This is Mari.
He is 71 years old and a true Efteling Fan!
Mari has worked for Efteling for 40 years and is still involved.
Mari is also known as the Puppet Doctor.
Efteling is his life's work, that's what makes a true fan!
Mari, tell us about all the things you've made.
This is Efteling Fans.
I'm playing with Meccano.
I used to play with it a lot when I was a child.
I loved engineering.
That's also the reason I later went to work at Efteling as a technician.
Even there, we used boxes of Meccano to, for instance, find out what type of movement a...
puppet's arm had to make.
We always made it in miniature first and later on a larger scale.
That's how the puppets were made.
My successors still use boxes of Meccano to put small things together to see...
if it's right.
If children are interested in engineering, I'll get the boxes of Meccano down from the attic.
When we were children, we loved going to Efteling.
But you couldn't really call us fans.
We went there to play.
Almost everyone in Kaatsheuvel had a family season ticket, including us.
That meant that once a week, the contribution for the family season ticket was picked up.
There was a Fairytale Forest, but that didn't move as much as it does now.
The gnomes never moved.
There was a rowing and canoeing lake, the big playground and, of course, the sports fields.
Where the Witte Paard restaurant is now was actually the canteen.
We always had fun playing football there.
I have to say that I wasn't that good at football.
I have more of a passion for engineering.
And to tell you the truth, I'm better at it.
I didn't used to think about working at Efteling, like Efteling Fans do now.
As a technician at vocational school, I was given the choice of starting at the Shell vocational school
or going to Efteling.
Because Shell was too far away, I went for an interview at Efteling.
I sat at the table with two superiors from the Efteling Technical Department,...
the manager and the boss.
They asked me whether I could make a squirrel move.
I said: "I can do that."
I thought they were joking, so I immediately said I could do it.
Great, they said.
And I got the job straight away.
I started on 1 January 1972, in the Gnome Village, because that's where things had to move more.
That's where I started.
I have never had such a great job.
I soon got hooked and I had a great time.
I wouldn't want to have missed it.
Hang on a sec, I've still got something from the Gnome Village.
One of my first jobs was to build a chimney on this gnome's cottage.
I had set a beautiful, sleek little chimney neatly against the cottage.
I knew Anton Pieck would be coming by with Ton van de Ven.
He said: "Lovely! Have you got a stepladder?" Yes, I had that.
"Just put that up next to it."
I thought, whatever's going to happen next?
"Have you got a hammer, too?"
Yes, got that too.
So I get the hammer and he says: "Bash the chimney a couple of times."
So I bashed the chimney a couple of times, and then some more.
"Come back down", he says.
I look up and see the chimney looking very pitiful.
Then I had to go up to him and he shook my hand and said: "Look how nice you've...
made it."
I look at Ton van de Ven again, who had a little smile on his face and they walk away sniggering.
Afterwards, when I saw Anton Pieck's drawings, I only then understood what he meant.
Of course, I worked together with Ton van de Ven a lot.
Also making the gnomes move, I did that in the workshop with used materials because...
it wasn't allowed to cost much, of course.
Once they were working, I took them home with me,
which is unheard of now, someone taking gnomes home.
I did!
I took them home, put the plug in the socket and let them run for a bit.
My wife worked at Efteling, too, and was going to dress the gnomes.
She went with Ton van de Ven to buy material in an old shop in Tilburg.
You know, that musty material on bales.
In beautiful Anton Pieck colours, the true Anton Pieck colours.
So she dressed all the gnomes, then I tested them and that's...
how they came back to the Gnome Village.
If you take a look now, you can see those clothes still look nice on all the gnomes.
I also worked on Snow White, on the Goats' house, on the dragon.
It was a great time, really great.
I wouldn't want to have missed it.
Here we are at the Spookslot Haunted House.
That was a milestone for Efteling but also for me as a person.
It was a wonderful job!
Sometimes the problem cropped up that in terms of budget, things didn't work out...
the way we wanted them to.
At one point we had a coffin that had to be made, but with nothing in it.
That would be very annoying, we said to one another.
That's not possible, it just wouldn't look right!
We'll make something in our own time. We'll work on it in the evenings in the...
workshop and try it out on Sunday because their won't be a manager around then, so it might work.
On Sunday morning my colleague, Henk Smulders, and I walked to the Spookslot Haunted House...
carrying the doll and we stumbled across our boss, Bart Jutte.
So I say: "Oh, Henk, now we'll have to think up an excuse."
Mr Jutte: "What have you got there?
I've never seen that in the plans before."
"No, but you will, we're still working on it.
You'll see for yourself that it was somewhere in the plans."
In the end, when everything was working and was programmed, Ton van de Ven said:
"Oh, I'm so happy that all those little details still got added."
Meaning those figures in the coffin too, of course.
In 1980, on Princess Juliana's birthday, a parade was held for the last time...
at Soestdijk Palace.
