Today I'm gonna take you round Ireland
and we're going to stop at various locations that inspired Artemis Fowl.
We're behind the scenes here at the Flavor Lab.
Let's come on in and see what's happening.
Mickey has never had a ride-through attraction.
He's been greeting guests in parks, but this is his first ride.
My name is Eoin Colfer and I am known for writing the Artemis Fowl books,
which are soon and very excitingly to be a major movie from Disney Studios.
Today, we are going to go on a trip through the Fowl verse,
so I'm gonna take you around Ireland
and we're going to stop at various locations
that feature either in my creative process or in the book itself.
Where we are right now is a very special space for me,
because this is my office where I do most of my work
for four or five hours every day.
So the Fowl Twins Two is called the Fowl Twins Deny All Charges.
I have about two weeks' work to go
and then it's going to go in to Disney Publishing,
and I'm really looking forward to getting that book out there.
Artemis Fowl has been born into a criminal mastermind family.
His dad is a criminal mastermind, his grandfather was a criminal mastermind.
- You think I'm ready? - Welcome to the family business.
And he's not sure if he wants to take up the mantle.
But when his father goes missing...
Dad.
Artemis decides that somehow he must raise the money to find him.
It's been an amazing experience for me and my family,
because we got to visit the set
and they actually built the entire underground fairy police station.
They built Fowl Manor, where Artemis and his family live.
It's a very strange and surreal experience to walk through your own imagination.
So I kinda spent the day with my mouth open, looking around
and occasionally finding my sons with impressed looks on their faces.
Which initially I didn't recognize, having never seen that expression before.
I'm very excited to see, in the movie that is,
just how Disney have recreated the feel of Ireland.
I really want people to feel like they have visited Ireland.
Even better, I hope the movie makes people want to come here.
We are at a medieval manor house on the south of County Wexford
called Loftus Hall, and it is a very special place to me
because I used to work here and I was inspired by this place.
But, before you enter, I should warn you
that it has the reputation of being the most haunted house in Ireland.
So if you are brave enough, please follow me.
Loftus Hall is extremely important to the Fowl verse,
if you like, because this is Fowl Manor.
I worked here as a young boy, washing bottles in the bar
when there was a bar here, and it always seemed to me
that it would be an excellent house, with all its wonderful staircases
and passages and corridors and peepholes,
to have a family live, a family that had a life of adventure.
So when I started to write Artemis Fowl,
and I was looking for a place for them to live,
it seemed obvious to me, of course,
the most haunted house in Ireland, Loftus Hall.
So that's where I put them.
It's like a time machine for me to watch Fowl Manor on screen
because it brings me back to my own childhood.
When I started to write stories,
my father was delighted because he was very creative.
He said to me, "You know what?
"There's more than one way to see the world."
And I think I've been looking at the world that way ever since.
My childhood hugely influenced Artemis Fowl
because the character of Artemis was based on my little brother,
and all of his mischievous activities were centered on this area
because we came here for three months every year
and we knew every nook and cranny.
Also, this peninsula, this wonderful, marvelous, open-air playground
became our adventure zone. And for three months every year,
we made our own adventures, we went on our own quests,
and we basically had an idyllic upbringing.
This very unassuming, little entrance
actually conceals a massive, beautiful theater,
and this is Ireland's National Opera House,
and this is where I first got into drama and writing.
We're gonna go inside now and meet a very special guy,
who is the mayor of Wexford.
- George, how are ya? - Welcome home.
- Good to see you. - You, too.
But also, more importantly, he's a very old friend of mine.
The last time we were on that stage together,
- you were on the stage. - That's right.
- And I was beside the stage. - That's right.
Because this was in the musical The Lords of Love.
Famous Lords of Love that we sold out here.
We sold out here, yeah.
My mum was in the theater.
I learned to read from my mother doing her lines.
She acted on this stage. And I started off in the theater.
My first three or four things were plays, which I put on here,
- or in pubs around the town. - Yeah.
And people often say to me that my books are cinematic.
But they're not really. They're theatrical.
To know that you went on the Artemis trail.
- I'm still on it. - Starting from here.
- Starting from right here. - Starting from right here.
