Yale Gracie played a great role in creating Pirates. He was another animator turned imagineer, though given his skills with special effects, they actually called him an illusioneer. During his time he did an outstanding job for the special effects all without the use of video images. His lighting work on Pirates is subtly brilliant adding yet another layer of depth and dimension that's easily taken for granted. Any other artist would have made the lighting more stark or even brighter in which guests would see more, changing the tone entirely.

Yale Gracie is also responsible for the storm effects of the skeleton helmsmen cloud projections, the moonlit lighting of the Blue Bayou with its original fireflies and perhaps most importantly, the flames of the burning city. the effects of these flames were surreal for their time, so intense that the Fire Marshall made Disney install emergency shut off switches to the effects. Just in case guests began to panic believing the flames were actually real. And in the event there ever was a real fire; firemen needed to know which fire was real! There was even a divide between the imagineering team whether the flames were too intense.

Even the caves which seem so simple, were well thought out. Marc Davis purposely designed the bayou with an atmospheric sense of mystery. The stillness working almost as a pallet cleanser from the busyness of Disneyland. Lulled by the calm and quiet, you gradually sense a foreboding as you approach the dark tunnel then drop!

People believe the skull and several skeletons are real human bones that Walt Disney wanted for the attraction. Disney has never confirmed or denied any of the rumors.

One of the bigger technical problems with the attraction was to minimize the splash at the bottom of the water drops. Every modification made to the boat resulted in adjustments, either to the boat guide system, the boat or elsewhere making for a long and slow tinkering process. Eventually it resulted in a dependably dry attraction.

The scale, colors and wide scope as you wind the turn into the cacophonous bombarding fort scene, was all intended to jar the senses of guests. You're suddenly confronted by an entire pirate ship and sizable fort with audio animatronics yelling and firing at one another. According to Marc Davis this really did stun and excite people but is generally become taken for granted.

Carlos, the Mayor or Magistrate of Puerto Dorado on the island of Isla Tesoro - a.k.a. the well scene was one of the extremely rare instances where an imagineer's original design remained the exact same until completion. The Magistrate's shirt has a wash of mineral oil to make it look as though it's perpetually wet. Revealing just how great Marc Davis' concepts were, the dialogue, the character design, the costuming, and set design.

The auctioneer was added late to the attraction and yet it was the headlining scene. For the imagineering team, the auctioneer was the most sophisticated audio animatronic. Up to that point when Pirates of the Caribbean was released, he had more moves, a stronger lip sync and tons of small quirky variations. A leap from the Abraham Lincoln animatronic that was released only several years earlier.

Near the auctioneer is the redhead. So many people hotly debated the change of the redhead back in June of 2018. According to Claude Coats he said even Walt Disney himself openly voiced concerns about whether the auctioning of brides fit into the Disney park brand. And though they obviously went through with making the scene, Walt nonetheless held doubts.

It wasn't unfounded given some of Marc Davis' concept work. Marc was amused that someone thought that chickens would somehow lighten up a scene involving the selling off of women.

One of the things Walt personally asked for early on regarding Pirates, was a scene where the Pirates are sacking a city. Originally pirates chased all of the women in circles, at the time I suppose it was humorous, however Marc did actually conceptualize one woman chasing after a pirate.

Blaine Gibson used multiples of his face sculpts. It's also rumored that he used many real faces as inspiration. Big John's face was modeled after one of the janitors.

Look at the resemblance!

The man seated in the chair outside of the shack, across from the Blue Bayou Restaurant has the same face as the pirate standing in the jail cell trying to get the keys from the dog.

Big John is supposedly the same face as the ghost blowing out the candles in the ballroom scene and the same face used in the Haunted Mansion graveyard scene for both the bagpipe and flute players.

The man circling in the Haunted Mansion ballroom has the same face as the original
Auctioneer.

What's not as well known is that Walt originally intended Pirates to be part of the dining experience which apparently didn't turn out so well during a dress rehearsal.  The Blue Bayou Restaurant was up and ready to go months before Pirates yet Walt refused to open its doors. He felt both the attraction and restaurant were part of the same experience.

Unfortunately Walt never got to see Pirates of the Caribbean completed. He died just 3 months beforehand, while the kinks with the auctioneer scene were being ironed out. Given how much work he personally poured into its creation, it can easily be said that it was the last ride with his stamp of approval.

Pirates of the Caribbean is still the most popular attraction Disney has ever produced. It's the pinnacle of Disney magic and continues to unflinchingly withstand the test of time. Marty Sklar was quoted as saying that Pirates of the Caribbean broke the mold, it created a genre.

