The Ghastly Hatter

"The room they were in was an unfinished attic, and as they turned to run out the door, another ghostly manifestation appeared and blocked their way. He was a cloaked figure with an evil, grinning face. A hat box hung from his hand…"

In 2009, Jody and I fabricated a reincarnation of the original Disneyland 1969 Hatbox Ghost for the first D23 Expo in Anaheim.  The figure turned out pretty swell (if we do say so ourselves) and a short time later we were emailed by a well-known film director who at the time was writing a screenplay for an upcoming movie that, we believe, will make even the grimmest ghost grin.  In the blink of an eerie eye we were commissioned to build a second Hatbox Ghost, but this one slightly different from our first—more detailed and much more spooky.

We were inspired by the  famous publicity shot of Disney Imagineer Yale Gracey with the early mock-up of the ghost for the Disneyland attraction:

Gracey's early version had more facial "decay", frazzled hair, and irises in his eyes, unlike the final ghost that appeared briefly in the attraction.  We started with the head and went from there.

Working late at night in our studio became increasingly unsettling as this new visitor took shape.

We sculpted his stick body over a steel armature and stitched together his daft disguise entirely by hand.

    

Lastly, a custom brass name plate for his base…

…and the finishing touch.

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What's next for old Hattie? We've heard rumors that his restless bones may soon re-etherialize in Disneyland's Haunted Mansion, just as the moon climbs high for the Park's 60th Anniversary.  Although Jody and I had nothing to do with his long-awaited comeback, we are very anxious to see what may soon materialize in that dark attic corner.  Aren't you?

To the Moon with Frank Soltesz

Hey Kids!   Write your name here!

Impress your earthbound friends with a souvenir of your round-trip flight to the moon aboard Disneyland's TWA Rocket!  This exciting illustration of the Moonliner exiting the Earth's atmosphere with its tripod gear retracted, was created by artist Frank Soltesz.  

Artist Frank Soltesz in his studio, circa 1947

I've been spacing out over the dynamic work of Frank Soltesz for a long time, even before I knew who he was.  His magazine ads for TWA, and especially his complex "cut-away" images will floor you.

Ken Soltesz, Frank's son, has shared with me the original TWA magazine ad that Disney used for the certificate.  The text is fun to read, as well!

Visit the Frank Soltesz Gallery on Flickr!

"Hawaiian Eye" Tiki

Way back in 2006, as the collectible tiki mug craze was reaching its height, I made a special mug just for myself based on a (then) fifty-year-old television program that I was completely obsessed with.  Hawaiian Eye, produced by Warner Brothers in Burbank and originally broadcast on ABC-TV from 1959 to 1963, was a "private eye" adventure in modern Honolulu, with murder and mayhem set against the tropical scenery of the islands. 

The show had a vacation-like atmosphere with plots rum-infused with luaus, surfing, ukuleles, and Navy Grogs.  Anthony Eisley and Robert Conrad were the private investigators working from their stylish poolside office at the famed Hilton Hawaiian Village. Pretty nightclub singer Connie Stevens performed each week in the adjacent Shell Bar, and Hawaiian-born Poncie Ponce added to the fun as a colorful cab driver. Even the villains on the show each week seemed to be on vacation.

The most familiar icon of Hawaiian Eye, however, was the tiki seen at the opening and closing of every episode. Conceived by Art Director Perry Ferguson (best known for his production design on Citizen Kane, Alfred Hitchcock's Rope, and the live-action sequences in Walt Disney's Song of the South), the tiki also stood in the Hawaiian Eye headquarters and served as a sort of good-luck charm for the private eyes. 

Standing nearly 4 feet tall, the grimacing deity was reportedly carved from palm wood by an actor named Malcolm Mealey.  Mealey trained weightlifters here in Anaheim and chiseled tikis out of palm logs as a hobby.  Most of his tikis were purchased by Stephen Crane (Lana Turner's ex-boyfriend) who built hotels with themed restaurants, such as "The Luau" in Beverly Hills.

The tiki became the show's logo, both behind the scenes, and on the handful of rare (and highly collectible) merchandise items based on the series.

I've been told by Book of Tiki author Sven Kirsten that after the show closed in 1963, the tiki prop was taken as a memento by one of its cast members Doug Mossman, but it has since rotted away in his yard in Waikiki.

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By the way...Jody and I are currently hard at work on our online store set to debut in about a month.  It's a lot of work, but as it evolves there will be some nifty stuff you probably won't  find anywhere else.  Stay tuned!

Steaks and Chops

Let's journey back to "grandmother's day" with some wonderful artwork—part of an original pencil layout—created in 1955 for a rare full-color newspaper section presenting some of the "many delights and wonders that are yours to enjoy at Disneyland."

