67. Greg Meader on Sound Design for Spaceship Earth, Tower of Terror, Splash Mountain, and Phantom Manor

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It’s easy to look at theme parks as the product of just a small group of brilliant designers. Creative leaders definitely lead projects at Walt Disney Imagineering (WDI), but they are only a small part of the picture. Numerous specialties fall under the umbrella of WDI and work together to create the ultimate attractions we enjoy at the parks. One pivotal aspect is sound design, which helps to build an immersive experience while remaining seamless to most guests.

My guest on this episode of The Tomorrow Society Podcast is Greg Meader, who worked as a sound designer for Disney during the ‘80s and ‘90s. Meader played drums in Future World during the early years of EPCOT Center and ultimately joined WDI in the late 1980s. He worked on classic attractions like the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror, Splash Mountain, and the 1994 version of Spaceship Earth. One of Meader’s early projects was the stunning Phantom Manor at Disneyland Paris.

During the episode, I talk with Meader about his interest in sound design and how he got started at Disney. He gives an insider’s perspective on what it was like to work on attractions that remain an essential part of Walt Disney World and other parks. There are so many considerations that go into sound effects, including the noise generated by ride vehicles. It’s mind-boggling to think about how much planning and trial and error is needed to deliver top-notch experiences.

Show Notes: Greg Meader

Check out Greg Meader’s list of film and attraction credits on his IMDB page.

Watch this interview on Polygon with Greg Meader about his work on the video game WildStar.

Transcript

Dan Heaton: Hey there. Today’s podcast is all about sound design at Disney’s theme parks with my guests, Greg Meader, who worked on many iconic Disney attractions, including Spaceship Earth, the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror, and even Food Rocks. You’re listening to the Tomorrow Society Podcast.

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Dan Heaton: Thanks for joining me here on Episode 67 of The Tomorrow Society Podcast. I’m your host, Dan Heaton. One thing I’ve really enjoyed during the last three and a half years doing this podcast has been the chance to connect with some lesser-known figures behind the scenes at Walt Disney Imagineering. When I say lesser-known, I’m not referring at all to their skills. It’s just that the way Disney operates. We only learn about a few lead Imagineers out in front of a project and not about all the talented individuals that work behind the scenes. The perfect example is my guest this week, Greg Meader. I actually connected with Greg after I started writing my current blog series, Spaceship Earth Scene by Scene, where I’m going through each individual scene of Epcot’s iconic attraction.

Greg said to me after I did my introductory post for that series and indicated that he had worked on the sound design for the Jeremy Irons edition of Spaceship Earth, and I immediately wanted to connect with him to talk about that. What I discovered after doing a little bit of research on Greg’s career and then after talking with him, is how many great attractions he worked on during his career at Disney, including Splash Mountain, The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror, and Phantom Manor at Disneyland Paris. He also worked on Food Rocks and has a few fun stories about that odd attraction at Epcot. I even got to ask about a curiosity for me, the Stargate SG-3000 attraction, which I never experience but have an interest in given my love for Stargate SG-1.

It was just a lot of fun to talk with Greg, learn about his career, and he has a lot of cool stories about his time working at Imagineering. So this was a blast. Greg was so much fun and generous with his time. I’m super excited for you to get the chance to hear this show. Let’s go talk to Greg Meader.

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Dan Heaton: What was your experience like with Disneyland or with Disney in general when you were younger?

Greg Meader Well, I live in Southern California, about eight miles from the park at Disneyland. So as a youth, I went there a lot. It was kind of neat because we didn’t go every weekend, but we had access to it. So I’d go quite a bit. I have pictures of me when I’m three years old out there with my grandma. So I have a long history of being a guest at the park. As I got older, I still would go and finally in 1980, I got hired as a musician out there for the Christmas parade, the Fantasy on Parade, and that began my Disney career.

Dan Heaton: When you were going and you were younger, obviously, like you said, you live there, so it was something you enjoyed. Did you have any thought that it would ultimately lead where you’d end up working for them? Was that something you aspired for or did you kind of just enjoy it like many guess?

Greg Meader: No, I just kind of enjoyed it. I’m a drummer, so when I was in my teens, I had some of my instructors who worked out there in the parades. I kind of thought, hey, that’d be kind of a fun job. But I never really, I can tell you, I didn’t sit there every day just going, man, I’ve got to work there. That was never really part of my…it was an option, but it wasn’t like my only option. So that was kind of my view on it.

Dan Heaton: I think that’s pretty common with people that work there. Yes, there always are a few stories of somebody who just wants to do it, but a lot of people I feel like I’ve talked with I wouldn’t say stumble upon it, but all of a sudden end up working there for a variety of reasons, like you mentioned. So you mentioned you were a drummer, and I know you work in sound design, so how did you get interested in doing that when you were younger?

Greg Meader: I don’t know. Just one of those things where I can honestly trace it back to one incident in about sixth grade. We had a reel-to-reel tape recorder in class and we were recording people giving speeches, and me and one other guy were assigned to run the tape recorder. I remember sitting there, pushing the record button, watching the reels move, looking up at the wall, seeing the clock move to time it. There was not like an epiphany like “this is it”. But I can trace everything back to that moment. Like, I think this would be kind of a fun thing to do. So I kind of started getting down that path with sound. I was just always interested in music and sound and just stuff like that.

Dan Heaton: It’s interesting that it was fairly early, obviously, that you had such a connection to it. You mentioned that you had performed at Disneyland and then ultimately that kind of started you on that path. So how did that go where you eventually started working there later in the ‘80s?

Greg Meader: Well, what I did is I was at Disneyland for three years, just seasonal, casual, doing parades and seasonal parades, Easter, Christmas, special events, things like that. And in 1983, I was in the All-American College Band program there. I was an alternate, so I wasn’t really playing much, but I was on the roster. So that was kind of cool. And then in 1983, I was offered a full-time job to go down to Epcot and play in the Future World Brass and I took him up on it. So from 1983 to 1987, I wore white and stood out in Future World and played a lot of stuff, a lot of songs.

Dan Heaton: So what was that experience like? Because that was so early to the park and I know a lot of my listeners and myself included, love that era. So what was it like though, playing just out in the Florida sun all the time at Epcot?

Greg Meader: Well, it was interesting to me because myself and friends and family could not believe that I was getting paid just to play drums because they would ask me, what’s your job? And I said, well, it’s to play drums out on the park. They said, But yeah, but what else do you do? And I said, well, that’s it. That’s all I do. So it took them a while to just kind of grasp the concept of just getting paid to play drums. For me, growing up out here with Disneyland, I’d never seen another Disney park.

