141. Brian Crosby, Creative Director of Themed Entertainment at Marvel

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Marvel has become entrenched in our culture, especially through blockbuster movies. That success might seem obvious now, but it wasn’t a sure thing in 2009 when Disney acquired Marvel Entertainment. Marvel Studios’ Iron Man was a huge hit, but the Marvel Cinematic Universe had a long way to go. Its success led to Disney attractions like the Iron Man Experience and Guardians of the Galaxy – Mission: Breakout. With the arrival of the Avengers Campus, Marvel’s presence has grown even further. My guest on this episode of The Tomorrow Society Podcast is Brian Crosby, who played a key role in this progress.

As Creative Director of Themed Entertainment at Marvel, Brian has worked closely on attractions and other entertainment. He was a Concept Designer for Walt Disney Imagineering before joining Marvel. During the podcast, Brian explains his comics fandom and interest in becoming an artist. He participated in the ImagiNations Design Competition with Josh Steadman and received an internship at WDI in 2005.

Brian explains his excitement about the possibilities at Disney following the Marvel acquisition and pitching projects there. We dive into how the Iron Man Experience ultimately came to fruition at Hong Kong Disneyland. Brian also describes working with Joe Rohde on Guardians of the Galaxy – Mission: Breakout from a different perspective in his position at Marvel. Finally, we talk about the Disney Kingdoms series and the Seekers of the Weird comics. I really enjoyed the chance to talk to Brian about his career and all the cool projects from his time at Disney and Marvel.

Show Notes: Brian Crosby

Learn how to draw Baby Groot, Spider-Man, and more through the Marvel DRAW! YouTube videos with Brian Crosby.

Listen to Brian Crosby on the Bobsleds & Banthas podcast from March 26, 2001.

Follow Brian Crosby on Instagram and on DeviantArt.

Images are used by permission of Brian Crosby and can be viewed on his DeviantArt page.

Transcript

Brian Crosby: Like, well, what if Tony Stark brought the Stark Expo to Hong Kong and he sets up shop here in Tomorrowland? And that would be a way in, we’d have to acknowledge Disneyland as a park because he would know that he’s in Disneyland. So that was our initial hook, but it wasn’t the version of the Iron Man Experience that you saw today.

So one night, most of my ideas, they usually happen at about three o’clock in the morning. And I woke up and I said to my wife, I’m like, we did all that work trying to figure out how Star Tours could fit in, and we’ve gone down this other path with the Stark Expo, but what if we married those ideas? There’s nothing sacred that a simulator ride has to be a Star Wars ride. Why couldn’t a simulator ride be a Marvel ride?

Dan Heaton: That is Brian Crosby, Creative Director of Themed Entertainment at Marvel Entertainment. You’re listening to the Tomorrow Society Podcast.

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Dan Heaton: Hey there. Thanks so much for joining me here on episode 141 of the Tomorrow Society Podcast. I am your host, Dan Heaton. A lot has happened since the last time I talked with you. We’ve got capacity increases, masks going away in Florida in some cases, and the Avengers Campus is open. Oh my gosh, I can’t believe it. Wow, there’s a lot to cover and I feel like it’s the perfect time to have my guest today. Brian Crosby, who like I mentioned in the introduction, is the Creative Director of Themed Entertainment at Marvel Entertainment. We’re not going to really talk about Avengers Campus today, but everything in Brian’s story I feel like mirrors the evolution of Marvel at Disney. It’s like basically he was there for all the moments that led up to where we are now with this big new land at DCA.

I think too, with Brian being such a fan of comics growing up, and he’s seen it from when comics were very different when he was younger and just going to the store and picking up various issues and where Marvel has gone, and then being someone who worked at Walt Disney Imagineering and saw Marvel get acquired by Disney in 2009 and was just blown away by it and then became involved with attractions like the Iron Man experience and Guardians of the Galaxy Mission Breakout, and basically saw it on both ends because he then went to work for Marvel.

So it’s really cool to get a chance to talk to Brian about his background, how he got started at Disney, and then approaching theme parks and the company in general as a big Marvel fan first. So Brian has a cool perspective there from the other side of it. Now he bridges both gaps where he works at Marvel, still gets involved in theme park projects, has done a lot of cool things at Disney. And I think it’s a great backdrop to where we’re going in the future, both with theme parks and with Disney Plus and Loki and all the movies coming up.

We talk a little bit about that and just to see where it’s gone and possibly where it’s going in the future because there are a lot of different ways that Marvel can be connected, even through the NBA, which I wouldn’t have guessed. Disney’s continuing to expand what they’re doing with Marvel, and it’s a really exciting time for fans across the board of the parks and of the comics. So let’s dive right in. Here is Brian Crosby.

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Dan Heaton: My guest today is Creative Director of Themed Entertainment at Marvel Entertainment, who helps to bring Marvel to theme parks and other experiences around the world. He started his career at Walt Disney Imagineering in 2005, worked as a concept designer on a wide range of projects, also helped jumpstart the Iron Man Experience, which was the first Marvel themed attraction at a Disney park. It is Brian Crosby. Brian, thank you so much for talking with me here on the podcast.

Brian Crosby: It’s my pleasure, Dan. Thanks so much for having me. It’s good to be here.

Dan Heaton: Oh yeah. It’s a blast to talk with you. You’ve done a lot of really cool things, and I really enjoy the idea of talking about Marvel because as you obviously know, there’s a lot of Marvel things going on, and it’s really fun and exciting even during the pandemic and everything. It’s really cool.

Brian Crosby: Yeah, we’re all very excited. I mean, look, anyone, one of us that work at Marvel, we’ve inherited a legacy that anybody would die to be a part of. So we are fortunate enough to stand on the shoulders of giants here. So between Stan and Jack and Steve Ditko and so many others, it it’s an honor and a blessing to work on some of this stuff. Man, even after 80 years, we’re still going strong and the future looks bright, so we’re all very excited.

Dan Heaton: Oh yeah. I mean, just between all the movies coming out this year and the TV and then so many things at the parks, and we could go on and on, but I’d love to know a little bit more about your background too, which is, because I think it’s really interesting kind of how you got started. So when you were younger, before you were involved with Disney or theme parks or anything, I’m curious what really got you interested in becoming an artist when you were younger and comic books and everything else?

Brian Crosby: Yeah, I mean, honestly, I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t drawing. That’s kind of what I’ve just always done. I grew up most kids in the eighties with my Saturday morning cartoons and Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends and He-Man and GI Joe and so many others, Super Friends. Those were things that I really gravitated towards, and I just kind of fell in love with superheroes and characters and pop culture.

