159. Imagineer Kevin Lively on Being a Skipper and Updating The Jungle Cruise

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There’s no easy way to update a classic Disneyland attraction. We connect with them emotionally and want to preserve that feeling. Disney Imagineers faced this challenge when they refreshed The Jungle Cruise last year. This beloved attraction has changed frequently since its original version in 1955, but it’s tricky to balance keeping it modern and retaining the atmosphere. These hurdles were overcome by Kevin Lively and other Imagineers with The Jungle Cruise. As a former Jungle Cruise Skipper, he recognized the importance and possible obstacles with this project.

Kevin explains this process of updating The Jungle Cruise on this episode of The Tomorrow Society Podcast. As a Story Editor, he worked closely to ensure the changes fit comfortably. On this podcast, Kevin and I begin by talking about his background and interest in working for Disney. He started working at Disneyland at the Opera House and ultimately became a Jungle Cruise Skipper. Kevin’s role as an ambassador for the attraction took him around the world to connect with other Skippers and promote The Jungle Cruise. The next step was a move to Walt Disney Imagineering, which isn’t a common transition from working at the parks.

We also chat about Kevin’s other projects including the Adventure Trading Company, a cool interactive game at Disneyland. The play-test experience found an interesting way to connect merchandise with play inside the park. Kevin also describes his work on the Jungle Navigation Co LTD Skipper Canteen restaurant. There are so many great details inside that space, and Kevin describes some of his favorites. Finally, he talks about the experience of creating holiday overlays like The Jingle Cruise and Mater’s Graveyard JamBOOree. I really enjoyed talking with Kevin and learning more about his role as a Skipper and within Imagineering.

Show Notes: Kevin Lively

Learn more about Kevin Lively’s background and projects at his official website.

Check out Kevin’s artwork at his Etsy shop, SkipperKevin.

Follow Kevin at Livelyland on Twitter and Instagram.

Note: Photos in this post were used with the permission of Kevin Lively.

Transcript

Kevin Lively: We were in a meeting, we were brainstorming something and he’s drawing, and I just remarked to him. I’m like, it’s amazing that you have your iPad out and you’re cranking out this amazing artwork like nothing. He looks at me and he’s like, yeah, that’s how we feel about you and your puns. And I was like, oh. Oh, you’re right. Okay. That is my ability. Awesome. Cool. And so that’s when it kind of kicked in for me and it took years and years and years for me to actually feel like I deserve to be there because I was working with all these amazing people.

Dan Heaton: That is Imagineer Kevin Lively, who’s here to talk about the recent updates to The Jungle Cruise, his favorite details from Skipper Canteen, and so much more. This is going to be awesome. You’re listening to The Tomorrow Society Podcast.

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Dan Heaton: Thanks for joining me here on Episode 159 of the Tomorrow Society Podcast. I am your host, Dan Heaton. I hope that you’re all doing okay out there; I know it is a challenging time. It’s also really cold here in St. Louis, which is not fun either. But I’m excited to bring you this week’s show. I was very interested when I saw that Disney was going to make updates to the Jungle Cruise.

Of course, you can always have that first knee jerk reaction like, no, don’t make changes. But then if I really think about it, I appreciate on several levels what they ended up doing. One, they were trying to make the attraction more inclusive, more modern, and then also add some new fun gags to it to keep it feeling a little fresher. And I think they succeeded totally. It’s still fun, still the Jungle Cruise we know, but also has some nice updates that just make it a cool experience.

And one of the key contributors to those updates was Kevin Lively. If you followed those changes closely, you likely saw him in some videos from Disney. He was also featured prominently in the Behind the Attraction episode on the Jungle Cruise has a really interesting story where he started out working at Disneyland at the Opera House and then moved to the Jungle Cruise, became a Skipper, was an ambassador for the Skippers, got to travel to other parks around the world, and then moved to Walt Disney Imagineering, which is a change that while we’ve heard of some doing it, is pretty rare overall, like he mentioned during the show.

He got to work on attractions like Skipper Canteen, where he talks about a lot of the fun details there, some of the holiday updates to the Jingle Cruise and to Cars Land and then Adventure Training Company, which was kind of a fun immersive play test game connected to merchandise, and of course the updates to the Jungle Cruise. So I really enjoyed the chance to hear Kevin’s story, get some background on the latest changes, but also some of the other projects he worked on, and just to hear what it was like for him to work as a skipper and then switch over and start working at Imagineering as a writer and story editor. Hope you enjoy this conversation with Kevin. It was really cool for me to get the chance to talk with him,. So let’s get right to it. Here is Kevin Lively.

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Dan Heaton: I had like to go back though and just kind of know a little bit more about your history and how you got interested in Disneyland and theme parks and what kind of, is your background there when you were growing up in terms of your connection to Disneyland?

