Walt Disney World - Backstage Magic
This is a very long post, detailing the Backstage Magic tour that snarkymarcy and I took this past Monday at Walt Disney World. The tour takes you through the backstage and restricted areas in parts of WDW, and shows you how the magic works. If you don't want to know, don't read it. There are no pictures, because pictures backstage are not allowed. And I've not gone into every little detail of the tour, because there's just too much to experience.
The day started off rather inauspiciously. Because we were staying in one of the EPCOT resorts, the only way to get to EPCOT is to take a boat to the International Gateway, which is at the back of EPCOT. Since the tour started first thing in the morning, we had to meet at Guest Relations outside the front of EPCOT. And we didn't need a park admission for the day (considering that we had already paid $200 each for the tour). But there was no good way for us to get there. The solution ended up being to pay $100 at the IG for 2 one day admissions, walk through the park before opening (as if we were headed to a character breakfast), walk out the front of the park, and get a refund for the two passes there. A bit of a pain in the ass, but workable.
On the other side of EPCOT, we met our guide, James. James is a part-timer at Disney, working as a magician the rest of the time. His part time job at Disney is with the Disney Institute, which does tours, corporate training, and youth programs. They used to have adult programs (like cooking and photography), when they had their own hotel. But those programs and the hotel were closed down some time ago because they weren't able to make any money. We all had introductions (there were only 10 on the tour), and headed into EPCOT using the cast turnstile. We went to the backstage entrance just past the first building on the right side of the turnstiles, paused so James could talk about the significance of stepping "through the looking glass" (as all of the Backstage Magic tour imagery relates to the Mickey Mouse cartoon version of Alice in Wonderland, "Through the Looking Glass"), and went backstage.
Backstage at EPCOT, and Walt Disney World in general, looks pretty much like you would expect. The guest areas of the park are more like a set, with the backstage areas being utilitarian. Lots of cars, mechanicals, and other mundane details. Here, on our way to the bus, we got a little explanation of Disney terminology. Disney doesn't have employees, they have cast members. This is because everything is a show, and everone participates in it, from the character actors on down to the maintenance staff. Everything is either good show (everything went perfectly), or bad show (something was wrong). They don't have uniforms, they have costumes. Whether that's a character costume, or a maintenance costume doesn't matter. We also talked a little about distances, as James pointed out that we were walking between the Guest Relations desk at the front of EPCOT, and the Living Seas pavillion, about 200' apart. Whereas if you were to do that in the guest areas, it was a long walk from the turnstiles, through Innoventions West, to the Living Seas on the other side.
We got to the bus and were on our way. On the way, James told us how EPCOT uses a perimeter road for getting around, and there are busses that stop by each pavillion. This way you don't have cast members from France walking through Mexico. Our first stop was at the USA pavillion. Since the World Showcase is closed in the mornings, we wandered out to the onstage areas and watched a little of the work being done to prepare for opening up. We also talked about the architecture, which I will cover in a separate post with some photos. Then we went backstage again, and went behind the scenes at The American Adventure, the big show at the USA pavillion (after a short break to figure out why the door was locked).
For those who have never seen it, American Adventure is a show in a large theater, with a huge screen up front. They show a movie on the screen, and there are animatronics that pop up in front of the screen throughout the show. Backstage, we find out how this all works. There is a large mechanism, as long as a railroad boxcar and twice as wide. It has 10 positions, each position having one or two sets of animatronics. Each one has a hydraulic mechanism to lift it up to "stage level" (there's actually no stage). The entire mechanism is 147 tons, and it moves absolutely silently. Above it is a room with a giant rear projection system for the screen. Since there's no stage, and they have to project, the engineering room is completely dark when the show is in progress. And since everything is completely silent, no one is allowed back there when the show is running. There's actually glow in the dark footprints on the floor from the door to the control panel, so that if someone has to go in there, they don't fall into the pit where they'll be crushed by a 147 ton piece of steel.
The entire show is run by computer. The engineers sit in an office elsewhere, and the cast member running the show just pushes a button to start it. In the morning, they run through a series of tests to make sure everything's working as it should. Thankfully, as we were about to leave, they were about to start their tests. So we actually got to see them move everything around. And it does move completely silently. There are canisters to drip oil onto the tracks while it's moving, and the motor that pulls the cables to move it is in another room behind a bit of concrete. There's no noise, no vibration, nothing. By this time, we needed to be moving on. So we all thanked the engineers and headed out to the bus.