I couldn’t have articulated it that way as a kid, but I think one of the things I really loved doing was my parents would try to encourage my love of art and love of character, and I’d get coloring books and I was always trying to mirror exactly what I saw on the show. So I wasn’t one to venture outside and do weird color combinations or anything. I wanted everything to look exactly right.

So if I was drawing Spider-Man, I wanted the reds and the blues to be exactly right and stay inside the lines and look really cool. But my favorite thing to do was open up the inside of a coloring book, and inside that coloring book was a blank white sheet on the inside cover of the cardboard cover, and it was the perfect substrate for drawing on. So I would just have fun drawing on those inside covers. So I just from a very early age discovered that I had a passion for drawing. And like I said, my parents were always encouraging of me in doing that, and it’s just something I gravitated towards and always just always did well.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, that’s really cool. And I mean, it fits with what you ended up doing with your career, but I know too that you also were involved with being interested in Disney, and I believe you live near Disneyland, so I’m curious about how much background you had there with theme parks or just with Disneyland in general?

Brian Crosby: Yeah, I mean, look, I grew up in the shadow of Disneyland just about 15-20 minutes away from the park. And so going to Disneyland was always one of my favorite things to do as a kid. My parents, we didn’t have annual passes or anything like that, but my parents would take me and my brothers to Disneyland once a year, usually around May. That we always looked forward to it. They were going to take us out of school and we’d get to go to Disneyland for the day.

And the night before was just Christmas Eve to me. I remember taking out all my records and listening to the Disneyland music and I had this book of Pirates of the Caribbean, and inside of it was essentially a fun map on the inside front cover. I remember tracing my finger around the attraction, the pathway, and just imagining the things that I was going to get to see and do the next day at Disneyland. So yeah, the theme parks were just something that I just really loved. I mean, of course went to Knotts Berry Farm, but Disneyland was always very special to me. Peter Pan’s Flight was my favorite attraction. The idea of never growing up and getting to fly and just getting to be a little boy forever and have fun.

I think those were things that really resonated with me as a kid. So going to Disneyland, I remember when the Disney Channel came out, that was the first time I’d ever heard of Imagineering, is there were these interstitials called “Imagineer That”, and they showed, in one of them, they showed these scuba divers going down into the Submarine Voyage, the classic version where you had the mermaids and the buried treasure and all that. I remember them calling them Imagineers. And so that was the first time I had ever heard that word and thinking, well, that’s an awesome thing to do, that you get to go scuba dive in the Submarine Voyage, and that would be really fun to do.

But I didn’t really think of imagineering outside of that one moment. I hadn’t really thought of it as a career path. Comic books was really where I saw my future. I discovered comics when I was about 10, and it’s exactly when I was 10 in 1987. I remember it very well, my first comic book, and I really, when I opened that front cover and I saw that there were pencils and writers and inners and colorists, and I was like, that’s a thing that people do. These are grown adults that draw superheroes for a living. So at 10 years old, I knew that’s what I wanted to do, and little did I know that someday I’d get to marry Disneyland and theme parks with comic book storytelling. So I got the best of both worlds later on in my life.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, it totally makes sense. Hearing about your background, where you ended up, because like you said, all that stuff fits together we’re of similar age because I was born in ‘76, and so I was really into comic books in the ‘80s and early ‘90s as a kid. They were so big at the time, Marvel. I mean, I say that it’s very different than now, but I’d love to know from you, what was it about comic books that got you so interested in that, and then taking that along when you were going to education and stuff. How did you go about deciding I’m going to become an artist and do this for school and for a career?

Brian Crosby: Yeah. Well, comics captivated me because it was clearly illustration. Like I said, I recognized early on that people drew these, they did these for a living, and when I’d watch cartoons or whatever, you didn’t really hang around and watch the credits in the ‘80s. Once the credits showed up, you’d change the channel or you’d walk out of the movie theater. Marvel Studios has trained us to sit tight and watch the credits all the way through, because you never know it’s going to be at the end.

But in the ‘80s, that wasn’t really a thing, and so you changed the channel. So it had never occurred to me that people did that for a living. But like I said, with comics, I knew from the very beginning, Stan Lee, Todd McFarlane, these were names that I started to become familiar with. So I thought of that as a thing that I could do.

I think they captured my imagination because it wasn’t like animation where the whole thing was spelled out. There was the story in between the story. You’d see a panel and then something would happen in the next panel, and then the next panel and the next panel, and you’d have to fill in the gaps in your mind. So it allowed me to use my imagination. But I got wrapped up in the stories. I got wrapped up in the characters and the fact that these things came out every week or every month, like I said, when I discovered that first book in 1987, it was at a 7-11 right down the street from my house on a spin rack. And the guy goes, oh, yeah, they come out every month. I was like, what is this new world that has just opened up to me?

I remember my mom, she was the one who always, she enabled me with the comics. She took me to that first 7-11, and then she took me to the swap meet, local swap meet, and I’d find the comic book dealer, the guy that had old back issue bins, and I’d be rifling through and finding things to fill out my collection. I fell in love with the hobby. I fell in love with the medium of comic book storytelling.

And when I decided to go to school and really become an artist, I toyed with the idea of animation and studied that a little bit. But really, I came back to illustration and concept design and sequential storytelling as really something that I enjoyed. I felt like I had more control over it. And yeah, I fell in love with it as a professional as much as I did as a fan growing up.

Dan Heaton: It’s funny because where we used to go was the 7-11 near our house, and it was basically the same thing, ride our bikes there, and then comic book stores were a whole another level. I mean, that’s like crazy. They’re like, wait, it’s a store. I don’t understand it and just only comics.

Brian Crosby: I’m in, I’m going to live here.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, I don’t get it. But I’m interested too, because everything you’re describing makes sense in terms of heading towards that type of career. But I know ultimately you submitted a project for the Imaginations competition, which eventually, I believe led you ultimately to working for WDI. So I’m curious for you, how did you decide to submit that project and to get involved with that, I assume with the hope that you might get to work there?

Brian Crosby: Yeah. I mean, look, that one kind of came to me, so I wasn’t aware of it. I was going to Cal State Fullerton here in Orange County, like I said, studying illustration, studying art, and I was working as a security guard at night and at the Anaheim Hilton, ironically, right across the street from, I was a security guard over there working the graveyard shift, trying to put myself through school. And a buddy of mine, Josh Steadman, who’s an amazing concept designer and a themed entertainment storyteller, and just a great friend.

He and I had been friends for a number of years, and he had always, I knew he wanted to be an Imagineer. That was his lifelong dream. He called me one day and said, Hey, Imagineering is doing this competition. It’s called Imaginations. We could enter it. We just got to come up with an idea, and if we do, we might get to be interns at Imagineering. He’s like, do you want to do it with me? And that was it. I was like, yeah, let’s do it; I got nothing to lose, right? I need an internship to graduate. So my mentality was like, I just need an internship. I got to graduate from college and get my degree.

