60. Producer John Walker on Disney’s Tomorrowland, The Incredibles, and The Iron Giant

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Disney’s history with theme park movie adaptations is mixed. Pirates of the Caribbean charmed audiences, but The Haunted Mansion and The Country Bears fell short. Consequently, I entered the theater to watch Tomorrowland back in 2015 with both trepidation and excitement. The result exceeded my expectations, and I anticipated box-office success for Disney.

Sadly, the poor numbers and critical reaction shocked me. Three years later, I still don’t understand why the movie didn’t click. A variety of factors led to the end result, and they included marketing, timing, and audience expectations.

On the latest episode of The Tomorrow Society Podcast, I go in-depth with Executive Producer John Walker about Tomorrowland. During the podcast, we discuss that movie’s origins, production, and message. Our conversation includes the following:

• Why were Walker and Director Brad Bird interested in Tomorrowland?
• What was it like to recreate the 1964 New York World’s Fair and shoot at Disneyland?
• Why were references to Walt Disney limited in the final film?
• How powerful was shooting at Kennedy Space Center?
• Why didn’t audiences and critics have a better response?
• If Tomorrowland had been a hit, was there a chance to continue the story?

In addition, Walker and I discuss his work as a producer with Bird on The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, and The Incredibles 2. He has so many interesting stories about those movies from his diverse Hollywood career. I loved the chance to talk with Walker, and I learned a lot in the process.

Show Notes: John Walker

Screen Rant Interview with John Walker and Brad Bird on The Incredibles 2

Wired Interview with Brad Bird and Damon Lindelof on Tomorrowland

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Transcript

Dan Heaton: Hi there. Today we’re talking about one of my favorite topics, which is the movie Tomorrowland with Executive Producer John Walker. You’re listening to the Tomorrow Society Podcast.

(music)

Dan Heaton: Thanks for joining me here on Episode 60 of the Tomorrow Society Podcast. I am your host, Dan Heaton. I’m thinking back to about three years ago when I entered the movie theater to see Tomorrowland. I had watched the trailers, but really didn’t know much about the movie at all beyond George Clooney, Brad Bird, and the connections to the theme park land. And after seeing it, I was so pumped. I thought this is the type of movie that’s going to be a huge hit. It’s going to have a positive impact on Tomorrowland in the parks. People are going to love it. Unfortunately, that was not the case. Critics were mixed on it. Some were especially harsh on the message.

And crowds, while the movie made a lot of money at the box office due to the budget and marketing, that wasn’t enough for it to be considered a positive result for Disney. One thing that I’ve really liked is getting to talk with a small but really passionate group of people that love Tomorrowland through the Internet, yet it still bothers me a bit that it wasn’t more successful.

That’s why I’m excited to have a chance to talk to someone who worked on the movie directly, the Executive Producer of Tomorrowland, John Walker, who was kind enough to take time to talk through the production and how it got started, and of course, why possibly it was not a bigger hit. So it was really great to have the chance to talk with John, given his involvement in the film. But now it’s time for the main event. Here is John Walker.

(music)

Dan Heaton: All right. Well, my guest today is the producer of many great films alongside Director Brad Bird, like The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, Incredibles 2, and my personal favorite Tomorrowland. He’s also been very involved in the theater scene at Chicago and other places. It is John Walker. John, thank you so much for being on the podcast.

John Walker: Well, I’m happy to be here; I like talking about Tomorrowland.

Dan Heaton: Great. Well, yes, and like you mentioned, we’re going to spend a lot of this time talking about Tomorrowland, but before we do that, I want to learn a little bit more about your background. So how did you get started going into an entertainment career?

John Walker: Well, I always, as a kid, I was always in the theater in junior high school and high school and college, and I always wanted to be in show business in some way and just loved being a part of it. So I did sort of every job in the theater through school and afterwards. And after I graduated from…I graduated from Notre Dame and went to acting school for a couple of years at ACT, which is a theater in San Francisco.

