Tad Stones (Darkwing Duck, Chip 'n Dale, Aladdin)

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
If you're a fan of everything we do here at
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(00:21):
slash Jim Cummings Podcast.

Speaker 2 (00:24):
Do it now? How you doing out there? It's me Tiggert,
I am Duk Wing Duck. It's me Bunkers Deep Bobcat.
All right, y'all, did it rate your favorite firefly you desire?

Speaker 1 (00:37):
Holdo old knock Gud. My name is Jim Cummings and
welcome to tuned In. Welcome back to tuned In with
Jim Cummings. Producer Chris on the Prowl. Yes, indeed, ladies
and gentlemen. But today we have a very special guest,
and I'm wearing this in his honor. We have Darkwing

(00:58):
Duck's dad. Did you say, ar Quen Ducks that? Yes?
I did? A ka thus Rockwell, the one and only
Stoneses happy to be here. Yeah, Oh good stuff man. Well,
we've been waiting on this episode. My shirt and eye

(01:18):
and uh and you know, I, uh, I've been going
to comic cons and as as you have as well.
And uh, I've been prone to bringing these a few
of these and giving them away as prizes or selling
them for you know, too much money, uh and signing
them and uh. And it's just it's interesting because uh,

(01:43):
I was, I was telling Chris earlier. We're at a
point now, you and I where we've got three generations
of d w fans because the dad will be there
help the grandpa. At this point, he'll be our age
and then dad will be there. He'll be like thirty five,
and there's a little junior he's five or sixtion. I

(02:04):
am the tair the flaps in the night, you know,
and it just gives me goosebumps.

Speaker 3 (02:09):
Well, you know, this last condo I did a few
weeks ago, I had because we're trying to clean out
the house and hopefully some day I can only imagine anyway,
I had an old Vinyl Scrooge McDuck money bag from
the original ducktails. It was some you know, some they'd
give to syndicators or something like that. Of course, had

(02:30):
all these little PVC figures, plastic figures, from Kellogg's and
other places. Yes, that sell for various amounts on eBay
and whatnot. And I said, I'm just going to put
these in a bag and then if you buy something
from me, you get to reach into the bag. Or
if you're a kid, I specified a real kid, not
just yet one in heart.

Speaker 1 (02:51):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:52):
But it was so much fun because there was dads
who were who were coming up and they were you know,
the super fan. They're just getting their kid into it,
you know, and the kid would reach in and get
something that the dad would want and you could just
see it right there. And I said, well, you know,
Father's Day is coming up pretty soon.

Speaker 1 (03:08):
Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 3 (03:10):
It was just a light and how excited they got,
yeah sort of thing.

Speaker 1 (03:15):
Yeah, no, I remember, And this is years ago when
speaking of comic cons, right, it was one of the
very first that I ever went to. So it was
probably good ten years ago. And I don't think dark
Wing was on Disney Plus or anything quite yet at
the time. And there was a little little guy walking

(03:38):
up and he was five years old and he was
dark Wing. He was dressed as dark he was costplaying
dark Wing. And here's his dad, and dad's about thirty five,
and he goes, I have the child who it's in
the night ark And I said, good for you, buddy boy,
that's great, and I go, okay, well, I just had

(04:00):
to ask daddy a question. I go, Okay, this show's
been off the air for like ten fifteen years. How
the heck does he And he goes like this, and
he reaches into his bag and he pulls out a
stack of DV Disney pounds him down and he goes,
because I'm raising him right, And I said, yes, you are, Yes,
you are. You are raising him very very right. And

(04:22):
of course I signed him, and then they probably went
over to you and then you signed them.

Speaker 3 (04:27):
We don't want to. I think it my first convention
I did. I mean, I've been to convention as a
fan and to promote things with you me too, whatever.
But when I retired, the first time I was invited
as a guest, He's like, really, you're gonna fly me
to Atlanta? Sure, I'm going to get a hotel room. Okay, yeah,
we'll give you a table. And that was when I said, oh,

(04:49):
I need something to sell to the table. And I
started doing sketches, which I had never done before. Very
self conscious about, but.

Speaker 1 (04:57):
How you can do them with your eyes closed?

Speaker 3 (05:00):
The uh uh. The surprise of the convention was fans
came up and these two women came up separately and
they said, and they got misty eyed about dark Wing
and they said, the relationship of dark Wing and Goslin
got me through my childhood because evidently one had a

(05:22):
father was gone, or the other one maybe the father
was terrible. You know. I did not press for details.
And eventually they found each other and got to cry
together and became friends and all that. And then the
second day of the con a vendor comes up to me, uh,
and you know, I have a dark Wing poster behind me,
and sure, and she comes up and says, you know,

(05:43):
I never watched cartoons as a kid, and I'm thinking,
strange thing to say to me.

Speaker 1 (05:49):
Well, well, we've been question comment so far.

Speaker 3 (05:54):
Exactly, and she goes, except this one. And I said, wow, funny,
And I told her the story of the women I
had met previous day, and she just went, maybe that's why.
And I went, oh, glad I could help. Sorry, I
had a terrible life, you know. But that that same
con yeah, a person came up and she started singing

(06:15):
the Rescue Ranger's theme song, and she didn't realize that
you came up behind her. And then at the at
the end, you you know, you chimed in and Monterey
Jack really exactly good guy. So that's the that's the
way to do a convention. Yeah, and having the character
come up behind you.

Speaker 1 (06:36):
That's true. I think they would they would chuck that
one up. That wouldn't that works? Man oh man. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (06:42):
And I started doing sketches more and more at conventions
and some of my old artists storyboard guys say, wow,
you really learned to draw them well, you know, and
I said, yeah, it wouldn't have been nice when I
was actually doing the show, because you know, I drew
constantly during the show, but it was always a correction
on a storyboard and oh, make the action like this.
So I mean, they're fine drawings for what they were.

(07:04):
But you know, I didn't worry about being on model, right,
they knew you the duck was kind of things.

Speaker 4 (07:10):
Yeah, it was like drawing to convey a message exactly.

Speaker 3 (07:13):
And that was the unique thing in my career. I
was an artist and a writer, and I started in
animation and right out of college, like three days out
of college.

Speaker 1 (07:23):
And there's not many features. There's really many.

Speaker 3 (07:25):
Ye, there's more now because there was those whole shows
that were less script oriented, like the writers would do
an outline and they were more storyboard oriented, and a
lot of those people appreciated writing, the writers appreciated the
you know, the visual sense, and then those people you know,
ended up producing shows and all that. So, but yeah,

(07:47):
having both sides was rare, certainly when we started TVA. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (07:52):
Well I always said that you were dark Wing's dad
and Jenny was his mom.

Speaker 3 (07:56):
Yeah, definitely, because Jenny, I said, this is when I
it's like, you know, you're not the voice of dark
Wing around the world, obviously because in Russia, France, different names,
you know, different names for the characters, obviously, a different
language and all that all around the world. But you're

(08:17):
the dark Wing we worked with and designed the character from.
And you and Jenny, I remember how when you first
did the kind of flat sound when something was squash him. Yeah,
that kind of thing that like the next episode or

(08:38):
the episode after that, something happened and you did a
different cartoon. I'm sure it was hilarious sound effect and
she said, no, no, do that flat thing. Oh, and
you do and that and you going, you know, and
that's all that sort of thing. She would feed back
to you. We'd take those tapes, I'd play it for
all the staff, story editors and writers. So the character

(09:01):
was being created in this echo chamber from you and
Ginny and and all the writers. And that was so
it didn't matter what language it ended up in. The
actual character evolved that way. Jinny, on her interview with you,
said one thing that I can't believe it actually happened.

(09:21):
She said that they did a pilot with Lorenzo Music,
and I was saying, like, yeah, that was I said,
I mean back and then back in the back in
the day, back then, to use both phrases. There were
actors that we had worked with from Wuzzles and Gummies,

(09:42):
Chippindale and Ducktails and all that. So a lot of
those people say, oh, I loved working with oh and.

Speaker 1 (09:46):
So, yeah, and he was a gummy but he was tummy.

Speaker 3 (09:49):
Yeah exactly. But it's like to have him do a
whole pilot that would have been an executive decision. Would
have to sign up on it, because that would have
been paying somebody would have been he was just never
in my head as a just energy. It didn't matter
about the voice.

Speaker 1 (10:08):
Can we tell everybody who Lorenzo was in case you
don't know that Garfield he was, Uh he was Garfield
and Carlton the doorman, Carlton the door man, Mary Tyler
Moore and uh he used to do it. He used
to joke about it. He goes, well, if you want to,
I could do a medley of my greatest voice and

(10:31):
he that was it. That was it. If you hired Lorenzo,
that's what you got.

Speaker 3 (10:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (10:37):
And uh, not not the most dynamic, not the most explosive.

Speaker 3 (10:42):
It's not no blank You know, a guy you bring
for a billion voices?

Speaker 1 (10:46):
Yeah, no, that's so true, but but a hell of
a nice guy.

Speaker 3 (10:50):
Oh yeah, I saw you say that.

Speaker 4 (10:51):
You had Jim right away in mind for the role
of dark Wing Duck.

Speaker 3 (10:55):
I I worked with Jim oh Good in all those
shows in oh yeah, and then starting with Gummy Bears
because it was the first one I did it Disney,
and then a Rescue Rangers before it was Monterey Jack.
We did like Rescue Rangers four people because three of
the people always did a million voices and it was
always Corey and dress and trim, and then you'd have

(11:16):
some guest star, you know, to fill in the other voices.

Speaker 1 (11:18):
Peter Cullen, Frank Welker, so many.

