Report: Pirates of the Caribbean Special Event
Page 11 of 20

O'Day: (speaking of the slide) Walt reviewing the model and reviewing some of the miniatures with Claude Coates. Claude Coates was pretty influential on Pirates. Claude was the art director on Pirates wasn't he? Now in all the footage I’ve seen and all the interviews I’ve heard it seems that Walt was pretty enthusiastic about the opening of Pirates. Am I correct in that assumption that he just thought this was the greatest project? Tell us a little about that.

X. Atencio: Walt sent me over to Imagineering and the first job I got was to do the script for the Pirate ride. By that time Marc and Claude had worked out the model. So I had to just go through each scene and decide what would be said in each scene. So I put on my pirate hat and researched a little bit trying to get everything to "arrgh".  So I sent the first scene over to Walt and he said 'fine, keep going, it sounds good.' So I became a script writer instead of a cartoonist. He liked what I was doing and after the last meeting I suggested maybe we ought to have a song in there and I kind of half sang it to him and he said 'fine go ahead.' And that’s how I became I songwriter.

O'Day: Hey X., in some of the footage we’ve seen of Walt in some of the old TV shows and things he seems like he’s just having a kick showing the plans on this. So let’s take a look at Walt and the very first Disneyland Ambassador, Julie Riehm looking over some of the plans for what Walt calls the Blue Bayou Lagoon.

Video of Walt showing off the miniature of
New Orleans Square and the Blue Bayou Lagoon

Marc Davis as work

(An image of Marc Davis comes on the screen elicits lengthy applause with some guests standing)

O'Day: Pirates, like all great Disney theme park attractions, was more of a collaborative effort and as you can tell by the applause Marc was very instrumental in the creation of Pirates of the Caribbean. We have some rare footage and some rare audio of Marc talking about his contributions to Pirates. So let’s take a look…

(A snippet of the Marc Davis video shown at Cinderella's 50th Anniversary Celebration is shown.)

O'Day: Marc’s output of drawings for this attraction is pretty incredible. All the concepts he did. So let’s go through Marc’s Rogues’ Gallery if you will. Kim, Bob and everybody as we look through these if you wish to comment on Marc’s style or anything.

O'Day: The first sketch is for the Pirate Captain. This next scene didn't get included in the attraction.

Bob Baranick: This scene almost made it in the show during the recent rehab. When we were doing that rehab it wasn’t so much about political correctness as it was adding more Pirates to Pirates of the Caribbean. And we’d always been motivated particularly by these drawings that Marc did, adding some of these gags. This was one of my favorites we tried to do and what we were successful with is we were able to get some figures from the World of Motion, which were the same figures by the way - design wise as far as scale, the same heads and so forth - and that’s why it was such a perfect fit. It was quite a privilege, let me tell you, to be able to add some of Marc Davis’ elements to the attraction years later. This is one we really wanted to get in.

O'Day: I think we’ll all recognize this next one.