Kevin Lively: Sure. Well, I grew up in Southern California actually for many years. I lived down the street from Magic Mountain in Valencia. Had a Season Pass there for years and years later, got an annual pass for Disneyland. But going to Disneyland was a regular part of my childhood as it is for a lot of kids in Southern California.

When I was really little, my dad worked for GTE, the phone company, and they would do company nights at Disneyland, and I remember those being awesome. It was a private party nights and they would close it for just the employees, so it’s like an empty Disneyland all to yourself in the middle of the night. But yeah, I grew up going there. I think my first trip to Disney World when I was about five or six with my cousin and aunt and uncle, we traveled in their Ford Explorer from southern California to Florida.

Then afterwards we went up north and then back. So a big circle trip around the country, but I still have pictures and memories from that trip. So Disney has always been part of my growing up and my background. My dad loving Walt Disney, so I grew up with the respect and admiration and the knowledge of who he is, what WED was, Imagineering and all that. My dad actually, when he was a kid after going to Disneyland, he had an idea for an Autopia car. So he drew it and his little kid and then he sent it to the Studios or WED, and they send him back like a whole Autopia press kit. He lost that in a fire. So I never got to see it, but that was kind of just something that always ran in. My family is wanting to get in that world.

So growing up, my parents divorced, my mom moved up to Bakersfield where I guess middle seventh grade all the way to junior college. I was up here still a stones throw away from the resort. And Bakersfield being a big Disney town, a lot of friends also with annual passports, so doing a lot of trips growing up in high school age down there with friends became a regular thing to do. So yeah, just growing up in this area, Disneyland is in your backyard, used to be the case. You can hop down there whenever you wanted without a reservation. So times have changed.

Dan Heaton: Yes, they have. Well, I know you went to community college, but then you ultimately ended up at Cal State Fullerton, which is basically right next to Disneyland. So at that time were you thinking, I want to work for Disney or even I want to work for Imagineering. Was there a goal or was that kind of something that just came about as you were going to school?

Kevin Lively: So I think that’s always coming out of high school. That was kind of like the goal. It was a pie in the sky, moonshot, never thought it’d be possible. Coming out of high school, I started doing a lot of community theater and then going into directing youth theater. So being able to do a lot of creative things and have fun with it and being able to always work on a creative project was fantastic. So trying to find a way you can make a living aside from being a theater teacher, being able to work on creative projects like that was awesome.

There’s a couple moments in my life where it’s like a moment out of a movie where something just hits you in your head and you go, yeah, that’s going to happen. The first time being when I met my now wife, it was my senior year in high school and she went to a different high school, but she came to see a show and to see a production of Guys and Dolls that I got kicked out of because my grades were horrible, but I was working tech for it.

Then during intermission or before the show, I came down, I saw her and it was just one of those, yep, that’s the girl I’m going to marry. And it was just like a passing thought. It was bizarre. The only other time I really felt that was we were driving back from one of our Disneyland trips with friends around high school, junior college days, and this was the days of MapQuest, so this is before we could pull up addresses on the phone.

So I remember printing out the address for Imagineering because the five freeway in between Disneyland and Bakersfield goes right by the campus. And I’m like, I’ve always wanted to see it. So we got off the freeway and we drove around. It was dark, so we drove around the block knowing the geography. Now we probably did about three laps and before we found 1401 and then we stepped down, I took a picture and just the thought in my head was, yeah, this is obtainable.

I can do this. And then I just started focusing my efforts towards doing that. After high school, I took a year off after how many years of school? I just took a year off. My girlfriend, now wife, was a year behind me, so she wasn’t going anywhere. She had to finish up her school. So I worked and I saved money. And before starting community college, as I mentioned before, my grades in high school, I was a horrible student, so my grades were not good.

So I knew I wasn’t going to be going to USC or anything crazy like that. It just makes financial sense to knock out all your Gen Ed in community college before transferring. They’re worth the same and they cost a lot less. And so I started going to community college. During that, I started doing community theater with the kids, directing and doing things and really giving kids creative freedom to have a lot of fun, which I have lots of stories about. That became my reputation amongst the theater scene with the children’s theater.

Dan Heaton: I think that gives good background on why you were interested, the theater background especially, but just in general. So how did you ultimately end up starting to work at Disneyland? I believe you started at the Opera House, but how did that process go where you ended up working there as a cast member?

Kevin Lively: Sure. So after Bakersfield College, I applied for Cal State Northridge and Cal State Fullerton, and I got into both and I decided to go with Cal State Fullerton because it’s also known as Cal State Disneyland. It’s down the street. So it made sense that this is something I really wanted to pursue, that working and getting a job, it makes sense right now. I know it’s super uncommon for people to make that jump from Disneyland to Imagineering, but naive me went in like, yep, this is the logical choice. If you want to get here, you have to start here.

