Condor Flats Imagineer Interviews
Page 5 of 6

Condor Flats as seen from the Grand Californian Hotel. Soarin' is the large hanger on the left. The smaller checkerboard building is Taste Pilots' Grill. The Monorail beam runs through the area.
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LP: The other really memorable thing is the scents. What is the technology behind doing something like that?

AS: We’ve developed for our other films as well. We have them in books we have them in our other shows. What is unique about this, we weren’t sitting in a theater, we had a ride system now. We had to incorporate the scent to work with the fans and basically deliver those scents. That was one of the hardest things we had to do. My team really had to come up with the scent of a pine, the scent of an orange. Oranges are actually quite easy but coming up with a pine that didn’t smell like Pine-Sol, everyone commented it smells like I just cleaned my kitchen. We had to go back and forth and finally it dawned on me what we needed to do was add an earthy quality to the pine to really make it feel like you were in a forest and it really made it much more organic. Once it dawned on us that’s what we needed to do then the task became a lot easier.

LP: Is there one little detail in Condor Flats, one of your favorites, that people should keep a look out for?

AS: Honestly I love Soarin' but that little flight shop, Fly 'n' Buy, I've got a warm spot in my heart for that little place. I think the story around it developed beautifully. I think the fact that we were able to get that little land speed racer in there and prop it as beautifully as we did. I’m extremely proud of the team that I worked with on that. A fellow named Jim Armstrong I think did yeoman’s work pulling all of that together along with our prop person in Marion Mcnara. They did a great job. It’s kind of an unsung hero in the land but we’re really proud of that little shop, we really are.

The land speed racers inside the Fly 'n' Buy
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LP: One of the first things I bought in the park was a Soarin' Over California propeller hat from that shop.

AS: (laughs) Excellent, excellent.

LP: Is there anything that disappointed you at all about the way Condor Flats turned out?

AS: I wish we’d known it was going to be this popular. I think we would have thought about how we were going to queue people through the area and develop it a little bit differently. Don’t get me wrong, I’m really glad it is this popular but I think if we’d known we would have approached the design of the land a lit different.

These t-shirts show one of the Condor Flats merchandise lines. These four scenes are available in magnets, posters and many other items.
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