So I remember the first time when I drove out there with another musician that had got hired. We drove out there together and we pulled into EPCOT in the back employee parking lot, and it was very strange because it’s like this whole Disney World out there, literally the world, and I’d never seen it. It just felt weird because it was like, I can’t believe there’s a whole another Disney universe that I never knew about. I’d heard of it, but I’d never been there. But you kind of get used to that. Then you just, you learn your job and you go and you start playing. And EPCOT was a new park at the time, like you said. So it was kind of fun because it was a good time in life, I’ll say that.

Dan Heaton: I can imagine to play drums and hang out in and around Epcot and everything, that doesn’t sound like a bad gig. So when did it change where you ended up kind of moving on to the next next stage of your career?

Greg Meader: Well, when I was out there, the Studio Tour was being planned, and at the time there was just a dirt road, literally a dirt road behind Epcot that was leading to what would eventually become that park. I was with a friend of mine that was working out there, and I said, where’s that road go to? He said, oh, they’re building a new park. That’s where all the Imagineers are at, working on the park. That was the first time I think I’d ever heard the word Imagineering, I’d heard of WED, and I’d kind of heard it bantered about a little bit, but he goes, yeah, those people all do all the design work.

I thought, man, that sounds like a lot of fun. At that point I kind of made it my mission to try to get into Imagineering, and this was about 1986. I said, I’ve got to that’s something I got to really try and do. That’s kind of how it began. Then being from California, the band in Florida in 1987 moved back here, finished some school and got a job working in the post-production industry out here in Burbank, North Hollywood area, working on movies and television projects. At that point, Imagineering is, it’s in Glendale, and I knew where it was and I would go, this is pre-Internet. So you had if you wanted to find a job there, you had to physically drive there and go in the lobby and look in this little green book that was on the counter and it was just there.

I saw the book and there was nothing in there for me, but I still applied just because. And then of course, I got rejected because there was no job. So about every two months on my lunch hour, I’d run over there and just flip through the book. I saw one day it said Audio Production Specialist, and I said, well, there you go. So I applied and for me the rest is history. It worked out.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, I guess it did. Well, it’s interesting, too, because part of me thinks that was almost not easier because obviously you had to be diligent and have the experience. But being able to just go in there and look at a book, it’s like compared to now, it’s almost it’s almost a nice way to be able to do it. So you mentioned that was around like 87 or so in the late eighties, right?

Greg Meader: Yeah. I actually started interviewing in September of ‘88 and actually got hired in February of ‘89. So it was like, it was over Christmas. So there were some time off, but it’s about a four-month process. Yeah, it was kind of a, it’s like a kinder, gentler time. Back then, it was very like you kind of just mentioned it was, you walk in the front lobby, you say hi to the security guard. You look at the book, you said that you sit in a chair and you read it through it. So it’s very I don’t know, it’s a totally kind of a different atmosphere than it is today.

Dan Heaton: Pretty soon after that, it seems like you were then working on Disneyland Paris and working on a project there. How quickly did that happen and what was that like to kind of get involved with that project?

Greg Meader: Well, I believe it was probably going on by the time I started at the company. But working in audio is kind of like the last one of the last things that gets done. So a lot of our production, we were aware of a project for a year or two ahead of time, but we didn’t really actually do a lot of work until about the final six months.

We would do some recording and things like that, but actual mixing and editing and, getting it ready to go in for installation would happen in like the final six months. So we would have meetings and one day we were at a meeting and we had a list of all the, at the time it was called EDL Euro Disneyland. We had a list of all the EDL projects and we kind of went down the runner in the room and said, Who wants to work on what?

We just sort of pick things. It was very none of us like at the time. It was interesting for me because Phantom Manor was one I ended up working on. But at that meeting I remember it was sort of discussed that it was just simply a copy of Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion and there wouldn’t be a lot of production work involved. So a lot of people passed on it.

A couple of the guys that were senior to me passed on it and then it came to be and I said, I’ll take it. And it’s one of my one of my favorite Disney projects. So I’m really glad that I took it. But at the time he didn’t really know what it was going to be. It was just simply a lift from Disneyland, but it turned into so much more, at least from what I was doing on it.

Dan Heaton: Oh yeah. I went there once in 2006 and really wish I could have just basically we were only there a day and I wish I could have ridden that about 15 times because it’s kind of like the Haunted Mansion. But yeah, with the whole being in Frontierland and the Western feel and so many things like you did, I just feel like what they did with the story was so interesting. So tell me, like, what was it like when you really got into working on that attraction? Because to me, it’s still one of the most interesting attractions Disney’s done anywhere.

Greg Meader: Like I said, I really enjoyed it. Jeff Burke, the show producer, had it. He had an amazing concept of what it was going to be. He would have like some drawings and some artwork and he’d say, here’s what it’s going to look like, Here’s what I want it to sound like. And then he would leave. That was the best thing because he goes, I’ll be back in a week. Or we’d schedule another meeting. In that time I just worked on stuff kind of not really unsupervised, but in essence unsupervised, at least from a creative standpoint. So I would just kind of come up with things. The music was written by John Debney.

Well, not written, but rearranged by John Debney. He took the original themes and re orchestrated it and kind of came up with this, the whole Phantom Manor suite. So we were getting some temp tracks from him and just compiling sound effects and just different effects and just kind of trying to create what Jeff was asking for. Then he’d come back in and listen to it and go, I like that or I don’t like that, do it this way. But he always had this grand concept of what it should be. That was always appreciative because I was always sure what he wanted. It was kind of neat because he would say something that he would leave. He came back and he listened and he goes, yeah, that’s it. It was a good experience all around.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, it sounds like it. I feel like the music I was listening to that suite today and the music about it, it’s a little more eerie, like a little creepier that even not like in a frightening way, but it has a different feel to it. How much, just from your experience of just hearing what what Jeff wanted and then John was that a conscious decision to try and make this just a little bit scarier for what you could tell?

Greg Meader: You know, that was sort of decided long before I got on the project. So I don’t know. I mean, yes, it sounds like, I think that’s kind of what Jeff was going for, but I don’t have any inside knowledge on that part of it. I know that an original kind of a temp track was done by Christian Hope. Anyway, Christian did a kind of a temp track on a synthesizer. And I remember we recorded we took some, we took we took Vincent Price’s laugh from the Thriller album, from Michael Jackson’s, and we took Christian’s demo track and we threw some sound effects in there, and we kind of cut this little demo together.

