Naturally I had to hit the new Walt Disney Family Museum on the first weekend it was open.  After Jesus Christ, Walt Disney is my favorite hero and I’ve studied his life and career quite a bit.  Needless to say I loved the museum which is really well done.  As always I was inspired by connection points that I found with Disney.  He struggled and had serious failures.  At the museum I learned that Snow White, the first full-length animated film, had been known as, “Walt’s Folly”.  It reminded me of the period at EA when Madden Football was being called, “Trip’s Folly”.  Disney was infatuated with The Matterhorn, making both a movie and a theme park attraction out of it.  At the museum there are photos of Walt and his wife hiking in Zermatt.  I’m equally in love with The Matterhorn, which I climbed back in 1991 when I was still doing technical rock climbing (before I had kids).  I also grew up with Disneyland, which opened not long after I was born and was near my home.  Seeing all the models and drawings at the museum took me back to my childhood when I had a strong interest in architecture and did layouts of theme parks and built hypothetical attractions.  But the best reminder for me was in remembering that Walt was about my current age when he launched Disneyland.  I like to pursue new ideas and Disney is such a great role model because he was always innovating and he kept on doing it until the day he died.

The museum reminded me of my days at Apple where we worked with a former Disney Imagineer named Mike Vance.  Vance had told us about Joe Fowler, the Navy Admiral who managed theme park construction for Disney for many years.  Fowler was famous for being able to do any hair-brained scheme that Walt could dare to come up with.  Walt went on the Pirates ride before its debut and felt there was something missing.  He decided that the bayou needed fireflies.  A lot of engineering managers would have blown a gasket at this point on a project and would have said it was too late, over budget, would kill the schedule and should have been specified earlier.  And would have been indignant.  Admiral Joe Fowler just said, “When do you want them, Walt?”  The fireflies are one of my favorite things at Disneyland and I still remember the first time I went on the ride and kept studying them until I figured out how they did it (same thing with the clouds that go past the moon; in both cases really simple and elegant design solutions).  Well, I remember at Apple that after hearing this story some of us gently suggested to our engineers that they should be more like Admiral Fowler.  They didn’t agree.  In fact one of them went and got buttons made with the slogan just to mock us.  Ironically that guy later got fired for complaining that I was insisting that they use a mouse for user input and refusing to cooperate about it.