Ken Anderson

But OK, so kind of getting into this.

The star of this chapter is a man named Ken Anderson.

He was Disney's jack of all trades.

He had worked at the Walt Disney Company since 1934, which just like for reference, it was like, you know, 20 to 30 years.

Very dark.

It's very dark.

And this is going to continue for a bit as Ken Anderson works on this ride.

You will see he was really going for horror and scaring people.

So for now, for now, I don't have an answer, but we are going to move on to the weekly Disney windows.

And this week we are talking about Mr. Ken Anderson, um, He lived from 1909 to 1993.

And his Disney career spanned from 1934 to 1978.

He became a Disney legend in 1991.

And his window is located at the Market House in Disneyland.

And the text says simply, Ken Anderson Bait Company.

And the window was added in 1955.

And so what happened was Walt always referred to Ken Anderson as his jack of all trades.

They ultimately built the facade of the Haunted Mansion before they even put the ride in there because they knew they wanted to put it there when they were building out this thing called New Orleans Square in Disneyland, which is also where Pirates of the Caribbean is.

so they had this whole New Orleans area and they had this really nice ornate mansion there they knew was going to be a haunted house but they didn't know what was going to go in it at one point it was going to be a walk-through attraction and then they finally decided on a ride-through attraction because they invented this thing called the Omnimover system where you can move people through the ride pretty ornately and twist them around so they can look at different scenes which allows for effects to work really well some of the great Disney designers at the time Imagineers like Mark Davis, Ken Anderson, Claude Coates what's his name, Raleigh Crump.

I have a Raleigh Crump tattoo of Haunted Mansion concept art that he did for the ride.

So all these great Imagineers threw a bunch of their ideas into the ride.

So we'll be bringing this home, kind of referencing back to something we covered, I think, in part one.

We were talking about different ideas that were floating around and different inspirations for haunted mansions, and specifically Ken Anderson, one of the Imagineers working on this.

So when it came time to refurbish this room, the creative team had a lot of ideas, but they wound up coming back to an idea inspired by an old Ken Anderson concept.

And a friendly reminder, Ken Anderson was the one who was just generating a ton of like early on ideas for Haunted Mansion concepts.

And he was the one that traveled to the Winchester Mystery House.

This was the one that was owned by the widow Winchester, who was convinced after her spouse died that From a gun.

You mentioned the glowing footsteps on the ground.

Can we talk a little bit more about those? Because those weren't just like a random show effect they decided to put in here.

Snow White and Her Adventures was designed and built between 1953 and the summer of 1955.

Ken Anderson, one of the art directors of the original 1937 film, adapted the script for the attraction and led the original design team that included Bill Martin, who was responsible for the track layout, Herb Ryman, who created several interior backgrounds, and Claude Coates, who brought the dark rides to life through his ultraviolet painting skill.

Now, Ken Anderson was the most responsible for creating the original attraction, in part because of his architectural background.

Anderson became one of the art directors for the film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and had built scale models of the Seven Dwarfs cottage.

His experience and artistry made him the perfect person to transform the animated classic into a three-dimensional experience.

And Walt liked to give previews.

So each attraction had a mural previewing the attraction.

Ken Anderson and Claude Coates were assigned to create these murals because they had worked on the original films and they could paint quickly.

Um, this is for...

Yeah, this is for Ken Anderson.

So he's the Disney animator, um, like, that the sh- you know, he conceived all of the s- like sketched out so many of the concepts for the Haunted Mansion that we talked about earlier.

Then in the bottom left is labeled Brother Roland for Rolly Crump.

It just, they were waiting for the right time for it to fit.

Um, at this point, the task of, um, getting the ideas going again for Haunted Mansion, it was assigned to animator Ken Anderson.

We're gonna wind up talking about a lot of people, a lot of Imagineers, a lot of key players in the game.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah

... we're probably gonna tell you right now.

So Ken Anderson-

Well, and it kind of, like, is a, a precursor to, like, why you see a lot of names that you don't know in other Disney rides, 'cause it's like-