I remember we played it back and it was just one of those things where for the first time you could kind of get a feel for how it was going to sound and look like or not look like, but sound. Jeff and I and a couple other people just looked at each other and went, man, this thing is just going to edit itself. It’s amazing. So kind of from that point, it just sort of I want to say the show edited itself. We got effects, we got music, we put it together. I recorded Vincent Price, we put that in there and then wham! It just kind of came together. Of course, we didn’t end up using Vincent Price, but his laugh was in there.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, that story is so interesting how that changed. So when you’re designing and this is my lack of of being inside WDI and how it works but so you’re doing this are you doing this in Glendale or is this something where you actually ultimately you’re able to go to the actual attraction and test things out? Like how does that work when you’re doing sound effects and other things there?

Greg Meader: Well, you’re based in Glendale. We had Studios there in edit bays, in Glendale, right in the 1401 building. We would, that was our home base. So a lot of stuff, a lot of sound effects and things you’d get out of a library or Joe Harrington, who is the sound effects guru at the time, he would go out in the field and record just stuff. Joe was great because Joe had learned from Jimmy McDonald who started out in those early Mickey Mouse cartoons. So Joe had a you know, I learned a lot from him. I guess what I’m saying is Joe was really good.

He would go out in the field and record stuff and then he’d bring it back and then he would, he’d give you things and you’d start editing and cutting stuff together. But it would all happen in Glendale. A lot of the music, a lot of times would just be recorded. Like the music for Phantom was recorded over at Abbey Road over in London. So different things are recorded, different areas like different, different studios. It wasn’t all done. But it was that was were sort of HQ for audio.

Dan Heaton: It’s kind of amazing how the different like you said, the different places you’re kind of recording and then it all comes together and you’re in that attraction and it’s, oh, this just kind of feels like it should be about all the things behind the scenes that we don’t see.

Greg Meader: Well, correct. Yeah, you work out of Glendale, but everything gets you a lot of stuff gets voiceover sometimes. A lot of times like they won’t be in California, so you’ll fly to wherever they are. When you get everything done and edited and mixed to what you, it’s all ready to go. Then you go to the field and you do the installation, which is it’s a whole different set of circumstances.

You’re in the field and you’re running up and down stairs and you’ve got a tool belt and you’re just, you become kind of a construction worker for a month. You got the hard hat, the safety boots, the vest, all the stuff. Then you just, you make sure it’s all working. It’s an interesting time because there’s about 50 different disciplines all trying to work at the same time. So it’s a lot of scheduling.

I always used to joke, it’s just it’s a 24-seven job. You don’t work 24-seven, but you’re available to work 24-seven. Painters are going to be in there from 7 p.m. till midnight and then programming, show programming, the animatronic guys get it from noon to four or I’m sorry, midnight to 4 a.m. audio. You can have it from 4 a.m. to 10 a.m. there. There’s your work schedule.

Dan Heaton: That sounds really hectic. I was going to ask if given that that was part of the new park, was there a lot of pressure? Do you guys feel the pressure of the fact that it had to be completed? From your experience, I know you were just doing certain parts, but for the opening and just everything had to be right.

Greg Meader: I didn’t feel a lot of pressure because I just had a specific set of things to get done, you know? But I knew I would walk around the park thinking, I don’t see how this is going to get done by April.

Dan Heaton: Yeah.

Greg Meader: Because I was there in February. It’s amazing how things can come together quickly, but it’s I don’t know. I didn’t I didn’t feel that pressure because I just, I’m just one little cog in the machine. So at that point, it was Mickey Steinberg who was the number two guy at Imagineering, I think for project management, and it was on his shoulders. I’m sure he was feeling the pressure because it was, it was his responsibility to get that park built and opened. So I didn’t feel I’m sure I didn’t feel anywhere near the pressure. I’m sure he did.

Dan Heaton: Well, yeah. I think it’s kind of set up that way so that people that are doing individual jobs can do well and then the people up high can sweat it out and get very nervous and not get any sleep and all that. It’s probably designed that way.

Greg Meader: I’m sure there’s there were plenty of meetings that I wasn’t privy to where a lot of things were discussed. How are we going to do this? But I was just, what is it? My mind might be bliss, but my innocence is just, that wasn’t part of what I was dealing with. So I knew nothing about that.

Dan Heaton: So I want to make sure I ask about Spaceship Earth, which I know still, it’s like we mentioned early days of Epcot. It’s one of those original Future World pavilions that actually is still there. Now, granted, it has changed. We’re on version number four and may go to version number five at some point. But you were working on obviously the version with Jeremy Irons that opened in 1994, which is a beloved version by now, especially now that it’s been gone for 12 years. But hat was that experience like? How did you get involved in that project?

Greg Meader: Again, I don’t remember exactly. We would have you know, we’d have production meetings and we would be, like our manager would get a list of projects that were coming up and he would just go down the list. We’d have a meeting and we’d say, okay, who’s available? Who wants to do this? Who wants to do that? There were some of us, like I had worked on Splash Mountain, so I was kind of the water ride, boat ride guy. Another guy, Sam had done a lot of the Circle Vision thing, so he was the film guy. So we all kind of had like areas that we tended to work in.

I guess you call it a specialty, but Spaceship Earth, it was a redo or an update, it wasn’t considered like a major project. It wasn’t like Splash Mountain was from ground to an open attraction. But Spaceship Earth was already existing. So a lot of the stuff like sound effects and that type of stuff can be reused.

It was different music, but the sound effects and the different scenes were, we didn’t change that at all because there was just there was no reason to you know, we just had a meeting and say, Greg, do you want to work on this? Yes. Okay. It’s yours, and then you get a hold of the right people, the project manager or the scheduling people and say, okay, let me know when the meetings are. Then you just get your notebook, you go to the meeting and there you go, you’re on it.

Dan Heaton: That is different, like you said, because they have new scenes and such, but then a lot of it is similar. So I know you mentioned that a lot of the sound effects could be reused, but there were areas like the back half and then the descent that had a lot of new elements. So were there areas where you were either having new sound effects or doing new mixing beyond the music in order to put that together.

Greg Meader: Yeah. The way a project worked was that as the audio production person on that particular attraction, I didn’t create the sound effects. That was Joe Harrington that did that. So I’d go to John, say, Joe, when you’re done with what you’re doing, let me know and give it to me. So he would give me the effects that he had done. Then we’d have a list of the existing effects and we would just go through and pick out which ones were going to be deleted or not used and which would be replaced. But the music was all new and that was all mixed. We remixed and rebalanced everything in the ride, starting from zero. So it was a lot of different, a lot of different elements involved. ‘

But we would take old stuff that was there and then we would listen to it and go, okay, that sounds fine. There’s no need to redo that because a lot of times some of these effects that have cut you like, especially from the original versions of the shows, when Epcot opened, I wasn’t there. So this is secondhand information. But, you know, there was a lot of things to get done.

