171. Imagineer Scott Hennesy on Kitchen Kabaret, Tokyo, and Innoventions

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When we look back at EPCOT Center’s beginning, it’s easy to focus on classics like Horizons and World of Motion. That really just scratches the surface of what made the park so special during that era. Each Future World pavilion offered surprising gems beyond the headliners. Imagineer Scott Hennesy worked on a lot of those attractions during the ’80s and beyond. He developed the concept and wrote the lyrics to the memorable songs from Kitchen Kabaret, a fun show inside the Land Pavilion. Scott also was involved in the original Imagination pavilion and the Backstage Magic show at CommuniCore. These examples are just a small part of his extensive career at Disney.

Scott is my guest on this episode of The Tomorrow Society Podcast to talk about his background and projects for Disney. That work includes The Living Seas and Wonders of Life pavilions, which helped expand the scope at Future World. He wrote for both the Cranium Command and Body Wars attractions, though neither were great experiences. Scott candidly describes the challenges with projects like that pavilion that didn’t go so well. His work at EPCOT continued in the ’90s with Innoventions, where he reunited with Rolly Crump after their collaboration on The Land.

Scott’s career included many successful projects in Tokyo at both parks, including the Jingle Bell Jamboree, Visionarium, and multiple updates to the Enchanted Tiki Room. He worked closely on Tokyo DisneySea, particularly on Sindbad’s Seven Voyages and its replacement. We conclude by talking about the remarkable success of Duffy & Friends in Japan. Scott describes his work on initial concepts for that character’s story and more recent updates. I really enjoyed talking with Scott and hearing the great stories about his many years at Walt Disney Imagineering.

Show Notes: Scott Hennesy

Learn more about the children’s book The Cat’s Baton Is Gone: A Musical Cat-tastrophe by Scott Hennesy and Joe Lanzisero.

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Note: Photos in this post were used with the permission of Scott Hennesy.

Transcript

Scott Hennesy: One thing about the pavilion, which the public never gets to see, is United Technologies was the sponsor at that time, and they had an area in the pavilion where they could have business meetings, and they had this massive conference room with this giant wooden table that was an immaculate, beautiful table, incredible table, and we were all wowing over the table. And the guy from United Technologies says, well, you think that’s great? Watch this. He pushed a button and a secret button in the wall, and suddenly a panel opened up and revealed the fish tank. And just as this happened, a shark by and we all looked at each other and went, welcome Mr. Bond. It was perfect.

Dan Heaton: That is former Disney Imagineer Scott Hennesy, who’s here to talk about so many cool attractions from his career at Disney, including his work on Kitchen Cabaret, Body Wars, Sinbad, and a lot more in Tokyo, multiple versions of the Tiki Room, Country Bears, so much more. This is going to be awesome. You’re listening to the Tomorrow Society Podcast.

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Dan Heaton: Hey there, thanks for joining me here on Episode 171 of the Tomorrow Society Podcast. I am your host, Dan Heaton. Hope you’re all doing great out there. Personally here in St. Louis, it is brutally hot, basically the same temperatures and heat indexes is what you’re seeing right now in Florida, but no beaches, no Walt Disney World. But that’s totally fine because I have a really exciting episode to bring you here today. I talked to Scott Hennesy. Scott worked on a lot of attractions that I’m sure you’ve enjoyed, especially at Epcot during the early stages of his career.

I mentioned Kitchen Cabaret. The intro had a fun story from his work on The Living Seas. He also was very involved in Wonders of Life, Backstage Magic, also worked on Innoventions, worked with Rolly Crump once again like he did on the Land Pavilion on several shows there, and spent a lot of time working in Tokyo on a variety of attractions, like I mentioned in the intro, including the Jingle Bell Jamboree, the Get the Fever and Stitch versions of the Tiki Room in Tokyo.

Sinbad, two different versions, just a lot there, including work on Tokyo Disney Sea, and finally on Duffy and Friends, which I know we’ve talked about in previous episodes of the show with Ethan Reed. Scott’s had a really cool career. Also, what I found interesting on this interview was Scott talking about some challenges that he had where there were some really fun moments and high points throughout his career, but there also were cases where internal politics or other reasons, things didn’t work out as well.

So I found Scott’s story to be interesting in that way because it’s not only about how it’s cool to work on certain attractions and get to do that, but other situations don’t work out as well. I appreciate that Scott went into both the positives and some issues during his career at Disney, and there was a lot to cover. We couldn’t even get to it all, but we got through a lot. I think this is going to be very cool for you. So let’s get right to it. Here is Scott Hennessy.

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Dan Heaton: Scott, thanks so much for talking with me here on the podcast.

Scott Hennesy: Hey, Dan. Well, thank you for having me on the show. I’m glad to do this for you.

Dan Heaton: Oh yeah, I mean, there’s just so much that you’ve done that I find interesting. I’m really into a lot of the Epcot work and plus Tokyo, there’s just a lot. So let’s dive right in before we even talk about the projects. I know your family has a history with the Disney Company, so I’d love to know a little bit about members of your family that worked at Disney or kind of some of the background you had there.

Scott Hennesy: Well, it started with my grandfather, Hugh Hennesy. You’ll see his name on movie credits such as Snow White, Pinocchio, Lady and the Tramp, I believe Peter Pan, Fantasia. He was a background artist and a layout artist for the studio from the early thirties until his passing in 1954, I think it was. I wish I had known him, but I was three years old when he left.

And the stories I know about him were told to me by Herbie Ryman. I guess he was crazy. Herbie told me some of the pranks that he used to pull that I would’ve loved to have done some of those today, but in today’s world, you would’ve been fired for it. But Walt had a philosophy that it was a family company and as such, my dad got temporary work there as a male boy. He worked with a, who became a Disney legend, Colin Campbell, and the two of them used to deliver mail all over the studio.

They used to play in the dumb waiter in the animation building that went up to the third floor and down. Eventually, my dad, who became a very accomplished artist, also started working at the studio. He did some of the artwork concept art for Main Street at Disneyland, and he worked on Tomorrowland. The thing with my dad, his passion was film. He really loved the film business. So he decided that he would move on and he went to work for 20th Century Fox for a while where he had the chance to work on movies. He came back to the studio and Walt was never the same with him after that.

Herbie told me it’s because Walt felt he was betrayed by my father leaving the studio. Walt had some very unflattering things to say about my dad’s artwork at that time, and my dad figured, Walt, it’s your studio. Your name is on it. I understand. I’m going to go somewhere else. And he did. He went out, went back to Fox, ended up winning the Academy Award for the film Fantastic Voyage. There’s a twist to that in a little bit.

