left & below: In transforming the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror into a Guardians of the Galaxy attraction, “The building is instructing you about the power, the fortresslike quality of the whole thing,” Rohde says. “For the deep-diving fan, there’s plenty to see as well.”
never had any money because of medical bills. We lived in this old, vast, decrepit estate house with servants’ quarters and a carriage house that had a carriage in it.” Young Joe found his escape through reading and being “creative.” The family moved to Los Angeles when Rohde was in junior high as his father followed film and TV work, which included shooting on 1968’s Planet of the Apes. The running-through-the-cornfield scene where the apes hunt down and capture Charlton Heston? That’s Martin Rohde’s footage. “My dad would take me to work,” Rohde continues. “He’d say, ‘Hey, you’re not going to school today ’cause we’re going to flip a car over. You got to see this. We’re going to crash an airplane, we’re going to blow up a bridge! You got to see this stuff!’” Back lots and movie ranches became an influential playground for Rohde. “I would just kind of lurk around these places watching how things got done as a kid,” he recalls. On the old 20th Century Fox shooting ranch —what is now Malibu Creek State Park—“I would just wander off on 40,000 acres full of moldering old castles and trains and Davy Crockett forts and Che Guevara villages and that whole weird stone Planet of the Apes city. It was an odd formative experience.” Facing his next formative learning experience after high school, “Occidental was the only college I applied to,” he says. “I figured I was going to be in the arts, and Oxy had a theater program that was fairly well respected. The work that I do now leverages heavily on the type of liberal arts education that I got from Occidental.”
Rohde mustered his way through college through a mix of grants, scholarships, and work. (As a member of the kitchen crew at Oxy, “One of our jobs was pulling the dishes out of the big Hobart dishwashing machine and stacking them to be sent out again for food preparation,” he recalled on Instagram.) In helping art history professor George Goldner prepare his slide shows, “I got this incredibly steeped and distilled art history training on top of the courses I took,” he says.
scenic painter, and things began looking up —until Epcot was completed. Facing a layoff, he began farming out his abilities to producers in the company as an illustrator, which brought him to a crucial career nexus. “I get coupled with this guy who’s a very good mentor in design but not a very good speaker.” Now, Rohde has always been good at speaking. His gift of gab allowed him to leapfrog from the back end of production to the front end of conception. “So all of the training that comes along with a liberal arts education—the critical But it was a climb to reach thinking, the ability to comthe work he does now, one municate the principle of unthat began with the mysderstanding—all that comes terious role of Imagineer into play and suddenly I’m in 1980. “I got this super Rohde in 1980, about a month the talking guy.” entry-level job at a place I after starting his job at Imagi“When Joe talks, it causes knew nothing about and I neering. He’s working on a foam the IQ of everybody in the model of the interior pyramid didn’t know how to do from Epcot’s Mexico Pavilion. room to go up by 25 points,” anything,” Rohde admits says two-time Oscar nominee of his entrée to Disney. He was tasked with Bob Rogers, founder and chairman of BRC building intricately detailed models that Imagination Arts, an experience design firm. went far beyond the foam-core and Popsicle- “He just has this way of making you feel stick variety that he was creating as a high more literate than perhaps you really are, so school teacher. much better educated than perhaps you re“I start out on the Mexico Pavilion, which ally are, because he uses very sophisticated is at Epcot Center, my very first job,” he re- ideas from philosophy and cultural heritage calls. “Luckily I fall into the more sculptural and psychology, but he uses those terms in a parts of model building that I am quite good way that brings you along and he makes you at—the faux rocks and ruined pyramids, that think you understand them.” kind of stuff.” Prior to Animal Kingdom, Rohde’s biggest Riding the work wave provided by the design creation was a bar called the Advenmassive Epcot project at the Walt Disney turer’s Club at Disney World’s Pleasure IsWorld Resort, Rohde flexed his skills as a land. But when Michael Eisner took over as SUMMER 2017 OCCIDENTAL MAGAZINE 27