WDW Magazine December 2015 - Crowds at WDW | Page 125

Photo courtesy of Orange County Archives via Flickr

the park to scale and so, he wanted the railroad to be five-eighths because he wanted to have
that story book feel to it. Well, he also wanted the entire barn to be five-eighths and the
imagineers specifically the engineers had said to Walt, look this isn't a story set that's going to be
filmed for 30 seconds. Real people, a 100,000 a day have to come through here. There are some
real laws of gravity for the sake of safety that we have to pay attention to.
The way that they fixed that was they built ... We see it on Main Street, they built the ground
floor to 90 to a 100% scale so it's real size, you know, nothing special about it per se but then
the second floor is three quarters scale because no one ever goes up there and then the third
floor, if there is one, is and so the result of that is the buildings are safe and it can accommodate
people, it can accommodate crowds and yet it gives us that story book feel. The imagineers
actually refer to forced perspective as "The architecture of ".
Well, I used forced perspective to show the reader that life is not what happens to us. It's how
we react and how we respond to what happens to us. In other words, it takes perspective in
order to keep moving forward and to know that our dreams and our goals are closer than we
could ever possibly realize. Again, it's a design feature that if we know what to look for and know
how to apply it, it's not just true with Disneyland but it transfers into our everyday life as well.
Carl - Do you have any stories or anything about Walt and holidays because I know ... It seems
like that they really, really appreciate Christmas.