After that, my wife’s also an actress and she was going to acting school in New York and Circle in the Square. And we met halfway in Chicago and started our careers there because I’m from Chicago. We acted together and then we began producing together. And I always wanted to be an actor producer. I wanted to bring back that sort of 19th century tradition of the actor manager. I wanted to be John Wilkes Booth without the assassination.

So I did that for a while and I got more and more interested in producing and less and less interested in acting. And so I ended up running theaters and producing theaters in Chicago and a little bit in New York. We did that for almost 20 years in Chicago. And then we moved to Los Angeles because my wife had gotten an agent from a play she’d done in Chicago, in L.A. And I went looking for work in Los Angeles. It took me about a year ago, sort of going back and forth between Chicago and L.A. And at the end of the year of interviewing with anybody who would talk to me, I had two job offers. One was managing a theater in L.A. that was at the time called the Westwood Playhouse. It’s now called the Geffen Playhouse.

And the other job was being the associate producer on The Iron Giant at Warner Bros., which is something that was new to me. I’d never done animation before, had never really done movies before. And I took the animation job and started working with Brad Bird and we’ve sort of been doing that ever since.

Dan Heaton: Well, great. So The Iron Giant‘s interesting in a way too, because that’s a movie that so many people love. I showed it to my kids recently and they really enjoyed it. And it’s developed such a good following, but it didn’t start that way. It started out kind of being considered this flop. Why do you think it took a while for that movie to kind of build a following over the years?

John Walker: Well, it was really well reviewed when it came out and it’s a great movie. Warner Bros. at the time was not really committed to doing animation. They were sort of on their way out of the business and we sort of made the movie while the animation division at Warner’s was being shut down. And so we really wanted to get out of that business, and didn’t realize until it was kind of too late how good the movie was. So it wasn’t brought into the world properly.

It’s been a lesson for Brad and I, and that just making a good movie is not enough. You have to have a really good marketing and promotion team. You have to have a good distribution team and they have to be committed to the film in order for it to really work out. And what’s been heartening about Iron Giant is that, like you said, over the years, it just keeps chugging along.

I mean, Brad and I have been working on that film in various ways for the last 20 years every time…I mean, just a couple of years ago, Warner’s released a Blu-ray version of it for the first time, and we actually worked on animating two new sequences for the film that had been boarded and talent had been recorded, vocal talent had been recorded, but at the time, Warners didn’t want to pay for making those two sequences, but they run for it just recently. So those new sequences are on the DVD, on the Blu-ray.

Dan Heaton: That’s amazing. I actually watched it recently, but it wasn’t on the Blu-ray. So I didn’t even realize you guys had done more work for it, which is awesome and I’m sure is exciting for a lot of people that love the films. So then after The Iron Giant, you went on and ended up doing The Incredibles with Pixar, which was done 14 years ago, but has held up so well and not just because it has a sequel. How did that happen? How did you and Brad both end up working at Pixar on that film?

John Walker: Well, we were going to do The Incredibles at Warner Bros. and sort of after Iron Giant had happened, Warners was like, “Wow, that was a pretty good movie.” And we kind of blew it and we’d like to do another movie with Brad. So we were going to do Incredibles in hand drawn and 2D, and we started working on it at Warner’s and at the time they weren’t really committed to it and they sort of, well, maybe let’s see what the script is like.

And in the meantime, well, they were sort of equivocating Steve Jobs and John Lasseter and Ed Catmull were on the phone to Brad pretty regularly saying, “Why don’t you come up to Pixar and make that movie? We really liked The Iron Giant and we think that you should be here.” At the time, I didn’t think that was a very good idea because I thought, “Well, they’ll take Brad, but there’s not going to be anything for me up there.”

And if we can do this here at Warner’s and be successful at it, that could be a great move. So I was against it for a while going, “Oh no, no, let’s stay here.” But it became clear that the best thing for the film was for it to go to Pixar. What ended up happening is a number of the people that were, including myself who worked on Iron Giant, went to Pixar with Brad and we started working on it there. All those folks have done well at Pixar. So it was an interesting and fortuitous move for a lot of us.

Dan Heaton: So what was it like to work at Pixar? I mean, that wasn’t the first film, but Pixar was not Pixar like it is now. I mean, it had done, I think, like four or five films or something. So what was it like at that point in the early 2000s to be kind of there in the early days?

