“Drink up me hearties. Yo ho! Yo ho! Yo ho, a pirate’s life for me! You know this song, parrot? Feel free to join in anytime. Aye, but we’re loved by our mommies and dads. Drink up me hearties. Yo ho!”
Captain Jack Sparrow, or at least an Audio-Animatronic recreation of him, drunkenly sings these lyrics as you pass by him. You probably know them by heart. After all, “Yo Ho (A Pirate’s Life for Me)” stands alongside” It’s a Small World” as one of the unofficial anthems of Disney theme parks. They’re universally known and much beloved. That wasn’t always the case, though.
During the 1960s, Walt Disney didn’t realize that he was living out the last few years of his life. Even if he had, he probably wouldn’t have changed much. That’s because the Disneyland attraction he personally oversaw and developed during his last days has stood the test of time. This boat ride captures more than simply an era and a few fables. It encapsulates the full glory of tales of swashbuckling while delivering entertainment that is truly fun for the whole family, no matter their age.
As difficult as the statement is to believe half a century later, however, people once questioned the validity of the ride. They doubted it from its original conception as an altogether different type of attraction to its completion as one of the costliest buildings in the history of the park and Walt Disney Productions as a whole. In the end, the vision of the company’s founder proved prescient once again.
This is the story of development of Pirates of the Caribbean, a museum that became a tale of horror that switched into a revenue generation machine. And all that happened 35 years before Johnny Depp became the biggest box office draw in the world while portraying a fictional pirate not previously known in Disney theme parks. The early version of this boat ride had much humbler roots, yet the end result is the same. It’s synonymous with a trip to Disney and one of the true classics in the history of theme parks. Here’s the path Walt Disney took to leave a final signature attraction to his fans across the world.
For kids of all ages…
Two intersecting strategies led to the eventual shape and spirit of Pirates of the Caribbean. We’ll save the one involving a Beverly Hillbilly for last, just to build a bit of intrigue.
Walt Disney initially conceptualized his future pirate attraction as a museum. During the early 1950s, a handful of trusted employees at WED Enterprises all performed the same task. They spit-balled ideas about an amusement park whose land the company hadn’t even purchased yet. Their founder, visionary, and spirit guide had already decided that a park would be forthcoming. That was good enough for them.
Their instructions were to mine the archives of world’s foremost forms of entertainment. The stated intention was to unearth all potential stories that these not-quite-yet Imagineers could relay to a large audience. Uncle Walt already delivered a directive to his disciples. The choices they offered for future attractions must fulfill a simple but delicate requirement. All the guest options at what we now know as Disneyland had to appeal to children and parents alike.
Walt Disney always loved playing with his daughters, Diane Marie and Sharon Mae. In doing so, he noticed the oddities of conventional wisdom. Virtually all parks and playgrounds in existence during the first half of the 20th century had a fatal flaw. The designated play areas forced the segregation of parents from their children. He wanted to build something that would unite rather than divide families: in the war between commerce and family, Disney always sided with the latter.
A century-old craft, modernized
One of the suggestions the Imagineers highlighted as feasible was a classic, the wax museum. Madame Tussaud had popularized the premise starting in 1835, and the premise sustains a sizable following to this day. Disney employees conceived of several ways they could employ a wax museum. Two of the most popular versions never came to pass as originally anticipated. The Haunted Mansion took a decade to come to fruition, while Pirates of the Caribbean sat on the backburner in favor of other projects.
Of course, nobody at Disney called it Pirates of the Caribbean at the time. Their vision for the staging was a permanent exhibition of the pirate lifestyle. Like the wax museum itself, pirate tales had stood the test of time as a beloved type of narrative, thanks in large part to the writings of Robert Louis Stevenson. His seminal tale had its origins as a serial published in 1882 and 1883 before becoming a staggeringly successful book in 1883.