And a lot of times you just put stuff in as a temp track to keep it there. So you got sound and then after the park opens, you’re like, okay, let’s go back and fix that. Like that was the case on American Adventure. There were some rhythm tracks that were just put in as kind of holding temp tracks. And when we did that redo in ‘92, we finally replaced those. So some of these temp tracks lasted 10 years.

Dan Heaton: Yeah. I talked to Steve Alcorn. He did a lot of the show engineering on the original Epcot Center and his stories about kind of what they did with like you mentioned how Paris was. It sounds like Epcot Center was even more that way. We’re like it was basically dirt until like so soon before. So I’m sure that was special. It was something like Spaceship Earth that getting the to the American Adventure, getting the chance to upgrade. That probably was good for a lot of reasons, but especially probably also enjoyable for you, I’m sure, to kind of get that input for it.

Greg Meader: It was fun for me, like Spaceship Earth especially because when I was in the Future World Brass, we would play our opening set every morning right underneath the ball, right out facing the front gate. I stood in front of that every day for four years. And I’d ridden it quite a bit, and I was starting to just thinking at that point, not right away, but late mid-eighties after having been a musician there for a couple of years, I was starting to think, this Imagineering thing is kind of a way that I want to go. So then I started paying more attention to the attractions and trying to figure out how things were done. From a technical standpoint, Spaceship Earth was always when I got it, it was kind of a fun. I was excited about it.

Dan Heaton: Yeah. You mentioned that the music had to be redone because the music in the ‘94 version is so much more, at least to me, feels more like orchestral and epic. A whole lot of the sound in that is so much possibly do, like you said, to having just time to be able to do it in focus. But it’s grander with like that the music itself was that I mean I know we’re talking 25 years ago and whatnot, but is that something you remember as being a focus to try and kind of spruce it up a little bit?

Greg Meader: Well, I don’t because that happened in a lot of the creative design meetings before we got involved because the audio production department was part of show ride engineering. So we weren’t always privy to all the upfront creative meetings. Sure, sometimes we would get in on them, but a lot of times we weren’t so like, by the time we got word of it was like everything was designed and done, like, here’s what we’re doing, the ideas for doing grander music and all that stuff. I’m sure there were those discussions, but I personally wasn’t involved in any of them.

Dan Heaton: You mentioned putting on the hard hat and kind of getting it with Spaceship Earth. From what I’ve heard, just from what I’ve seen of the ride, it’s a very strange layout and such when you’re doing like the effects and all that, are you getting to like get inside there and work at all or is that all done just outside? Are you able to get much inside and kind of dig through that area when you’re testing things?

Greg Meader: Well, when you’re testing things, when you’re installing the sound, yes. But when you’re producing it and creating in the studio now, you’re familiar with the ride. You’ve been on it. You know what it’s like. You know what we would do a lot of times as we would take…this is 25 years ago. So we didn’t have like the handheld zoom recorders like we have today. But you take a DAT tape machine and a microphone and just sit in the vehicle and record the ride as you ride through it. We were also because we were working on it for real, we would have shot the sound off and just go through and record just the vehicle on the building sound because that’s a moving car like an I don’t know what you call it, Omnimover. But it never stops.

It’s a lot of mechanical devices, always moving, always creating sound. So the biggest thing for like for me and anybody that worked on the audio for those different attractions was just, what’s the noise floor on that ride when you with everything shut off Spaceship Earth was, was relatively loud. It was a I don’t know what I could be wrong in this number, but I think the noise floor was you may not understand what this is, but it was about 75 to 80 DB which, in a recording studio, it’s down around 35 and that’s an exponential curve. So 35 was way quieter than 80.

Dan Heaton: Well, I don’t understand specifically, but I understand the point because, I even notice when I’m ride, especially when you you see like an old ride video. I think they’ve done a better job with that. But those vehicles sound so loud.

Greg Meader: They are a lot. So what we would do is we would record the ride, just the mechanical sounds of it. Then when we were mixing music or just making things kind of editing a show together, we would feed that mechanical sound into the studio at the appropriate level. And none of us were happy with that because it’s just noise you’re inducing. But that’s the reality of what the environment was going to be. We would do that with crowd noise and mechanical noise and just any noise that was going to be part of any kind of part of the show. We would mix it, but we would have it playing right.

Dan Heaton: Because the last thing you want to do is have your sound, these beautiful, great sounds. Then someone gets on the ride and all they hear is the vehicle.

Greg Meader: Well, yeah, and that’s exactly what would happen. You would hear it in the studio, you’d make this nice mix and it’d be very subtle and go, I can really hear that part. That sounds amazing. That singer’s voice is great. Then you get in the ride and it’s just gone because there’s some sort of some mechanical thing right there, making some noise all the time. We had a thing at Disney called Disney Way, one where corporate employees throughout the company could take a three-day program where they would tour the studio, they would tour Imagineering, then they would tour Disneyland, kind of a behind the scenes. It was for people that work, like in marketing and insurance and what I call the non-glamorous jobs at the Disney Company.

But they would do these tours and I would play them tracks like from Spaceship Earth, like orchestral stuff. They would hear and they’d go, wow, I didn’t know that was all going on in the ride. I never heard any of that. So it was a bit from a sound audio production standpoint. It was always a bit frustrating because the sounds we had in the studio were just so much better then the sounds in the ride and because the room has better speaker systems. I wish Disney fans could hear the original tracks in the studio like I was able to because they sound amazing.

Dan Heaton: Oh man. Because they have official audio releases and stuff, but even those are not the same because those are condensed and those are put together more like CD songs. It’s not the same thing I’m sure than what you’re talking about.

Greg Meader: No, it isn’t, because unless you can hear it in like a full on, like the studio, like I know for example, when we did that, like the Tower demos for I think Eisner was listening to him. But we set the room up, we set the lighting just right. We had stuff in surround. We had big subwoofers. You really created this sonic environment that was very cool. But in the back of your mind that it’s never going to be that when it gets to the attraction. You do the best you can in the studio and then you do the best you can when you get out to the ride.

Dan Heaton: Definitely. And I think you’ve you’ve referenced like a bunch of attractions that I want to ask you about, We’ll get to that a little later. But American Adventure, let’s talk about that since we’re at Epcot. So I know you worked on redoing audio from the Golden Dream film, like when they made changes to that in like, I think it was ‘93 ish. So what was that experience like kind of going back in? You know, there were new scenes and kind of rerecording parts of that.

