Are Disney’s Magic Kingdom Google Maps images fake?

 Blog
Mar 252013
 

What’s the deal with these bird’s-eye photos of Disney’s Magic Kingdom in Orlando, Florida? They appear on Google Maps when you zoom in and click “Satellite.” They seem fabricated. Why?

1. Parades don’t do that.

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Check out the configuration of the parade. Normally, the enter the Hub from the bridge at 10 o’clock, travel clockwise, and exit at 6 o’clock. Here, the floats go round and round the entire Hub as if it’s a carousel. In real life, floats pack together, with lots of dancers between them, and with no large gaps. But look:

Continue reading »

Congress demands answers on privacy from Disney: the letter

 Blog
Jan 242013
 

Today, Edward Markey (D-Mass.) wrote The Walt Disney Company CEO Bob Iger demanding answers about the new MyMagic+ “magic bands” RFID-based wristbands that are being implemented at the Orlando theme parks.

“As a Co-Chairman of the Congressional Bi-partisan Privacy Caucus, I am deeply concerned that Disney’s proposal could potentially have a harmful impact on our children.”

This is a very interesting wrinkle. I’ve been talking about personal data collection, personalized content, and Disney for years, but who knew the three would collide in such a big way?

The complete letter follows. (h/t Epcyclopedia) Continue reading »

Jutta Levasseur, Epcot’s egg painter, has died

 Blog
Aug 302012
 

Jutta Levasseur in her studio inside the store in the Germany pavilion. (Credit: Issysue.Blogspot.com)

I was at Epcot in Walt Disney World last week, and I learned the sad news that Jutta Levasseur has passed away. The German-born Levasseur had hand-painted egg  ornaments in the Germany pavilion since the park’s opening day in 1982.

She was such a fixture that the park gave her the great honor of setting aside a studio nook overlooking the World Showcase Lagoon. Her eggs, which were Disney riffs on an old Germany Christmas tradition, were meticulous work, many taking up to three weeks to complete, and were prized by Disney collectors. Most of her eggs are now gone except for a few large ones costing well over $1,000, but her name plate remains on a shelf above her desk in tribute.

I have not been able to find an obituary for her, but I have reached out to Walt Disney World to see if it can confirm this sad news. (Update: It confirmed the news but had no other details.) A few years ago, other cast members told me that she was battling cancer, and it’s true that Jutta was not in her usual station very often for the past few years. Five years ago, she was only working Fridays and Saturdays, but her handiwork was considered by many to be a symbol of Epcot.

I first met Jutta when I was writing my first guidebook to the park for Pauline Frommer’s series (I teasingly called her little oblong canvasses “chicken roe”) and I made a decision to spotlight some of the cast members who have been part of Epcot since the very beginning. There are a few cast members at Epcot who are true fixtures, including Miyuki the candy sculptor in Japan, the Hat Lady (now Hat Ladies) of the United Kingdom, and the brothers in the mariachi band in Mexico (I shot a video feature on them a few years ago). I am sorry to see her depart, and at a relatively young age.

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 »

My video interview: What it’s like to work at Epcot

 Blog
Jul 142010
 

Here’s a new video I did (and the link to the original). I’m not actually in it because I felt that it should be about them, not me. But it was me who was asking the questions, and it was me who approached Disney to do this topic.

There are actually a bunch of people working at World Showcase in Epcot who have been there since the beginning, or who are fixtures. There’s Miyuki the Japanese candy lady, there’s Jutta the German egg painting lady, there’s Carol the Hat Lady in the United Kingdom, and there’s Andrew the wood carver in the Outpost.

And then there are these brothers, in Mexico: