Harper Goff

The Nautilus becomes a character itself.

Designed by Harper Goff, it's a masterclass in visual adaptation.

Verne described it as a sleek cylinder, but Goff ignored that.

He designed a terrifying iron sea monster with riveted scales and predatory viewport eyes.

So I do want to talk about a couple people, and again, you are the e- expert on this one.

So in m- in our brief research that we did do, we did come up with a couple people that we think y- we have to talk about, right? So Harper Goff, we-

Yes

... probably we should start with, right?

This is what we're, how we're gonna get it."

Yeah.

He was probably of, as far as the Imagineering input, like the, the creative ideas and all that, Harper Goff was, was the man.

And-

He was in London, and he was at a train or model train shop.

And there's another guy there, and they started chatting it up, and his name was Harper Goff, and he was an illustrator.

Harper Goff ended up working for Disney as an illustrator on like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, but he ended up becoming one of the main designers of Disneyland.

The genesis of Disneyland was in play.

Play unlocks the flow state.

The gallery didn't just show Ryman's work.

It exhibited pieces from an incredible roster of Disney legends like Mark Davis, John Hench, Blaine Gibson, Colin Campbell, Harper Goff, Ken Anderson, and Sam McKim.

In 1994, the gallery commemorated Ryman with a limited release of three New Orleans Square lithographs, nicknamed Candy Shop, The Courtyard, and The Blue Bayou.

And there was a limited edition sculpture, a bronze sculpture replicas by Imagineer and sculptor Blaine Gibson were sold through the gallery, along with lithographs, posters, and an exhibition catalog.

to most American audiences, which helped Charlie's town feel like a place that really could have existed anywhere.

Inside Bavaria Studios, production designer Harper Goff built the factory as a series of environments that became stranger as the tour continued.

The centerpiece was, of course, the chocolate room.

Artificial grass, oversized mushrooms, candy-colored trees, pipes, platforms, and a brown river that looked considerably more appetizing on film than it apparently did in person.

Yeah, it's again, a lot of similar names to Imagineers that you recall from a lot of other stories about Disneyland and even animation in the studios.

A lot of these people keep popping up, like Harper Goff is still around, still designing things.

But with such a big undertaking as this massive land, this massive chunk of Central Florida that Disney bought, there's a lot more to do.

So it's not just one designer.

But as things have changed over time, you don't get that same sense of, well, Walt didn't want it to be this way because Walt wasn't really involved with the design of this park.

And really, no one person was involved.

Because this park is so huge and undertaking and has so many different ideas and designs behind it, even Master Plan 5 kind of acknowledges that this isn't, just to bring up a name that I said earlier, it's not Harper Goff's.

half of the park it's not you know joe roadie's half of the park this is a whole bunch of people who came together and each pavilion had its own design aesthetic and construction crews just like they had different sponsors and different ideas that's why in some pavilions you get an attraction in some cases you think you're going to get an attraction like in germany where they even built They even built a show building back there for a boat ride in Germany that never happened.

Yeah.

So, all right, so speaking, and I think of like Handcrafted and some of these videos that have come out recently, does your book start at the very beginning with Harper Goff and digging out a trench in California?

Oh, we go back.

Yeah, we go back to even before the True Life Adventures and Walt's earliest ideas for like the Mickey Mouse Park and things like that when he was – there was always some sort of well rivers were involved live animals were involved ended up being like livestock and that sort of thing but always had the idea of doing something along the lines of the jungle cruise inspired by like true life adventures and that that's where it starts so um yeah we go all the way back to the beginning

Okay.

Which I actually, I had, I got some help from my friends to help me unravel this one.

So going all the way back to true life adventures and the origins of the jungle cruise and Harper Goff and all of that.

So something else going on at the time was the making of 20,000 leagues under the sea, the movie.