ENGINEERING MAGIC
// By Calandra Weaver
When most children visit a Disney theme park, they might dream of becoming Peter Pan or Cinderella when they grow up.
But not Morgan McDowell (ECE’20). When McDowell visited Disney World with her family, she didn’t dream of becoming a character. She dreamed of creating the rides.
Fast forward to adulthood, and McDowell is now a software developer at Walt Disney Imagineering, the division of the Walt Disney Company responsible for the creation, design, and construction of the Disney parks and attractions.
“All of my career decisions were geared toward becoming a Disney Imagineer.”
McDowell made her first small steps toward this career goal by pursuing software engineering internships with the Walt Disney Company and Google during college. She became a software engineer at Google after graduating, then made the move to Disney Imagineering a couple of years later.
McDowell, who has been an Imagineer for more than two years now, recently completed working on her first attraction project—Tiana’s Bayou Adventure in Walt Disney World.
In 2020, Disney announced that the new ride would be themed after The Princess and the Frog. Tiana’s Bayou Adventure replaces Splash Mountain, a popular log ride, which opened in California’s Disneyland in 1989 and Florida’s Disney World in 1992. Splash Mountain was gutted, but the Imagineers kept the iconic 52.5-foot drop.
“Splash Mountain was a staple for many guests,” McDowell says. “It’s an honor to work on Tiana’s attraction since it will now define a lot of families’ trips to Disney World.”
The attraction follows a story that takes place after the narrative depicted in the film version of The Princess and the Frog. Guests travel down the bayou with Tiana and her talking alligator friend, Louis. The pair run into other beloved characters and, as one might expect, there is a lot of singing and dancing throughout the journey!
Someone had to orchestrate this adventure, and that’s where McDowell and other Imagineers came into play.
McDowell began working on the project during the final six months of ride construction to help install software for the show elements—all of the entertaining, visual components that make the story immersive for guests. Her work included audio-animatronic figures, lilies that light up in the water, and fireflies that blink on and off. She also had to ensure that the show elements would shut down in case of a fire alarm.
Tiana’s Bayou Adventure includes many highly advanced animatronics—key parts of the experience that have come a long way since Walt Disney himself first became fascinated with them.
In the 1940s, Disney had his Imagineers deconstruct and examine a small mechanical bird he found at an antique shop in New Orleans. This eventually led to the creation of the Enchanted Tiki Room, which opened in Disneyland in 1963 and featured more than 200 animatronic birds, flowers, and tiki statues.
Disney animatronics have undergone dramatic improvements in the past several decades, including the introduction of compliance technology, which allows for more fluid movements. In 2019, Imagineers began using technology that enhanced speed, range, and overall performance.
Tiana’s Bayou Adventure has built upon this technology. Many different Imagineers—from programmers and animators to costumer designers and illusion makers—came together to develop and execute believable three-dimensional replications of the beloved Princess and the Frog characters.
McDowell isn’t the only Purdue Imagineer who took part in this collaboration.
Asa Cutler (ECE’23) is also living out his childhood dream of working as an associate control software developer for Disney Imagineering. He and McDowell both worked on Tiana’s Bayou Adventure—but in different locations and in slightly different roles. Cutler wrote the software for the animatronics’ control systems for the Tiana attraction at Disneyland.
“It’s really exciting to see what we’ve built,” Cutler says. “I love seeing the audio animatronics move and play their show for the first time.”
Cutler’s role was to program the figures to align with the creative vision, which began with studying the characters’ movements in the film. Louis the alligator is one of the largest animatronics the Imagineers created, so it took a lot of trial and error to get his body to bounce in just the right way as he moves along with the music.
All of the animatronics move with incredibly smooth, lifelike motions, proving how much Imagineering technology has progressed since the Enchanted Tiki Room.
“It’s very unique to be able to work on Disney audio animatronics,” Cutler says. “It’s rewarding to know that what I worked on will be seen by millions of people—for decades to come!”
McDowell and Cutler share feelings of gratification in their work, even after stressful days.
Sometimes, with a coffee in hand, McDowell walks down Main Street, U.S.A.—the iconic boulevard just past the entrance of Disney World’s Magic Kingdom Park—observing the happy people on vacation and thinking, This is really cool.
“I play a part in making these happy memories—the same memories I experienced when I visited Disney World as a kid with my family. What we do is awesome. We make magic. There’s no other job like this in the world.”
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