Haunt & Holt: A Rare Look Inside Garner Holt Productions

It’s not often one gets to stand amidst towering shelves full of artifacts representing over 60 years of theme park craft, but that’s exactly the opportunity that was presented to members of the Themed Entertainment Association on October 19th when the world’s largest manufacturer of animatronic figures, Garner Holt Productions, opened the doors of its Redlands, CA production facility for a Halloween-themed behind-the-scenes event.

Garner Holt Photo: Redlands Daily Facts

From ghost dogs to 45-foot tall dragons, Garner Holt Productions (GHP) has lent its unique talents to bringing countless characters to life around the world. If eyes are the windows to the soul, the thousands if not tens of thousands of eyeballs that GHP has placed in its figures over its 40+ year history means it has also been at least partially responsible for imbuing soul to so many of our most beloved theme park attractions.

Corey Albert of WET and Ian Klein of Vizir Productions with GHP lead figure finished Ben Shwenck in his demon costume. Photo: Themed Entertainment Association

On this rare occasion, GHP welcomed over 170 TEA members into dimly lit halls filled with figures from projects past offering a plethora of fantastic photo opportunities. Live characters played by GHP staff also roamed the floors. The head of the CG department was a screaming banshee. Hannibal Lecter was from Plastics. Ben Schwenk from figure finishing dressed in a seamless, terrifying demon costume he made and posed as an animatronic before lunging at unassuming passersby—an act that invoked much cursing.

After dining on typical Halloween fare of “witches’ fingers” and “raw flesh” on toast, attendees took their seats to hear from the man himself, Garner Holt. While he joked that he was dressed up “as a cranky old guy who chases kids off the lawn” there is a strong sense that Holt is still very much a kid at heart. Indeed, as he’s shared previously, GHP is his playground.

Holt’s opening slide, “Wrecking the Halls: Inside Stories of Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion Holiday,” promised a peek behind the curtains of a now-classic holiday overlay, but gave the audience so much more with stories from a lifetime of magic-making. Holt’s fascination with theme parks began with his mother’s gift of the Haunted Mansion souvenir record, which he played again and again even before he ever had the opportunity to actually visit the attraction. A trip down those haunted halls was all it took to convince him that one day he’d create fantastic experiences of his own.

Newspaper clipping introducing readers to Garner Holt’s backyard haunted house from the Monday, October 28, 1974 edition of The San Bernardino County Sun from San Bernardino, CA.

That day was not far off. In October of 1974, Holt built a haunted house—little more than a shack in the backyard—that on Halloween night attracted 400 people.

The next year, when he was just 15, Holt was hired to build a haunted attraction for Central City Mall in San Bernardino. The experience was housed in an old trailer. Holt noted that a skeleton he created that spun around and lunged at guests “had kids piling on the floor” in fear.

The success of “Garner Holt’s Haunted House of Mystery” paved the way toward several other opportunities to create haunts at other malls across Southern California. In between the paid gigs, Holt made and sold fake severed hands to fund his passion projects. They were an immense success. The public’s appetite for gory Halloween accessories had yet to be sated. “No one had chopped hands back then,” Holt said.

It wasn’t long before his work attracted the attention of WED Enterprises, now Walt Disney Imagineering. Imagineers Wathel Rogers and Wayne Jackson paid the Holt family residence a visit to see the Uncle Sam animatronic Holt had crafted for the 1976 Bicentennial. It was an impressive technological achievement that was made in part from sawed off metal from his father’s fence posts.

Holt’s career and now incorporated company grew exponentially over the next couple of decades with projects for the likes of Knott’s Berry Farm and MGM Resorts. In 1998, GHP started building the titular animatronic figures for Chuck E. Cheese. They’ve since built 500. Walt Disney said, “it was all started with a mouse.” With Holt, a mouse may not have started it all, but it surely helped keep the doors open.

Haunted Mansion Holiday at Disneyland Resort. Photo: Ben Lei on Unsplash

It was also a mouse—Mickey this time—that opened the doors to GHP’s future even wider. In 2001 for the first time ever, Disney entrusted an entity outside of Imagineering to put an animatronic in one of their attractions. Prior to the debut of Haunted Mansion Holiday, Disney had created only two holiday overlays: one for It’s a Small World and another for Country Bear Jamboree. For Haunted Mansion Holiday, Holt and his team pulled out all the stops. He shared he would have gladly done the job at a loss saying “I wanted to do a really good job because I figured that was my future.”

Haunted Mansion Holiday was more than a marker of future success for GHP; it set the stage for a legacy now fully intertwined with that of Disney. Since the first install of Haunted Mansion Holiday, which has versions in Anaheim, Orlando, and Tokyo, GHP has created over 450 figures for Disney from under the sea to infinity and beyond.

