A backstage look at California Adventure

Like all the other Disney theme parks designed since 1955, the new California Adventure adjacent to Disneyland in Anaheim teems with illusion. Visitors on the "Soarin` Over California" ride actually smell the filmed redwood forest and lift their feet up to keep them from getting dipped into a nonexistent ocean. At an attraction called "It`s Tough to Be a Bug," the insects rustle about and interact with guests.

The place where all this fun begins is Walt Disney Imagineering, which is made up of a group of creative masterminds - part grown-up children, part genius - who conceive, design, plan and construct park attractions. It all begins in their imaginations and only later is translated to computers, models and finally the real thing.

Barry Braverman, senior vice president and executive producer at WDI, had his work cut out for him when he was given the assignment of turning the enormous Disneyland parking lot into a theme park celebrating California.

"First of all it was a challenging subject," Braverman said in an interview. "Getting your arms around California - it`s just such a vast subject. And the daunting challenge of designing a park next to Disneyland, the original, is a little intimidating."

Coming up with ideas for the theme park and attractions was only one part of the problem.

"It was a very complicated urban design project," he said.

Indeed, the theme park was only part of a $1.4 billion expansion and redevelopment project begun a decade ago that also included a collection of restaurants and shops called Downtown Disney and the Grand Californian Hotel.

Once the Imagineers had ideas in their heads, it was even more challenging to turn them into three-dimensional reality and making that reality easily accessible to and understood by their patrons.

Braverman says necessity is often the mother of invention. In the new "Soarin`" attraction, for example, the idea was to give viewers a hang-glider`s perspective of scenic California.

"What we were after was giving guests a view of the beauty of California, the diversity of the landscape, but in a way they could never experience in real life," Braverman said.

He said just creating a beautiful movie would have been easy. But giving the perception of flying or soaring from a hang-glider`s perspective proved difficult. Getting the audience up in the air and into the proper lines of sight for the enormous screen, then getting them back in a maintainable way proved to be a challenge.

Braverman`s staff tried several ideas. One was similar to a dry-cleaning conveyor system, but that idea had to be abandoned due to design problems: Should it fail, viewers were suspended above ground in different ride positions, and getting them all down safely would be a problem.

A solution surfaced when fellow engineer Mark Sumner came up with a design that would function something like a small section of a Ferris wheel that would lift people up into the required viewing position and then set them back down easily and safely.

Sumner`s attempts to draw his conception failed, so one weekend he hauled his old Erector set down from the attic and constructed a working model. The result became the basis of a serious engineering design effort.

"That was the breakthrough on how to get this ride done," Braverman said.

Another problem surfaced with the Grizzly River Run raft ride.

"One of our ideas from the design team was to do a thing called the Grizzly Go-round," Braverman said. "We wanted to spiral the raft down this spiral sluice like from a gold mine."

Aware that this approach had not been done before, the team was excited to proceed when an engineer suggested they make a model first, warning that their idea might not work.

"We actually built a full-scale mock-up of the sluice and had water pumped through it," Braverman said. "We got a raft and put it down, but there was so much friction of the raft hitting the side walls as it went around that no matter how much water we pumped down, the raft didn`t make it to the bottom."

When that idea didn`t work, they created a spinning drop. But that raised the question of how fast the ride should spin.

"We didn`t have a handy spinning raft test," Braverman said. "So we built a spinning turntable on the back of a pickup truck and drove it around the parking lot at WDI with people riding it and spinning it at various speeds until people got green because it was too fast. It was pretty funny seeing these guys spinning around on a turntable on the back of a pickup truck, but that`s the kind of crazy stuff you do to make these things work. It`s just part of a day`s work at Imagineering."

Eventually they created an attraction of which they could all be proud.

"I think we have the most physically exciting raft ride anywhere in the world," Braverman said.

Humor is also in the creative team`s job description. It was their task to design slogans to enhance the windows of the shops in the park.

"We used the shop windows to support our story lines for the park, so there are a lot of funny gags and puns in those shop windows relating to the themes of the different areas," he said.

A few they came up with were "Alcatraz Lock Co. - People pick our locks," "Sausalito Maritime Bank - Floating loans since 1898" and "Gold & Gate - Attorneys at law."

Another illusion the Imagineers created is seen along Paradise Pier at the base of their giant Sun Wheel.

"Notice that we made it look like the cars go below the surface of the water," Braverman said. This was accomplished by "creating this dry bunker and a mirror around it to make it look like they drop below the surface."

But there are some trade secrets Braverman isn`t willing to reveal, like how do they make it seems as if those bugs are sitting right there in the audience with you?

"We don`t give away the magic," Braverman said.

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Author: Stephen C. Fitch