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I’ve enjoyed the chance to dig further into how attractions are developed by Walt Disney Imagineering. I learn something new every time I speak with someone that worked for Disney behind the scenes. I originally spoke with sound designer Greg Meader on Episode 67 back in March. We covered a lot during that show, including his work on the Jeremy Irons version of Spaceship Earth and the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror. There was still a lot more to discuss from his career, however.
Greg has worked on more than just projects for Disney. He also did sound for multiple attractions at Ferrari World in Abu Dhabi, concert films for NSYNC and U2, early audio concepts for Islands of Adventure at Universal Orlando, and simulators for Iwerks Entertainment. Those examples actually represent just a small fraction of Greg’s work. Along with those projects, we also cover the following Disney topics on this episode:
- What was it like to record the new audio for the 1993 update of Walt Disney’s Carousel of Progress?
- How were the early versions of on-board audio at Space Mountain in Disneyland tested?
- What was the different version of Catastrophe Canyon at the Disney/MGM Studios that Greg prefers to the finished product?
- Where could you hear Greg’s voice at the Great Movie Ride at the Studios?
- What was it like to work on the sound for the holiday version of the Country Bear Jamboree for Tokyo Disneyland?
Show Notes: Greg Meader
Listen to Episode 67 of The Tomorrow Society Podcast for Greg Meader’s first episode where we talked about his background, Spaceship Earth, the Tower of Terror, and more.
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: Today on the podcast, Sound Designer Greg Meader is back to talk about Carousel of Progress, the Disney/MGM Studios, including Catastrophe Canyon, Universal’s Islands of Adventure, and the Country Bears Holiday Show. You’re listening to the Tomorrow Society Podcast.
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Dan Heaton: Thanks for joining me here on Episode 83 of the Tomorrow Society Podcast. I am your host, Dan Heaton. One thing that’s interested me when I am talking with people that worked at WDI during the Eisner era when there was so much growth during what’s often called the Disney Decade, is how many different projects people worked on, whether it’s at Paris or Tokyo, of course in the States, and that’s definitely true with my guest today, Greg Meader, who was originally on this show on Episode 67 last March.
During that conversation, we covered his background and then dug into some projects, but there was so much more that Greg has worked on that I wanted to talk to him about. The list of projects is stunning, both at Disney and at other companies like Iwerks and even for Universal and in other realms because in a full career in the theme park industry, especially during a time of growth, you are going to do so much.
We dug into things like his work on the 1993 update of Carousel of Progress or the concepts for Islands of Adventure or concerts by U2 or NSYNC afterwards. There’s just so much there. So there was plenty for me to cover with Greg on the second appearance and probably enough to cover on a third appearance given all the different projects that we discussed during this podcast and in our first discussion back in March.
So this was a really fun podcast to record. I feel like I was as interested in asking Greg about what it was like to record like an NSYNC concert or some of the other projects he’s working on or has in the past as I was about some of the big Disney projects. I love learning more about Carousel of Progress, so this was a real treat for me to talk about that for a while too. So let us go and talk to Greg Meader.
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Dan Heaton: All right. My guest today is a sound designer who started at Disney as a musician, played drums at Epcot, and then joined Imagineering in the late eighties. He worked on Phantom Manor in Paris, the Jeremy Irons version of Spaceship Earth, Splash Mountain, Tower of Terror, and so much more. Also worked on Islands of Adventure with Universal, and so many other projects. He first appeared on this podcast on Episode 67 earlier this year, and he is back to dig even further into his work. It is Greg Meader. Greg, thanks again for coming back on the podcast.
Greg Meader: It is great to be back.
Dan Heaton: Excellent. Well, I know you’re still working on a lot of things, so I’d be curious just to know upfront, what are some things you’re working on now, at least in general?
Greg Meader: Well, I can tell you what I’m working on. I just can’t go into detail. One of the cool things is the MSG Sphere project in Las Vegas. It’s owned by Madison Square Garden and you can find it on the Internet, but it’s a giant 400-foot diameter globe theater that’s going to be somewhere off the strip in Vegas and you won’t miss it once it’s built. So it’s going to be a concert venue for in-house acts and touring acts that come through. And kind of the cool thing is that it’s going to have some really neat audio tricks and I can’t really go into detail what they are, but it will sound unlike any other theater you’ve ever been in.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, I looked at just the information that’s been released online and I go, what is that? Because I mean, you know how Vegas is, it’s already so big and kind of gaudy. This fits right in.
Greg Meader: Yeah, this’ll out Vegas.Vegas.
Dan Heaton: That’s really hard to do, but I think it sounds like a fun thing. I hope everything works out and it opens up. I know it’s supposed to open in a few years, but it sounds like a cool project.
Greg Meader: Yeah, I think 2021 is the scheduled opening date, and they’re also opening another one in London too, which I dunno if it’s concurrent, but that’s also been announced too, so there’s going to be two of them.
Dan Heaton: Well, I’ll put a link to the news stories in the show notes. It’s definitely worth reading about if you’re interested, even just in entertainment and kind of where things might be going. But it looks pretty cool. But I know looking a little bit back that you worked on Ferrari World on a few projects in Abu Dhabi, which is one of those, when I see kind of YouTube videos of theme parks that I will probably never get to, that one comes up a lot. It’s kind of this crazy indoor park. So what was it like to work on that park?
Greg Meader: Yeah, that was interesting because who would’ve ever thought Ferrari Motor Company would build a theme park in the Middle East? It’s neat because it’s indoors, because it’s very hot there and humid. I never thought the Middle East was that humid, but when I was over there it was just, it’s like Florida on steroids. It was crazy. So the whole park is indoors and it was Ferrari-themed. Everything in there was based on something about Ferrari. I worked on three shows.
There were more shows in the venue, but I personally worked on three of ’em. One was like a water flume ride where you rode through the engine of a Ferrari. It was broken down into giant set pieces and you travel through the engine. Another one was a 3D, what I call it a 3D ride through sort of like the old Spider-Man was at Universal from I guess 15, 20 years ago. You ride through different rooms and there’s 3D screens and the vehicle moves around and shows you different scenes. It was again about Ferrari and that was it. It was just a Ferrari-based theme park, and they had a lot of museums within there as well. So you could go in and see different Ferrari’s that have won F1 championships over the years and just historical Ferrari that they have in that they own.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, it’s crazy because I always knew that as the place where there were the fastest roller coaster, basically they have one that’s the fastest anywhere. And so I thought it was more just like this coaster place and then I kind of looked into it more and I’m like you mentioned, I mean, I would’ve never thought to have a log flume that goes through the engine of a car. That’s very odd.
Greg Meader: Yeah, that’s why it’s an interesting place. They also have inside, they have a, it’s not an Autopia, but it’s for kids and they ride little Ferrari’s around on its track or streets, but I think you peddle ’em so it doesn’t go very fast. The most interesting thing is that as we were mixing it, one of the shows, I forget the name of it, I was just working with working titles like F10 or F12 for Ferrari 10, but the water ride, we were playing the music and mixing it and playing it back for some Ferrari executives, and they made it very clear that in their mind the music was secondary to the sound of the engine.