So that was really where my focus was, and that one decision changed my life, changed everything for me because then Josh and I and his brother and another friend of ours, we did this project together. And the idea was based on The Rocketeer, Josh, and Josh is probably the biggest Rocketeer fan that there is that I know of. I love The Rocketeer as well. And we talked about what it might be. So it was conceived of as an attraction that could have gone into California Adventure in the 1930s Hollywood type thing.

My role on the project was to storyboard it. So I storyboarded it, not in traditional storyboard fashion, though, I storyboarded it as if it were a 1930s comic book. That was kind of the inspiration. And I look at it now and I see the rudimentary art that I was doing at the time, and it makes me cringe, but it was enough to get me looked, at least at the time.

I learned it didn’t just get me in, but I also learned a lot about presentation as well, and I learned a lot of that from Josh. I mean, the whole idea was to package this thing as if it came from that era. We did a DVD of the project that was put inside of an old time film canister, and that was all inside of a gold embossed rocketeer box, and the whole thing was themed from top to bottom.

So we submitted it. Imagineering loved our presentation, and they called us up and said, we’d like to bring you guys in to do some interviews. So we did some phone interviews at first, and then I went in to Imagineering and got the interview there and was fortunate enough to get that internship. So the summer of 2005, I did my internship at Imagineering in the Information Resource Center and ended up being just a great experience. Got to meet all the concept designers and artists at the time, because they were basically, I was cataloging artwork. So all these beautiful pieces of art that are preserved in this art library, this is kind of the very beginning of digital art.

People are just starting to make that kind of transition. But most of the artists at WDI at the time were still doing traditional art boards and concept renderings on paper, and they were bringing ’em in to be cataloged. So every time they’d come in, I’d get to chat ’em up, tell ’em who I was, and I always had my portfolio at the ready, and I was quick to show ’em my portfolio and get their feedback. I knew even then that this was a very unique opportunity that I had to be in the walls of Imagineering, the inner sanctum as it were, and then be able to show my artwork to these Imagineers. And I definitely wanted to take advantage of it in hopes of having getting a job there, really.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, that sounds like an amazing experience, especially how it kind of all came together. So how did you ultimately then get a role full-time at Imagineering, and what was that early work when you were able to work there, not just as an internship?

Brian Crosby: Yeah. Well, at the very end of my internship, everybody that was an intern that summer, we had to give a presentation, and the presentation was kind of, hey, here’s what I did this summer kind of a thing. I asked the lady who was in charge of it, I said, so what is everybody else doing in terms of presentation? She goes, oh, well, everybody’s kind of putting together a PowerPoint and they’re going to show the stuff that they worked on.

So immediately I thought, okay, if a PowerPoint presentation is what everyone is going to do, that means the lights are going to go off. And all the potential project managers and executives at Imagineering that were watching this presentation would not see you, the person, and would feel disconnected from you. And frankly, I thought probably get a little bit bored watching a PowerPoint presentation.

So I thought, okay, what can I do to not do that? And I said, so in my brain, I thought, all right, we’re going to do the complete opposite, no PowerPoint presentation. I’ve been here working with all these physical pieces of art, so I’d like to put ’em all on display. Some of the things I got to work on and deal with when I was working in the art library. I also discovered that in the art library where originally was that building unfortunately is no longer there at WDI, but there was a giant skylight at the top, and when you opened it, it was loud and it was old, it’d been there forever I think, and it went and it would open up, and I’m like, this is perfect. I’m like, so all the lights are going to be down.

I go, can I go last? So everybody gives their PowerPoint presentation, and then I said, I want that skylight thing to open up so it wakes everybody up. The light comes in and I’m going to present myself. So I was hoping that the executives and the leaders would like my presentation skills and hopefully like me as a person and want to work with me. That was my thinking, and I had some great conversations after that presentation. It went really well, and I was offered a full-time job working at Visual Imaging Production, kind of a subsect of the Model Shop at Imagineering. And I wasn’t doing anything glamorous.

I was putting together presentations for the creative division, a lot of kind of grunt work, but again, I had a full-time job at Imagineering and I had benefits and my family was going to be able to eat. So I was doing, I was okay, but again, I recognize that as the opportunity that it was in that now my foot’s in the door yet again, I’m now an employee. I’m one step closer to the dream of becoming a concept designer here. And so I knew then and there, it’s time to really go to work.

So I looked for every opportunity to work on projects to, I found out other projects that were maybe in development or had a long lead time, and I would work on that stuff late at night sometimes. I was there all night long with a foldout mat that I had underneath my desk. I would crash for a couple hours in my office and literally work all night trying to build my portfolio. And after about a year and a half, I did break in and was able to get into the Concept Design group.

Dan Heaton: Excellent. It’s great that you recognize too, how much of an opportunity that was, because I think that sounds like that was really the key. Well, as a Concept Designer, I know you were involved with in some form with a lot of cool projects, Finding Nemo Subs. I believe you had some things to do with TRON and Star Wars concepts. So I’d love to know for you, what were some of the most memorable or fun projects for you when you started out as a Concept Designer?

Brian Crosby: Yeah, I mean, I really love working in kind of the blue sky phase. That’s my favorite time of the project. It is always great when things become real and you have funding and now you’re moving towards an opening date. But for me, as a concept designer, I really like the front end of that before we necessarily even identify where this thing is going to live.

We’re just dreaming big thinking of anything and everything we could do, what would be the coolest thing that we would want to experience. I enjoy that part of the process. And then getting to present it to people and hopefully get them excited about it. Then it becomes a real project. And then we drill down on some of the finer details, and you have to make cuts and edits and things like that. You have to sacrifice some things.

So that’s part of the natural course of any project. But the things that you mentioned, I loved working on working on Tron in Shanghai Disneyland was a blast. I didn’t work on it for long. I some storyboards for it, but I really found my niche working on Star Wars projects. Then once Marvel became a part of the family, that was a home run for me because going back to what we talked about at the beginning; comics and theme parks were about to come together in a big way. So that was something that I was very, very excited about. So I think it really comes down to the subject matter was always fun, but it changed, right? I mean, sometimes it was Pirates of the Caribbean, sometimes it was Tinkerbell and the fairies. Sometimes it was Star Wars, sometimes it was the Avengers.