John Walker: It was really exciting. I had never worked at a place like that before. Steve was a big presence, his spirit of excellence. I had never worked at any place that was so demanding of just the best you could possibly do. It was intimidating and exciting. And I always thought that if anybody was going to figure out how to make market and distribute movies in the 21st century, it was going to be Pixar because of the connection to Steve and Apple.

I was sort of waiting for that, for Steve to do for the movie business, what he had done for the music business. It didn’t quite happen because he got sick, but it was an exciting time. And Pixar was this pure play production company. All we did was make the best movies we knew how to do. We didn’t make movies that actually pitched very well.

I mean, Ratatouille is the classic example. “Oh yeah, we want to make this movie about a rat in a kitchen.” That’ll get you pretty far in Hollywood and it was exciting. It was artistically stimulating, the work we did was pleasing to an audience and it was financially remunerative. It was a really cool time and it was fun to be a part of it. And it was a small company, maybe 400 people, I think when I went, we went there and the producers, there was a handful of producers that sort of ran the place with the small executive pod and it was scrappy and it was fun.

Dan Heaton: Yeah. I think that showed in the movies and they’ve done amazing work throughout their tenure at Pixar, but just those early films really seemed to have that scrappy feel to them. And it’s interesting because this summer with Incredibles 2; it came out 14 years later. Why do you think, I mean, because I think that’s one of the sequels because sequels, sometimes people are really excited about them, sometimes they’re not. I feel like The Incredibles 2, judging especially by how successful it was, people were really excited about that. Why do you think the staying power of those characters in the movie is so strong?

John Walker: Well, I mean, it was kind of set up to have a sequel. I mean, it has that, you kind of want that family to go on another adventure, you’re not sure what it is. Brad, and we resisted it for a long time because A) because there were other films we wanted to do and Brad wanted to do and B) the superhero landscape changed so much that it felt like, “Oh, really? You need another superhero movie?” I don’t think so. I think because when the Incredibles came out, there were really only a couple of franchises going and Batman was sort of on and off and Spider-Man was there, but now it’s every week.

Brad had always had a good idea from the get go about Helen getting the mission and Bob having to be at home and that’s always sounded like fun. So eventually it seemed like the right time to do it and if we’d wait, it didn’t feel like we could wait much longer if we were going to do it at all. So it seemed like a good time to do it.

Dan Heaton: And it’s interesting to think about, like you mentioned with superhero movies, because Marvel films now, not just Marvel, a lot of them are so ubiquitous or so common that it’s funny to think about even 2004. It seems like they’ve been around forever and it’s only been really the last 10 years or less.

John Walker: Yeah. And it’s because one of the reasons is because the special effects have finally caught up with that genre. You can actually do those movies effectively and that’s in large part because of Pixar, because it’s all CG…Those are animated movies, all of them. It’s that ability to be able to do pretty much anything you can dream up and make it look great. That’s the technology allowing those stories to be told and people love them.

And the thing that finally brought us around on Incredibles 2 was it’s not really a superhero movie. It’s a movie about a family. They just happen to have these sort of metaphoric superpowers that are really just standings for their place in the family. The father is strong, the mother has to stretch in many directions. The 13-year-old daughter is insecure and wants nothing more than to turn invisible and keep people away with force fields.

The 10-year-old boy is an energy ball and just has super speed and the baby is just a possibility, could be anything, could be nothing. I mean, I think that’s the great. The thing I love the most about The Incredibles is that those superpowers are just a way of amplifying what those characters roles are in the family. That’s why you can’t age them up. We’re not interested in making a movie about Dash being in college.

Because then it doesn’t work, right? All of those superpowers fit who they are at that age in that family. And as soon as you break that, you’ve broken what’s at the core of the film and the characters. You got to just keep them the same age and you can do that in animation because your actors are not aging. Unless their voices change a lot and they haven’t …we did have to recast Dash because he’s 20 something, but everybody else is just…you can pick up right where you left off 14 years ago.

