July 21 - Don Knotts

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On this day, in 1924, Jesse Donald Knotts was born in Morgantown, West Virginia. The fourth son of William and Elsie Knotts, Don’s childhood wasn’t a happy one. William, already a schizophrenic and alcoholic, suffered a nervous breakdown after the birth of his fourth child and frequently threatened his children at knifepoint. William died from complications associated with pneumonia when Don was 13 and his mother was forced to open a boarding house to make ends meet. Don became an introverted kid who found release by performing on stage.

In high school, Don began performing as a ventriloquist and stand-up comedian at local church and school functions. After high school, he went to New York to start a career as a comedian. It didn’t pan out. He returned home and enrolled at West Virginia University as an education major. After his freshman year, he took a break from college to join in the fighting of World War II. From 1943-46, Don spent most of his tour of duty travelling between the islands of the Pacific, doing stand-up as part of a GI show called Stars and Gripes. Along the way he earned the World War II Victory Medal, Philippine Liberation Medal, Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal (with 4 bronze service stars), Army Good Conduct Medal, Marksman Badge (with an M1 Carbine) and the Honorable Service lapel pin. After his honorable discharge, Don returned home, resumed his studies at WVU and graduated in 1948.

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With his degree in hand, Don moved to New York again and promptly never used it. This time around he had all sorts of contacts from his days in Special Services and his entertainment career began to build. Not only was he a much more confident stand-up performer in the city’s night clubs, he managed to land a recurring role on a radio program, Bobby Benson and the B-Bar-B Riders, as a wisecracking know-it-all. This led to wider fame on television. In 1953, Don started two years on the soap Search for Tomorrow which rolled into a permanent role as part of the repertory company on The Steve Allen Show. It was on the latter show that Don perfected his character of the extremely nervous man, something he would use to great comedic effect for the rest of his career. During his tenure with Steve Allen, Don also broke onto Broadway in the show No Time for Sergeants and onto the silver screen with the movie version of the same. It was one of Don’s co-stars in Sergeants, Andy Griffith, who would change his life forever.

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In 1960, Andy was given his own television show, aptly named The Andy Griffith Show. Andy was to play a small town sheriff and Don was hired to be his deputy. Initially, the plan was for Andy to be the comedic lead while Don played the straight man. By the second episode, though, Andy could see that the show worked way better the other way around and the character of Barney Fife was allowed to blossom into one of the most beloved guys ever to grace a television screen. During the first five seasons of Andy Griffith, Don won three Emmy Awards for his portrayal of the bumbling law man. Andy had always maintained that his show would only run for five seasons. Don believed him when he said that and sought out a movie contract as what he thought was the series end drew nigh. So it was a surprise to Don when additional seasons were announced. He hadn’t actually signed anything yet with a movie studio, but he felt that he might not have another opportunity to do so. He left the show and eventually signed a five picture deal with Universal. He wasn’t done with Barney Fife, however. Don continued to occasionally play the role in specials and Mayberry RFD, the spin-off to Andy Griffith. People loved the character so much that Don would pick up another two Emmy Awards during those rare Barney sightings, bringing his total up to five for the same character (and a perfect nomination/win ratio).

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After leaving The Andy Griffith Show, Don spent the next several years starring a string of mostly forgettable comedies on the big screen. The more recognizable titles are The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, The Incredible Mr. Limpet and The Shakiest Gun in the West, but none of them are going to make anyone’s best of list. Don also continued to work steadily on television well into the Seventies with guest appearances on Scooby-Doo, 1969’s The Bill Cosby Show and Here’s Lucy.

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In 1975, Don became part of the Disney family when he teamed up with fellow funnyman Tim Conway for fairly mediocre (but profitable) family comedy, The Apple Dumpling Gang. Don would become a staple of Disney comedies for the next few years, with roles in Gus, No Deposit, No Return, Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo, Hot Lead and Cold Feet and ending the decade by joining Tim once again in a sequel, The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again. It would be over two decades before Don appeared (or at least his voice did) in another Disney production as Mayor Turkey Lurkey in 2005’s Chicken Little. His last performance period came a year later in the direct-to-video film Air Buddies, a sequel in Disney’s Air Bud franchise.

