March 2, 2006

More on Disney’s Yeti

The St. Paul Pioneer Press featured an article about Disney’s newest attraction. The Disney designers made several trips to Nepal to get the details to make the attraction realistic. Film crews accompanied them and shot footage for a Travel Channel show that will premier in April.

Several research trips from western China to Nepal helped Disney designers create the 6.2-acre attraction, including their rendition of a Himalayan village called "Serka Zong" that leads visitors up to the ride.

The village includes a tourism booking office, Tashi’s General Store and Bar, and an old warehouse refashioned as a yeti museum — all built with taut attention to the architecture and feel of a real east Asian mountain town.

It took jets, helicopters and donkeys to deliver Disney’s creative team past slippery, narrow roads and to a 1,000-year-old monastery to study the Himalayan culture. The team stayed there three days and gathered information about local beliefs in the yeti.

"Our story was really about the culture and the people, the areas where there is human habitation," said Joe Rohde, executive designer and vice president with Walt Disney Imagineering, and a member of the expeditions.

Disney based its design for the yeti on golden monkeys in the Qinling mountains — cold-weather primates with blue faces and fiery orange fur.

Cryptomundo reader TJ commented earlier "I think the design team used the chinese golden snub-nosed monkey (Pygathrix roxellana) as a point of reference for the Yeti." Looks like TJ was correctomundo.

Park researchers were accompanied by Conservation International and film crews from Discovery Networks, whose Travel Channel will premiere a chronicle of the trip called "Expedition Everest: Journey to Sacred Lands" the week of April 9.

Filed under Abominable Snowman, Bigfoot, Bigfoot Report, Cryptotourism, Cryptozoology, Expedition Reports, Folklore, Media Appearances, Pop Culture, Sasquatch, Television, Yeti