Dan Heaton: Yeah. I mean, Sara Vowell can still do that same part, so it all works out. All right. Well, let’s get into Tomorrowland because I want to make sure we have enough time to talk about that. For me, it really connected with …I mean, I’m a theme park fan. I’m interested in…I especially grew up with Epcot and everything with that and Tomorrowland. So for me, this was right down the middle, but going back to kind of the beginning, how did this project really get started for Brad and yourself?

John Walker: Well, it was Damon Lindelof and Jeff Jensen who began working on it at Disney. Damon and Brad had worked together briefly, I think, on Mission. Damon told Brad what they were working on, and Brad was really excited about that. So we came into it that way. I had been working on a film at Pixar, and that was going through a bunch of changes. And so I left that film, took a couple of years off of Pixar and went to work on Tomorrowland. It was Damon and Jeff that started it, and then Brad got involved and began writing with Damon and trying to make this movie about an optimistic future rather than a future that is the apocalypse. It’s like, if you’re going to make a Disney movie about the future, when it should be positive, the future could be great.

Dan Heaton: Yeah. Great, big, beautiful tomorrow. You got to stick with that. So what was exciting for you? You mentioned you’d taken a few years off and then got back into it with this movie. What was exciting about this premise for you going into it?

John Walker: Well, I had never worked…I mean, it was exciting from a professional standpoint because I’d never worked on a big live action movie like that. And it was big. It was all over the world and big budget and amazing special effects. And it was really exciting and a hundred day shoot. And that was a learning experience for me to be on a film that large. I really wanted to do that. And I hadn’t actually taken any time off. I took time off from Pixar to go do this.

Yeah, I took a leave of absence at Pixar for a couple of years and went and worked on Tomorrowland. And it’s the same company. So I mean, Disney had owned us by then. So I really wanted to work on a big film like that. And I was really impressed by the people that do that all the time, that work on films at that level, it was really a privilege to be part of it.

Dan Heaton: Yeah. So you mentioned that Damon started working on it, and then Brad was involved and such. And then I originally heard it was called “1952”, the original kind of announcement that Disney made early on, and then eventually was called Tomorrowland. So did a lot change when Brad got involved or yourself in terms of the concept and where it kind of went in those early years?

John Walker: No, I think it was always…I mean, Brad was always interested in what Damon and Jeff were doing. I mean, he’s a really good writer, so he certainly had something to say about that, but it wasn’t…I don’t think it changed a lot. I think the 1952 reference was just sort of a working title, and it was a way of sort of teasing the fact that it was going to be called Tomorrowland, and the land was going to be sort of featured in some way.

Dan Heaton: Sure. So part of that obviously takes place one of the opening scenes in the 1964 New York World’s Fair where Frank visits as a kid. What was it like to be on the set when that was kind of recreated for the movie?

John Walker: It was fun. We did it. We shot that in Vancouver, and it was at the University of British Columbia. And so much of it, of course, is the stuff on the ground was all real, but everything in the background was CG. So the globe and all those things that you see in the background is all added later. But on the ground, we had a bus from 1960, some Greyhound bus, and we had a lot of carts that were around at that point, the little electric carts from the Fair we had, and it was fun. And that actually was the first day of shooting we shot that. So that was exciting as well.

Dan Heaton: Yeah. There’s like a Blu-ray extra where you can see Brad moving around the different people and kind of said it’s the first day. It was like a little video diary and everybody’s excited and kind of recreating that period, I’m sure was a lot of fun. And then of course you shot inside “it’s a small world”, I believe, at Disneyland, which I know kind of goes with that scene, but it’s in obviously a different place. So how was that like kind of setting it up as not exactly what the one at Disneyland is like, kind of making it look like the original one?

John Walker: Well, we had a separate set in Vancouver that was like the line. Going up to it and Michael Giacchino actually plays the ride operator. He has this whole backstory about why he’s doing that. That we shot in Vancouver. Then the inside of the ride, we shot actually at Disneyland.

then when the boat drop and goes down on the way to Tomorrowland, that was another set that was built in Vancouver where just the big slide, because that’s a practical, that’s a big old tank and a slide for the boat that was huge, this huge set that was built just for that shot. So you’re piecing it together. The line is in Vancouver, the slide is in Vancouver, and then when you’re inside the ride, you’re shooting inside the ride itself.