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As the Seventies drew to a close, Don would strike television gold once more. The popular sitcom Three’s Company was losing its landlords to their own spin-off, The Ropers. Don was brought in as the apartment complex on the show’s new manager, Ralph Furley. John Ritter recalled everyone being terrified of Don’s star status, but he quickly integrated himself into the existing show and remained a regular cast member until the series finale in 1984. The aging Don Juan wannabe character of Mr. Furley would be something that Don would parody again and again for the rest of his life on venues as different as Robot Chicken and the TVLand Awards.

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Following the end of Three’s Company, Don’s career began slowing down. He joined the cast of the short lived sitcom What a Country! for thirteen episodes in 1987 (why was it short lived? It starred Yakov Smirnoff and he said the show’s title. A lot). He rejoined Andy Griffith for several episodes of Matlock, playing his pesky neighbor between 1988 and 1992. The highlight of his post-Company days is undoubtedly his portrayal of the mysterious TV Repairman in the 1998 hit fantasy/cautionary tale, Pleasantville.

As the millennium rolled over, Don began suffering from macular degeneration, which severely limited the number of public appearances he could make. He did continue to work, however, most notably teaming up with Tim Conway again for a series of direct-to-video children’s shows called Hermie and Friends. His final two live action appearances came in 2003 in a cameo on his old co-star John Ritter’s new show, 8 Simple Rules, and a 2005 cameo on That 70s Show, both of them as landlords. In early 2006, Don contracted pneumonia which ultimately claimed his life on February 24 of that year in Los Angeles, California. He was 81.

July 20 - Verna Felton

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On this day, in 1890, Verna Felton was born in Salinas, California. When she was ten, Verna performed in a San Jose benefit for the victims of the Galveston Flood of 1900. She attracted the attention of the manager of a travelling show in the area, who offered her a contract. Verna's mother declined on her behalf. Shortly thereafter, her father died, leaving the family in bad financial shape. Verna's mother then contacted the show manager, who quickly produced a contract and she spent the remainder of her formative years in the theater.

Verna toured with the Allen Stock Company up and down the West Coast of the United States and Canada. Initially she was billed as "Little Verna Felton, the Child Wonder" but by 1907, she had become one of the company's leading ladies. In 1910, one of the troupe's shows was The Defiance of Doris, which had been written specifically for Verna. By the Twenties, Verna had stopped touring and settled in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. She was ensconced in the Empress Theatre there, again as one of their leading ladies.

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Verna moved to Hollywood in the Thirties and became a staple on radio programs from coast to coast. She started in 1937 as the mother in The Cinnamon Bear, a serial designed to air between Thanksgiving and Christmas and was rebroadcast every year for decades (you might even be able to find it somewhere in the world this holiday season). From there, Verna moved on to have recurring roles on The Great Gildersleeve, The Jack Benny Program, Point Sublime, The Abbott and Costello Show, The Joan Davis Show, The Judy Canova Show, A Day in the Life of Dennis Day, The Red Skelton Show, December Bride and My Little Margie. She was queen (or aunt or nosy neighbor) of the airwaves for two decades, right up until television began to capture people's imaginations. And she really only slowed down enough to change mediums.

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As television clawed its way to the top of America's entertainment heap, Verna rode the wave of radio programs that made the leap. She reprised roles that audiences had only heard her in on the new versions of The Jack Benny Program, The Dennis Day Show and December Bride. Her portrayal of Hilda Crocker on Bride, and its spin-off Pete and Gladys, earned her Emmy nominations in 1958 and 1959. One of Verna's most famous roles came in the early Sixties, when she was a semi-regular on The Flintstones as Pearl Slaghoople, Fred Flintstone's demanding mother-in-law. She also enjoyed guest appearances on I Love Lucy, Wagon Train, The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show and the final episode of Dennis the Menace.

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Verna's most enduring body of work, though, came through her long association with the Walt Disney Company. Any one of the characters from her list of Disney voice credits would make a performer proud, but she could boast all nine of them. She started in 1940 with dual roles in Dumbo, playing both the circus' Elephant Matriarch and Mrs. Jumbo, Dumbo's mother. Next, she became everyone's favorite Fairy Godmother in Cinderella, a role she actually reprised twice afterwards on the radio, once for Screen Directors Playhouse and again for Hallmark Playhouse. Verna's next role took a villainous turn when she brought to life the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland. She followed that up with Aunt Sarah in Lady and the Tramp (her son, Lee Millar, actually voiced Jim Dear), Flora, the red fairy, and Queen Leah in Sleeping Beauty and Eloise in the 1960 short Goliath II. Verna's final role for Disney was as Winifred, Colonel Hathi's wife, in The Jungle Book. All that and she hasn't been granted Legendary status. Shameful.

