March 11 - Bruce Healey

On this day, in 1950, Bruce Healey was born in St. Louis, Missouri. As a child, Bruce began, like many kids, learning how to play the piano (with a healthy dose of percussion thrown in) and, like most kids, he hated it. Okay, considering how his life progressed, maybe hate is a strong word but he did not grow up wanting to be a musician. That dream took years to form. As he got better at playing different instruments, he began to study how to arrange songs for those instruments which led him to actually composing his own pieces. And that’s when he first thought “Hey, this could be a career.” In order to further those plans, Bruce enrolled at California State University, Fullerton as a Music Composition student. At the same time he got a part time job at Disneyland, playing the drums in the marching band for the Christmas parade (all music for the parades used to be live). Thus, his growing love of music became intertwined with a growing love for all things Disney.

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Bruce began working for Disney full time in 1973, after graduating from CSU with his Bachelor’s degree. As part of the team in charge of providing music for everything from parades, to television specials to Super Bowl half time shows, Bruce spent his days arranging and composing pages and pages of music. By 1980, he’d become Music Coordinator and Arranger and six years later he’d moved up to Music Director for Walt Disney Attractions, the position he still holds today. He will proudly tell you that he is responsible for every piece of music produced by Disneyland (and just as quick to point out he doesn't do it alone) since 1986 but his work can be heard at theme parks spanning the globe.

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Perhaps his most famous piece is currently heard around the Rivers of America in Disneyland, off of Sunset Boulevard in Disney’s Hollywood Studios in Florida and in the Mediterranean Harbor area of Tokyo DisneySea. Some of you are smiling knowingly because you know I’m talking about Fantasmic!, one of the most popular night time spectaculars that Disney’s ever created and has been running for almost 27 years in California, where it all began. So even though Bruce says it’s okay if people know his music but don’t know him, the next time you find yourself daydreaming about slaying a dragon, and you find yourself humming a familiar little tune, may you think fondly of a man who has devoted his life to making so many of your favorite Disney elements sound really good. Happy birthday Bruce!

January 7 - Voyage of the Little Mermaid

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On this day, in 1992, Voyage of the Little Mermaid first invited guests to travel under the sea at the Disney-MGM Studios. When the studios first opened in 1989, the Backlot Tour was half of the available attractions. When the park proved to be more popular than anticipated, pieces of the Backlot Tour were slowly taken off the tour and made into their own stand alone things. One of those pieces was a theater at the end of the tour.

At that time, Disney was in negotiations with Jim Henson to acquire the Muppets. In anticipation of that deal, two attractions opened at the Studios featuring Jim's characters. One of those attractions, Muppet*Vision 3D is still running. The other was a live stage show with life size Muppet characters that opened in that little theater located just off Animation Courtyard. That show was called Here Come the Muppets and ran for just over 15 months. The show that replaced it is one of my favorite shows in all of Walt Disney World.

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Now is a good time for full disclosure. I'm more than a little biased when it comes to VoLM. I performed in it more than 7,700 times over a three year period. That number sounds impressive when I say it but it's really not. There are performers still there who have been with the show since the beginning and have logged well over 25,000 performances. Compared to them, I'd barely started. I am immensely proud of the not only the work I did while part of the cast but of everyone I worked with, most of whom put me to shame with their talent. So even though VoLM is getting shiny patches on the knees of its pants and looking a little haggard when it crawls out of bed each morning, I think the world of it.

And, for the most part, so do guests. They might not all appreciate the fact that Ariel is singing live rather than lipsynching to a track. They might not care that being able to watch nine puppeteers ply their craft at one time doesn't really happen much anymore, or anywhere. They don't even notice that the show doesn't make much sense if you've never seen the movie (let's be real, though, who hasn't seen The Little Mermaid?)  But I do think they enjoy the show completely and wholeheartedly. After all, audiences have been consistently showing up, day in and day out, for 27 years now. In fact about a third of all guests who come to the Studios each day find their way through the little theater near the back of the park. To put that in perspective, about half of all guests will find a seat in the much (much) larger space that houses the park's premiere show Fantasmic. VoLm does more than all right for itself.

There are constantly rumors afoot that Voyage of the Little Mermaid is on the brink of closing. The reasons are always varied: it's so old, so tired, it would cost too much to properly refurbish it, Disney is getting rid of all puppeteers, etc. etc. etc. A couple of years ago, more than one blog even reported as "fact" that it was done that Labor Day. As the Studios are in a constant state of flux these days, those rumors get more rampant the closer Star Wars Land gets to opening but so far they remain rumors. Will there be a place for VoLM in the new Disney's Hollywood Studios? I'm sure at some point it will go the way of Legend of the Lion King and Here Come the Muppets, but don't count this little slice of undersea adventure out just yet. And when you do go to see it, if you run into Max, tell him an old friend says hello.