But he was much happier working in the motion picture industry. One summer when I was still in junior college, my dad was giving me a hard time. He said, why don’t you go get a job? Don’t sit around and be a bum. Well, he had just had lunch with Colin Campbell of all people, and Colin said, well, WED, Walter Elias Disney. That was what Imagineering was previously called.

He said, they’re hiring kids for the summer to come in and paint walls and sweet floors and do things like that. My dad said, why don’t you just give them a call? So I called WED, it was funny because they must’ve been expecting it because they go, you’re Dale Hennessy’s kid, right? And I said, yes, I am. Do you have an art portfolio of any kind to bring in? And I said, well, I kind of do.

I had some artwork from high school and I had a few pieces from junior college and I had a model I made of a Japanese temple in high school. So I took that all in. I thought, why do they want to look at this stuff if I’m going to be sweeping floors and painting walls? So they looked at it and they said, well, thank you very much. We’ll call you. We’ll let you know if you get the job or not. So I went home thinking, whatever. They called me the following week and they said, we want you to come in and start working in the model shop. And I thought the model shop, whoa. I went there. I was issued my smock, and next thing I know, I’ve become an official employee of the Disney organization at WED Enterprises.

Dan Heaton: That’s impressive. You must have at least wowed them enough with some of your art or with what you had done to think that you were able to do that. So what were some of the early projects or what was it like to work in the model shop when you just started there?

Scott Hennesy: First of all, WED, when I started there in 1970, when I first started there, it was still run the way Walt ran the company when he was alive, and I thought I had died, gone to heaven. I mean, it was a great place to work. My very first job was making a mop for the Cinderella figure in the Mickey Mouse Revue. For those of your listeners who don’t know, the Mickey Mouse Revue was a very popular show where the Disney characters, all audio animatronics, played classic Disney songs and there’d be vignettes from different movies, and I made the mop that Cinderella before she transformed was holding when she was singing.

Then from there I went on to work on 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the model for the ride that was put in Walt Disney World. The models back then were phenomenal. They were usually done at one-inch scale. They were placed on platforms that were about five feet tall that were constructed to follow the exact ride configuration. So you would walk through these models and view the attraction as guests were going to see it, and there was incredible detail in those models, and the figures were phenomenal. The sculptors did these amazing jobs that the painters painted them with so much detail. It was just a thrill to be working there. One of my favorite stories, I was working with a gentleman named Dave Burkhart.

Dave was breaking me in and teaching me the ropes, and we spent a couple days making sunken ships for the graveyard of sunken ships seen in the ride, and we’d take the ships and we’d bust them up and we’d make them look old and decrepit and covered in barnacles, and we got ’em all painted and we left them on a piece of plywood that was sitting on a trash can.

We came back the next day and they were gone. We thought we asked around, did you guys move those or anything? No, we didn’t touch them. Dave investigated further and found out that the janitorial staff thought, well, these are all busted up and they’re sitting on a trash can. We’re just going to throw ’em away, and they threw ’em all away, and unfortunately, it was the day that the trash was picked up and taken, so we had to make ’em all over again.

Dan Heaton: I’ve heard a lot of stories like that. It’s always the maintenance staff. You have to be careful. So how did your career progress? I know you left for a little bit for the Army and then came back. So in the 1970s, how did it kind of flow from there after those early projects?

Scott Hennesy: Well, I did have to leave because of Uncle Sam. Vietnam was going on and I took a break from, I had been accepted to Los Angeles City College or Cal State Los Angeles. I’d been accepted to, but I didn’t go immediately from junior college to there. I took a semester break. Well, that was a mistake because at that time they were saying you had to progress year after year after year in order to avoid being drafted. I was told I was going to get drafted.

Funny thing happened the day I went to appeal and they said, you got no grounds to appeal, dude, so you can expect to be drafted in July. That very day I got home, I had a letter from Volar, the volunteer army, where they were having people enlist for two years. Normally it was a three year thing if you enlisted, but with Volar you can enlist for two years.

So I figured if I’m going to get drafted in July, I’ll just enlist now and get it award with sooner. So I did. I went in and did my time with Uncle Sam, and then I came back and went back to work at WED, and when I came back in ‘73, they were starting to do concepts for Epcot. And I worked on a lot of World Showcase models. I worked on one for the Philippines, which obviously never got made for those of you who’ve been to Epcot, and I worked on the one for Iran back then.

Iran was run by the Shah, and we had a good relationship with Iran at that time. That obviously went, all went away. One of the things that I liked about back then is that the company was trying to groom talent for other things, and we were all gathered together a bunch of us, and said, look, why don’t you guys see what kind of concepts you can come up with for new attractions?

So I wrote a couple of treatments, nothing ever happened with ’em. One of ’em was a dinosaur ride. I always claimed, hey, Steven Spielberg ripped me off. But there was a political situation, which I won’t go into detail with, where something happened between me and the boss in the model shop, and I was on the verge of resigning, figuring I don’t need to put up with this. One day I got called into Marty Sklar’s office. Marty, I love that man dearly. He said, look, I like the way you write. I like the way you’ve handled yourself. He says he needs some treatments written for some things he’s doing. Would you like to do that without any hesitation? I said, yes, show me the way.

Went upstairs to meet Rolly, and there again, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. Rolly was the greatest guy I’ve ever worked with and worked for in my entire life. What a complete joy. They call him “the whimsical Imagineer”. He takes things seriously, but he approaches it in such a playful, childlike manner that it was like being a kid again. God, I remember my alarm clock going off in the morning and I’m going, yeah. I’m going to work. I couldn’t wait to get there.

So I worked on concepts for, they were doing a health pavilion for Epcot. I wrote a number of concepts for that, which never got realized for various reasons. Let’s see. Oh, and then Rolly was made a director for the Land pavilion, and Marty Sklar came to Rolly and said, look, I want you to put together a team for a show on nutrition that Kraft who was sponsoring the pavilion would like to have.

So Steve Kirk, Jeff Burke, and I were told, come up with a show for Kraft foods and the Land Pavilion that discusses the nutrition guidelines that were in effect at that point in time, which was eat something from each of the four food groups at every meal. So we did, and we started playing around and we came up with a show called The Kitchen Kabaret, and that was the first show I ever wrote for Imagineering or WED there again.

I had so much fun doing that, and I was actually surprised that I got away with a lot of stuff I did. Actually, when I finished the first script, Marty saw it and said, you’re going to need some help here. So he sent in Al Bertino, who was the gentleman that wrote the Bear Country shows and America Sings, and Al was great. He came in and he goes, I don’t see anything wrong with this script. Let’s just go with it.