Marc Davis, Mary Blair and Walt decided to put Alice Davis, (Marc's wife) in charge of the costuming for the Pirates. She manufactured all of the original costumes for Pirates by strictly following Marc Davis' designs. Walt had a very favorable view of her after her work on It's a Small World; especially after Alice had garnered a very high regard by Mary Blair.

Alice spoke about this time period as being difficult. Relatively new to Disney and working in the center of the model shop, surrounded by a small crew of scrutinizing eyes, she persevered and put forth her best effort. She was told not to focus on the  lining of the coats, but she would argue that they would last longer. The audio animatronics were intended to run for hours a day, every day, for years which of course was going to wear out the fabric. She designed and created 47 costumes for Pirates of the Caribbean and told higher ups that she believed each animatronic needed a backup costume, but was told no because they were on a large, yet fairly tight budget.

Well you can cut two costumes at the same time you're cutting one. Alice had worked on her own line of fashion and made costumes for television for over a decade. At this point she knew that one costume wasn't going to work.

Dick Irvine, (the one who handedly denied her the budget for duplicates of all the costumes) asked Alice how much material she would need to complete the project.  Alice doubled the amount and made two of every costume anyway. She even got a carpenter to make her a secret cabinet where she stored them.

Several months after Pirates opened, there was a fire (oddly enough in the fire scene). Dick Irvine ran to Alice in an emotional state and asked how long it would take to remake the costumes. They couldn't reopen the ride unless the Pirates were clothed.  To his dismay, Alice answered that the hats alone would take weeks. Then she told him that she had originally made two of every costume in spite of his initial direct refusal. She told him she could get the costumes to him in 30 minutes and the attraction was running again within 24 hours.

Currently, Disneyland retains three sets of costumes for every figure.

Alice Davis humbly refused to take credit for the design of the costumes, claiming they all came from Mark's concept design work. On occasion she would have to redesign a costume for a tricky situation. As was the case with the auctioneer. He wears a long vest to his knees, and when he leaned back his pants rose up to his vest repeatedly. And since none of the modelers listened to Alice explain that a gentleman dresses himself to the right or the left, the entire figure was torn down. The modelers then understood what Alice meant that a gentleman dresses himself to the left or the right.

The original redhead in the auction scene was also a problem. Alice had to tackle the area below her bust because there was only a 2-inch tube holding her upright. Alice's job was to dress this hollow body, so she made a stiff under bust corset that attached to the top of the hips to help give her shape. However, it was always kept hollow. Alice well understood costuming was all about illusion of what the audience sees.

In the early days just after Pirate's opening, it was Alice's job, along with her team to check each figure every morning and adjust all of the costumes and wigs, as well as  makeup to help make them look realistic.

Welcome back to part 4. In this post we're taking a look at the audio for this amazing attraction.

It's impossible to explain the creation of Pirates of the Caribbean without bringing up Xavier Ateno otherwise known as "X" Ateno. He was an imagineer, but got his start as an "in-betweener animator" for Monstro and Pinocchio. Later he moved up to assist on Fantasia. Fast forward a number of years, he did some stop motion work on the toy soldiers for Babes in Toyland which resulted in him working on the toy solders in the parade at Disneyland as well.

Before long he was moved over to full-time imagineer in 1965. X hadn't done much as an imagineer other than working on the dinosaurs for the Primeval World diorama on the Disneyland railroad. When Walt personally tasked him with scripting Pirates of the Caribbean, X had never scripted anything in his life!

To put the script of such a gargantuan project into the hands of a completely untested artist who was not even a writer, was an incredible gamble. X worked on the storyboards with Marc Davis and in the midst of all of this craziness, X knew Pirates would need a song. An idea  struck him for a melody as well as lyrics. Never having written anything before he scribbled down lyrics and brought it up to Walt.

If Walt happened to like it, X decided that he would hand it off to musicians like the Sherman Brothers to complete. Instead Walt Disney told him it was great and instructed him to get with George Bruns to do the music. George Bruns is best known for writing The Ballad of Davey Crockett. Yo Ho, Yo Ho was specifically worded to undercut the idea of hardened murderous criminals into charismatic whimsical rascals, obviously inspired through Marc Davis's concept work. X admitted that all he did was use the kind of dialogue Marc Davis' pirates may have spoken and put it to music.

People still whistle to themselves over half a century later.