Garner Holt Productions moved from San Bernardino, CA to a new production facility in Redlands, CA in 2018.

Thanks to their expertise and reliability of their products, GHP has touched every era of Disney history including updating and replacing figures on Walt Disney’s Enchanted Tiki Room, the world-famous Jungle Cruise, and It’s a Small World. More recent attractions populated by GHP creations include no less than four Buzz Lightyear dark ride shooters, Monsters, Inc.: Mike and Sulley to the Rescue!, The Little Mermaid ~ Ariel's Undersea Adventure, and Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage for which GHP developed more than 80 figures.

Despite the high volume of work GHP does for the corporation, Disney is just one of over a hundred clients of varying sizes although a few of the 120 animatronic figures GHP currently has in production are for other significant players in the global theme park space. During the tours conducted during the Halloween event, these figures of all shapes and sizes were quite literally shrouded in mystery, covered in black sheets. Holt teased, “You’ll see them soon…somewhere.”

Production time for GHP’s animatronic figures depends on the complexity, size, and level of customization, though Holt offered these rough benchmarks. According to director of creative design, Bill Butler, all figures are designed for a 20-year service life.

Still, there was more than plenty to see on the tour of the 120,000-square-foot building which GHP relocated to in 2018, a move that nearly tripled the company’s previous space in neighboring San Bernardino. In addition to the space required for manufacturing, the building also has room to store much of the company’s archives and a sizable collection of many non-animatronic treasures from across theme park history including many theme park ride vehicles such as “Bertha Mae,” one of the Mike Fink Keel Boats that once looped around Disneyland’s Tom Sawyer Island.

TEA members gathered in one of the flex spaces at Garner Holt Productions during the Halloween-themed behind-the-scenes event. Photo: Themed Entertainment Association

Flex spaces can accommodate large-scale events like the one organized with TEA and programs like “Garner Holt Education through Imagination” which offers field trips and activity-based initiatives to encourage kids toward S.T.E.A.M disciplines. During these workshops, as many as 150 kids visit for as long as five hours in one day during general operations.

At the heart of the new production facility, hidden behind royal blue curtain walls is also a full-fledged animatronic show, Reflections of the Face of Lincoln, which features one of GHP’s most advanced creations to date: a hyperrealistic bust of President Abraham Lincoln which uses its “expressive head technology” and proprietary motor control system.

Garner Holt makes a cameo appearance in Westworld. Photo: HBO

Walking the sprawling floors of Garner Holt Productions surrounded by decaying relics from attractions past and intricate, metallic visions of the future is an awe-inspiring and, at times, unsettling glimpse into the possibilities of lifelike invention. Fittingly, Garner Holt and GHP director of creative design Bill Butler appeared as background technicians in Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s exploration of this very subject on the HBO series, Westworld.

Early in the show’s first season, the co-creator of the Westworld park, Dr. Robert Ford played by Anthony Hopkins, tells a young host, “Everything in this world is magic, except to the magician.” In his own playground, Garner Holt has combined ingenuity and imagination to create illusions that help attraction-goers suspend disbelief and embrace the reality of the world before them.

“Everything we build is usually a unique piece of machinery,” Holt says, “Even if you think you’ve done something similar, it’s never the same.” It is this drive to innovate that keeps GHP at the top of the industry and us, the wide-eyed guests, awash in the magic.

TEA SATE 2019 Begins

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It’s been just a few weeks since my fellow co-chairs and I shared a complete look at the sessions and speakers for the Themed Entertainment Association’s SATE Seattle 2019. Our most recent announcements included Keynote Speaker, Starbucks Senior Recruiter Neiha Arora as well as entertainment for the program, singer Alexandria Henderson, said to be the first African American woman to play Legally Blonde’s Elle Woods—on a Seattle stage in fact. This week, the stories we’ve been crafting and nurturing for this conference meet their audience.

Months ago, President of WhiteWater’s Park Attractions Division, Nathan Jones and Director of Business Development at Color Reflections Las Vegas, Shannon Martin, and I had our first conversation about what this SATE could be. By its very nature, SATE (Storytelling + Architecture + Technology = Experience) comprises so many creative ideas and fields that the possibilities are truly endless. But we had to choose a path and that path was one that each of us had tread in our personal and professional lives: recognizing differences in one another and making those differences work in symphony for the greater good. As co-chairs, we’ve walked that path together and now invite others to join us.

The need to embrace diversity—as our theme “Embracing Diversity: Experiences that Bring People Together” urges—could not be more pressing. The World Economic Forum estimates that gender equality in the U.S. will not be achieved for another 208 years.* 26 U.S. states do not expressly protect against discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.** 70 United Nations member states still criminalize same-sex relations between consenting adults.† There are 2 million immigrants and refugees in the U.S. with college degrees from their home countries but remain unemployed or working far below their skill level.‡

These are sobering statistics, to be sure, but to dwell on them without action is unacceptable. It’s clear we need to do better. And we can. SATE brings together creators from all over the world, from all different walks of life, and from trades of every kind. Together, we create entire worlds; it follows that we can create a better one.

