When a guest walks into Radiator Springs and down Route 66 they enter the world of that movie. It’s exponential growth in the immersive experience. Tony was asked what’s next, what other environments, what other Disney films? How does Imagineering continue that progression forward?
Baxter responded, “You know there’s a great thing that’s happened in Radiator Springs. It’s called Lots Of Money. And that does allow you to create something that you couldn’t afford for the 17 million dollars. But on the other side of the coin, emotion can engage you even more strongly than having to build physical things and so for me, I look at being able to take people out of the way the real world functions and put them in something you couldn’t dare to do or couldn’t conceive of doing unless you were a very skilled person.”
“I think that’s the joy of going on Soarin’ (Over California). Most of us would be comfortable hang gliding over all of the scenes you see in there. But when I took my 95-year-old professor from college on it, she looked at me and she was almost in tears. I don’t know how your eyes function when you’re 95, but she’s very physical and she said, ‘I never dreamed at my stage in life that I would be put into a situation like that,’ and she said, ‘I now feel as though I now know what it would be like to soar over the world in that way.’
“I’ve got a thing going right now that allows you to do something, I better be careful here — they’ll kill me, it allows you to do something competitively, not with video games and getting a score and all that. I think that’s a whole world thing, it’s not a theme park thing in the end. What I’m working on allows you with other guests to compete with one another to get somewhere ahead of them. I don’t think we’ve ever provided that before. So that excites me. It’s not any one thing, it’s not necessarily more expensive, it’s just allowing you to deliver something that we can’t get on our own devices.”