There were engine sounds and music playing together, and they said to Ferrari, the engine is the music. And so we went, okay, we get it. And actually in a couple of scenes we took the music out because we just left the engine sounds in.
Dan Heaton: So when you’re doing that, are you just constantly with the sounds, just using lots, they mentioned all these different types of sounds of engines, and is someone looking at going, no, that doesn’t sound right or that sounds right. It’s all about the, I’m just trying to picture doing the sound and just dealing with all these engine sounds. Is that what you did?
Greg Meader: Well, for me, I was the mixer. So the sound designer that I worked with, Jeff, he’s based is in Detroit, Michigan. And they know somebody, he or his studio knew somebody that owned a bunch of Ferraris. So they literally took the Ferrari out to a parking lot one night and recorded an actual Ferrari, just making engine sounds revving up, idling speeding off, speeding in. Just anything you could think of. So we never got any feedback saying, oh, that’s not the right sound, because every sound was an actual Ferrari engine. So that was good.
But it’s weird because you always think, well, we need the music to carry it through this scene. They were like, no, no, no, that engine is carrying it through the scene. They were very, I mean, and one of the guys guys there was the grandson of Ferrari himself, so his last name was Ferrari, you’re not going to say no to.
And the guy’s like, I want to hear this, I want to hear that. So it was just kind of funny because there were a lot of car engines and they’re car people, so they would cue in on things that you normally wouldn’t think about, oh, I need to hear the starter on this because the starter on a Ferrari has a different sound than a Dodge and we need to hear when the engine starts up, I want to hear that whine of that starter or something. That’s just an example, but there was a lot of that of just they want to hear specific sounds at specific times in the ride.
Dan Heaton: That’s funny that as opposed like every theme park or they’re talking about branding and IP and you think about, oh, the character, we need to meet this or the song with them. It’s just the car that’s the brand.
Greg Meader: Yeah, that was it. It was a Ferrari theme park, Ferrari World. So yeah, Ferrari in the car was everything. They might have what I affectionately call rubber head characters walking around there, but I never saw them, but they might have ’em now, but it was all Ferrari car-based stuff.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, that’s really interesting. I want to ask you too about, I know you worked when you weren’t at Disney, you worked at Iwerks Entertainment and worked on some simulators and such, which I find a lot of those interesting. I know on the last podcast we talked about the Stargate one, but you mentioned to me that there’s this Virtual Voyages attractions like these 4D attractions, which sound a lot like something that’s happening right now at Disney. It’s just interesting, like an early version of the Millennium Falcon ride. What was it like to work on some of those simulators like that?
Greg Meader: Well, I will say that yes, when full disclosure, I didn’t work on the Millennium Falcon ride. I don’t work for Disney. I have never been on that ride yet, so I don’t exactly know what it is. But from everything I’ve seen, it looks very familiar to what Virtual Voyages was back in the nineties, other than its computer horsepower these days is so much faster and graphics and rendering and all that kind of stuff.
But yeah, it was fun because it was frustrating though because the challenge is that you know what you want to do creatively and in your head, but computer hardware just couldn’t keep up, especially in 1995, 97 when I was at Iwerks or when I started there and I wasn’t really on the creative at the beginning part. I came in after it was kind of done, but we were still doing work on it, but you’re thinking, oh, we should do this with the sound, we should do that. And it’s like, well, we can’t because the computer just doesn’t have the power to do that. So it gets frustrating because you know what you want to do and then you know that it’s going to get done at some point in the future, just you can’t do it right then.
Dan Heaton: Yeah. Well, what’s crazy about those attractions, from what I know is that yeah, they were doing, I mean, trying to do things that I can’t imagine, like you mentioned the computing power, I think of it from the nineties and I’m thinking, wow, that was really ambitious. So when some of the things evolved with gaming and again, like interactivity and such, when you’re trying to, I mean, work on sound and such for it, was that a challenge back then to be able to do sound for something that was on such the cutting edge of even what computers could do?
Greg Meader: Not really. I mean, sound has kind of been sound for a long time now. I mean, other than switching to digital, the process of creating sound and recording it and mixing it is all that. It really hasn’t changed much since probably the thirties. I mean since Jimmy McDonald did the first sound effects on the Mickey Mouse cartoons, he did it all manually, but the process is still pretty much the same.
So even though with Virtual Voyages, it was a cutting edge computer visual experience, the audio was still, it was surround audio, but it was nothing, I can’t say it was anything crazy, weird or special about it. I mean, you want to make it sound good, of course, but there was nothing that I remember that was just really hard to get through or over. It was just mostly a good, just a normal sound mix.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, that makes sense. I just asked the question because again, I’m thinking, well, maybe there was something they were doing beyond that, but like you say, it’s not, there’s only so many different ways to do something like that. I know you also, speaking of sounds and doing something, you also worked on some on NSYNC concert experience film.
Greg Meader: Well, I was at Iwerks Entertainment and we had a little, our main job was creating ride simulators and the whole company was formed originally to build Star Tours without being at Star Tours. It was to build ride simulation theaters for parks other than Disney. So that’s how it was formed. And part of the company would build simulators, and part of the company would distribute film to those simulators.
Then we had a little film production company that would work on just some fun little projects. I don’t know how or why, but somehow we came into contact with people that wanted to make an IMAX film of an NSYNC concert, and we said, okay, we put a bid on it and we got it. So there you go. And I was the sound production manager, so that was my sound film. So it was kind of neat.
We got to record, I think we filmed, we shot with the, we didn’t use IMAX, that was the competing cameras. We used Iwerks cameras, but we shot six concerts, filmed six concerts, and I recorded three of them. When I say I recorded, I hired the recording truck because recording a live concert, you get one shot to do it. And unless you have a lot of live experience, it’s very difficult to, it’s not difficult to do, but there’s a lot of pressure getting it done. So me being a studio person where you have a little more relaxed schedule, I didn’t do the actual recording myself. I supervised, which was great.
We hired a recording truck and got everything from three concerts recorded, and then I got the audio after the editors so they could cut the film together. Then the coolest part was after we got, after the whole thing was edited, I mixed it in Stem. So you basically sit in a studio and you mix the audio as you want to hear it in a studio, and then I take those, so I mixed the drums together. I mixed the keyboards, I mixed and in an NSYNC concert at that time, all the instruments were live. They had backing tracks that played with sounds, but they had a live drummer, live bass player, live guitar player.
So we would take all those tracks and I would mix ’em, so they sounded great in the studio. And then I took it over to a Universal IMAX at CityWalk out here in California and put the tracks in through the Universal Sound System, how you’re going to hear it eventually. So ultimately that’s what you want to do. I got it in there, and then the director came in and we worked from midnight to 7:00 AM mixing the film for two weeks.
Dan Heaton: That has to help a lot to be able to do that in there because if not, like you said, it’s not going to sound the same.