January 6 - Disney-MGM Studios

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On this day, in 2008, the third Walt Disney World theme park, the Disney-MGM Studios, ceased to exist. Which sounds more dramatic than it really is. The theme park didn’t actually go anywhere, of course, it just suffered a name change to Disney's Hollywood Studios. But that is enough of an excuse to talk about a place that has become near and dear to my heart. The park opened on May 1, 1989 as a theme park, yes, but with a fully operational production studio layered on top. The concept for the park had actually started on a much smaller scale. In the mid-Eighties, Legendary Imagineer Marty Sklar had teamed up with Randy Bright with the task of creating two new pavilions for Future World in Epcot. The two lead a team that came up with plans for a health based pavilion called Wonders of Life and an entertainment pavilion known as the Great Movie Ride. When Michael Eisner became the head of the company, he looked at the Great Movie Ride and thought it might be better to make it the anchor for a third theme park. To that end, Disney signed a licensing agreement with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and the Disney-MGM Studios was born, at least on paper.

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As plans for the new park grew, it was decided that included would be television and film production facilities, a functional backlot area and an auxiliary animation department to the California studio. The animation studio was the first thing to open and it promptly caused problems. MGM filed a lawsuit claiming they only agreed to a theme park and didn’t know anything about new film productions at the site. The fact that MGM wanted to open (and eventually did open) their own theme park at their hotel in Las Vegas, may have had something to do with it. Disney would file a countersuit over that theme park. In 1992 a federal judge decided that there was enough money to go around that both parks could exist. Only one still operates today, however, making the whole thing an overly expensive, not to mention pointless, spat.

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Plans for the new park were further complicated when Universal Studios announced that they were going to build a theme park in Orlando that would be similar to the one that already existed in Southern California. Construction had begun on Disney-MGM in 1987 but was accelerated in order to beat Universal’s opening by as much as possible (Universal’s actual opening was so plagued by problems it might not have mattered, but that’s a discussion for another time).

When Disney’s version of studio opened in 1989, it only had two attractions to offer guests. One was the Great Movie Ride (from the original Epcot brainstorms) and the other was the Studio Backlot Tour, which was part tram ride (through Catastrophe Canyon) and part walking tour. The Little Theme Park That Could proved to be popular, though, and it began to change in subtle ways almost immediately. Part of the backlot, New York Street, was taken off the tram tour and opened to relieve pedestrian traffic as the Streets of America. Bit by bit, pieces of the backlot tour were made into their own attractions, mainly to help with traffic control, including the theater in the Animation Courtyard area that made me love the Studios (more about that in my next post).

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The park also began expanding almost from the beginning. Star Tours debuted before the end of that first year. In 1991, the Grand Avenue area opened featuring one of my favorite attractions, Muppet*Vision 3D. The next big expansion opened in 1994 when Sunset Boulevard appeared on the map and dead ended at the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror. Since then all sorts of changes have happened. Actual productions stopped happening (too late to matter to MGM). The animation studio packed its bags and moved to California. The backlot tour systematically phased itself out until it was closed and the entire area was demolished to make way for an expanded Star Wars area. A Pixar street was added with the ever popular Toy Story Midway Mania ride and then even more Pixar was added as Toy Story got it's own land. And then, seventeen months ago, the Great Movie Ride itself closed its doors to make way for a new Mickey Mouse based experience.

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When the Great Movie Ride closed, the argument could be made that the Disney-MGM Studios actually did cease to exist at that point, not with the name change nine years earlier. The park has changed and evolved so much since opening day that hardly any of the original park is left. It is poised to change even more later this year with the opening of Star Wars Land (yes, I'm aware it's called Galaxy's Edge, not Star Wars Land, I'm marginal on that name) but that's okay. Change is something Walt expected his theme parks to do and I think Disney's Hollywood Studios has done the best job of embracing that change of any of them. It's gone from being a place where movies are made to being the place that brings movies to life. Will it get another name change as it moves into the future? Bob Iger once hinted as such, some really terrible names were focus grouped and then denials were made about Bob's hint, so I honestly don't know (although I'm still pulling for The Pixstar Ranch). What I do know is that the Disney-MGM Studios... I mean Disney's Hollywood Studios (some habits really do die hard) becomes more relevant and more exciting with every change.