Dan Heaton: It’s really disappointing that in “it’s a small world”, you can’t actually go down that slide.

John Walker: That’s right. Yeah. We always thought that in my fantasy, I thought, well, if the movie’s a really big hit, maybe they’ll go back and add this to a “small world”, wouldn’t that be fun?

Dan Heaton: That would be amazing. So yeah, but I like the idea of…yeah, because the scene feels very seamless and the way it kind of goes through each step. And obviously there’s the other moment where he goes inside with the jet pack. But I’m sure that just hearing you explain it, it’s easy to think about how many different pieces go into even that scene, which is only 10 minutes or something, totally.

John Walker: Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean, they’re complex. Those big movies are complex to shoot and you can be…I mean, Tomorrowland, when they actually go to Tomorrowland, that’s in Spain, in Valencia. Those are real buildings in Valencia where we shot for a few weeks, and you’re back and forth between sets and there and Vancouver, and it’s fun how it’s pieced together.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, definitely. And I know you shot, I believe, in Disney World with Carousel of Progress, but that didn’t end up making it in the film, but I know there’s this lead scene. So I mean, how much was there a lot of footage shot there or was it really just quickly?

John Walker: We were there. I think we were there just a few days. The big thing was shooting in the Carousel. That was a great scene and some things are just too much and we had to cut some of that stuff, but it was a cool scene. It was great to have, because a lot of people don’t know that those things were at the World’s Fair and then got moved.

Dan Heaton: Yeah. For especially people that might go that aren’t like me and have probably studied more about it than they should, they go on the ride and they’re like, “Oh, this is a cool ride.” And not thinking that the history with them and then Mr. Lincoln and everything else at the World’s Fair.

So you mentioned it didn’t make it in the film and then obviously we hear the song from it at the beginning and then the Blu-ray has lead scene where Keegan-Michael Key kind of talks more about Walt Disney and kind of the connections, but a lot of those didn’t make it. So do you think…it didn’t bother me that it wasn’t in there. I’m just curious about the creative choice to kind of pull back beyond the name a little bit from make the Disney references a little more subtle and kind of how that came together.

John Walker: Yeah. I don’t know if that was the over…it was more just a matter of time and trying to streamline the story and get on with it. And it wasn’t about trying to diminish the Disney references. We loved those references and wanted them as much as we could get in there. It was just more about trying to make the story work. And it was tough. We struggled with it about how to …

Because in the original version, we didn’t meet Frank Walker until deep into the second act. So George didn’t even appear until pretty deep into the film, and that didn’t seem to work. And so we were trying to …there was trying to figure out how to get him and his younger self and Brit, and everybody sort of set up at the beginning. So it got a little clunky. I don’t think we solved that completely.

It’d be fun to go back though and try to recut it a little bit, more of the way we want it. We also had this huge animated sequence that played while young Frank was in the boat going to Tomorrowland, and we had to cut all of that too.

Dan Heaton: Right. Yeah. And that’s on the Blu-ray, but that scene is really well done. It’s like three or four minutes long. And no, and I understand because the movie is two hours easy and you could make…for the diehard fans, you could make a three-hour movie and everybody would be thrilled, but you’re making, like you said, this massive big budget movie that can make tons at the box office and still not be enough. So it’s tricky.

John Walker: And good for Disney for taking a big risk on an original work. You don’t see a lot of that these days. And we felt bad because we didn’t come through financially and that it makes it harder for them to make bets like that. We want them to make bets on big bets on new work, and that’s risky. And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, but that’s the only way you can get to a franchise. You got to do the first one sometime, and it’s got to be original.

Dan Heaton: Yeah. And that’s the thing. I remember seeing it…I had seen the trailer, but not knowing that much about it and going to see it in the movie theater that weekend and being like, “This is amazing. I want to tell everyone about this movie.” And then reading, I would go reading critical reviews and such, and some reviews were good. They weren’t all bad, and then they were mixed, and then seeing the results, and it was number one, but it kind of got this reputation because of the budget. For you, I know you’re really close to it, but why do you think it just didn’t get the success I think it deserved?

