Park People
parkworld-online.com Q Lines Joe Garlington My interactive adventure with Walt Disney Imagineering
How did your early career prepare you for your time at Disney?
Joe Garlington was the creative lead for interactive projects at Walt Disney Imagineering (WDI) from 1990 until February of this year. Starting his career in 1980, working on projects for EPCOT, he went on to co-found Art & Technology Inc, designing interactive attractions for museums, zoos and theme parks. Returning to WDI in 1990, Joe developed attractions for all the Disney theme parks worldwide, including Turtle Talk with Crush, Stitch Encounter, Monsters Inc Laugh Floor, Disney Quest, The Sum of All Thrills and the interactive elements for Toy Story Midway Mania. In an exclusive interview for Park World, the ex-Imagineer tells us more about his career designing attractions, the rise of interactivity and
personalisation, and why he’s “jealous as heck” of the next generation of attraction designers
As a college undergrad I studied anthropology and later art. The anthropology and my general curiosity about people helped me understand what the people I’m trying to entertain are thinking, feeling, wanting. That made it easier for me to provide entertainment that works for them. My art training as a sculptor and interactive artist helped me first in my work as a model/prop maker in movies and later in my early days at Disney. For example, I did the gopher in Caddy Shack. My graduate work at the California Institute of the Arts helped me think critically and over the long run that was the biggest thing my education brought me, the ability to think outside of the box, to look for and find new ways of entertaining.
What are some of your proudest achievements with Imagineering? I’m most proud of three categories of work from Disney. First, I turned interactive design from something that any old designer did into a specialty. In the process, that made this kind of work a more important component of the industry. And it made the work better, forced it to be held to a higher standard than it had been held to before.
Second, I pushed the frontiers of entertainment. WDI
[Walt Disney Imagineering] celebrates its inventive culture but there is still a lot of work done there that follows established patterns. Mine never did. My teams pushed and pushed and pushed. I’m proud that they did and that I was able to help them do it. Third, I broadened the talent pool at WDI. Because interactivity had never really been supported before I arrived as I grew the specialty I was able to bring in lots of new talent. I have long believed that design teams should look like their audience; it is arrogant to think you can design for people you don’t understand. So, for instance, I brought in lots of women – I was the first manager to gender balance my team. And I brought in lots of technical folk, even though I am an artist and arts manager. The modern tools of development are no longer divorced from technology the way some artists seem to think they are.
What projects in particular are you most proud of?
Much that I pitched never got built, but the big custom- made games at DisneyQuest like Virtual Pirates of the Caribbean, Virtual Jungle Cruise, CyberSpace Mountain, the Animation Academy, the Living Character program overall, with specific shows like Turtle Talk with Crush, Stitch Encounter and Monsters
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EPCOT is the home of many of Joe Garlington’s hits
Inc Laugh Floor; the games for Toy Story Midway Mania, all the early work that led to Magic Words with Mickey and Enchanted Tales with Belle are all projects my teams did that I am very proud of.
Much of your work has appeared at EPCOT. How different is the EPCOT of today to that envisioned by Walt Disney? They have little to do with each other. Walt envisioned a model city with real people living in it and real factories as the exhibits. After he died nobody knew quite how to pull that off. I don’t think anybody remained who could have sold that idea to American business and Walt could not have afforded to do it on his own. So EPCOT today is a World’s Fair-like theme park, not a working, model city. I love it as a park, it is unique in the world, but it is pretty far from Walt Disney’s original vision.
The term “interactive” is used commonly today within the industry. What for you is a true interactive attraction – is it just about technology or something more than that? Technology has nothing to do with it. Interactive experiences can be high, low or no tech. The basic definition is simple. It is any piece of entertainment where user input alters the flow of the show. In my mind there are actually three categories of entertainment: 1) Passive, which can be mentally active as heck, where guests watch a performance developed by others. 2) Active, where guests become physically active (as in an “interactive” fountain) but where what they do does not change the programming.
3) Interactive, where guest input causes the progress of the show to change. In the end it comes down to who is responsible for the actions of the protagonist in the
NOVEMBER 2014
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