It was all over the map. Sometimes it was Alice in Wonderland. It was all over the place, but it was the people that I worked with, the mentors that I had that really made such a huge difference in my career. People like Rob’t Coltrin and Tony Baxter and Dave Crawford and Tom Fitzgerald. Then people that you’ve interviewed in the past, like Jim Clark and Tom Morris, those people became incredibly influential mentors to me at Imagineering. And they helped shape my career. They helped give me opportunities that I wouldn’t have had otherwise.

And you really, I discovered that as important as my hard work was, and it was important, I also needed to be networking and have advocates for me and my design ideas, my design style within the walls of Imagineering, because we have people that have worked there for 30, 35, 40 years. If you’re the new kid on the block and you’re trying to get onto a project, sometimes it can be a little overwhelming to try and get selected when they have these kind of old reliables that they’ve worked with for many years. So it was kind of twofold. It was like hard work sacrifice, no substitute for that, but also networking and developing relationships with people inside the walls of Imagineering.

Dan Heaton: That has to play just a big role working with such great experienced designers. But it can be a challenge. But you mentioned Marvel, and it’s easy for me now to think about, of course, Marvel being acquired was so obvious. It was a great idea, but at the time, I mean, Iron Man had come out, but it wasn’t the Hulk and everything, but it wasn’t considered such a no-brainer. But I’m sure for you, with your background being at Disney, this had to be really cool. So I’m curious for you, that experience when you learned, I believe in 2009 when they acquired Marvel. I mean, what was that like for you as such a fan? Because not everyone there I’m sure was on that same scale at the time.

Brian Crosby: I never could have imagined that would happen, right? It had never even occurred to me. I mean, I was already a Wednesday warrior at the local comic book shop. Every Wednesday we’d go myself and Josh Shipley and a few other Imagineers, we’d go and get Taco Bell and go to House of Secrets in Burbank. That was our Wednesday tradition.

So I love superheroes, love comics. So when I woke up that morning, went into work and open up my computer and saw the Disney logo and the Marvel logo together, I couldn’t even imagine that this was real. I had to check several other websites to make sure I was seeing this correctly. I’m like, wait. So Disney bought Marvel. Marvel is part of Disney. We could do Marvel stuff. That’s what that means. We can do Marvel attractions. My brain exploded. I’m texting everybody that I know.

I was so excited, and this seriously was the perfect, perfect opportunity for me. I actually went through a little bit of a down point in my early concept design work where I was getting some feedback that my style was maybe a little too comic booky, and not everybody was looking for a comic booky style. So I wasn’t getting put on as many projects as I was hoping for.

So I was getting a little nervous about my career, and I was going to try and reinvent my art style and art approach, but then Disney buys Marvel and changes the whole world for me. I didn’t know anybody at Marvel; I just was a huge fan and certainly loved the first two Iron Man films and loved The Incredible Hulk, and going back loved the Toby McGuire, Sam Raimi Spider-Man films, of course, and the Brian Singer X-Men film.

I loved all that stuff. Going back to Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends and Marvel comics. I’m buying these every Wednesday. This is the coolest thing ever. So I remember we had the author of the Marvel Encyclopedia come into Imagineering shortly after the acquisition was announced, and he was going to give a presentation, just a Marvel 101 to all the imagineers. And so we piled into this giant conference room, which I believe at the time was called the WED Conference Room. And you can fit quite a, most of Imagineering could fit in there. So there was a buzz about it, and I know there was some naysayers and people that felt like Marvel wasn’t Disney and didn’t necessarily fit in with the Disney brand. But man, I didn’t care. I was so excited; I was so jazzed. I just wanted to be a part of it.

So that day when the author was coming in, I went and sat in the front row, I was ready. I was so pumped, and he starts talking and he’s doing deep cuts. He’s going into the Phoenix Saga. He’s talking about good guys becoming bad guys and all these different things. And I’m there with him. I’m hanging in every word, the Cree/Krull war. I’m like, this is great. And I turn around to see who was excited with me. I want everyone to be excited with me and blank faces. Nobody was into it. I remember looking back and just being so disheartened that people weren’t as excited about it as I was.

So initially I was very disappointed, but then the light went off again. The light had gone off many times before. This is an opportunity, this thing maybe better than anybody in this room, and you’re a fan of it and you love it, and a lot of people don’t seem to, so I’m all in. So I decided then and there, I’m going to focus on Marvel. I’m going to make this my thing; I’m going to get involved in as many Marvel things as I can. I’m doing my homework. I don’t even more about the Marvel universe, and I want to be the partner of choice for any Marvel project that’s happening here.

That’s exactly what we did. And we were pitching ideas big and as small as a Marvel churro cart, all the way up to the biggest thing you can imagine. We just had a blast. And obviously not everything gets built, but it was concept and we were ideating and we were having a blast doing it. And through that, I got to meet the guys at Marvel and have new mentors on the Marvel side of things. Folks like Joe Casada and Dan Buckley, who became good friends and mentors to me, Joe in particular, he and I became just really tight, really great friends, and that led to my new job.

Dan Heaton: Well, yeah, you mentioned too pitching projects. So I feel like it’s good to mention the first big Marvel attraction, which was the Iron Man Experience in Hong Kong. And I did talk to Joe Lanzisero about this. He was in charge of Hong Kong at the time. It was interesting to hear about it from somebody who was kind of green lighting it, but I’d love to hear about it from your experience as someone who’s such a fan of Marvel, and to have this attraction go into Hong Kong and have the Stark Expo pre-show and everything else. It had to be pretty cool to have that in Tomorrowland.

Brian Crosby: Yeah, I mean, bless Joe for giving us the reins to try and come up with something, right? So mean, we had done, I came on at the very end of what was some early development on bringing Star Tours to Hong Kong, and there was some thinking about what, so obviously there’s no Star Tours there. And so we thought, let’s take Star Tours to Hong Kong.

So I did a few concept designs of what that might look like. And shortly after doing that, got the feedback from partners at Hong Kong Disneyland, that they’re not really into Star Wars over there, that they kind of view it as old sci-fi, which at first broke our hearts, right? I mean, here we’re recording this on May the 4th. So it’s Star Wars Day. And so how could you not love Star Wars? We all love Star Wars, and they didn’t grow up with it.

It wasn’t part of their DNA the way it is with us here in the us, but they told us, but we really love Marvel. We really love the Marvel movies. We’d like to do something with Marvel. And so we’re like, okay. So we started brainstorming Marvel stuff, and it wasn’t just Marvel stuff, but we also had to think, because we had never done a Marvel attraction before, we had to think philosophically about how you bring Marvel and that world, the Marvel universe of characters into a Disney theme park.

Because I’ve said it in other interviews, and I apologize if people have heard this before, but when you go into a Disney castle park, you pass through that tunnel and that plaque, it says here, you leave today and into the worlds of yesterday, tomorrow, and fantasy. That’s a promise. That’s a promise that every Disney Castle Park makes to you. But the Marvel universe takes place like here and now, Peter Parker is a kid from Queens, so he lives in our world. Disneyland would exist in the Marvel universe, and it does.