One thing that it's worth noting here is how wonderful everyone we met was. All of the groups that allowed us to tour their areas (some have not, due to safety or security concerns) were very cooperative. They answered questions where they could. They weren't bothered at all by our interrupting their work, and most places had even laid out things (costumes, animatronics, other toys) specifically for the tour. It not only shows their own pride in their work, but also shows that the tours aren't just a way for Disney to make more money. Everyone involved really does want to share what's going on behind the scenes.
Back to the tour. Once back on the bus, we headed over to the EPCOT cast area. This is where all of the cast members who work in EPCOT come in, get their costumes, catch the bus, talk to HR, and where the management has their offices. It's a remarkably small building, considering that it handles all 3,000 cast members who work in EPCOT. We walked through their Pride Hall, where each group has painted part of the wall however they pleased. The engineering folks even used fiber optics and a motion sensor! Then we went into the costuming department. James explained that every piece of clothing he was wearing, including his belt but excluding his shoes, came from costuming every morning. This department has racks and racks of every piece of clothing that cast members wear, in every size needed. Cast members come in and "shop" for what they need. Every piece is barcoded so that textile services can track who has what, how long it's been in service, how many times it has been washed, and when it needs to be replaced. Their laundry plant (which we saw from afar later) is huge, and actually sorts clothing using the barcodes, so everything can be washed the way it needs to be.
Next door to costuming they have a shop that handles repairs to the costumes, as well as cosmetology and hair styling. The shop can do everything from repairing rips and tears to building a new costume from scratch when needed. Cosmetology does makeup primarily for the character actors and entertainment staff that don't have headpieces on (such as the princesses). And the hair stylists do everything from standard haircuts and styling for cast members, to assembling and styling wigs for the character actors (again, who don't have headpieces). James noted that while almost all of the animatronics have real human hair, all of the character actors wear synthetic wigs. So when you see Jasmine or Ariel out in the parks, that's not their real hair. The reason is that they need wigs so that the hair looks exactly the same every time. And it's synthetic because the heat and humidity is not easy on human hair. The animatronics, for the most part, are in climate controlled environments.
Every character has a huge book that describes exactly how their hair and makeup are to be done, so it's exactly the same every time. While we were there, one of the stylists was working on a wig for Jasmine. It has so much hair, that they actually need to disassemble three wigs and reassemble it into Jasmine's wig. And those wigs need to be styled every morning so that they're ready for use. James noted that it was something like 6 hours just to style that wig properly. And the books specify how it should be done. Before they even interview a hair stylist, they hand them a book and a wig that's about to go to the incinerator because it's been worn out, and tell them to make the wig look like it says in the book. That's the test.
Back onto the bus, and we headed out of EPCOT. We headed over to their floral shop. These people handle all of the floral arrangements for everything on property. All of the hotels, parks, and special events. And WDW does over a thousand weddings a year on site. Not to mention conventions. Flowers come in every day from all over the world, and are stored in a huge walk-through fridge to keep them dormant until needed. We walked through to their shop, and saw some candleholders with roses and spiderweb on them. Obviously something for the Haunted Mansion. The ladies there informed us that they had actually put them together earlier using roses that had been sitting out for several days. And the event (a dinner at the Haunted Mansion) wasn't for another day or two. But if the roses weren't truly dead by then, there were going to go ahead and spraypaint them black.
The next stop was Disney-MGM Studios. We entered over behind the Tower of Terror, and drove back to the costume design and production department. James told us that they have two types of character cast members. The cast members who portray characters on the street (and sign autographs and the like) are hired to fit the costumes for them. The cast members who portray characters in shows (like Fantasmic and Beauty and the Beast), are hired for their acting ability and the costumes are tailored specifically for them. And those can be quite expensive. The costume designed for Belle for the Beauty and the Beast show at MGM costs around $10,000. In the front area of the building, they had three half-size versions of three of the princess dresses. But we moved on to where the real work was being done.
