July 25 - Harriet Burns

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On this day, in 2008, Harriet Burns passed away in Los Angeles, California. Born as Harriet Tapp in San Antonio, Texas on August 20, 1928, growing up during the Great Depression really brought out her creative side. Toys and games couldn't be purchased, they had to be created out of materials that could be found. How imaginative was Harriet as a child? While most kids would give their pet goldfish a name like Goldie, she named hers Tackaonsitgo Popeye Gotsinyammer Cockapinay Kasuzyanna Karachi Dianashey Brianashey Jickalicky Jackaboney Christianna More and could actually remember the whole name every time. Was she destined to become an artistic Legend? Whether you believe in that sort of thing or not, yes.

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Following high school, Harriet's father told her that he would only pay for college if she majored in Home Economics (yes, that was, and still is, a thing). She agreed and enrolled at Southern Methodist University in Dallas but, in the end, pulled one over on dear old dad by changing her major to Art, kind of forgetting to tell him about that. After graduating from SMU, Harriet spent another year at the University of New Mexico studying advanced design (no word on whether or not dad paid for that). In 1951, she married her college sweetheart, Bill Burns and did some work designing displays for Neiman Marcus in Texas.

In 1953, the Burns family moved to Los Angeles, California so Bill could try his hand at a career in acting. It didn't work out terribly well. In spite of the fact that she had a one-year-old daughter at home, Harriet decided that she'd better find some work to help pay the bills. On the basis of her previous design work, she was able to get a position with Dice Display Industries Cooperative Exchange, a Hollywood based prop company. For a little over a year, Harriet designed and built props for shows like the Colgate Comedy Hour. She was also part of a team that designed and built sets for the floor shows at Las Vegas hotels like the Dunes. Near the end of her short time with Dice, Harriet was a leader of the team that designed Santa's Village, a small theme park in Lake Arrowhead, California. Even with all that steady work, Dice Display still went belly up in early 1955. One of Harriet's co-workers decided to  return to his former place of employment and suggested that she try to get a position there as well.

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Harriet heard rumors that the Walt Disney Studio wasn't hiring women right at the moment, but she applied anyways. She later quipped that they must have thought her name was Harry because she got the job. Her first assignment was on a new television show the studio was working on, The Mickey Mouse Club. She started out making props but soon was helping to design and build the iconic clubhouse set that would feature prominently in every episode. Harriet worked her magic at a station right next to Fred Joerger, who was one of two people in a new department known at that time as Model Department. Fred's admiration of her talents would change the course of her career (as well as the look and feel of Disney theme parks).

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Fred worked with Wathel Rogers doing a very specific job that Walt felt needed to be done. They were making models of everything that was being built for the company's new theme park over in Anaheim, Disneyland. Fred felt that he and Wathel could use the help of Harriet in their model work and suggested to Walt that she become part of their department. Walt agreed and Harriet was transferred in. She was only the third person, and the first woman, to become what would eventually be known as an Imagineer. It's a position she would hold until her retirement over thirty years later.

Harriet's first task in the Model Department (soon to be renamed WED Enterprises), was to create a detailed model of Sleeping Beauty Castle, the most iconic landmark in Disneyland. Once the park was opened in July 1955, the trio at WED continued making models of attractions, but now they started depicting potential rides instead of existing ones. One of Harriet's first projects of this kind was to design and build a model of the Matterhorn Bobsleds ride, a 1/100th scale replica of an attraction that was a 1/100th scale replica of the actual Matterhorn in Switzerland.

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As time went on, WED Enterprises began adding more and more people to its ranks and taking on more and more projects. Designing and building four attractions for the 1964 World's Fair pushed everyone's creativity to the limit and everyone, including Harriet, showed they were more than up to the task. Harriet was part of two teams for the Fair, the one working on Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln for the State of Illinois pavilion and the one creating the Carousel of Progress for the General Electric pavilion. Both of those projects have stood the test of time. Great Moments is still running on Main Street USA in Disneyland and the Carousel is still turning in Tomorrowland in the Magic Kingdom.

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During the same time work was progressing on the rides for the World's Fair, Harriet was also busy doing another role she played with WED: she was a figure finisher. That meant she was one of the people who carefully applied paint and other materials to both Audio-Animatronics and the sets of attractions to give them their show ready or finished look. The first attraction she did this for was the Submarine Voyage which opened in 1959. It was the next one, though, that really showed off her talents. While doing finishing work on The Enchanted Tiki Room, hand applying thousands of feathers to the shows dozens of birds. she noticed a problem. When the four main birds breathed in and their chests puffed out, everything looked fine, but when they exhaled and their chests went back to normal, their skin looked bunched, kind of like Jose and the others were suffering from mites. Harriet solved this problem one day in a meeting. Walt was wearing a cashmere sweater and she couldn't help but notice that the knitted fabric moved at his elbows exactly like the Imagineers had envisioned the birds chests moving. Four custom made cashmere bird skins later and the bunching problem was fixed.

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Harriet was deeply involved in the design Disneyland's first major expansion, New Orleans Square, and all the restaurants and attractions that call it home. She made a model of the entirety of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride and was one of the attraction's main figure finishers. For anyone wondering where Imagineers get their inspiration from, it just might be you. The pirate that sits on the bridge swinging his leg and singing as guests float under him was based on Harriet's mailman at the time. She was also part of the design team that created the Haunted Mansion just a couple of years later. Sharp eyed guests will notice a tombstone at the Mansion about an opera singer who shares a name with Harriet (it's not a coincidence; all the tombstones at the Mansion honor the attraction's original designers). Walt was so impressed with her talents, he featured Harriet on several episodes of the Wonderful World of Disney throughout the Sixties, showcasing her work in the Tiki Room, Pirates and the World's Fair rides.

