A Creature
Named Elee

I wanted to be an Imagineer from the time I was nine years old. I had a pretty specific picture of what that meant: a group of creative people dreaming up something nobody had done before, then figuring out how to make it real.

After years of persistence, I got into Ride Engineering, first briefly in 2008 and then again when a former colleague helped me return as a contractor. The reality was a little different from what I’d pictured as a kid. Most of the dreaming belonged to the Creative department. My job was to engineer their vision.

There was plenty of interesting technical work, but it wasn’t quite what I’d waited all those years to do.

Then I got onto a small R&D project. For the first time, the engineering and the dreaming were happening in the same room, with everyone contributing. This was it. This was what I’d wanted to do since I was a kid.

We were developing a creature for the new "Star Wars land." We gave her the name Elee. The idea was for an elephant-sized, four-legged beast to move freely through the land with guests riding on her back.

It was exactly the kind of project I wanted: an experience that didn’t exist yet, and a small multidisciplinary team figuring out how to make it exist.

How do you make something that enormous feel like a living creature, while carrying real people through a busy theme park? It was a wonderfully unusual challenge. I was on the engineering side, but we were all part of creating the experience together.

One of the engineers who reviewed our work had been at Imagineering for more than twenty years. He was something of a legend in the department. He was imposing, demanding, and had exceptionally high standards. If you were going to build something for a ride, you needed his approval.

During one of my design reviews, he challenged me to rethink a problem that had been around for a long time.

His words were: “You need to solve this.”

It wasn’t an instruction on a project schedule. I understood it more as an aspirational challenge, almost something to keep in the back of my mind. But I took it seriously.

I spent the next few weeks working through concepts. Some ideas went nowhere. Others were interesting but didn’t quite do what I wanted. Eventually I arrived at an approach that felt different enough to be worth sharing.

When I brought it back to him, he started asking questions. He challenged parts of it. And then he said something I still remember:

“How has no one thought of this before?”

Almost immediately he added: “Submit an invention disclosure today!”

I did. The experience of being on that team, wrestling with the challenge, and having a new idea recognized was exactly the sort of creative engineering I’d wanted to do.

For all the work we were doing, Elee never became a finished attraction.

Disney executives decided the project cost was too high for the available budget. That was it. We had developed a lot, and the technical work was exciting, but the project wasn’t going forward.

I was still a contractor at the time. When the project ended, I was looking at losing my job, too.

Through relationships I’d built at Imagineering, I found an open position in Show Mechanical. I applied, interviewed, and got hired. I went on to work on animatronic figures and show equipment and, eventually, became a "blue-badge" bona-fide employee.

I’m proud of that work. But if you ask me when I had the most fun at Imagineering, it was still R&D. Elee was the kind of creative engineering work I’d dreamed about.

The strange thing about Elee is that, even though the attraction never opened, I still think of it as one of the defining experiences of my engineering career.

I went on to work on attractions that guests actually got to see. I helped lead engineering work on some remarkable figures and shows. There were plenty of things to be proud of.

But the R&D team was where I finally got to do what I’d imagined doing since I was nine: come up with something together that didn’t exist, and try to make it real.

Elee never carried a guest, but I got to design and invent vehicles and systems that eventually would.