John Walker: If you could answer those questions, I don’t think we solved it ourselves. There were things that we wanted to change, and we didn’t really have time to do it. So I think it was that we didn’t succeed as much as we wanted to. I also think that part of it is that it’s not a cynical movie. It kind of wears its heart on its sleeve, and that it’s an easy target.

And I think a lot of people would rather have edgier, darker vision to the future than ours was. I think we made the mistake too of being too coy in the marketing. I think we didn’t want to reveal a lot about it, so we were kind of secretive about it, about what the movie was about. And I think we gave the impression that it had some huge twist, right? That it was like The Crying Game or something, that if you gave it away, you’d ruin the movie.

That really wasn’t…there wasn’t anything like that in the film. We just wanted it to be a surprise for folks. And I think that that got, especially for critics, I think it got to be, “Oh, you’re going to be coy about this and not show much in the trailers and not talk about it.” Well, okay, you better surprise us. And then we didn’t do that. I think that was a mistake on our part too.

And I don’t think we realized at the time, we were just like, “Ah, we think movies in general show too much in the trailers. We just want everybody to open the Christmas prisons on Christmas.” And I think that that got conflated with this idea that there’s this big big, big surprise in the film that will be ruined. The film will be ruined if we give too much away. And that was never our intent, but I think it may have been perceived that way.

Dan Heaton: It’s interesting because I think of it though as…and I hadn’t thought about that in terms of a surprise because that’s one of the reasons though I found, especially the first viewing, enjoying it so much, is that you come in and there’s not a huge shock because you see Tomorrowland at least the ’60s version really early on. So it’s right there. But also you get on the road. It’s like a road movie.

I feel like it’s a bit of a throwback in that way where it’s like you get on the road with these characters and you don’t know where they’re going to go, but you’re on this journey and it’s an adventure. And it’s not so much, Tomorrowland’s important, but I feel like somehow it got conflated where it was all about seeing Tomorrowland too.

John Walker: Yeah, I think you’re right. I think that we were making a road movie and I think people wanted to just…they wanted a movie about Tomorrowland being in Tomorrowland. And I think we were never making that movie and it was like, oops. And we thought it was great to be on the road trying to get there, but that was fun.

Dan Heaton: Yeah. And it’s so hard. It’s easy in hindsight to look back and say that because if it had been more successful, you’d say, “Well, that was a perfect strategy.” So I wouldn’t be too tough on that. I wanted to mention too that you guys shot at Kennedy Space Center, which now near the end of the shuttle program or around that time, to me that those scenes are poignant given that we’re still going to space, but not at the same level. So what was it kind of like to shoot there for those scenes?

John Walker: Well, it was really exciting. I mean, we were on Pad 39, which is where all the shuttles went off, where the Apollos went off, and it’s not used anymore, of course. But while we were there, they launched a Mars mission on the new pad next to us, and we got to watch the launch from 39, and that was really exciting. It was really fun to be there. That’s a big part of the film was this idea of, why aren’t we doing more of this? Why aren’t we looking to the future and exploring more? And we wanted to sort of boost NASA at the same time. It’s like, “Come on, let’s get going. “ And they don’t need us to boost them, but we wanted to cheer them on as part of the film.

Dan Heaton: And I think I connect to that too, because I’m very interested. I grew up in the 80s, so I didn’t see the Apollo program, but very interested in that. And then the space shuttle was around when I was a kid. For people that are interested in that, I think the movie really hits. I could tell that Brad’s interested in that. And you mentioned too, the message, just I wonder if the message would hit better today. I mean, not that it was so different in 2015, but not to really get political, but just given where we are in the country and kind of what we’re seeing each day, I don’t know. I feel like this is a kind of movie that might connect more just even three years later.

John Walker: Yeah. Well, I mean, the idea that there’s a power in, for lack of a better phrase, positive thinking, and that there is also a power in negative thinking. If you just keep giving into that negativity that the future will not be what you hope it is, you have to stay optimistic. You have to be looking to that future. And I thought that that was…it’s a good message. It might resonate better today. It’s good.

