CineFantastique
2004 DEC
Vol. 36 No.1

Captains Treasures

By Jeff Bond

If you’re a fan of Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, you’d better prepare your fingers for March 1, 2004 — because you’re going to do a lot of dialing or typing that day. The Disney catalog and DisneyStore.com will be putting a handful of amazing collectibles from the film on sale simultaneously to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Leagues, and you can expect many of these limited editions to sell out rapidly.

Leagues fans have had a tough life for the past half-century. While the Disney film’s stunning art direction and unforgettable submarine design by Harper Goff have long been some of the most iconic images in cinema, very little licensed merchandise from the film has ever been released. Kevin Kidney, Creative Manager for Art and Collectibles at the Disney catalog and a longtime fan of the film, saw the film’s 50th anniversary as an opportunity to redress that situation. “The 50th just seemed too good to miss,” he points out. “Plus I knew the DVD would be out and there would be a lot of refreshed history that people would have access to and that people would have fresher in their minds.”

Kidney, Associate Merchandise Manager Noka Aldoroty, and Associate Design Manager Jody Daily brainstormed with artists to come up with a line of slavishly authentic collectibles that would satisfy even the most rabid Nemophile.

The centerpiece of the project is a 22 1/4” illuminated replica of the Nautilus, Captain Nemo’s shark-like Victorian submarine. To create the most accurate possible rendition of the submersible Kidney turned to Rich Allsmiller and William Babington, two longtime authorities on the Nautilus who had inherited much of their artwork and research from Disney Imagineer and Leagues champion Tom Scherman. Allsmiller reproduced the sub’s intricate rivet details by taking impressions — plate by plate — from the original 11-foot metal Nautilus miniature now on display at the Walt Disney World Resort in Florida, a process that took him over five years to complete. William Babington then scanned the resulting patterns onto a computer and used a laser cutter to reproduce the rivets on a 3-D prototype. To fully recreate viewers’ familiar image of the Nautilus, details from the body of the 11-foot miniature were combined with those of the full-size exterior sets of the ship’s wheelhouse and deck.

“Rich Allsmiller is the one who said that it needed to be done that way,” Kidney notes, “because everyone is familiar with that upper deck and as cool as the 11-foot miniature is, it’s only meant to be seen in these specific scenes and the builders never thought that it would be so studied and picked apart the way it has been.”

Allsmiller, a former Lockheed employee who worked on the Stealth fighter, points out that many attempts to reproduce the Nautilus over the years were based on original Disney blueprints that didn’t reflect the final onscreen design of the sub. “The blueprints were at best a guide for the 11-foot and 22-foot models, and there were numerous changes made to the model as it was being constructed,” he says. “Fred Stoos did the final drawings; he was a big fan of Civil War ironclads — like the Monitor and the Merrimac — and elements of those crept in when he drew up the final design.”

Over the years, Allsmiller’s research has corrected the discrepancies between the blueprints and the final version of the sub — prep work that helped make the upcoming Nautilus replica more accurate.

Also included in the 50th anniversary collection will be a 5 1/2” tall music box replica of Nemo’s pipe organ sculpted by Kidney and Vladimir Petrov, and several 1/6-scale metal replicas of the stylized diving helmets from the film, the perfect size to mount on a G.I. Joe. There’s also an elaborate version of a snowglobe, 20,000 Leagues style: “We wanted to do something that looked grand, so Jody Daily designed a mechanical diorama water globe that has a little motor inside,” Kidney says. “It’s like a glass globe but you look into a peephole that houses a mechanism and some dark, tinted, murky water, and when you turn the mechanism a motor pushes a giant squid up against the glass so he seems to move out of the gloom into the light.”

Decorative pins and stained-glass items will round out the collection, but Leagues fans will have to act fast. “It all comes out March 1, 2004 [and will only be available through the Disney catalog and Disneystore.com],” Kidney explains. The League collectibles can’t be preordered and they’re limited to runs of between 1,000 and 1,500, so the night of February 29 looks to be a sleepless one for anyone who covets their own Nautilus.