You should watch the featurette about the “research” for Everest
It was a cortège of about 50 people slogging through the Khartoum airport
Things didn’t go the way you’re making them out to have gone. Projects became jobs programs instead of capital construction…which isn’t “the way”
I think the thing with Rhode is, you can't expect him to be the driving force behind every "great" project.
For a park like AK where there
is was a strong focus on an authentic environment emulating real places that exist in the world that most people will never see in person, his work is like that of someone creating an experiential documentary.
We'll never visit the real places or feel what it's like to be there so he does his best to soak it all up and give you as close to what you're missing as he can - not just surface-level but really as close to what you'll never get to see or hear or touch in person as he can.
That would probably be excellent for World Showcase or whatever the
f#$% we're supposed to call that, now.
It worked for Pandora because James Cameron in his movies treated that moon like it was a real place that exists that most of us will never get to visit, too.
Frankly, Cameron puts more work into making that place real than he does the actual stories and dialog happening in it when he makes these movies.
Star Wars?
Joe probably could have done something pretty spectacular that would have really pleased the people that treat that lore like gospel, too. I'm sure it would have felt a lot less like a back-lot with disjointed static set pieces once completed, anyway.
But you can't have a guy like that who is slow and expensive and wants to become one with the source material before breaking ground on a project in charge of it
all.
You need other people who can also do great work who are faster and know how to do more with fewer resources to do things, too.
Joe Rohde was basically like the James Cameron of Imagineers.
James' stuff brings in boatloads of money and gets tons of attention but it takes him ten years to make a movie and the budgets of his last three films were enough to end a lot of careers if they didn't do mind-bogglingly well.
If the industry was just people like him, every theater chain and most of Hollywood would have gone bankrupt decades ago.
You need people that can do their own kind of great work on shorter timelines with controlled budgets. Maybe their stuff isn't as grand in the end but it can still be amazing and enjoyable and leave an impression.
Those are the people you want handling Marvel and MK like-stuff and filling in the spaces between the icons someone like Joe births.
You need people that can take a Chester and Hester budget and end up with something that... isn't Chester and Hester - someone like the Robert Rodriguez of Imagineering and probably three or four of them for every James Cameron type; people who know how to pick out appealing floor tile and complementary colors but don't act like they're doing God's work trying to impersonate Joe while being the third or fourth person to redesign an area that in a decade or two will probably be repainted and re-tiled yet again with something different.
To wrap up my Ted Talk, I don't think Joe is the savior a lot of people are acting like he would be. I think losing him was bad but I think he became the only strong creative face of Imagineering left by the time of his departure and that was
also bad.
I certainly wouldn't mind seeing him come back but it's not like that's going to solve all the problems. Imagineering was already a huge mess long before he left and I think his style of doing things becoming sort of the
only way, unless they were putting together complete throwaway crap intentionally in some cases*, was part of that problem.
*Because they don't know how to do fast-and-good so they'd settle for kind-of-fast and mediocre when they needed something more quickly.