Dan Heaton: Good. It’s hard to say. It’s just something that struck me really while we were thinking about it. So one more question about Tomorrowland here. If it had been a success, and I mean, were there any discussions about where the story could go in the future? Because I think the movie holds itself together pretty well as a contained story, but any discussions of sequels or other ways to kind of expand it in the future?

John Walker: Well, no. I mean, there weren’t any particular ones, but certainly the idea of Tomorrowland and how it got started and who were the founding members. And some of the earlier drafts that I read had more of that in it. I think that if it had been successful, I think that we would have been exploring some of that.

Dan Heaton: Yeah. And I would have loved to have seen more in the theme parks too, which I know you kind of referenced earlier, but that would have been fun to see. Not some big overhaul, but some way to tie that in, which I think probably would have happened.

John Walker: We hoped. We certainly hoped for that. Yeah.

Dan Heaton: Yeah. So I just want to close out with a few more questions here, just general ones. But we mentioned shooting at Disneyland and all that, and then this podcast is often about theme parks and stuff. How about you? I mean, do you like Disneyland? Do you go very often? And if you do, what do you enjoy?

John Walker: I grew up in the Midwest, so I never went as a kid, so I don’t have the kind of connection to it that…I mean, all my connection to the park is through my work, and I love being there, but I always go for work. What I’ve been able to do, which has been fascinating, is to go be backstage in the middle of the night at two in the morning on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, while they’re doing the maintenance. I’ve been behind the scenes on “small world” and seen the IATSE bug on the flats from New York when they…the scenic crews in New York built those flats for the World’s Fair, and those same flats are still in “small world”. And I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that bug, the IATSE bug.

Dan Heaton: No, I haven’t, but I’m curious about it though.

John Walker : It’s a stamp. It’s the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees. Their logo looks kind of like a bug and it’s stamped on the scenery. You can see the stamp from like 1959 or whenever they built that stuff for the original ride in New York, and it’s the New York local. So it’s fun that it was fun to be back and backstage, behind the scenes at “small world” and see the stamp from the New York stagehands that built that stuff that was at the World’s Fair.

Those are the kinds of experiences that I really like at being at Disneyland is like being there after hours, being there in the middle of the night, standing next to the animatronics on Pirates of the Caribbean and the alarm goes off because when those things start moving, you better not be anywhere near. They’ll take your arm off, right? So the alarm goes off and everybody gets away from those things because they’re swinging stuff around and you don’t want to be in the way.

Dan Heaton: No, those things are like machines. I mean, powerful machines.

John Walker: Yeah, they are. Yeah. They’re like chainsaws.

Dan Heaton: Well, great. Well, that sounds exciting. I’ve never been in any ride at 2:00 a.m. behind the scenes. So you mentioned it’s only professional, but you still got it on me. That’s awesome. Okay. So what’s going on currently? I mean, I know Incredibles 2 came out. Are there any projects that you can mention or even vaguely that you’re working on?

John Walker: I’m actually going to do a play with my wife, a two-character play in Los Angeles in January and February. We started doing plays together and we have this two character play called The Empty Nesters that we’re going to do at the Zephyr Theater on Melrose in January and February. So that’s our next project.

Dan Heaton: That sounds great. If people want to learn more, is there anywhere they can go for that?

John Walker: It hasn’t quite got set up yet, but we’ll have emptynesters.com website, but it’s not up and running yet. But soon, the Zephyr Theater in Los Angeles and on Melrose will also have information about it. Opens in January.

Dan Heaton: That sounds great. That sounds really exciting. It’s been great to talk with you about Tomorrowland and I appreciate it. I’m glad to learn a little more insight about a movie that I really love.

John Walker: I’m glad you…who knows, maybe Tomorrowland will have a life like the Iron Giant just keeps sort of rolling along.

Dan Heaton: Well, I know it has a lot of fans judging by people I interact with online, so you never know. So John, thanks so much for doing the podcast.

John Walker: Sure. Take care.