A MOUSE CLUBHOUSE EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW
BLAINE GIBSON
talks about Pirates of the Caribbean

by Scott Wolf

If I had to choose one word to describe Blaine Gibson I'd have to say, "humble." He does not need to be. He is a mega talent. You can see him in some Disney television shows showing Walt Disney the Abraham Lincoln bust he sculpted. He sculpted for Pirates of the Caribbean, It's a Small World, The American Adventure, and even the iconic "Partners" statue of Walt holding Mickey Mouse's hand that appears in front of the castles at Disneyland and Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom.

But, before Blaine sculpted for Disney he was an accomplished animator on many of Disney's classic films.

He enjoyed working as a team with others and felt that everybody equally deserved the credit for the finished product.

In addition to his humility, another endearing quality is how easy it is to listen to Blaine. His voice and calm tone are like listening to the most wonderful college professor where you want to grasp on to every word.

It is such a pleasure to be able to share my Blaine Gibson interviews with you.

For Pirates of the Caribbean, Blaine Gibson sculpted the pirates in the attraction.

Scott Wolf: Can you tell me about working on Pirates of the Caribbean?

Blaine Gibson: Well, I think it was my most enjoyable experience at Disney. It was the project I worked directly with Walt on. And of course I had to respect Marc’s (Davis) ideas, but Walt wanted me to do certain things.

Believability was his big thing at that time. He was getting away from the strong cartoon, and all of the animated features were getting more realistic. That doesn’t mean that they’d be real, but they were getting more believable. Like when Frank Thomas did a character, you believed that character. It was alive, and that’s what Walt liked. That’s why Frank was sort of picked by Walt as to being the criterion for animation.

So when the pirates came along, the thing that Walt wanted me to do was to get them to be interesting characters. They didn’t have to be totally realistic, but when you did them they had to be some type of character that was based somewhat on realism.

My wife and I would go out to dinner or something and you never knew when you were going to find a type of character that would be so unique that he would fit in to really complement the characters that we were doing for the pirate ride. So I would get so glued in to a guy like that, I’d be staring at him, and my wife would quietly kick me under the table and say, “(quietly) Blaine, stop staring at that man!” And I did it with women, too, because we had women in the pirate ride. I had to get them to be believable.

The redhead was not a very big problem but Marc wasn’t there so I had to take over the whole scene. So I was designing the form and I chose to do it kind of a hefty, pretty girl, and Walt came by and said, “Don’t get that TOO sexy, Blaine.” But he did it with sort of a grin so I guess he approved of what we did.

SW: The characters in the ride are a fascinating blend of very human, and yet caricature.

BG: That’s exactly right. It was fun for me to do it like that, but Walt’s idea was, “Keep them believable, Blaine… keep them believable.”

Almost of those are based on real people that were alive at the time I did those. And yet I couldn’t ignore what Marc did (his concept drawings). His wonderful suggestions of what they were doing were very unique, like the guy sitting on a cannon and all that stuff. It was kind of new, different. Marc added humor that a lot of the people wouldn’t have done, and I was very empathetic to that.

I felt that my job was unique and I had Walt coming in and looking at them every week, and although I work fairly fast, usually I could get one pirate done every week. Certainly in a week, probably even less time than that, maybe two in a week. So Walt would come in very regularly anyway.

One of the cases where I did one based on a guy at Disneys, this particular guy wasn’t working where I was working, he happened to be a man working outside. And it wasn’t like I was knocking or trying to belittle a laborer because I was a laborer much of my early life, and you don’t belittle laborers. It was because he had the most wonderful face that I’d ever seen.

George Snowden was a sculptor that was on my team. He was older, he was the same age as Walt was. A wonderful guy. He said, “Blaine, you’d better be careful with that one. It looks exactly like him. “ Well, it was more exaggerated, but when you look at it you think, “Yes, it looks like him,” but in a good, exaggerated character. But I didn’t really change it because each one was costumed differently and he did turn out to be an interesting character.

Marc had the programming, they were set up, but when we were through with all of my characters later on in the whole program, he and I would get together and we would say, “This one belongs with that character and this one belongs with this character,” and we worked that out together because the characters had already been approved by Walt.

It would be like casting for a movie. You want to get the character to fit whatever part he was. I just went along and did all kinds of heads.

In fact, all of those characters for that scene around the well where they’re auctioning off all the ladies, I was working with Walt on that. As I said, Marc was on vacation during that period in the early development so he would come and he would take my characters and he would redraw his things so there would be a consistent participation of Marc drawing, too.

His style was so broad he would make more of a cartoony guy out of it but it was okay for what he did, but we’d still use mine in the final program. It was fun and I always had a great respect for Marc.

When he retired he had my wife and me over for dinner at his place. They were wonderful people and Alice was a marvelous cook and when I retired and left to go to Sodona, Marc and Alice were very kind and they had a luncheon for us, my wife and me, and they were always very nice people. I had a great respect for both of them.

Marc was so versatile. I’m sure he could’ve been a good sculptor.

SW: After Pirates, you still worked at Disney for almost another twenty years, right?

BG: Yes, actually I continued until I was way into my 80s.

Photo provided by Walt Disney Imagineering.

More from Blaine:
How he got his start with Disney in 1939
His move to Imagineering and Disneyland on opening day
Disneyland and Great Moments with Mister Lincoln
Sculpting for "Mary Poppins" and theme parks such as Epcot

See other interviews

NOTE: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in the interviews are solely those of the interviewee and do not necessarily reflect the views of Mouse Clubhouse. Mouse Clubhouse accepts no legal liability or responsibility for any claims made or opinions expressed within.