On Working for a Rat - Part One

I've been working at Walt Disney World for a very long time. Twenty-Seven years, as I write this (I tell people that I started working at Disney when I was nine, which is how I can be only Thirty-six! ;-))

I started during the Tencenial celebration, which was the ten year anniversary of the Magic Kingdom. I was working in the North Service Area's Central Shops in the Ride & Show Department. We were building equipment that was bound for EPCOT Center and Tokyo Disneyland.

I transferred to EPCOT on April 1, 1982, which was while the park was under construction. It opened October 1, 1982. After about 7 years of working 3rd shift (Midnight shift) at the American Adventure and World Showcase, I moved to MACS, which was responsible for the park's Ride & Show computers, among other things. I was there about 9 years, and then I transferred to Datacomm.

That one time bit of a timeline is just to give you a little background, and I won't be repeating it again (at least not in its entirety). I thought I would share with you, my faithful readers (all both of you) some humorous tales of "Life Working for a Rat." I won't be doing this every week... maybe once a month, unless I hear of a demand for more frequent stories (or never again, if I hear from Disney's lawyers).

This week, I take you back to 1982 when I was working at The American Adventure. If you are sitting in the 1024 seat auditorium watching the show, you likely have no idea of the complex goings on backstage, and even under your seat. In case you've never seen the show, it is a theatrical show using Audio Animatronic characters to present a bit of American history. Hosted by Mark Twain and Ben Franklin, they take you from the pilgrims coming to America in search of religious freedom, through the industrial age, and end with Mark & Ben standing on Lady Liberty's torch high atop the Statue of Liberty.

Backed by a 70MM (larger format) film projected on a HUGE curved screen, you watch set after set raise out of the stage in front of a perfectly synced image. Frederic Douglas rides his raft down the Bayou, Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir sit on top of a stone ridge with Yosemite in the background, Ben Franklin walks up a staircase to Thomas Jefferson's loft, Matthew Brady photographs a frontier family just prior to the civil war, and the flash powder expels a large ball of smoke as the light floods the stage. All of this, and so much more, is happening in the small space between you and the screen. But in walking out of the theater with the audience as they leave the show, I would hear people say things like "Did you see the horse?" "Wasn't the baby cute?" and, in my mind I would be yelling at these people "There's technology going on here folks! Don't you want to know how all these large set keep popping up in the same space? How is it Mark Twain's cigar wafts smoke? How the heck does an Audio Animatronic figure walk up a staircase?"

[sigh]

Well, I am not sure how much I can really tell you, and I certainly don't want to spoil the magic for you, but I need to tell you a little bit as background for my story. Stage left and right each have 3 lifts. These are non-moving steel frames with hydraulics that lift a set piece from the pit floor to up in view of the audience. The speed that each set rises is timed to be in sync with the movie, the effect being that you (or a camera) is being lowered into a scene long enough to witness a tidbit of history. There are multiple sensors to monitor the progress, and interlocks to keep them from coming up when they shouldn't. Computers monitor everything and insure that every thing works properly and stays in sync. When there's a problem, the curtain drops, the auditorium lights come up, and the show goes "101," which means that the show is down. When this happens, and host or hostess apologizes to the audience and requests that they come back later. A phone call is made to central base (which is under the MACS department that I mentioned before) and they are advised that the show is 101, and what happened. Central base would then broadcast on several radio frequencies (Maintenance, Operations, Security) of the situation. Ops would then know to advise guests to visit the American Adventure at a later time. Maintenance for that area would know to get to the backstage area as quickly as possible in order to bring the show back up. Security would.... um.... get another doughnut? No, I guess they probably helped with crowd control.

So anyway, a group of us are eating lunch over at the cafeteria. The show was still trying to shake off the bugs of any new and complex show, so we were all keeping an ear on the radio for any signs of problems. And we were not disappointed. The announcement came from Central Base "Attention all units this frequency! American Adventure is 101. Susan B Anthony will not go down!"

I seem to remember someone shooting diet Coke out of their nose in a fit of laughter, and it was right after this that everyone was required to wear a earphone when in a guest area.

Whew! That was a long way to go for that, but I hope you enjoyed the journey. Look for many more (hopefully shorter tales) in the coming year!