from 2008

BOB GURR
Disney's human people mover, talks about his work at Disney other than his specialty, which was working on Disney's best known vehicles

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 Bob on Mouse Clubhouse and to be able to share our conversations with you. 

Bob Gurr: There were people who were doing the original engineering of the Abraham Lincoln body (for the 1964-'65 New York World's Fair where Walt had four attractions), but it just was not working, it was done in great secrecy here, even I didn't know about it. But one day in '63, pretty late in the job because I had already been working on the World's Fair for two years, Walt told Roger (Broggie) to bring me over to the studio and meet him in this certain room behind the machine shop. It was a little room and Lincoln was in there and I could see in a wink that this thing was never going to work, but because the guys that were doing it were what you call conventional shop designers doing stuff as they had done in years before, they never thought of Lincoln as a totally different kind of thing. The meeting didn't last all that long but Walt was in a really bad mood, they had spent a lot of time and a lot of money and this thing didn't work.

They had a problem with it because it had red hydraulic fluid in it and it was actually guys behind the wall helping the machine get out of the chair to make it work. One of the hydraulic hoses burst while Walt was showing it to a lady friend of his and the hydraulic fluid came out on the shirt and she was furious at how dare you reenact the killing of Abraham Lincoln. There’s been various versions of that story but that’s exactly what happened in that secret room.

I remember Walt was in a bad mood and he looked at me and he said, "Bobby, I want half as much weight and twice as much motion," and he said, "I don't want any wiggle," and he demonstrated about wiggle because Lincoln is tall. He said, "People know when you've been drinking and they'll see it and some of my men come back and I know they've been drinking."

Scott Wolf: Did that really happen? If it wiggled it looked like Lincoln was drinking?

BG: Yeah, so I've got to come up six and a half feet from the floor all the way to the top and don't have more than about a sixteenth of an inch of wiggle in it. They said, "We've got to do the bearings entirely different," and I said, "Airplane fuselage." I happened to have an airplane fuselage in my garage because I was in a glider club and I was helping to restore it. Little tiny tubes, high strength alloy, little tiny bearings with special tricks to tighten the bearings, all kinds of little tricks. So I immediately saw Abraham Lincoln as an airplane which is just a different mindset, but that meant that would be really easy to do. Easy for me because I can see in 3D, before there were computers, so to visualize the mechanical parts that would go inside a Lincoln body with all of those motions, and we had big cylinders in those days because many of them were pneumatic rather than hydraulic so much of the space was consumed by what we called servo valves which didn't leave much room for all the structure and all the motion parts and everything.

Blaine Gibson sculpted the Lincoln and I ordered up a full body sculpt cast in foam and then I treat it like a car body. I put all these lines on it, like every ten inch lines and laid it out in X Y Z axes just like a car body, then I put the little red marks on it and then I took the Lincoln out and I ran out in the shop and ran him through the band saw and sawed him all up in parts. That way you had chunks of the body to visualize the shapes inside, that every ten inch line, which broken down into every one inch line I had a shape that told me where the parts can't be outside the body. It’s kind of a hybrid way to work, but you do anything you can and go as fast as you can go and from the day I started until the day my last drawings were done was only ninety days, and I had to take time out from three other jobs to do Abraham Lincoln.

I didn't really catch up with the production of Lincoln more than just seeing it in the machine shop because I had my draftsmen making individual parts of my layouts. No assembly drawing, no nothing, just go go go go. So every day I drove over with more drawings, just give them to the shop. They just built the stuff figuring it'll all go together eventually. There's no way to show them what it is until we'll stick it together and you'll see it, then you guys can put the body on, then you can put wiring on and put all the tubing in. Then the costume people can start putting the costume on it. One guy was doing the head, another guy was doing the hands, so I didn't have to do the head or the hands. I had to do the elevator that was down below the floor that ran the whole thing, plus big hydraulic actuators that ran the knees that would bring him out of the chair.

But the look on Walt's face as he showed that thing off was I think better than I saw him showing off the monorail to dignitaries from cities all around the country.

It wasn't until about two weeks after the fair opened, that's about the time we finally got the electrical bugaboos out of it. It was critical for time, but he had his heart set on it, but every time anything came up about Lincoln I could see Walt was so satisfied. He had something nobody had.

The funny thing was that up until the day I was called over to the studio from WED to look at this secret project I only had done things with wheels. I knew nothing about humans and I had to be a quick learner.

SW: Were you at the World's Fair?

BG: Oh yeah. You have to install stuff, you do test and adjust, and my primary job was with the Ford “Magic Skyway,” because that was my primary job starting in July of 1961.

SW: Did you work on the “Carousel of Progress”?

BG: Yeah, I did all the preliminary engineering concepts for animated figures because the Ford Motor company ones (for the “Magic Skyway” attraction) were further ahead but they were real crude, and we wanted to go another step up. So I wound up doing the preliminary ideas, some of which didn't work at all, but they got up just enough that we started what we call the AA figure system and we were designing a lot of those parts over at WED (now called Walt Disney Imagineering) in Glendale and building them at the shop here (at the studio). In the meantime the shop picked up on how all this might standardize the stuff and away they went. While they were doing all that at that level, that's when Walt came along and up one more level to Lincoln, because Lincoln was way sophisticated compared to the GE (“Carousel of Progress”) figures.