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Harriet was part of Walt Disney Imagineering until her retirement in 1986. Not only did she work on stuff at Disneyland but she was also influential on the designs of Walt Disney World, Tokyo Disneyland and EPCOT Center. She would continue to spend the rest of her life creating magic just on a smaller scale, doing it exclusively for her grandchildren and their friends. She also remained highly active in the Santa Barbara arts community, where she maintained her home. In 1992, she was honored with her very own window on Main Street USA in Disneyland, the first woman to ever receive one. It reads "The Artisans Loft, Handmade Miniatures by Harriet Burns." In 2000, the pioneering Imagineer was officially declared a Disney Legend. She passed away eight years later from complications brought on by a heart condition. She was 79.

June 23 - The Enchanted Tiki Room

On this day, in 1963, the Enchanted Tiki Room began serenading guests in Disneyland's Adventureland. As WED Enterprises (today's Imagineering Department) was working on attractions for the 1964 World's Fair, they were also looking for ways to improve Disneyland. One of the technologies they were developing was a kind of robotics eventually trademarked as Audio-Animatronics (we'll see why they got that name in a bit). The first dive into that pool came when Walt brought a mechanical bird back from a trip to New Orleans and set his Imagineers to trying to upgrade its movements. The team then moved on to a figurine that tap danced like Buddy Epsen. They continued to expand their knowledge, making more and more complex figures and systems. Eventually they would wow audiences with a likeness of Abraham Lincoln at the Fair, but first Walt had his whiz kids work up a little something for Disneyland.



Originally, the Enchanted Tiki Room was going to be a Polynesian themed restaurant, filled with birds and flowers that would sing to guests as they ate. The large fountain in the middle of the theater was supposedly going to be a coffee service station. That plan was quickly abandoned in favor of more Audio-Animatronic figures appearing in a full blown show. Underneath the theater, was an enormous room filled floor to ceiling with all the computers necessary to run all the figures. Because of the enormous amount of heat generated by those computers, the Tiki Room became the first building in Disneyland to include air conditioning. While that might entice guests into the show today, it actually wasn't as much of a selling point in 1963; the technology itself was impressive enough to fill the seats.

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By today's standards, the birds, flowers and totems of the Tiki Room are so basic they aren't even sophisticated enough to be considered quaint. But for guests of the time, watching an entire room seemingly come alive by itself was amazing. How did they do that? was a question pretty much on everyone's lips. A lot of folks today probably think they know how they did that, but most of them would only be partially right at best. The clue comes from how the technology was named, Audio-Animatronics. Yes there an electrical impulse that moved something mechanical, but that impulse was actually initiated by sound.

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Each individual movement requires its own channel and each channel requires its own reel of magnetic tape, that's why figures in the Tiki Room are so simple. Less movements means less reels which means less computers that need to stay synched up. Every movement has two positions, a resting place and a moved place. In other words the movement is either on (moved) or it is off (resting). Each reel of magnetic tape has a certain tone recorded on it that, when played, vibrates a metal reed, closing a circuit, sending a pulse of electricity to a pneumatic (or air driven) valve that causes whatever movement it’s connected to (eye blink, wing flap, mouth opening, etc). When the electrical pulse is spent, the movement returns to its resting position and waits for the next one. The tones are laid out on the tape at precise intervals to make, in the Tiki Room’s case, it appear that all the figures are dancing and singing in time with a recorded soundtrack. That’s why it took an entire room of computers, running hundreds of reels of tape to make the whole thing work. Nowadays, of course, we have fancy computing systems with enough power that you could probably run a set up like the Tiki Room from a couple of laptops (and hardly anyone even knows what magnetic tape is), but in 1963 this was top of the line stuff.

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As mind boggling as the technology was, Walt didn’t rely solely on gizmo’s to make the show work. He got the Sherman Brothers to write another earworm, The Tiki Tiki Tiki Room (they were writing their slightly more famous earworm, It’s a Small World, around the same time). He got the best voices he could find for his four macaw stars, half of which actually came from in-house. Wally Boag and Fulton Burley, who played the Mexican bird, Jose, and the Irish bird, Michael, respectively, were regular cast members across the park at the Golden Horseshoe Revue in Frontierland for decades. The quartet is rounded out by Thurl Ravenscroft (who also appears in The Haunted Mansion) as Fritz, the German parrot, and Ernie Newton (who was also the singing voice of Boo-Boo Bear) as Pierre, the French parrot. Walt also had some of his best Imagineers working on how the figures looked, Legends like Harriet Burns and Joyce Carlson. The attention to detail paid off.

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The Enchanted Tiki Room was a hit from the beginning. An extra Audio-Animatronic bird, placed near the entrance in an effort to get people to come see the show, caused traffic jams of guests trying to see just what this new thing was. Interestingly, entrance to the Tiki Room cost an extra 75 cents, supposedly because technically WED Enterprises owned it, not Disneyland, and it was therefore a separate attraction from the rest of the park. The popularity of the show saw an identical version installed in the Magic Kingdom in Walt Disney World right on time for opening day and Tokyo Disneyland was also Enchanted at its opening. The first two Tiki Rooms are still running just as they did back in the day (we won’t talk about the couple of years that Florida’s version was “Under New Management”), albeit with upgrades in the technology that run them, but Tokyo’s has undergone a complete revision. It’s now a Stitch themed Hawaiian show and no longer uses the original theme song. Speaking of which, you know you’re dying to sing a few verses of it, so All together now, in the tiki, tiki, tiki, tiki, tiki room, in the tiki, tiki, tiki…