Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. Tomorrow I leave for a weeklong excursion to Disney World with two of my favorite little dudes in this big, bad world. I'll be technically on vacation (although I do have a story brewing about something I'm doing while at the parks... mysterious seeekrriiitttss) and will be spending every spare moment bonding with the nephews or goofing off at the parks, so I put some thought into what I was going to do with this week's BTS column.
Instead of putting a hold on the column I'm just gonna give you a week's worth of images at once. How about that? Seven images to carry you over until next week. You can treat it a bit like an advent calendar if you want and just look at one image a day or, if you're like me and have very little self control, you can look at them all at once.
Since I'm in a very Disney mood, don't be surprised that the images below are all pretty Disney/ film/park/animation related.
You're going to be getting some different kinds of BTS shots, starting with one of Uncle Walt showing off his model for Disneyland back when he was pitching the concept of the park!
As a kid that entrance meant a whole lot to me. The experience I had there as a child has definitely colored my outlook on the world and getting to share in that joy with my young nephews next week has me totally pumped. I can't wait!
Next up is a nice picture of one of Disney's 9 Old Men, Wolfgang “Woolie” Reitherman animating Mickey for, I believe, Mickey and the Beanstalk, using his own goofy expresions as reference.
To show that the technology might have changed, but the animation process not so much let's look at a similar photo, this time of Pete Docter hard at work on John Lasseter's Toy Story using those new fangled computer machines.
Before we go back into more vintage Disney, I wanted to throw in this amazing shot of John Lasseter posing with his childhood toys that actually inspired all the now-famous collection of characters in Toy Story.
One of the movies I showed my newphews in preparation of this Disney World trip was the swept-under-the-rug Song of the South. I told them about it when we rode Splash Mountain on the last trip and figured it would be kinda cool if they were some of the only kids to have actually seen the movie all the characters are from to ride that ride this time out.
They loved the animated sequences, but were kinda bored by the live action stuff. I still adore the movie and think it's unfairly maligned (usually by people who haven't seen it), so let's look at this publicity shot of young stars Bobby Driscoll and Ruth Warrick seeing the animated Br'er Bear come to life thanks to another one of Disney's “9 Old Men” Eric Larson.
We're dipping into live action for the next Disney image. Return to Oz scared the shit out of me when I was a kid. The Wheelers, Mombi screaming for Dorothy's head, the Nome King trying to eat Jack Pumpkinhead... Nightmare fuel.
Here's a shot of the stop-motion masters bringing the Nome King to life:
We're going to wrap up with something from the original Pete's Dragon. The impetus of this family trip to Disney World was to be there for the final running of the Electric Parade, which is being mothballed at Disney World for good and will have a limited run at Disneyland before going away for good. One of the highlights of that parade is the 1:1 scale, smoke-breathing Elliott. Since Pete's Dragon was one of my favorite movies as a kid I remember being really psyched when I saw Pete riding Elliott in the parade as a kid, which has made that stick with me into my adulthood and is why I'm super sad to see it go away.
Today's image is a bit of an animation test (assuming testing for scale) of Pete (Sean Marshall) in his appropriately themed civilian clothes in the lighthouse with a rough Elliott drawn in for the climactic moment when the dragon relights the wick and saves the day.
There you have it. Seven photos to cover my week off. See you jerks next week when the column goes back to daily nerdy updates!
-Eric Vespe
”Quint”
quint@aintitcool.com
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