Greg Meader: Well, because IMAX, the way they handle their bass management with their woss is different than a standard 5.1 or even Dolby Atmo Theater. Dolby has its own way of dealing with bass, and IMAX has their own way of dealing with bass. So if you just mix it in a studio in stereo and you take it and put it in the IMAX theater, it’s not going to sound horrible, but the bass is just overwhelming at times.
There’s a lot of low end in an IMAX theater, just have to, and actually, I remember a couple of the tracks I had, I muted them because they weren’t needed and they were just low synth and stuff, just some really low frequency that in the studio sounded really nice. But when we got in the theater, all it did was just create this muddy low end that obscured everything.
So I shut ’em off and there was still plenty of bass, plenty of subwoofer. The funny thing for me was that before I went into the theater, I called IMAX up in Canada and said, I’m going to be mixing this thing. Give me some specs on your system so I don’t blow it up. The last thing I want to do is take down the Universal IMAX theater. So they gave me the specs, how loud things could be and signal and that kind of stuff. So when I got in there and I knew what the specs were, I talked to the IMAX, the guy I talked to, the guys who designed it, but the projectionist didn’t know that, and he was nervous.
I was playing stuff pretty loud, louder than a normal film. He was just getting all freaked out because he thought, uh oh, you’re going to blow this system up. I had to reassure him; I said, no, I’ve talked to the guy who designed it, I know we’re good, but he was still nervous every night. But at the end, it all worked out. It’s just that he was, it wasn’t his system personally, but he worked there every day. So that was his home, but it all worked out.
Dan Heaton: Great. That sounds like an interesting project.
Greg Meader: Yeah, the most interesting part was being at the concerts and just being in that environment. I’ve never worked in that environment before and just you’re around the guys, you’re around the fans, of which there were 60,000 girls at each concert, roughly ages 14 to 15, and if you’ve ever heard 60,000 14-year-old girls scream, you don’t know what loud is with no low end. It was just this amazingly loud screaming sound, and we found that all the girls knew all the words. So when they were singing on stage, the girls in the audience were singing along with them. So we put microphones up on the front of house mixing position and recorded the audience singing with them because that was part of the concert experience.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, I can imagine. I’ve never been to an NSYNC concert when they were big, but I could guess that I get the idea.
Greg Meader: Yeah. A quick funny story: we did do one scouting concert in San Diego before we started filming, and me and Doug and a couple other guys I worked with, three or four of us went out there and we got seats into there and we were sitting there and we were surrounded again by 14-year-old girls, and we were questioned as to why we were there, not by the parents, but by the girls.
Do you guys even listen to this? What’s their hit song? What are the names of the guys? Do you know who Joey is? We were just, we were getting peppered by these girls and we’re just like, yeah, we know we’re supposed to be here. We’re supposed to watch this concert. And it was just funny. The girls were just like, they didn’t believe that these middle-aged men were at an NSYNC concert.
Dan Heaton: They were like, what are these guys, cops or security, what?
Greg Meader: They were like, they were quizzing us to see if we were worthy of being there. That was the funny part. Which one’s Joey, who’s Justin? It was just kind of funny. The funniest thing was that because a lot of the girls were driven there by their dads out in the hallway outside the concert, all the TV monitors had on basketball games, so the dads could go out and watch sports while the girls were at the concert. So it was a funny experience.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, I’m sure. And I think you did something similar right for U2, that was that a pretty similar experience or was that after?
Greg Meader: That was after, and it was going to be the same, but not quite. They did their YouTube Vertigo tour, they released a concert film of that tour, and so they were doing an IMAX version of it, large format, and we were involved with it. We were going to try to do the recording for the film and everything, but turns out that U2 had something like 11 Pro Tools rigs already recording the concerts. So I didn’t get to go to Brazil.
I didn’t get to record the concerts, but what I did work on was the mastering of it in the IMAX theater because in a regular theater or in a studio, it sounds a certain way, but the IMAX theater is so unique in the way it handles sound that the best way to get a good representation of what it’s going to sound like is to mix it in the theater.
So we didn’t really mix the film in the theater, but we did play the tracks back and did some measurements and sent some mixed notes over to the mixing stage about how to EQ it for imax. So then after we got that and they mixed it, then what I did is I traveled to the major market theaters like Las Vegas, San Francisco, Chicago, and set up the theater to make sure it was to spec because we mixed it. We set the specs up at Universal out here to make it and mixed to that.
So I just made sure that the theater was set up properly because IMAX is pretty good about their specs and keeping their theaters up to date. But I did find some systems that were not quite what they should be as far as left and right speakers were wrong. Volume levels, tweeters were blown out, one sub four wasn’t working. Just little things. But you add that up and then all of a sudden that concert film just doesn’t sound very good. And it was U2 and National Geographic was concerned, they wanted to sound good. So it was kind of fun. I did see that film a lot though.
Dan Heaton: Oh yeah. By the end, you’re probably just like, Bono enough we’re done.
Greg Meader: Yeah. I knew every inch of it.
Dan Heaton: Well, let’s talk about some theme park stuff you did. I know you worked, like I mentioned in the intro, you worked on Islands of Adventure, and I know you mentioned that you worked more on the audio concepts for the park. So what was that like getting involved there and doing that with a new park, which we don’t get that many new parks in the states, so something like that in the nineties?
Greg Meader: Yeah, it was interesting. The first interesting thing was that when I went over to Universal Creative over at that time, it was based out here in California, was that the place was staffed by mostly people I worked with at Imagineering. So all the people that had been laid off from Disney were then hired by Universal. So that’s why those parks are already pretty good because everybody working on ’em has a lot of experience. I was part of, I think it was a five- or six-man audio team, and we were hired as a group and we were just basically given a preview of every attraction and every land that was going to go in the park and tell us what you think we should do from a sound standpoint. So we said, okay, well for Jurassic Park, we should have dinosaurs in the bushes.
We should be able to, if we can somehow, one of our things we wanted to do was vibrate the glass in the restaurant. In the movie, when you seize the glass vibrating, we wanted to somehow do that with subwoofers and make it very subtle so you wouldn’t really hear it, but yet if you’re sitting at your table and you look over, you notice you’re glass vibrating. We thought that would be kind of neat. So we made recommendations like that.
There were some transitions between the island of Nublar and other areas. We thought, well, let’s have dinosaurs running out through the bushes and moving sounds so we can hear things out there. We won’t see ’em, but we’ll hear ’em. So we made recommendation like that. I know one of ’em in Dr. Seuss Land, we said, well, let’s take the sound. There’s a giant carousel with wacky Dr. Seuss items on top of it. As it spins, let’s have the sounds fly off the carousel and fly over your head and crash behind the building behind you.
Now visually nothing was going to happen, but we wanted the sound to fly through the land and crash into things and just Dr. Seuss’s style, just funny things. Now we made all these recommendations that I don’t know how many actually got used, but we were concepts, so we weren’t really concerned with actual production work. It was one of those things of here’s what you should do, and then it goes through budgets and logistics and operations and other things and stuff gets cut. So I think some of it got utilized, but I honestly, since I didn’t work on the production of the park, I don’t know how many of our ideas actually got into the final product.