Greg Meader: Well, for me it was amazing too, because Golden Dream is one of my favorite Disney songs of all time. Just the fact that I got to remix and do some stuff on it was amazing for me. But it’s a long show. It’s 30 minutes and we only change the Golden Dream sequence. But we had to extend it out because we had to add in footage of things that had happened over the previous 10 years.

We brought in George Wilkins, the composer, and he didn’t write the original tune, but he wrote all the choir and all the different arrangements, dub stuff that was used. It was a lot of fun just you go out and record the vocals and you take the music tracks and you get to go back into the original tracks, not the mix that you hear in the ride, but all that, like the original recordings from Philadelphia, like the orchestral stuff that was done in like ‘78, ‘79 for the opening of Epcot.

You just get to go back into like archival material and just find all these really neat pieces of music. They’ve always been there, but you never hear them before. So you get to bring them into the studio and you kind of you remix things and it was a lot of fun for me. And, I have it, and when we were mixing Golden Dream, it’s a very emotional song if you listen to it, especially when you watch with the images.

So we were mixing it. Forr that we had we finally got the video edit of all the new images and we’d never seen it before. So we thought, well, we’ll just, we’ll play it. We got to play it along and see if everything lines up. And so we put the song up to video and we’re playing it and we get to the end of it.

And myself, George Wilkins and then Ken Lisi, who is the music supervisor at the time, we’re all sitting at the console with tears in our eyes and we’re like, wow, this is pretty powerful. So that was kind of a neat experience for me. It’s just one of those things, like it just it affected us all emotionally, you know? But then you rewind and do it again and it becomes less emotional and by the hundredth pass, you’re like, you’re over it.

Dan Heaton:You’re just like, okay, JFK, I’m done with you.

Greg Meader: That’s it. Yeah. But another interesting story on my part with JFK. You know that that he has that the sequence where they showed the funeral procession and George had written a bunch of parts. We were playing it all back in the studio and, George goes, oh, I forgot to write some snare parts. I go, well George, I play drums, so I can probably do that. So I got a drum, not that day, but I brought a drum and George wrote some parts and we recorded everything. And we were able to fill in that spot, put it into the show. So my little bit of drumming is still there to this day.

Dan Heaton: Well, that’s great. So, yeah, I’ll have to look for that the next time.

Greg Meader:I mean, yeah, not the drum set part stuff. Just the Kennedy funeral sequence parts, right?

Dan Heaton: Yeah. That song is still one of my favorites. And even after, I have not watched it 100 times in a row, I’ll admit. But even after seeing it a decent amount of times, the film, it all clicks. So it’s really cool that you were able to go back and I believe you also, there’s the vocals are different, right? You brought in different female vocalists, right?

Greg Meader: Well, it was interesting the singer is on the male singers, Richard Page, who was in that group Mister Mister.

Dan Heaton: Right. I remember that.

Greg Meader: I don’t know if it’s it’s not a maybe a kept secret, but maybe not everybody knows that. The original singer, I think was I’m going to say Marty McCall, but I’m not sure that I guess she had contacted cancer and passed away, so she was not available to do it. But we got the girl Siedah Garrett, who had written “Man in the Mirror” for Michael Jackson and sang on his one of his albums.

So she was the female vocalist. Between her and Richard Page, they knocked it out of the park again. It’s just fun to be involved. It’s fun to be in the studio when that’s just being recorded because you’re hearing it for the first time. Just like when you hear a performer just nail something and you’re like, wow, that’s amazing sounding. It’s going to be amazing for the next 20 years.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, that’s the thing with a show like that. It’s going to play, I don’t know how many times, six, eight times a day or whatever, every day for they did recently, I believe a few years ago went back and at least made the show like fix the sound. It made it all nicer. So I think that show will be there. It’s not a show that’s on the chopping block anytime soon. I think it’ll be there as long as probably for a really long time.

Greg Meader: Yeah. I think the only issue is that the Golden Dream…you can’t keep making it longer and longer as history marches on. At some point, you’re gonna have to delete some stuff to keep it under it, because not so much now, but back when Epcot was built, your time limit on those shows was 30 minutes because of the way the audio bin loop tapes were built and made. Analog 24 track tape was only 30 minutes long at running at 15 inches per second. So every show at Epcot was under 30 minutes.

Dan Heaton: That’s interesting. I didn’t think of that because American Adventure is like one of the longest.

Greg Meader: So yeah, it’s like 31. But, you know, I can tell you it it was from the beginning of the tape to the very end of the tape, there wasn’t a lot of spare tape left over when that show was first when the loop was created. It was long.

Dan Heaton: That’s all interesting. And I want to ask you about Tower of Terror, because I know you mentioned that briefly and the Walt Disney World version especially is just for sound. I can’t imagine almost a better attraction to work on because so much of that attraction is sound. Either you’re in the dark or the fifth dimension. So what was that like working on it?

Greg Meader: Well, it was neat because what was happening at Imagineering for me at the time was Joe Harrington is our sound effects guy. He was mentoring me and I kind of have an ear for sound effects and he showed me the ropes and would teach me stuff. And so for me, Tower of Terror was the very first sound effects ride that I got to do. Well, I did Food Rocks, but nobody talks about Food Rocks. I did all the crowd sounds for Food Rocks to make it seem like it’s a live show, but Tower was the first real attraction, I call it that. It was interesting.

I was given this book. It was just a storyboard. It had the whole everything, just all like drawings of what was going to happen and kind of a rough script. And it was like, here you go, make some sound for stuff. That was kind of it, you know? Yeah, it was a lot of people worked on Tower, I love to take credit for working on all of it, but I didn’t. Joe did the fifth dimension. My task was the boiler room, you know, the cooling line area and the ascent shaft and the drop shafts, the meat and potatoes of the ride. Although I think the fifth dimension is very cool, but I had all the drop shafts and the ascent shafts.

Dan Heaton: That’s still a still a big part of it, obviously, yeah.

Greg Meader: I like to think.

Dan Heaton: You know, and I’m not downplaying at all. I just think though, that like when you either I mean at the beginning when you go up, obviously, and then especially when you get through the fifth dimension and the sound right in there, when then you ride before you drop all of that, you don’t even think about it if you can easily forget, but that sets everything up so well. I mean, how did you so when you’re doing that, especially for either the ascent of the drop, like it’s a weird thing as it’s kind of subtle. It doesn’t hit you over the head, which is really hard I think for that.