We’ve seen it in comics a few times. So how do we bring the Marvel universe into a park that’s about, it’s taking you out of the real world. We had to think about that philosophically. So we quickly gravitated towards the idea of the Stark Expo from Iron Man 2. This was a thing where Tony Stark was celebrating his technology. If you remember the scene from Iron Man 2, it’s very, very World’s Fair-esque. And so it had the song written by Richard Sherman. So there was a lot of Disney DNA in that sequence from Iron Man 2. So we gravitated towards that as a way to kind of get us in to the Marvel universe.

We’re like, well, what if Tony Stark brought the Stark Expo to Hong Kong and he sets up shop here in Tomorrowland? And that would be a way in, we’d have to acknowledge Disneyland as a park because he would know that he’s in Disneyland. So that was our initial hook, but it wasn’t the version of the Iron Man Experience that you saw today.

So one night, most of my ideas, they usually happen at about three o’clock in the morning. And I woke up and I said to my wife, I’m like, we did all that work trying to figure out how Star Tours could fit in, and we’ve gone down this other path with the Stark Expo, but what if we married those ideas? There’s nothing sacred that a simulator ride has to be a Star Wars ride. Why couldn’t a simulator ride be a Marvel ride? Why couldn’t it be the Marvel characters?

You see the Marvel Universe in your simulator ride, and she’s like, you should jot it down. So I did some scribbles, my whole commute, that’s all I could think about. I was jotting down ideas. First thing I did when I got into office that day, I put together a pitch board, Rob’t Coltrin, who was the Creative Director overseeing that project. I took it to him and I go, hey.

And by the way, that day we were about to talk to Tom Staggs, who was the head of Parks and Resorts at the time. So we were about to go into our pitch on what the Stark Expo was going to be. And so I go, Robert, I had this idea. It’s kind of crazy. What do you think about this? And he said, I like it. It’s crazy enough that it might be the thing that they want to do, but let’s kind of put it in our back pocket.

We’ve gone down our path already with these other concepts, and if we need a dark horse idea, we’ll bring this out. I’m like, okay, fair enough. And so we went in before we go to Tom, we go to Joe Lanzisero, and we pitch it to him, and then we go, by the way, we have this other little dark horse idea. Joe kind of said the same thing. He’s like, that’s just crazy enough that they just might pick it.

So let’s keep that in our back pocket as a dark horse. So we get to the meeting with Tom. Sorry to be long-winded with this answer. And Tom likes all the ideas that we proposed. He totally gets the Stark Expo approach, and we said, well, we kind of have this other idea. So we bring out the simulator version of it, and I pitch it to Tom and he goes, that’s what we’re doing.

He’s like, that’s it. That’s the thing. So we were kind of like, I think we’re a go on this. So we were off and running, and like I said, initially it wasn’t Iron Man specific, it was more of like a Marvel Universe 101. And then that morphed into an Avengers ride. Then it was John Lasseter who really challenged us to really focus and lock this in on Iron Man.

That Iron Man was, he was the hot character at the time. The first Avengers film had come out, but nothing had, even though Thor and Captain America were popular, Iron Man was the guy, he was the main, most of the popularity sat on Robert Downey Jr. And Ironman. So we locked in on Iron Man as our character. They worked with the Stark Expo conceit. And so we started developing the Iron Man experience. By the way, I’m at Imagineering still throughout all this.

So I get to present this idea, and ultimately I got to present the idea to the Hong Kong government. At that time, it was an Avengers ride. So I got to go to Hong Kong and had to go into this very top secret type shield building and with Rob’t and Joe and everybody, and present the story for this Marvel simulator ride. That was quite an experience, but we were off and running and we were doing something that we were really excited about, and that ended up becoming the Iron Man Experience, the first ever Marvel attraction in the theme park at Disney.

Dan Heaton: It’s great that it all came together. Sometimes it seems like with an attraction that once you come up with it, it’s like, oh, that makes total sense. It has to kind of seem like a crazy idea at first. But now that I look at it, I go, Iron Man, the Star Tours, they don’t have Star Tours in Tomorrowland and Star Expo, it all kind of fits, but it seemed like it had to go through some steps to get there. But you mentioned your job too. I know you were at WDI then, but then moved, but I know you ultimately, you referenced moved to Marvel, so I’d love to know about what it was like moving over to Marvel and what you were then doing in that job.

Brian Crosby: About halfway through the development of the Iron Man Experience, Joe Casada, who I mentioned before, has become an incredible friend and mentor to me, a superstar in his own right, really a Marvel legend in terms of being an artist and a Chief Creative Officer and Editor in Chief. Joe’s kind of done it all. He and I just hit it off, mainly both big baseball fans. But we talked baseball, we talked Marvel, but Joe and I were actually at breakfast one day, and I told them, I said, hey, crazy idea. Do you think Marvel would ever be interested in kind of having an Imagineer full-time on staff? So this was my play to be the full-time Imagineer on the Marvel team. That was my thought.

So I’m like, I’m going to try and cement this marriage, because I’d already been working with them. I was working on so many different Marvel projects that were in kind of blue sky development, obviously the Iron Man Experience. And Joe said, that’s interesting. That’s an interesting idea. Lemme give that some thought. That was the end of the conversation. So I thought, hey, I tried. I threw it out there. It probably never happened.

A few months later, I get a call that they are interested in having to come over and lead a new division of Marvel, be the Creative Director of essentially what had been a marketing assignment, but it would be overseeing live events, which would include theme park development and things like that, arena shows and character appearances and stuff like that from Marvel. And I thought, hey, if there’s one company that can pull me away from Walt Disney Imagineering, it was Marvel. That was the one, and it was just an opportunity that was too good to be true. So I jumped all over it. And that again, it was another little pivot in my career that really ended up being a complete game changer and changed the trajectory of my career forever.

One of our first initiatives was to, we changed the name from live events, solidified it as its own division and made it Marvel Themed Entertainment. And that’s what I’ve been doing for almost a little over, actually, it’s been a little over six years now, and we’ve certainly done a lot of work in the Disney theme park space. But in addition that we do arena shows and comic conventions and fan events and character appearance and museum exhibits. So kind of the dimensional installations of the Marvel brand is what we are responsible for. We have a lot of great partners that we work with to help bring these things to life. And it’s awesome. We’re crazy busy. We found new ways to be busy even during the pandemic, and I really do love the job that I have in the sandbox that I get to play in.