Speaker 3 (11:21):
And the you know, having that group you just know
who like Rob Paulson loved working with Rob. He used
to joke around with a voice that became Steelbeak, and
that was specifically me saying I want to design a
character for that voice. Yeah. Yeah, And it wasn't until recently,

(11:42):
and I've already forgotten the other names that I knew that.
There was no way they'd say, oh, yeah, Jim's going
to do it just on my say so, so we
had to try other people. And recently I found the
list and there were usual suspects at the time, and
like I said, I honestly don't remember. You know, basically
you came in and wiped in everything out of my

(12:03):
mind because oh good, that's the voice in my head
do all sorts of things.

Speaker 1 (12:08):
So that works. I'll take that. Yeah, glad, glad to
hear that. Well. I always thought that one of the
keys to dark Wing was the fact that he doesn't
have any superpowers. He's a duck, you know, and not Howard.
No relation you know, none of that, No, Daffy's thank you.

(12:30):
But but he had a lot of gizmos, oh yes,
and not as many as Gizmo Duck because he was anyway.
But I thought that that was so cool because he
had he was a cross between the Shadow and Batman.
I think that's fair in there somewhere, and Batman had gizmos. Oh,
he had cool gizmos.

Speaker 3 (12:51):
And notoriously, especially in the Silver Age, Batman was notorious
for comics by the way, Yes that's true. Yeah, he
was notorious for putting his face on everything, like can't
you just throw the shrieking or the gotta look like
it's got to look like a bat that's right, Okay,
we got this cool car going, you know, the hood

(13:13):
is missing something. Yeah, because I grew up, you know,
and with the long sedan or whatever it was, with
that giant bat that batmobile had a big bad head
on the front and one single fin bat Wing in
the back. So that's definitely, you know, was in my
mind when I was doing Dark Wing and really all

(13:36):
the Thank god there was no Internet, because if I
was able to call up all those old comics I
was half remembering, I probably would have gotten paranoid. But well,
we can't do that exactly because they're doing it. That
would we can't play your eyes. You know, instead of saying,
I remember this flash cover where he was a marionette

(13:57):
or you know, well like Nega Duck, he will say
why is a Nega Duck? Yellow? Red and black? And
people say, well, those that's the opposite colors, and then
they look up a colored chart. No none at all, really,
I said, no, they're the color of the reverse flash.
It was evil double danger, there wasn't yeah, and you

(14:17):
know it was that sort of So I mean dark
Wing started out as double O Duck, yes, and uh,
we couldn't use that name. He became less super secret
agent and became dark Wing. Uh, And that gave me permission.
I kept the spy stuff we had developed because my
feeling is that's who paid for the gizmos. I don't
know that we ever said it in the show, but

(14:38):
to me, it would make sense that, hey, they hire
this guy freelance. They pay a nice big fee, you
know when they say, oh, you got to be able
to get around town. So here's a motorcycle, yeah, on
a duck bill on it. H. So I mean I
just into Silver Yeah exactly, Thunderquack and the rat Catcher,

(15:00):
and there was going to be the wave Shredder too,
which is why Saint Kernard has water around it, which
would have been his boat.

Speaker 1 (15:07):
I don't think we ever got around it, or we never.

Speaker 3 (15:09):
Wrote a boat story. Yeah, came down to, you know,
so which is it?

Speaker 1 (15:13):
After all? He said Duck, So why would he have?

Speaker 3 (15:15):
Oh? Never match?

Speaker 1 (15:17):
That was the thing about his origin.

Speaker 3 (15:19):
People said, you know my answer to why didn't you
do an origin story of dark Wing Duck? And I said, oh, contrea,
we did like six of them, you know, parrodying different,
you know, and fans will say, no, no, uh, he
became dark Wing because he went to high school with
Mega Volt. I said, no, that's just the story you like.
So that's why you think it's cannon, because there is

(15:39):
no cannon in Darkwing. You know. It's like, no matter
how DC Comics changes Batman lore and updates it somehow,
Alan Moore's killing joke is always part of the you know,
the background. It's just what Barbara Gordon is in a
wheelchair or not.

Speaker 4 (15:58):
You know, have you been catching wind of this dark
Wing reboot that they're talking about.

Speaker 3 (16:02):
Oh yeah, technically I am a consultant. One would think, well,
it was funny because early on fans, I mean, you know,
hit the social network saying well, tad Stones is a consultant,
so of course it's going to be perfect. You know,
that's right, tad Stones. Won't let them do it, it'll
be wrong. We finally had to tell I had to

(16:22):
tell everybody the definition of a consultant is somebody you
pay to give advice that you don't have to listen to.
So it's like yeah, yeah, and I've seen very little
of it. I mean it's going it's uh, you know,
I'm not sure exactly what stage it's at, but I
saw early outline, early treatment, which they've now drastically changed,

(16:47):
understood as I understood, well, I know.

Speaker 1 (16:50):
We did a while ago, did did a I don't
know what it was, but.

Speaker 3 (16:57):
Like a sizzle reel or no.

Speaker 1 (16:58):
It was a full blown, uh dark wing show and
uh fully animated, and it was not dissimilar to The
Batman's Return, where he was older. He was thirty years older,
and he had a beard, he had the old man beard.
And I don't know where it's going to go or

(17:21):
what it's going to do and in fact, I don't
even am I still going to be dark Wing?

Speaker 3 (17:25):
I have no idea. I know I don't need I'm
on the record because I saw the sat A clip
when I said, the silhouette is great, and I said,
and I said, you know, hearing Jim's voice that sells it.
And you know, it was like, that's when I got oh,
things are still changing. Who knows how it's gonna because
that was more than a year ago. Yeah, and that

(17:47):
was obviously a thing that you spent way too much
money on this little piece, because there's no way you
can afford that. I'm sure I should be saying none
of this tonight anyway, I just to me if you're
I mean, it's weird. It used to be that a

(18:07):
cartoon character was his design and his voice. So if
you're going to replace Donald Duck, he had to sound
exactly like Ducky Nash and that's how Tony got and
s got the job. But then there's kind of a
feeling where no, this is more like if you were
doing a live action reboot, you can't, you know, cast

(18:29):
the same actor if it's supposed to be a young
person and that original actor is now forty and it's like, well,
we need a new young person. And some of that
sensibility is guy, I'm not talking Disney, I'm talking to
the whole animation industry, and to me, it's like, well,
you go back to the source material, whatever it was.
Sometimes it's a comic or something like that, and you know,

(18:53):
be true to that. That's what made the thing unique.

Speaker 1 (18:57):
Tuned with Jim Cummings, you could support the show on
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ad free access to the show itself, prize drawings, and more.
You'll feel the difference, so go ahead and join the
Tuned in family today at Patreon dot com slash Jim

(19:19):
Cummings podcast Do It Now.

Speaker 3 (19:22):
When they did the Chippendale Rescue Rangers movie, I thought
the guys did a great job as the voices, but
it was built into the concept that the voices were
used to were things that they put on. They were
doing animated character voices. You know, that's speeding up thing,
and they still looked like Chipindale right you show they

(19:43):
had turned Dale into a CG character, he still was
on Model as far as if we were just going
to say, hey, let's turn a bunch of Disney characters
into CG. That's the kind of transition you'd say, Oh, yeah,
that you kept the same design, it's just fuzzy. Now.

Speaker 1 (19:58):
Yeah, that was a kind of a interesting piece of work,
there wasn't it.

Speaker 3 (20:03):
I enjoyed it because I took you as it is.
It's like, no, this is They're not doing more episodes
of the show. This doesn't have anything to do with
the show. At the conceit of this piece of fiction
is this is the behind the scenes movie while that
show that you love was made.

Speaker 1 (20:18):
It was very interesting.

Speaker 3 (20:19):
Though, I mean it, it was what it was. Yeah,
it was very successful and as far as I know,
who can tell with streaming kidding, but I laughed a lot,
you know.

Speaker 4 (20:34):
Yeah, yeah, your point makes me think about when the
Sonic movie was first getting released and they had this
commercial and Sonic like looked nothing like Sonic the Hedgehog.
You know that everybody's used to human teeth. Yeah, exactly, exactly,
you know what I'm talking about. And then it's nice
to see though at least they listened to the backlash.

Speaker 3 (20:53):
Yeah, you know, well, and then they had fun with
the character and the Jimmindale movie. You know, that was
a lot of fun seeing those characters. And a certain
duck build Avenger made a little appearance at the very end. Yes,
he did appreciate it. Yeah, I do a voice that
joby too. I'm the I actually played myself. Oh, there's
a scene where the boys Chippendale are offered a television

(21:18):
series by a Hollywood producer. Right the telephone, that's my voice.

Speaker 1 (21:23):
Yeah, that's wonderful.

Speaker 3 (21:24):
It's funny because I just you know, it's one of
those things where I guess it was during the pandemic
for that matter. I'm recording lines into my phone and
just sending it to them. But I'm doing it as
we would do it, you know, back in the day
where you do a bunch of takes. You say, you
know what, take the first half of a second line
here where you know, and so I did things. I'm

(21:46):
listening to my own voice in the ear, and I said,
you might want to do that sort of thing. I'm
sure they went, yeah, whatever, take the third one. That's yeah, yeah, yeah,
too much work, not kind of cut and pasting. You know,
did you do it?

Speaker 1 (21:59):
What?

Speaker 3 (22:00):
And you know, I'm not doing it anymore. But what
I really loved that, I guess is super rare, if
if it ever happens, is getting the cast together in
the same room and they're doing the show in front
of you, and you're working off each other and you
can add lib in a smell.

Speaker 1 (22:17):
Is so much better?

Speaker 3 (22:17):
That?

Speaker 1 (22:18):
Yeah, so much better. I haven't, I don't, I can't.
I can't remember the last time I did a show
that we were all there. Yeah, I can't. I couldn't
tell you. I mean years, long time. Yeah, way before COVID.
And it wasn't COVID that did it.