Verna worked right up to the end of her life (The Jungle Book was actually released posthumously). On the evening of December 14, 1966, she suffered a fatal stroke and passed away, just hours before Walt did the following morning. She was 76.

July 19 - True-Life Adventures

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On this day, in 1950, In Beaver Valley, the second film in the True-Life Adventures series, was released to theaters. The Walt Disney Studio's first foray into the genre of nature films was actually animated. During production on Bambi, countless live animals were brought in for animators to sketch, numerous lectures were given on topics like what happens to a forest following a major fire, and the characters were depicted much closer to reality than animation usually chose to portray them. Notice that none of the animals are wearing clothes, for instance. Walt's interest in the natural world, while it slipped to the background for several years, endured.

In the late Forties, Walt's personal concern about the vanishing frontier prompted him to hire Alfred and Elma Millote, a husband and wife team who owned a camera shop in Alaska, to begin documenting anything and everything in the wilds of their state. They filmed Eskimos, bears, small town businesses, caribou, you name it (when the boss basically gives you carte blanche on a project, you don't ask questions). Walt and his team sifted through hours of seemingly unrelated footage and zeroed in on the antics of some seals. He asked the Millotes to get more footage of seals, turned everything over to the Legendary James Algar and told him to make something out of it. The result was a 27 minute film called Seal Island.

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Walt took Seal Island to RKO Pictures, the studio's distribution company at the time, to schedule a release date. RKO declined to accept the offer saying that no one was going to be willing to sit through a 27 minute nature film. Walt left RKO's offices, visited a friend of his who ran the Crown Theater in Pasadena and convinced him to show Seal Island for a week in December. That showing allowed the picture to qualify for the Academy Awards the following year. When the envelope was opened for Best Documentary Short, the winner was... Seal Island. Supposedly, the day after the Oscar ceremony, Walt told his brother, Roy, to take the golden statuette down to RKO's offices and "beat them over the head" with it. There's no coincidence in the fact that Walt started his own distribution company shortly thereafter. He'd been growing increasingly dissatisfied with RKO and their initial refusal of what turned into the True-Life Adventure series was the last straw.

Buoyed by the success of Seal Island, Walt had the Millotes gather more footage which was again turned over to James Algar. The subject of the second film was beavers and resulted in the 32 minute film In Beaver Valley. It, too, won the Oscar for Best Documentary Short. The formula was perfected and proven to be commercially viable. Over the course of a dozen years, Disney would release 14 True-Life Adventures, seven shorts and seven features, winning a total of eight Oscars, five for the shorts and three for the features. In addition to being successful in its own right, the series was also a valuable training ground for an up and coming producer name Roy E. Disney, spawned a daily comic strip that ran for eighteen years starting in 1955 and inspired countless young people to get into the conservation of nature.

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Not that the True-Life Adventures didn't create some controversy along the way. Some of it was silly, like the objection to putting Tango music behind the mating dance of tarantulas or playing the Anvil Chorus while bighorn sheep locked horns. Walt wasn't trying to make dry scientific movies. He was trying to present nature to an audience that needed to anthropomorphize their subjects in order to even begin to care. Which isn't to say that all of the objections were unfounded. For the 1958 feature White Wilderness, a film crew transported lemmings from Manitoba to Alberta in Canada, filmed them until they got the footage they wanted and then herded them off a cliff into a lake to film their "suicidal tendencies." There's a reason no one had ever filmed lemmings doing that before. They don't do that unless forced to. It is important to note that no one at Disney ever asked the film crew to do anything like that, but apparently no one questioned the footage afterwards either.

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The last True-Life Adventure was the 1960 feature, Jungle Cat. The studio continued to make films featuring live animals after that but they were based on fictional stories like Perri, based on a tale by Bambi author Felix Salten, and Charlie, the Lonesome Cougar. The True-Life Adventures did gain a second life, though. Excerpts were taken from them and presented to schools as short nature films for the classroom. I particularly remember seeing the ones distilled from The Living Desert.  And they have inspired a new series that exists today, albeit with more scientific rigor applied to them, the Disneynature films.