So I applied, I want to say June 7th or something. I applied and I got the job, and it was back in the days where it was pretty tough to get in. It was right on that they were hiring, but they also still turned people away, which was so getting in there, my home attraction, I technically got hired in to Critter Country attractions, and I trained for a couple days and my trainer just saw how I was training on Splash Mountain.

She’s like, you’re not happy, are you? I’m like, well, no. I go to school for communication. I love theater; I love talking to people. I just feel like I don’t think this is the right fit; I mean, I could do it, but I don’t know how happy I would be. So she pulled some strings and they’re like, well, if you want to hang out a little bit longer, you can just work some guest control. Then they transferred me over to Adventureland and they put me over at the Opera House, which is pretty cool.

Now, the unique part about the Opera House back then at least is you had, it’s a very small crew, and this is back in the day of a Disneyland of first 50 Magical Years starring Steve Martin and Donald Duck. So the opening crew are people who had been there since before I was born.

We’re talking people hired in the ‘70s and were still working. And so the morning shifts were always covered Monday through Friday. You knew it was Bob and Mike working the opening crew, but there was a lot of evening shifts. So working at Disneyland in the night with fireworks and everything was really cool. So Opera House was my home attraction. Then remember I was walking through DCA, California Adventure, back when it was before Buena Vista Street. So they had that big sun and engineer ears to the right. And I got a call from Rachel who was the main scheduler for us. So this is the lady who was making everyone’s master schedule for the entire land. And she’s like, Hey, Opera House is going down. I think they had to get new carpet or new seats or something. She’s like, I need to cross train you.

She said, what do you want to do? And I said, well, I’d give my left arm. I need my right arm, need my left arm to work Jungle Cruise. I’ve always wanted to do that. And she’s like, you got it. So I got trained over at Jungle Cruise. When you work Jungle Cruise, you also work Tiki Room. And that was just a natural fit. I’ve always wanted to work Jungle growing up, I always went there twice. Once during the day and once at night because it’s like the only attraction that will give you complete unique experiences depending on the daylight. Then a few months after that, she called and she was like, oh, Jungle’s going down for a refurb. I need to cross train you because there’s not enough shifts at Opera House. She’s like, I have to put you in Indiana Jones.

I’m like, are you sure? I’ll just work parades. Working Indiana Jones was not my favorite thing. It became a joke between me and the schedulers. I just try to avoid it. It’s not my cup of tea. Some people love it and they’ll swear by it and they’re awesome at it, bless their hearts. But it’s like the polar opposite of Jungle Cruise at Indy, you’re inside a loud angry building and you’re telling kids that they’re not tall enough to ride. Over at jungle Cruise, you’re outside telling jokes where literally I had a newborn on my boat once. Anybody can ride Jungle Cruise.

And then at my year ceremony, I was getting my year pin, she’s like, I was sitting next to Rachel again who does the scheduling, and she’s like, hey, you need another attraction. I said, well, do you have anything in the beep beeps or the two toots? Because I’ve always worked vehicles or steam trains. And she had an opening in Main Street Vehicles, so that became my final attraction. The only thing cooler than working Jungle Cruise is driving Walt’s Fire Engine. I always joke, the perfect job at Disneyland would be driving the fire engine, but wearing the Tiki room costume. That’d be perfect. So that’s how I rounded out my attraction knowledge at Disneyland.

Dan Heaton: Well, I think you got to work on a lot of different attractions. Yeah, Indiana Jones, you even got to press the button and be underground and have it be really loud. Then you had the Jungle Cruise, which is the opposite, like you said. So you mentioned you have a background in theater and just, I know you’ve directed plays and everything. How much do you think that helped you or really fit with when you got to be a Jungle Cruise Skipper? I mean, did that feel pretty familiar given that background?

Kevin Lively: I did a lot of, I was on the high school improv team and I did improv after high school, but Jungle Cruise, they discourage improv stick to the script, but at least being public speaking, I’ve never really had a problem with, I’m actually, when it comes to parties, I hate parties. I hate gatherings. It’s just never been a cup of tea. But if I’m on stage in control of a situation, I did huge presentations at D23 Expo in the arena, not a problem.

But if you put me into a cocktail party situation, I am like, where’s the door? I’m ready to go. So getting up in front of people was never really a problem for me as a trainer, I brought in, I had to train people who have never been on stage before. Some people getting a job in their retirement just as a way to assign their grandkids in who have never had any performing experience at all.

Jungle Cruise is a new hire attraction, at least it was. I’m not sure if it still is. So really anybody could be assigned Jungle Cruise. And it’s a really interesting dynamic, and I think that kind of adds to the charm is the skipper roulette of it. You never know who you’re going to get, which is going to add to your reride ability. So yeah, I definitely think the theater experience helped to my advantage at least. I was comfortable. I never really had a problem with audiences or interacting or thinking on my feet. Jungle Cruise became the perfect fit for me.