To embrace diversity is to embrace possibility. We hope TEA SATE Seattle 2019 clearly demonstrates this. We have new voices. We’ve changed up the program. We have the most women on stage of any previous SATE conference. And we’re ready to learn from all our speakers and everyone in the audience.

We look forward to our paths coming together in Seattle and beyond.

TEA SATE Seattle 2019 takes place Seattle, September 26-27, 2019 at Cornish Playhouse at Seattle Center. Follow the conversation on Twitter at @TEA_Connect and #TEAsate.

Sources:
* World Economic Forum
** Movement Advancement Project
† International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Intersex Association
‡ Upwardly Global

TEA Summit: Thea Award Recipients Represent a Range of Approaches to IP

Whether an experience creator is looking to build a new attraction, reimagine an aging one, or construct an entirely new park, the question of “what story will this experience tell?” is always present. The question of what piece of intellectual property drives that story—established or wholly original—usually follows suit.

That decision, however, is rarely straightforward, even amongst the biggest and most successful brands. Disney’s infamous inability to use much of the Marvel universe at its Florida properties due to a perpetuity clause in the licensing deal with Universal Parks & Resorts comes to mind, although one can imagine Disney feeling pretty happy with its library of IP these days thanks to the acquisition of 21stCentury Fox’s entertainment assets. Now can we get that Buffy theme park?

Considering the use of IP for an experience can feel like feast or famine for experience creators; the biggest studios appear to have the luxury of boundless IP, while smaller or more cost-conscious organizations may have to work harder to find relevant characters and stories, whether through complex licensing deals or their own creativity. At Day Two of this year’s TEA Summit, Thea Case Studies Day, Thea Award recipients not only represented projects from across the budgetary spectrum, they also represented a diverse range of approaches to identifying and implementing IP in their projects now recognized for Outstanding Achievements.

FIELDING FRANCHISES
Universal Spectacle Night Parade, Universal Studios Japan, Osaka
Live Show Spectacular

Early on in the four years it took to develop the Universal Spectacle Night Parade at Universal Studios Japan from concept to completion, the creative team at Universal Parks & Resorts considered over 18 different IPs before ultimately deciding on the four franchises represented in the final parade: Jurassic World, Harry Potter, Despicable Me/Minions, and Transformers. 

© Universal Studios

For a parade intended to celebrate “The Best of Hollywood” it was a review process, Mike Davis, Senior Vice President-International Entertainment and Project Director at USJ, Matthew Preston Jones could not take lightly. That process included creating varying levels of design concepts for all 18 IPs, considering how franchises would physically translate into the park environment, weighing them against other areas of the Comcast NBCUniversal business—its “Symphony” strategy in action—and perhaps most importantly, how each IP would translate for the Japanese audience, something that Davis emphasized several times during his presentation.

The result of his efforts along with those of roughly 1,000 staff and vendors is a fluidly choreographed, total immersion into these fictional realities.

MINING THE COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS
Bazyliszek, Park Legendia, Chorzow, Poland
Attraction, Limited Budget

“Every Polish man knows the story of the Basilisk” said Legendia Director, Paweł Cebula. So, when the theme park contemplated a new attraction to mark its 60-year history, the legendary Basilisk—a snake with a rooster’s head—made it “the best IP you can imagine” on which to base Bazyliszek, Poland’s first interactive dark ride created with the help of Alterface, Jora Vision, and ETF Imaginative Engineering.

Concept art for the Bazyliszek attraction created by Alterface, Jora Vision, and ETF

In an interview with InPark Magazine, Cebula notes that Legendia was already conceived around bringing Polish legends and fairy tales to life. While “some of them have been forgotten or seem old-fashioned,” Cebula says, “they hold great symbolic value and storytelling potential.” Specifically, Bazyliszek is “based on such an authentic Polish folklore, but shared in a way that speaks to modern audiences.” 

Indeed, as the Thea Awards Committee noted in its remarks, “Delivering an attraction that is well integrated in its cultural context, but that manages to deliver a compelling modern and fun experience is not only remarkable, it is also a great alternative to major IP offerings. Bazyliszek is an outstanding model of an attraction that speaks to its regional audience.” The attraction’s narrative furthers that connection to the parks guests by integrating original characters found elsewhere in the park, making it a contender for the “meta attraction” designation we previously wrote about on our blog here.

