Working on my story involved a quick trip to the Disney campus in Glendale, California where CODE: Rosie was born. It’s only the second reporting trip I’ve ever made to the company. The first was almost 29 years ago, and I’m fairly confident that it was the first time I ever traveled to a place of business, interviewed its employees, and turned what I learned into a feature article.
Back then, the Disney facility in question was the then-new Disney-MGM Studios theme park in Orlando, which at the time had a working animation studio working on projects such as Roger Rabbit cartoons. I wrote about it for the Winter 1990 issue of
my animation fanzine,
Animato, before I was gainfully employed full-time as a journalist. I’ll never forget leaving the studio facility with a PR person. When my handler directed me to exit through a door built into a tall fence, I suddenly found myself
inside the Disney-MGM park, which I’d somehow forgotten was just a few yards away.