from 2008

BOB GURR
Disney's human people mover, talks about the creation of the Haunted Mansion Omnimovers, People Mover, Monorail, small world boats and more

by Scott Wolf

If you've ever been to a Disney park, chances are you've ridden in Disney Legend Bob Gurr's work, whether you've ridden in a Pirates of the Caribbean boat, a Haunted Mansion omnimover, or even a Monorail, and that's just the tip of the iceberg in regards to the vast amount of Disney resort projects he has contributed to.

It was great fun speaking with Bob about his work for the Disney Resorts, going right back to the opening of Disneyland! His vivid memories make it exciting to hear his stories! He can tell you about his work down to the smallest detail, why certain decisions were made, what kind of hardware he used. Remarkable! So, needless to say, it's exciting to have Disney's human people mover here on Mouse Clubhouse and to be able to share our conversations with you. 

Bob Gurr: The People Mover at first at Disneyland came about based upon Walt's desire to have some kind of high capacity ride system of some kind. The first application was going to be for the La Brea tar pits job which most people don't know about. He was working with what later became the Page Museum I think. We had a meeting down there, real early, '65 I think. He was looking at some kind of a ride system and I did some preliminary drawings of how it would work. I based it on some of the rides at the World's Fair that I thought were really cool and really neat. General Motors had a really simple ride, it was just a pallet with a chair, but high capacity and real reliable and I met the guy who designed it. Then I think AT&T had one that you kind of rode sideways, and I thought this is what we want to do, a continuous conveyor chain-like thing and try to keep it as simple as possible.

Scott Wolf: That had not been done before the fair

BG: It had been done at the fair, but not the way that Walt wanted it. So the origin of the People Mover was for a very short-lived potential project for the La Brea tar pits. We were always having conversations about everything all the time anyway, so one day I was sitting in John Hench's office and we're just kind of kicking around different ways of how can you arrange shows, how can you arrange the segue from one scene to another, because John was always talking about rides are like movies and you have to have logical segues and you have to control the point of view.

Up to that time, people always saw everything either going forward or going sideways or walking through or something like that. It just came up in John's office, he had a candied apple on a stick. I picked it up and I said, "You know, we can do a car (pointing to the apple) and we can put it on a chassis and the chassis can go up and down and it could turn and then (turning the stick) we could have this car body turn relative to the chassis so you could look in all directions and then when the car would go up and down you could keep it level or you could tip it, whichever you wanted to do, and it would look in all directions.

Everybody knows I'm a pilot and one of the primary navigation things is called omnirange, omni meaning "all" because the radio waves go in all directions as part of the function of the navigation system. So I just said the word "omni," all and "move," we're going to move, "Omnimover." It was just a name in a conversation and the name stuck. You have to watch out what you say around here. It was nothing more than as simple as that.

Conversations occurred right after that, the art directors loved this because we could design the scenes so that as you have segues from here to there and you get rid of some of the blank spots because you turn and you look here and turn around and look this way or you go around, go backwards and go that way. In the meantime, the Haunted Mansion ideas had been going on forever and ever and ever and a lot of mockups at the studio.

In the meantime, Monsanto had this idea of, "Why don't we do something that has to do with the molecule?" Then it was like, "Oh, we don't have to do a walkaround. Gurr's got this thing that's an Omnimover thing. We could do the scenes like that." Then it was just bang, bang, bang, just like that.

SW: I loved the Omnimover in Adventure Thru Inner Space.

BG: Some of these thoughts got going in '64 because Walt sent me over to Europe with a camera and a bunch of film to film some apparatus at the Swiss Lausanne National Exposition.

I had started to work on how you would have a load system for vehicles and I had this idea that if you could put the people inside a ring and then the vehicles go around the outside, the vehicles could go a lot faster relative to the people to the speed of the people getting onto it on the inside with continuous moving like a speedwalk, that would be a slick way to load it. Of course at the Lausanne Exposition they had one sort of like that and Walt comes back and said, "Bob, I just saw one! Go tomorrow! Here's the camera, go!" So Fourth of July of 1964 I take off for Switzerland to go see what they're doing. I knew that's the direction we want to go in.

So we had the Omnimover idea and we put that one as a continuous chain around the ring load, come up through the center and we got that but then it was, "Oh, we can also run parallel and run slower which would be perfect for the Haunted Mansion.”

SW: I never knew the Omnimover came out of a concept for the People Mover.

BG: None of these jobs were stop/start, they all blended.

So as it turned out we had a new designer, a guy by the name of Bert Brundage, and I wanted to break him in on a job so I gave him the job of you do the production engineering and I'll guide you with my layouts showing you how to do it, that way I could work on other jobs while I could sort of stop at his desk in a couple hours. I could get more done by having more guys doing stuff so I didn't have to be on the board 100% like I usually do.

So we built the mockup at 1401 Flower, at that point we had a warehouse in the back , we had room so we built a track and it worked very well and it showed everybody that this Omnimover thing, this is going to be really neat. Complicated, a lot of parts, but it's going to work. So I designed the body for it and Bert did all the development drawings for the chassis and away we went. That blended into, "We can control the sight lines in the Haunted Mansion, we don't have to have a walk around."