Speaker 3 (22:34):
Oh no, no, it was.

Speaker 1 (22:36):
It didn't help, but but boy, yeah, I can't even.
You know, I'm lucky to bump into people going into
do a record, you know, other actors.

Speaker 3 (22:46):
Yeah, I mean that was so much fun. While you
guys are waiting while somebody else is doing their lines,
you're out in the green, Yeah, snacking on oreos.

Speaker 1 (22:54):
Or pretzels or whatever, and absolutely.

Speaker 3 (22:56):
Chatting people up and talking about you know what happened
on some other show that.

Speaker 1 (23:02):
Was that was the silver age of cartoons, not comics.
Ye might have been golden.

Speaker 3 (23:07):
Yeah, I'm so happy and it's a, it's a it's
a bad transfer. But there was one time I took
a video camera into the rehearsal because Genia would do
although she'd you know, she got to what. We always
recorded them, but we did a full rehearsal just going

(23:30):
through the script, everybody in the room. And then especially
this one, this was the two parter just Us Justice Stucks,
so we had all the heroes and all the villains,
that's the key guys in the room. And I got
video footage of it, which a friend transfer digitally and
we put it up on the internet. So if you
search YouTube, that's like the other than you know, footage

(23:57):
behind the scenes for commercials, you know, for that you
don't get, you know, the the advertising stuff like that,
you get it. You know, it's always one character, one
person doing a voice, and the scenes already animated or whatever.
But no, that was a lot of fun because it
was it was all the names at the time.

Speaker 1 (24:16):
So yeah, yeah, gosh, yeah, it'll never be like that again.

Speaker 3 (24:21):
I don't. I don't think, and that makes me think too.

Speaker 4 (24:23):
We'll probably not even have a lot of behind the
scenes footage of this era either, because everybody records a
home and who double records themselves. Well, if they really
want to promote you, you're not doing You're not setting
up a camera to record you in your own home
little recording booth.

Speaker 1 (24:38):
You know.

Speaker 4 (24:39):
Yeah, maybe somebody out there is.

Speaker 3 (24:42):
I don't know. They've done entire feature films with everybody,
all the animators, all the actors, everybody at their houses. Yeah,
you know, and a lot of people have to upgrade
their computers like that. But yeah, it's just amazing that
they like south Park. South Park comes to mind. Well,
south Park was always a weird animal because and they

(25:03):
used to joke about it. The computers they use to
do south Park could animate the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park.
I mean there's mega machines stuff like that, and here
they're here. They are not, but they're able to do it.
I think they can do a show in a week
six they could be really content.

Speaker 1 (25:25):
That's really How long did it take to animate a.

Speaker 3 (25:30):
Yeah, that's a good question. I think we'd send it
off and it'd be I want to say, nine months
to come back literally from overseas. And that was back
when we shipped things physically, that's literally, that's right, stuff
in boxes. Yeah, it wasn't like, you know, I we
did lose a show of Chip and Dale somewhere out there,

(25:50):
really and my impression is something happened to the ship,
you know, So that was it's like, do we literally
put them on ships? Can't they even go by air?
You know? But we you know, luckily everything gets copied.
But that was all original art and stuff that went
over because basically what we would do is you do
as much of the designing and the control and the

(26:13):
recording and the timing of the action, you know, in studio,
then you pack up all that and it goes overseas
and they do the actual animation. And you know, when
we started in between the so and we always send
somebody over there who would be who could answer questions
on the fly over there that we could talk to

(26:34):
and all that.

Speaker 4 (26:35):
And over there, what country are you going to?

Speaker 3 (26:38):
Countries? It was there in Korea and Disney actually had
a studio in Australia. It's like, oh, dark they did.
Australia did, thankfully what I considered the real pilot of
Dark Window, which was I mean, there's the talks about

(27:00):
where it is the story of Goslin being adopted by
Darkness which started off the show Rise Little Girl, Little
I used to get payments for that, no kid, Yeah,
because I wrote half the ching, because half the song
is the code.

Speaker 1 (27:15):
Yes, that's the right thing it was. I remember it well, yeah,
it feels like boy, I remember all that stuff.

Speaker 3 (27:22):
The uh I'm not too good with yesterday twenty years ago. Yeah. Yeah, anyway,
the uh, well where it just went out of my
mind and I came back, were talking.

Speaker 1 (27:36):
Back from Korea, back from Australia.

Speaker 3 (27:38):
We were talking obviously the real pilot was that sinking
feeling with Professor Molliart Well, I don't know if we
call him professor, but Molliarty, yes. And I had to
write a script. That's it. We had talked dark Wing,
we had drawn dark Wing, we had designed things, but
now it was like I have to put what's in
my head into your head, meaning all my story editors

(28:01):
and all that. So you have to write the original script.
So that script actually had Honker was a little more
active how he would use his brain to calculate angles
and stuff.

Speaker 1 (28:11):
Like foots on the Udd family the uh.

Speaker 3 (28:16):
But all of the that first episode went to the
Australian Studio, which is very small but they really knew
classic Disney, Classic Warners animation, the beautiful matwork. We got
a pencil test back of that full pencil test which
is you never see wow uh, and it was hilarious.

(28:36):
We I showed it to the crew and we everybody
was laughing so loud and all that that a secretary
came in and said, you know, are basically our boss.
What's going on in here? And you know, and it's like,
you guys have to keep it down, you know, because
the boss was next door. It's one of those things
like no, it's okay that we like to be bar

(29:00):
He came in and laughed along.

Speaker 1 (29:01):
And who was the boss back then?

Speaker 3 (29:03):
That was Gary Kreysel, Gary Christ, Gary Kreisler. Basically that
was he built the animation division because he was the
He had taken Disney records from just like a nothing
children's thing and started turning out hit records because he
got guys like Willie O and Fhilio, will Ryan and

(29:24):
Phil Barron doing going Quackers and then they they give
it they do alone exactly the and they would put
things to good. They did Michael Jackson reading Et or
some sort of et album. So it was they really
turned it into this money making thing. So when Eisenern
Katzenberg came in, they tapped him to watch over television

(29:48):
and ultimately to just concentrate on animation. And I always
say that they loved Gary because he treated Disney money
like it was his own. It's like, how much does
this cost? Uh? Oh, that's always It was a tight
fisted ship that we were working.

Speaker 1 (30:05):
Yes, that's you know, we tarted to explain. I never
got a raise. Yeah, yes, I see where you're going
with this.

Speaker 3 (30:13):
But that was we were working at breakneck speeds. When
I went and visited the guys doing the Ducktails reboot
in twenty seventeen, one of the writers said, so, how
big was your writer's room? Writer's room? Somebody would walk
into my office and say, hey, what if Chip and
Dale had an alien doppelganger or something like that, and

(30:35):
we'd talk about it back and forth, and yeah, write
that up. That was the writers that the what if
dark Wing became a sponge for an episode? Oh, well,
could he fight the Liquidator? Does that make sense?

Speaker 2 (30:48):
You know?

Speaker 1 (30:48):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (30:49):
Yeah, you talk through that sort of thing and then
go write that up.

Speaker 1 (30:52):
Right.

Speaker 3 (30:53):
So the idea that they and plus they had seasoned
long arcs and things like that. The idea that you
could get a writing group together ahead of time and
plan things out. There were things that we did that
Twin Peaks was a hilarious episode. Obviously having fun with
Twin Peaks.

Speaker 1 (31:14):
Twin Peaks, if I was gonna say if every hopefully
some of you out there remember that.

Speaker 3 (31:19):
It was a big onsons of whatever. The I remember
it was pitched by Jan Strenaud as a writer, and
I said, okay, but it has to work with somebody
who has never seen Twin Peaks, because obviously the kids
were not staying up, that's true. Probably if they were,
they weren't watching Twin Peaks, that's true. Anyway, He took

(31:43):
a shot at it, and I said, no, it had
too many like throwaway lines like Puss would make sense
to anybody who hasn't seen the show, but like the log Lady,
there'd be a log reference or something like that, or
cherry Pie and over their heads what wasn't So it
was just like, well that was weird, but it wouldn't
be funny. It wouldn't be a callback to anything. And

(32:04):
I realized I had to take over that script because
I realized it would be unfair to him because the
dividing line of what is what would work and not
is in my head and I didn't want to put
him through that exercise, so I took that over. But
then one of my story editors, Kevin Hops again was

(32:25):
not a Twin Peaks viewer, and he just loved the
tone of that script that we had done with Dark
when it was so crazy and we got inside we said, yeah,
we should do more like that. Yeah, the other shows
that we could have fun with, and we're all excited
about that. But nobody ended up pitching those stories. So
it wasn't like I had a writer's room to give

(32:46):
out commands. I had talented people. My point was, let
the talented people be talented, don't make them do everything
my way. And you had to go. Our schedule was
so tight, you had to go with the stories that
were pitched to you. And we had great stories.

Speaker 1 (33:01):
You know.

Speaker 3 (33:02):
Obviously people loved the show. I think it was like,
looking back, it's like, oh, yeah, why didn't we do
more of that or find another show to have fun?

Speaker 1 (33:11):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (33:12):
Exactly. We could have done it within the Disney Afternoon.
We could have done a Tailspin episode or something like
that where recast our guys as those characters or something.

Speaker 1 (33:22):
Oh, there you go.

Speaker 3 (33:24):
But you know, we were just like, when's the script? Two?
This is always the same Friday except for this Friday
to script?

Speaker 1 (33:32):
Was it here?

