Disney Legend Bob Gurr on creating his Disneyland rides

 Blog
May 282012
 

Cheers to Bob Gurr, who both shaped my childhood and drinks my favorite adult beverage. (Photo: MiceChat.com)

My regular readers know that I am passionate about how the past is preserved. We, as a culture, are so obsessed with money that blow our heritage off all the time. That’s one reason I wrote a new article for Travel + Leisure about the original Disney attractions that Walt knew best.

The destruction of Walt Disney World’s Snow White’s Scary Adventures, which happens on Friday, distressed me enough for me to write a slideshow feature about the oldest Disney rides, and for it, I talked to Bob Gurr, an Imagineer who helped build Disneyland in 1955 and went on to be a crucial designer for the park’s most seminal rides.

That same passion for making details about our past available to everyone has inspired me to put Gurr’s full interview on this blog so that anyone can read his words. Magazine and Web articles can only put so many words into stories before people’s click fingers get itchy. But there’s no reason the words of someone as esteemed as Gurr should be left on the cutting room floor. (I also salvaged a choice nugget from an interview with Anthony Bourdain last year.)

Make sure you go to Travel + Leisure and read my whole piece — that will make everyone happy, including me. You can also buy Bob’s book on engineering and Disney History, Design: Just for Fun, at his website. You probably have a long emotional connection with his worth without even knowing it, since he shaped the vehicles of most of Disney’s most iconic ride systems from the Disneyland Monorail (a National Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark) to the Haunted Mansion‘s distinctive Omnimover (a name he coined).

I asked Bob to discuss a few Disneyland attractions that he had a hand in, and the way Walt Disney figured into their creation. Some of his recollections won’t be new to Mouseheads, but they are full of reverence for the process, and considering the cultural importance of the results of that process to American culture, it’s worth putting on the record anyway. Here’s what Bob said, in his words.  Continue reading »

10 failed movies and TV shows redeemed by later success

 Blog
May 252012
 

At the time? Embarrassing. Now? Fun! Strange how a few years makes you see the joy that was intended.

1. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971)

When it came out, it was a flop. Not surprising, since it’s a children’s movie that contains a shot of a chicken getting beheaded (it’s during the boat ride scene). The author of the original book, Roald Dahl, despised it. But repeated showings on network television in the 1970s, when there were only a few channels and scant opportunities for kids to watch programs of their own — the beheading was excised for that — made this a beloved property of the post-Moon Shot generation. Gene Wilder’s wild-haired, is-he-or-isn’t-he performance, though wildly different from the squirrelly, goateed Wonka of the book, was a harbinger for modern sarcasm. He also gave the movie the heart it needed to endure — something Johnny Depp, in his unleashed, twerpy interpretation couldn’t muster. Look at the picture. His off-kilter performance is still worth a meme, 41 years later. Continue reading »

You hate songs in the second person

 Blog
May 242012
 

There are many things about Broadway musicals that make me shift in my seat. One is when the heroine winds up alone on stage and sings wistfully, and at agonizing length, about how lonely she is. Another is the power “I love you” ballad the two leads slam out together, climaxing with a seismic belt and the obligatory applause.

But the third, and by far the worst, is the newest bad habit of modern musicals: songs with a lyric written in the second person. These are the songs when the character in question, once they’ve broken into song, can barely utter the word “I.” Instead, they layer their words with “you,” distancing themselves from the outburst and rending musical moments like a stack of platitudes of bumper stickers. They sound like musical fortune cookies.

I think I blame Sondheim for this modern stylistic entrenchment. In 1970, his main character in Company reached his big epiphany about loneliness while singing “Being Alive” in the second person.

Someone to hold you too close,
Someone to hurt you too deep,
Someone to sit in your chair,
To ruin your sleep.

He went on like that for a few verses because he had to. He was a character who couldn’t embrace his needs, who shelved them while his loved ones developed and moved on around him. Finally, in the last verses, he switches to the first person, indicating he’s finally made his personal breakthrough.

Somebody, hold me too close,
Somebody, hurt me too deep,
Somebody, sit in my chair
And ruin my sleep
And make me aware
Of being alive,
Being alive.

It was a good song. It worked. And the trick of using the second person worked for a good reason. Bobby wasn’t fully an “I” yet. He was all super-ego, and resisting the naked urges of his ego. I suspect that in some ways, he reflected Sondheim himself, who takes an intellect-first approach to writing and perhaps by constitution isn’t automatically emotive. Continue reading »

Revisiting Rosewood, Florida, today [WATCH]

 Blog, Video
May 112012
 
Rosewood Baptist Church, Florida

Rosewood Baptist Church, Florida

A year ago, I first visited Rosewood, Florida, the site of a horrific racist massacre in 1923. Someone imagined a black man raped a white girl, and it exploded from there. I found the paltry memorialization of this American tragedy to be disquieting. I wrote about my first visit to Rosewood on this blog (click here to read that post, see the pictures, and read the depressingly politicized plaque).

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to return. Rosewood is in Levy County, where Florida State Road 24 meets County Road 324, a few miles east of Cedar Key on the Gulf of Mexico. This place once buzzed as a miller of cedar for Faber pencils. Now it’s quiet.

My first trip there was too unsatisfying, bereft of the vibration that turmoil usually leaves. I left without a sense of the gravity of what had happened there. If I hadn’t known beforehand, I never would have realized that this dusty, overgrown, fire-prone patch of coastal Florida land had hosted any event of note, let alone one charged with such fury, terror, and bloodlust.

This time, I battled the seasonal swarm of lovebugs to shoot a little video of Rosewood so people can see it for themselves. It appears, on the face of it, to be a dreary, sun-baked little outpost of pickup trucks and scrubby trees. It seems like nothing special as long as you remain ignorant.

But of course, the woods most people zoom past once were once the setting for unimaginable savagery. Continue reading »

A little of my recent work

 Blog, Video
May 082012
 
Jason Cochran in Bank of America's The Savings Experiment on AOL

Hosting 'The Savings Experiment'

You already read my blog, and thank you for that. I put a lot of thought and effort into my topics and writing here.

I always post some of my other goings-on through my Twitter feed. Not everyone follows my tweets (and even those I do can’t keep an eye on my feed 24/7), so I’ll round up a few links to a selection of the coolest things I’ve been up to in the past few months.

The New York Post: Update of this year’s development in Orlando

DealNews.com: Booking Got Bumped? Your Vacation Cancellation Recource

The New York Post: Preview of the big new rides at amusement parks across America

Scanorama (Sweden): Cover story on how to do Broadway like a local (link to PDF)

The New York Post: Feature on Anna Maria Island, Florida

I have two features in the editing pipeline at Travel + Leisure. They will be sequels to my recent feature for them about America’s Most Beautiful Neighborhoods.

BBC World: Expert appearance on Fast Track, discussing the South Korean theme park boom. I’m at 4:04 and 9:33. And they spelled my name wrong. I’ll know I’ve made it when they don’t spell my name wrong. Then again, that’s what Condoleezza Rice has been saying for years.


CBS This Morning: Segment about the ramifications of the proposed merger of U.S. Airways and American Airlines

I have also hosted four “The Savings Experiment” segments for Bank of America: on filing your taxes, buying drugstore items, and cable TV service (which is in post-production). I’ll embed those in a future post.