In many ways, Stevenson was the Walt Disney of his field. His fictional account of the pirate lifestyle resonates to this day. Many of the pop culture elements we know and love about pirates such as treasure maps, peg-legged pirates, and parrot pets stem from Treasure Island. Not coincidentally, it was the first live action film from Walt Disney Productions, cementing its placement as one of Disney’s most beloved stories.
A pirate’s life for me?
Imagineers planned to recreate a pirate world befitting Stevenson’s writing. The wax statues would celebrate the history of pirates, recreating their appearances in amazing detail. Guests at Disneyland would walk from scene to scene within the museum, with parents teaching children about a critical part of American history and folklore.
Alas, a couple of problems existed. An accurate depiction of pirates proved problematic for a theme park focused on family. Pirates were by nature treacherous scum, criminals of the highest order. While pop culture romanticized the life of nautical treasure hunters, they weren’t good people. To wit, many of them died of venereal diseases that they received from…well, it’s best not to speculate. We probably shouldn’t speculate as to how and why Blackbeard came to be married 14 times. It’s not a happy tale for many of the families of the first 13 brides.
The numbers game
How could a family-friendly theme park tell a story about such men without horrifying children (or their parents)? Even if Disney solved that problem, a second one existed that eventually proved too large a hurdle to overcome. Theme park tourists walking through a wax museum don’t move uniformly. Some people rush through exhibits while others take their time, lingering to savor every detail. Disney would struggle to maintain a steady flow of traffic in a wax museum.
Also, even if the company’s cast members offered some sort of live show in each room, they couldn’t guarantee all guests the same experience. Some would have a better view than others. Also, anyone who missed something they deemed important would want to stay behind to watch the next show. Park planners couldn’t guarantee any consistency in terms of attraction throughput.
By Disney’s best calculations, a wax museum would only deliver throughput of 500 guests per hour, a laughably small amount for Disneyland. During 1960, the park claimed its 20 millionth guest, and they were averaging approximately five million visits a year by that point. That is more than 13,000 guests a day. The wax museums they planned could only service less than half the people attending. Imagineers accepted that their current plan for a pirate museum wasn’t feasible.
You bought me a birdcage? Umm, thanks, I guess.
Image: Disney
The answer to Disney’s problem actually presented itself a few years before Imagineers had even pitched Pirates of the Caribbean. During the early 1950s, a Disney electrician named Lee Adams received an unusual gift. His boss, Walt Disney, walked into his office and handed the befuddled man a birdcage. Inside this metal device was a bird, and it could sing. While this notion doesn’t sound the least bit impressive today, it was the equivalent of handing a caveman the wheel at the time. What’s odd is that the toy itself dated back almost one hundred years. Nobody had ever successfully advanced the technology in the century that followed, though.
Disney delivered a directive to his employee. The man was to understand the machinations of the system and improve it. Uncle Walt wanted a better singing bird. As innocent as this anecdote sounds, it was one of the signature moments in the history of the entire theme park industry.
Let’s take a moment to appreciate how Walt Disney’s mind worked. In a way, he was the original innovator in the field of artificial intelligence, only without much of the intelligence. He loved the process of creating something entirely new out of thin air. He predicated his entire career on imbuing inanimate objects with lifelike behaviors. Even the terminology used to describe his movies punctuates this point. They’re animated movies, after all.
Disney and his staff performed the animation by bringing pictures to life simply by drawing enough cells to tell the story. Every single illustration was dead on its own. In combination, they evolved into vibrant fairy tales.
The Hollywood legend’s natural curiosity played in his favor while window shopping in New Orleans. Where most people would have seen a silly, noisy toy that would probably get old quick, Disney envisioned artistic advances of a historic nature. While constructing his theme park, he always explored new technological advances that would aid him in his ultimate goal: bringing inanimate objects closer to life. This silly singing bird offered the process of a better tomorrow.