Efteling is quite royalist, so we took the train and the carriages to the palace and drove through the palace garden.
At one point, Princess Juliana also boarded the train, of course.
We had a wonderful day there and at the end of the day I received this nice photo...
with me in it as the conductor, next to Princess Juliana.
I could ride the train as well because besides my work as a technician, I also played...
the train driver.
It was really great!
This is Carousel square, which brings back another wonderful memory,...
Anton Pieck's 90th birthday.
We went to pick up Anton Pieck in the town where he lived with a big coach but it was a surprise for him.
The bus drove to Kaatsheuvel and on the way Anton Pieck popped up with all the little scenes he had created.
All the employees had dressed up just like Anton Pieck had sketched and drawn them.
He loved it.
When we arrived here, we took a big picture of Anton Pieck's
pet project, the Carousel.
I didn't have to do any work on it, a bit of maintenance and greasing, but when you look at...
how it moves, it wasn't really necessary.
I didn't need the box of Meccano here.
We're standing in the museum.
The museum is my former workshop.
We actually developed many techniques here.
We also started with movement technology here.
In miniature with the gnomes and after that we moved to the Spookslot Haunted House.
The biggest step we have taken is the puppets in the Fata Morgana dark ride.
We even started to try to develop a marionette puppet that is controlled from above...
via bicycle cables.
In the end, it didn't work out and we quickly gave up on the idea.
Then we thought, if we have to make 150 or 140 puppets and we've got to fill them with engineering...
it will have to be something that can be built fast.
It took us more than a year to develop a puppet with a lot of movements...
in the body, more than 20 movements, while the propulsion takes place underneath.
It was a brilliant development.
You could set up a warehouse like a box of Meccano,
which you could take parts out of to put figures together, and it worked.
From that moment on, we knew the Fata Morgana dark ride would be delivered on time.
We used different kinds of technologies for the Fata Morgana dark ride.
Pneumatics, pneumatic propulsion using cylinders and air.
For instance, the blinking of the eyes, which is very fast and is quite easy to achieve.
We applied the same weights and forces and made the eyes blink with impulses.
It worked fantastically!
Hydraulic, propelled with oil cylinders.
That makes it easy to have something move but it has its disadvantages.
We also developed wooden disks.
We were even able to apply for a patent on the combination of engineering with the drive.
They called us the 'Puppet Doctors'.
Henk Smulders and Mari van Heumen had become the Puppet Doctors.
This is the marketplace and all sorts of things go on at the marketplace.
Ton's drawings were beautiful but they were drawings that look good as pictures on the wall.
They are still lifes.
Here at the marketplace you can see the fruit vendor.
He looked great in the drawing and Ton told us exactly what kind of atmosphere he wanted.
The fruit vendor had to sell his wares to a customer.
Ton talked about it
and we made sure that's how it was.
There were no sketches of the movements, we thought them up ourselves.
Ton thought it was great.
The Magicians, for instance, move most.
The rug salesman also has a few movements as he has to walk along.
Those are the puppets that needed to be able to make more movements.
Especially figures that needed to move their hips, and look around, these are the ones that...
move most.
When I look at the scene with the prisoners are sitting, we had to get the hips and buttocks...
moving.
Scenes like that take a lot of time to work out.
How do you get the hips to move in such a way that people will think: "Look at them...
labouring away, look at them push.
Not a nice place to be, a prisoner in a mill like that."
They're actually very nice scenes to create.
On Friday evenings we used to grab a beer.
We'd chat about the week ahead, about which ideas we could use.
Could we make something else great?
Could we add some pranks?
Because pranks have to be in the shows.
With another beer came even more ideas.
Ton van de Ven used to pop in because he knew we'd be there.
Even our old director used to come.
They'd join us, grab a beer and let us do the talking.
They were always fun evenings.
I still think the Fata Morgana dark ride is one of the nicest attractions I was able to work on.
I bring my grandchildren here.
Whenever I'm at Efteling, I always visit the Fata Morgana dark ride.
I've been retired for 6 years now.
I can't let go of Efteling yet and Efteling perhaps can't let go of me yet.
After my career as a technician I became manager of Integral Security, which...
covered company security, emergency response and First Aid.
I gave a lot of training for that, too.
I still train first responders every now and then.
I also became a volunteer at Villa Pardoes, the lovely holiday accommodation...
for sick children who come here with their parents for a nice week's holiday.
There are also a lot of companies, like Efteling, that support this great project.
I'm back as a technician again.
I repair the go-karts, bikes and tractors here because the children love them.
There's nothing nicer than seeing a smile on the children's faces when they go off on a tractor or go-kart.
It's fantastic, isn't it?
Really great!
Which Efteling Fan do you think deserves to be in this YouTube series?
Please let us know in the comments or send an e-mail to youtube@efteling.com.
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