SW: So “Carousel of Progress” preceded Lincoln quite a bit?

BG: Oh yeah, Lincoln and “small world” came at the last second.

SW: Did you do any other AA figures for Disneyland?

BG: I wound up doing so many things in so many directions. I did the battling elk machine which preceded Lincoln by many, many years for (the “Mine Train” through) Nature's Wonderland. It was real crude but you could believe it. I did one animated figure that had a bounding deer and had nothing but trouble with it but it was believable. I did a jumping sheep which we never did run. We ran it one time only and we had an accident with the Mule Train. One of the mules spooked the first time the sheep jumped.

SW: I guess even with testing you wouldn't know how a live mule would react.

BG: I had no idea that it was going to be so real that the mule believed it. The mule reared up and he fell over and since they were all tied together all the passengers on all the mules went down into the river. A big wreck. Walt was like, "Shut it off!" We waited a week and that darned mule would not go down that trail one more time, he'd get up to that place and he would stop.

SW: Even after you took it away?

BG: Even after a week, oh yes. He was a worthless mule. I thought, "(chuckling) That was a pretty good figure." I worked on elephants and I worked on a charging rhinoceros machine, two rhinoceros, it was kind of unreliable but it was a you never knew what it was going to do kind of a machine, so yeah, I'd be working on animations.

SW: What was the last thing you did for Disney?

BG: As a consultant in the early 2000s, the “Little Mermaid” theatre in Tokyo DisneySea was going to break new ground, they were going to have the Ursula figure out over the audience. One of our unwritten laws is that we do not ever intrude over an audience with machinery, what we called show action equipment. It's a no-no, you don't do it.

SW: For safety reasons?

BG: Yeah. Several designers at WDI did not want to do it, they were spooked by it and we also had a lot of Japanese engineers working on it. One of the Japanese chief engineers had assigned a Japanese lady engineer to come up with a machine and she was scared to do anything that was custom. She only wanted to adapt a rented something like a crane. They'd gone up to Las Vegas and they looked at a crane and the more they saw, there were all kinds of problems doing it, but she didn't want to make a custom machine.

So then I got called in as a consultant through another company called Entertainment Engineering who said, "Let's have Gurr look at it." I saw what they wanted to do and I said, "You're going to have so much trouble with this crazy crane because cranes go up, they don't go down. What are you going to do down there?" and she didn't know what to do.

I said, "You know, it's always cheaper and faster to make a dedicated machine when you've got stuff like that." "Oh no, no, no, we don't want to do that." I could see their point because they're engineers, they're very cautious, they're very conservative. Then entertainment Imagineering was given a short contract saying, "Okay, you guys are so smart, you come up with it," and then they bailed it to me as a subcontractor for them, so I laid it out, the concept of how to do it which was very straightforward, a very simple machine but very big. You basically had this great big monstrous, like a big oil derrick that had two more pieces that would come out and change its angle, then it had a big piece on the end that would animate the head and the Ursula head is like three times bigger than the room we're in here.

Michael Curry, the puppet guy up in Oregon had the contract for the Ursula head. Then with Kent Bingham I laid it all out, we made our drawings, they did the calculations, came down here and made a big presentation to all these Japanese engineers including his chief engineer and these guys looked at everything and it was so obvious around the room that that it is so simple. I didn't know what to expect in the meeting and this engineer looked at me and goes, "(sincerely) Bob-san… thank you!" There was no more discussion. End of the meeting, design accepted.

They took it to Tujunga engineering and they dropped the ball on it, they sent it to WED engineering east in Florida. They had three guys working on it and they goofed up a whole bunch of the parts. Disney shops things around for a low price. The winning bidder was out here in San Bernardino who by that time was a very trusted company that does a lot of Disney's work, in fact they do all of Disney's animated figures now. I helped start getting Disney work for them.

The drawing package was beautiful, but the guy got the job and he said, "I think something's wrong," and I said, "I'll come take a look," so I went out there and I took about a half hour and I looked at all these drawings, just one error after another but curable. I said, "Garner, this is a real expensive job, very heavy, very risky, hop ahead to the job being done and installed in Tokyo and the Disney company really really happy because it really works, because it's going to be stupendous when they see this thing." I said, "Go through this drawing package and identify all the things that won't fit." Like they had two inch parts going in a one inch hole that you cannot do. Dumb, dumb, dumb stuff which means you've got to do revisions. I said, "Remember, be very gentle and very nice and very friendly and show them every week a new package of revisions in their drawing package that you have discovered so you will then build the machine and it will work flawlessly, but you will have an awful lot of revisions and Disney's going to have to eat them all and you're going to have to upgrade that contract every week." He said, "Okay..."

Anyway, it got done, Disney, when they saw it finished, and it cost them more than a hundred thousand dollars of extra work at full profit margin for them, but the end result when Disney finally went to San Bernardino and they bought that machine, they were happy with it, they got it shipped, installed, hooked it up, ran it, put Michael Curry's Ursula head on it and I thought, "There's my last piece of work!" Back to the Walt days of something that had never been done where you never do stuff like that, but it runs and it's over there.

More from Bob:
True stories of the Disney Monorails, Haunted Mansion & People Mover vehicles & more

See other interviews