Greg Meader: Yeah, but I think that was by accident, that design. I think it’s just anything art. I mean Marty Sklar used to have this thing of he’d say, just everybody at Imagineering had a blank piece of paper in front of them. When you started doing something, you had that blank paper and you would just start drawing or in my case, doing sound. So I was given this book and said, here, make some sound for it. So I didn’t really have a plan. I just kind of started what I want to hear.

You had the drawings, you had the pictures, and you talk to the show producer and they have a concept of what they want to hear. You know, this isn’t nothing. It was done in a vacuum. It’s always a team. There’s always people you’re involved with in meetings, and you would do mock ups if you play sound for people and they’d always come in and review it. But there was no real direction. It was just like, yeah, here’s the book, look at the pictures and make some sound that matches the pictures. And that’s what I did.

Dan Heaton: So you mentioned when you read Spaceship Earth, when you did Spaceship Earth, you would ride it and test it. Now that makes sense for Spaceship Earth. But did you do that in Tower? Because to me, that feels like a little bit harder to actually ride and test out in the same way.

Greg Meader: Absolutely. I did that in Tower; not just me, but several of us rode that thing, I don’t want to say hundreds of times, but maybe cumulative over time, hundreds of times. But yeah, we were in it a lot because we had the thing was it was a new ride system. So the ride engineers were not really, they were sure that it worked, but they weren’t really sure how the timings, how accurate things would be. So we wanted to make sounds that would match the movement of the elevator.

This was before digital audio existed. But we didn’t have the ability to run random shows and all that kind of stuff like we do now or they do now. So we would…I sat there with a stopwatch and a notepad, and I still have that notepad, with the timings on it. Okay, 1.5 seconds to here, two seconds there. Halt for three at the top and then drop.

What you do is you make some edits and you make that it’s slightly you make two or three different versions and then you’d go back out there and you install it, you write it and go, that didn’t feel right. I going to change this. There were there was production facilities down in Florida. So you’d go over to one of the Studios there at the park, actually, and do some edits and go back and reinstall at night and try it again. And just, it’s just it’s very repetitive.

Dan Heaton: You just keep dropping.

Greg Meader: Yeah. It’s interesting, though, because the first time you ride it like everybody, it’s just you don’t have any idea what’s happening. Your senses are overwhelmed. But by the 25th or 30th time, you’re very relaxed. And it’s I wouldn’t say the thrill is gone, but the thrill is kind of gone. You know what to expect. It’s fun to do, but it’s the initial thrill is gone.

Dan Heaton: Well, yeah. And at least then they only drop you once. Like now they have the random sequences where you go down and back up and down and back up. And I’m like, that would be hard to test.

Greg Meader: Yeah. Now it’s like you’re just like at the end of a yo yo is what you are. And you know, I don’t know, I haven’t been over, I worked on the first, the original one and then the second version, Tower of Terror two. And I think they’re probably on, what, six or seven now? I’m not really sure. So I’m not sure how they’re doing it now with randomness. They might just be running, feeding sand in there and just letting that letting it just run and because everybody scream and it’s right. It’s not a very subtle environment.

Dan Heaton: Yeah. And you could hear the machine going, the elevator going up and down and all of that. So it’s yeah, it’s different. That’s interesting.

Greg Meader: Yeah, there was some interesting but I got stories for days of everything, But my favorite story was we were working on it one night and there were four or five of us in the ride vehicle just working on stuff. And there’s an intercom down to the control room. And the ride engineer said, he goes, okay, I’m going to park you at the top while I do a couple of things now, before I drop it. We go, okay, great. So he parks at the top and this is two or three in the morning. It’s Florida, so it’s not really cold.

We’re just sit up there and we’re just chatting. And after about 20 minutes, we forgot we’re on the ride because we’ve been sitting there for so long. And then all of a sudden he just drops it. He didn’t tell us. Out of the blue we just started falling. And I can tell you, the thrill was back there for that moment. We get to the bottom. He just comes out, he says, Oh, I’m sorry about that. But it was on purpose, and it was funny. So it’s a story I have to this day.

Dan Heaton: Well, you got the throwback, I guess.

Greg Meader: Yeah, I certainly did.

Dan Heaton: My listeners would be upset if I didn’t at least say, Do you have any good stories of working on Food Rocks? Like real quick, what was that like?

Greg Meader: Yeah, I don’t know any great stories. Okay, I’ve got a couple I guess. My job on that show was to create all the crowd sounds like all the cheering, all the clapping, all that kind of stuff. So that’s what I did. So I took concert sounds from different concert albums that I owned and just dumped it all into my editor and just matched to the music. But it was kind of fun. I was present, but I wasn’t doing the actual recording because that wasn’t my assignment at the time. But when I think Neil Sedaka came in, the Pointer Sisters came in, they all came in and I did their recordings there.

So that was kind of fun with all these singers coming in. And I can tell you it’s a funny drummer story. We had recorded a lot of the t racks with studio musicians, and studio musicians are amazingly great. They can just play anything that you put in front of them. And so we played the Peter Gabriel song Sledgehammer in a way.

Dan Heaton: I forget too, but I know it’s all it’s a take on that.

Greg Meader: Yeah. So anyway, we recorded it and we sent it to Peter Gabriel for approval, and he came back and he said, he goes, It sounds great. He goes, but there’s just it doesn’t groove, right? I’m not feeling the groove. He goes, It doesn’t have a right feel to me. We said, okay, we’ll work on it. We took the session drums and we did some editing and kind of made them less perfect than they were because session guys and girls are pretty much just right on every time. So we kind of made it a little rougher, sounding like, the rhythm wasn’t exactly perfect every time. And then we send it back to and he goes, Yeah, that’s it. That’s good. So that’s my Food Rocks story. It’s not very exciting.

Dan Heaton: Oh, I like it. The idea of Peter Gabriel listening to that and going through and being like, oh, I’m not feeling that. I love that story because to think of like, this artist who’s kind of a little esoteric. I quickly did find it just because it’s going to bother me. Oh, high fiber. Yes.

Greg Meader: That’s it. Yeah. But the coolest thing for me out of the whole deal was that at that time, Disney owned Hollywood Records, which had Queen on their label. So one day, we were using Bohemian Rhapsody at the end of the show. And one day this tape arrived, and it was the 24-track mixed master tape from Bohemian Rhapsody. It wasn’t the original, but it was a copy and it was from Queen. So we had every track from Bohemian Rhapsody unmixed and all the alternate guitar solos, alternate takes from Freddie, all the different parts.