Dan Heaton: So when you’re training and learning how to be a skipper, and then I know from talking to others that there’s certain different jokes you can choose each time. So how did you go about doing it, picking the, because I’ve been on it a lot, but not enough to be able to say, oh, here’s this joke for this one, or whatever. It always feels different, but how did you choose which ones you wanted to use regularly? Or did you mix it up a lot?

Kevin Lively: I would go out of my way to the dust off the ones nobody was using going into the hippo hole, and you’d fire your gun and you’re like, oh, that was close. Well, not my shot. My shot wasn’t close. My shot was way up there. I guess you can call that a hippo shot. Nobody was using that joke. I love that joke. It’s one of my favorites.

The dangerous part about that though is when you pull back into the dock and your guests get off your boat and they go with great cruise, I love the new jokes. Never heard any of those before. Then the lead or the manager standing on the dock shoots you a look. You’re like, Hey, it’s in the script. That was the only risky part. But I always tell people, actually the first time I met Joanne Johnson for the Jungle Cruise movie, they asked, what’s your favorite Jungle Cruise joke?

And I’m like, well, it’s not necessarily my favorite, but I’ll tell you that if you don’t do the backside of water, guests will get off the boat and tell you you forgot to do the backside of water. Now, there are other jokes you can use, other spiels you could go under Schweitzer Falls and tell everybody, hold your breath because you’re going underwater. But that is not as iconic as the backside of water. So always had to work that one in. And then to keep it fresh for me, I would try to have fun with my crew.

If you got a tween or a young teen who was too cool to be on the Jungle Cruise sitting next to you, oh, that just became gold right there. You can just have fun with them for the next eight minutes and the parents will love you for it. That was always a lot of fun. I once had this tween who she was trying to read her Twilight book for the entire cruise, and I picked on her. It was a lot of fun. Her parents, again, because the parents love when you have fun with the kids and you get to pick on them a little bit.

Dan Heaton: Yeah. So I know you ultimately worked as a Jungle Cruise Ambassador where you were going to Tokyo and other places and doing more than just being a Skipper, you were kind of a representative for PR and whatnot. So how did that come about? And I’m curious for you, what kind of attracted you to doing that?

Kevin Lively: So that all came about because of the Jungle Cruise anniversary, I’m sorry, the Tokyo Disneyland anniversary, 25th anniversary in 2009. I want to say what they did is they granted 25 cast wishes. So they did things like a castle with a pop star in front of the castle. And one of the Jungle Cruise Skippers said he wished he could have a gathering of Skippers from around the world.

So what this turned into was a competition, three different competitions, one in Disneyland, one Disney World, one at Hong Kong Disneyland, where we have other Jungle Cruises. Each resort did their own audition process. So for Disneyland, they sent out a notice saying, Hey, we want to send a Skipper to Tokyo. We want to send a Skipper to Tokyo, and we’re going to have an audition process, so sign up if you want to do it.

So the first round was just submit an application, which turned into literally anybody with Jungle Cruise knowledge. Even people who hadn’t worked there in four years were like, who wouldn’t sign up for that opportunity for a free trip to Japan? Man, that’s awesome. So that was the first round is the managers went through and kind of filtered out, yeah, who are actually the Jungle Cruise regulars. The next round was performing your spiel for managers who weren’t necessarily in your area. So maybe somebody from Fantasyland foods type situation. I got pulled, I was working Opera House that day. They pulled me to do that part of the audition competition. So I took them out while wearing my Opera House tuxedo, which was pretty fun. And then afterwards we went into Adventureland’s Oasis, which is now Tropical Hideaway, and they asked us questions.

One of them being, what’s the story of the Jungle Cruise? And I think they were looking for like, oh, it was a shipping company. It had turned tourism and now it’s doing cruises. But I was wearing my Opera House costume, so I was in that mode and my Jungle, sorry, my Disneyland history hat was on. So I just went through the entire history of the attraction from conception to Harper Goff outlining the river with a stick to modern day, to the updates and all that stuff.

So from there, they announced the finalist.; so it was me, Brian Hughes, who is now a manager, I want to say he’s a merch manager at Disneyland. Nick Lillard, who is still a Jungle Cruise Skipper, that man loves Jungle Cruise more than anybody could ever imagine. He was a Marine, and he would drive up from Camp Pendleton to Disneyland for his Disneyland shifts to work Jungle.

