Utah man recreates the magic of Disney — in his basement

RIVERDALE, Utah ( ABC4 ) — Travis Larson of Riverdale doesn’t have your typical basement set up. Rather, as you step into it, you’re quickly transported into a world of fantasy, designed to emulate the magic of Disney.

“Over the years, a lot of people would assume that the basement is more like knickknacks or things that I’ve hung up on the wall … not a whole environment,” Larson said. “That is what I think is fun about it. The goal is to be a little bit more than what a person expects because it’s a departure from the norm.”

For Larson, the idea started 12 years ago. He said when his family moved into the house, the basement was a work in progress. That’s when he had the idea to create something unique.

“I thought, well, this is kind of a good opportunity to do something different than what I have upstairs, because I didn’t want just a repeat, just more of the same,” he said.

Larson, who made many of the materials used to create his own version of Fantasyland, said he came up with a few concepts before it clicked.

“I went through a couple of drawings, a couple of iterations, a couple of ideas. I had an old west, a pirate, and a twenties with an old movie theater,” he said. “I’d drawn up a bunch of different layouts, and as I was going through some photographs that I had taken at Disney, and it was like, wow, that lines up with this, and that lines up with that, so it just kind of explained itself.”

In the basement, you’ll find plenty of Disney-themed spots, such as the outside of Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, Snow White’s Scary Adventures and Peter Pan’s Flight.

Larson describes the basement like a movie that you can watch over and over again and discover something new each time, saying that one of his favorite parts are all the hidden details throughout it.

“There’s always fun things to kind of find. I have things that I don’t even think the rest of my family even knows about, but they’ll find them eventually,” Larson said.

His goal? To make other people smile.

“My goal in doing things that are creative is to make other people happy,” he said. “The people that have seen it, and it’s given them excitement, and they’re like ‘I want to do something like this, how do I do it?’ — that is the reward there, that you can do something that benefits others and makes other people happy.”

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