July 18 - Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln

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On this day, in 1965, Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln, an Audio-Animatronic show, began wowing guests on Main Street USA in Disneyland.  In the late Fifties, Walt wanted to expand the Main Street USA area of Disneyland, specifically by building an attraction that was a tribute to the Presidents of the United States, all 34 of them up to that point. The problem was that Walt's vision had outpaced the technology of the day. There just was no physical way to create the show he had planned in his head, even if he had unlimited amounts of money to do it. The idea had to be shelved and the expansion never happened.

Several years later, as Disney was signing contracts to provide rides and shows for the 1964 World's Fair, the Imagineers of WED Enterprises brought a prototype of a new technology to show their boss. Since they couldn't make a show with 34 moving Presidents, they'd been focusing on making a single mechanical man in the likeness of Walt's boyhood hero, Abraham Lincoln. The Imagineers had managed to create something that, although quite primitive by today's standards, was kind of magical. Walt was intrigued by it, convinced the state of Illinois they needed it for their Fair pavilion and got them to foot the bill for constructing it.

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The first attraction with Audio-Animatronic technology to open was the Enchanted Tiki Room in 1963. Compared to Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln, though, the Tiki Room is simplicity itself. A few beaks open and close, some wings flutter and eyes blink (granted this occurs on over a hundred different figures at once, but still). As impressed as guests were by singing birds and crooning flowers, they were floored by what what they saw in the Illinois pavilion. Great strides had been made in Audio-Animatronics in a short time. Not only did Lincoln speak and gesture and address different parts of the audience, but HE STOOD UP FROM HIS CHAIR! WHAT IS THIS SORCERY? Audiences marveled at the life-like qualities of the figure in the show and made Illinois one of the must-see attractions of the Fair.

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When the last guest had passed through the 1964 World's Fair, the Disney attractions were hands down some of the highlights of the whole affair. They were already pretty much paid for by the pavilions that had commissioned them and were already popular with guests, so it was natural that Walt would want to incorporate them into Disneyland. Three of the four attractions were installed whole while just the Audio-Animatronic dinosaurs from the Ford Pavilion made their way into part of the Disneyland Railroad. Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln found its way to Main Street USA (although it was a duplicate attraction, the original was believed to have been lost when the Illinois pavilion was completely demolished; turns out, the original figure was actually carefully packed up, delivered to California, strangely forgotten and discovered years later in storage), it's a small world took over Fantasyland and the Carousel of Progress landed in Tomorrowland. All four of them can still be seen today.

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Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln ran at Disneyland until 1972 before undergoing its first rewrite. The new show that opened in the space, The Walt Disney Story, actually didn't include the figure of Lincoln for the first three years. He was reinstated as part of the show in 1975, after thousands of guests asked where he went. And that's has been his status since then. Eventually a new gets written that leaves old Abe out and eventually he has to be written back in because people love and miss him. You can see him as part of the current show, The Disneyland Story Presenting Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln. His technological aspects have been updated over the years making him still just as cool to watch as when he first stood up to illuminate guests over fifty years ago. Oh, and Walt did finally get that tribute to the Presidents he wanted, he just didn't live long enough to see it happen. You can see it at the Hall of Presidents in Liberty Square at the Magic Kingdom in Walt Disney World (now with forty-five moving figures!).

July 17 - Disneyland

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On this day, in 1955, Disneyland welcomed its first official guests in Anaheim, California. To be fair, the first people to walk through the front gates on that July morning were not the first guests to visit Disneyland. Some press had already been given a tour and Walt and Lilian had celebrated their wedding anniversary at the Golden Horseshoe Saloon a couple of days before. They weren't even the first paying guests as everyone who came that first day were supposed to be invited. I say supposed to be, because about half of the 28,000 people in the park for the opening ceremonies either had fake tickets or no tickets at all, they just hopped the fence. Needless to say, the park that had once been declared by potential investors to be just as much a folly as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was initially called caused quite a stir right from the get go.

