Remember the whole #DisneyAtHome thing fans were doing, like, 10 years ago when the pandemic started? (Wait, it's just been five months? Fooled me.)
Walt Disney Imagineering's Joe Rohde and his family just made their own video from their Southern California home, but it's not an attraction recreation. Perhaps fitting from the industry's professor of theme park design, Rohde and his family are offering an insider's view of some of the details to be found within Disney's Animal Kingdom - 2,500 miles away.
Disney just posted the first of what Rohde said will be a five-part video series about design at Disney’s Animal Kingdom, for which Rohde was the creative director. And he's given it a perfectly punny title for something produced by his family while they're stuck at home: "The Rohdes, Less Traveled."
"The challenge is to work with what we have, therefore limited only to the photographs and video clips that I have on my own laptop and snapshots that I found in a box in my studio, plus settings we’ve improvised in our house and yard," Rohde said.
That challenge didn't even slow him down. The first installment looks at hand-carved wooden windows that Walt Disney World guests will find throughout the Anandapur section of the park. To illustrate, he shows a Nepalese window that he picked up at the Rose Bowl Flea Market in Pasadena. (Clearly, I overlooked that on my flea market visits.)
Watching the video should give any theme park fans a deeper appreciation for the detail to be found on their next visit to Disney - whenever that might be.
Rohde's been busy on social media during this downturn across the industry. In case you missed it, check out our recap of Joe Rohde's amazing history lesson on theme park design - a 37-part series he posted to Instagram earlier this year.
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