Don Iwerks, the engineer whose camera and projection systems shaped decades of Disney films and theme park attractions, died Thursday evening at Ojai Community Memorial Care Center. He was 96.
His family said in an obituary that he passed peacefully, surrounded by the love of family and friends. Disney confirmed the death in a statement from D23, the company’s official fan club and archives division.
Iwerks was born July 24, 1929, in Dallas and grew up in Southern California, the son of Ub Iwerks, the animator who partnered with Walt Disney to create Mickey Mouse. He joined Walt Disney Productions in 1950 as a lab technician, then spent two years in the Army’s Signal Photo Corps during the Korean War before returning to the studio. In 1953, he moved into camera work, starting on “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” and eventually ran the company’s machine shop, camera service department and technical engineering division over a 35-year career.
His engineering fingerprints show up across Disney’s history. He helped develop the 360-degree Circle-Vision camera used for “America the Beautiful,” a film that ran at Disneyland for 17 years before resurfacing at EPCOT, Tokyo Disneyland and Disneyland Paris.
He and his father refined the sodium vapor process that blended live actors with animation in 1964’s “Mary Poppins,” including its “Jolly Holiday” sequence, and he later built the projection system for Star Tours and 3D effects for “Captain EO.” Generations of Disneyland visitors also unknowingly encountered his hands — cast as the model for the Abraham Lincoln Audio-Animatronics figure, a template still used on park robotics today.
After leaving Disney in 1986, he co-founded Iwerks Entertainment with former Disney executive Stan Kinsey, building giant-screen theaters and simulator rides that reached nearly 300 venues across 38 countries before SimEx acquired the company in 2001.
Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro called him an innovator whose contributions to the company’s films and attractions delighted generations of fans. Iwerks won the Academy’s Gordon E. Sawyer Award in 1997 and was inducted as a Disney Legend in 2009, sharing a Main Street window at Magic Kingdom with his father.
He is survived by his wife, Betty, sons John and Larry, and daughter Leslie Iwerks, an Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker who has chronicled the family’s Disney legacy on screen.