So now I'm gonna take you back to Dublin
for the last stop on our whirlwind tour of Ireland,
and possibly the most important stop.
Because in Dublin, in the Civic Theater,
there's a big crowd of Fowl fans, waiting to see my one-man show,
which is called Fowl, Fairies, and Family.
And what that show does is show
how the characters in the Artemis Fowl books
are actually all based on my family, or my close friends.
I am a little bit nervous, I will admit,
because my family and my close friends are all coming to the show tonight.
So, fingers crossed that they're happy, and they have a sense of humor.
Please welcome to the stage, bestselling author, and my good friend,
Eoin Colfer, everybody!
Thank you, everyone, for coming along.
It's very heartwarming, and you do get emotional about it.
But, sometimes you forget when you're in a room on your own,
and you get a bit dispirited and disheartened.
But then, when you get out on the road and you meet the people
who are actually reading these books, and the books actually mean a lot to them
and remind them of a part of their own life,
that it was really important for them to have a good book.
So it's really lovely to see all that in this big Disney movie 20 years later.
Thank you very much, good night.
For me, the guest enjoyment, I believe
that's really why I got into cooking.
Food drives emotion and it brings back memories,
and they're great memories of food that they have eaten
that a parent or a loved one has made.
We at the Flavor Lab do our best to create that emotion for our guest.
Flavor Lab is a culinarian's dream job.
The Flavor Lab is really a test kitchen and a test facility
for new concepts here at Walt Disney World.
Every new location that opens up in a park, in a resort,
a location that's gonna get reimagined,
me and my team put together not only the kitchen and the equipment placement,
but the menu, the menu design, and really the overall concept.
Regal Eagle Smokehouse is our most recent concept.
It came about knowing that Epcot needed a new exciting restaurant.
They also knew that they needed barbecue.
Barbecue. What does that mean to you?
How do we take North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas,
all those great elements of barbecue and mash it into one great concept?
A concept brief is really some guiding principles
to kinda align us in moving forward in our next steps.
All right, so this looks good.
So, once a concept brief is done,
we're gonna partner with Walt Disney Imagineering
and really make sure that our stories align.
- Hey, Gregg. - Hey, Michael.
- Hi, good to see you. - How are you?
It's good to see ya.
It all starts with the Flavor Lab, and they make these amazing dishes
and then Walt Disney Imagineering comes in
and we create the environment.
Everything from the props, to color, to graphic design.
We just create the overall ambiance for the guests.
So within this space we were really kinda riffing on the barbecue competitions,
bringing that kinda underlying storyline of a competition.
And we felt the perfect host for the Regal Eagle would be
the most regal eagle, which is Sam.
- Sam the eagle. - The barbecue is the lead story
and then we're layering Sam within that story.
So that would be kinda like an event poster
that we could put up in the space somewhere to say,
"Okay, all of the guests, you're at this competition.
"This is an annual event we do every year."
"A salute to all cook-offs,
- "but mostly barbecue." - Yeah.
Okay, chefs, I think we've got the final version of sauces and rubs.
This is the one we were working on this week,
to get it to this point, and it's in a great spot,
and we'll send it to the vendor to finalize.
Didn't we thin this down, too? Wasn't the last one really thick?
- So, okay. - Slightly, yeah.
I love the mustard.
You know, I don't know how many guests are gonna enjoy the mustard sauce.
- It's got a good sweet element, though. - Mmm-hmm.
So I think that could be the tipping point, right?
So I think we have an opportunity to do, like, a large family meal,
so we know that all of our recipes are accurate.
We'll invite everyone next door, see what they think of the flavors.
All right, I hope everyone is hungry!
It's all good.
This is family meal day.
We have cast members ready to taste all this food we have been working on.
And we're gonna have them fill out a ballot
for what their favorite things are.
And we're gonna use this data
to see what we should be moving forward with our menu.
So, in just a quick tally, everyone seemed to like the mustard sauce.
Mustard all the way, huh?
Hey, listen, I'm happy if everyone loves the mustard.
I've been wrong before, once.
So, I think that the mustard sauce will be on the menu.
The decision-making process is all based on research.