Speaker 3 (33:33):
Yeah? Oh man, Well, a lot of pressure, yeah, but
it was so much in in those early days of
the Disney Afternoon. The thing that was so rare about
it was Wayne A Vista distributionists who put out the cartoon.
That's a Disney company. We didn't sure have to take

(33:56):
notes from them, and they pretty much once we sold
Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katz in Bergram, whatever series we're doing,
they had to take it. So in other words, I
wasn't getting in with the boss. So we had an
in house person that we would pitch premises to a

(34:16):
couple of people, and that was that. Well, the there
was Bruce Cranston was higher up. That was Greg's boss.
But the great thing worked out is Greg Wiseman, who
later did Gargoyles. Greg was assigned to our show and
he was fairly new. And the great thing about is
Greg had been an editor at d C Comics and

(34:37):
the actually written uncredited some issues of Captain Adam. So anyway,
he knew every reference and could say, hey, did you
think of you know whatever? And then he was super passionate,
you know, and and very knowledgeable. Obviously a great writer.

(35:01):
But he once said to me something that I know
that Gary would never have allowed. He said, Dad, this
is your show. My job is to be objective and
give you notes. Whether you take the notes or not,
that's up to you. And it's like, I just bit
my lip because it's like, never repeat that outside of

(35:23):
this room. Yeah, we're gonna go with it, don't let Yeah.
On the other hand, Greg, Greg was so passionate about
things that he would just wear us down. And you know,
the idea was always it wasn't wrong. The note was
always based on something different. Yeah, so you might do
it execute it in a little different way. But you know,
he was an asset, you know when it came to that,

(35:45):
but we didn't. It wasn't until basically the Dark Wing
was not canceled per se. Everybody says, well, why did
you cancel such and such? Back then then the business
the ugly word, the business plan was you only need
sixty five episodes.

Speaker 1 (36:03):
That's right for syndication because stretches out thirteen.

Speaker 3 (36:08):
Weeks, thirteen weeks of five episodes, your friend. But now,
if you have a toy line like Transformers that you're
hyping and that's you know, the main reason for the show,
you can keep going as long as you're turning out
new toys. For us. It was like episodes, that's.

Speaker 1 (36:25):
It, that's right.

Speaker 3 (36:26):
Why didn't they adopt the toy model with turk Wing, Well,
they put out some toys, they just didn't. It was
a weird thing, like he's not an action toy and
he's not a little kiddy toy. So McDonald's they did exactly.
I mean McDonald's did toys of you know, yeah, RESCU Rangers,
many and all the Disney Afternoon stuff, and they designed

(36:48):
a second line. It just you know, I don't know
what the numbers were, but evidently they weren't big enough
that business exactly. And that goes for the show too.
I always quote Lily Tomlin, who one of her characters
was an agent. She said line has always stuck with me.
That's nobody calls it show art, you know, So when
you hear about a decision being made, that's what's going on. Yeah,

(37:11):
but with dark Wing. And this is before Disney owned ABC.
ABC had seen stuff or heard about stuff. I don't
know if they were officially pitched it, but they wanted
thirteen episodes of Duck Wing Duck And.

Speaker 1 (37:28):
That must have made you feel great, because it did.

Speaker 3 (37:31):
But what was really great about it was and later
on they wouldn't have made this kind of deal. They
felt like, we can't have episodes on ABC and in
syndication because all the syndicators will be irritated, so we
have to do thirty more episodes. So they had to

(37:52):
be separate, right, Yeah, so what they did, but we
showed them episodes, but we didn't we showed them in
I don't know how many, whether it was groups of
five or whatever. They might see some footage, or they'd
see storyboards, or they would just see a script and
they had to choose. They couldn't give notes, but they
have to choose if they passed on something, and this

(38:15):
is the gambling part that was fun. If they passed
on something, they would never see that again. So it
wasn't like we're not sure about this one. And then
the next group is a bunch of dogs and they say, oh,
we want that one back. Nope, you're not kidding it.
So who knows what was what was up with that? No,
it just made sense that otherwise you couldn't. You could

(38:37):
not give ABC thirteen of the absolute best episodes, the
best animated, the funniest in their minds. Anyway that had
the syndication had to have the you know, dark wing
of you know, the humor, the animation and all of that.
So that's how it was handled, which turned out great.

Speaker 1 (38:56):
join the tuned In family today at Patreon dot com

(39:18):
slash Jim Cummings podcast Do It Now.

Speaker 3 (39:22):
When fans try to put things in the correct order,
I just shrug, I says the puct you production Numbersduction
numbers are given when something is approved to premise. That
doesn't mean that's going to be the next in line written.
It's like, you know, you got four or five story

(39:44):
editors and they're juggling and they're doing juggling. You know,
you've got all these scripts going on at the same time,
and then you take the ABC episodes out when they air. Now,
recently a Disney executive reached out to me and I
thought this was super nice. He said, we have the
a chance to re order the shows on Disney Plus,

(40:06):
so we're looking at you for the correct order. I
said the same thing I just said, which there is
no order. However, it makes.

Speaker 1 (40:13):
Sense exception of the origin.

Speaker 3 (40:15):
Well, well to speak exactly the meeting Goslin, but I said,
it makes sense that before you have a team up
of villains, you introduce the villains ahead of time. Nega Duck.
Nega Duck famously appeared when he was hit by a
ray by the electrical villains, and he was right to

(40:38):
a good guy, a Positi Duck and a Nega Duck
at the end, and we were worried, well, can Jim
do the voices? That's three voices he has to do
with the same character. Will that work? How will Overseas
handle it? And sometimes because they're looking at drawings off,
the character looks exactly the same. Yeah, how often is
that going to get mixed up? And it turned out
to be doable, and at the end of it, I said,

(41:00):
I love the character of Nega Duck. Jim did a
great job on it. Let's do more stories of Nega Duck.
And the writers were going like, well, so he gets
hit by the ray every time and splits into two.
I said, no, there, I don't want to see positive
nobody likes positive duck. Yeah, it's mega Duck. And they said,
and this was a duck. This is was my philosophy

(41:22):
again from the Silver Age economics when there was kind
of continuity. They said, how do we explain how he
comes back? And my answer was you don't and you
just do episodes. Really funny, it's true several shows in
someone's had a story about the negaverse and fans think, oh,
that's the real origin. It's like, okay, fine, that makes sense,

(41:44):
and you can do fanvation of how the when dark
Wing was originally split, that character was an echo of
another dimension. You can come up with the story you want.
That's part of the fund.

Speaker 4 (41:56):
And then you get to be truly creative. It's like,
you know what they say, like thinking like a child.
You know, It's like a child would never think like, oh,
this doesn't make sense because it's not in or how
did this happen? It's just like sheer entertainment. It's like,
this is what's happening, and who cares?

Speaker 1 (42:14):
Why? Yeah?

Speaker 3 (42:14):
And then comics again when I was you know, comics
every once in a while they renumber everything start with
an issue number one, and mostly it's because number one
issues sell more that you make more money. But there
is also a feeling like wait, these high numbers can
put people off, saying like oh do I have to
catch up? And it's like I got my first comics

(42:37):
in a barber shop and you just mak who's this
Superman guy?

Speaker 1 (42:42):
Oh?

Speaker 3 (42:42):
This Jimmy's his best friend, because it says right there,
Superman's pal.

Speaker 1 (42:46):
Yeah, Superman?

Speaker 3 (42:47):
And you you put the pieces together. And then I
remember the first Marvel comics I bought. I was on
vacation and walked into a general store next to this
camping campground we are at, and there were these comics
with boxes in the corner. I bought this one that
was Iron Man versus the Melter, and it was Guy

(43:10):
in a golden suit, ye, the clunky suit with his
arm being melted and tails to astonish where a Giant
Man was first introduced, and I'm reading that evidently he
used to be ant Man and I can go twelve
feet tall. Yeah, yeah, yeah, And there was something about
how those were written that I went back and bought

(43:34):
anything with that little corner thing. And as we went around.
This was up in Lake Tahoe. We drove around the
lake and every time we stopped. That was back when
comics were in spinner racks everywhere.

Speaker 1 (43:46):
They were comics or twelve.

Speaker 3 (43:48):
There were ten when I started, and quickly became twelve. Yeah,
so fourteen verst spider Man was spider Man versus the Vulture,
and all that stuff stuck in my brain, you know.
For dark Wing. People say, oh, the Liquidator is based
on hydro Man, and it's like, I have never heard

(44:09):
of hydro Man. I was in college in those years
and I didn't have a comic store nearby. He's based
on the Sandman spider Man number four, I want to say,
because Sandman escaped from Spider Man by going down a
drain in particles like that, and he stopped Sandman maybe

(44:29):
in that issue by throwing bags of cement at him
and then hitting him with water, right, And we used
that gag to freeze Liquidator, but that going down the
drain just seemed you know. And then what made Liquidator
fun was the idea that he was a super salesman
and always talked him, right.

Speaker 1 (44:47):
I remember that that was such an odd and Jack
Angel was he was the Liquidator, remember, yeah, maybe you know,
I remember, I think he did that, well he did
it in my imagination anyway.

Speaker 3 (45:04):
And then just jumping back randomly because it occurred to me,
you know. Our various shows were created in bizarre ways.
Rescue Rangers started off as a pitch for Miami Mice
and it was just Miamivice was huge at the time,
and we just we had a gong show with Michael
Eisner and Jeffrey and they always loved tricky names or

(45:30):
names clever because the idea was, yeah, you had you
had to create a great show that would keep an audience.
But if you had like a title that was intriguing
it in a way, it's like in theory, more people
check out your great piece of entertainment and you keep them,
which is how Dark Wings started. And I was told

(45:52):
to create a show called double O Duck and we
had a Ducktails episode with Launchpad, and the marching orders
were it can't be Launchpad. The whole point is create
a new character, but it started with just that name.