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Everyone has probably heard the story of how Walt was standing around watching his daughters, Dianne and Sharon, riding the merry-go-round at an amusement park and got the idea of building a place where adults and kids could have fun together. It's a cute story but only part of the reason the idea of Disneyland wormed its way into Walt's brain. The other part was the letters. Every year, the Walt Disney Studio got hundreds, if not thousands, of letters from people who wanted to come visit the studio, see how movies are made and see their favorite characters. Walt knew that if the average person actually showed up at the studio, they'd be bored out of their minds within ten minutes. Not only was there nothing for people to do there but the reality of making animation (and even live action) is a long, slow, tedious process. And everyone's favorite characters were nothing more than drawings, not the walking, talking beings that people believed they saw in the theaters. Walt began to envision a place that tourists could come visit.

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The first actual mention of his idea in memo form came in 1948. He talked about turning an eight acre plot of land across the street from the studio into a Mickey Mouse Park. Except Walt's idea kept growing and quickly outgrew the spot he had in mind. He hired a consultant, the Legendary Harrison Price of the Stanford Research Institute, to help him figure out how much land he would need. Harrison did his best, trying to anticipate future expansions, and came up with 160 acres. Walt thought it sounded good, looked around and bought some orange groves in the city of Anaheim. That original eight acre plot didn't go to waste however. It's still part of the company and currently houses Walt Disney Animation and the ABC Studios.

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Now that he had a site, Walt just needed some money to build his dream. Naturally he turned to his financial guru of a brother, Roy, who immediately tried to talk him out of the whole thing. That pep talk, as usual, yielded no results so, Roy rolled up his sleeves and got to work. Asking current Disney employees to support the boss's craziness raised a few dollars but nowhere near the $17 million it was going to take to build Disneyland. One of the more genius ideas was a partnership between the fledgling ABC television network and Disney. ABC needed content to broadcast, Walt needed money and thus the Disneyland television series was born. ABC a top quality show to boost their ratings, Walt got ABC to invest in his park and Walt got something even better: advertising. Not only did he name the show after the new venture but he came into people's homes every week and told them all about the wonderful things they would experience when they came to visit. He was able to build anticipation to a frenzy.

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Construction on Disneyland actually began on July 16, 1954. Walt had all sorts of Legendary people in place to make his dream come true. Old timers like Marc Davis, who helped design the place, and new hires like retired Rear Admiral Joe Fowler, who oversaw the construction process. One year and one day later, Disneyland was ready to open. Sort of. Like most major projects with deadlines, things got a little crazy near the end. There are plenty of famous stories about people's shoes getting stuck in asphalt that wasn't quite set yet and all sorts of other mishaps that first day. But none of that matters. People were enchanted by what they saw and have kept coming back for more. There are now a dozen Disney parks scattered around the world, but Disneyland boasts the most visits of any of them (mainly because it was the only one for sixteen years, but still). History was made on July 17, 1955 and theme parks have never been the same since.

July 16 - Hocus Pocus

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On this day, in 1993, Walt Disney Pictures released the Halloween comedy Hocus Pocus. Pocus started life in the early Eighties. Screenwriter Mick Garris wrote a film about a boy who'd been turned into a cat three centuries ago by witches, based on an idea that producer David Kirschner came up with. That script was sold to Disney in 1984 and was dark,  scary, full of 12 year olds and called Halloween House. It languished in development hell for almost a decade, undergoing severe rewrites, gaining and losing cast and directors and generally going nowhere. Then, in 1992, Bette Midler caught wind of the project, said she wanted to do it (in the role that was originally written for Cloris Leachman) and suddenly all the lights on the movie turned green.

Disney hired Kenny Ortega to direct the film, which was an unconventional choice. Kenny had been a choreographer for years with classics like Dirty Dancing and Ferris Bueller's Day Off under his dance belt. While a choreographer isn't that far off the mark from a director, the only thing Kenny had directed up to this point was the movie Newsies, which wasn't a hit Broadway show yet (or even a cult classic film). It was a little picture that had flopped terribly at the box office. Kenny offered the lead role of Max Dennison, the virgin who accidentally resurrects the Sanderson sisters, to Leonardo DiCaprio, but Leo was too busy earning an Oscar nomination for What's Eating Gilbert Grape to accept. Omri Katz got the role instead and filming suitably began in October 1992, with the production being completed a mere four months later.

