Archive for February, 2009

Along with the book, I’m in the middle of writing an article for Celebrations Magazine (which I did a brief review of here). Since I was talking to various cast members anyway, I decided to ask a few that worked on Main Street if they had any additional information about the famous windows that adorn the second story of every building.

For those of you who don’t know, these windows serve as the “credits” to the park; witty tributes to the men and women who helped Walt make his dream a reality.

In any event, one of the cast members had a very interesting story about one of the windows, as recounted below:

When I was first cast as a Show Quality Monitor, the group was in the process of building an index to all the windows on the Magic Kingdom’s Main Street. It eventually became a file of not only the images and wording, but brief biographies of each person that were honored.

We had a little problem with a pair of adjacent windows that honored six people. We found the information on five of them without much difficulty, but on the sixth, all of our usual sources were mute.

We finally broke down and wrote to the Corporate personnel archives to ask what that person did for the Company. They replied that he had worked for Disney…but only for about four months!

The matter became a bit more clear when we discovered that he had spent those few months working in the sign shop.

That’s right, his job had included painting and touching up the windows on Main Street!

Apparently, he thought that five names didn’t balance well when they were split three and two, so had inserted his own name to make the pair of windows come out even.

We were out there with razor blades, scraping him off, the very next morning.

So there you have it, folks! It seems like this former painter wanted to leave his own mark on the most magical place on Earth! His name apparently stayed on the window for close to 8 years. Incredible!

What window was his name on, you may ask? Well, you’ll just have to read the article in a few months to find out!

As some of you may know, Walt’s original vision for Epcot was to be a living city of the future. He wanted people to be able to work and play in the same place, and have everything they ever needed in their own self contained little town.

Unfortunately, that’s not how Epcot is today.

Though Walt’s original vision does live on in some way in the form of Celebration, I’m sure we all would have loved to have seen Walt’s dream come true.

However, we can still see what Walt originally had in mind with these original concept drawings for Epcot. Click on them for full sized versions.

Epcot – The City Of The Future At Night:

Another view of Epcot at night:

The shopping area. Notice the early rendition of the Monorail going through town as well:

The transportation center. Not only can we spot the Monorail as we know and love it today, but also get a view of the WED People Movers!:

Another, earlier, view of the transportation center:

And finally, the original concept drawing of Epcot, drawn by the man himself:

I know, I know, I’ve been neglected this website. And I apologize for that!

However, I have some cool stuff coming over the next couple of weeks.

First off, I’m now knee deep in writing a book about Walt Disney World. “Who the heck needs another book about Disney?” you may be asking yourself. Trust me, I asked myself the same thing.

However, looking into it, I realized that a lot of people out there want to see what Disney is like from the other side of the fence. Mainly, from the people who work there.

So, I’ve been speaking with a lot of former and current cast members the past few days (and more to come in the coming weeks), and I will be posting some of the interviews here for you to check out. It’s incredibly interesting to see how these people feel about a company that we all love so much…from the good and the bad.

So, stay tuned for some killer interviews!