00:00Mission to Mars was one of the original opening day attractions at the Magic Kingdom.
00:09Then we did the alien encounter attraction.
00:13A group of imagineers had worked really, really long and hard and tirelessly to take the idea
00:19of binaural sound and craft an attraction from that.
00:25This tech, they were demonstrating their technology on how to teleport things from
00:29space to earth.
00:30And of course, the technology didn't quite work, and so this monster was teleported in,
00:36broke out of the case, and just wreaked havoc.
00:38And it was actually pretty scary.
00:40And if getting close to you in the dark, violating your space enough, then physically touching
00:46you is.
00:47So when the creature was flying around the room, what adds a layer of reality, not only
00:52do you hear its wings flapping as it goes over you, but you can feel the wind that comes
00:57from that flap of the wings.
00:59You hear this horrible alien come right up behind and breathe on you.
01:04Your imagination puts all that together when you're in the dark.
01:07With the Magic Kingdom being more of a family audience and wanting less scary, maybe a little
01:12bit more humorous, it came time to rethink what that space could be.
01:17Fortunately for us, what film came out and became very popular was Lilo and Stitch.
01:22It seemed like it would be a lot of fun to work with the four-armed character, and clearly
01:26his personality at the beginning of Lilo and Stitch was this total wild, little crazy alien.
01:32We liked that.
01:33We said, that could be a lot of fun to have that little wild, crazy little alien running
01:37around in the room instead of this big, huge, nasty alien, and still have a lot of fun with
01:42this manoral system and so forth.
01:44So an attraction in Tomorrowland that started as Mission to Mars, then became Alien Encounter,
01:49and then finally became Stitch's Great Escape.
01:51We really felt that when Stitch came out, he was a character that belonged in the Magic
01:55Kingdom, and that's why we switched over there.
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