You could hear like, you hear things that weren’t in the mix, like you can hear the piano, like keeping time. You can hear people counting off stuff. So it was neat to kind of just we just put it up and just all played it. We listened to it and went, wow. Kind of like dissecting a masterpiece. That was pretty amazing. So all the stuff at the end of the show, when you hear Bohemian Rhapsody, that’s all original Queen stuff that, none of that was ever that wasn’t rerecorded. That was all original. That was kind of neat I thought.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, that’s excellent. That gives me more, I don’t have to say appreciation, but I’m going to I feel like I’m going to have to find the soundtrack and listen to it again. Now, just for a while for Peter Gabriel, of course, but then also for the Queen part.

Greg Meader: The original artist did a lot of it, but we had a guy who’s a voice actor, and we used him a lot of stuff, and he was the guy that he was Sting, he was Peter Gabriel or Peter. He would sing any artist that wasn’t a real person.

Dan Heaton: Well, that’s excellent. I have to go back and ask you about Splash Mountain, though, which is one of my favorite attractions. I know you mentioned you were the boat ride guy at that time. That one being obviously a log flume, but also having a lot of music and a lot of sounds in general, kind of how was how was that experience?

Greg Meader: It was I don’t want to say overwhelming, but it was busy because while we were working on Florida, we were also working on Tokyo Splash simultaneously. So I was working on two of those shows and there’s 100 and some tracks and each, for each ride. Especially in Florida, we used all new music, we used the bluegrass sound. So what was cool about that was we went to Nashville and recorded guys playing, bluegrass, and we recorded all the background music. So we were down in Nashville for, I think two or three weeks, just, recording every day. Those guys are all pretty amazing. They’re all amazing musicians in the first place.

They just would they would play stuff. Because what we were doing was we were using a lot of the singing voices from California that had been prerecorded. The guys in Nashville had to play to a click track at the right tempo, in the right key. The key that the original stuff was written by Debney and it was in a key that was good for orchestral instruments, but that’s not the same key. That’s good for banjos. So what happened was, these guys could play in any key, but, the instruments were just they were playing in keys that they’re not used to playing in. Look, they were great. They did it amazingly well, but they were playing notes. They normally don’t play right.

Dan Heaton: It wasn’t their preferred approach.

Greg Meader: It wasn’t. No, it wasn’t. But they were able to, they were able to really nail it. They were just really good at what they did and they were able to play stuff. It was they just nailed it. I think Charlie McCoy was his name the harmonica player because the original pieces like for Zippy, were written in different keys as the song went on. No one harmonica would play all the notes in the song. So Charlie had to play like two bars and then stop and we’d back up and then go punch.

He’d play the next two bars on a different harmonica, back up, and punch in so that the performance of the harmonica and Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah in Florida could never be played live by one person. There’s so many different keys in that song that it just it modulates so much that the harmonica just, harmonicas all have like a certain range they play. He had four or five on his stand, but he couldn’t do them all at once. So that was a bit of trivia that maybe nobody cares about, but it’s there.

Dan Heaton: I think people do because it’s fascinating because even as learning more and more about how it means just put together, there are so many things I don’t consider. Like you mentioned, even with what the bluegrass guys had to do and the harmonica, I never would have thought when I hear that, I would never think that that was recorded the way you just described. So that’s really cool.

Greg Meader: Iguess the funny part is that when we went to record it, we didn’t think we were going to do that either. But he played two bars in and he goes, he stops, he goes, I can’t play any more notes on this, on this instrument, but I can do it on that instrument. So it’s kind of like t was sort of a surprise to all of us, I think.

Dan Heaton: I can imagine. But it all came together well, because I feel like the music on I’ve mostly ridden it at Disney World, but the music on the Disney World one that style, especially in the early parts of that attraction, like when you’re just kind of rolling along and you can hear the music, it it really sets the mood well. It’s really good.

Greg Meader: Yeah, we were happy with it. There is one bit of music trivia as you go up the up ramp with the vultures. You know, when you go up that last ramp, it’s an orchestral piece, which of course is totally out of character from the rest of the ride. That orchestral piece was originally recorded for Disneyland but never used. We were looking for something at that end and, I had that track and I played it for the producers and they said, Yeah, let’s use that. So Walt Disney World Splash has a Disneyland track that is not heard at Disneyland. Again, better music trivia that is not the end of the world. But you know something.

Dan Heaton: No I think it’s good and that moment I didn’t really think it outside the ride but that moment really fits because all of a sudden it becomes really ominous, like it’s all bluegrass that followed. Then it’s like, Whoa, we’ve changed it.

Greg Meader:Yeah. And it’s kind of like it’s sort of that Darth Vader, you know? It’s got a you know, it’s got a very evil sound to it.

Dan Heaton: Oh, in the back and everything.

Greg Meader: Yeah. But all the singing, most of the singing, not all of it, but probably 80% of the singing was stuff that was already recorded for Disneyland. That’s why the guys in Nashville had to play to existing tracks because we used a lot of the same singers, not the singers, but the same tracks. Splash Mountain was a huge project. I could go on, but I don’t know that anybody wants to hear.

Dan Heaton: All the people love Splash Mountain. But obviously, just in general, you described, was it a challenge, like you mentioned, you had to do two at once. So was that a challenge to kind of I mean, you mentioned to balance it or were you was it just a really hectic time, too, to kind of move back and forth?

Greg Meader: It was a very hectic time. It was, you’re doing the production work, it’s not so bad because you’re in the studio and you’re going, okay, I’m mixing music, but this music is going to be used in both rides. So I’m killing two birds with one stone here. Where it got tricky was during installation because installation is a lot of different disciplines there at one time.

No matter what the schedule says, you never really kind of stick to it because there’s just there’s so many things that happen that just delay it or move it or change things. It was just for me. 1992 was just like a crazy year because in February I was in France and then in April I was in Florida and then in May or June I was in Tokyo. It was just a lot of installation work. So during the production part, it wasn’t so bad. But when it got to installation, yeah, it got kind of crazy.

Dan Heaton: I can imagine. You mentioned earlier real quick that you had done some work on Indiana Jones, at least recording some dialog and such. What was that like? Did you work much on Indiana Jones or was that kind of a quick project?

Greg Meader: No. Well, it was a big project, but my only involvement was because I just kind of finished up doing Tower at that time and when it was kind of ramping up for production. So my only point on that ride was I recorded all the dialog in it, like John Rhys-Davies in the preshow and then the Indiana Jones soundalike for the main show.

Dan Heaton: Oh, I was trying to remember if that was actually Harrison Ford or not.

