The first day of a new attraction at a Disney theme park is one that will find Disney Imagineers, who worked to create the and build the attraction, milling near the exit.
“The the coolest thing for me as an Imagineer is to be able to go stand by the exit of a new attraction that we opened,” Dave Durham, Executive, Creative Ride Engineering, Walt Disney Imagineering, said during a press conference for the upcoming “Behind the Attraction” series debuting July 21 on Disney+.
After spending years working with a team and making the many decisions, and having a vision, “when all is said and done, the guest literally speaks as they come off the ride,” he said.
Durham is one of the over dozen Imagineers featured in this new 10-part series that explains how Imagineers create attractions. Each episode focuses on a specfic attraction.
Part of the joy is not only solving the issues and creating the magic, but seeing how people interact with the magic.
And that is not only for the big attractions. “We have decompressions spaces. We have small attractions. We have all kinds of things that make the Disney guest experience in the parks,” Jeanette Lomboy, Vice President/ Site Portfolio Executive, Walt Disney Imagineering, said during the press conference.
The first attraction Lomboy said she worked on was during the Epcot Millennium celebration. It was insignificant in terms of scope and scale, she said, but she remembers walking into the space and seeing three generations of women, a grandmother, mother and daughter. “And they were not speaking a language I understood. And I realized in that moment they were having fun, that what I could do in that moment, everything that all the pain, the angst that we go through to deliver these things to our guests, that they could understand it.”
The reaction surprised Lomboy as she discovered the real impact of the guest experience. And that pleasurable feeling returns with each new attraction. “it just amazes me after all these years that it feels that same way every time we open something,” she said.
But smiles and guests talking about how positive the attraction is, are just two ways you Imagineers can measure reaction.
“There’s something better than people complimenting an attraction when they get off it,” Brian Volk-Weiss, executive producer and director of “Behind the Atrraction,” said. “And I was a part of that when I got off Rise Of The Resistance,
“Speechless, literally six people, we’re just blinking. Like for like adults, five of the six people were adults. Just blinking, no one said a word for about 15 seconds. I don’t know what’s the better compliment than that,” he said.
