, specifically to work on Space Mountain Disneyland. I'll tell you what I remember about the project to give you an idea how things came together in those days. While many of the individuals are still working at Walt Disney Imagineering today, I gather that things have changed considerably.
The Space Mountain project had a green light by the time I joined, but as the youngest member of the team (I was told I was the youngest WED had ever hired--I was 18 1/2) I helped sort and file the hundreds of concept drawings that had been prepared. The main lift was originally outdoors; the track popped out of the building; there was a water splashdown; there were two tracks, as in Florida; they considered many things. Eventually, Glenn's design for a restaurant, an ampitheater and an arcade with a completely enclosed, single track layout, was approved.
Glenn was the Job Captain for Cinderella's Castle in Walt Disney World. A Job Captain (I eventually rose to that title) is the drafting team leader, coordinating the effort to produce a set of working drawings. Glenn had done so well (the castle was extremely complex) that he was promoted to Project Designer. WED had about a dozen of these, including Chuck Myall, Vic Greene, Doug Cayne, George Rester and other names that dated back to the beginning (or so it seemed to me). Glenn must have felt the odd man out, I realize now, because he was a draftsman and the others were artists or set designers. Glenn is a tall man with close-cropped blond hair who doesn't smile often. I believe he had been a Marine; it fits. He had a mechanical drafting arm on his desk which set him apart from most architectural drafters as well--this device is/was used by mechanical or aircraft drafters. Glenn preferred 3H or 4H pencils; the art directors liked squishy-soft HB or Blackwing Eagles.
Glenn was teamed up again with an industrial designer named George MacGinnis. The pair had produced Space Mountain in Florida in 1973. There, the grand building sat aloof outside the railroad tracks with a reflecting pond and no visible doors or windows. Compared with John Hench's original sketch from 1964-65, the design was crisp, precise. What you might expect from someone with a drafting arm. In Hench's sketch, the "mountain" was pink-purple and featured curves and wiry tracks suggesting Art Noveau influences. Glenn's architecture was a low-slung cone with a rakish cap. The Kennedy Memorial outside Jerusalem was a model--it features fifty pillars that swoop up, aiming at the heavens--as was Japan's Mt. Fuji. There was great concern that Space Mountain not be visible from elsewhere in the park, say, Town Square or in front of Pirates of the Caribbean. Tests with balloons and an 1/8th scale model of the entire park (some 300 feet on a side) established height limits that virtually dictated that part of the facility would be underground.
As the first project on the east side of the park since Walt died almost ten years before, the Disneyland operations people wanted to "help" with the design. They insisted that the park needed more fast food (burgers) and more restroom capacity. The whole idea of a thrill ride was urgent because ride-oriented Magic Mountain (built in 1971) was catching on, and nearby Knott's Berry Farm had just installed the first Corkscrew coaster. (Only after Big Thunder in 1979 did this me-too fervor die down.) The new project would hunker down into the ground to avoid being a visual distraction and it would include a huge bathroom, a huge fast food facility with conveyor-belt BurgerMaster machines, an ampitheater to replace the Tomorrowland Stage and a gigantic coin arcade because it's hard to say no to a bazillion quarters.