Yes, he’s the guy who played Jed Clampett
Image: Disney
Of course, for that tomorrow to come, Adams must decipher the underlying mechanics of a strange toy. He had an advantage, though. Disney Imagineers were early pioneers in the field of electrical animation already. Adams felt confident he could design and engineer lifelike electronic devices that could display human traits if he had enough time to work on the system.
To achieve this admirable goal, Adams returned to a recent company experiment. Other staff members named Wathel Rogers and Roger Broggie received a similar assignment from their Uncle Walt. He asked them to perform a similar technological breakdown of another emerging technology. An inventor had proved that by sending a series of pulses to an electronic tape, the closest thing to hard drive technology in the era, he could cause an electrically operated device to move.
Rogers and Broggie set out to recreate this experiment using a test subject. Disney himself recommended an accomplished dancer whom he’d used many years before. That man’s movements had performed a baseline model for the movements of Mickey Mouse during the 1920s and 1930s.
Disney admired the dancer and kept in touch over the years. When the opportunity presented itself to employ the man once again, he happily did so. The artist showed up and performed a detailed soft shoe routine. Rogers and Broggie recorded the entire performance and thanked the man for his time. Soon afterward, Disney himself showed his gratitude by casting the man who also acted in a key role in the company’s upcoming television production, Davy Crockett.
Davy Crockett was the Star Wars of the mid-1950s in terms of toy sales, and the show’s continued popularity led to one Buddy Ebsen becoming an in-demand television star. And that name should sound familiar to you, as, he was Jed Clampett on The Beverly Hillbillies. Who knew he could dance? For more information about Ebsen, you should read his Wikipedia page. The section on The Wizard of Oz will blow your mind, even if it’s not Disney related.
Singing Birds and a Dancing Man
Image: Disney
Rogers and Broggie used Ebsen’s toe tapping skills to create something they called The Dancing Man. They developed the ability to control its movements as if it were a puppet capable of pulling its own string. Their boss felt confident that they were on to something big. Even he couldn’t have understood the full import of this research and development proposition, though.
What the Disney engineers and electrician learned qualified as computer technology, at least for the 1950s. Through trial and error, they discovered that the inventor of the singing bird toy had led them down the path toward a major scientific breakthrough.
Magnetic tape is a technology people over 30 actually know quite well. Your pre-mp3 mix tapes were called cassettes, but they employed the same underlining concept, only repurposed for music. They held a specific sequence of stored information. Pushing the various buttons on your Boombox (Google it, kids) would cause the magnetic tape to perform a designated task. It was high-functioning magnetic-tape-based computer system, at least of a kind.
The Imagineers advanced the concept of artificial manipulation of inanimate objects through a series of programmable functions. Buddy Epsen’s foot functions paved the way. The three men tested the Dancing Man in novel ways, attempting to audio-animate each of his precise moments. The aforementioned pulse sequences could trigger literally thousands responses in the otherwise lifeless machine. They learned repeating tape could store enough data for an entire dancing sequence and, eventually, an entire show.
Disney could also output hundreds of these sonic waves in a single second. It was this revelation that led to the invention of the company’s first true Audio-Animatronic (AA), the legendary singing birds in The Enchanted Tiki Room. It went live in 1963. By this point, WED Enterprises, the Disney engineering team, had already patented the technology.
Disney goes all-in on the technology
Image: Disney
The 1964 New York World’s Fair advanced and elevated public awareness of AAs. Guests from across the globe demonstrated awe at the new invention. The Illinois Pavilion’s masterwork was Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln. It was so life-like that the inanimate object brought numerous audience members as it recreated Lincoln’s motions simultaneously with his speeches. At this point, all involved knew that AAs were a future staple of Disneyland.
