#joe rohde

[ceilingriver]

[harley-the-pancake]

I need to talk with Goodtimeswithscar about ed Disney imagineer Joe Rohde yesterday. Please I need this.

[damailbox]

Disney Adventures, April 2006

[disneyparktournament]

Happy 25th anniversary Animal Kingdom!

[magicalthoughtsblog]

“Sivako!”

[idreamofthemeparks]

This kind of story should take place on a dark and stormy night, but in reality it's a warm Los Angeles summer afternoon when Joe Rohde walks through the office doors. Of course, the headquarters of the Parks division are beautifully maintained. The air conditioning envelops him immediately, and the first thing he sees is a secretary at her desk, smiling brightly.

He doesn't need to say a word. "Glad you made it, Mr. Rohde. I'll let them know you're here." The impeccably dressed brunette picks up the desk phone, dials just a couple of numbers and says, "He's here, Mr. Chapek. I'll bring him in for you." She stands up, holds an arm out and tells him, "Right this way."

"Thank you--" he reads her Disney nametag-- "Emily." In respectful silence she leads him to the mahogany doors of the conference room, and stands back as she lets him through. By the time the door swings shut behind him, she's already gone.

The long, polished table is seated almost entirely with the usual people. None of the suited men and women give him more than a polite nod, but a "Joe! Lovely to see you again!" echoes from the far end. Bob himself, at the head table like usual.

"Nice to see you too, Mr. Chapek," he manages.

"Come on, take a seat! We're all friends here." Joe pulls out the only empty chair and sits up straight. Bob meets his eye from across the room. "How was your flight, Joe? Was the car we sent all right?"

He swallows, hopefully imperceptibly. "Everything went fine. Did you have something you'd like to discuss?"

"Getting right to business. Well, yes, I did call you for a reason." Bob leans back in his chair. "The board and I have been having some chats today. We were thinking of how we could improve some things at that Animal Kingdom of yours. It's been a while since we've touched that one up, hasn't it?"

"Pandora is less than a decade old," Joe says as respectfully as he can manage.

"Right, well, we feel that some parts of the park may need a facelift. Something that could make it appealing to a wider audience. Specifically, we've been thinking about our old friend Expedition Everest." He pauses, as if expecting a response, but Joe steels his face, betraying nothing. "You've seen Toy Story, right Joe? A lot of people have. The movies do pretty well. So does our land at Hollywood Studios. We had an idea for a little cosmetic makeover."

Nobody else at the table joins in about this idea, but a few nod in support. "We were thinking we'd do something about that old broken yeti, maybe replace it with a big, scary dinosaur toy or something. The rest could be easy. Maybe Andy went hiking up that mountain and dropped a few of his toys on the way. We could do it on a pretty tight budget. What do you think?" He caps it off with a tight little fake-pleasant smile.

Joe sucks in a breath. "Respectfully, I don't agree. I would prefer to keep the ride the way it is. Sir."

Bob leans forward, his elbows on the table, his hands folded over his mouth. "I see. I didn't expect much else. We could nix the changes, or at least delay them." The man seated next to him pointedly stares downward; he's been in these meetings before. "But you know what that means, don't you, Joe?"

There's no point in dignifying this little game of his with a response, but Joe nods just once. Just for a second, a cold breeze hits him in the face, and he squints at the sensation. He just catches the barely-hidden grin crossing Bob's face before the tingling sensation begins in the earring hole of his left earlobe, and he closes his eyes.

It only takes a second before the cold tingles cease, and there's a small metallic clink as one new earring drops onto the many others. He keeps his hands folded in his lap, resists the urge to touch it. "I'm glad we could agree," he says after a moment, his voice deliberately steady. "Was there anything else for today?"

Bob slaps his hands down on the table. "Nope! That's all I needed for today. Thanks for flying out, Joe, appreciate it. Take care of yourself, all right?"

Joe smiles and wishes him goodbye, walking himself out of the conference room. A cheerful "See you at the next Imagineer meeting!" is the last thing he hears before the door thuds shut behind him. There's no sign of the secretary, and it's just as well, because he practically runs out of the building and back into the heat.

He doesn't even check to see if anyone is around before he reaches up to feel his stretched earlobe and the pile of earrings that adorn it. After a second or two of feeling around, his fingers locate the new one. He sighs a little with relief. It's not very big or heavy this time. He can definitely bear this one.

As he begins to walk the perfectly-maintained sidewalk back to the complex's entrance, his earlobe bounces a little with every step. The weight of it reminds him of his body's limits, whatever they may be, and about what will happen when-- if-- his ear gives out and its trinkets clatter to the ground. But just like always, he can learn to live with it. He always has, right? He can keep going. Now it's time to go home.

[backgrounddisneycharacters]

If you haven’t heard, legendary Imagineer Joe Rohde has announced his retirement on January 4th 2021. I have a character scheduled for that day, but I will bump it for one Joe Rohde has created.

Congratulations, Joe Rohde, for your forty year career and creating rides, parks, resorts and more that have inspired countless millions of people and created memories for so many more. Thank you for playing Harrison Hightower III and Dreamfinder and bringing them to life.

I could talk all evening about what his work means to me, but his works should speak for themselves. Without Joe Rohde, we would not have the Disney Worldwide Conservation Fund. We wouldn’t have the Adventurer’s Club or the Society of Explorers and Adventurers. We wouldn’t have Animal Kingdom. Guardians of the Galaxy; Mission Breakout. The Aulani Resort. He started at Walt Disney Imagineering when Epcot was being constructed as a model builder. Now he’s choosing to leave at the top of his game.

I wish Joe Rhode all the best in his retirement and his future travels.

Bahati nzuri!

[avatarmovies]

joerohde

Fun. In the business of entertainment design you will come across people who will say, “Why can’t it just be fun?” This question is often actually an accusatory form of micro-aggression, and really means…”Why are you wasting so much time on intellectual BS and overbred aesthetic sensibility?” But there is a logical answer. Fun is cheap. I can have fun in an inflatable pool in my backyard. I can have fun playing basketball by the garage. I can have fun watching videos of snarky cats. This fun costs very little. An inflatable pool costs 50 bucks or less and can be used many times. A trip to a major entertainment venue like a Broadway play or Theme Park can cost many hundreds of dollars per visit, all in. So…are these places just plain fun? Are they hundreds or thousands of times more fun than shooting silly string at each other on the porch? Probably not. Therefore, fun cannot possibly be the motivating factor in the compulsive, repetitive, over-scale patronage of the theme park industry. The motive is simply not competitive enough based on other options. People must be paying this kind of money and making this kind of effort for a reward that is of higher value, more rare, and of greater impact than fun. That reward is many things, among which is the sensation of transport, of being moved magically into another place or another time. It is the intensity of experience which results in permanent memories. It is the rare sensation of cohesiveness, harmony, and thematic organization which allows the human brain to relax and be absorbed. I could go on. But all of these properties reside in the obsessive execution of coordinated detail, resulting in places with a strange otherworldly attraction. And that is not cheap. In fact, theme parks are repositories of human time, effort, and, yes, money…which guests sense through the level of detail, organization, and intensity. Theme parks are a form of communication between designers and audiences… They are relationships. People like worthy, meaningful, invested relationships… Not cheap ones.