Greg Meader: No, it was. It sounded like it was. Originally I’d heard it was going to be Harrison Ford because I was told that he was coming in. But don’t tell anybody because they didn’t want to make a big deal about it. They said just he’s going to be in on this day at this time, but just keep it quiet.

Dan Heaton: Really. The Indiana Jones in the attraction, it has a few lines about like, oh, tourists and all that. But it’s not like he gives a big monologue. So I feel like doing a soundalike it doesn’t surprise me as much as it might now that I think about it.

Greg Meader: Yeah, the story I heard was that again, this was not I didn’t hear firsthand, but that I guess his kids at the time want him to do it because they thought it’d be cool for their dad to be in Indiana Jones the ride but that may have just been urban myth or something. So we had talked about before that the noise floor in Indiana Jones is incredibly loud. It’s like Spaceship Earth on steroids. It’s hard to hear what Indy says anyway, so I sound like works just just fine.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, I agree. And before before we kind of finish up here, how long did you ultimately work for Disney and where kind of did you go next afterwards?

Greg Meader: Well, my total time at the company was from 1980 to 1996. So 16 years, and not all of it was at Imagineering. Some of it was a Disneyland entertainment. Four years was at Epcot Entertainment ,and then six years on staff at the end and then one year on contract. So,a total of 16 years with the company. Then after that, of all places, I went to work for a company called Iwerks Entertainment, which if you know your Disney history, UB Iwerks was Walt’s first partner back in I think Kansas City.

Dan Heaton: Yeah.

Greg Meader: So anyway, Ub’s son Don, one of his sons, worked at the studio for eight years and when he retired from the studio he formed basically a ride simulation film company and that’s where I went to work. So I started working on the same thing. We’re working on a Disney, but just not at Disney out here in California. You know, next door to Disney is Universal. And I’ll be honest, they were doing hiring too. So I did some contract work with Universal, did some audio design work. I was part of a team. We worked on Islands of Adventure, so did a little work for Universal.

Then I went back into the film post-production world and worked on some movies of which most of which you’ve not heard of. But I did work on the it was a third of the Honey I Shrunk the Audience or Honey We Shrunk Ourselves trilogy with Disney. I had worked on, at Disney. I had worked on The Honey I Shrunk the Kids Playset Adventure at Studio. That was my first project. I did all the ADR dialog recording for The Honey I Shrunk the Audience 3-D film at Epcot. Then when I got out after I left Disney, I was working on Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves. So II have quite a history with the Honey We Shrunk the franchise.

Dan Heaton: Well, I’m familiar with some of the sequels just based on having young daughters. Sometimes you find a film that you put on. So I think they’ve seen Honey, We Shrunk ourselves, actually.

Greg Meader: Well, if you watch Ourselves and the credits might include me at the end.

Dan Heaton: Excellent.

Greg Meader: I can’t leave without saying this. The best film I worked on at that time was a great big film called Barbwire with Pamela Anderson.

Dan Heaton: Yes, I remember that.

Greg Meader: It’s almost like a cult film, I think, because every time I mention it, everybody’s heard of it. Anyway, I did sound effects. I was part of the sound effects team of two or three of us that worked on it. So I did film work and then I worked for Iwerks and now I’m working in the video game world.

Dan Heaton: Excellent. I have to ask you about one other project you worked on, which was the Stargate SG-3000 attraction, I believe you worked on it, and I’m a fan of the TV shows. So I was curious. I’ve never experienced that attraction. It was not out that long. But what was that like?

Greg Meader: Well, that was a ride film attraction. It was done for a theme park in Germany, specifically for that theme park. I don’t know that it was ever meant to play anywhere else. That theme park has long closed, so you’ll never hear it. But that was fun. It was fun because we got Don S. Davis, I think that was his name.

Dan Heaton: The General, yeah.

Greg Meader: So he did that. He did all his own voiceover. We had a soundalike for Richard Dean Anderson because he wasn’t available to do that. So we had a soundalike there. I got a lot of the sound effects. What was kind of cool; I got a lot of the original sound effects from the sound designer on the show. So all the effects in that ride film are from the show. So we were authentic in that sense. And it was four and a half minute ride film or 4 minutes. It was just kind of a classic ride film. You know, you start out, something breaks, you’re out of control, you fix it, and then you save the world and then the rides over, it’s every ride. But it was fun. It’s like Star Tours, only Stargate.

Dan Heaton: I think I read somewhere that it did play briefly at a few Six Flags parks after the Germany park. But again, I think it was like a year or so, and then it was quickly gone because of licensing and such.

Greg Meader: The way it works is that outside of Disney and Universal, there’s a lot of special venue theaters throughout the world and they need content. And so this film was done in in the can and just basically at Iwerks, we had, I guess, the license for the right to distribute it. We would as part of our catalog, we’d send out to potential theater sites and say here’s your list of films you can choose from. So some theaters did take it. So it did play outside of the German theme park area, but not for long. They would usually sign maybe a six-month lease on a film, so it would play for six, six months and then that would be it.

Dan Heaton: So you mentioned you’re in the video game industry now. Is that that what you’re currently still working on for the time being?

Greg Meader: To be honest, what I’m currently working on right now, I can’t tell you. All I can say is that when it gets done, you’ll know it’s done. But I’m so, yeah, I’m working. What I can’t talk about is I’m working in the video game world right now. I was working on a big a triple-A game, which is a PC based game called Wild Star. It came out and the game was pretty amazing graphics and all the work we did on it, but it didn’t sell very well, so it’s been shuttered. But I’m working on a couple little they’re called indie games and they’re smaller games and they’re much less work.

You know, in the Wild Star game, we had eight people on our sound design staff and just for four years just working on things. These indie games, it’s just me. But, you know they’re fun because they’re kind of like the Wild West, you know, They’re just it’s a small team. It’s very fluid and just, it’s very like, can you do this? Yeah, I could do that. All right, You got it. You know, it’s just very I don’t want to say it’s unorganized, but it’s very, it’s Wild West.

Dan Heaton: It sounds cool. It sounds like a lot of fun and great. This has been amazing. Thanks for telling me all the great stories. I really appreciate the time being on the show.

Greg Meader: Sure. Thanks for having me. Hopefully people enjoyed the stories and I’ve got more.

Dan Heaton: Excellent. Well, thanks a lot.

Greg Meader: All right. Thanks.

Dan Heaton: Well, that was great. I really enjoyed talking with Greg, and I was a little nervous right after a recording if you’d actually ever hear this show. I had some computer issues where I thought this episode might be lost, but luckily I was able to retrieve it and I wanted to give thanks out to Greg for being super cool. He volunteered to record again if needed, but luckily we were able to bring this original conversation to you today.