Dan Heaton: Oh, it sounds like a perfect fit for knowing what I do about your background and everything else. It just seems to fit perfectly well. One of the things though that happened, I believe when you were then at Marvel was Mission Breakout, the Guardians of the Galaxy attraction, and with Joe Rohde leading and then changing over the Tower of Terror, which is a pretty big move, especially with what’s going to eventually happen at DCA. But I’d love to know for your experience now you’re at Marvel and an attraction’s being set up, but I believe you were pretty closely involved in that too. So I’m wondering what that was like.

Brian Crosby: Look, Rohde’s a legend, everybody who’s a fan of Disney and a fan of the parks knows Joe. I had never really worked with him. I knew who he was obviously at Imagineering, but I just hadn’t really worked with him too much. He was put in charge of what’s called the Marvel portfolio. One of our first assignments was, well, first Joe wanted to figure out how he envisioned Marvel in the parks.

We had done a lot of philosophy, and anytime you start a big Marvel project, the philosophy of how you bring Marvel into the park, that always comes into play and always becomes the first point of, I don’t want to say contention, but just a lot of spirited debate, I should say, because we’re all passionate. We’re all storytellers. So there’s a lot of ideas about what that means and what’s the right way to do it.

And so Joe, as the new portfolio leader, he wanted to get a handle on that for himself. So he took about a week and kind of solidified what his approach was and how he thought Marvel played in the parks. Then he came back and said, here’s how I imagine it. And he invited all of us to the table, and one of the first assignments to help bring that philosophy to life was end up becoming Guardians of the Galaxy: Mission Breakout. I learned some very valuable lessons about theme park storytelling from Joe leadership skills. He was created a very welcome, open environment.

He let everybody in have a seat at the table. Everybody had a voice. And with Mission Breakout, we were doing it, and it was such an accelerated timeline. We were trying to open it day in date with Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2, the Marvel Studios film. And in order to do that, we didn’t have time to dance around and pontificate about what it could be. It’s like, hey, we got to make decisions like today, and we’re off and running. So we did have a little bit of time to kind of noodle with some other ideas besides Guardians of the Galaxy, which Joe has mentioned before in other interviews.

But Guardians of the Galaxy is what we kept coming back to just because it was such a radical change, so different. We thought we could tell a story that fit within that ride system. We could confine the characters in a way. It’s not like Spider-Man where you want to see him swinging all over the place and doing crazy stuff. But this is a pretty small space. And the Guardians worked in what we were trying to do, and of course the humor that comes with them. But it was a great, great experience working with the folks at Marvel Studios, James Gunn, all the actors from the films.

And like I said, Joe, creating a great environment of open communication and dialogue really made it for a pretty awesome experience. Look, we know there were some naysayers, some people that maybe weren’t thrilled with the idea of changing the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror, but those voices weren’t lost on us, but we knew what we were in charged with doing, and we believed in the story that we had come up with and the experience that we had created, that it was fun, that it was funny, that it was irreverent and that it was something radically different, but it had to be at least as good, if not better than what was there before.

That was the bar that we set for ourselves. And I’ll leave that up to the fans to decide if we met that bar or not. But I know that we were very proud of what we did, and it’s still something that’s always fun for me to go and experience even now.

Dan Heaton: Well, yeah, and I think though too, there was a lot of concern among some fans, but a lot of people, I know that initially I’ve heard a lot of the same type of statement, which was, at first I was very hesitant, and then I rode it and it was really fun. That seems to be, I mean, the general consensus, because I think people were like, oh, so you’re just going to drop not realizing that it’s different. You’re going up and down and the music and the whole experience. It’s something that, it’s something that’s totally different, which I think fits with Guardians. You couldn’t just do Tower of Terror or fix a few things that have it be Guardians of the Galaxy. It wouldn’t make sense.

Brian Crosby: Well, with Tower of Terror was the whole ambiance, the whole spirit of it was different. It was about building suspense. So that build towards the drop was suspenseful. We’re taking you through one step at a time until you get to that point where, oh my gosh, we’re going to fall and then we drop you. But with Guardians, we wanted to get right into the action right away. So there’s no suspense building. It is boom, we’re flying up the fortress, and then we’re dropping you and in sync with the music in what just becomes a hilarious experience. I think it’s hilarious, a hilarious experience. Then you have all these different vignettes of things that are happening to the Guardians, and it’s chaos, right?

It’s chaos in the Collector’s fortress. So it was just a blast, and the cue was so fun to come up with and what we’re going to put in all of those vitrines hiding some Easter, Easter eggs in there to maybe some other Disney stuff, but of course, lots of Marvel Easter eggs as well from Agents of Shield and the original Guardians of the Galaxy film. And there’s just a ton in there, and even we were able to do some nods to the Collector and the Grandmaster from Thor Ragnarok. So there’s lots of fun in that space.

Dan Heaton: Excellent. I want to ask you about one more project before we start to sum up quickly. I already have talked with Jim Clark about the Disney Kingdoms series, so I feel like I’m just doing an oral history of the Disney Kingdoms series without trying here, but I’d love to briefly know just that if people aren’t aware of, it’s the graphic novels that were connected. It was done through Marvel, but connected to some Disney attractions like Big Thunder Mountain and Figment and Dreamfinder, and then the Museum of the Weird. I’d just love to briefly know your experience on that and working on such a different type of project.

Brian Crosby: Yeah, that was, look, as I mentioned before, we were also excited about what we could do with Marvel in the theme parks that began the germ of a completely new idea. What could Marvel do with Disney stuff? And we thought, nobody is really thinking about that. A lot of us are talking about how to bring Marvel into the parks. No one’s thinking about what can Marvel now do with the Disney intellectual property IP, as we call it, right? That goes back, Jim Clark and I had a passion for doing this actually long before Disney Kingdoms came about.

We worked with Daniel and a few others on, we were really passionate about the Museum of the Weird, so for Disney, your Disney fans that listened to the show, probably familiar with the Museum of the Weird Rolly Crump, Disney legend, and his designs for that space, that was actually announced on the Disneyland Centennial TV special.

Walt announced it, and he announces it with, ‘it’s a small world’, Pirates of the Caribbean, Haunted Mansion. And the fourth one announced on that show was Museum of the Weird. Okay. So the three that got built became arguably the most iconic Disney attractions ever made, right? They’re still around to this day. Those are staples of every castle park. You got to have some version of those in some way. That Museum of the Weird never happened, but we’re like, what a great name, what great idea.

We love Rolly’s art. And so we became passionate about trying to bring back the Museum of the Weird, and Jim could testify that we did every iteration you can imagine, of what the Museum of the Weird could be, because we were so passionate and so hungry to bring it back. So we got one piece of feedback that told us, it’s going to be hard for you guys to do this because it’s really not attached to any kind of IP or movie or anything like that. And that was a very honest, but a very disheartening note to receive. So we played with some different IP that we could maybe attach to it, but we thought even none of that felt quite right.

