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Just
beyond James Maharg's back yard in Gladstone, a work crew has
secretly been picking apart an extraterrestrial flying machine
and packing it into crates bound for Florida.It's yellow and red
and it looks, in the words of one witness, "like something
out of Jules Verne." It looms taller than most of the
houses and businesses in the neighborhood. And it's news to
Maharg and his neighbors. They found out just last week that
Walt Disney World had hired a Gladstone company for the theme
park's biggest facelift in 20 years. It is one of at least three
area businesses helping on the project.
"I didn't notice a thing," said
the astonished Maharg, a retired meatcutter who
lives on Northeast 76th
Street. "But this is a quiet neighborhood - people tend to
mind their own business here."
That suits Disney's park
designers just fine - as it does the companies they hired to
build futuristic contraptions for a revamped Tomorrowland in
Disney's Magic Kingdom.
For them the project is
top secret.
Disney says it never discusses the
details of projects it assigns to other companies. And it says
the companies can lose those contracts by talking about them.
"We can't
comment," said Allen Supplee, the project manager at A.
Zahner Sheet Metal Co., the general contractor. Neither can the
other area companies, in
cluding Goens Brothers Painting Inc., on whose property the
spaceage creations were assembled.
But an artist who
constructed neon lights for the contraptions described in
blueprints as "biomes" - could hardly control his
excitement.
"They were lit up a few nights
ago," said Greg Garnett, a neon specialist at KC Sign
Express Inc. in Overland Park. "They looked like
spaceships."
Garnett isn't sure what a biome is. But it's part of what Disney
engineers envision as an "alien landscape," he said.
Disney engineers told Garnett they wanted his lighting to
provide an eerie effect. "Remember growing up in the '50s?
Remember all that sci-fi stuff? This is it," said Garnett.
"This is real Buck Rogers-style, real futuristic and
overblown."
Continued
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