Dan Heaton: Well, I’ve been on that carousel and I don’t remember that, but now I feel like I want to go back there just to find out if that sound actually does that.
Greg Meader: I think that’s one of ’em that didn’t make the cut. We thought it was pretty funny. It’d be fun to do, but again, I don’t know that it made the cut. The problem with theme parks is that they’re very loud. Even just the ambient noise level outside at a theme park is louder than you think. So to get sound to travel like that, you’ve got to have it pretty loud, and that requires big speakers and big amplifiers and a lot of equipment. So I don’t know that a lot of the ideas we had really were practical, but they were pretty cool.
Dan Heaton: Because a lot of times you’ll be in a land and there’ll be a lot of people, and for some reason all of a sudden it’s not as crowded. And then I’m like, oh, wow, I didn’t know that sound was going on. So it’s kind your sixth sense or whatever you want to call it, but because there’s so many people talking and so much going on, you don’t do it. Is that a challenge just in general? I mean to figure out, you also don’t want to have it where when people move, all of a sudden somebody gets their ears blared out because it’s so loud.
Greg Meader: Well, that’s the other problem. Yeah, because it has to be loud to be heard, and if you’re standing next to a speaker, it’s really loud. So that’s part of the big problem, not the problem. But one of the issues with theme parks is that it is so loud, either outside ambient noise level or even on a ride on an attraction. We’d sort of discussed maybe a little bit on Spaceship Earth last time, just the ride vehicle noise creates such a noise floor that it obscures a lot of sound.
The same thing with Islands. It was just we thought, okay, let’s have the dinosaurs running out in the bushes, and if it’s quiet, it’s pretty cool, but if it’s not quiet or there’s a lot of people making noise, you lose it. The, I don’t want to say the, I don’t know, that’s, that’s one of the challenges of designing sound for theme parks. They’re very loud. They’re not studio quiet, so subtlety goes out the window. You’ve got, everything’s got to be big, loud and kind of in your face.
Dan Heaton: I think that’s probably more even the case now because some of the attractions are just so, I hate to just say big, but I mean they’re designed, you have these attractions that are costing, whether it’s Harry Potter or Star Wars or whatnot, hundreds of millions of dollars that I think you almost have to use the sound to, and I know you didn’t work on those, but I’m just saying use the sound to make the feel epic. You have to feel the largeness in some way, I would think.
Greg Meader: And it sort of becomes a nuclear arms race. We want it louder. Okay, well now it’s a bigger vehicle, so it may make more noise. Okay, well now we’ve got to make the sound louder, and now we’ve got a bigger picture. I want hear, it’s just at some point you have to stop. You can’t get any louder or bigger with the picture, so you’re kind of just, there is an end point, but you’re right, I think newer attractions definitely go right up to that end point. There’s no subtlety. It’s on. It’s a 10.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, which can be great when done well, it can be wonderful when not as done well, then you’re like, oh my gosh, I want to look.
Greg Meader: Yeah. One of the very frustrating things that I’ve, and this is just again, just working in theme park audio, is that the sounds, you get the music, you can have a pretty nice sounding show in the studio, and you just know once you get to the field that all that niceness is just going to get buried by something. So you just have to just accept that that’s going to happen. I used to play, they have a thing at Disney called Disney Way one where people that work at the company in different areas can do a three, I think it used to be three-day kind of a tour.
They’d take a tour of the studio, a tour of Imagineering, and then a tour of Disneyland, and these are people that worked in travel and insurance and legal and kind of the less glamorous jobs at Disney. So they would come through and I would play them sounds from different shows, and many times they would say, wow, I never knew that that was there. I never heard that piece of music. That’s a great sounding thing, or whatever they heard. And I’d go, I know it’s there, you just can’t hear it. So it was always very, from a sound perspective, it got very, not frustrating, but you just knew that what you heard in the studio was not going to translate into the show.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, I know that’s always got to be a challenge. Now let’s talk about some things you worked on at Disney, including something that is not on the grand over the top epic scale, which is an attraction that I have a very soft spot in my heart for, which is the Carousel of Progress, which I know you worked on quite a bit. The version that for the most part, beyond them swapping out like a TV screen and such is still there today, the version of the 1990s. So what was it like to work on that update for the Carousel of Progress?
Greg Meader: Well, it was fun because look, Carousel of Progress is one of those historical shows that is part of the World’s Fair and with Walt and everything, so it has its place in Disney history. So that was kind of neat, but it was fun. It was a challenge, a technical challenge because the theater itself, it’s a carousel that moves around the different theaters, but when you’re looking at the stage on the left and right, there’s turntables when the scene starts, there’s the mom ironing on the ironing board.
Then when the light shuts off and it shows something else, that turntable turns around to be like the kid listening to a radio. So that one little area can have two different scenes in it. And so each particular scene had turn balls on either side that would turn with different scenes, so you could basically increase your set without increasing the size of the stage.
So a lot of the sound came through speakers and the speakers would, they had a thing called speaker switching, which was run by show control. From a technical audio standpoint, it made it very difficult to mix that show because the only way to mix it was to be running the whole show with the theater moving and everything. Normally you just want to sit in the theater and mix it and be okay. It sounds great. But at the time, which would be 1994ish, I think ‘94, it was not easy to do. So it was a very tough mix to do. It was a fun thing to record because we recorded Jean Shepherd who was the, I didn’t know him because he was an East Coast radio guy and he was the one who wrote a Christmas Story with “Shoot Your Eye Out Kid”.
He was a narrator of that film, and he was great. So he basically got the script and he didn’t change it, but he doctored it here and there and he put in some good stuff. One thing I remember he changed was about the Crosley three two radio. He makes mention of that in the show because it was just, I think the script said it’s a radio and he goes, when I was a kid, we had a Crosley three two radio.
Every kid had one of those. So he would put in things that he experienced when he was a kid in New York. So that was kind of neat, and I think this is not Carousel related, but it’s Jean Shepherd related. One of the coolest things that Jean was a big baseball fan. So when he came out here to do the recording, me and I think it was, it was Kevin Rafferty, I think was the writer on it at the time.
We went to an Angels baseball game with Jean and his wife. So it was kind of neat just sitting there watching a baseball game with this guy, just having him tell us stories. Then next day we were in the studio, but what we did with the recording of the studio is we recorded it like a live radio show, and actually Jean insisted on it, rather than having each actor come in and do their lines separately without any interaction, we set up seven microphones and had everybody in the room at the same time, and Jean insisted on it.
It was a great idea because that way the actors hear each other, they talk to each other, and it’s like they’re having a conversation and not just reading lines. Now you can do it separately and get away with it. Most actors are very good and they can fake it, but Jean wanted that and we all thought it was a great idea. So that’s how we did it. All the voice interactions were all recorded at the same time. So that was kind of neat.
Dan Heaton: Wow, I hadn’t heard that before. That’s really interesting. So yeah, especially in the last scene where there’s, it’s not just one person, the father talking to one person where everybody’s out there. So you had all the actors basically recording. That’s great.
Greg Meader: They were all in the same room. We did it at Studio A at WDI out there in Glendale, and we were all in the same room at the same time.