So apparently he told Marty that and Marty said, fine. So I was kind of spoiled at that point in time and I thought writing here is going to be a lot easier than I thought it was going to be, which really wasn’t the case later on, which I’ll talk about in a minute. But yeah, we had a lot of success for that show. I was very proud of it, and I don’t know if you can see over my shoulder, there’s a poster behind me that was in the pre-show area.

Dan Heaton: Oh, nice. I saw that show as a kid. It’s super fun. It’s one of those where you almost can’t believe that that show is like, I mean this in the best way possible. You can’t believe the show’s there because it’s just so clever and odd in a wonderful way. So I’m impressed that, like you said, that they let you do it because it was just so cool. I don’t know. It was fun for a kid. It was blast and my parents seemed to love it too.

Scott Hennesy: Well, the thing is, everyone was taking Epcot very seriously at that point in time. This is about we want to discuss the future and what’s coming up and how it’s going to affect our lives, and we thought, well, where’s the Disney in all of this? We thought, well, let’s try this. Let’s have some fun and make the food come to life like cartoon characters would, and Mancraft loved it, and eventually management loved it, and we were off and running.

Dan Heaton: Were you involved much with the writing of the songs? I know some of these songs, particularly the veggie, veggie, fruit, fruit and everything has really carried on with the life of its own even now I’d say.

Scott Hennesy: Yeah, I actually wrote all the lyrics for the show and Veggie Veggie Fruit Fruit haunts me to this day. I’ll see somebody I haven’t seen in years. Rather than going, hey, Scott, how are you? They walk up to me and they go, veggie fruit, fruit, veggie, veggie fruit, fruit.

Dan Heaton: Oh, well, I’m sorry to bring it up again then. I know you also worked on Imagination. Speaking of fun pavilions for Epcot, you were involved in that too around that time, right?

Scott Hennesy: Yes, yes. That came next. That was not with Rolly, that was with Tony Baxter. Tony is a Disney visionary extraordinaire. I mean, I think he embodied the spirit of Walt Disney more than anyone else I’d ever worked with, but he could be challenging. I would write scripts. He had an idea on how imagination works, which apparently so did everybody else. I would write a script and then Tony would say, no, no, no. I want to do it this way, this way, this way. I’d make those adjustments.

Then Marty Sklar would review the script and he’d go, no, no, no, you need to do this, this, this, which contradicted Tony. Well, then I was caught in a rock between a rock and a hard place. Well, then I’d find a place where I could make both of them meet. Then John Hench would come in and go, no, no, no, no, this is wrong.

This is wrong, this is wrong. Eventually, the show was turned over to another writer. By that time, I had done 52 drafts, 52 drafts of the script, and that’s when I started thinking, damn, I really liked Kitchen Cabaret compared to this show. It was a difficult show, but I have to say one of the most rewarding shows, first of all, I did write a lyric for a song to be played in the pavilion, but when it came back from the music department, it sounded very reminiscent of “It’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow”, and the decision was made. We can’t do that.

We want something unique and different. So they brought in the Sherman Brothers there. I was working with the Sherman Brothers. I didn’t write the lyrics for the song that they wrote, but I learned a lot from them. These are two of the nicest guys, very down to earth, just normal people, not some of these guys I’ve worked with who have egos the size of a Buick. I really enjoyed working with them and I really love the song they wrote for the pavilion.

Dan Heaton: Oh yeah. It’s held on for so long. I mean a good way. It’s still one of those where you can hear it and it’s classic Disney. It seems like it’s even longer than the pavilion has changed and everything, but still kind of carries over. Well, I know you kept kind of working on Epcot and also worked on Backstage Magic, which I also saw as a kid about the computers and how they worked, which was the second show in that spot. So I’m curious to learn about that because it’s not one we talk about as much now, but I mean it still was a cool show.

Scott Hennesy: Yeah, the interesting about that show is if you remember, the audience stood on a platform above the room that housed all the computers that ran Epcot Center, and of course back then there were just these banks and banks and banks of cabinets that held all these computers. I know the computers aren’t there now. It’s probably all done on somebody’s iPhone for all I know is the computers have advanced so much, but the show, we talked about the history of computers, how computers came to be and how they did run everything in Epcot, and it was a very fun show. Oh, the thing about the show that I really liked was the predictions for the future here.

It was 1984 I think it was, and they were talking about, well, one day in the very near future, you’re all going to have a computer a little bigger than the size of a credit card that would do 10 times more than what your desk computer could do now. Here we are looking at our telephones and they’re going, man, they knew what they were talking about. They talked about how computers will one day help people who were paralyzed to walk, which is now happening, or how you might have a wristwatch where you could do language translation, and I have used language translation many times on my phone, especially when I was in Japan. The translations still got a little work to do. Some of the translations are a little strange.

Dan Heaton: They’re getting there.

Scott Hennesy: They’re getting there. Yeah, they’re getting there.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, it’s amazing what can be done right now, and like you said, a lot of that early Epcot in that area, some of the predictions, you’re like they were pretty close, especially that, so it’s pretty cool to see. Well, I want to stick with Epcot for a moment with The Living Seas because speaking of, I mean, that’s another pavilion that I feel like was at the time really ahead of its time, and I believe you had some involvement in that creation during the mid eighties too.

Scott Hennesy: The Living Seas. Yes, fantastic pavilion. The fact that you took what they called a hydrator, which was an elevator that took you down below underneath the ocean, and you walked past this massive fish tank that they had there with all these fish and sharks and things swim by. It was quite an experience. The thing about The Living Seas that I will always remember is I had to work, I say had to not, I worked with Dr. Robert Ballard from the Woods Hole Institute.

Dr. Ballard, for those of your listeners who don’t know, was the gentleman who discovered the location of the Titanic, another great guy, another down to earth human being. We worked on a show. He helped me develop a show called Jason, which is about an undersea robotic submersible that you could remote control, you could control remotely to explore things. When he would go down to the Titanic in the submersible, they would send a remote out to go inside to the areas that would be too dangerous for them to go.

So I worked on the show called Jason. We had an audio-animatronic model of Jason and a couple of computer screens, and he would talk about what he was going to do under the ocean and people could view that. I also worked on a show called Suited for the Sea, which I worked, got information from Dr. Sylvia Earl. Her thing was remote viewing is great, but if you could see it up close and personal, it’s better. So she was responsible for creating this one suit called the Gym Suit.