Walt Disney possessed a distinct point of view on the subject. A natural born showman, he always considered everything in Hollywood terminology. Disney attractions were the stages, and how Imagineers built these sets defined a theme park tourist’s enjoyment of the proceedings. AAs added a newfound level of realism to the exhibitions. These shows would include performers who never missed their mark, never coughed during a show, and never once forgot their lines. To Disney’s mind, they were the perfect thespians. Here’s how he described the technology to writer Kathy Merlock Jackson in her book, Walt Disney: Conversations:
“After we get (the AA), we get it programmed. It’s like rehearsing a show when you go through it and rehearse it and rehearse it and you finally say, “That’s it!” We say, “All right, let’s go for a take.” All the things we do here are recorded, and then when we play the tape back he will do everything he is doing here. Only it is all part of a programmed show, you see.”
Disney added that he had no intention for AAs to replace human thespians or other Disney cast members. That wasn’t the purpose he envisioned for his new hybrid android. Instead, he noted the benefits from a business perspective. With AAs, he felt they could perform on demand. In Walt’s words:
“We operate 15 hours a day. And these shows have to go on the hour. And my Tiki bird show goes on three times an hour, and I don’t have to stop for coffee breaks, and all that other kind of stuff, you see. So that’s the whole idea of it. It’s just another dimension in the animation we have been doing all our life. It’s a dimensional thing and it’s a new door. It’s a new toy for us and we are having a lot of fun. We hope we can really do some exciting things in the future.”
The wording he chooses is umambiguous All of the timeless Walt Disney animated classics included a fatal flaw that bothered their creator. The illustrations existed in only two dimensions. AAs offered the promise of a better type of storytelling, one with literally and figuratively more depth. Pictures on a screen could only do so much for Disney. The AA of Abraham Lincoln, on the other hand, could cause audience members to suspend disbelief long enough to acknowledge that maybe, just maybe, they would accept that the 16th President of the United States was standing in front of them, delivering one of his most famous speeches. Disney was correct about the choice, just as he was about how impactful this technology could be for telling pirate tales.
The other World’s Fair innovation
Image: Disney
Pirates of the Caribbean never could’ve come together if not for the advances WED Enterprises made in the build-up to the 1964 New York World’s Fair. In particular, they attacked an ongoing problem at Disney, the previously mentioned crowd control issue, one they still battle today. The problem with suggested haunted house and pirate museums was that the park guests wouldn’t move through the building in uniform fashion. Disney’s own words above reflect how passionate he was about his park operating with clockwork precision. The chaos of mercurial travelers determining the throughput of his attractions was wholly unacceptable.
A breakthrough occurred while engineers plotted for their quartet of World’s Fair exhibits. They developed a novel form of tracking that could provide uniform exploration of an environment. In other words, they could control the pace and movement of the people enjoying Disney rides. Two different solutions presented themselves. One technology they patented was the Omnimover, a ride cart that gave Disney the power to determine the rider’s line of sight.
The other originated from the boats employed for Pepsi’s It’s a Small World. Those vehicles ran on underwater tracks, silently pushed down the path by propulsion jets. Both inventions achieved two laudable goals. They would reduce the stress on park guests since they only had to sit back and savor the scenery. Simultaneously, Disney would define the flow of traffic throughout the applicable attractions.
Through this solution, Imagineers could exponentially increase the hourly volume of guests for their impending pirate attraction that was no longer a museum. It spiked from a projected 500 visitors per hour to 3,600. Yes, they boosted productivity by a factor of seven. This was the difference between half the daily Disneyland visitors leaving disappointed because they couldn’t enjoy the pirates ride versus everyone having the ability to go through it multiple times.
Who, me?
Image: Disney
With all the puzzle pieces finally aligned properly, all that remained was for Disney employees to build the ride. This is another opportunity to discuss the oddity of working for Uncle Walt. He had a maddening ability to uncover talents in his employees that even they didn’t know that they had.
Take, for example, the man affectionately known as X. Francis Xavier Atencio started to work for Walt Disney when he was 19-years-old. The Disney Legend stayed at the company for 46 years, taking time away only to fight during World War II. From 1938 until the opening of Disneyland, X’s job was the obvious one at the company. He was an animator by trade but by his boss’s evaluation, he was only a good one. Disney was nothing if not honest with his charges.