Dan Heaton: Excellent.
Greg Meader:Just everybody had a microphone and a script and we just rolled tape and go, because see, Jean was a radio guy, so he liked to do stuff live. So we would do the scene live, and then we did a little editing, but not a lot. There were things here and there. One of the edits we had to make after the fact was there was a line that the mom says about, she goes, I like electricity now. We don’t have to use that smelly gas again to heat the house. And we got a memo from Marty Sklar saying, take out the word smelly because we have gas company sponsors. They don’t like their product being referred to as smelly.
So things like that happened. So there’s a Carousel story for you. Then I think that’s the only time we did that in that show, so we took out the word smelly. So she just says, oh, now we don’t have to use that gas anymore. But the script was smelly gas.
Dan Heaton: That’s funny. So real quick question on the mixing. So you mentioned you had to do it in there while the show was going. Could you, I mean, I assume though you could stop the show and keep rerunning the same scenes. You didn’t have to run through the whole show and mix as you went along, right? You had more ability to stop and start and stop as you went along.
Greg Meader: Not at that time. I mean, nowadays it’s different. You could, but then it was what, I didn’t even have a mixing board in the theater because the actual amplifier and control room for audio was in those tunnels down below the Magic Kingdom tunnels, and it was a couple hundred yards from the theater. So the mixing board was set up in the tunnel underneath, just down in the Magic Kingdom tunnels with all the wires and all the connectors going into the amplifiers that went up to the theater.
So I would basically just take notes because there was no, you didn’t have a phone then, so you couldn’t just record it. A lot of tech didn’t exist, and it was just a notepad, my ears and a pencil, and I would listen to the scene and go, okay, Mom was too low. Dad needs to come up. That’s too loud. The music’s got to come down, and I’d make notes and I’d watch the whole show, and then I would go down and make some tweaks and then go watch the whole show again. Yeah, it was very time consuming.
Dan Heaton: I can imagine. I would think. Yeah, I mean, I didn’t even think about the fact that with the technology that was so limited, I don’t mean limited in a terrible thing, it’s just a different era.
Greg Meader: Well, it all, it was analog there. You couldn’t do wireless, you couldn’t have, nowadays it’d be really easy just run everything off your laptop and just you could set up, it’s a lot easier to do today.
Dan Heaton: Yeah. So this is totally just because we’re talking about Carousel of Progress. So you recorded it in the nineties and amazingly that audio is still playing now today with things, people talking about car phones and laser discs and the whole deal. This is totally an opinion question, not a, what did you do? What do you think they should do with that? I know that to talk about updating it and I would love to see it stay, but how do they fix that? What would you think? What would you want ’em to do with that scene?
Greg Meader: That’s the hardest question because I noticed even with the old Carousel before we redid the new one, they would refer to the VCR, but the thing was is that they were referring to the same machine, but they were using terms that we didn’t use. I remember in the old show something like, let’s turn on that video tape recorder, which, okay, everybody had a VCR, but nobody called it a video tape recorder. Everybody called it a VCR, but you don’t know when you’re new, you don’t know what it’s going to turn into the VR and scene four is, it’s VR.
I think, I don’t really know if there’s a way, I dunno if you can ever win in that situation because it’s just, even if you predict the future, you may not predict the terminology. You knew that laser disc was a temporary thing and there’s going to be something else after that, but you didn’t know what we knew when we were doing the scene. This is going to be dated in two years, but what do you do? So it was laser disc, well, what’s next? Okay, we think DVDs are it, but we didn’t talk about Blu-ray at all or 4K resolution or even modern day like 8K. None of that was we didn’t know. So I really don’t know if there’s an answer to that. My opinion is that it’s very difficult because even if you get the technology right, the terminology is not always right.
Dan Heaton: Yeah. You almost have to do either a retro version, it was back to the sixties or some sort of so far in the future, but I could even see a scenario where you would say, I’m going to do something that’s a hundred years from now. And even so something you predict is out of date in five years. You just never know.
Greg Meader: Yeah you can, I mean, with technology just changing so fast, although I can’t say we’ve reached a plateau, but the iPhone hasn’t changed a whole lot. It’s gotten more expensive and it does a few more things, but it’s pretty much the same phone. It was that when it came out, you call it an iPhone or you call it an Android, but in 1994, okay, you could pick a car phone, but you’d never think to call it an iPhone or an Android.
Dan Heaton: Or even cell phone wasn’t even a common term.
Greg Meader: You could say cell phone, but you still say cell phone, but cellular telephone or again, you knew what the tech was going to be, but you just don’t know what it was going to be called. And you could say, oh, well, let’s use the sim card. Okay, well, a sim card is still a legitimate thing, but not many people talk about it. It’s not used commonly. So even when the tech is still used again, you never know. I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s a win-win situation ever. Like when you had the new concept for New Tomorrowland, the Tomorrowland 2055 at Disneyland, which sadly never got built, but the concept was the future that never was is now here.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, it’s like Discovery Land at Disneyland Paris. Very similar.
Greg Meader: Yeah. It was just, okay, take the Jules Verne version of the future that we know is not going to be it and make it that. So the Disneyland version was kind of, it wasn’t Jules Verne, but it was sort of that mid-century modern fifties version of the House of the Future. Everything’s modern and plastic and smooth and round and that kind of stuff, and you know that that’s not the way it’s going to be. So the motto is going to be, yeah, the future that never was is here.
Dan Heaton: It never goes out of date because it never existed, basically.
Greg Meader: No, it never existed. The Jetsons future is an amazing future, but we’ll never have flying cars. We’re not going to have schools up on pedestals with the Jetsons moving sidewalks into offices. I mean, I just don’t see that ever happening, but it’s still kind of a fun future. But it was back to Carousel. It was kind of the same in scene four. You knew going in that you weren’t going to win this scene. This scene was going to be good for a year, maybe two, and then that’s it.
Dan Heaton: Yeah. I think there’s only so much to do. I assume they’re going to make eventually, I mean rumors and how that goes, but at some point there’ll be an update at least to that scene, but I’ll be really curious to see what they do because there’s pitfalls no matter what they do.
Greg Meader: Well, yeah, because the problem is is that, well, I think everybody knows this. You can write the scene today, and by the time you get it installed, it’s out of date in many areas, and you can try to predict the future. We could have said in ‘94, we could have referenced a Blackberry, which would’ve been revolutionary at Blackberry. That’s pretty cool. Well, where’s the Blackberry today?
It exists, but it’s not what it was. Even if you reference things today, they might not be here tomorrow. And it’s just so hard to predict. I mean, that’s my opinion is that I think that’s a no-win situation. You have to go with something kind of retro, something kind of like the horizons with the robot vacuuming and cleaning up the room. It’s a robot that never existed, but that’s the future.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, it feels right, like you said, kind of like the future that never was. Well, I wanted to ask you, speaking of the future, I know you at least were involved with the putting onboard audio in Disneyland Space Mountain. I recently talked to Tim Delaney about putting onboard audio in Paris, but I believe you’re involved at Disneyland, so how did that work out when you were working on that?
