An Interview With Steven Davison - Part 2
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An Interview With Steven Davison - Part 2 of 2

Steven Davison was the creator of Eureka! A California Adventure parade at Disney's California Adventure. He's also worked on"Believe...There's Magic in the Stars", "Believe...In Holiday Magic", "It's a Small World" Holiday and others. During the opening of Disney's California Adventure, Davison talked to LaughingPlace.com about Eureka and some of his other Disney projects.

The first half of this interview was presented last week. In Part two, shown here, Davison continues his discussion of Eureka and also talks extensively about "Believe...In Holiday Magic"

Eureka!
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LaughingPlace.com: There certainly are some California stereotypes and ethnic stereotypes in Eureka. Is that something that has worried you at all or that you've been extra careful about?

Steven Davison: We are very extra careful. To the point of focus groups, in a sense, in that we would do designs and run it past a few leaders and say "what do you think?" Eureka and the sand car changed and changed and changed a lot based on that and how people felt because we didn’t want to do Baywatch. We didn’t want to do what a lot of people really stereotype the beach as. So we middled it in a sense and made it very athletic and very different. It’s all about that whole idea of her melting into the sand and like kids came and made this giant sand car around her and that’s like the whole beach cruising thing and everyone lives in a convertible in California.

Even the Latino piece, that is one of the hardest communities to get into. There were certain things I thought were great to speak about and they actually embraced the whole thing because they were just so proud of Disney actually celebrating their culture. Watts Tower went through the roof with us. We met with their artistic directors and said we really want to do this and they were so proud, again, that Disney would almost honor them. What my hope was - it’s such a beautiful monument but no one goes there. Everyone is afraid to go there, so why don’t we put it out there and really honor it and get it back on line. It just went through a four year renovation and they’re going to reopen it again - I think it has reopened now - and really get people to it. Get people back into that community and really use a device that we have here to help out other people at the same time.

LP: We talked about the jumping stilts at the end of the parade...

The Jumping Stilts
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SD: The jumping stilts - they’re called Power Stills actually - they’re from Germany. Danny Castle, one of our stunt coordinators from Fantasmic!, brought them to us. We were just fascinated by them.

LP: You also have some skaters and bikers. Is that specially difficult to have to deal with in the parade?

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SD: Actually it is. That was a tough piece. To walk into meetings and go "I want to put somebody 12 feet in the air on a bungie harness inside a circle and have them do back flips and turns,"  those are really challenging things to actually engineer. If it was on a flat piece of ground like out here behind the Hollywood Backlot, it’s much easier because you can put stuff into the ground. We’re talking things that move which complicates things 20 times beyond what you normally would think.

To engineer the girl in the hoop in the front of the Phoenix was amazing because of the amount of stress you have. Originally she was supposed to be up where the lantern is, but the amount of steel it took to get that point where the lantern is ended up making the candle stick like 8 inches across and I go "that’ll look strange coming out of her hand." So artistically we bounced stuff around. We start with the ultimate idea and then we work through it and still get the same impact, I think, but we’re not trying to kill anybody or have things happen. I think it’s one of those things - you kind of start here and go "well, here’s another way to think about it." We all get together as a team and just talk about it, "that wouldn’t work out, why don’t we do this" and we start working through things together.