Joey Summers, who’s still at the resort, Mickey Wright, who’s now retired, and Tiffany, who was Adventures by Disney guide, I’m not sure she’s still doing it now, but she went by Skipper Oregon at the time. Those were the other finalists. They said that we were going to have guest judges. We didn’t know who they were. So morning of, we show up and the judges start showing up. Some of the judges, Tony Baxter, Kevin Rafferty, then showed up. We had John and Nancy Lasseter, who had just spent the night in the Dream Suite for their anniversary. Marty Sklar rounded it out, and then they picked the order, and I went first and I took out the Cruise, and there’s some clips of there. I think they found them on Behind the Attraction. So you can see some of those cruises with Marty and stuff on there.

But it was raining heavily that day, which is never fun, which is why I’m wearing a jacket. I never wore my jacket or my hat in the jungle, but whenever it was raining, I did. So we took out Marty, it was his birthday. So we did the birthday song for Marty, and then at the very end when we pulled into the dock, the rain was starting to come down, so they tried to pull the canopy over and the water just splashed all over Marty Sklar, and he just got drenched, but he was having the time of his life, so he didn’t care at all. He was also wearing a windbreaker and a hat.

So he was good, but then they took out everybody else, and at the end they said, in second place we have Mickey Wright. And then they said, unanimous decision was for me as the top pick for the Skipper, which as soon as they said like, oh, unanimous pick.

I’m like, oh, it’s going to be so-and-so. Then so when they announced it, I was kind of just stunned, if you ever find the video of it, my eyes are kind of just glazed over. And I’m like, huh. Then they said, we have another surprise. We’re actually going to send two Skippers. So it was me and Mickey got to go represent Walt’s original Jungle Cruise at this big gathering of skippers. While we were there, we did some really cool things, a lot of workshops with the Skippers.

They actually did. It was early morning ceremony where Mickey and Minnie came out in their safari clothes, and we all brought water from our respective rivers, and we poured it into the Tokyo River and all these cast members came and it was so cold, it was snowing, and they were sitting on the cold concrete or whatever it is, slurry, the path of Adventureland watching this ceremony.

I’m just freaking thinking, I’m cold myself. I can’t imagine sitting on this concrete. And then they hopped into lines. They didn’t know what boat they were going to get in. They didn’t know if it was going to be a Hong Kong Skipper or an English speaking American Skipper. But they went out there and we took out cruises for them and it was fantastic. So after that whole experience, I became the default Jungle Cruise rep. It wasn’t an official title or anything, but I just became that go-to person. So there was a USA Today article or something about working at the resort, and they wanted to talk to a Skipper, so they brought me in for that. When we had the ambassadors come over from Paris, I hosted one of them at Jungle.

Then the first pass of the Jungle Cruise movie with Tim Allen, Tom Hanks, that screenwriter came out and it was me and Jerry York who was our A lead. We took him around. I think I was technically involved with the Jungle Cruise movie more than most people, because I was there for that first iteration, at least for a couple hour walkthrough. But yeah, that’s kind of how that evolved. From there, everything just kind of fell into place as far as the Ambassador role, it was an unofficial thing, but it kept coming back to me, which I’m not going to say no because it’s an awesome, it was an honor to represent the attraction like that.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, I feel like I could ask tons more about all those experiences, but I want to make sure we talk about your moving ultimately to WDI jump ahead a bit. So I know that you mentioned as something you wanted to do. How did you ultimately, were you able to make that jump and start at Imagineering several years later?

Kevin Lively: When I was at Cal State Fullerton, I decided I’m taking all these classes anyway. Why not? If I’m going to get credit, try to figure out how to use this to my advantage for my career wise. So anytime I had an opportunity for a project or something that can then relate back to my work and then maybe build a portfolio or have something to go off of or learn something new about the company, that’s what I did is I tried to focus everything between all my courses.

So to fulfill my arts units, I took a ceramics class. One of the things was you had to do a paper on a ceramic artist, on a sculptor or anything like that. So because I was working in the Opera House, we had those Blaine Gibson maquettes of different characters. I’m like, I’ll write about Blaine Gibson. This can then relate back at least anything.

I’ll learn more about him. And so being a cast member, I had the Disney e-mails at my disposal, and we also had access to the Archives, which is amazing. So on a whim, I reached out to Dave Smith, who was the founder and head of the Archives at the time, introduced myself, said, Hey, I’m writing a paper on Blaine Gibson. Is there anything you guys have that could help me out in my research? And he said, sure, come on down.

And he pulled the Blaine Gibson file, which is amazing, just things dating back to his childhood. Blaine Gibson was a champion soap carver who won a competition judged by the guy who designed Mount Rushmore. I was able to find cool nuggets like that. So when I was there, he said, well, you have to remember too, at this time, I didn’t know what I wanted to do for Imagineering.

I didn’t know I want to be a writer or what, just because it wasn’t explained. And I think that’s a misconception that a lot of people have because when you listen to an interview with Tony Baxter, he is like, well, I’m an idea guy. That’s not a position, that’s not a job. That’s not on your business card, that’s not on your paycheck. Idea guy is not a role. So I knew I wanted to go there, but I didn’t know what I would be doing.