We have to make decisions based off of data.
We need your feedback on some of these sauces.
And that goes for any type of cuisine that we create.
If the data tells us that...
Some good data here.
All Texas barbecue is spicy,
then we're gonna develop something that's spicy
because we're gonna stay true to what it is.
- And you've had the brisket? - I have.
- Brisket was good? - Everything's super good.
Mac and cheese is very good. Nice and creamy.
- Winner. - Texan approved.
- Okay, so you're from Texas. - Yes.
- So, Texan approved. Good. - Mmm-hmm.
Wow. These look amazing.
I love how you made the Sam Eagle cook-off poster
the largest poster.
The guests will understand that he's the host of the cook-off.
This is such a great element.
They really reflect the different regions and the associations within the graphics.
They came together great.
Whether it's the background music,
or even the lighting, or just how we have the tables arranged,
all of those small details come into place
to create these perfect memories and experiences for our guests.
I love the welcome sign as well.
Today we're in front of our Regal Eagle Smokehouse here at Epcot.
It's taken us several years to land here.
The partnership with Flavor Lab and the testing of menus,
it's a dream of a lot of the chefs and people that work here at Epcot
to have a smokehouse here.
When you work on something for years,
and you see it come finally done,
people are so excited about it, it kinda just blows your mind.
It's so near and dear to my heart
and our team's heart to see it come full circle.
It really made it special.
All the years in the history of the company,
Mickey has never had a ride-through attraction.
He's been in parades, he's been greeting guests in parks,
but this is his first ride.
- The days are just jam packed. - Yeah.
From here to opening day, every second counts.
I'd like to say, "Welcome to a typical day,"
but there is no typical day here.
Every day is different. You don't know what to expect.
These are all Imagineers, spread out throughout the upper floor.
A lot of designers,
all working on different projects for parks around the world.
Cruise ships, resorts, secret projects.
My earliest memory was being in my crib with this Disney train on the wall.
Casey Jr. was a locomotive and the rest of the cars had Disney characters,
and I remember being enamored with Mickey in one of the train cars.
Being the Imagineer creatively responsible helping come up with the story
and deliver this attraction of Mickey and Minnie's Runaway Railway,
it all comes full circle as the last major attraction
that I'll help design and deliver.
I can't think of a better cherry on the cake,
the beautiful cake that's been my career as a Walt Disney Imagineer.
It's been... This is just...
Uh, I'm getting emotional about it.
- Morning, Charita. - Hey. Good morning, Kev.
Gotta update you on a few things.
- Oh, really? - Yeah.
When I got the call that we were doing a Mickey and Minnie ride attraction,
the first thought I had was, "Okay, this is really daunting,"
because these are the icons of our company.
- Let's see if Joe's in. - Okay.
Hey, Joe.
Joe is responsible for creating a lot of the sound for our attractions.
This is Mickey and Minnie's first ride ever.
We thought it would be fun
to harken back to the heritage of the Walt Disney studio,
and we performed all the sound effects old school, the way it was done.
Specifically, Joe, I was hoping
that you could share with us the famous tritone whistle.
You're talking about the Steamboat Willie.
- The Steamboat Willie whistle. - That's the one.
We wanted to stay true to the Mickey cartoons.
We wanted to go back and use as many original props as we possibly could.
The history that I hold in my hand here is significant
because Walt bet everything
on the first synchronized Mickey cartoon in 1928 with Steamboat Willie.
It was the first sound cartoon.
But this whistle was used when Mickey pulls the rope on the steamboat.
This very whistle provided that sound.
And Joe and I had the extreme honor of working with Jimmy MacDonald
who was the voice of Mickey Mouse for 38 years.
And he was the studio sound effects wizard.
His whole concept of how he created sound effects, we continue to do that.
We walked the halls with legends in those days.
When you learned something from them, you knew it was right.
Because they learned it from Walt.
My dear friend and mentor Marty Sklar.
I always promised Marty that some time in my career,
I would help to design and develop
an attraction with an original story and an original theme song,
kind of much in the spirit of Haunted Mansion or "it's a small world"
or Pirates of the Caribbean.