It looks like a giant Michelin tire man that’s been filled with hair, and she could go down like a thousand feet under the surface of the ocean and explore the whatever she was looking for down there, and they had a mockup of it at the pavilion that people could literally get behind it and see how difficult and challenging it was to move the arms and things like that.

But I learned so much from Dr. Ballard and Dr. Earl. It was a great, great experience. The one thing about the pavilion, which the public never gets to see, is the United Technologies was the sponsor at that time, and they had an area in the pavilion where they could have business meetings, and they had this massive conference room with this giant wooden table that was immaculate, beautiful table, incredible table, and we were all wowing over the table and the guy from United Technologies says, well, you think that’s great? Watch this. He pushed a button and a secret button in the wall and suddenly a panel opened up and revealed the fish tank. Just as this happened, a shark swam by and we all looked at each other and went, welcome Mr. Bond. It was perfect.

Dan Heaton: Before you even mentioned the shark, I was thinking that’s like a James Bond moment from a villain from the late ‘70s or something where it’s like the underwater city or something. That’s amazing. Well, I want to make sure we talk about Wonders of Life. I know you worked closely on that, especially on Body Wars, which was the big pavilion in the late ‘80s at Epcot, so I’d love to know what that was like for you to work on it, and especially Body Wars, but anything. I know you were involved in a bunch of projects with that one.

Scott Hennesy: Well, okay, this is where things get a little dark. For me. I did work on Wonders of Life. I wrote a show called Goofy About Health; I started to write the show. And I turned it over to Chick Russell. I got busy with Cranium Command and Body Wars, but there was a show where Chick and I sat in a editing bay for two days and watched every Goofy cartoon that had ever been made. We started out the morning laughing our heads off, and by the end of the afternoon I was like, God, is this ever going to end? The one thing we discovered is we looked at over 50 years of Goofy cartoons and Goofy’s design changed a lot over that 50 years.

So to ensure that people didn’t catch the dissimilarities, we created the set that looked like a little city with windows in it, and you’d see Goofy appearing in his bedroom or at his doctor’s office or at the bar or on a billboard. We were able to break up the images so that people wouldn’t notice. That Goofy isn’t the same Goofy he was in the screen before. It was very challenging, but I thought Chick did a great job with that. When it was all said and done, I also, with Steve Kirk, created a show called Cranium Command. We were going full speed ahead. I worked on that show for like four years.

And I also worked on about that during that same period, concepts for what became Body Wars. The thing that was struck was a bit of a downer for me was that Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg had just taken over the studio, I shouldn’t say taken over. They were brought in under good conditions, and they had been dealing heavily with the Studio Tour, the MGM Studios. That ended. We were right in the middle of starting to do the production for Wonders of Life while Michael and Jeffrey came over and said, we’re going to do it our way, and they literally pushed me off the projects.

I went to Marty and asked him, well, now what do I do? You stay with it. You stay with it. I said, okay, I’ll stay with it. I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I stayed with it, and sure enough, I was sitting in a room with Cranium Command and there were people on the corporate, people on the other end of the phone saying, don’t let him participate. We don’t want anybody polluting what you’re doing with the garbage from the past, and I’m sitting there going, this, by the way, was at the Studio Tour, so I thought, okay, gentlemen, thanks for the time, and I went out and enjoyed myself in the park.

They didn’t want me there, so I left. I was able to stay somewhat with Body Wars, which I always found ironic because my father won an Academy Award for Fantastic Voyage, which is a journey through the human body here. I’m working on Body Wars, but again, most of the people that did the actual film work kind of didn’t want me around. Leonard Nimoy was brought into direct It. Now, Leonard was nice. He was another decent human being, and I could communicate with him, but I had ultimately very little to do with the finished product.

Ironically, Body Wars I thought came out, turned out very well, but it was in a simulator, a simulator experience, and they had what park operations calls protein spills, which means people were barfing all over the place. That’s partly because we really don’t know for a fact or we didn’t at that time, but we think it’s because in Star Tours, even though you’re diving and dipping and flying between structures and things like that, there’s always a sense of a horizon line, so your brain knows, okay, I am dipping to the left here. I’m dipping down. I’m dipping in Body Wars. There’s no horizon line. We think that disoriented some people’s brains enough to where, well, I’m just going to share my lunch with the floor.

Dan Heaton: Body Wars always I found much harder to take than Star Tours as far as I never got sick. I didn’t have any protein spills, but I remember coming out of that and being like, wow, that was an experience. So I think you’re right. I think there was something too because Star Tours, you’d be like, I feel pretty good. Body Wars, I don’t know. Also if it’s like going through the heart and the brain, everything, if that’s just does something different to your enjoyment, I don’t mean that in a bad way. I just mean it’s just a different experience.

Scott Hennesy: Yeah. Well, originally the original concept, it was supposed to be a roller coaster where you would dip and speed through various organs, and it was going to be, we had planned on a classical music score to accompany it, but the simulators were very popular and the decision was made to do that. Michael Eisner is the one that came up with the name Body Wars. He said, well, they got Star Wars. Let’s do Body Wars, and he said, that name has sizzle, so it sizzles.

Dan Heaton: Well, I know you ultimately then went and you were doing quite a few projects in Tokyo in that time after that, or around the same time, not the time is always kind of varies. So you were involved with a Saucer Safari, which is something I don’t know I admit anything about, but I’m just curious to learn a little bit about what that was because it didn’t come here, so I’m not sure.

Scott Hennesy: Yeah, no, and it never went there either. What happened is after what happened to me on Body Wars and Cranium Command, I thought, I’ve always been interested in Japan. I think I’d like to maybe work on a Japanese project. So I went over and talked to the Yoshi Akiyama who was the creative lead of the Tokyo portfolio at that time, and I said, anything I can do?

And he said, as a matter of fact, we’re trying to come up with a new ride system or a new ride for Tokyo Disneyland. Would you please give us some ideas? Well, it turns out they had the CircleVision Theater in Tomorrowland over there, which was showing American Journeys, well, American Journeys to the Japanese. It wasn’t doing gangbusters, so we thought, well, okay, let’s gut the theater and we’ll put in a ride system kind of like Peter Pan, where you would fly through a series of scenes of a cartoon alien planet and you would shoot at targets.

We call it Saucer Safari, and the targets were based on an idea that a Disney Designer had years earlier for a shooting gallery where you’d shoot an alien and his head would pop open and then a little alien would pop out or the stomach would split open and all these funny gizmos would spin around and I mean there was a ton of those, and we created this whole little scenario, and I went to Japan with Yoshi and with Ann Telnaes. Ann since moved on, she’s now a political cartoonist for some papers in Washington DC.