Greg Meader: Yeah, I was involved in the very early R&D stages of, we used Disneyland because it was the closest ride that we could get to, and there was some creative concepts about what if we put audio onboard the vehicle, and we said, great. So then the first question was how do we keep it in sync with the vehicle? Because the vehicle’s unbeknownst to us, they run at different speeds depending on humidity, heat, weight, all that stuff. So we weren’t really sure how to make it stay in sync. We knew you could write music in sections and connect things like when you get to the end of one music queue, you just have the note hold out for 10 seconds, 20 seconds, and then the next music segment triggers. So how do you trigger it? What triggers it? Is it a light on the track?
Is it what? We were looking at just a lot of different concepts, and it was all early stuff. It was never, I didn’t work on the Dick Dale or any of the later stuff, the actual production work where it was in the park when I was working on it, we literally had speakers duct taped to the back of the seats on the vehicle. I sat in the backseat with a piece of plywood and a DAT tape player, a little DAT with the wires connected to the speakers, and I would just press play as we rode through it just to hear.
We were just trying to see the timing of the music with the timing of the vehicle. What we found, one of the things we found was that from the first, I don’t know that I don’t remember the exact numbers, but when the vehicle runs through cold in the morning, within about 10 rides, it’s almost 10 seconds faster because the track heats up and the track heat was, we determined that the heat of the track, the heat of the air and the weight of the vehicle would give you your fastest ride.
So our unscientific determination was that if you ride Space Mountain on a hot afternoon full of people, that’s going to be your fastest ride.
But I would time it and it would be 10 seconds different. Within about 20 minutes of the first ride, we were thinking, okay, well the vehicle’s 10 seconds faster. Well, the music has to be 10 seconds faster, so how do we do that? We were looking at maybe putting sensors on the wheels, so as the wheels spin, there’s a counter that would count the reflections and just an optical device that would basically just vary speed the audio to match the speed of the wheel. But that didn’t work. The audio was going all over the place, just like a record just, or I shouldn’t say record like a tape.
The speed was changing too much. So then we thought, well, maybe we could put a kind of a gearbox thing, so even if the wheel changes speed, it does a little math and it doesn’t slow it down as much. And it started getting really complex, a lot of devices doing a lot of math, and it just was, what do we do? That was my involvement. It was at that level. We’d go down there at night, a couple guys from R&D myself, from audio, a couple guys from audio engineering hardware at WDI, and we would just ride the ride and play tapes and sit around and talk about how do we make it work.
Dan Heaton: It’s interesting because it kind of fits with what you said about Carousel of Progress, where things now I don’t really think about. I mean, yeah, I’ve thought about the fact that I know Space Mountain is not always going to run at the same speed, but not that big of a difference. And also trying to all sink in. Now we’re just thinking of, oh, you just have these sensors. I know it’s not that simple. It’s very complicated, but it’s definitely very different, or you plan it that way, where then it seemed like it was just you’re trying a lot of different things almost to figure out how it could even be done.
Greg Meader: Well, that was just it to me, that was the fun part because now you think, okay, and I’m not sure exactly what the final verdict was. I don’t know exactly how it’s done now, but what was fun in the beginning was that it wasn’t being done. So every idea was valid. Everything was like, well, if we put sensors on the wheels or if we put sensors on the track, you run through lights on the track, we can do that. We can vary speed the audio to match the speed of the vehicle. We just kept throwing out ideas, and that was the fun part to me, because you’re just, you’re trying ideas and that most of ’em won’t work.
One thing we really found out, and we never thought about it was that we thought, well, let’s put the audio down underneath the car. Well, those cars on the track generate a ton of static electricity when they run, and it was just crackling and interfering with the audio, even though it was digital audio, the system, the wires themselves are picking up the static in the air like an antenna, and we never thought about that, and all of a sudden it was like, there’s so much static coming off these wheels that we can’t have really any audio gear near those wheels.
Or if we do, it’s got to be very shielded. But when you shield it, you got to build a box, you got to add weight, and then you got to have maintenance procedures to fix it, and it just becomes the whole big thing. So we may have not, I don’t remember if we went that route, but I think we just said, okay, let’s think of something else. Because everything ultimately has to come back to maintenance guys, fixing the cars and keeping things running in an R&D state.
You can do the most complex, weird looking setup you want, but it’s got to be practical. At the end of the day, guys come in that the maintenance guys at Disneyland, they’re sharp, they know what’s going on, but they’re not going to be rocket scientists repairing this guidance system every night. They just don’t have time for it.
Dan Heaton: Yeah. It’s one of those things where it’s fun. You can get it to work once you’re like, wow, that’s amazing. And it’s like, well, yes, this has to carry 2,000 people an hour every day for 12 hours a day or whatever the number is.
Greg Meader: And not break, and then if it does break, you got to be able to pull the car into the bay, swap a part out and get it right back out.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, that’s the trick.
Greg Meader: That is the trick. Yeah. The funniest instance for me was we once got it down to how we wanted it to work, Michael Eisner, and at the time, Judson Green was the president of attractions or the, I dunno what, he was president of something. So anyway, Judson Green and Michael Eisner came down and wanted to ride it, so it was Michael Eisner, Judson Green, and myself. I sat in the backseat with the tape recorder in my lap, and I just pressed cues as we got to certain points in the ride, and I just thought it was just such an absurd, not absurd, but it was just such a bizarre scene.
Me in the back pushing this tape button in the front, the CEO of the company wearing a suit, riding a roller coaster. It was just funny because at the end of the day, okay, he’s the CEO of the company, but when the ride got to the end, he’s still just a kid in a candy store. He loved the ride, he liked the audio, and he was just turned around and he’s asking me questions and it’s just like a guy, just a kid in front of you going, Hey, what if we tried this and that? So that was the Michael Eisner that I knew. A lot of people, there’s varying opinions on him, but every time I interacted with him on things like this, it was always fun.
Dan Heaton: I’ve heard similar things, especially in the, I don’t know, first 10 years or whatever where it seemed like you could see it when he would do the TV shows where he was introducing it and all that. The guy seemed to enjoy his job quite a bit, especially when they were really expanding, which I think was this timeframe. So that doesn’t surprise me.
Greg Meader: This was the beginning of the Disney decade. Yeah. I don’t want to get into too many details, but he did mention a couple of times at these meetings that he really enjoyed being over there at Imagineering looking at things because he was out of the boardroom. He wasn’t dealing with all the stuff that you deal with as a CEO of a giant company. He could just be a guy looking at a ride and having fun; he liked that.
Dan Heaton: Speaking of Eisner, I want to make sure we have time. I want to talk about a few things that the park, that really was his thing, which was the MGM Studios now called Hollywood Studios, and I know you worked on some projects there, especially things that were there in the early going, which I went there. I was a teenager, but I remember going there the first year and around that time, and I know you had quite a lot of involvement with elements of the tour, which at the time was had Catastrophe Canyon, and then you met Herbie and you had the walking tour, especially with Catastrophe Canyon. But just in general, I’d love to learn a bit about what you did there for that project.
