Creators of “Mickey and Minnie’s Runaway Railway” Discuss Challenges of Designing a Ride
“Very technical but fun challenges, and it looks really cool when you ride,” Paul Rudish sums up his experience helping to design “Mickey and Minnie’s Runaway Railway” for Disney’s Hollywood Studios. An hour-long panel was released as part of Comic-Con@Home 2021, from the organizers of San Diego Comic-Con.
The full video is at the end of the article.
Who’s on the panel
This panel, moderated by Sarah Sterling, includes panelists:
- Charita Carter (senior producer, Walt Disney Imagineering);
- Kevin Rafferty (retired Imagineer and executive creative director for Mickey & Minnie’s Runaway Railway);
- Paul Rudish (executive producer and supervising director, The Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse);
- Christopher Willis (composer, The Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse and Mickey & Minnie’s Runaway Railway Parks attraction); and
- Elsa Chang (character designer, The Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse and Mickey & Minnie’s Runaway Railway Parks attraction).
Lots of challenges
Self-described “armchair Parks historian” Paul Rudish recalled how many of the original attractions were designed by the people who had directed the films they were based on. Composer Chris Willis realized the same is true with the early composers, crossing over between the studio and Disneyland.
There were a variety of technical challenges. Willis recalls “Your kid brain knows when you go underwater, and you come out at see this huge jazz band underwater, you kind of know what that should sound like. But then your grownup brain has to figure out, ‘are we going to have speakers hidden behind all the instruments?'”
Rafferty replied that “some of our scenes are so epic, they’re so huge, we couldn’t find mockup space big enough to actually recreate the scale of an entire scene.” They’d occasionally find themselves laying on their backs, when they could only realize the upper half of a screen.
Rafferty remembers some of the designers adding fake bolts to the outside of the train cars. Appreciative of their work, he reminded them that it had to look like a cartoon, not Big Thunder Railway. “So once everybody had learned the rules of the game, then the engineers and the designers were able to not put physical fasteners on this thing, but to hide the fasteners, like the nuts and the bolts, and then we drew them on, as though it looked like it was a dimensional piece, it look liked it was all hand drawn. And that was part of adapting to and sticking to the rules.”