BEHIND THE ATTRACTION Director on Diving into the ‘Fun Nuggets’ Behind the Disney Parks’ Biggest Attractions

Whether you are a Disney parks regular or are a more casual fan, the new Disney+ docuseries BEHIND THE ATTRACTION aims to take viewers behind the scenes to learn the history of some of the most iconic elements of the park.

“What we try to do is…really get into the the fun,” director Brian Volk-Weiss told reporters. “We went away a little bit from the history and the protocols of building these attractions and just really went for these fun nuggets that either helped build the pop culture that we live in now or a part of what’s coming that is allowing Disney to continue to have such a big voice in the culture.”

But picking out the subject of the first ten episodes—five of which are streaming now, including installments on Haunted Mansion, Star Tours, and Space Mountain—was not exactly an easy feat.

“We started with a list that, I exaggerate not, was like…over one hundred [attractions],” Volk-Weiss admitted. After it was suggested they trim the list, “we still submitted a list of 30. The good news to get it down fast was we decided very early on not to do any episodes about attractions that don’t exist anymore. So otherwise it would have been 10 episodes about Mission to Mars. So that that was shot down very aggressively.”

“Once we made that decision, what we tried to do was blend,” he continued. “It was like a blending of the iconic attractions where like if we didn’t do a Small World, people would be [confused]. But then we also tried to do episodes where it’s like you may have expected this—knock on wood, God willing—to have come up in season 8.”

And while some may think they know the parks inside and out, “attractions are like icebergs,” Volk-Weiss said. “The public, you’re only seeing maybe two percent of the attraction. If people knew the infrastructure that they don’t see that make these attractions work, they’d be blown away. So that was a big part of what we were trying to do.”

BEHIND THE ATTRACTION, Now Streaming, Disney+

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