Forever Magical
Page 4 of 7

Once again, "we’re walking, we’re walking" past Business Street and into the Studios’ Backlot area and the various studio warehouses. On Business Street we saw the storefront facades that are easily altered for filming in a variety of time periods or locations. Our next stop was the Property and Drapery warehouse which houses props from the Disney Company’s years of production. There were coffins and paintings from Evita, a Dalmatian print couch, Gummi Bears stand up and more.

Then it was over to the Zorro parking structure. This area once housed the Pueblo de Los Angeles with a fort, a jail, a square, an inn, and a church from Zorro. Over time, as more shoots became "on location," the backlots sets including the Zorro locations were replaced with other facilities including the parking structure.

We continued walking past a service station and then paused for photos of the exterior of the Feature Animation building. The eight-story Sorcerer Mickey hat once housed Roy E. Disney’s office. We were not able to enter the building as work continued on Treasure Planet. Across the street from the new Feature Animation building was the ABC Riverside Building (the west coast home of the ABC and ABC Family television networks).

And once again, "we’re walking, we’re walking" to Sound Stages 1 and 2. Sound stage 2 is "as deep as it is tall" the very helpful security guard told us. It was used for filming the classic Mary Poppins and was recently used for Armaggedon. It is now known as the "Julie Andrews Stage" because of its Mary Poppins legacy. Sound Stage 1 was built with the original lot and had just completed a shooting for the ABC series Alias. According to the security guard standing at the sound stage’s entrance, the Disney Studios are a state of the art location and are used by many other studios in the area. In fact the day we were there another studio was there filming the next film in the Austin Powers series.