What was remarkable about Uncle Walt was his nose for talent, particularly the maximization of it. In Atencio, he saw an insanely creative mind that didn’t quite translate when he put pen to paper, at least not when it came to drawing. One day, Disney tapped his staffer on the shoulder and said a few fateful words. “X, it’s time for you to move.” Atencio has noted on multiple occasions that his employer treated staff members like staff pieces, positioning wherever they made the most sense on the board in his mind’s eye. In the early days of Pirates of the Caribbean as a boat ride, X made the most sense as a writer.
The dramatic change in his work routine was understandably disruptive to X. He noted that his new co-workers had no idea why he was suddenly there, and he didn’t have a good answer for them. He didn’t even have an official assignment when he arrived. He was to spend his time thinking and being creative. In truth, he felt like a fish out of water. Animators working for Disney rarely worked on their own projects at the time. They operated at the whim of their leader, and they quite liked that.
Faced with newfound freedom, X felt paralyzed. After a few days, the boss called with new instructions. They were less nebulous in tone. Disney told his protégé, “X, I want you to write the script for the Pirates of the Caribbean attraction. There will be scenes with pirates and townspeople and so forth, and I want you to write all the dialogue.” Several aspects of this surprised Atencio, the primary one being that several established Disney Imagineers such as Marc David, Claude Coats, and Bob Gurr had already nearly finished the project.
But Walt, I’m not a writer…or a lyricist
X’s job was to bring everything together. Uncle Walt requested that Atencio craft an amusing storyline. His work should match the dazzling AAs and set pieces the other Imagineers had designed. It wasn’t easy since the pirates themselves were quite scary looking. The attention to detail caused a sense of foreboding amongst the employees, and Disney rightfully worried that small children might steer clear. This was especially problematic at a time when guests were still paying for individual attractions.
As an artist, the company founder wanted a revolutionary new attraction. As an expert businessman, he understood that Pirates of the Caribbean had to pay for the entire New Orleans Square expansion. The price tag for it had ballooned to $15 million, almost as much as the $17 million outlay for all of Disneyland 12 years prior. Part of the reason this section cost so much was the never-ending saga of The Haunted Mansion, which wouldn’t be ready for guests until 1969, three years after the debut of New Orleans Square.
Disney as a company was struggling with the financing of the new development. The boat ride had to be a hit, especially since over half the cost of New Orleans Square was the $8 million Disney spent on Pirates of the Caribbean. The plan was to list it as an e-ticket ride at a cost of $0.75 (roughly $5.50 today). If kids didn’t want to get on the boat, it’d be a financial disaster for the company.
Luckily, Disney yet again chose the perfect person for the assignment. The new environment benefited X greatly. His creative juices quickly flowed, and he suggested the first signature element of the ride to his boss. It was the song listed at the start of this article, “Yo-Ho (A Pirate’s Life for Me).” Atencio felt that a hearty sea shanty was the perfect solution to the problem of scary pirates.
The only catch was that Atencio expected one of Disney’s accomplished lyricists to run with the idea. He was taken aback when Disney simply stated, “Oh, this is good. If you need some help with the music, get George Bruns to score it.” And thus, a lyricist was born from a combination of inspiration and desperation. The singalong tune would put guests of all ages at ease while also getting them into the spirit of sailors on a treasure hunt. His instinct proved correct as it has become the penultimate earworm across the Disney theme parks.
X also mastered the art of the pirate joke. His first set piece suggestion involved a nefarious auctioneer selling off a number of women. While nobody could pitch the same scenario today, it instantly set the tone for the integration of existing Pirates of the Caribbean illustrations and AAs with Atencio’s acerbic wit. He remembered that pirate tales are ribald, too. One of the jokes from those early sessions involved a euphemistic pirate asking for a lady to show her larboard side. You don’t hear that in many family rides.