So we hatched a different idea. We said, hey, these comic books are getting turned into movies, and now we’re all talking about how to make ’em into theme parks. What if we backdoored this whole idea and said, what if we made this into a comic book first, and then it could become a movie, and then we could build a Museum of the Weird? So that was the idea. It’s like, we’re going to turn this into a comic book. So what is a Museum of the Weird comic book? And so Disney, about that time, this is actually before they bought, Marvel, formed a comic book company at the Walt Disney Studios called Kingdom Comics, and the whole idea was that they were going to release comic books with the intent of turning them into big feature film franchises.

So Jim and I, we pitched Museum of the Weird to them amongst a few others, and they loved the idea. We thought it was going to get turned into a comic book, but in the course of that project, Disney buys Marvel, Kingdom Comics goes away. So we’re like, well, maybe we’re not doing it with Kingdom Comics anymore. Let’s go pitch it to the Marvel guys. So this was our idea to turn this into a feature film franchise. So then we thought, what I mentioned before, what could Marvel do with Disney? We rallied not just Jim Clark, but Josh Shipley and Tom Morris, and we had an idea to turn this thing into a comic book series.

So we pitched it to Marvel. We actually pitched it to Joe Casada at a baseball game. So Josh Shipley and I, after the D23 Expo, we go to the Angels game and our hidden agenda was to pitch this idea of a Disney Kingdoms comic. So in addition to the Museum of the Weird, Josh and I had been kind of formulating an idea of doing a Disney comic book universe. And so we kind of married those two ideas. So we pitched it to Joe and Joe. It was kind of the same idea as when I pitched him about the idea of coming to Marvel. He’s like, that’s an interesting idea.

So a few months later, it goes by, Joe calls us and he goes, hey, remember that idea? You guys pitched me about the Disney Comics thing? Well, we dig it. We’re going to do it. And so we’re like, okay, I guess we’re doing these comics. The first one out of the gate we’re like, we want to do Museum of the Weird. Turns out there is an actual Museum of the Weird in Texas, Austin, Texas, I believe.

So we couldn’t call it Museum of the Weird for legal reasons. We changed the name to Seekers of the Weird, it’s about the people, and within the book Seekers of the Weird, the Museum of the Weird is a thing. So that was our first book, and then again, we were off and running now on a whole new line of comics, and we did Figment, which was a huge, huge hit. We did the Haunted Mansion, we did Big Thunder Mountain Railroad. We did another edition of Figment.; we did the Enchanted Tiki Room, and so we were really having a blast.

So we brought other Imagineers on Andy Genova, and we had a nice little core group of Imagineers, about five or six of us that were really passionate about this idea and bringing these comics to life, working very closely with the Marvel team and their writers and editors and artists, and letting them do what they do. And we were kind of Imagineering experts and kind of helping ’em with that side of the house, and it was a true labor love; we really loved to doing that project. It was a blast to do, and it got to scratch that comic book itch in a completely different way than I had imagined previously.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, it’s such a cool project. Just the merger of Marvel and Disney and the different interactions and something like Museum of the Weird, which still holding the torch for it. I don’t know if it’s going to happen, but…

Brian Crosby: You never know, man. You never know. These things have a way of finding new lives somehow, some way.

Dan Heaton: You never know. Maybe they make a new Haunted Mansion movie at some point, and that somehow the Museum of the Weird is incorporated. Then it kind of just filters right in. We’ll see. But there you go. Yeah, you never know. It could happen. All right. Well, I want to finish. I want to ask you just a few kind of overall questions before we finish. Sure. The main one is, I asked this to a lot of people, which is more about the type of advice you would give to aspiring imagineers and everything.

I’m curious for you, just given that you have slightly different background with comics and with Marvel, you could take it a lot of different ways. But I’d love to know from your experience, what advice you might give to aspiring artists to maybe want to work in comics or possibly Imagineering, but are still kind of figuring out their way. What would you suggest they do? Or even just how they approach things.

Brian Crosby: There’s no, in my mind and I this kind of advice to college students and stuff quite a bit, there’s really no substitute for hard work. Try and identify what it is that you want to do. I think a common phrase is jack of all trades and everybody wants to be a jack of all trades and do everything, but there’s a second half of that phrase, which is jack of all trades, master of none. And that’s not a good thing. That’s not a good place to be.

So my recommendation is great to be a jack of all trades, but instead of master of none. How about be master of one, be the best at something? You got to be really good at something that you really love and are passionate about. What’s going to get you out of that bed in the morning that you want to work on and you want to do it every single day? At the end of the day, all these project teams at Imagineering or Marvel or any, I would imagine any other company, they got to identify who’s going to be on that project and what your deliverable is going to be on that project.

So in order to get to be one of the people on that Excel spreadsheet that has a list of all the people on there, you got to figure out what your deliverable is and what your expertise is. Then once you’re on that project team, now you can show you have great ideas, you can write, you can do whatever it is, all these other things that you can do, but you need to be that master of one that got you in the room. And so I say, hey, try and identify what those things are that you’re really good at, that you can really develop and become a master at and work really hard and sacrifice.

I got almost obsessive about if I wasn’t working hard on my craft, somebody else out there was somebody else out there. And when the opportunity comes, when opportunity knocks, they’re going to get the job because they’re busting their hump every day. So I wanted to be that guy. I wanted to be that guy that was going to work harder than anybody else.

So that’s my big advice for young artists and don’t get, so I think people get locked in the intellectual property of it all like, oh, I want to be at Disney, I want to be at Marvel, I want to be at Universal. Whatever it is that in my mind should be almost secondary. I think it’s good to have those goals in the back of your mind, but really think about what it is that you want to do. What is it that you want to create?

Do you want to design theme parks; do you want to be an engineer? Do you want to be a writer; do you want to draw comics; do you want to animate? What is it that you want to do? And then once you identify what that thing is that you really want to do, then you can start going after the companies that you want to work for and getting experience wherever you can.

I mean, there was a lot of projects that I worked on before I got to Disney that didn’t pay great, but got me some valuable experience and I got to know some people that could help me with my career because who is almost as important as how good you are, sometimes more important, which is honest but true. So it’s good to get experience where you can work your butt off and there’s really no substitute for that.

Dan Heaton: I think that’s a great answer. And I mean I’ve heard similar themes from others, but really the hard work part of it, I think that you’ve stressed is the key and really good advice. Well, Marvel’s got a lot going on because of the pandemic. You’ve got four new films coming in the second half of 2021, we’ve already had two great shows. Falcon and Winter Soldier just finished. We have Loki. There’s many other things beyond that that’s like the high level. I mean, what are you excited about from what’s coming in the near or even far future at Marvel?

