Disney Imagineer and author Bruce Gordon died 6 November 2007. Born in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, on 18 April 1951, he grew up in California. He first visited Disneyland shortly after it opened in 1955, and was a fan and Disney collector ever since.
Gordon began working at Walt Disney Imagineering (WDI) as a model designer in 1980, and went on to bigger and better things in the organization. He helped create, and was credited as “show producer” of, Splash Mountain in 1989. He was also the show producer for the 1998 renovation of Tomorrowland, Tarzan’s Treehouse in 1999, and the Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh in 2003. His final project was the Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage, and he left WDI in 2005.
Tony Baxter, creative vice president at WDI, met Gordon in the early 1980s when the latter was constructing props and sets for Epcot’s “Journey Into Imagination.” Baxter told the Los Angeles Times: “I recognized this guy was really special because he not only knew how to do it, but he understood the magic and the emotion of what we were trying to create. We instantly became partners, because I’m an idea person and Bruce was someone who could make ideas real.”
After leaving WDI, Gordon worked on the Walt Disney Family Museum, which will be opening in San Francisco soon. “When we conceived the idea of the museum, Bruce was at the top of our list of people we wished to engage to work with us,” Walt Disney’s daughter Diane Disney Miller said in a statement. “Bruce had a deep understanding and appreciation of my father as a man, not simply a brand or icon.”
Gordon also wrote several books. The first, co-written with fellow Imagineer David Mumford, was Disneyland: The Nickel Tour, a 368-page history of Disneyland told through postcards of the park. After finishing the book in 1990, they realized it was too big and expensive to print for any standard publishing house. They eventually self-published the book, borrowing $100,000 to print 3,000 copies, which they sold at $75 each. They sold out of two printings of what is now “widely regarded as the most authoritative book about the Magic Kingdom.” Some of Gordon’s other books include A Brush with Disney and the forthcoming Walt Disney World: Then, Now, and Forever.
He is survived by his father, Walter E. Gordon, and his sister, Nancy M. Gordon.