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PW-FEB20-30-32-Industry-Influencer.qxp_Feature 02/03/2020 11:19 Page 31


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an attraction in St. Augustine and then I went down to Kennedy Space Centre and they bought one too.” What happened next, changed everything. “While I was there, I met a man who was an ex-Six Flagger from Atlanta, named Bill Barnes. Bill asked me, ‘are you going to IAAPA?’ and I said, ‘what’s IAAPA?’ (remember, it was 1978!). He said, ‘you really need to call IAAPA and join; call them soon as you get home.’ So, I did.” John signed up for the show that same year, but by his own admission he had


no idea of what was going to take place. “I thought it was really only Sally and Disney that were building animatronics, I was naïve. By looking in the directory, I found five or six other companies that sold animatronics, so I called them and found out a little bit about all of them. I really thought, based on the history that I heard about IAAPA, that we were in the right place.” Sally only had a small 800 square foot


manufacturing and administration base in Jacksonville, FL. Taking a leap of faith they rented 300 square feet of space at the IAAPA expo, bringing everything they had made but hadn’t sold that year. “We had everything,” says John, “a space creature, a professor with a slide show, a pirate with a bird on his shoulder; we had Santa Claus, we had Elvis, and we had Sally. We really were warmly received – people got what we were doing, whereas the display people were scared of us.” When asked what the show was like back


then, John tells me, “it was huge, it was glitzy, it was like going to an amusement park where everything is new, and everything is free, just like it is now. 42 years later our company ranks 36th in seniority among exhibitors. It’s humbling for me to think we have outlasted many companies in this great industry.”


Time for change Looking back at Sally’s first years in the industry John says, “Over time, there were other impacts, other things changed.” The first major change was the shift away from motorised mannequins, into musical animated bears that would sing songs, “because of the success of Chuck E Cheese”, still a successful FEC until this day. “Anyone that was building animated performing characters was being courted,” says John. Sally began creating musical bears and shows for other folks interested in


animating a pizza restaurant. “We had Billy Joe and the Blue Brass Bears, Daniel and the Dixie Land Diggers, and Ursula and the Oompapas” says John. “We changed from being a manufacturer of a communication device to being in the ‘entertainment’ business. We had to create new show control, new techniques for animations, for pneumatics. We were refining our products all the while building it ourselves.” Having expanded too aggressively, Chuck E


Cheese went bankrupt. “With one of our biggest market all but gone, we had to find a new way to propel the business.” John remembers this period well: “Necessity is the mother of invention as they say, but so too is fear of failure. When the first paradigm shift took place, we went from single and double character displays to animated musical shows. Once that market evaporated, we focused on the void of dark rides in regional parks. The existing quality was very poor in comparison to the sophisticated Disney and Universal model, and we thought we could close the gap. “Disney came in with their great rides, great IP’s and


almost shamed everybody else that had the old corny style dark rides. One of the real appeals of the


FEBRUARY 2020


traditional dark ride was to get with your girlfriend or boyfriend and go through the dark ride where you could kiss –that’s why they were called ‘tunnels of love’; it was nothing really decorated, they may have had roses on the wall, but nothing much. Or, there was a second type with gags that would scare or startle you, all homemade stuff that that the park owner-operator would create in his onsite barn. “Disney dark rides were a paradigm shift, so we


had to counter that with another - the introduction of gaming in the ride. That’s what opened up our market. We already had the animatronic stars, show control, lighting and audio. Then, we built a scenery department and created the designs so we could work with other people to fulfill larger projects.” At the 1986 IAAPA Expo Sally showcased its


first interactive dark ride concept, Ghostbusters: The Dark Ride. “This was our first stab at marketing


an interactive dark ride. Our model was larger than life, with highly detailed sets and scenery and lots of animatronics. ‘The greatest dark ride designed, but never built’ – as we call it. It’s really where we wanted to go with our future; it just took a while to get there. But- I think we made it!” The concept certainly caught the industry’s attention. From this point on Sally


gradually earned the trust of regional parks, showing them that they too could have a destination quality dark ride, which was suitable for all the family and at a price they could afford. Widely credited with the birth of the interactive (shooting game) dark ride, The


Great Pistolero Roundup was the first actual interactive ride that the company designed and built, winning IAAPA’s Brass Ring Award for Best New Product (Major Rides and Attractions) in 1995 and recognised again the following year in the Family Entertainment category. Sally was “pretty much a solid dark ride company by that stage,” says John, adding from that came the North Pole Adventure, Treasure Hunt, Ghost Blasters™, Scooby-Doo’s Haunted Mansion and Zombie Paradise (which used the first trackless ride system). Created for Walibi Belgium in 2003, Challenge of Tutankhamon remains one of John’s favourite projects to this day. “It’s a fully immersive attraction, with multiple endings, a trackless ride vehicle and uses our interactive laser system. It has a good pace and is a quality experience all the way through,” he says. Justice League: Battle for Metropolis was another


major breakthrough for Sally, propelling the company into the major leagues in terms of mixed media dark ride attractions. It scooped both the IAAPA Impact Award and IAAPA Brass Ring Award for Best New Product in 2015, together with the Thea for Outstanding Achievement Award in 2018. It was what


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