First we stopped to see someone making a half muslin form of a costume from a designer's drawing. This is where they use a form (altered for the cast member who is to wear the costume, in this case), and pin pieces of muslin around it to make one half of the costume (the other half is just a mirror image). Then the designer will come down and make sure that it's actually what they wanted. Once done, the muslin is unpinned and gets transferred to paper, which becomes the pattern for the costume. This is sent off to the people in the CAD room, who transfer the muslin pattern into a computer, and arrange the pieces so that they can cut them all out with the least waste. They used to use paper patterns, not so long ago, in huge black cabinets. But they have been putting everything on the computer so they don't lose them, don't ruin the patterns, and can easily make alterations for sizing.
When they're ready to make a costume, the pattern is printed out using a plotter. Someone then cuts out the pieces, and cuts out all the fabric by hand, so that the patterns all match. They also have a large computerized cutter, which can read the patterns directly from the computer, and cut out fabric quickly and precisely, though it's only used for parts where pattern isn't a concern (such as muslin pieces). The person cutting then puts all the pieces in a bag, along with any buttons or other trim, into a mesh bag with the instructions (remember the books for hair and makeup? They have similar things for costumes) and hand it off to the first available seamstress. That one seamstress now does all of the work of assembling the costume. There's no assembly line process (where one person sews on a zipper, one person sews on a sleeve, etc.). In fact, remember the test for the hair stylists? Prospective seamstresses get handed a mesh bag. After it's put together for the first time, the costume gets handed off to another computer person who documents exactly how it looks, where all the buttons are, and every other detail. That way it gets made the same way next time.
Done with costume design, we moved on to lunch. This was at Mama Melrose's, inside MGM. On the way, I asked James about how backstage is handled at MGM, since you could actually see backstage from the onstage areas, and there's a backlot tour (which goes through the costume design department, among other places) that's a regular ride. James told us that because MGM is designed to be the "Hollywood that never was", it was OK, and actually part of the plan, that backstage was visible. This was all part of the show. In addition, in MGM it was OK for cast members from one themed area, such as Sunset Blvd. (1950s era), to walk through another. But you would still never see them inside each other's attractions. This segued into a talk about how things were themed. For example, Mama Melrose's is an Italian restaurant (one layer of theming). But it's an Italian restaurant as would appear in NYC (two layers of theming). And it's also an Italian restaurant like in NYC, but actually in Hollywood (three layers of theming). So every song that they play inside is either Italian, or references California. And the memorabilia on the walls mixes things Italian with Sinatra records and California street signs.
Over lunch, we talked about many a little detail, and about jobs. After lunch we slipped out through a side door and back onto the bus. And off towards the Magic Kingdom we went. But not directly. We took the long way around, past the Grand Floridian. Driving past the Magic Kingdom parking lots, around the Transportation and Ticket Center, James noted that the parking lots were large enough that you could drop Disneyland in the middle of it (all 244 acres) and still have enough room to park 500 cars around it. All of these cars leak fluid, and every time it rains that all washes off the pavement. As such, the parking lots are surrounded by a moat, lined with sand and clay, which acts as a natural filter. The parking lots drain into the moat, and contaminants never make it to the groundwater. The moat is the largest waterway at Disney that is not connected to any other waterway. It also helps with the distancing of the parks from the "reality" of the real world. To get to the Magic Kingdom, you have to drive in from the far end of the Disney property, placing it as far away from the outside world as possible. You park your car, and have to cross a moat and take a tram to the TTC. Then you have to take a monorail or a boat to get to the Magic Kingdom, making it like a fairytale destination that is difficult to reach.
As we went by the Grand Floridian, James noted that we should watch the road up ahead. Disney didn't really want guests going down this road, but there were no security checkpoints, and no fences. Instead, they use psychological tricks to discourage people from going down there. Just like the trip to the Magic Kingdom separates you from the real world, trying to go down this road jars you back into it, so it's obviously not somewhere you should be, and doubly so if you have a young princess in the car. As soon as you pass the Grand Floridian, the nice landscaping stops. The helpful signs (excluding basic traffic signs) stop. And the road turns a couple times for absolutely no reason, so you can't see where you're going and you can't see where you came from. Each turn has an unpaved road off of it, with a large area to allow cars to turn around. In this way they strongly encourage people to turn around and head back to the Disney they know and love. But down the end of the road is the North Services area.
