Disney Legend and former Imagineer Joe Rohde had the opportunity to talk to some Universal Epic Universe creatives and shared his notes from their presentation.
Joe Rohde Discusses Epic Universe
“Last night I was invited by the legendary Bob Rogers to his annual legends dinner,” Rohde explained on Instagram. “I arrived on time, which turned out to be very early, because most of the participants in this dinner were the creative executives responsible for Universal’s recent Epic Universe, who were busy handling a record-breaking two hour long post-presentation receiving line. Eric Parr, Jody Keller, Katy Pacitti, Steve Blum together with moderator Bob Rogers did an excellent job of describing the management theory that underlay this impressive accomplishment.”
Rohde added, “I have not yet seen the park, but I was happy to just listen to them talk about their method.”
His “directly transcribed” notes from the presentation included “a Park is first a park” — something echoed multiple times in the lead-up to Epic Universe’s opening, particularly regarding Celestial Park.
“We’ve made a conscious effort to put the park back into theme park,” Adam Rivest, executive producer for Celestial Park, said back in 2024.
Rohde called this a “very important” point and said it’s what Imagineering tried to do with Disney’s Animal Kingdom, the park he largely designed. Rohde wrote, “a Park is first a park… not a frantic highway of people rushing to and fro to try to ping off hyped up attractions.”
Here are the rest of Rohde’s notes:
*Deliberate departure from accepted canon… Like making each land a Cul de sac.
*Not based on huge mega draws… but on a whole mixture of small intimate interactions, the value of which cannot be measured using typical metrics.
*The principal that a world, imaginary or not, has levels… and this is what makes it seem real, argues against a fixation on monumental installations at the expense of detail and ambience.
*“If you have a land about dragons there better be dragons”…
*Regarding value engineering … several pointed comments around this … most importantly what exactly is value? The very rational assertion that the power to reallocate money to “engineer value” should reside in the design team.
*Regarding team structure, Talent is diffuse. Many people are multitalented and most teams want multitalented people. So a truly integrated team messes with the silos by which we measure performance. Customize the treatment of each person … there is no such thing as a generic person, nor a generic method of design.
*Refuse to stay in the boxes that HR wants you to.
*Our (executive) job is not to say no. Our job is to say How?
At the end he alluded to the next generation of theme park designers, writing, “The audience was full of young people ready to listen. Someday they will be ready to act. And yesterday they got plenty of good advice.”
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