Post #260164 by Cammo on Wed, Oct 11, 2006 10:31 AM

I've heard that the Dland management and designers don't like Shag very much. He has too many ideas and doesn't do exactly what they say, apparently. If he was on staff he would have been fired a long time ago.

The Disneyland designers in fact seem to have tried to copy his style (which is funny because Shag is lifting a lot of his stuff from 50's era Disneyland designers like Rolly Crump & Ward Kimball) for the 50th Anniversary items; that horrid stuff they put out with the grey-blue background colors and flat graphics of different sections of the park.

Here's my beef with the current Disneyland design staff; the 50th Anniversary items were lousy. I was hoping to get a really nice watch or at least a cool mug, but the stuff they ended up producing was dull colored and unimaginative. The 50th watch was in that dull blue again, or in dark brown on a black background; an unreadable watchface.

Why didn't they make everythjing gold colored? Why use battleship grey? What, are they crazy? Why not use the plethora of Disneyland 50's graphics to re-issue or update some new products? Why not do what Shag envisioned; a simple product for each section of the park original to 1955, and a shirt to match?

I was really hoping they'd do a watch for each land, a silver and red Tomorrowland watch, a woodsy Frontierland one with a Davy Crocket cap on the front, etc. How about a Fantasyland Matterhorn watch that plays the flute song as an alarm? You get the idea. Why don't they get the idea?

And it seems to be something you can blame on the designers themselves; I wouldn't have put my name on that stuff they were trying to sell.

Anyway, hey, the new Winnie the Pooh ride is not too bad. Finally they remembered the little kids who make the place tick tock.

And the Mickey Mouse Club watch in the shape of a TV set was really nice. A beautiful job. Everything should have that much class.