DRAWING FROM MYTH
Fantawild Oriental Heritage, Xiamen, China
Theme Park

For its 22nd theme park, Oriental Heritage in Xiamen, China, Fantawild Holdings melded traditional Chinese culture and modern technology through 12 attractions across nine themed areas. “China has a long history,” Fantawild Holdings Executive President, Daisy Shang told Park World, “There are a lot of stories to tell.” Indeed the sheer volume of stories from over 3,000 years of history meant Shang and her team conducted a great deal of research in order to come up with the right narrative foundations for the park’s media-heavy attractions.

“Some cultural stories are very famous but some elements are not suitable for modern audiences,” Shang told the TEA Summit audience. Others, like the legend of the Butterfly Lovers, featuring the characters Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai known as the Chinese Romeo and Juliet, were such a part of the Chinese mythic tapestry that including them in the park was an easy choice.

“The Butterfly Lovers” Zhu Yingtai and Liang Shanbo in the Panoramic Augmented Reality Theatre at Oriental Heritage © Fantawild Holdings, Inc.

Shang also pointed out the fundamental differences between Fantawild’s business model and other brands: “Many theme parks use IP to have global appeal, but licensing fees for well-known IP are high and may not fit very well with local culture.” By creating original content based on folklore, folktales, and mythology, Fantawild both combats the high cost of IP and achieves its goal of building “localized parks based on localized culture.” 

LEADING WITH HISTORY
Be Washington: It’s Your Turn to Lead, Mount Vernon, VA
Museum Experience, Limited Budget

© 2019 Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, Cortina Productions

“What if we wake up one morning and find the busses no longer there?” That was the existential question posed by Rob Shenk, Senior Vice President for Visitor Engagement at George Washington’s Mount Vernon, that became the genesis of the Be Washington: It’s Your Turn to Lead interactive theater experience created in part by Cortina Productions.

In the on-site experience—also available on the web for in-home or in-classroom participants—guests face some of the same crises that Washington confronted during his presidency with the aid of on-screen advisors and gamified interactivity. To relay the same urgency Washington must have experienced to guests, participatory moments are timed and everything is rooted in history.

“We didn’t need to invent any heroic stories,” Shenk said, “we just needed new ways to tell them.” In each of the four possible scenarios, the heroism of Washington and others is realized in rich, cinematic scenes played out on a 6K screen while 36 guests stay engaged with 18 touchscreen kiosks. Through its self-imposed directive to stick to the facts, use primary sources, and eschew any alternate universe narratives, Be Washington demonstrates that the key to learning history is to live it. 

BLENDING CULTURE AND CREATION
Universal’s Volcano Bay, Universal Orlando Resort, Orlando, FL
Water Theme Park

In a video introducing the story behind Universal’s Volcano Bay Water Theme Park, Dale Mason, Vice President & Executive Art Director at Universal Parks & Resorts, tells the tale of the fictional Waturi people who traveled the world’s oceans in search of a new home. During their voyage across the South Pacific, they “made friends and collected the culture” from real-world places such as Tahiti, Bali, and the Chilean island of Rapa Nui (aka Easter Island).

One of the ten creative principles that drove the Universal Creative team in the development of Volcano Bay was the aim to achieve “plausible fantasy,” something this blending of authentic cultures and fictional creation certainly suggests. Of course, using art, architecture, language, and other iconography from real cultures can make for a tricky tightrope to walk. 

During the TEA Summit, Mason briefly addressed this citing the team’s extensive travel and the use of cultural experts to help mitigate any issues of insensitivity, but goes further in an interview on Theme Park Insider’s podcast, Building The World’s Best Theme Parks from November of 2018. In it, Mason references a trip to Bali and an exhibit at New York’s Museum of Natural History about the Pacific Rim and the cultural convergences that naturally take place across the region. “You want to make sure you honor the cultures, but we also don’t want to go too deep,” Mason says. In fact, one of the reasons he cites for pulling cultural elements together is to achieve “a much broader view of it all.” 

Overall, Mason says, “there’s an incredible amount of work that goes into making sure we’re making the right decisions.” While Volcano Bay may not feature characters and locations guests already know and love, having IP that celebrates exploration, friendship, and cultural diversity ensures guests from all over the world feel a sense of belonging throughout their stay and beyond.

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IP or its implementation can make or break an attraction (or in some cases an entire park), which is why the research phase was paramount to each one of these projects. What worked yesterday may not work today, and given the investments these experiences represent, the choice of IP has to resonate with the tomorrow’s audience just as much as it does with today’s—2, 5, or even 10-20 years down the line.

The experience creators that took the stage at the TEA Summit Thea Case Studies Day may have come from an incredibly diverse backgrounds, but together, their stories demonstrate that despite quite different approaches to IP, history, myth, culture, and the best of Hollywood are timeless keys to success.

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VIZIR PRODUCTIONS was founded on a love for research and delivering creative that maximizes the potential of story worlds represented by IPs and brands. Contact us to discuss how Vizir can help guide your vision from concept to completion.