In Disney Mold : Firm Takes Animation to Museums

After overseeing the design of computer systems for the Space Mountain and Big Thunder rides at Disneyland, the overhaul of the Matterhorn ride and construction of an animated show at Tokyo Disneyland, what’s left for 34-year-old Paul Reedy?

Well, there’s Ruby Mountain Jack.

Reedy spent 13 years working for Walt Disney Productions. Then in 1983 he formed his own company, Reedy Productions of Van Nuys, which specializes in mechanical animation and museum exhibits.

Ruby Mountain Jack, the company’s latest project, is to be a life-sized, animated miner who will appear on a theater stage in Elko, Nev., and tell the history of the area. Reedy Productions has designed and written the show for the Northeastern Nevada Museum, which is trying to raise $380,000 to build the project, a museum official said.

Reedy is hoping for a boom in museum exhibits such as craggy, bearded Ruby Mountain Jack, combining education and entertainment.

Audience Participation

“Rather than looking through a glass case at something and reading about it, we want people to be able to participate in some way,” Reedy said. “We want to create excitement. The education gets through, but you don’t realize it so much.”

The hopes are shared by five other former Disney employees in the firm, including his brother, Jim. The company, which employs 11 artists, engineers, carpenters and computer specialists, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Wilkes-Barre, Pa.-based Jewelcor Inc., which sells merchandise through catalogue showrooms.

The firm’s venture into what Reedy calls “close encounters” museum exhibition began about a year ago when the demand for an earlier product--animated character shows for a restaurant chain--rapidly declined.

“That industry just fell apart,” Reedy said.

Today, Reedy’s crew, mostly men in their early 30s, works in an 18,000-square-foot warehouse near Van Nuys Airport.

Their projects include a huge mechanical music box with a computer-run, animated orchestra on a rotating stage. Reedy Productions is building the orchestration for a history museum in Baltimore. The company also has created a two-foot talking robot that can wield a shovel at a ground breaking or solicit money at a fund-raiser.

Several museum curators said they think Reedy’s decision to concentrate his marketing effort on museums is a prudent move because traditional museums, facing competing forms of entertainment, are scrambling to become more interesting.

“Museums are going to have to be different to attract people,” Howard Hickson, director of the Northeastern Nevada Museum, said.

“There will always be a natural desire to look at antiques and artifacts, but people don’t learn much from that. Museums should step lightly, at least, into the entertainment field and maybe someday even get a stronger foothold.”

J. Rounds, administrator of the Museum of Science and Industry at Los Angeles’ Exposition Park, said museums must help visitors overcome their fears of subjects that seem “forbidding, unapproachable and threatening.”

The answer, Rounds said, is to make exhibits fun rather than merely informative. To that end, the Museum of Science and Industry has developed 18 “interactive” exhibits--all of which encourage hands-on participation by visitors, Rounds said. The exhibits were unveiled just before the 1984 Olympic Games.

“We wanted to create an atmosphere that is inviting and non-threatening, an atmosphere in which people feel free to experiment with science and technology and have a positive experience of mastery over the technology,” Rounds said. “In the few hours most people spend at the museum, we can’t expect to convey a great deal of factual knowledge, but we can get them over their fear of the subject.”

Many of the exhibits in the museum’s walk-through communications wing were designed by Michael Jurdan of Communication Arts of North Hollywood and built by Reedy Productions. Reedy charged $300,000 to construct the exhibits, sponsored by several telecommunications firms.

Visitors can step into the supposed future world of telecommunications, paying bills and shopping from home by using computers attached to telephones.

Another section demonstrates the latest ideas in home security. Visitors to a small house can simulate a fire or a burglary, complete with an animated bandit.

“It’s been well documented by research at traditional museums that visitors suffer from mental fatigue very quickly . . . if they are just reading text and looking at objects, but not doing anything,” Rounds said. “We try to keep them going for longer periods of time by providing pacing.”

Another Reedy project is in the elephant section of the San Diego Wild Animal Park.

According to Terry Winnick, general manager of the San Diego Zoo, which operates the animal park, the exhibit helps visitors understand “how we take care of animals, why there are zoos, what the plight is of endangered animals, what it takes to keep elephants healthy and how they breed.”

Not all of the exhibit involves fancy technology. One exhibit, designed to show how strong elephants are, consists of a log in a stream attached to a rope through a pulley. Visitors can match their strength against that of the elephant. “The elephant can lift this, can you?” a sign asks.

Paul Reedy’s experience with Disney was in electronics and computers. His brother, Jim, spent 11 years designing special effects for Disney motion pictures and stage sets for animated shows at Disneyland and the Epcot Center at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla.

When the work slowed at Disney with the end of the Tokyo project, the brothers decided to go into business together.

Reedy Productions was founded to build animated character shows for another division of Jewelcor, Circus Playhouse Inc., which owns and franchises family restaurants throughout the country. The shows feature an eight-member animal band.

Circus Playhouse has ceased opening new entertainment centers in its American restaurants but is exploring European and Middle Eastern markets.

Reedy Productions lost money during 1983, its first year of operation, but made a profit in 1984, when museum contracts began to come through, officials said. They would not reveal figures.