Marty Sklar worked out the timing for pirates and dialogue throughout the attraction. The song was performed by the Mellow Men, a quartet founded by Thurl Ravenscroft. Thurl coincidentally voiced the accordion playing pirate, the pirate once balanced a top the dynamite barrel and was in fact the voice for the singing howling dog. If you don't recognize his name, he was an amazing voice actor with a laundry list of credits including Tony the Tiger.

The Mellow Men worked on a number of Disney movies and shorts such as The Three Little Pigs, the elephants in The Jungle Book, and the singing busts inside the Haunted Mansion. They also performed with Bing Crosby, Doris Day and Elvis to name few.

Paul freeze, the ghost host voice in The Haunted Mansion, was the voice of the
auctioneer as well as a few other Pirates.

Welcome back to part 3 of this famous attraction!

After the boats were added to the Pirates of the Caribbean, Claude Coates went on to design and lay out of the actual track pattern, utilizing all of the available space just like he did on Its a Small World. Once this was completed around late '66 he oversaw the production of the show models, literally building the attraction using Marc Davis's very thorough design work.

Harriet Burns, one of the first three original imagineers who designed the buildings for Disneyland and helped build the first model for Sleeping Beauty's castle. Harriet actually created this long, intricate and exact model layout for the entire ride design point of view from the guest perspective in a boat.

The pirate figures placed throughout were essential in tailoring and tweaking the attraction. Both Marc Davis and Walt Disney utilized this modeling method to hone the best possible staging for guests to enjoy. It was featured in Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color as well as some other promotional work.

The full scale figures and faces were created by Blaine Gibson essentially the Disney sculptor at the time. Blaine's modeling team comprised of Peter Kermode and George Snowden. Blaine started by sculpting maquettes of every figure, human and animal, (there are over 120 by the way) nearly all of them from Mark's conceptual drawings. Blaine personally made more than 30 different faces from studying Marc Davis's concepts.

After Blaine completed sculpting the figures they went to the capable hands of Leota Tombs, mostly known as the face of Madame Leota in the Haunted Mansion. She was a truly amazing artist and imagineer on Pirates of the Caribbean and mainly worked on forming, designing and finishing work on the figures along with Harriet Burns.

Marc Davis' Pirates drawings went to a whole other level and more artists were brought  in under Marc to flesh out ideas. He no longer had the time to do the work himself. By the time the '64 Worlds Fair had wrapped up in '65, Disney was in full swing creating Pirates of the Caribbean. Walt decided within a year that he wanted it bigger than ever so he added another show building. Due to space restraints, men had to go beneath the berm surrounding Disneyland which also meant that the boats had to go under Disneyland's train tracks. The entire area previously developed for the wax museum was completely dismantled, steel and all, to be redesigned.

No one knew what to do with most of the first building so Walt told WED to put in some caves using the methods and tools they had already developed in the caves for the Ford Magic Sky Highway. The second building was necessary for the addition of a full scale pirate ship and part of a Spanish Fort battle bombardment. Once it was decided that boats would be part of the pirate experience, Bob Gurr was brought in to redesign the boats he had fashioned for the '64 World Fairs It's a Small World attraction. He had his hand in Pirates of the Caribbean as well as so many other things.

Since the boats for It's A Small World were created by Arrow Development, the company was also used to make the boats for Pirates of the Caribbean. Arrow was also used to Fashion The Flume system for Pirates, when you take those drops.

In the fall of '64 Walt, Marc Davis and some others flew up to Arrow Development headquarters to test out the boat in a flume mock-up. Dick Irvine executed the art direction on Pirates of the Caribbean. He was the first to head what is now known as Walt Disney imagineering. Prior to working for Disney he had a robust career in movie set design and all the technical aspects of the day and when you understand that, it starts to make sense why Disney attractions are so often a cut above most of what you'll find at other theme parks. They've always used high-end movie set design layout and lighting etc for their attractions and that started with Dick Irvine.

Irvine was hired not just to be in charge of certain projects or single attraction, but rather the Disneyland and Magic Kingdom Parks as a whole! A lot of the design and force perspective stuff within the parks, is due to Irvine. He personally did the art direction for Pirates in both Disneyland and the Magic Kingdom. Though Bill Martin is also credited for his hand in the art direction, he was the art director of Disneyland's original Fantasyland. Martin also contributed to the Monorail, Sleeping Beauty Castle, Cinderella's Castle, Peter Pan's flight and the entire layout of the Magic Kingdom itself.

Learn more in Part 3.