On the way in, we passed by one of the fireworks bunkers for the nightly fireworks show at the Magic Kingdom (situately quite conveniently next to the fire department). On the other side is the dedicated power plant for WDW. As you head further into the area, way down off to the left is the cast parking area for the Magic Kingdom. It's far off enough that cast members need to take a bus to the utilidor entrance on the north side of Fantasyland. They're actually moving main costuming out there (more on that later) to make things a little more efficient. Right now, EPCOT has the more advanced costuming area, where cast members shop for their own costumes. The rest of the parks are moving towards that because Disney has found that giving the cast members more responsibility has resulted in things running more smoothly. But getting back to the tour, parking is not interesting. So we went through the security gate into the North Services area.
Our first stop was the Christmas barn. This was Marcy's favorite part of the tour. The building is around 60,000 sqft, and everything's stacked 3 layers high. It contains all of the Christmas decorations for all of the WDW properties, plus some of the other ones like Vero Beach and Hilton Head. All of the trees are artificial now, to stem the sheer waste of all the trees they would go through every year. So now every tree is decorated, placed on a pallate, and stacked away inside the barn for next year. Over the course of the year, each tree is checked to make sure every light still works, no ornaments are broken, and it all looks perfect. They have boxes and boxes of every type of Christmas ornament imaginable. And like the rest of WDW, everything is themed to match where it will be. Decorations for Fort Wilderness look different than the decorations for the Grand Floridian. Over on the other side of the barn were the giant trees used in the parks. 65 feet high, they have to be assembled from 10 foot high sections in place. And in the back is where they did all the work. The cast members here work all year long to prepare for the Christmas season (just after Thanksgiving, to just after New Years). They did have one toy back there that I really like. It's called a magic box, and it is commercially available, but I'd never seen one before. When they have a light strand that has a light out, or missing, they plug it into the magic box. It sends a high current through the strand, which can fuse some burnt out bulbs back together. Any that don't fuse back together will buzz, as the current arcs through them, making them easy to find and replace. They also had a bunch of LED light strands, which they were starting to switch over to. These have much lower power consumption, and last much longer than conventional lights. A bit more expensive as well, though.
From the Christmas barn, we headed over to the prop department. These folks are responsible for setting the stage for all sorts of events, in WDW and around the world. They do conventions, weddings, dinners, even proms. All the pieces they have they have either built themselves, or "found". By that, I mean that they have salvaged parts from displays that were being disassembled and thrown out, old rides, or anything else they can get their hands on. It's all stored here to wait for the day that someone asks for the Acropolis at their event. But just a quick stop here before we went across the street to Central Shops.
Central Shops is a truly amazing place. They can build almost anything there. For example, their first monorail was bought from an outside source. When they needed to expand the monorail service, they pulled the red monorail into Central Shops, took it apart piece by piece, duplicated each piece twice, and put three monorails back together. They commonly bring an engine in one end of the building, and a finished vehicle out the other. When we were walking through, they had the chassis of all the Space Mountain cars from Disneyland in California, and were preparing to rebuild them. Further down, we saw a VW Beetle (old style), which they were getting ready to make a copy of, but split it down the middle. They were going to be painted like Herbie the Love Bug and used in the new stunt car show at MGM. James told us that there were over 1500 trades represented in that building alone. I can only imagine the scope of the unions they have to deal with.
We started off in the metal shop, where their shift was just finishing up. This was probably a good thing, considering the amount of noise there would have been otherwise. We had eye protection (neccessary for walking through the building), but nothing else. Next stop was over to their computer numeric control (CNC) shop. In here, they can make a mock-up of a part in plastic on the equipment, and the computer records exactly what they did, so it can replicate any part on its own. James showed us a plastic castle nut from the locking mechanism for the safety bars in one ride. Next to it, he had the metal version that the computer had made afterwards from a piece of solid metal rod stock. We walked across the hall to yet another shop area that dealt with plastic, rubber, and fiberglass. First stop was the vacuum press that they use to make molded plastic parts, like the trash can swing flaps. Then on to some lampposts that had been covered with fiberglass to look like bamboo. Then past someone who was making a mold for the bumpers for the cars on Splash Mountain. James asked him why they didn't have a mold already, and the answer was that they had made a few changes, so it was time for a new mold. He was using epoxy to form the mold to a prototype bumper that had come out of the shop.
