John Hench

Color is a very critical thing. I've found that architects don't like colors. Engineers too. And so somebody has to stand in. Because this is the finish of it. It is the emotional part of a structure.

Big cities are chaotic. And chaos for humans - who have experience from their ancestors - is the last step before conflict. So, in the park, every kind of visual contradiction has been eliminated.

There were no jewelry hidden. Walt wanted this atmosphere: They were supposed to live here, they've been outside somewhere, but they could come back at any minute and catch us.

Then, you were supposed to discover the city, where they were. But because somebody like skeletons. And that they discovered that they were at a cheap price, we used too many skeletons all over the place, and the public got the wrong message.

Walt put everything he knew about communication with images into the park, so it was very familiar.

The show is being changed right now, by the way. Jeff Burke is doing it for the Magic Kingdom. And I think it will be better, with new birds, master of ceremonies, etc.

Mickey is one of the prime examples: Mickey has never been suspected of being an American export. It was deja vu. They gave him a local name and he's been accepted everywhere he goes.

I have wanted to be a fine artist painter, and I reached the point in art schools were I'd like to understand more about images and how images communicate information to people. And I was not getting very far in that from my professors.

Of course, it gave the studio an enormous power, because I don't know any other place who had that skill with images to communicate with. And the need of these kinds of images are even greater now than they ever were because we are losing our life symbols.

Even in China. Children there, next to the Great Wall, who had never seen Mickey Mouse responded. So the studio did have that skill to communicate with images.

In live action movies, you just hope that everything works. Because the actor may had a bad morning and doesn't play good, or accidents happen continuously. Many things contradict what you are trying to say. But in cartoons, nothing contradict what you want to say.

Well, it was never supposed to be like that. Walt died before we had finished. The original idea of Walt's was that you came down there, into the caves, and there were no pirates. But they had been there just seconds before! There was a hot meal on the table, steaming.