Speaker 1 (46:05):
Yeah, launch Pad is very heroic anyway.

Speaker 3 (46:08):
Exactly, he's all of his ways.

Speaker 1 (46:10):
He might as well have sidekick, you know, stamped on
his forehead. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (46:14):
He made a great trio with ye Wing and yeah Gosling,
you know, Yeah, Terry was great too. Yeah, the guy's
doing the duck Tails reboot. For some of this did Frankenngonis,
who was the co producer and story editor of that.
It was the worst kept secret the studio that the show.
He really wanted to do his dark Wing Duck. He

(46:34):
was like dark Wing Duck for Halloween three years in
a row. He got out of a school book report
by doing a report on the dark Wing episode. Anyway,
so we naturally started chat chatting about dark Wing and
I said, well, you know what's really the hard dark
Wing is Goslin And he said, no, Dad, we know
darknys Duck is the story of a father and a

(46:54):
daughter and a launch Pad.

Speaker 1 (46:56):
Yeah that's true.

Speaker 3 (46:58):
I said, okay, you got it this guy, Yeah that's true.
But anyway, you start out as Miami Mice as that
goofy name. And then and I remember at the meetings
somebody said, well, what are they gonna They can't do drugs,
and Michael said the cheese. You know. But you know
when we actually exactly when you started to we started,

(47:23):
you know, working with stories, it was like we quickly
changed it. And I don't know that Legal said anything
or I did it out of caution, but it quickly
became Metro Mice and we did a whole script for it,
and we created a character, Fat Cat, and Jim did
Fat Cat and that was exactly the character who ended
up and the you know, the original designs ended up

(47:45):
in Rescue Rangers. And that was a case where it
used to be like in my p D Blue or
with Mice, and it was just like, you know, there's
a lot of murder in those shows that we can't
really do. But I found a piece of artwork in
an early mini bible for the show that had the
mice holding guns, and I'm not they didn't have rubber

(48:06):
darts in them. They were just like pistols. Oh.

Speaker 1 (48:08):
I was like, it wasn't a gas guy.

Speaker 3 (48:11):
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 (48:12):
Don't tell you how many of those I've signed. Oh
yeah at conventions. I guess people do it with them.
Oh God, I'm gonna forget the name of the instrument
that that makes them. Oh the three D prints, the
three D printers. Yeah, it's like, wait that that sounds
like magic to me?

Speaker 3 (48:31):
What pretty much? Oh? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (48:35):
You know as in suck Gas Evil Tour.

Speaker 3 (48:37):
We used to That used to be his second thing
that he would always say. And you remember getting the notes. Yeah,
it was like people about that. The mothers kept thinking
it was suck ass. I was like, well that would
be an edgy or.

Speaker 1 (48:51):
Well yeah, well they they I can't remember if they
were live, but I feel like ABC. It was ABC.
It wasn't like the syndicated people that we worked with,
but they were going Now, by the way, now when
Jim says, you know, he's getting out the gas gun
and he's gonna shoot it, what is he saying? And

(49:13):
a suck gas evil doer? They go, okay, so that
is what he's saying. Okay, do me a favorite? Do
me a favorite? Have Jim hit that g.

Speaker 3 (49:24):
You know got it would be one of those I'll
take the g off of this word where he says good.

Speaker 1 (49:30):
Yes, yes, yeah, that's right. So so on the other hand,
suck ass evil doers. I just wanted to get that exactly.
I feel better now, okay. And also because you and
I are both old comic guys from like a way back,

(49:51):
and I don't know if if I don't even know
if we've ever really talked about this, or maybe I
did pick up on it from a previous interview of yours,
but there was always a little bit and this is
an old we're going way back now comic books of
the Spirit, remember him.

Speaker 3 (50:11):
I just literally two weeks ago bought Spirit Artisan collection
what I already had, the two big artist editions, which
where they scanned the original art pages and I mean
those things are just fantastic. Oh you know, you have
to build a bookcase for them because they're huge. And
then recently I got for my birthday, I got Happy Birthday.

(50:37):
That was a month ago. But fine, no, ILL accept it.
But it's like my kids gave me, my grandkids basically
gave me a certificate. At Amazon. It's always like, especially
we're trying to clear things out, it's like, what do
I buy enough? There was two things I bought. One
was a book that was either misplayed or I've had

(51:02):
things stolen out of offices before, and this one the
Frank and Ali Illusion of Life, the original edition of that,
and I went to turn for it one day and
I'm going, it's not here. And I went upstairs with
my daughter. It's like, do you have this? And check
with the kids. Did you ever borrow this? And it
was just gone. So it has my eyes in it,

(51:22):
and basically my eyes and nose. And when there, they
took a bunch of pictures of us to illustrate the
relationship of expressions, and they got like six of us
just really screwing up our face and girning. I'm just
gonna say, And I said, oh, I'm I should have
a copy of that. It's not like I'm going to

(51:42):
study animation all over again, but I should have that. Eventually,
you guys are going to inherit it, but you know,
you'll know what page to look me up. But the
other thing I bought to round out the gift certificate
was this artisan edition of Spirit, which is the same thing,
just not bull size, because back in the day comics

(52:03):
were done double size, I mean, which are giant pages,
and then they shrank down and now they've shrunk a
little more. Yeah, Milkkiff, who did?

Speaker 4 (52:13):
They weren't always like the little no no art.

Speaker 3 (52:20):
Yeah. Milkniff was famous for his brushwork on Terry and
the Pirates and Steve and basically he had to work
that big. Jack Kirby used to work that big, and
then you know it was you know, reproduction got better
and all that, and basically the arts can turn out
more work if they're not literally using and whatever on

(52:44):
larger pages. But yeah, I always thought Dark Wing should
have more spirit that the Dan Kipplesmith is the writer
currently doing the Dark Wing Duck series that I to
covers for, and I brought that up with him because
there's a tendency to limit the number of panels per page,

(53:05):
and it's like, you know, Spirit would often have basically
eight panels in a page, all different shapes and sizes,
and it wasn't always about the Spirit, it was about
a side character or something. Yeah, and I just love
that that kind of storytelling. Oh god, yeah, I would
love to be more spirit and dark. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (53:24):
Well, you know, I used to collect all those comics
and I've told the story before because it just makes
me so sad. You know, Mom, God love you, you know,
but I remember coming back home after I had left
home for years as an adult, and I only bought comics.
I didn't get rid of comics. I bought comics.

Speaker 3 (53:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (53:47):
Then I had the traditional white box, you know, the one.
Oh yeah, And I just went upstairs to the attic
one one year and and I'm looking around. I'm looking around,
and I said, mom, h a little bit of an
emergency here. I can't find any of my old comic books.

(54:09):
You know, that first one with the thing was on it,
and Sue Storm and the Invisible Girl and Mister Fantastic,
And then of course there's that one with the guy
he's swinging along on a spider web. Amazing, what was it? Amazing?
Amazing fantasy. And then there was a guy in a

(54:29):
sort of a leaden costume, looking kind of like Iron Man,
and literally every every number one that, it's all the
ones you're thinking of, all the And she goes, oh,
don't worry, hunt, I took that.

Speaker 3 (54:46):
I took it down to church, and you.

Speaker 1 (54:48):
Know, we we gave it away and and and I said,
really kidding, oh darn, you know, I was gonna sell
him and buy you a house.

Speaker 3 (55:00):
So did she ever believe you on that to her saying.

Speaker 1 (55:05):
She's ma, well, she thought I was making a mountain
out of a mole hill, and I was making a
mountain out of a mountain range. I was minimizing it
for the love of my mother, and uh it was like, okay,
let me just get this out of me. Oh okay, Well,
you know I'm a film better now.

Speaker 3 (55:26):
I used to buy comics, you know, the Silver age ones,
you know, when I was really young, and my dad
would buy some for me because he had originally wanted
to be a cartoonist. Unfortunately graduated in like the Depression
and what about oh yeah, feeding your face instead of
feeding your dreams.

Speaker 1 (55:46):
Oh yeah, I had all those stories.

Speaker 3 (55:49):
But he had all these how to draw a cartoon books?
Oh no, kidding, lived I grew up on. That's why
I knew Milkkniff and al Cap and all that from
the famous cartoonist. Course I love Cap. Yeah, but I
would I would lose track of them. It's like I'd
have a stack of like, you know, maybe foot tall,
maybe a little less, something like that, and then they'd

(56:11):
be in a certain drawer and then I would they
would not be there anymore. But I wasn't. I knew
them all, but I wasn't it. You know, it was
not like, oh, you're doing comics all that until the
Marvel comics that I talked about on a vacation. Then
that's when we wanted to be a collector. And that's
when collecting was fun, because every used bookstore would have

(56:35):
like a box of magazines, you know, and comics that
were for a nickel.

Speaker 1 (56:41):
That's I guess.

Speaker 3 (56:42):
I got two copies of Avengers number one for a
nickel each. You know, I got all sorts of there.
So at a certain point I had complete sets of
up to a certain point whenever I stopped the run,
the complete runs of almost all the Marvel comics. When
I finally went to and then I realized that this.

(57:03):
You know, I don't think i'd retired yet, but it
was like I realized a lot of these comics, I'm
I was buying to keep up a set, and I
wasn't these are like recent, sum well my recent what
I considered recent was decades old.

Speaker 1 (57:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (57:22):
Oh I love the Middlemen. Yeah, those I hung on too.
I knew that the anyway the you know, I trade
him in at at House's Secrets in Burbank.

Speaker 1 (57:35):
Oh sure, yeah.