Greg Meader: Well, it was interesting that project was, I started at WDI in February of 1989, and that park was opening in May of 89. So it was under full installation, scheduling everything. So I was just kind of, and I never went to the site. I did all my work in California. I was the new guy, but I did a lot of, at that time, that park was all digital from an audio standpoint. So every track that was recorded on tape had to be converted to a digital, not a stream, but a digital file that was burned onto an EPROM chip that was then loaded onto a card and put in a rack in the ride.
So I digitized probably 90% of that park, just digitizing everything for all the Herbie vehicles. And anything that had sound in the park was digital. And like I said, about 90% of it was something I had physically burned on a computer chip. I know the original opening day park, kind of like a glove, it fits like a glove. I just know every part of it, and I know it’s changed so much now it’s got even the same place. But yeah. And Catastrophe Canyon was, this is my personal opinion, it was Universal Studios Earthquake had just opened. Word on the street was that the company wanted something to match that. So come up with something quick. So Catastrophe Canyon was born.
Dan Heaton: It’s very similar. There’s a lot of similarities.
Greg Meader: One of the neat things that it never happened on the ride, it happened during installation, was that Joe Harrington, he was creating some of the sound effects for it. Well, not some, all of ’em actually. I was just kind of the mixer, making sure that it all worked.
But we were at the ride at night and we were playing these low frequency sign waves, like around 20, 25 hertz, and the human ear really can’t hear below 20. You could feel it like earthquake level, but you can’t hear it. So he was playing these tones out of the speakers we had in the theater and outside at night, and you could walk under the sign wave and the sound would almost go away. Then he’d walk 10, 15 feet and it would just get overbearingly loud. You could feel your shirt shaking, the air was moving.
It was the most bizarre thing you could feel. We thought, man, we got to get this in there. And the sounds we took, the sounds that Joe created, and we put ’em on Eprom chips. But just due to the sampling technology of the time, it did not recreate those little frequencies like we hoped. So it didn’t sound the same, it didn’t sound bad, but it never had that same sound. Then you dump all the water in there, which of course absorbs a lot of sound waves. It was still a good show, but the show that nobody saw or heard was the one that was me and Joe in the middle of the night playing these low sounds out of a keyboard just through the speaker system. It was incredible.
Dan Heaton: Oh, it makes me a little disappointed that I didn’t experience it.
Greg Meader: Yeah, nobody experienced that, and that was frustrating. It was amazing.
Dan Heaton: Well, I know you’ve also, you had some involvement. I know you’ve just gotten started, but on the Great Movie Ride too, I believe a little bit there too, right?
Greg Meader: Yeah, that’s the ride that I worked on the most, even though I wasn’t on site, I did all the, not all, but again, most of the Eprom burning the different scenes. So Don Lewis, another audio guy was out in the site and he would go through and mix things and he would send notes back to me and saying, I need to burn these tracks and this and that with that EQ. I was doing a lot of that.
So we’d do the Munchkin scene, for example, with the Wicked Witch, and then I would get a note back saying, turn the Munchkins down, or we have to do this, you have to raise the Witch up volume wise. So I would do that and send it out to him. Everything had to be shipped physically on an airplane. So it took a day to get out there, and then he would go, okay, that was good, but change this now go to this scene and change that.
So it was a very, nowadays it’d be like you could just upload files and be done with it instantly. But back then it was kind of like mail where he would mail me something, I would fix it, I would mail it back to him, he’d put it in and go, alright, that’s pretty close, but I need to do this. I think my biggest claim to fame with the Great Movie Ride for me personally, is that in the opening scene, the load scene, when the music gets queued and the ride is about to start, you hear a director yell, lights, camera, and then action. Well, I was the lights and camera voice, and Don was the action voice.
There were a couple other voices in there from the audio department. So it was very, that was at a time when if you needed a voice, you just went in the studio and recorded it. There was no union, it was just go in there and say something. So I liked that era of Disney. So anyway, so for however long the Movie Ride was running, I was lights camera, that was my big voice work with Disney.
Dan Heaton: It still feels weird to me that it’s not there. I mean just because it only closed two years ago. But it’s something.
Greg Meader: And we also had on the pre-show where you’re in the queue line where the film is playing all the different film clips together, I worked, I didn’t really mix it, but I kind of helped supervise the mix. I was interesting because that was all film stuff. So that was mixed over at the studio lot in Burbank. The studio guys that were mixing it were old time film union guys. So what they did is what they did, and they didn’t take any suggestions from young theme park punks like myself.
They were mixing to a digital tape. We used Atari 32-track digital machines, and they were mixing to that and they were used to mixing to analog machines, and they’re different the way your level control. So as they were mixing it, myself and another guy that I was working with were noticing a lot of red lights on the digital machine and we’re like, guys, we really don’t need red lights. We can’t have ’em. This is a digital machine.
And they’re like, cigar chomping guys, don’t worry about it. Sounds fine. Because when you mix analog, your view meters will commonly hit the red, but analog deals with it, digital doesn’t. And we were like, no, guys, this isn’t going to be right. They said, no, we’re fine. So it turns out they weren’t fine. So we took their mix and took it back to WDI and basically remixed it.
We didn’t tell ’em, but now that the ride’s gone, we can say this, but yeah, the mix that we did was not the one that we did at the studio because guys just, they mixed it how they wanted to mix it, and it didn’t really work. It wasn’t like a bad sound. It was just technically they were hitting the machine too hard and there was distortion. So if anybody’s in audio tech, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Audio digital distortion was happening on every track, so we had to fix it.
Dan Heaton: Well, it’s good that you fixed it. It’s good you were there.
Greg Meader: Yeah. It was me and another guy that there was two of us that kind of dealt with it.
Dan Heaton: Well, I know you also worked on Star Tours, which opened, I believe a year later on the queue line and on a few things and did a little bit of drumming. So I’d love to learn about that a bit.
Greg Meader: Yeah, I have three drumming, maybe it’s just two. Well, I used to play at Epcot in the eighties, so I played live drums all the time. But on Splash Mountain, there’s a porcupine that’s playing on the back of a turtle and he’s just playing along. I forget which song it is, but I’m the guy playing the porcupine drums. I didn’t work on the Disneyland ride and there was already one for that, but I thought, you know what? I’m working on this show. This is my audio show. I’m going to play the drums again.
I could have used the Disneyland track, but I chose not to. I decided just to play it myself. So I got a woodblock and some sticks, went to the studio at WED. I hit record on the machine and just sat in there and just played it. That was what was neat at that time at WDI is it was very, everything was not really by the seat of your pants, but it was very low key. You just did stuff and got it done. There was no corporate review. I didn’t have to submit my proposal of how I wanted to record the woodblock to anybody. I don’t know that you even have to do that today, but back then it was just Greg, just get it done. So that was kind of fun.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, I love those kinds of stories because it shows the ingenuity to things that we now take for granted and how they came together.
