Company Profile
www.parkworld-online.com
Garner Holt Productions, Inc. 40 years of
incredible imagination
Garner Holt Productions, Inc. turns the big four–o this year after its humble beginnings in Holts’ parents’ garage. Here Creative Design Director Bill Butlertakes us back through some of the biggest projects in the company’s captivating history...
F 40
or many products, a single brand name stands for the height of quality, innovation, and charismatic, diverse creations: Apple for electronics, TESLA for
automobiles, Disney for entertainment. In the unique market of animatronics, Garner Holt Productions, Inc. (GHP) is the first and last name for exceptionally well-designed and built figures for parks, attractions, and other locations around the world. And in July 2017, the animatronics company founded by a teenager celebrates its fortieth anniversary. “When I first started my company, I was out in my parents’
garage with one card table,” said Garner Holt, founder and president of the company that bears his name. “I was 16, the only employee, and still in high school. Now I’ve got a 70,000 square-foot garage and hundreds of card tables!” All that—plus close to a hundred talented employees—put GHP at the height of their unusual line of business.
Inspired by a childhood trip to Disneyland, Holt began
tinkering with mechanical figures and effects around age twelve. At first, they were just toys, but in a few short years, Holt’s fascination grew from mere child’s play into something much more. “I wanted to have some sort of attraction, something where I could show people what I was doing,” said Holt. “My parents were tired of me almost getting the neighborhood kids killed with my crazy backyard rides, so they insisted I come up with something more low-key that still challenged me creatively. Most of all it had to be safe.” What followed was a series of walk-through haunted houses in Southern California shopping malls and an animatronic Uncle Sam show for the US bicentennial in 1976. From such small local projects (including a mail-order latex
severed hand), GHP under Garner’s direction secured increasingly larger, more valuable, and more challenging
JULY 2017
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