Randy Thornton is the go-to guy at Disney for creating soundtracks, reissues and boxed sets. I know this because I was sitting in the audience last Thursday at D23 when he ran down through his credentials, and the Diz faithful applauded him for giving them so much stuff over the years. Thornton is an amusing individual who knows his stuff and appears to be dedicated to putting out the best product he can--more on that in a moment--and he slides into a Ludwig Von Drake impression at random.

Thornton was there to talk about what he had done for the previous 30th anniversary edition of the "soundtrack" to The Haunted Mansion ride and what he had improved for the new 40th anniversary edition (which was available for sale in the D23 Dream Store but is not available elsewhere yet, apparently). To illustrate this, he brought along the literal soundtrack to the Mansion, laid out across seventy-two tracks. And he began to relate to the audience the difficulty in taking a theme park experience and making it a strictly audio experience. One of the major difficulties was dealing with "loops," i.e. the attraction runs audio in loops so that a section of music or speaking or whatever is constantly repeating itself as you ride through that section of the ride. So in several instances, he had to find a way of making a looped audio bit into something that happened in one linear movement or just a few times--and preserve the experience of the ride for the listener.

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