The text written to accompany this page:
"The Red Wagon Inn is one of several charming eating places in Disneyland. It is resplendent in the elegance of a by-gone era reminiscent of the famed eating houses of yesterday. All appointments are authentic mementos of the gay and glamorous 90's--including the stained glass ceiling, entrance hall and foyer taken from the S. James home in Los Angeles, one of the West's most noted old mansions. Atmosphere, however, is not confined to the building alone. The menu itself brings back visions of historic good eating --featuring steaks and chops."

"Grandmother shopped in a store like Swift's Market House on Disneyland's Main Street. Here we find the old-fashioned butcher in straw hat and cuffs, the pot-bellied stove and shelves lined with authentic old-time meat and grocery products. Swift & Company, whose quality meats are served exclusively in Disneyland, is the sponsor of this exhibit."

"The Chicken Plantation at Disneyland is a gay antebellum river plantation house, reproduced in every nostalgic detail. French Provincial decor and old Southern Hospitality make the Chicken Plantation a memorable spot. You'll want to visit the Plantation soon and enjoy tender grown Swift's Premium Chicken."

Christmas with Old Friends

My favorite project this year was creating the corporate holiday greeting card for Warner Bros. Studios Animation.  Warners currently owns the Hanna-Barbera film catalog and I was beyond thrilled when they asked me for an original design featuring the classic H-B characters. 

There are so many good characters to choose from so, naturally, I chose the earliest ones and placed the style in the late '50s/early '60s.  Ruff and Reddy, Huckleberry Hound, Yogi, and Boo-Boo Bear are constructing a paper tableau using the very tools I used to create the actual scene. 

On the flip-side, Quick Draw McGraw and his sidekick Baba Louie are assisting from behind the scenes.

This was so much fun to work on, and required some tricky staging to pull off the illusion that the flimsy paper characters were actually supporting the scissors and x-acto knife.

The interior of the card had its own special tableau, as well.  I thought it could be fun to contrast large and small characters together in one shot:

Magilla Gorilla dangles a real vintage ornament (from our own Christmas tree at home) while the mice Pixie and Dixie leap around.  Incidentally, I hope everyone out there reading this is familiar with all these great Hanna-Barbera characters.  We don't see them very much today—except perhaps for Yogi Bear—which is quite a shame.  I spent countless hours of my kidhood enjoying the TV antics of these characters, and it was a dream come true to be able to revisit with them for a short while as they skipped across my workbench.

Happiest Color Combination on Earth.

1956 Fantasyland, Disneyland

Tiki Kiliki

A gift for a sweet and photogenic friend, Tiki Kiliki (Miss Christie White) of The Hukilau. 

(Painting by Jody Daily, tiki mug by Kevin Kidney.)

Tiki Kiliki, herself.

Rolly Crump: The Architect of Delight

Illustration for Los Angeles Magazine by Kevin Kidney & Jody Daily,  March 2011

Rolly Crump is one of our favorite designers in the whole wide world. Whether we're talking about his theme park contributions for Disney, or his satyrical counter-culture posters, Rolly rules.

A few years ago Los Angeles Magazine asked us to create an illustration to accompany an article about the legendary artist, and of course we were thrilled.  Our first rough concept was heavily inspired by our love for Rolly's "Museum of the Weird":

Our first concept.  Too weird?

Rolly's bizarre bats and dragons proved to be a little too dark for the tastes of the magazine's art director, who asked us to try something lighter and more cheerful. We decided to take elements from some of Rolly's more familiar Disneyland designs and build an imaginary theme park out of them.  We lovingly referred to this concept as "Crump City":

"Crump City" preliminary sketch

 The art director liked it, and decided we should do sort of a mock "attraction poster" with the elements.  The design became more and more simple as our "poster" took shape.  We created our art digitally in Adobe Illustrator and played around with possible color schemes.

Experimenting with different colors and values.

We did a lot of fussing with colors until we landed on the final bright purple version at the top of this post.  Everyone seemed to like it, and we even received a swell compliment from Rolly himself.  Score!

Rolly Crump: Muse of the Weird and Wonderful

Sun illustration by Rolly Crump, 1966

Rolly Crump is one of my favorite artists in the whole world—not only for his groundbreaking Disney work—but for his quirky and beautiful independent art as well.   Actually, I'm inspired by everything I've ever seen him do.

Rolly with his Tower of the Four Winds model
for the 1964 New York World's Fair

In Disney circles he is known for his designs on the Enchanted Tiki Room, It's a Small World,  the Haunted Mansion, the Adventureland Bazaar, and to a lesser degree for his legendary unbuilt Museum of the Weird—macabre and witty concepts that were decades ahead of their time and Tim Burton.

Lighting Fixture for The Museum of the Weird, 1966

I love his drawing style of the 1960s: bold, ragged ink line, textured and angular, with colors kept to a minimum. Much of it borders on the psychedelic.  Even more, his art has a sly sense of humor that I'm simply crazy about.

