In the early ‘80s, Stones was pulled from animation to work on special projects for EPCOT. © 2001 The Walt Disney Co.

So that was a lot of fun — again, learning entertainment from a whole different direction. You still had a sense of what’s Disney, but there was a whole different way of thinking about your audience. You may think you have a sophisticated group coming through, but in reality it’s like that little kid with ice cream around his mouth pointing at something on a ride, “Look mommy that’s fun,” — it’s got to work for that kid, for the whole family. It was a very interesting time, although I left it right when we were getting to the fun part of actually constructing it and seeing it come to life. I worked on the Imagination pavilion for Kodak, they signed off on everything and that’s when I was called back to the studio; this was in 1982, the year EPCOT opened.

I did a little stint in live action, and for the life of me there was a good year where I have no idea why they were giving me a paycheck. I gave advice to the TV division when they did anything relating to traditional Disney animation. I worked on a Donald Duck 50th Anniversary special with Dick Van Dyke that combined live action and animation, that was fun.

I was originally called into live action to do EPCOT specials. Management told the companies that had built pavilions, “Give us another million and we’ll have a network special on the theme of your pavilion the week EPCOT opens.”

Well, management was living in dreamland. They were thinking back in the days when the networks were begging Walt to do anything for them. Walt went to ABC back in the ‘50s and said, “I’ll do a show for you, but it’s got to be called ‘Disneyland’ and every once in a while I’m going to promote my park.” They said, “Fine, fine, anything.”

Management had that in mind, they had some great documentary guys working on it and I came in to kind of Disneyfy it. The specifics don’t matter because it never happened. They went to the networks and said, “The first week of October we’re doing this huge promotion when we open EPCOT, and five days that week you’ll have hour specials on — Transportation! The Land! Energy!” The networks looked at them and said “Y’know, we have our own news divisions to do low-rated documentaries.” I finally headed back to the animation department and was there right when Jeffrey [Katzenberg] and Michael [Eisner] came in.

They had me and a couple of other guys come in to pitch ideas. I had two full storyboards in color on two different subjects. One of the writers just kind of put his pad down, because he was in the stage of saying, “What if... Mickey buys a house, or something?” One of my boards was Mickey in Outer Space and the other was Sport Goofy. They thought it was great and put it in development and started doing story reels. Darrell van Citters and his crew took it over, because at the time it was thought Darrell and his crew would do Roger Rabbit. This was way before Dick Williams came in. They did a pencil test where the characters were totally different, including an animated human detective — a totally different project.

Darrell’s crew included Mike Giamo, Joe Ranft, who’s now a key storyperson up at Pixar, Brian McEntee, who was an art director on Beauty and the Beast. It was a great group and Darrel’s a very creative thinker. They also did a little short subject, again for the EPCOT specials. Because there was going to be animation in them, we started production on it early before we knew the network was going to laugh at us. The plug was pulled and Tom Wilhite, who was in the Disney movie side let us put it together as a short subject called Fun with Mr. Future.

Joe Strike is a NYC-based writer/producer with a background in TV promotion and a lifelong interest in animation. He is writing a children’s novel.