In fact, she’s won the Pulitzer Prize, but her sketches of what we could do in there were fantastic. They were very funny. We presented it to Oriental Land Company management at that time. For your listeners who don’t know, Oriental Land Company is the company that owns and operates the Tokyo Disney Resort.

They very nicely said, thank you. We will take your concepts into consideration the next day. We were called in and said, we don’t want to do it. They didn’t want to do another ride system like Peter Pan; they felt it was just too dangerous. They said, besides, this isn’t really Disney. We don’t see any Disney characters in this concept, but thank you. Anyway, I had some great dinners with ’em. Thank you guys. Then flew home figuring, well, that was it. I’m done with Japan now, I’ll probably go back to Epcot.

I get home and the next thing I know they’re saying we have to do something with the Bear Country Theater over there. We want to put the Christmas show in there. They had done a Christmas show for California, The Christmas show in California, it had a lot of original songs and done by Michael Sprout and Dave Feiten. Michael Sprout, one of my favorite writers.

I’ve enjoyed working with Michael, but they had done some original songs. The Japanese said, look, we like the idea of a Christmas show, but we need more Christmas songs in our version of it because they actually know most of the Christmas songs that we have. They don’t celebrate Christmas like we do, but they do celebrate Christmas. It’s kind of like a party time.

I had to go through and find a list of songs, Christmas songs that they thought would be appropriate for their show, and sure enough, they said, we want this, this, this, and this. So I incorporated those into the Christmas show script, and the next thing I know, I’m in Tokyo in the middle of June, which is very hot and humid in a recording studio listening to Japanese actors trying to sound like Country Bears singing Christmas songs. I thought, man, this is weird.

Dan Heaton: Just another day of the job.

Scott Hennesy: Yeah, it’s part of the magic.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, well, very cool. They did used to have a Christmas show at Florida and California when they had it, but I never saw it any time, and I know in Japan it’s super popular. They love the Bear Show; it is just so popular there, so I think you help to continue that legacy because it’s going strong from what I’ve heard.

Scott Hennesy: I think it’s still going strong. I hope it’s going strong.

Dan Heaton: I believe so, yeah. Well, you also worked on Le Visionarium, The Timekeeper in the U.S., but for Tokyo and so for the 10th anniversary of Tokyo Disneyland. So I’m curious what you’ve done on that because I really liked that film and the total show itself I think is very cool.

Scott Hennesy: That was another interesting thing after the Bears show, I thought, oh, I’m done with Tokyo. I’ll probably go back to Epcot, and they said, wait a minute, hold your horses. Le Visionarium features Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, and the Japanese know of them, but they don’t know a lot about them. They don’t know who they really are. Their works just aren’t really popular in Japan.

So I was asked to come up with a show, a pre-show that explained not only who The Timekeeper was and what he did and the nine lens camera that he sends back throughout history, but also give the audience some background on the works of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, and I directed the pre-show for that. The fun part for me was I got to go to Tokyo, I’m sorry, to Paris to see Le Visionarium in the Disneyland over there, and I had to realize we’re going to be translating this show from French into Japanese.

Normally, what I did was all the scripts in Japan that I worked on, I sat down with the Japanese writers and explained what everything meant in English, why we put a joke here, why the joke is funny to us in English, because humor doesn’t translate, so they had to find something comparable. It was very challenging, but here I was with the English version of the French show telling them about it. But while I was there in Paris, the Oriental Land Company management who was with us decided to take us all out on the Bateaux Mouches, which is the boat that goes on the river Seine, a dinner tour.

Well, the first thing, we sit down, next thing you know we’ve got 18 bottles of wine in front of us and we’re all getting smashed out of our minds, and I’m sitting there. I knew very, very little Japanese, but I’m sitting there drunk out of my mind going this, think this boat is fun, but I’m looking at the Eiffel Tower. As I’m saying that, I’m thinking, this is weird. Here I am in Paris talking Japanese while these cultural icons are right out the window.

Dan Heaton: Oh, man, that’s fun. That’s not, again, not something you get to do every day, so I think, I dunno. It sounds like a fun experience. I mean, one to get to work on some of the other parks, especially given your experience on Body Wars and everything else, Cranium Command, it seemed like you had a nice run there of just some fun experiences, but then you ultimately came back and worked at Epcot with Rolly Crump, which is awesome, on Innoventions, which was the big replacement for CommuniCore, and I know you had a lot of involvement there, but I just getting into the chance to work with Rolly again, I’m curious what that experience was like and then some of the things you worked on.

Scott Hennesy: Yeah, they actually asked me when I came home, and by the way, although I had fun working with the Japanese, it was very difficult. Cultural differences made it strange and sometimes almost impossible. So I come home from Le Visionarium and they said, look, we’d like you to go back to Epcot for a while and work with Rolly, but by that time, the company had changed the way they did business so dramatically and Rolly wasn’t really happy with it, so they said, well, why don’t you go down there and work with him and see if you guys can work together and find a way to deal with the changes in a positive manner.

Not that Rolly was doing anything negative, just times changed and he wasn’t there, and I wasn’t there to be honest with you either, but we worked on a show called The Magic House, which was sponsored by GE, and the idea was we had a live host or hostess on stage who start talking about the future of homes in the country, what you would be able to do with your home. Suddenly magic things would happen, like for instance, the hostess would sit down on a chair and suddenly they would start floating up in the air that we brought in a gentleman named Jim Steinmeyer who designs and builds some of the great illusions that we all know.

I once asked him, actually told him, I said, I studied magic as a child, and I said, but I got to a point where I said, I don’t want to know how things are done because it destroys the fun for me. He said, well, he says, that’s good. He says, he because says, you’d be surprised it just how simple some of those tricks are. Anyway, we’ll leave that as it is. Anyway, during the person or rabbit I should say that was making all this magic happen was the Great Caratini, which was a rabbit that appeared on a video screen off the side of the stage and Great Caratini was voiced by Matt Frewer, who was also the voice of Max Headroom.

Dan Heaton: Right.

Scott Hennesy: Anyway, from that, you went into the next room, which had models of each of the rooms of the house of the future, and as you went into the kitchen, Caratini would appear and say, well, in the future your stove can do this or your refrigerator will do this, and the bedroom, this’ll happen, this’ll happen. Apparently Caratini wasn’t a very popular character. I dunno, the people just thought he was kind of an obnoxious ass, the magic show and the tour just kind of petered out after a while, but then I also worked on the Bill Nye show, Bill Nye the Science Guy, which was great.

