To celebrate the 30th anniversary of Fantasmic! and the recent reopening of the show in Hollywood Studios last month, let’s give a spotlight to three people who were pivotal in its creation: director Barnette Ricci, art director Tom Butsch, and composer and music producer Bruce Healey.
Fantasmic! was created as a stopgap attraction between the releases of Splash Mountain in 1989 and Toontown in 1993. Michael Eisner liked the idea of having a show in the Rivers of America to pack the restaurants along the riverfront, and possible ideas for what could kind of nighttime show could occupy the river were thrown about for years before it developed into a celebration of Disney’s animated feature films. But figuring out how to be able to project scenes from the films turned out to be a big problem, for raising and lowering traditional projection screens would not only be a clunky process on the river but also a slow one that would break the momentum of a show. Luckily, Barnette Ricci, a long-time show director for the Disney Parks who would be named a Disney Legend in 2019, found the solution on a research trip to Paris: she discovered a piece of tech developed and patented by a French company named Aquatique Show. The “water screens,” as they were called, used high-pressure nozzles to create fans of mist onto which the film clips could be projected through rear projection.
Ricci: By layering the dancing water fountains, special lighting, lasers, pyrotechnics and black light, along with live performers on watercraft and this new way to project animation on water, I was convinced all of these elements combined would create a rather exciting show! …It took months of searching through Disney film footage to find the right clips for the storyline and to create the film elements so they would look great on the water.
The Rivers of America was drained and reconstructed to accommodate the infrastructure that would be needed for Fantasmic!. The team was on a time crunch to be able to get the show done to serve as a proper stopgap between Splash Mountain and Toontown. Ricci wrote the script (as well as the lyrics to the song “Imagination”) and continued to re-edit it as Bruce Healey re-scored the iconic music from these films, but according to Tom Butsch, the story and spirit of Fantasmic! hardly strayed from Barnette Ricci’s initial vision.
Tom Bustch originally worked as a set designer in theater and then moved onto sitcoms before finding work set decorating on shows and seasonal attractions at the Disney Parks, where he would work for over 20 years. He storyboarded the entirety of Fantasmic! and materialized Ricci’s vision and brought it to life through the many set pieces used in the show. With a limited budget, his team made Fantasmic! economical as they could without ever sacrificing quality or scale. When they found that they were unable to afford the technology required to animate their Maleficent dragon, Butsch devised it so that a mechanical head would be raised on a genie lift (cherry picker) rigged with chains for the wings which would be flapped by performers (this dragon would eventually be replaced with a fully mechanical dragon in 2009).
Bruce Healey is famous for having reportedly produced every musical score in every parade and show at Disneyland between 1984 and 2017, but he’s done work across Disney Parks around the world and has been a composer, arranger, orchestrator, and conductor on everything from nighttime shows to television specials during his tenure. But out of the hundreds and hundreds of projects he’s worked on, Fantasmic!, on which he not only arranged and rescored the classic music from Disney films but also composed the main iconic theme to the show, is the work he says he is most proud of.
Healey: Fantasmic! still tops the list. I’m grateful for the chance to do some of my best work on that show.
It is more important to me that people around know and enjoy the music I’ve created and produced. If I’m not well known, but my music is well known because it’s part of the Disney legacy in some way, then that is great with me.
Fantasmic! was only supposed to run for a few years, but its enduring popularity has allowed it to become a classic staple of Disneyland and, with its recent renovation and reopening, will likely play on for many more years to come.
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