And it was funny because he would run into me somewhere and say,
"Kev! Got that attraction yet?"
Marty would have loved this.
There's many things that he taught me along the way
that are also very much in the heart of this attraction.
I'm just sorry he wasn't around to see it.
- Here we go. - Here we are.
All right, so here we are in the beautiful, ornate,
exquisite lobby of the Chinese Theater.
And this begins our attraction story where we're here today to see the premiere
of Mickey and Minnie's latest cartoon short called Perfect Picnic.
Nothing can stop us now
I'll tell you how We're gonna make it happen
This is where our guests get to watch the short
which actually sets up the premise of what's going to happen in the attraction.
And have a perfect picnic
From the old school were a lot of the sound effects
that Jimmy MacDonald invented.
For our locomotive, we used the same device
that was used to create Casey Jr. in Dumbo.
A round kind of wagon wheel with syrup jars.
If you go...
Then you put all that together and you create that...
Beautiful day for a picnic.
Yep, we're off to the park.
See y'all later.
And then, this is also the place where they will magically
have the opportunity to enter into the cartoon world.
So this is Runnamuck Park.
This is the very first scene that our guests are going to experience
once they have loaded the train and have come into the park.
Walt always said that the guests in his parks were like a camera.
We're everywhere. We're everywhere around you,
designing in a 360-degree environment.
We've got situations where we have dimensionality.
We have lighting, we have projection.
We have this beautiful fountain which is another one of those scenic illusions.
That water, it is projected on an acrylic surface,
and then we have dimensional set pieces that have all blended together
to make a seamless environment that we call Runnamuck Park.
When the train cars jump the track, they have a mind of their own.
They can go anywhere.
In cartoon logic, they end up in, of all places, a cartoon carnival.
There's carnival rides going on, there's cartoon characters getting in line.
The big story point of this attraction,
Mickey and Minnie have purchased all the balloons
so they could tie them to Donald Duck's hot dogs sign.
The twister comes to life and blows Mickey and Minnie on their flying balloons
out of the scene and the train cars follow suit into the next big surprise.
We have taken technology that's available to us,
and we have integrated it in unique ways.
We've got a transparent monitor that we're using and combining it with projection.
We're composing an environment
that our guests are going to be really excited to be in.
I was glad you were in town
'cause I'm putting together a ride-through mix of the whole attraction.
And originally I was just doing it of the ride,
then I thought of putting the short in the beginning.
But then there was a hole in it because of the cast member interaction with Goofy.
And I thought, that would be totally cool to record you as the cast member.
I think that's a great idea.
Oh, hiya, folks! Wanna take a ride on the train?
Excuse me, you there.
Who, me?
Do you mind helping these good people into the cartoon
while I fix this here locomotive?
Well, not what I expected to do today, Goofy,
but I think that'd be a... Gah!
Short window, man.
See that's the thing that I was anticipating
because it's a really tight amount of time.
Let me just throw an adlib one in there
because I have a sense of the time of the window now.
Excuse me, you there.
Who, me?
Do you mind helping these good people into the cartoon
while I fix this here locomotive?
Uh, sure, Goofy. I think that would be okay.
Thanks! Be back in a jiffy! I'll pick you up...
- I like it. - Yeah, I like it, too.
Is that a good one?
I believe we're good!
- All right. You're a pro. - Another box check. All right!
It's about theater. It's about showmanship.
Don't just use technology to drive your story.
That's not gonna work.
You need to come up with the story and vision first.
Use the technology, use the invention that helps you to tell that story.
So many of the new artists, they're brilliant,
but they've come out of schools
where it's the technology that's important and it's not the story.
It takes a few old codgers like me and Kevin
to say, "You're starting in the wrong place."
And only when you can make your guests make pictures in their mind
does their level of enjoyment really come up.
When they've contributed to that story,
they're satisfied because they had a great part in it.
Because it is Mickey and Minnie, our goal has been for them to say,
"What just happened?"
Whoo!
When they're in an attraction and it's working really well,
and they're pulled into the spell of what's going on
and the magnificence of the theater, the surprises and the stuff,
all of that goes away. They're just happy.
And that's what we do, we create happiness.