At that time, my boys were of an age where they watched him on TV and he was like, oh, my dad’s working with Bill Nye the Science Guy. The show was called Innoventions and Bill, through the course of that show, he was explaining what Innoventions were innovation and invention combined and how you create an innovention.

In the course of his positive dissertation on creating things, he’s confronted by the clouds of doubt, and we hired three comedians. There was Margaret Cho, Kevin Meaney, and Paul Rodriguez, and they each were a cloud of doubt and they were basically filling Bill Nye’s head with negative thoughts and things, but Bill persisted and came through in the end with a big rainbow that wiped out the clouds of doubt, and it was basically a positive show explaining you can accomplish anything you set your mind to. And that’s what all the Interventions around us in the Innoventions pavilion or what used to be CommuniCore became Innoventions, and that was his way of saying, look, everything around us here is great and you should be excited and thrilled.

Dan Heaton: Well, excellent. Yeah. I mean, was it still a good experience to work with Rolly on that, even though I know that the company was so different?

Scott Hennesy: Oh, yeah. Yeah. There again, Rolly is Rolly. We had a lot of fun. One thing, we were both into exercise and we would meet at six o’clock in the morning and walk around the lagoon there at Epcot, which was one mile in distance, but at six o’clock in the morning in Florida, you’d still like a hundred percent humidity. By the time we made the mile trek, we had to change our clothes. We were soaking wet.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, it’s still pretty rough, especially in the summer. I think it’s even hotter now than it probably was.

Scott Hennesy: Imagineering is being moved to Florida. Have you heard that?

Dan Heaton: Yes, yes. I’m aware.

Scott Hennesy: Well, I’ve spoken with some of people there and they’ve opted to not go there for political reasons, but some for the fact they can’t take that heat and humidity.

Dan Heaton: Oh, yeah. Compared to California, which 75% of the year is gorgeous or 80%, I mean, goodness, it’s a change for sure. I know you ended up ultimately, then you did more work for Tokyo with Toon Town around that time in the late ‘90s or mid ‘90s, so I’m curious how you ended up again working on Tokyo, which I mean Toon Town and then ultimately into DisneySea.

Scott Hennesy: Okay. When Interventions wrapped up, there was a big wrap party. Everybody that was involved in the project went to this wrap party. We were all having a good time, and the project manager got up to thank us all and then sticking a pin in a balloon, he said, by the way, if you don’t know, if you don’t have a job or you don’t have an assignment when you get back to California, you’re not going to have a job that we’re laying off people left and right and we’re all looking at each said.

They’re like, whoa, howdy folks. Thanks a lot, dude. So I flew home wondering, well, do I have a job or I, and I was asked, would you be willing to work on Toon Town in Tokyo? Well, my first thought was I was still kind of confused about the way the Japanese did business and their thought processes, and I thought, man, you want me to go over there and talk about American cartoon humor from the ‘40s and ‘50s and ‘60s and explain that to them?

And I said, this is going to be weird, and I thought, I actually thought maybe I should start looking around, but then I thought, oh, at least I have a job. At that time in my life, I lived 65 miles one way from where I work, and what I did is every morning I had a collection of cassette tapes. I was very much into spiritual development at that time and new ideas and new thinkings in the spiritual world. I was driving home and I thought, you know what? Maybe I should start thinking about learning Japanese culture.

So I started buying cassettes and CDs about Japanese culture, and I started listening to it, and when I got to Japan, I started putting some of what I’d learned into practice, and suddenly it was like a light bulb went off. I was making inroads with the people over there, and the project went very, very, very well. I was very happy with even the most challenging moments; I knew what to do at that point in time, so it made a big, big difference in the way I saw the Japanese and ultimately worked out the best for me.

My favorite story on Toon Town though, translation issues in California, one of the window graphics said Chin Chin Construction Company, so we were going through all the window graphics with my counterparts OLC, and they said, well, what does Chin Chin mean? I said, no, that doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a silly little poem. Let me in, not by the hair of my chin, chin, chin. They go, well, we can’t do that. I said, well, what’s the problem? Well, it turns out Chin Chin, this Japanese slang for that appendage that is near and dear to us males.

Dan Heaton: Oh my.

Scott Hennesy: So it’s the Three Little Pigs Construction Company in Tokyo.

Dan Heaton: Yeah. Well, I’m glad they caught that though. That could have been unfortunate. Now that you seem to be doing well in Tokyo, you ultimately then ended up doing some work on DisneySea, which is, I have not been there, but it appears to be an incredible park. I would love, it’s like at the top, there’s my bucket list of places. It’s like at the top by about a mile from everything else, but I’m curious how you got on that and some of the work you did.

Scott Hennesy: First of all, in my opinion, Tokyo DisneySea is the most beautiful theme park in the world. Not that I visited them all, but as far as Disney’s concerned, it’s an amazing park, amazing park. I was so grateful and happy to be working on something of that magnitude using what I had learned about Japanese culture. It was a tremendous experience. I ended up going to all the recording sessions I was responsible for.

And I didn’t write all the shows there, but those that wrote, I took their scripts and I sat down with the Japanese artists and explained again what the intention was of the English version so that they could find a comparable way to say it in Japanese, and then I’d go to the recording sessions and I would sit with the Japanese director and communicate the same ideas to him or her, and that was nirvana to me, and I love that work.

I loved it so much. One thing I didn’t particularly care for is I was responsible for writing what they call show information guides or SIGs. A show information guide was basically a document about, there was one for every attraction, every shop, every restaurant, every food cart, every merchandise cart, every live show. It explains to the cast members who were working there, what the show was about, how they were supposed to play their role, what was the significance of the costume they were wearing. These things started out very simple originally as a one-page document, but they got more and more and more complicated.

Toward the end, it was like, man, it’s like writing a detailed book report on everything. I ended up, and because I didn’t do ’em all, I did get some help toward the end on Tokyo DisneySea, but because of what I did there, I was asked to do the same thing for Tokyo Disneyland. So in the end I wrote over 200 of those things, so I was kind of fried when it came to SIGs.

Dan Heaton: That’s a lot.

Scott Hennesy: Yeah, it is a lot. It is a lot. And ironically, I would work on some of them and then within a month the attraction was closed and I’m thinking, oh man, now I got to write a new one.

Dan Heaton: They got to stop replacing attractions. That’s too hard. Well, around that time you also worked on Tokyo has done an interesting job with updating their Tiki Room. They’ve had multiple updates. I know there was an update here for a while at Disney World, but this one unique to Tokyo, the “Get the Fever”, which opened I believe in ‘99. So I’m curious about this because I haven’t watched a video of it. I know it’s not there anymore, it’s a new version, but I’m curious about how you go about updating this classic attraction for Tokyo.

