Thursday, May 17, 2012

Fantasmic

Fantasmic is a live show that first played at Disneyland before cloning out to other Disney parks. There was no theater. You stood across from Tom Sawyer island and watched this amazing thing unfold, with all sorts of pyrotechnics and images projected on screens of mist and boatloads of Disney characters and, of course, a fire-breathing dragon. The story is something about Mickey Mouse having a dream and the power of good winning out over the power of evil, and what better representative of the power of evil than Malificent, the witch in Sleeping Beauty who transforms herself into said dragon?

Kevin Kidney was an imagineer who worked on the original Fantasmic and the creation of the original dragon (which ultimately ended up being a dragon head on a stick, lately replaced by a full-blooded [?] audioanimatron). One of the things he did back in the day was create a home-brew stop-motion of the potential show-stopper, using an original model that had been designed for the show. If you're a Fantasmic fan or Disney historian, you have to see this. It's Designing a Fantasmic Dragon. And it's fascinating.
.

No comments:

Post a Comment