And so when I was going through this stuff at the archives day, Dave Smith said, Hey, you need to go talk to Chris. She’s a writer at Imagineering. She might be able to help you out too. She did a lot of the history stuff and she knew Blaine. So he set me up to meet with her. I met her for the first time and she was fantastic, gave me some wonderful information.

She said, when you’re done with the paper, send it my way. I’d love to read it. So after I finished the paper, turned it in, sent her a copy, and she’s like, this is great. Well, she’s retired now I can say this. She’s like, I’m not supposed to do this, but would you mind try writing a copy of what this is? It’s called a show information guide. I just want to see if you can do it.

If you’re not familiar, Show Information Guide is kind of like the Bible for the different attractions. I want to say all of them have it, but the older ones who never got around to it, older Magic Kingdom ones don’t have it. But anytime we do something new, now you create this whole show document. It talks about the design has the fun facts as a story, a cast member role, all that stuff.

So I wrote a mock one for The Haunted Mansion, and she’s like, yeah, this is fantastic. She became my first advocate to try to get me over there. And I realized, oh, I can be a writer for Imagineering. So for the first time, I knew what direction to follow. Things started falling into place the whole time working Jungle Cruises. We had the Indiana Jones Summer of Hidden Mysteries, and that was an interesting thing because it kind of fell into the Skipper’s laps. We didn’t know it was coming; we showed up and they’re like, oh, by the way, we installed these four things. Here’s some jokes. They never reached out beforehand to talk to us for spiel submissions, which they normally did.

And so I led that effort and I wrote some jokes and I sent ’em up. I’m like, Hey, Skippers, think this would be fun to work with. Is there a way that we can get these approved? And she started going through the process. Unfortunately, the legal process took more than the Summer of the Hidden Mysteries, so they never got approved, but that would play in later because she would get me in to apply for an internship with the writing team.

When I showed up for the interview in Glendale, all the writers were coming in, and Kevin Rafferty came in quoting one of my jokes from that, which is pretty cool. I went through the interview, went great later, found out that originally I didn’t get it. I came in second only to find out later that originally there was supposed to be two internships and one of ’em got cut.

So I missed out on that one. Lot of speed bumps on the way to Imagineering. However, from there, I made contact with Rafferty who later became one of my judges for Tokyo. So when Chris retired, we didn’t have a point of contact for our Jungle Cruise stuff. She was kind of like the person we would talk to get things approved. So I reached out to Rafferty and said, Hey, Skippers have new jokes.

Who should we reach out to? He is like, well, I guess that’s me now. So I would submit all the jokes from the Skippers to him to try to get things approved for the script and decide he and I would just bounce puns off of each other. He and I are just kindred pun spirits. We just rapid fire back and forth. And it got to a point we were doing holiday Christmas puns.

He said, okay, you need to stop until I can get these paid, get you paid for these. So he became my biggest cheerleader, my biggest support in trying to get me over to Imagineering, and I’ll be forever grateful that man for that. And so Kevin would try to get me in any chance he could. Eventually I got married.

We had our first kid on the way, and I reached out to him and said, Hey, if I’m going to do this jump, I need to do it now. I have a kid on the way. If I don’t, I have to go back home and work for my father-in-law. And so he was able to get me in on a contract basis into the Blue Sky Department, and I was actually still working at the park for a whole summer and doing Imagineering contract work, freelance work, until the lawyers found out.

They’re like, you can’t do that. So I had to choose if I wanted to stay at Disneyland or I wanted to make the jump doing contract freelance work for Imagineering. So clearly I went with that, and from there I was a blue badge, sorry, a green badge contractor for two and a half years working on things like Adventure Trading Company and Jingle Cruise.

And eventually I kept pushing like, Hey, I would love to be full-time. If you guys can get me on as a real employee, instead of just doing all this contract work with change orders and all that stuff, that’d be great. I kept getting told, oh, we don’t have enough work. We don’t have enough work. It eventually got to the point where again, the lawyer stepped in because of labor laws you have to get in on, you have to hire him if you want him to keep doing work, you can’t just keep doing contract stuff because he’s been here so long.

So that got me in a part-time basis, and I was a part-time maximum 30 hours a week, no benefits situation for Imagineering for about two years. The nice part about Imagineering my whole time there. I never had to look for work, which is an awesome, awesome thing. People are always coming to me, which is super flattering and stoked to not have that issue of trying to find work.

We had a new executive come in and she was looking at my workload and she’s like, why are you not? And I’m like, they say there’s not enough work for me. She’s like, you have enough work. I’m like, I have more than enough. She’s like, this is stupid. So she was able to push me in and that’s what got me on. So after almost five years of contract work and part-time work, I was a real boy. Imagineering, right? So from there, just things kept coming.