Speaker 3 (57:37):
Uh. Then later on I actually put the rest of
my collection on consignment, uh at a store that changed
hands now. But their problem was and they sold a
bunch of them Mark Wade, I think also the comic
writer also sold had his own consignment there. But the
problem was I I was a comic reader. My comics

(58:00):
not going to plastic bags with boards and yeah, the
same here, I mean more recent ones did, because that's
how they sold them for a while at various comic shops.
That's true, but so I got money for them. But
but mine were readers. And if you're going to be
spending several hundred dollars on a comic book, you really

(58:20):
want the pristine.

Speaker 1 (58:22):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (58:23):
But I don't understand is the whole slabbing thing, the
whole one slabbing where you take the comic, you get
it graded and they put it between plastic and falling
suck the air out of it. I bought two of them,
never to never see it again.

Speaker 1 (58:38):
Yeah, I agree. Well I bought them, and I said
the helbout it. You know, these are just going to
be investments, and it was they were too. Winnie the Pooh,
you've seen them and they're sitting around the yeah. Yeah,
and they were in there and they were graded and
so one is a nine point eight and one's a
nine point four. And I went okay, and in my

(58:59):
mind the investments, well yeah, exactly plus because I can't
read them.

Speaker 3 (59:04):
Yeah, so I know the guy does the voice.

Speaker 1 (59:07):
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, and I can't
because they're embedded in this. You know you signed the cover,
that's true.

Speaker 4 (59:16):
Yeah, we haven't talked about a lot of ye before
you go.

Speaker 3 (59:20):
Just yeah, do you want to say, can you sign
this for you?

Speaker 1 (59:24):
Yeah? No, don't put my name. Yeah, that's always a
dead giveaway. Oh no, no, no, no name. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (59:30):
Yeah, well that has changed. I'll do I used to do.
People would find my address, oh online or you know whatever. Yeah,
and that said, I'd get mail and O can you
do a sketch of this? You can do an autograph
of this?

Speaker 1 (59:43):
And I knew that what do you do with that?

Speaker 3 (59:47):
I used to again this during the pandemic, and I realized,
you know, there's some people just struggling for ways to
get by, and it's like I'll literally sign something and
do a real quick sketch. I'm not going to do
something gorgeous, or I would sell at a con, but
do a little sketch and sign it and do that.
But then things opened up again and I realized, you know,

(01:00:10):
you get this letter like, oh, mister Stones, I'm so
you know, big friends with your career and all that.
I'm working with these seven young ladies never named, never
think like that, how she's raising them right or whatever,
and this would mean so much to them, and I'm going, no, yeah,
the little girl is going to care about my career.

Speaker 1 (01:00:32):
Yeah. And if you don't have to put their name, yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:00:35):
Actually, though, here's the big difference, because I post online
that I don't do that anymore. I have a little
slip of paper that I just put in that says
I don't do this anymore because it keeps it instantly
shows on eBay. And somebody says, that's why I always
personalized mine. I said, check eBay. That doesn't matter anymore.
All these to Grace to Alex too interesting. You know that.

(01:01:00):
It's just like you know, so I you know when
it comes if some well I won't even say what
I might sign because I don't know, but I can
tell that they all come at once. I went, oh,
somebody had a convention in New Hampshire. It looks like yeah,
you know, and people will join autographed clubs and it's

(01:01:22):
you know, and they're saying, yeah, will you joined the club?
And I guess they here's a list of addresses and
people who say they're you know, I got something back.
Well that something was going so they just had to
cut that out.

Speaker 1 (01:01:36):
It's a bad idea.

Speaker 3 (01:01:37):
Yeah. And now as we get older and you go
to conventions, you know that can be part of your
you know, it's part of how you're getting by. You
sign things, you take pictures and whatever, and I sell drawings.

Speaker 1 (01:01:52):
Yeah, you know that's why not because you can.

Speaker 3 (01:01:55):
Yeah, and people it's like, oh, I don't even I'm
not even sure you can. You're supposed to send money,
you know, through the mail, but if you do that,
it's like, well, you know, sorry. What I'll do is
just put the money back in the self addressed stamp envelope.

Speaker 1 (01:02:11):
Yeah, send it back to them. But I never get money.
But if I did, I keep it and I did
teach them a lesson.

Speaker 3 (01:02:19):
And when they when some people write and then they
don't do a self addressed stamped envelope, it's like, yeah,
that's an easy bin.

Speaker 1 (01:02:27):
Yeah that yeah, but yeah, that that riddles my mind.
Would you send me a like a five by six poster,
you know, a dog? Yeah, let me do that for you.

Speaker 3 (01:02:37):
Literally this morning he came, I came here. Before I
came here, uh, dropped off some mail and one of
them was from the fan really impressed with your career.
It means so much. I love the Disney Afternoon.

Speaker 1 (01:02:53):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (01:02:53):
And he had little index cards that said great actor,
you know, tadstones down at the bottom, so in case
you can't read the signature, I guess that is. Then
at the end of this saying I love the shows
and all that says what was it like doing voices
for The Disney Afternoon, Like, oh, yeah, you really researched
me a lot, like.

Speaker 1 (01:03:16):
Doing doing medley of your voice.

Speaker 3 (01:03:18):
You should hear me try Winnie the Pooh. Yes. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:03:24):
Tuned In with Jim Cummings, you could support the show
join the Tuned in Family Today at Patreon dot com,

(01:03:45):
slash Jim Cummings podcast Do It Now.

Speaker 3 (01:03:49):
Winnie the Pooh is one of those landmark shows with
Carl Gears and all that on TV. Though really I
remember because he often went over budget in the first season,
and I remember Gary Kreisel again, the man who was
typing the money, uh, saying it's a good thing is

(01:04:12):
success because he in trouble because they put that on
the story I heard. And this is before the Disney
Channel was the huge. They were still finding.

Speaker 1 (01:04:24):
What they were supposed to do.

Speaker 3 (01:04:25):
You know, they put winne Pooh on I think Sunday mornings.
It was like the lowest rated part of the of
the channel, just because it was early in the mornings
on the Yeah, and I guess they were thinking Saturday
morning type stuff, and we don't want to compete with
Saturday mornings, so do that, and it became their top

(01:04:46):
you know, that show just suddenly became this mega hit.
Even that was you know, just top to bottom. The
quality that loved that was putting.

Speaker 1 (01:04:55):
Oh yeah, it was very well done, yeah, really really
well done.

Speaker 3 (01:04:59):
That it was impressive. I took some of the they
got a pencil test on that one too, and took
it over to features and they were saying, wow, this
looks pretty good.

Speaker 1 (01:05:07):
Yeah. I will never remember the ratio, but they said,
I remember talking about how great it looked. You could
turn the sound down and go look at this. I
mean it was not you were not mistaking it for
Huckleberry Hound exactly, you know, because they moved and they
were very fluid and and I don't remember the ratio,

(01:05:29):
but there was x amount of what would it be
drawings per minute? Well, it's like as opposed to you know,
flash cards.

Speaker 3 (01:05:39):
Yeah, I mean it's basically it's twenty four frames a second,
and you can but even in feature in feature films,
for certain actions or if there's a camera move, you
put it. We'd call it putting on ones, meaning you
need a different you know, per frame. Every frame needs

(01:06:02):
a different picture because it's just a technical thing. If
the camera is panning with the background the characters moving
too fast, it'll strobe. But generally all those Disney features
were done at on two's, meaning every two frames there'd
be a drawing. So full animation doesn't really have a

(01:06:22):
lot to do with how many frames you do. It's
what you do with those frames that you the acting
that that was put in. You know, we tried to
do that in our shows and not just have characters,
you know, doing some cycle in the background or something.
And that's why we sent those you know, directors overseas
to to do drawings and over all that. Yeah, to

(01:06:45):
oversee overseas. Yes, but all those show and Jim was
a big part of those early days of yeah, the
Afternoon actually Disney TV Animation, you know, from the very beginning,
so you weren't getting puzzles in correct, I don't know.

Speaker 1 (01:07:01):
I don't think I ever did a wazzle.

Speaker 3 (01:07:03):
Yeah, I can hear it right after staked into Gummy Bears. Yeah,
and all that.

Speaker 1 (01:07:10):
I don't know what the first well, the first Disney
thing I ever did was Dumbo Circus and that was
you know, that was that was for Disney Channel. It
was I think it was one of their first shows too,
so and I just you know, I thank God all
the time. You know, I was there when Disney Animation,

(01:07:31):
Disney TV Animation was taking off, and so was I.
So I I mean a bit of right place, right time.
But hopefully I deserve to be cast. But I often
think that there will never be a time like there
never has been that to my knowledge, that there were
that many people, that many artists and writers and music

(01:07:52):
people and actors all coming together and and all just
just coming up with this fountain well of creativity.