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When Hocus Pocus was released, it did better than Newsies, but not by much. It did gross more than its budget, but with advertising costs factored in it probably gave Disney a good $15 million tax write off. At this point you might be scratching your head and saying wait a minute. This is a Halloween movie and it was released in July. What gives? The official story is that The Nightmare Before Christmas was chosen as the studio's Halloween entry that year and management didn't want Hocus to interfere with that movie's returns. So they randomly released it earlier. A much truer story would be that management didn't think much of Hocus and didn't care when it was released, it was always going to be a tax write off to them. Except, in the end, it wasn't.

Owning a property means that you get to use that property over and over again, however you wish. When the Halloween season rolled around every year on the Disney Channel, and later on ABC Family, Disney needed content to show. Hocus Pocus became an annual tradition on both channels, and since people were seeing it at the right time of year, gained bigger and bigger audiences with each showing. It's gotten to the point now that Freeform (what ABC Family is currently called) actually breaks viewership records every year and Hocus Pocus has become a tentpole event for them. Excitement over the movie has led to the center stage show at Walt Disney World's Mickey's Not So Scary Halloween Party being based on the Sanderson sisters. Hocus' three stars, Bette Midler, Kathy Najimy and Sarah Jessica Parker (all of whom have had successful careers since) have even expressed interest in making a sequel. So far Disney has yet to commit to the sequel the fans want, but rumors continue to fly about a crappy made-for-tv remake. Like I said. When you own a property, you get to do with it whatever you wish. Not necessarily what the fans wish.

July 15 - Al Bertino

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On this day, in 1912, Albert Bertino was born in California. And that statement is literally as close as I have been able to pinpoint his place of birth. Somewhere in the vast swathe of area known as California. Needless to say, there's a reason we pick up Al's story in 1934 when he began working for the Charles Mintz Studio (for those of you who think that name might sound familiar, it is the same studio that screwed Walt out of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit six years earlier). After some time there, Al moved over to the Harman-Ising Studio, thinking that he was moving to a better outfit. Unfortunately, Harman-Ising was soon going to lose their distribution deal with MGM and would cease to exist. That's how Al ended up as an assistant animator at the Walt Disney Studio in 1939.

Al started on features like Pinocchio and Fantasia before moving up to animator in the Shorts Department and eventually landing in the Story Department. His name actually appears as part of the 1945 Goofy short Hockey Homicide. All the players in the short are named after real people at the studio and Ice Box Bertino keeps getting into fights with Fearless Ferguson, named after fellow animator Norm Ferguson (the real irony here is that by all accounts Al was a sweetheart of a guy and wouldn't fight anyone).

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When the medium of television came along, Al began writing episodes of the Disneyland anthology series. One of his favorite stories to tell was about a show they wrote for the Christmas season that included a segment on the birth of Christ. Walt sent Al to the church down the street to get the nuns approval on his script. The Mother Superior read it over, declared it good and asked where Al got his good ideas. Al, mindful of who he was talking to, look upwards and said he wasn't shy about getting "help from the man upstairs." The Mother Superior immediately agree that Mr. Disney was indeed a wonderful man, Al was too flustered to correct her and took his leave before he burst out laughing.

When Disney dissolved its Shorts Department in the late Fifties, Al became a victim of downsizing as most of his story work had been with that group. He then began doing freelance work with whatever studio needed him, a time he once described as one of the happiest of his life (mainly because he got paid more for contract work). He spent the next several years working for UPA on Dick Tracy and Mr. Magoo, Terrytoons on Hashimoto and Hector Heathcote, Bob Clampett on Benny and Cecil, and the Walter Lantz Studio.

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In the mid Sixties, Al returned to Disney, this time as an Imagineer with WED Enterprises. He became part of the teams that created such classic attractions as Pirates of the Caribbean, Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, America Sings and the Country Bear Jamboree. Big Al, the large Country Bear that keeps trying to sing Blood on the Saddle during the show, is not only named after Al, but he considers it a bit of a self portrait in the medium of Audio-Animatronic bear. Call it the perks of being an Imagineer.

Al retired from Disney in 1977, but he did one more freelance project before actually finishing his career. He was co-designer of the Monster Plantation (now called the Monster Mansion) dark ride that opened in 1981 at the Six Flags Over Georgia theme park. Al continued to reside in Los Angeles, California until his death on August 18, 1996. He was 94.