Don Iwerks, the Imagineer who built the tech behind the tech, dies at 96
Disney Legend Don Iwerks died on July 9 at age 96. He isn't a household name the way his father Ub Iwerks is — Ub co-created Mickey Mouse and later became Walt's in-house special-effects pioneer — but Don's own career quietly shaped a lot of what makes modern Disney attractions work, including the plumbing underneath today's animatronic showpieces.
He started at Disney in 1950 as a lab technician in the special photographic processes department. From there he helped develop the 360-degree Circle-Vision camera system, first used in Circarama U.S.A. when Disneyland opened in 1955, and later built the projection system for Star Tours, the motion-simulator attraction that's still running in some form at multiple parks today. After 35 years at Disney he started his own company, Iwerks Entertainment, in 1986; it became SimEx-Iwerks in 2001 and is still building immersive cinema systems.
Worth flagging for anyone doing animatronics work: the current wave of front-projected animatronic faces — the same category of tech behind Disneyland's new transforming pirate — is a direct descendant of the projection-mapping problems Iwerks spent his career solving. Josh D'Amaro, Disney's CEO, said Iwerks "embodied that rare combination of heart, ingenuity, and passion that has always defined Disney." Iwerks himself put it more plainly in an earlier interview: "There was a 'can-do' attitude I learned from Walt and my father. If you're doing a really first-class job, you don't need to worry about the money. It will come."
Carousel of Progress overhaul: the outside fabrication shops are now on the permits
Carousel of Progress closed for its ground-up rebuild on July 6, and the construction paperwork is starting to show who's actually going to build it. Walt Disney Imagineering has filed a Notice of Commencement naming Mecca Productions as the lead outside partner — a design-fabrication-install shop whose recent Disney credits include Rock 'n' Roller Coaster Starring The Muppets and the Toy Story Land snack kiosk, with the upcoming Indiana Jones and Encanto attractions at Animal Kingdom already on their books.
Additional permits list Icarus Exhibits and ThemeWorks for set installation and Southeastern Construction and Maintenance for structural steel. It's a useful reminder of how much of a project like this — new scenes, a new Audio-Animatronics figure of Walt himself to open the show, a timeline pushed forward toward a "distant future" finale — actually runs through specialist outside shops rather than staying entirely in-house at Imagineering. The attraction isn't expected back until sometime in 2027.