In the meantime, in '62 we built the Mansion because Harvey Gillett was the chief architect, ran the drafting room and he wanted to see his building built, so Walt agreed to build it before we had the ride figured out, so the building was there as a placeholder for a long time, "and we'll fill it with something somehow." Later, "Oh, the Omnimover from the Monsanto ride, we'll run it outside the railroad track (underground)," then there was the idea of we'll build buildings outside the railroad track, so all these ideas were just going like that, just one after another.

SW: How did the Disneyland Monorail come to be?

BG: If you look at the original Herb Ryman drawing (the first concept drawing of Disneyland), in the lower right hand corner there's Tomorrowland and in the background of a building there's a monorail, a hanging type of monorail like the French SAFEGE system. So Walt had in his mind the whole time that he's going to have a monorail in this park.

In '58 he and Lilly were driving in Germany near Cologne and just as they went down this street with trees on either side, a monorail went right across in front of them. Thirty seconds either way, Walt would have never seen it. So he immediately inquired, found out about it, immediately had Joe Fowler go over and start talking business with them. Came back, made a preliminary deal, Walt then came back, brought me a bunch of drawings and photographs of the monorail and said, "Bob, you're going to do a monorail." In fact, the monorail job started out called the Monorail Viewliner. It was a temporary name for the thing.

So I immediately had to learn everything about German saddleback monorail which I'd never seen in my life. Didn't know anything about it, and in a matter of two or three weeks, come up with a preliminary design, how we would do it, what the structure would be like, and particularly what's it going to look like. All in a matter of two or three weeks, it was such a fast job and I made that one big rendering that John Hench painted, the monorail crossing.

I drew that up in about ten minutes because I was trying to solve a particular problem. The German train is like a blocky looking loaf of bread with a slot on the bottom sitting on a stick. Pretty ugly. I wanted to hide that it was a box on a stick and the old Buck Rogers thing with a pointed rocket with the little sled runners, 1938 Buck Rogers, that would do it. One sketch on my kitchen table, I made that one drawing, immediately got started on some structural stuff.

Having already done the Viewliner I knew about how we were going to do it. Get the job started and then we'll figure it out as we go. Sure enough, then Roger Broggie and I get sent over there to finalize the production details and we argued with these Germans for a week because they had business deals already made with a car builder up in Bremen that was going to build car bodies. Same deal as the Autopia, we had somebody going to sell us something. We had to tell them we were not going to engineer it at the Alweg company in Germany, we're not going to have the body builder in Bremen build the bodies, we're going to do it ourselves. "Who's going to do it?" "Well, I'm going to engineer it." "Well, you're not an engineer. You have no German diploma of engineering." The Germans can't believe that anybody designs without being an engineer. So we irritated a lot of people for a week, but Roger and I were sent by Walt for that mission to tell them that's what we're going to do and there would be a legal agreement between both companies (Alweg and Disney), but they would send some engineers to help, particularly engineering the beamway and then from time to time another engineer would come help me. So that job took eight months from the get go to giving Vice President Nixon a ride. That's how fast this company moves.

SW: I heard that the newest Disneyland Monorails (Mark VII) were largely inspired by your designs.

BG: Yes, you talk to Scott Drake, the fellow that designed it, he didn't do any mechanical, he did only the body styling, he looked all over at all the kinds of things he could have done and he said, "You know, we've got to go back to the original, the feel of that Buck Rogers thing," because that kind of set the feel for an iconic looking shape, sliding along the beamway over the park.

Same way when we had a company redesign a monorail for Florida around '91. We worked with the Bombardier company and their engineers tried every kind of sketch and rendering and they finally threw up their hands and said, "We're just going to make it like Bob's Mark IV. We can't beat it." Scotty did the same thing. He said, "I can't come up with a better picture."

SW: That's gotta be flattering.

BG: Yeah, it's flattering, but remember, it was a ten minute design. The speed with which Walt had us going, you don't stop to have a committee meeting, you don't get people to buy into ideas, you don't have a lot of schmoozing around. You clearly think and visualize and almost in the way of being a savant, then you go, "Oh, yes!"

SW: Was it's a small world the first boat you'd ever done?

BG: Yes it was, because we were looking at what we knew before about what are we going to do with high capacity rides and since I was designing mechanical stuff and had already been hip deep in the Magic Skyway (World’s Fair attraction) which was a complicated vehicle system, I thought level track always beats climbing track, connected vehicles always beat colliding vehicles, and propulsion by water is the simplest you're ever going to get. You get rid of everything. So it was like let's do a boat, and then a few calculations, a few sketches, we said, “Boy, we could push 4,000 an hour with a boat.” In the meantime Arrow Development (company) liked boats because they were doing flume rides and they said, "We could build that, so give us some drawings." So I made a drawing of the track, it had a trough, it had a drop channel in it, and that's all there was to it. One sketch of a boat, boom, got it.

SW: The movement of the water actually propels the boat forward?

BG: Yeah, there's water pumps that pick up the water out of the “bottom trough,” go through a pump and then go right back in the trough, and then I had guide wheels hanging down below because it would thrust the boat. Then we found out later with Pirates, we don't have to put a bottom trough, we just put a flat bottom and channel the flow and then the whole water will carry the boat anyway. So Pirates are simpler than the original small world, but that's how it got started. Just float boats, it's really simple.

More from Bob:
His work at Disney on Audio Animatronics and non-vehicle projects

See other interviews

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