No time to waste, we headed into the paint shop. Here they had a few horses off of Cinderella's Golden Carousel in Fantasyland. This carousel was built in 1917 by the Philadelphia Toboggan Company, and Disney had purchased it in 1967 just for it's mechanical parts. They were going to make their own horses for it out of fiberglass, but under all the paint were beautiful, hand-carved mahogany horses. They actually built 11 horses, to assist with swapping out the mahogany ones for maintenance, but they've found now that the fiberglass horses have been deteriorating much faster than the original mahogany ones. The three that were in the shop were mahogany and were in the process of being stripped and repainted, which they do periodically (no less than 3 years between) to keep everything looking good. It's actually next to impossible to tell which ones are wood and which ones are fiberglass unless the poles are removed and you can see in there to where it's not painted.
Next door again to the animation shop. These guys work mostly on the animatronics found all over the parks, but they also do some other work on mechanical parts for rides (such as seatbelts, which they had just set up a test on in the back room), and parts for some of the character devices. When we walked in, someone had just set up a repetitive task for one of the birds from the Enchanted Tiki Room. It was continually going through all of its movements, and it would be for the next 48 hours before it went back in. Next to that was a tiki bird that we could play with (they had a nail that we could use to activate each of the movements). On the bird, all of the movements are controlled with compressed air. But next to it was a larger animatronic (Bonnie Appetit from the old Diamond Horseshoe Revue show) which was hydraulically controlled. We couldn't play with the hydraulics, but parts of her were air controlled (such as larger arm movements). The idea is that the hydraulic movements are more fluid and natural than the air movements, so they're used more. But for things like the tiki birds, where they're over a guest's head, they don't want to use hydraulics because of the risk of a fluid leak. James noted that Bonnie's arm didn't used to swing out like it did. He always used to stand right next to her as they ran through the movements, when one day she smacked him in the head. Seems the engineers had changed the movements as a joke. One of them walked by right then and said "Serves you right!"
We followed him over to another work area in the animation shop, where they were working on a Nemo character costume. This was actually a plastic shell around a motorized cart (such as a handicapped person would use). The cast member would climb inside, and use the controls to move around, and hand controls to make the fins move. The tail was constructed of a flexible plastic so it would move back and forth as the cart moved. They had it in the shop to change the door mechanism so that it was easier to open (from either side, since it wouldn't do to have the fire department using the jaws of life on Nemo to get a cast member out if they were incapacitated). James wanted to give it a shot, so he started to climb inside. Being over 6', this was a bit of a task, but he finally managed to cram himself in there and close the door. It has a magnetic closure around the edge so it stays tight against the plastic shell and you can't tell where it is unless you're looking for it. Thankfully, James was also able to get himself out of the costume, and we were on our way.
We got back onto the bus at this point, and drove around the Magic Kingdom to the cast member entrance behind Main Street USA and Tomorrowland. We step out onstage for a minute, and then headed back and inside the buildings. Right as you get in (this is where one of the cast member breakrooms and security is), there's an elevator and a stairwell. We went down the stairs to the utilidors. The first thing James explained is that there are no tunnels under the Magic Kingdom. Because the water table is so high, they couldn't dig at all. So they built the utilidors (short for "utility corridors") at ground level, and then covered it all up. What they dug out to cover it with became Seven Seas Lagoon, around which the Magic Kingdom and the Contemporary, Polynesian, and Grand Floridian resorts sit. So the guest areas of the Magic Kingdom are actually the second floor of a three story complex. The third story are the tops of the buildings around Main Street USA, where much of the park management has their offices. However, having said all this, all the Disney manuals and documentation refer to the Magic Kingdom tunnels.
