Post #105402 by pariartspaul on Sat, Jul 31, 2004 11:23 AM

Great pictures! Brings back memories, gosh, twenty something years ago I was working at Imagineering and we did the new tiki room for the brand new Tokyo Disneyland, and we had a small crew feathering and painting up the birds and the perches, etc. What fun it was. My favorites were the girl birds on the birdmobile because they had lipstick and turquoise eyeshadow, really funny. And the feathers on the top knots were tricky, you had to take scissors and crimp them to get just the right curve to them. And the toucan beaks were fun to paint because they had really bright color blends on them. We had a great artist from Disneyland at the time, Cindy Bothner come up and give us all feathering lessons! There was quite a strict procedure to it, every feather had a certain place. They were mostly dyed turkey feathers.
I used to visit with Harriet Burns in the model shop from time to time and she created the art techniques for the birds in the original show, and she used to tell me stories about working with Walt Disney and how interested he was in all the details. Boy did she have the stories!
But I remember quite a few if not all of the real originals from DL were pulled and rebuilt at the same time. The birds from the original show had hand-laid fiberglass bodies, (they were in pretty bad shape at the time, brittle and cracking) and the new ones had new 'kydex' bodies, a vacuum-formed plastic material that they've used ever since.
I've always loved the tiki room. I hope they keep it forever.

[ Edited by: pariartspaul on 2004-07-31 11:25 ]

[ Edited by: pariartspaul on 2004-07-31 11:26 ]