Stout on China

ARCUDI: I read something in your biography, something else I didn't know and something else I want to hear about. You're designing a dinosaur museum in Zigong, China?

STOUT: Three of the things I've always wanted to design are natural history museums, zoos and public aquariums. I would love to take what I learned at Walt Disney Imagineering and apply it to designing other places. Obviously there are exceptions, but for the most part natural history museums still have 19th century displays. Advances in showmanship in other arenas haven't been taken into account. Or they try to appear contemporary by throwing high tech solutions at show problems that don't need them. They haven't really used their collections to dramatically convey knowledge or information or educate the public; I think they could. I think the time is ripe to do that. Zoos are the same. The biggest advance in zoos is that they no longer just display all of the animals in cages but they group them according to continent. That and more realistic habitats are about all that's been done conceptually in the last hundred years. I'd love to go way beyond that with both zoos and natural history museums and involve the public in many more ways. When I say this, paleontologists and museum people usually have an initial panic attack; they think I want to turn their museums into a Disney theme park, which is not what I want to do at all. I want to take the same approach to design that Walt Disney initially took when designing Disneyland. In the early 1950's Walt took his kids to an amusement park. He was appalled at how crummy the place was, how filthy it was, how the rides were all rusty and in disrepair and how the people running the park didn't seem to have any concern about a public image or the people attending the park. There was a sleazy carnie mentality to the running of the place. Walt took everything he felt was wrong about that experience and got rid of it, cleaned it up, changed it and came up with Disneyland. I would like to do the same thing with natural history museums and zoos in that I would take everything, without sacrificing any of the good science and any of the knowledge -- in fact enhancing both the good science and the conveyance of that knowledge -- and apply contemporary show thinking and presentation to the redesigns of those places making them much more exciting and dynamic.

ARCUDI: So why start in China?

STOUT: They're the ones who offered me the job!

ARCUDI: How did that come about? Were the Chinese familiar with your work in some way?

STOUT: My Walt Disney Imagineering stint was an "learn-while-you-learn" situation. I was there for two years straight and learned an enormous amount about designing themed entertainment. When I left them I immediately went to Universal and did the same thing for them. I've been bouncing back and forth between Universal, Disney, and a company called Landmark Entertainment Group, another major player in themed entertainment design, ever since I worked for Disney. I've done a lot of work for the Landmark Entertainment Group. Landmark's president was Gary Goddard, the director of "Masters of the Universe" for which I was the production designer; so Gary and I go way back. Landmark gets most of the non-Disney, non-Universal themed entertainment jobs in the industry, designing whole theme parks themselves and also designing stuff for Universal and Disney as well, stuff like the "Terminator 3-D" show. Landmark hired me to design a Wizard of Oz theme park for Kansas. The Zigong, China officials were aware of Landmark's work so they were approached to do the Zigong Dinosaur Museum project. As soon as Landmark heard "dinosaur" they hired me.

ARCUDI: So sometimes it pays to be pigeonholed.

STOUT: Yes indeed.

[To read the full version of this interview, please see The Comics Journal Winter 2003 Special Edition.]

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