Speaker 3 (01:08:01):
That thing I said about and that I didn't get
notes from you know, Puyna Vista, and ABC couldn't give
you notes in the first thirteen. They wanted a second season.
All that's rof. That meant because we had done our
sixty five plus thirteen for ABC. That meant I had
to do it the normal way at the networks, meaning

(01:08:23):
pitch them premises and people say, did they kill any
ideas you really wanted to do? And I said, we
pitched like for everyone, we pitched you know, three or four.
So no, it's not like those things get retained like
I say, it could be like Okay, no, seriously, dark
Wing becomes a sponge, but he has to fight the

(01:08:44):
liquid dators. That puts him at a disadvantage. Well, here's
the here's the beast story, the emotional thing of it
because he thinks he can he's using us and all that,
and launch Pad is using him to clean the car whatever. Well,
he best villains and that's probably more than I would
remember of anything else. So it's like, no, everything I

(01:09:06):
wanted to do we basically did, except in hindsight, Oh,
we should have done an episode of such and set. Yeah,
but that last thirteen we had to do notes. So
I figured that's never going to happen again. Of that
arrangement of a distributor or not giving notes, whether it's
a networker or a syndicator, and management kind of you know,

(01:09:29):
they would really watch it, like the first three scripts,
and then it's like Harry had a job to do
running the division, you know, so and then when the
first footage came back, you know, every to be posed to,
you know, poise to doing more notes. The one time
I thought it would happen again is when DreamWorks created
their animation television animation and they were doing twenty two

(01:09:53):
episode things. It was all in house, and I said,
it can happen again. It's all in house. They can
just hire these creative people and let them go. Just
make sure, you know, have to do with somebody watching
over and instead they and that was the only thing.
And I wasn't working there that you know, a lot

(01:10:13):
of my guys have moved over but instead they brought
over people from Features to watch over stuff and give
notes on the early things. And the problem is features
And I was told this when I started at TV
Animation Features and TV is a whole different thing. You know,
what John Lassiter was able to do with Buzz Lightyear

(01:10:34):
when they did a buzz light Year adventure at the
beginning of Toy Story two, I think was fantastic. It's like, well,
how long did you take to conceive and storyboard that?
Five minutes? Three minutes, five minutes, because we have twenty
two minutes to get out every week. That's the huge difference,
you know, of that is a huge difference. You got

(01:10:57):
to be a genius at a much faster pace. You
don't quite hit the mark anyway. The people they just
you know, pilots were done and redone and all that,
and it's just like, it's not brain surgery. Here's what
you identified the key things you love out of the
movie and the characters. You've got these great people, you know,

(01:11:17):
working for you, with great track records, and you know,
sure somebody can give notes, but don't stop the train,
you know. So that's when I realized, oh, it really
isn't gonna happen again. And when it comes to recording stuff,
that was you know, part of it was actor schedules
because you guys are getting so popular that you were
booking we're work were as opposed to. I forget what

(01:11:40):
the rule was, but it was like, hey, once we
book them, we have them for four hours, four hours,
four hours, and that's it. You can you know.

Speaker 1 (01:11:47):
They're yeah, so never really took four hours?

Speaker 3 (01:11:50):
Yeah, I think ever, but you know. And then the
other was just people getting too picky an editorial and
stuff like that, where it's like, let the act. You
get so much more of having everybody in the same room.
Oh you have, you have less stress. You know, you
have good coming out of that. You know. Oh, I agree,

(01:12:10):
He's just fantastic.

Speaker 1 (01:12:12):
Yeah. And if somebody ad libs, which I was notorious for,
it can screw up things because if they keep the
ad lib. I've told the story before were you know,
I did Aladdin, as you know, and there was some
guy named Robin Williams who was only you know, god
and and I had lived one or two things, and

(01:12:35):
they kept it and that threw off Robin's line and uh,
and they kept this in the return of Jafar, where
Robin says, well, I'm sorry that, you know, they had
to bring him back in to redo, and so at
the end of the thing he had I've told this before,
but it still cracks me up because I'm sorry, but
that's another ad lib and I won't be putting up
at this from a tertiary character. And he reached down

(01:12:57):
and grabbed my feet and rolled me up into a
blind and Genie.

Speaker 3 (01:13:00):
Made me vanish.

Speaker 1 (01:13:02):
So I was then then I wasn't in it anymore. Really, Yeah,
So I personally got the finger from Robin Williams.

Speaker 3 (01:13:09):
Yeah, I would have been on the second when we
brought Robin, Yes, takeover, Yes.

Speaker 1 (01:13:13):
It was his dad came in and he was kind
of green. Genie, wasn't he a little enough? He was?

Speaker 3 (01:13:19):
It was it was the same it was we had
I think it was Charlie Adler did a voice that
was really close to Robin. And that was the problem
that it was like, no, you're you know, even though
Robin and Disney were on evil terms, then I didn't

(01:13:42):
know the he still had to say of who got
the thing, or maybe they were just still trying to
patch things up with them the you know, so Charlie
was was totally out and Dan was just Dan had
a fantastic improv background and it was just super funny

(01:14:05):
and came up with a very warm type of genie
that was you know, we're great for the show. It
was like we did Patrick Warburton in buzz light Year.
You know, he really was funny. He did a great
job of it. And then when it came time to
release our multi part as a direct to video, which

(01:14:27):
actually launched the show, I.

Speaker 1 (01:14:29):
Think they said direct the video. Pardon I think it
launched direct to video.

Speaker 3 (01:14:35):
No Return of Jafar did is that the one?

Speaker 1 (01:14:37):
Like? Okay, well I knew it was there.

Speaker 3 (01:14:38):
Yeah, it was one. Yeah, the uh on the buzz
light you think Tim Allen had to then a dr
Patrick Warburton and it was just driving Tim crazy because
his and it turned out fine, but Patrick is a
very unique person in his phrasing, in his timing. Absolutely,
Tim was what does this guy doing? It was a

(01:15:04):
good transition into the series to have a video that
has the familiar voice, arguably with a different kind of
a rhythm. And then Patrick just did the series and
he was funny. But yeah, Return of Ja'far did start things,
and that was all I was trying to do is
because budgets were always tight, and I was afraid they

(01:15:26):
were getting tighter, and I thought if there could just
be some other bit of income coming in. And I had,
through being at Disney, I had met some middle management
people over at Direct Videos, and I called up the
guy I knew, and I said, you know, technically I'm
doing the sequel to Aladdin. Are you guys interested? And

(01:15:47):
again all I was thinking is maybe if you could
sell a few copies. It's like, hey, maybe don't cut
our budgets. Anyway, he took it to hire.

Speaker 1 (01:15:57):
You did it organically. You just took up, took up
the end of Aladdin exactly and then boom the next
day pretty much because the.

Speaker 3 (01:16:07):
Uh, well though, I will let me finish. The other
thing is the middle management. I took it to his
bosses and they were not interested until they released Aladdin
on the video and it was huge and a barn
burner of all sorts, and I thought, I'm going to
call it that guy again, how about call yeah? And

(01:16:28):
he went to his bosses this time they were very interested.
In Suddenly, Jeffrey Katzenberg gets wind of it and so
we suddenly are in a conference room screening it for
Jeffrey Katzenberg, and luckily not necessarily for the quality of
the film, but at that first one, the first half
was done by Disney Australia, these great animators. The second
half was done by Disney in Tokyo, and those they

(01:16:52):
were still great, but a whole different kind of animation
than what Australia was able to pull off, especially with
the Genie and we and returns. Jafar was able. We
took part of the Arabian Nights song that wasn't used
in the feature because it talked about I forget what
it was, whether they talked about the forty Thieves or

(01:17:12):
Arabian Nights or there is something that fit our show.
So Jeffrey sits down, good, this gorgeous horse animation starts
as these writers going across the dunes and you're hearing
that the real music, the song and everything. And he
gets through the first sequence he says, guys, this is

(01:17:33):
looking pretty good. And at that point he knew it
was you know, it costs three and a half million
dollars as opposed to oh, god knows what the feature. Yeah,
then he started giving notes, he like sat forward and
it was like, okay, we've got to finish this up
as an a production with I got to work with
Academy Award winning sound designers and mixers and all of that.

(01:17:55):
I learned so much, you know, through that sort of thing.
So that really started dedund work.

Speaker 1 (01:18:00):
On that one.

Speaker 3 (01:18:01):
Yeah, yeah, and legendary exactly, yeah, legendary recording engineer. But
that really and went out and broke you know, records.
I was never happy with that story. It just I
cringe at which the one return just because it was
in parts. And the main reason why I came about

(01:18:22):
is and the reason why it smoothly took off is
if you take the genie out of Aladdin, the arguably
the smartest but certainly the funniest character in that movie
is Iago Gilbert Godf and I said, I want that
bird in the continuing show. So I needed and to
get him out. It's like, oh, I guess we got

(01:18:43):
to release you know, ja'far And that really is the
start of the story. It was just to get Gilbert
into the thing, and that worked out great character played
across the Monkey and Frank Walker Is. It really helped
make the series. It's just the dynamics of that sort
of thing. Yeah. Yeah. The second one, you know, Rob

(01:19:08):
Robin had made up, Jeffrey had left and and whatever
their fight was, you know, the guys came in and said, no,
no problem with all that, and amends were made, and
suddenly he's doing the voice for us, although we already
had animation going with Dan Dan. Yeah. So Robin, although

(01:19:32):
it was early enough that we weren't gonna make him
a d R, it was like he could go from it.
But so we had all sorts of things. There was,
and there was one sequence that I thought we really
wrote toward the genie here he's really going crazy, where
he's gonna leap out of the plane and say Geronimo,
and and basically that one it was when well, it

(01:19:58):
doesn't matter where it was, but basically I thought that
one was. And then Robin gets to that point and
suddenly he's doing a marching troop of bagpipers and he's
going all over the and it was just fantastic. So
I said, well whatever, And in fact, he gave us
so much material. The editors looked at me and and well,

(01:20:24):
actually it was the letter. It was like storyboard. They go,
how do we do this? I said, we need to
cut it like music, and I just listened to the stuff.
I said, these are always funny things. Okay, I want
a real fast thing, and now this one is longer.
And it was just to have a like a radio
show and the lead just those rhythms and all that.

(01:20:44):
And once we did that, it was like, you know,
just go ahead and storyboard it. Yeah, crazy and it
was super a lot of fun. And it was really
fun when Robin would do talk about the genie. Later
he would mix up Aladdin the movie and the Forty
Thieves that he would just the gashould mix him up,

(01:21:06):
and every once in a while he'd say, we'd go like, yeah,
that was ours. Yeah, yeah, although that was true of
the first movie. To give credit to my two friends,
John Musker and Ronnie Diamonds.

Speaker 1 (01:21:15):
I was about to bring them up. Yeah, they they
were up.