Scott Hennesy: It’s tough. First of all, the Tiki Room, they’re not as enamored with it as they are with the Bear Country shows or Country Bear shows. I was working at that time for Eddie Sotto, very, very creative, imaginative human being. It’s amazing those things that came out of that man’s mind. His idea was, well, let’s tell the story because people are getting bored with the show. Let’s tell the story where everything in the room’s gone to sleep and we’ve got to get the audience energized to help bring the room back to life. The Japanese love audience participation, they’re very big into that, so we thought, alright, we will create a show where at the end they’re all clapping and singing and trying to get everything to come to life again, and it was like a Vegas show.

The Birds became, we had a Frank Sinatra bird and a sultry female performer named Lava, and we had Sammy Davis, Jr. type bird, and they all sing songs, get the You Give Me Fever and things like that, and throughout the course of the show, suddenly the Tiki came to life, the flowers came to life, the lighting came to life, and the audience was all clapping and cheering, but even that didn’t do the trick. A few years later they said, well, we really make it more Disney. We need to put a Disney figure in there. And Stitch was very, very popular in Japan.

In fact, they did a TV show, a cartoon show where Stitch lived in Okinawa and he wasn’t with Lilo, he was with a little Japanese girl, his shows, and that show was very popular. So the decision was, let’s put Stitch in the show. The title of the show was The Enchanted Tiki Room: Stitch Presents Aloha e Komo Mai. Now we had to get legal clearance on every title that we came up with in Japan, Aloha e Komo Mai had been taken, so we couldn’t use it alone, which we wanted to.

We couldn’t use the name Stitch alone because it had been registered somewhere else. Actually, it had been registered by a sewing machine company, but including the Enchanted Tiki Room: Stitch Presents Aloha e Komo Mai. We were given legal clearance and this was after a very long ordeal to find a title that would work. None of us liked that title so long, but we least we got clearance.

But Stitch is in the show. And then the idea over there is that when the audience is in the show and the birds start performing stuff starts going wrong, suddenly there’s horns honking and it’s been so long now I forget all this crazy little things that happened, but in the end it’s revealed the perpetrator of all these pranks, is Stitch, and he comes up out of where the fountain was in the middle and he’s playing on a ukulele and I believe they’re singing “Aloha, E Komo Mai” at the end of the show, and as far as I know, it’s still there.

It’s got that Disney character in it. But I’ve also heard for the years I worked over there, they were talking about bulldozing the Tiki Room. They thought we got to put something else here. These shows are just not doing well, and I’m surprised if it’s still there. They’ve always wanted to change and put something new in there.

Dan Heaton: I think it’s still there, at least from what I checked, but I remember, I haven’t been over there, but I went to Aulani in Hawaii and the line of mostly Japanese tourists for Stitch was the longest for any character. Stitch and Duffy were the two big ones for any of ’em there. So I was like, man, people just kind of mostly are over Stitch in Florida, so I dunno. It’s very different now. It’s been a long time since the movie came out, 20 years or something.

Well, I want to ask you about Sinbad because to me, I know there’s been two versions. I believe you were involved with both, but to me this is such a cool attraction. It reminds me a little bit of “it’s a small world” or a little bit of Pirates. I mean, just such a long involved detailed attraction. So anything, I’d love to learn a little more about that from what I’ve heard because it’s super cool that that’s there and seems to be still going strong.

Scott Hennesy: Originally, the original show was a literal telling of the Sinbad story. We used AA figures that very small, little bit larger than small world figures, but they had as much animation as a pirate’s figure, and there was like 166 AA figures in that attraction. It was the most AA figures in any show at that time. The original show was the Seven Voyages of Sinbad, and it was a literal telling of the Sinbad story as taken from 1,001 Arabian Nights.

My challenge, and that was I had to write four lines for every character. The idea was you can go through this ride two, three times a day, you might hear a different telling of the story, and it was very challenging. There’s like 660,000 words in the English language. There’s like half of that in Japanese. So they had a bigger challenge trying to find four ways to say the same thing for the characters.

Unfortunately, it was a literal telling and it’s kind of a dark story. In the end, the show just kind of started to wane and we needed to find a way to energize it. We all sat around, came up with ideas for how do we punch this up? So we came up with the idea of the Storybook Voyage of Sinbad; Sinbad’s Storybook Voyages is the title. It was a more playful telling of the story, whereas in the first one, there’s a giant that was threatening the crew and ultimately in the actual story he kills them.

We didn’t want to tell that story. The giant in our new story would be playing music with him and having fun things like that, but to help really help the show give it a super Disney quality as they brought in Alan Menken to write a song along with Glenn Slater called “The Compass of Your Heart”. A beautiful song, and it really, really punched up the entire attraction as you go through. You’re learning that treasures are to be found everywhere, but the real treasures are the people you meet in your life and you cherish friends, and it was a much, much better message and much more accepted by the Japanese audience. Plus we gave Sinbad a little sidekick named Hondu, a little Tiger. Hondu does very well in the gift shops.

Dan Heaton: It’s important. Yep. So I know you also around that time worked on several attractions that had already been in other parks, but then moved to Tokyo like Indiana Jones with the Temple of the Crystal Skull and Buzz Lightyear in Tokyo and California. I’m curious for you just getting to work on some of those attractions. Buzz actually reminds me a little bit of that earlier. You mentioned the Saucer Safari though in a little different way. I’m curious for you just getting to work on some of those and kind of translating attractions that exist, kind of moving them to a new park. What was that like?

Scott Hennesy: The Indiana Jones Adventure Temple of the Crystal Skull in California, you’re kind of in the India somewhere in that part of the world. The Japanese don’t find that a mystique to that area. They said that’s kind of normal for us. They said we would like the Indiana Jones in our park to be something more mysterious. And so we asked them, well, where would that be?

They said, well, God, central America. That really kind of freaks us out for some reason. So the idea with Indiana Jones in Tokyo was the crystal skull, which is where they literally found the original crystal skulls and it’s been a very successful ride over there. It’s in many ways the same ride; it’s in California. It’s just that the story told a little differently and there’s a big crystal skull that you confront in the show that blows a big smoke ring right at you, and everybody loves that effect.

Dan Heaton: Yes, definitely. And I know you worked on Philharmagic, which is still going strong recently. Just got a Coco update, so people seem to still very much enjoy. We just saw it, it’s still great. I’m curious what that was like for you.