The humorous touches were critical to early reception of Pirates of the Caribbean. Even with the humor added, many early writers described it as a scary ride. Imagine how foreboding it would have been without the easy laughs. His script proved so perfect that upon completion of the attraction, the company switched him over to The Haunted Mansion, the triumph of his career. Fittingly, the man who considered himself an animator first and foremost wrote equally memorable lyrics for that ride, a song known as “Grim Grinning Ghosts (The Screaming Song).”
Tying everything together
The iconic attraction was nearly ready by this point. It had the perfect story and accompanying song. The AA technology seemed so lifelike that Disney himself worried that the technology was evolving at an alarming rate. All that was left were the set pieces and the boat ride itself. Oddly, the latter portion proved more challenging.
During the 1950 and 60s, the concept of getting wet on an amusement park ride wasn’t a popular notion. Disney execs worried about this a great deal with both It’s a Small World and Pirates of the Caribbean. They solved the problem with the Pepsi attraction by running the boats at a glacial speed. The pirate ride proved trickier. Again, commerce created conflict.
Disneyland needed that guaranteed throughput of 3,600 people per hour to turn a profit. The size of the attraction was so large that the boats had to move more rapidly than on It’s a Small World. This wreaked havoc with their plans because pushing the vessels down the path inevitably created splash. Today, everyone accepts that they’ll take on some water during Pirates of the Caribbean. In 1966, however, the thought horrified Uncle Walt.
Disney demanded that his Imagineers strap together a lifting apparatus that would carry him through all phases of the boat ride. He identified all the dangerous spots that were sloshing him. Then, he specified the steps his employees should take to solve the aquatic issues. What’s amazing about his dutiful attempts to provide a joyous customer experience is that he was in the final few months of his life, already feeling the effects of lung cancer, even though he had not yet received the diagnosis.
When you think of Walt Disney as a showman, that’s the most fitting imagery: A dying man strapped to an apparatus that drags him through splashing water, all so that he could insure that his guests would never get wet. And the most amazing part is that he went through that waterfall over and over again until he was confident that everything was perfect.
A pirate’s life for all of us
The set pieces, well, you likely know a lot about them. Each part of The Blue Bayou is unforgettable in its own way, which is why several key moments from the attraction were recreated in the Pirates of the Caribbean movie franchise. It’s basically a 10-hour monument of inside jokes from the ride, one of many reasons it’s such a popular film series. Over time, Disney even introduced the show stopping character, Jack Sparrow, into the attraction.
Long before that occurred, even before the ride debuted, Walt Disney himself died in December of 1966. Intentionally or not, Pirates of the Caribbean became his last major attraction. It opened three months and one day after his death. Word spread quickly that his AAs, the newest form of storytelling at Disneyland, were more than worthy of carrying on his legacy as a technological innovator.
Guests from around the world came to see the final story Disney told as well as the futuristic tech he left the world as a parting gift. Pirates of the Caribbean quickly became one of the most popular e-ticket attractions in theme park history. Within months of its debut in March of 1967, Life Magazine reported that its turnstiles were spinning at an amazing rate.
Estimates indicated that roughly a million guests a month were paying 75 cents each to ride Pirates of the Caribbean. At that rate, Disney would have recouped the $8 million investment in the attraction within a calendar year. They would have paid off the entirety of the New Orleans Square in approximately 20 months at that rate.
In other words, the pirate wax museum that morphed into a splash-less boat ride almost instantly proved itself as one of the biggest draws in the history of Disneyland, a feat the film franchise later duplicated. As for the AAs and other special effects, they were so lifelike that the Anaheim Fire Department didn’t want to authorize the attraction. They worried that the fire effects used during one of the set pieces would confuse people so much that they wouldn’t be able to identify when a real fire started. That too is a fitting postscript to the career of Walt Disney.