Dan Heaton: Yeah. So you mentioned the Adventure Trading Company, which I didn’t experience, but I always like to hear about the idea of making the parks more interactive and scavenger hunt, especially some of the early ones. There was also the Legends of Frontierland, similar timeframe. So what was that like in terms of getting to be involved, especially so early on with that type of almost like a scavenger hunt project?

Kevin Lively: Sure. So that project actually was first thought of by, one thing you’ll know about me is I try to give full credit to people, try to give credit where credit is due. It’s one of my biggest pet peeves is people taking credit for things they didn’t do. The idea was originally called Jungle Trading Company, and it was thought of by Brandon Kleyla, also known as Trader Brandon, and out there, amazing props guy, the man behind Trader Sam’s also another former Jungle Cruise Skipper.

He had the idea, he pitched it for one reason or another, it got handed off to me. My producer, Joey Caporaso, who’s become one of my best friends over the years. So he was fresh from Adventures by Disney as working for them. I was coming in fresh from Imagineering. So we were kind of starting around the same time and it was a perfect marriage for that project.

But going in there, we had a really strong leader in Tricia Cerrone who was the head of the Blue Sky, who kept pushing us trying to find what it is that it’s not just another retail experience, what is it that we’re doing? And she’s the one who really pushed for, we have our little juju charms. It wasn’t about I need to go earn this. Like what does this represent is tied to it?

And we’re like, well, the soul, the Skipper is humor. So every single one of those charms has a different attribute and venture quality, adventure, adventurer, quality tied to it. So humor, discovery, knowledge, all these different things that great adventures like Indiana Jones would have originally, we put it up as a play test at the D23 Expo. It was when we had that really cool exhibit and they had Pandora’s up in the very front.

It was kind of like an open house was the theme. So for Blue Sky, it was represented through this play test. We worked with the Disneyland entertainment to find these amazing performers, some of which we would then carry on the next year into Disneyland. But the test was an overwhelming success and they wanted to do in-park tests. So we rushed things as fast as we could. And let me tell you the work that Joey and our partner at Mickey’s of Glendale, Ryan, were able to get a piece of Disney merchandise not only designed, designed by amazing artists named Brandon Starr, but also through the safety process and everything and working with vendors and getting everything shipped, and it was unprecedented. It doesn’t happen. And so amazing credit to those guys. We were able to do this test. We did it again at Disneyland.

It was supposed to last for a month. We worked with our Disneyland operations partners. Jim Doyle, who was a manager in Adventureland at the time, was our big cheerleader. It’s scary for a business that has been operating the same way for 50, 60 years to go in there and say, hey, your system that you’re doing now, we know it works and it’s successful and it’s profitable, but what if we did it like this? And full credit goes to that guy for really bringing in every line of business.

They had to figure out a new way to bring in merchandise every morning and then work with foods and work with attractions and distribute these things. And it was amazing, amazing feedback. We were able to get it up off the ground, and not only did we get it up off the ground, but it was so popular that we sold through everything earlier than we thought we would.

The whole experience was a play test. And as you’re going into a play test, you goal is to break it as you’re going. If your play test is going swimmingly, it’s not doing you any good. So you want to go in there and you just want to throw every wrench into it as you can. And I think one of the benefits we had is the Imagineering team, the core team from Imagineering was me, it was Joey, and it was also Morgan Lee Richardson who had our time was our intern. If you don’t know Morgan, he was a field art director for Avengers Campus. Amazing conservation artist. And I think it was our scrappy attitude.

We were still, the new kids on the block. We’re not the Imagineers who worked on Epcot. We were the Imagineers born after Epcot. And then I think that’s where a big part of my experience in community theater and Morgan’s experience working on haunts and things like that came in because it really was us showing up right at park closing, going into the base of Tarzan’s Tree House and installing technology that we had no business installing, only because the guy who developed it was on maternity leave.

So Morgan was in there in the shrubs, we’re running choirs, getting all this stuff to work. It was just really cool, scrappy can-do “Muppets putting on a show” mentality that was, I’m super proud to have been part of. Then as this play test is going on, we kept throwing it, well, what else can we do? How can we break this? So that’s when we were coming up with like, well, let’s invite people.

Anyone who’s earned the snake juju, they can come on a snake hunt. And then the cast members were phenomenal with that. We had a cast member named Ben who was an amazing superstar. I think he’s over at Galaxy’s Edge now, working in the Lightsaber Workshop. But that guy was just more animated than you could ever ask a merch cast member could be. He was like agava quality entertainment just in an Operations costume.

But he was just leading the charge. They’re putting together all these fantastic activities, cast members from attractions and retail and foods were coming together and playing games in the middle of Adventureland. There was just this buzz going around and it breathed a lot of fresh life into it. Yeah, I mean, as far as the Adventure Trading company goes, the one we held off on was our Skull Juju, which was, we had it as one of the normal jujus at D23 Expo.

