Making of the Haunted Mansion Holiday gingerbread house

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This year marks the tenth anniversary of Haunted Mansion Holiday at Disneyland park, and each year, some very different teams gather for a very special project: the Haunted Mansion Holiday gingerbread house. Cast members from teams like Operations, Engineering, Creative Development and Food and Beverage all work together to bring this spooky but tasty creation to life. In this video, we learn how they do it and what they do to mark their special reunion each year.

Larger-Than-Life Halloween Pumpkins at Disneyland Park

[Rare] Louis Prima - Jungle Book [Exclusive Footage]

Maintaining Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland Resort

All You Want to Know About "World of Color"

Deep Dive - Epcot: Marine Biology

Disney's Dreamers explore the fascinating world under the sea with marine educators at Epcot The Living Seas with a behind-the-scenes adventure to learn more about the opportunities available in Biology and Marine Biology.

Behind The Scenes: Main Street Electrical Parade Returns To Walt Disney World in 2010

Behind The Scenes: Float Driving in the Main Street Electrical Parade

Behind the Scenes: Disneyland Performers Prepare for Celebrate! A Street Party

Denny Newell, senior show director and creator of Celebrate! A Street Party, takes us behind the scenes and shows us what it takes to get ready for a Disney parade.

These wanna-be dancers must go through auditions, rehearsals, conditioning and more to appear in a parade. I guess it never occurred to me, but Denny points out that the crew in Celebrate! A Street Party must perform on-stage for a full hour on the parade route!

Behind-the-Scenes: Topiaries at ‘it’s a small world’

Here are some additional fun facts about topiaries:

• There were 24 original Disneyland Park topiaries premiering in 1963. They included a waltzing hippo, a poodle, a pig, bears, elephants, seals, and giraffes. In 1966, they were permanently planted at “it’s a small world.”
• Growing a typical shrub Character Topiary can take from 3-10 years for completion, depending on the size and complexity of the shape.
• Walt Disney got the idea of creating “living” topiaries by seeing traditional topiary gardening in Europe. He asked his film animators and Disneyland landscape team to work together to create the first living sculptures for Disneyland in 1963. They came up with several and one of those included Dumbo making his debut in Fantasyland.

Meet the Disneyland Resort Sign Shop Cast

The Music Behind The Little Mermaid: Ariel’s Undersea Adventure

posted on April 11th, 2011 by Valarie Sukovaty, Disneyland Public Relations

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For those who saw “The Little Mermaid” back in 1989, you know the music in the movie was just as magical as a mermaid falling in love with a prince and living happily ever after. Remember “Part of Your World,” “Under the Sea,” “Poor Unfortunate Souls” and “Kiss the Girl”? You’ll hear all these classics throughout the new attraction, The Little Mermaid ~ Ariel’s Undersea Adventure, set to open at Disney California Adventure park in June.

More than 20 years ago Alan Menken wrote the movie score that won an Academy Award, and he collaborated with Howard Ashman on the songs. For the attraction, the music needed to be arranged somewhat differently, so well-known musical arranger and orchestrator Danny Troob, who has worked often with Menken, took on the challenge. In this video, we go into the music studio and give you a front row seat in a session with Troob and a 65-piece orchestra, as they recreate the amazing Little Mermaid music we all know and love.

Behind the Scenes: Getting Down and Dirty with Pirates

posted at the Official Disney Parks Blog on May 4th, 2010 by Heather Hust Rivera, Senior Manager, Corporate Communications, The Walt Disney Company

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I’ll often stop, shake my head and then start laughing when I think about some of the crazy things we talk about here at the Disneyland Resort, and this is one of those times. There aren’t many companies that have to come up with a way to make clothes look dirty. Here at Disneyland park, this was a very real challenge for the costume designers in charge of the Pirates’ costumes.

When the Pirates were first introduced as regularly appearing characters in 2007, Entertainment Show Director Glenn Kelman worked with Walt Disney Studios to develop the concept for how the pirates would come to life in the Parks. They quickly decided the pirates needed to be unique, have a sense of humor and, of course, be very dirty. This was a problem because we do not like our Parks costumes to be wrinkled, dirty or smelly in any way. So, what could they do?

At first, the costume designers distressed all of the costumes, staining them by hand, putting in actual rips and tears. But this solution, while great for a few days, had two problems. First, the costumes had a short shelf life and would need to be rebuilt far too often, and second, no matter how we tried to stain the costumes, our terrific laundry facility kept washing the stains out. Nobody likes a clean pirate! Clean pirates just don’t seem real. 

So, the costuming team came up with a clever solution. They would pre-stain the fabric using a process called sublimation (where dye is added to the fabric in patterns) and then build the costumes using the “dirty” cloth.

The fun part was designing a pattern of “stains” that could be applied to the fabric. This relatively new technology was being used to add stripes or floral patterns to material, but we might have been the first ones to use it to permanently stain costumes. Since then, the Resort has invested in its own sublimation machine and trained a team to use it. Now we are creating our own unique patterned fabric for Disney Parks and Resorts around the globe. And, it was the Pirates who helped us find this new “technological” treasure.

Today’s video takes you behind the scenes and shows how this sublimation process works.

Behind the Scenes: Making of ‘Mickey Notes’ at Disney Parks

posted at the Official Disney Parks Blog on March 26th, 2010 by Thomas Smith, Social Media Director, Disney Parks

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As you know, our “Give a Day, Get a Disney Day‘ program ended earlier this month when one million people volunteered or committed to volunteer in their communities.

But along the way, we created and launched something special to celebrate volunteerism called “Mickey Notes“- our first stop-motion video. It was five days of work at Walt Disney World Resort taking more than 4,300 individual still photographs of about 25,000 pieces of paper. And today, we’re sharing a behind-the-scenes look at how we did it.