Brian Crosby: So many things. I mean, look, every division of Marvel has got just amazing things going on, and that’s not me being a company man. That’s me being the Wednesday warrior and the fan of Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends from the eighties. There’s so much going on right now at Marvel, it is just such a great time. It’s exciting. I mean every week we got 15 to 20 comics coming out, telling completely new stories with new characters being invented all the time.

The amazingly talented writers and artists that are putting those together, the video games division is just killing it with Avengers and Spider-Man and Miles Morales and the mobile games, Marvel Studios. There’s almost hardly a weekend in 2021 where you’re not doing something Marvel related. We’re all excited for Loki that’s coming up and Black Widow and this string of films that is coming up. And later on in the year, Ms. Marvel and Hawkeye, just an awesome time.

Then for us at themed entertainment, I mean we just got done with a NBA broadcast last night where we did, it was called the Arena of Heroes, Marvel’s Arena of Heroes, which was a combination of the NBA and Marvel and telling a story where we didn’t know what the ending was going to be, so we had to come up with multiple endings for this scenario. So we’re doing museum exhibits and the comic cons are about to come back. So in the theme park space, Avengers Campus is about to open. We’re all very excited for what’s happening at Marvel. It’s a great time to be a Marvel fan. There’s so many exciting projects that are coming in ways to consume. If you’re not a comic book guy and just like going to the movies, that’s totally fine.

If you’re a hardcore gamer, we got stuff for you. And if you love going to the cons, I can’t wait to get back to the cons again and see everybody see the fans. Doing the cons has become really one of my favorite things to do because we put together our Marvel booth and I, I still think like a theme, like an Imagineer in all my projects. So when we put together our Marvel booth, I’m thinking about what’s the guest experience and what are they going to get to see? You got to be 360 degrees and how do you feel immersed in the Marvel brand when you’re there in the Marvel stories and you get to meet your favorite creators and actors and filmmakers.

That’s really fun. And then to see the cosplayers come and they’re so passionate and talented and I’ve really come to enjoy doing the cons and I can’t wait for those to get back. So like I said, the Marvel universe is big, it’s moving on to Greater. Stanley used to say, and man, we’re having a blast doing it.

Dan Heaton: Well awesome. Well I’m excited. I’m even more excited now. Your enthusiasm just has me. I’m ready to just run through a wall for this. This is really exciting.

Brian Crosby: Going to Hulk smash right through that wall. Yeah.

Dan Heaton: Last question. This may be the most important. So I know you come from a baseball family. You mentioned baseball a few times. Your dad and brother played in the Major Leagues. This is going to be out of date by the time this comes out as of this recording, the Angels are 13-14. They’re in fourth place. Twofold question here, do they have a chance this year? Tough division, surprising team. Seattle, Oakland doing well. And will Mike Trout ever get to the playoffs again?

Brian Crosby: You know what, I love that you brought this question up. As I mentioned before, I don’t know if I’d have my career at Marvel if I couldn’t talk a little bit of baseball. Thanks Joe. And I hitting it off on the baseball front, so I’m always happy to talk baseball. So yeah, my dad, he was a major league player in the ‘70s and then a scout through the ‘80s and ‘90s and he’s retired now and is enjoying being retired.

And my brother Bobby, actually tonight the night of this recording, he’s making his managerial debut. He was a former big league player, but now he’s the manager of the Midland Rock Hounds and I’m very excited for him. It’s a whole new career for him. And my other brother Blake is a scout with the Toronto Blue Jays and he’s just having a tremendous career as well.

So baseball is certainly in my blood and I love the game. And like I said, some of the pro sports activations that we’ve now been doing with Marvel allows me to, before I got to blend theme parks and Marvel, now I’m getting to dip into the professional sports world. I got to draw a card of Mike Trout in a Topps partnership, and so I’m getting to blend my affinity for sports and baseball with Marvel. So it’s another great marriage. But as far as the Angels go, I think we’re going to be okay.

I think our lineup is nailed as always. Pitching can be a little suspect. We’ve got to avoid the injury bug, but I think the division is a little bit weakened. I think that the Astros have taken a little bit of a hit. Oakland’s always going to be sneaky tough, but I think the Angels could, I think they could get back to the playoffs this year. I think they look good. Like I said, they had a few injuries, but when everybody’s healthy, the Angels are banging. And I think Trout gets back to the playoffs in 2021, if not 2021, 2022 for sure.

Dan Heaton: I like the optimism. I hope it happens because a player that good, I want to see him in the playoffs and I want them to make it. I’m a Cardinal fan. I’m in St. Louis. They’ve been a little shaky lately, but I can’t complain.

Brian Crosby: My dad was a Cardinal.

Dan Heaton: Oh really? That’s interesting. I didn’t realize that.

Brian Crosby: Yeah, 1971, man.

Dan Heaton: Just a little before I time. But yeah, so we could do about a two-hour baseball podcast, but I don’t know if the target audience here is going to follow us along, but I had to ask you about it. On that note of optimism, thanks so much for being on the show. It was a blast to talk with you, Brian. It’s really cool and I’m excited to learn more about your career, but also with what’s going to happen at Marvel.

Brian Crosby: Well, thanks so much for having me, Dan. It has been great to talk to you. You do a great show. You’ve had some of my best friends on this show and it’s been my pleasure.

Dan Heaton: Well, that was great. Before I finished, I do have to give an update on the Los Angeles Angels. I’m recording this on May 26th. So it’s still a little ways from when you’re hearing this, but the update is, if you recall, the Angels were, I believe 13-14 when we were talking with Brian. Now they have 21 wins and 27 losses. Unfortunately, they are six games out of first. They’re in last tied with the Rangers, but really it’s not that far. So I don’t want to be pessimistic.

They have won their last two games as I speak. They have Shohei who’s incredible. Oh my gosh, what he’s doing is amazing. They don’t have Albert Pujols anymore though. He’s now with the Dodgers. Mike Trout is hurt. He’s going to be out for a while. So I think the odds aren’t great, but again, I look at the other teams in this division, the A’s are leading. Astros are up there. Seattle and Texas aren’t very good.

The Angels have a shot, but without Trout and with their pitching, Dylan Bundy hasn’t been great. I’m not sure. It’ll be interesting to see. I did enjoy talking a little bit of baseball with Brian. I feel like we could have talked a lot more about that near the end. It rarely happens on this podcast. It’s a rare thing for me and maybe I should do it more. I don’t know. Let me know what you think on that front.