Scott Hennesy: There again, I had to take the script and explain it to our Japanese counterparts and they made it work in Japanese and very popular show. They love seeing Donald Duck’s butt in the ceiling behind you and all.

Dan Heaton: It still works every time.

Scott Hennesy: Yes. Yeah.

Dan Heaton: Well, I want to jump ahead a bit to attraction. I don’t know much about which is Goofy’s Paint and Playhouse because that’s in Toon Town in Tokyo, an interactive attraction, kind of a cool idea. So this is one that we haven’t seen everywhere else, so I’d love to learn a little bit about it.

Scott Hennesy: Well, it was originally Goofy’s Bounce House. Unfortunately, people were getting hurt to the point where it was a concern to management. They didn’t want a lot of lawsuits and things like that, so they said, we got to change this out. So we came up with this idea called Goofy’s Paint and Playhouse where you go into a certain group or is let in at each time and you see Goofy’s house.

Obviously Goofy needs a remodel if the house is kind of battered, tattered, strange things going on, but you’re lined up in the middle of the room are these things called splat masters, which are these guns, it’s look like ray guns attached to cans of paint. When you fire them, it throws a digital image on the wall and when everybody fires their gun, they literally can change the look of the entire room and being it’s Goofy’s.

You go from a ratter battered, tattered living room to one that looks like it’s from the jungle or from an exotic beach scene or an old Western town. Just a lot of fun stuff. Very popular and had a lot of fun with that one. I did the scratch track for the American, we do everything in English first so we could share it with the Japanese and I was the guy that did the voice of Goofy for our scratch track, which I thought that’s not going to be no big deal. I had to sore throat it for like four days after it.

Dan Heaton: It’s amazing. Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean to talk over you trying to do Goofy.

Scott Hennesy: That’s all right. I don’t want to sore throat anymore.

Dan Heaton: I’m amazed what people that like the voice of Mickey or the voice of Goofy or whatever do every day, I’m just, I don’t know how they do it.

Scott Hennesy: I’ve worked with some of the best and it’s amazing. It’s funny, you’re talking to ’em and they’re smoking a cigarette and next thing you know they’re into this cartoon character that you’ve heard for years. Like, wow, how do you do that?

Dan Heaton: You got to have a different type of voice.

Scott Hennesy: I guess.

Dan Heaton: I don’t know. Super powerful. Well, I want to finish, the last thing I want to ask you about is, of course, I talked to Ethan Reed about this extensively is Duffy, which as you’ve noted, very successful project, so popular in Japan. What was your role on that with Duffy’s friends I should mention too, because it’s not just Duffy. There are many friends, which again, all over Aulani because very big in Japan. So please tell me more about this.

Scott Hennesy: Okay, I’ll start from the beginning. Duffy started out in Florida as the Disney Bear and wasn’t selling very well. So the merchandising division in Florida sold, I think they said 10,000 units to OLC. So OLC started selling the Disney Bear in the Cape Cod section of Tokyo DisneySea and Joe Lanzisero, who was in charge of the Tokyo projects at that time, and I sat down with them in Japan and said, you got to have a story here. Folks we’re Disney. You don’t just stick a teddy bear into Cape Cod.

What’s the connection of the teddy bear with Cape Cod and merchandising? And finally they said, alright, go back and show us what you might be able to do with this thing. We came back to the states. I wrote a story about how Minnie made this teddy bear for Mickey because he was going to go on a sea voyage and the teddy bear was going to keep him company and we storyboarded it.

Julie Svendsen, one of the great artists at Disney, she did this fantastic storybook, like storyboard and illustrated the entire story. We showed it to the Japanese and they loved it. They loved it, and next thing you know, they started selling and then originally in the story we were going to have the bear sold in a little duffle bag. So we named the bear. He said, we know what a duffle bag is. We don’t really like to name Duffles. What if we call him Duffy? I says, yeah, that’s great. Go for it.

So the next thing you know, they’re selling Duffy’s and these things are flying off the shelf. They’re incredibly popular, so popular. That OLC then decided to create Shelly Mae, which is the female counterpart to Duffy, and we all started doing this in 2006. When I retired in 2012, Duffy and his associated merchandise had already made over a billion dollars.

Dan Heaton: Oh my gosh.

Scott Hennesy: I’m thinking, man, if I only had a small percentage of that, I could have retired years ago. But then Duffy also went on to Hong Kong, very popular there. Then it was decided, well, we should give Duffy some friends. So I came back as a consultant for a few months and we created, first off it was Gelatoni, which is the cat who Duffy had spilled his, he’s always sold in the Mediterranean harbor section of Tokyo DisneySea. Gelatoni is the story. Duffy was enjoying his gelato when it fell on the ground. Well, this cat comes over and painted a picture with it with his tail, and that’s gelato, and they became good friends.

Then in the American Waterfront section, the New York section, Duffy meets this rabbit that is practicing dance moves because she wants to be a great Broadway star. Someday we named her Ruby, but for some reason the Japanese named her Stella Lou, Ethan Reed, very talented designer. He designed Ethan redesigned Gelatoni and Stella Lou, and then he did one called Cookie Ann for Hong Kong, and I don’t know if he did any others before he moved on, but yeah, no, Ethan did a great job and these characters are all very, very popular. I don’t know why they don’t do well here in the States.

We’re not into teddy bears here for some reason. I mean, it’s scary. It baffles. I would be in downtown Tokyo and I would see adults walking around with their Duffy’s and I’m thinking, wow, what is it? That’s one part of the culture I don’t understand yet.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, it’s crazy because yeah, I remember when Duffy was a character in Florida and you could just walk right up to him, it nothing, and it wasn’t the same. And then like you said, I think $1 billion. Wow. And that was then, I’m sure who knows what the number is now?

Scott Hennesy: I mean, that was 10 years ago, so…

Dan Heaton: Yeah. Wow. Well that’s your legacy, right? Duffy?

Scott Hennesy: Yeah, ironically, all those things they worked on, the most successful thing I did was a teddy bear.

Dan Heaton: Well, I kid, but no, you worked on so many awesome things. Well, Scott, this has been amazing and I know we didn’t even hit on everything, but we’ve definitely covered a lot and I really appreciate the time. It’s been awesome having you on the podcast.

Scott Hennesy: Well, thank you for having me on. I had a good time.

Dan Heaton: I want to give a big thanks to Ethan Reed for helping to set up this show. You should check out Ethan’s Episodes, 140 and the Round Table, 155, with Joe Lanzisero. Both of those were so much fun, and if you like this one, I think you will enjoy those episodes. Thanks so much for listening to this episode. I really appreciate it, and I will talk to you again next time.