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7. Ub Iwerks and Don Iwerks

Image: Disney

Business: Iwerks-Iwerks Stereoscopic Cameras
Location: Magic Kingdom (above the Main Street Bakery)

Ub Iwerks met Walt Disney in 1919, and they became fast friends. Fast-forward to 1922, when Iwerks joined as a lead animator at Disney’s Laugh-O-Gram cartoon studios. When Laugh-O-Gram went bankrupt in 1923, Iwerks followed Disney to Los Angeles and created Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. When Disney lost the rights to Oswald to Universal in 1928 and famously sketched the idea of using a mouse instead, it was Iwerks who cleaned up the draft and created the refined Mickey Mouse we know today. Steamboat Willie was almost entirely animated by Ub Iwerks.

Image: Disney

In later decades, Iwerks worked with Disney developing visual effects, including the process that combined live action and animation in Song of the South, and the xerographic process behind cel animation.

Image: Disney

His son, Don Iwerks, was a masterful camera technician, working behind the camera on Disney’s 1954 film 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. For the rest of his career, Don Iwerks and his father led ambitious, technological innovations behind filmmaking for the Walt Disney Company, including the futuristic 360-degree filming process behind Circle-Vision 360, as we explored in-depth in our Lost Legends: The Timekeeper feature.

8. Richard Sherman and Robert Sherman

Image: edenpictures, Flickr (license)

Business: Two Brothers Tunemakers
Location: Disneyland (at the 20th Century Music Company)

There’s a great, big, beautiful tomorrow, shining at the end of every day; there's a great, big, beautiful tomorrow just a dream away!

It’s a world of laughter, a world of tears; it’s a world of hopes and a world of fears; there's so much that we share that it's time we're aware it's a small world, after all…”

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, even though the sound of it is something quite atrocious…”

Image: Disney

In the Tiki, Tiki, Tiki, Tiki, Tiki Room, in the Tiki, Tiki, Tiki, Tiki, Tiki, Room, all the birds sing words and the flowers croon in the Tiki, Tiki, Tiki, Tiki, Tiki Room...

One little spark of inspiration is at the heart of all creation… Right at the start of everything that’s new, one little spark lights up for you.

If, in your head, you sang those lines rather than reading them, you’ve got the Sherman Brothers to thank. Richard and Robert Sherman were Disney’s go-to songwriters for not only feature films (they scored The Parent Trap, The Sword in the Stone, Mary Poppins, the Jungle Book, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, The Aristocats, and dozens more) but for theme parks and attractions.

Their infectious songs have arisen to the top of the Disney Parks songbook, becoming iconic instrumentals that reverberate through the parks today. In addition to the can’t-miss-classics above, they’ve also developed music for Magic Journeys, Tomorrowland’s Lost Legend: Adventure Thru Inner Space, EPCOT Center, and Disneyland’s non-functional Disaster File: Rocket Rods.

It’s only fitting that the pair is forever credited at the Two Brothers Tunemakers, as they live on through the songs they produced that will never be forgotten.

9. Tony Baxter

Image: Theme Park Insider

Business: Main Street Marvels (Disneyland), The Camelot Core (Magic Kingdom), Main Street Gazette (Disneyland Paris)

Tony Baxter is perhaps the most prominent of the “Second Generation” of Imagineers – a band of designers who joined Disney around the opening of Magic Kingdom. As the first of a new generation, Baxter and his peers had an unusual new perspective: having visited Disneyland as children gave them a vantage point that the designers of Walt’s era simply couldn’t have had!

Baxter’s story is an Imagineering dream for most Disney fans. Imagineers caught a glimpse of a project he’d developed for college (a Mary Poppins dark ride for Fantasyland) and, before long, had plucked him from operating Disneyland’s Submarine Voyage to working under Claude Coats to design Magic Kingdom’s fantasy-infused version – the Lost Legend: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

Image: Disney

Since then, Baxter went on to become the face of a new age of Imagineering. With mentor Marc Davis’s Western River Expedition on the back-burner, Baxter pulled out pieces of the project to create Big Thunder Mountain (and its could-be compliment, Disneyland’s never-built Possibilityland: Discovery Bay); he designed EPCOT Center’s most-missed fan favorite and Lost Legend: Journey into Imagination, led the charge on Splash Mountain, took creative control of Disneyland’s European-village-inspired New Fantasyland, worked with Michael Eisner and his new, thrill-focused, cinematic vision to create another Lost Legend: STAR TOURS, and led the development of Disneyland’s epic Indiana Jones Adventure.

Brilliantly, Baxter was given complete creative control on the design of Disneyland Paris, and under his guidance, Imagineers there created some of the most spectacular re-imaginings of Disney classics ever, including the park’s headlining Lost Legend: Space Mountain – De la Terre à la Lune and the mysterious Modern Marvel: Phantom Manor.

Tony Baxter is a true living legend. As a pioneer of a new age, he’s unique among this list for having never even met or worked alongside Walt Disney. And yet, he’s a Legend and an icon all the same for the way he’s led the next stage of Disney Parks development and opened the story of Imagineering to a new generation – a symbol of possibility for a the armchair Imagineers of today.

Opening Credits

The notion of Disney Parks’ “opening credits” scrolling past you as you step down Main Street, U.S.A. is perhaps one of the more thoughtful, cinematic, clever, and brilliant pieces of Disney’s Imagineering. And this list is in no way exhaustive. Between the four “Main Streets” at Disney Parks (and a few smartly-placed windows in Disneyland’s Frontierland, Adventureland, and Toontown), hundreds of figures are preserved in a living Hall of Fame, forever written into the recipe of minds who created and shaped the Disney Parks we know today.

Image: Disney

Harper Goff, Card Walker, Harriet Burns, Richard Irvine, Meg Crofton, Yale Gracey, Marty Sklar, Dorothea Redmond, John Hench, X Atencio, Ron Miller, Jack Lindquist, Roy O. Disney, Michael Eisner… the list goes on and on, with each figure big and small having a prominent position and supporting story in the ongoing creation of Disneyland and its sisters.

Hopefully, this brief look at a few of the key windows around the world provides a start to the exciting stories out there around who made Disney Parks and how they did it.

 
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