Greg Meader: Yeah, that’s it. My other story of drumming is the Kennedy funeral drums in the American Adventure in the Golden Dream sequence, which I think are still in there. I just heard the 2018 version of the Golden Dream, and I think my drums are still there, not the drum set, but the actual marching drums you hear during the Kennedy speech. And that came about because George Wilkins wrote the, he didn’t write Golden Dream, that was Bob Moline, but he wrote all the interstitial stuff, and when we redid it in ‘94, ‘92 for the first time, he wrote all the arrangements for that.
So we’re in the studio and we’re mixing it, and we get to that, we’re playing it with picture for the first time. And Kennedy’s there, and right across the screen, some drummers march by, and George Wilkins just looks at me and he goes, I didn’t write a snare part. And I mean, if you know George, he used a lot more colorful language.
So he commented that he didn’t write a snare part, and all the musicians, the studio, the session’s done, it’s just me and George in the studio. I go, well, I play drums. If you write something, I can do it. And he goes, really? I go, yeah. So he wrote out the part, I borrowed a snare drum, a marching drum from a friend of mine, and I brought the drum in, and we just recorded it, overdub it numbers of times made it sound like it should sound, but I just thought it was funny because George forgot to write the snare part. Then he realized it during the mix, and then he just, I don’t want to say I saved the day, but I saved the day.
Dan Heaton: Well, nice work.
Greg Meader: Yeah, that was kind of funny to me. It was just, the funny part was just George’s reaction when he realized that he didn’t write that part. He’d written everything else. And then he goes, oh man, I forgot that part.
Dan Heaton: Well, there’s a lot more, but there’s one thing I definitely want to ask you about before we finish, which is, and I think maybe because this used to play at Disney World, I believe years ago, the Country Bear Jamboree or Bear Band Christmas show, which still plays in Tokyo, and I know you recorded, edited, and mixed it, so I’d love to know a little bit about that.
Greg Meader: That was my show, the Jingle Bell Jamboree. It was just one of those shows of, it was interesting because in the audio department that time, we had our supervisor, Ken was moving to a different position as a music supervisor. So they needed somebody to work on a lot of the Japanese shows. And they said, Greg, you’re the guy. You’re up, do it. So that was my first show in Japan.
It was actually the first show that anybody other than Ken in the auditing department had worked on for quite a while. So I was sort of told, don’t blow it, make a good impression. I went over to Japan, got the script translated, and it was interesting on the script translations, because we’d had the English script, you translated into Japanese, the Japanese is then translated back into English, and then you compare it a bit with the English script and see if it says the same thing or means the same thing because translation to Japan or Japanese is, it would always come back to just weird things.
It would go back and forth multiple times until finally the Japanese script matched the intent of the English script. Once that was done, I didn’t do this, but we booked the actors and the singers and flew to Japan, flew to Tokyo and just recorded everybody over there. So everybody singing on that show were all from Japan. They’re all Japanese actors, and were well-known.
Some of ’em were TV personalities over there, I didn’t know. But the people that lived over there in Tokyo knew who they were. What was funniest to me was, no, this wasn’t Jingle Bell, but this was kind of part of Splash. We were playing some tracks back, some Japanese, some talking, and this might’ve happened on with the, what is it, Melvin the moose and the buffalo, those characters. Well, they’re talking, and I was playing this back in Glendale, and there was a guy in there that spoke Japanese, and he started laughing, and I go, what’s funny?
He goes, it’s funny because they’re using southern accents. I go, I just never thought of Japanese as having a southern accent. And he goes, yeah, this is not a Tokyo accent at all. It’s a Southern Japan accent, which makes it funny. It’s the equivalent of us using the south, the deep south accent. So it was just funny to me.
I never thought I go, no, Japanese is just Japanese. But no, there’s accents and I don’t know, I just never about it. But it was funny. So yeah, it was a fun show. Went over there and just recorded everybody came back, did some editing, went back over, installed it, and I guess it’s still playing to this day.
Dan Heaton: Well, yeah. I mean, now that Country Bears aren’t at all at Disneyland, that’s been the case for a while. Then it’s still in Florida. They have the version that’s shorter. The one I always saw was the vacation one, which isn’t there anymore. But for people that I would not even put myself in this, but people that are just like diehard Country Bears fans, the Tokyo Christmas show is up there as something special because they actually do make changes during the seasons, which is really cool.
Greg Meader: Yeah, that’s funny. That’s just funny because it wasn’t a minor project, but it wasn’t a high profile one either. It was just something I did, and I enjoyed it a lot. It was a lot of fun to do. One of the funniest instances I had was that doing a little editing over there, because it’s an 11 hour flight to get there and just, it’s not easy to always come back. So at one point, I took an editor over there to edit tracks there, rather than coming back to California to edit. The Japanese operational folks at TDL were operational people. They weren’t creative editing types. So I was working on the show doing some editing, and then I was at a meeting and I was asked to explain all the problems that the show was having. And I said, well, there’s no problem.
It’s just we’re editing it together and it’s coming together. They said, well, you’re doing so much editing, there must be many problems. And I was like, no, I mean, that’s how you create a show. But I realized that they had never seen a show created. All they did was install it and make it run, but they never saw a show being created. So they had no idea of the editing process.
I was kind of surprised, I dunno surprised. It was just funny to me that they didn’t understand the editing side of it because I was editing, they figured there must be problems. It’s like, no, that’s just how you make a show. But everything got explained and was fine. I just remember at this big meeting, and they were going around the table and somebody said to me, please explain the audio problems we’re having.
Dan Heaton: Oh, geez.
Greg Meader: I thought, well, we’re not. But yeah, it took some explaining and it all worked out, but it was a fun show. I enjoyed it. And just all the characters and Japanese people, I don’t understand their language, but they have a great sense of humor. So you’re recording this show and actors, they just, they’ll start singing and laughing and then they start laughing so hard they can’t sing, and then you just have to stop the tape and let ’em laugh. It’s just a lot of funny times, I find myself just laughing at things that I didn’t understand. They were laughing. It was a fun show.
Dan Heaton: No, it sounds great. I’m glad to hear that there was some fun behind the scenes too. Well, Greg, thanks for doing this again. This was a blast. I’m glad we got to talk about some of the other projects. Well, especially NYSNC, but some of the other projects you worked on over the years, it was great.
Greg Meader: Yeah, well, it’s fun to relive the old memories.
Dan Heaton: Well, is there anything else you’re currently working on that you want to mention, or what are you involved with today?
Greg Meader: Well, we kind of touched on it. Maybe I’m working, I can’t say what I’m doing, but I am involved in the MSG, the sphere of project in Las Vegas from Madison Square Garden. And I’m also involved in, this has been publicly announced, and I can’t tell you what again, but I can say that Universal Studios Beijing has a lot of cool things happening there. I’ll be a part of that. I can’t tell you what though. It’s all secret; it’s Universal Studios Beijing, you know what you’re going to get from Universal Studios. It’s going to be big, loud, and pretty exciting. So it’ll be fun.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, the little bit I know about what might be planned for that park. It sounds really exciting. So that sounds like a great project.
Greg Meader: Yeah, it is. Very interesting.
Dan Heaton: Well, thanks a lot, Greg. This was great.
Greg Meader: Sure.
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