The utilidors were designed to allow easy access to the utilities around the Magic Kingdom (they're all exposed in the utilidors), provide storage (the utilidors are up to 15' high, and wide enough to store things on either side and still drive a cart through), and provide a way for cast members to move around without having to walk through the park. There are only two gas powered vehicles allowed into the utilidors: ambulances, and the armored car to handle cash. Everything else is electric, mostly carts used for moving supplies and people around. Because there are no real landmarks to know where you are or where you're going, the walls are color coded as to which land in the park they are under. To help colorblind cast members, there are also pictures that go along with the color-coding. The colors and the pictures have been changed over the years, but the large maps in the utilidors haven't been updated to match, but there are other signs to help. The maps have been updated, at least once, to change some information. More on that later.
We walked from one side of Main Street to the other and stopped in front of a large wall map to talk about all this. James also noted that the Magic Kingdom is the only place where utilidors were used. Every other park uses a perimeter road, like EPCOT. EPCOT does actually have one tunnel, connecting one end of the perimeter road (by guest relations) to the other side across the park entrance. It runs under by Spaceship Earth, when you have to walk up over a mound in the earth. We moved on and walked a few steps down the corridor towards Adventureland. And that's about as far as we went. I was a little disappointed at this point, because it's obvious that we weren't going to head further down the utilidors to the more interesting (to me, at least) parts, as the tours used to. But we stopped here and talked about a few things. Being the computer geek that I am, I asked James if we were going to talk about or see DACS. And thus brings us to the first thing that we're not supposed to know about the utilidors.
James started off by saying, "It's unfortunate that you know about that." It seems that since 9/11, they stopped taking tours there for security reasons. DACS stands for Digital Animation Control System. It's the computer center for all of the Magic Kingdom, and controls just about everything that goes on, rides, parades, pretty much anything animatronic. As far as Disney is concerned, it doesn't even exist anymore. That's the one modification to the map that I noted, that the location of DACS was removed (it's still on some of the online maps however, so it's easy to know where it is). And because DACS is located next to the Character Zoo (where they keep the character costumes), and Main Wardrobe (where everyone else's costumes are), they don't take the tour there either. The claim is that they're moving Main Wardrobe out to the cast parking area for efficiency, and to make it more like EPCOT. But I have a feeling that they want that space in the utilidor for something else. Marcy suggested security, and that's quite possible. I think they also want to reduce the number of people hanging around near the DACS room.
James did tell us about AVAC, which is another interesting system they use. It's a large tube that runs through the utilidors and has outlets above ground at various points throughout the park (in the backstage areas). When a trash can is full, a cast member swaps out the trash can and takes the full one backstage to the nearest AVAC tube, and empties it in. The AVAC system whisks the trash away to a processing facility outside the park at about 60mph. Of course, this brings us to the second thing we're not supposed to know about the utilidors.
James mentioned that wouldn't it be nice if they had a system like that for handling cash? "Well, we don't," he said, and then went on to describe how it doesn't work in detail. All of the stores have an outlet near the registers where the cast members can just drop in cash, and it gets sucked away to the Cash Control office, where it can be processed and prepped for the armored car to take to the bank. It's unclear whether the system is like AVAC, where money is just dumped in, or more like the pneumatic systems that banks use for drive throughs. I would guess the latter, since handling change in an open tube would not be easy. The cash control office is not labeled on any map, and probably never has been. But looking at the maps, there's a room under Fantasyland that is unlabeled, and convenient to the driveable utilidor entrance north of Fantasyland. That would be my guess.
We walked back through the middle of Main Street in the utilidors, past the personnel office and break areas. James commented that WDW is moving to a completely paperless pay system. They had been encouraging people to switch to direct deposit, but they were still printing paper paystubs every week (we all know what they look like. Just like checks). Now they're going to be putting all the paystubs on a computer system where CMs can access it, and not printing out stubs at all. Not bad, considering there's about 60,000 cast members working at WDW. We went back upstairs by the same stairs we came down, and headed onstage at the front end of Main Street, in the courtyard where the train station is, just in time for the afternoon parade to come by.
After we finished watching the parade come through, we talked a little about how it works. Some interesting facts:
- The parade takes a little over 20 minutes to go from Frontierland through to Main Street USA. During this time, the cast members and characters involved have to be waving and performing constantly, regardless of weather. As they move offstage from Main Street, they actually turn around and keep waving until they are completely out of sight.
- To supplement the normal sound systems, there are extra speakers hidden all over the place. There are actually speakers inside windows on the third floor of Main Street, and the windows automatically open before the parade comes through, and close 30 seconds after the parade music stops.