Pride Creations "Push Down" Toys, 
concepted by Rolly, 1960s 

According to Rolly, even while at Disney he always had cool projects going on the side.
In 1960, a chance meeting with West Coast rock poster pioneer, Howard Morseburg, led to a new venture in printmaking. Rolly's satirical designs poked fun at Beatnik culture, the coffee houses and jazz clubs of Greenwich Village, Seattle, San Francisco, and the East Bay. 

Poster for Pete's Poop Deck Jazz Club
Seattle, Washington, 1960

His easy-to-read graphics satirized big issues of the era, from drug use to the human rights record of revolutionary Cuba and the Soviet Union.  Though they apparently weren't made in extremely large quantities, the hand-pulled prints were popular with artistic young musicians and hipsters, and were influential on poster design that later dominated the Sixties.

"Green Gasser Kauphy House" Poster 1960

In 1959 Rolly became a show designer at WED (now Walt Disney Imagineering) after Walt saw some of the propellers and mobiles he had created.  

Rolly's Rongo Tiki God concept, 1962

Jody and I first met Rolly when we were curating "Tiki: Native Drums in the Orange Grove" at the Anaheim Museum in 1996.  Rolly gave a 2-hour presentation describing the inspiration for his Tiki designs and his other work.  It was an unforgettable evening.

Jody Daily, Rolly Crump, & Kevin Kidney
Anaheim Museum Tiki Show, September 14, 1996

In our own projects for Disney, Jody and I have welcomed the opportunity to more fully geek out over Rolly's designs by translating several into merchandise, including his 1967 Tomorrowland Ticket Booth,  Small World Clock facade, and, of course, his Tiki characters.

Rongo Tiki Drink Bowl at Disneyland, 2009

Thanks, Rolly, for sharing your creativity and utter coolness with us.

Paper Boy

"I'm a bow-legged chicken, I'm a knock-kneed hen,

Never been so happy since I don't know when,

I walk with a wiggle and a giggle and a squawk

Doin' the Tennessee Wig-walk."

Grand and Glorious "America On Parade" Models

Four paper people in rectangular frames, looking like minimalistic strangers on a train, could be something you'd expect to see in a museum of modern art. But this small three-dimensional model made of cardboard, white paper, and plastic toothpaste caps is actually a piece of rough concept art created for one of Disneyland's most famous parades.

"Television and Movies"

America On Parade ran daily at both Disneyland and Walt Disney World during the 1975-76 US bicentennial anniversary. Consisting of fifty units and 150 performers, it was by far the most elaborate parade ever staged at the Disney parks.

Here are some very rare images—most of them shot by myself in the late 1980s using a Polaroid instant camera—of the wonderful scale models that Disneyland kept in storage at the time. Back then, the Disneyland Entertainment-Art Department preserved a treasure trove of artwork for Park shows going all the way back to the early sixties and Walt's lifetime. When I was just starting out as a young parade designer at Disney, I became fascinated by these fragile hand-made miniatures and assembled a file of snapshots for my own personal reference.  Around 1999, shortly after I had transferred out of the department to a new position in Glendale,  I learned to my horror that nearly all of the Anaheim model shop's archive had been destroyed or discarded in order to "free up precious storage space for other things." I've come to believe many of the photos I had taken might now be the only existing record of this (mostly vague) corner of Disneyland history.

"Thanksgiving Turkey"

"Betsy Ross"

The A.O.P models were made in 1974 by Clare Graham and a small team of artists under the creative direction of Bob Jani, who had also led the creation of the Main Street Electrical Parade. Built from simple materials, such as colored felt, paper, wire, and illustration board, these models guided the construction of the final full-sized parade floats.

The Transcontinental Railroad

I love these, and refer back to them often.  The stylization was a great inspiration to us in designing the "paper sculpture" look for Mickey's Soundsational Parade.  The model, above, of the two steam locomotives coming face to face at the completion of the first transcontinental railroad is one of my all-time favorites. It's a stunning unit, and I just wish the image were sharper.

"Schoolhouse"

"Wagons West"

"Industrial Revolution"

"Phonograph"

"Radio"

Some of the models from the section of the parade dedicated to "America's favorite pastimes"…playing sports and eating ice cream.  Some high-concept ideas here!

"Popular Sports"

"Ice Cream"

"Telephone"

The Capitol

Transportation

These "transportation" floats, depicting the 19th and 20th centuries are pretty fantastic, as well.  Some of the models shown here were photographed for a 1975 souvenir book (by David Jacobs) sold during the parade's run, but most historic Disneyland parade art is unpublished, lost, and unknown.   I'll try to share more photos in the coming months, even the out-of-focus ones!