Hello friends, I hope that you are doing well. Today I’d like to share some illustrations that I created for my wife’s articles. If you’re familiar with this blog then you might remember that my wife is a theme park historian. We co-host the Pink Monorail podcast on the Jim Hill Podcast Network, as well as on YouTube. She was a teacher of theme park history, and had also written articles on various sites for decades. She mainly posted on
MiceChat.com yet there were some changes with that site, as well as the other theme park sites in the past few years.
A handful of litigious people had been going after any theme park website. The claim was that they were using copyright images without permission. That would normally be understandable, however these people had also been going after sites for using any pictures taken at theme parks. These lawyers weren’t necessarily working for or with the theme parks themselves. They were looking to settle with the most successful websites out of court. They were essentially claiming dominion over just about any picture that had ever come up in a Google search. These included images taken by guests years, decades, and in some cases more than a century ago. These were posted on free image hosts, and shared in public forums. It didn’t matter if the faces of people in the image was blurred if a theme park site ran the image. Unless the site actually took the picture, and could prove it then they would receive a cease-and-desist. This had really hurt sites that had been running history articles using archival photos, or even scans from the library. Even if a site did have the right to run the graphic, they would rather pull the article rather than have to fight in court. The ad money was not worth a fraction of the legal costs to simply pull an article.
To get around this MiceChat, and the other sites had updated their policy to only run images from their own photographers, or photos from the press team at the various companies like Disney, or Universal. The downside was that the press contacts did not necessarily have access to the archives, and the archive people didn’t have a searchable image library. So it made it difficult for my wife to write her articles. I suggested that we could run illustrations, and not photos with some of her articles. We could also freely use attractions posters. If the only posters available were faded, or damaged scans then I could recreate them.
I could also recreate things like aerial maps, and even make up my own posters as part of the articles. For example when my wife wanted to write about the Mine Train through Nature’s Wonderland I offered to create graphics for her. This attraction existed partly in the same place that the Big Thunder Mountain coaster sits today. Part of it also fell in an area now occupied by Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge.
So for her article I did a variation of the original attraction poster, and created a map for guests to visualize how large the attraction really was. I also found some concept art by Marc Davis, and turned it into an animated gif. All of these things were fair use.
The missus then wanted to write about the Skyway which existed in Disneyland many years ago. The buckets actually travelled through the center of the Matterhorn mountain. My brothers, and I had wonderful memories of this ride. So I recreated the poster for the attraction, and colorized some black and white images from the Disney archives. After that she wanted to do an article on the various changes to Tomorrowland. So I set about creating my own posters to highlight some of the rides from that era. These included the Monorail, Submarine Voyage, Rocket Jets, People Mover, Adventure Through Inner Space, and Rocket Rods. It was a great way to share history, without stepping on any toes.
All of the design work helped keep my illustration abilities sharp over the months, and allowed my wife the freedom to write about her favorite topics. It was a genuine win-win. Did you ever hear about a dubious legal action that hurt your favorite outlets? Tell me about it in the comments section. If you enjoy this blog there are several ways you can support me. You can
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videos on YouTube. You can even subscribe to the
Pink Monorail Podcast featuring my wife, and myself.