- The parade goes from Frontierland to Main Street in the afternoon, and the opposite way in the evening. This is because mob mentality causes people to follow behind the parade. If it went from Frontierland to Main Street in the evening, everyone would follow the parade right out of the park at once, and mob the exit and transportation systems. By going the other way, they lead people into the park, and even out the way everyone exits at night.
- There are 37 zones defined for the parade, and this is how the PAGEANT system tracks where each float is. The float reads magnets embedded in the pavement along the parade route (the ones on Main Street look like pieces of gum), and transmits to the PAGEANT system whenever it crosses a zone boundary. This way the PAGEANT system can make sure the right sounds are playing.
We walked up Main Street and looked at a bunch of the third story windows. Many of them are printed with signs for fake businesses, and the names of people running those businesses. These commemmorate some of the people who have been involved in making WDW happen. The game is to read the signs and try and figure out what the people listed did (or do). For example, Walt's window faces the castle (because the castle was his big dream), and says "Graduate School of Design and Master Planning). About halfway up Main Street on the right is a window that says "M.T. Lott Real Estate Investments", and lists a bunch of company names. These are the dummy corporations that Walt and Roy (O.) used to purchase the land for WDW. These names all form the opening "credits" for the Magic Kingdom (the train tunnel that you have to walk in through is like a curtain, and one of the first smells is popcorn), adding to the presentation of the parks as a show.
We finished walking up Main Street, and went backstage again and onto the bus. The bus took us back over to EPCOT, and James gave us each a pin, with the image of Mickey stepping through the mirror, and "Backstage Magic" printed across the top in mirror script. They're not available anywhere else, so it's a really nice collector's piece, especially for those who collect pins. James actually asked the bus driver to take us back over to the EPCOT resorts, as well, so we wouldn't have a problem getting back to our hotel.
One other thing we talked about along the way (earlier in the day, but it didn't really fit into this anywhere), was about the land that WDW is on. When they were first planning WDW, Walt didn't like what happened around Disneyland in California. Namely, when they built it, it was surrounded by orange groves. As soon as Disneyland was put in, land prices shot up and everything got developed. When they decided to build WDW, they searched all over the country for the right spot, and settled on central Florida because the climate was right, and the land was cheap. To keep the land cheap, Walt, Roy, and the others involved created a series of dummy corporations to purchase the land that would become WDW. The first acres were bought for about $80 each. After people kept wondering who was buying the land, a journalist from Orlando named Emily Bavar who was at a California Disney party eventually asked Walt what he was going to do with all that land in Florida. Walt denied purchasing the land, and then went on to describe in detail why it was unusable, and the journalist broke the story the next day. Some of the last acres that Walt and Roy purchased cost them around $80,000 each. WDW ended up being over 30,000 acres. One third of that is secured as conservation lands, and will never be developed. One third is taken up by the current parks, resorts, offices, and such. And the remaining third is still undeveloped.
WDW straddles Orange and Osceola counties. This caused a bit of a problem, because it was unclear who would get tax money, who would provide services, and how zoning and building codes were going to work. To solve this, and at Disney's behest, Florida created the Reedy Creek Improvement District, a special taxing district comprised of the land Disney owned, plus some land owned by the district itself, about 450 acres owned by the State of Florida, and about 24 acres owned by other people. It gave Disney the ability to create their own building codes, zoning, and land use restrictions. It also gave them the responsibility for providing fire and police services, wastewater treatment, and all of the other services that a county has to provide. Taxes get paid to the district, as well as to Orange and Osceola counties. But RCID is essentially a private government, owned by Disney. This arrangement has brought some worries to the State of Florida lately, because they have suddenly realized, between Comcast's offer to buy Disney and those trying to oust Eisner, that Disney actually could be sold, and this private government would be in unknown hands.
All in all, the tour was a day (and money) very well spent. I would have liked to have seen a few more things, like behind the scenes at a simulator ride, such as Star Tours or Body Wars (really, I'd rather see Mission: Space, but even many of the cast members haven't seen that). Or more of the utilidors under the Magic Kingdom. But it was still interesting to see all the things that Disney has done, and the sheer enormity of the infrastructure behind presenting the parks and resorts to the guests.