Speaker 3 (01:21:18):
They a lot of the lines that people credit Robin
with they actually wrote into the script, but for publicity
they went along with it. They went like when you know,
because Robin did add so much to it, you know,
some of the ones ever quoted, they were they just
played with it. But I started at Disney six months

(01:21:38):
after Ron did and and we shared an office. I
was like three months before Glenn Keene was one of
the top animateurs full time, so it was I actually
went to them when they asked me to do the
Aladdin series because I had started features. I was very
self conscious. I say, is this all right with you guys?
They say yeah, sure, And really, by the time Pocahontas

(01:22:01):
came around, I saw Mike Gabriel, who's one of the
directors of that kind of came by. I said, aren't
you guys doing a Pocahontas series? And I realized it
became a mark of you did a successful film, you
have television animation. Where I was always carrying this thing
of like, oh TV animation because of our budgets and timing,
but it was always it was Michael Eisner's philosophy and

(01:22:25):
animation was important to him. When we at the end
of it, the Sunday after his first week at Disney,
and technically I was on vacation and somebody called me,
We know you're on vacation and it's a Sunday, but
can you come to Michael Eisner's house for a meeting?
And all I know is what I'm reading in the papers. Yeah,
I'm not going to say no to this. Yeah, And

(01:22:47):
it was this very small group of people, and I
had stuff from previous things that I could show of
Mickey mouse projects. He said, oh, these are great, these
are great, but Mickey, we cannot do Mickey unless we
know we can do them one hundred percent, right. And
his feeling was Disney's top name in animation. Anywhere there's animation,

(01:23:08):
we should be but that doesn't mean it's the same.
So we should be the best feature animation, and we
should be the best animated shows on TV. But they
didn't expect TV animation to look like feature animation.

Speaker 1 (01:23:23):
Right, interesting because yeah, yeah, I think I can see that,
and it's frames per second and all of that.

Speaker 3 (01:23:33):
It's really just yeah, back, I mean again, when I started,
it was like from my education was fun. We were
still editing at the very beginning with Gummy Bears. Third
season is the one I did, But they were still
editing on film. You couldn't do the kind of tricks
where hey, take out three frames here and then two

(01:23:53):
frames here, reverse these orders, because you were literally cutting
a piece of film, gluing it together, and then some
poor negative cutter down the lane with there's only one
negative would have to do those same kind of thing.

Speaker 1 (01:24:06):
And at Horta over at the old B and B studio,
there was this what was that that machine if you
can remember it, I'm not going to remember his name,
but there was a machine and a film editing with big,
giant reels of film and it was animation, remember that. Yeah,
And it would go down and it would come down

(01:24:28):
and there'd be a screen right here, so he and
then he would cut that out, then he put him together. Yeah,
and it was perfect.

Speaker 3 (01:24:41):
Yeah. When it got to digitally, you could try out
things and reverse this and all.

Speaker 1 (01:24:45):
That, but this was hands on.

Speaker 3 (01:24:47):
That was exactly So I got to have a little
of that. I learned something from Trom Razeka as head
of production and surely first started and I sat in
on a gummy Bear's mix that he was doing and
it was a if not a whale, a whale size
creature coming up a river and they had wave sound,
you know, water sound effects. And Tom said, hey, do

(01:25:11):
you have any of those wave sounds from that earlier
apartment and the real and they say, yeah, you know,
put some of that in here. So he used waves
crashing on the beach sound effects in this other place,
and it was like suddenly it was right, and it
was like that clicked in my head when my favorite
sound effect was in return of you.

Speaker 1 (01:25:32):
Far your favorite sound effect, it is a free sound guy.

Speaker 3 (01:25:36):
Yeah, well, okay, when I started Disney, we used to
we were trainees and we every once a month we'd
meet with some body in a different company. And I
remember with Jimmy McDonald was it was not a legendary nicky.
He was the main sound effects guy. Yes, yes, anyway,
he taught. He showed how he did the sound effects

(01:25:57):
of popcorn popping, because he pointed out that popcorn doesn't
make sound. The sound that you associate with popcorn is
the popcorn hitting the sides of the popcorn machine. Pots
are and popper. And he used two thin dowels and
a linoleum covered or vinyl covered kitchen chair and just

(01:26:18):
would hit that and randomly and all that. It was like,
you know, that's like, well, my version of that was
Ja'afar comes out of the lamp. He's now a genie.
He is super powerful. Right. Then comes the moment where
these wrist bands clamp on to his wrists. Meaning he's
a slave.

Speaker 1 (01:26:36):
Right again, what.

Speaker 3 (01:26:37):
Sound does that make? You can always do a shing
or a magic yeah, but I said, get me the
sound of a jail door slamming shut like an old yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:26:50):
And they did from gun smoke yeah basically yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:26:54):
But actually no, I wanted the ones that rolled shut,
so you get a little that rolling and bring it up. Yeah.
And it worked perfectly, and I knew subconsciously what we're doing. Yeaheah,
ironically that we did that. We did the dam track
at one place, and then of course finished up with

(01:27:16):
the Academy Award winning people. But it was and they
had they did the same thing, but it was just
slightly different, and maybe it was just in my head,
but it was like that was the thing of there
is something that has no sound, because it's just two
arms going up into the air and then playing with
sound to make you think of something else. And that's
what I loved about my career is that I always

(01:27:37):
said I learned enough of every piece of the process
to be dangerous that I could give notes and they
would make sense. But my goal was always to hire
people better than I am in all those places. And
that's especially because days Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:27:57):
So you got dangerous very much and let's yes, oh man.

Speaker 3 (01:28:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:28:03):
and more. You'll feel the difference, So go ahead and
join the tuned In family today at Patreon dot com

(01:28:24):
slash Jim Cummings podcast do it now, amazing.

Speaker 4 (01:28:29):
We're just about out of time here. We have to
be out of this studio in just a couple of minutes. Yes,
but thank you so much for coming on. That was
a great conversation.

Speaker 1 (01:28:37):
Tad's oh here, thank you for accept no substitutes, ladies
and gentlemen.

Speaker 4 (01:28:41):
Absolutely, yeah, that was some really interesting stuff they were
talking about.

Speaker 3 (01:28:44):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:28:45):
Yeah, I think people really like that. People really like that.
I enjoyed that. That was a lot of fun.

Speaker 1 (01:28:50):
Yeah, Like Rob always says, it's nice to lift up
the circus tent and look under there.

Speaker 3 (01:28:56):
Yes, absolutely really, yeah, see what those climes.

Speaker 4 (01:29:01):
What I really liked about this conversation was like you
you've had you have such a business mind and like
looking at the entertainment industry kind of from that angle,
you know, it's refreshing and unique.

Speaker 3 (01:29:12):
I feel it. It was what people, you know, what
I had to deal with. I was always the guy
dealing with management. In fact, I did I did. My
partner in several early Disney shows was Alan Zaslov and
Alan went back to not quite if he was at
Termite Tarrons he was like running around giving people coffee

(01:29:33):
or something like that, but he was at upa doing
Gerald mcboyn boyn, you know. And he was brought on
as an animation veteran to help out with Dug Nails
in direct on that and we were to take it
up on on you know, several of those early shows.
And then things changed and Alan had to go on
a different show while I was developing something else. And

(01:29:54):
suddenly Alan was going to notes and meetings and he
came into my my office.

Speaker 1 (01:30:00):
He said, Dad, they said this and.

Speaker 3 (01:30:02):
This and this. I said, yeah, and what do you
think I was protecting you? You know from all those years,
you know? And I said, some you know, what you
have to put up with. You don't have to do
the note the way they say it. You just have
to realize, Okay, there's a problem there. I have to
give them a nod exactly. Yeah, but yeah, that was

(01:30:24):
so I whenever I could learn something from that end
of the thing, you know, and sometimes just random stuff
like we did Buzz light Year of Star Command. One
of the key characters of Mira Nova. She was a princess,
but she was kick ass, and they weren't going to
do a toy of her in the in the toy
line and it's because girl toys don't, you know, don't sell.

(01:30:48):
And I said, well, she's a key character. She's the
one who actually does the fighting and you know, and
hand fighting. And I don't think they ever Well, they
must have put out a toy line because I designed
a toy that they actually did.

Speaker 1 (01:31:02):
But you know, there reiduals on toys.

Speaker 3 (01:31:04):
No, sadly, No, I'm from animation. I don't expect. Yeah,
that's true. Yeah, had I've gotten residuals on all the
scripts I had done, you'd be doing fine. Look at
you guys, a bigger studio.

Speaker 1 (01:31:16):
You are doing fine. Yeah, we're not worried about Yes, Oh,
thank you so much.

Speaker 3 (01:31:24):
Absolutely absolutely, it was always great work with you. We
were like, oh, when I had those teams together, you
could just kind of relax and have fun.

Speaker 4 (01:31:34):
Yeah, well, we hoped, We hope all of you guys
watching out there enjoyed that episode. That was another episode
of Tuned In with Jim Cummings. If you like that
episode and like this show, be sure to like and subscribe.
It helps us out, it helps you out, helps you
find more content like this, and if you like it
so much that you want to see more, good news,
We actually just recorded an episode for Patreon exclusively.

Speaker 3 (01:31:57):
Exclusively. That's right.

Speaker 4 (01:32:00):
You can see exclusive episodes, stuff that you don't get
to see here on YouTube, extended episodes, all that good
stuff and much more. If you want some merchandise, you
can go over to Jim Commings closet on Shopify. Get
some good stuff over there, and you can check the
link in this description for any upcoming convention appearances that
Jim has Until the next time, I'm producer Chris the

(01:32:20):
Legend himself, mister Jim Cummings, and the Legend Tad Stones.
Thank you so much for being here. Really appreciate it,
and we will see you guys in the next one.

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