John Hench

yeah.

And John Hench, the three of us.

Flew to Detroit, took the GM executives out to dinner, and Marty and John Hench and Randy point at me and say, this is the solution to your problem.

Hire him.

So in other words, Marty and to a certain extent, Randy Bright and John Hench, they started BRC Imagination Arts.

And there are worse ways to start a company.

than to be hired by the world's largest corporation on earth to do a project in a Disney theme park.

Yeah, Tomorrowland's always been like the cool land at Disneyland.

Like I always, you know, loved the way it looked, you know, that beautiful John Hench art direction of like Space Mountain with those white, you know, spires on top of that really cool looking building.

Um, you know, the, the people mover going by is like, uh, and then there's, there's beautiful floral, um, designs like, uh, you know, with, with all the different flowers like that were there, you know, in the, in the entrance to Tomorrowland, you know, throughout the, the nineties.

Right.

And that did go through my mind when I started.

And even the very opening page of the book, it's a nod to Herb Ryman and John Hench.

And you can see it in that caption there.

I actually started scribbling over their... concept drawings as well to get myself you know in the mood to finish what they started and then the more i realized it's kind of like when you're learning something first you're you look at other people you admire to learn the craft then all of a sudden one day you wake up just like i'm just gonna i got i found my own style now right so um so i started off trying to be true to walt I ended up just doing this really, the idea of Progress City and making that, you know, like you said.

Alan Tudyk had a great story about talking to kids with cancer and bringing joy to their life through his work with Disney.

Yeah, there was, uh, uh, Kim Irvine talked about that she would hang out with John Hench in the park, and he w- he said like one time or something after getting off Space Mountain, he's like, "We gotta take care of this park because it's not our park.

It's the guests' park.

We just take care of it." And I was like, "Oh." So anyway, great show.

You see, originally, Walt Disney envisioned it to be a dining experience with live birds.

Disney, along with John Hench and the Imagineers, would choose to pivot to the first use of audio animatronics to avoid the obvious complications that come with using live animals.

They would also drop the whole dining aspect in order for their guests to fully take in the show.

But anyways, let's get back to the early 1990s, where Steven Schussler is attempting to find investors for his rainforest-themed restaurant, one that was definitely going to have live birds.

stuff.

I mean, Disney legend John Hench, I love telling this story.

I was working in Adventureland one day, and I look over, and I'm like, oh, my goodness, that's John Hench.

You know, he's sitting there with color swatches.

Because he worked until the day he died, you know, and he was such an expert on color and they would match the color to, you know, they knew the colors for Walt Disney World would have to be different for the ones from Disneyland just because of the latitude and the sunlight.

um you know taking that into account so you know but he's sitting there you know with color swatches working on something in adventureland at the time and i'm just like oh my gosh

it's john hench you know

that that would excite me more than you know oh look there's an a-list celebrity coming through with you know with their entourage because i was like john hench this is the guy who helped create my childhood so yeah so yeah the detail there they would scrutinize you know that's one of the things about Disney when Disney does it right they scrutinize all that stuff it's not it's a choice it's it's not like you know oh we just picked a color at random to put on this sign or whatever no there's a reason it's that way

She'll show how all the new appliances and gadgets are making life easier for the whole family.

Speaking of John, we'll find him out on the porch handing out candy to trick-or-treaters and poor Uncle Orville can be found in the bathroom with no privacy around here.

Happy to see that Orville is still, still there, still kicking.

Act three is going to feature the new millenniums, what they're calling it.

With the 90s drawing to a close, our Carousel family is preparing to ring in the new millennium on New Year's Eve 1999.

Y2K.

Amid the excitement of the countdown to 2000, a new thing called the internet is bringing John, Sarah, Jimmy, and Patty and the world together.

closer together than ever before if you're anything like the family not everything is going to make it till midnight or not everyone is going to make it till midnight grandpa has already nodded off before the big countdown while grandma sneaks the tv over to wrestling when no one is looking i like those little nods back to the