We held onto it for our final event, and then the last day of Adventure Trading Company, the line to get the thing to earn the Skull Juju, the line went down to Main Street. It was Indiana Jones on opening day. That was insane. The way that everybody got into it, the way that it still carries on with fans, it’s super flattering and I’m happy to have been part of it.

Dan Heaton: I love the idea of just taking, like you said, taking a different approach to merchandise or to attractions or restaurants or anything. That brings up another project I know you worked on, which I enjoyed going to, which is still there. The Skipper Canteen at the Magic Kingdom, which to me, the food is really good, but it’s also one of those places, it’s like there’s so many little details and everything, and I know you were involved with some of that, and especially given your Jungle Cruise background, it totally seemed to fit. So how did you get involved with that and what was that like?

Kevin Lively: So Skipper Canteen, it was back when I was doing my contract work and when I first heard about it, they’re like, oh yeah, we want you to do it. It was one of those things where, well, we have people on staff who need work, so we have to give it to them first. So it went to another writer who after, so he started off the project and then he left to go to Universal.

They’re like, oh, well now we get Kevin. They’re like, well, no, we have another guy. He needs work. So they put him on there and he was on it for a week or two, and I’m not sure why he left the project or where he went, but then it was like, finally, now we can talk to the consultant. So they brought me in to work on that, and the creative team for that was super cool.

It was one of the things I’m a stickler on is the story of continuity. I see the opportunity for the parks to have their Marvel Cinematic Universe going on and trying to explain to people like the Easter eggs, you can’t just have Easter eggs anymore because everybody has a computer in their pocket with a camera that’s connected to every other pocket computer in the world because people are expecting that interconnective storytelling.

So going in there, they kind of handed me like, oh, this is the work so far. And they’re like, yeah, we’re going to have Albert Falls and we’re going to make him a member of Society of Explorers and Adventurers, and he’s going to be friends with so-and-so. And I was like, oh, this is cool. I’m like, except that portrait you’re showing is from 1899, and our story takes place in 1938. So that’s a 40-year difference.

So that’s how we kind of like, well, maybe we need to have a descendant of Albert Falls, which is how we had the evolution of Alberta come to be that. I had two daughters and I wanted them to be awesome to give a cool, strong female role model for my kids. So that’s where Alberta was born from. And from there, being able to connect all the stories and setting things up for more society of explorers and ventures. But my overall goal, if you mentioned theme to Joe Rohde and you’re like, I love the theming of pirates. He will give you a lecture about what theme is. Theme is not setting barrels up.

Theme is not Star Wars, right? Avatar. The theme of Animal Kingdom is not animals. It’s the intrinsic value of nature, and it’s this, and it’s the aging and it’s man versus the, so Joe will give you a whole extra on that. So the theme of the Skipper Canteen, I’m going to put on my Joe hat and start talking with my hands, which is awesome for an audio podcast.

The theme of the Skipper Canteen is the family. It’s the unconventional family. It’s not the 2.5 kids, mom, dad, dog, white picket fence; it’s family being who you’re with most, who is there with you for those important moments in life. Looking back in my days at Jungle Cruise. Jungle Cruise Skippers are considered amongst each other. They’re family. They’re with you 40 plus hours a week; they’re there with you on hot Days, cold days, holidays.

Their stories about on 9/11, a bunch of Skippers got together in one of their own apartments and they watched everything play out there. It’s those people who are closest to you, and it rings true throughout generations of skippers. It doesn’t have boundaries. When I went to Tokyo, it was the same exact thing with their crew. So that was our theme. It’s our unconventional family of the skippers, which also plays into, you have Alberta being raised by her grandparents.

That’s an unconventional situation, but also that relationship that Alberta has her with her family of Skippers. So with that being said, I wanted to pay tribute to my family of Skippers. So what that turned into is somebody said the Skipper Canteen is a love letter to Jungle Cruise, and it’s like the biggest compliment I ever could have had with all those little Easter eggs I put in there.

Every trophy on there is a nod to a skipper, whether in Disneyland or Walt Disney World. One of my favorite details is there’s a signup sheet for the Junior Skippers, and every single name on there is the name of a child, born to Jungle Cruise Skippers, including my own just there was a baby boom among Skippers around that time. So I really wanted to focus on that family aspect. We could talk about whatever you want in Skipper Canteen. There’s so many fun little nods and Easter eggs and things like that.

Dan Heaton: Well, what’s like a favorite detail or a couple of favorite details of yours? Because I’ve seen a lot of them, but I admit, I think I’d have to go there a hundred times to see everything. So what’s something that’s in there that’s something you really enjoy and that is there?

Kevin Lively: I love our audio tracks that we have coming from the kitchen and from the upstairs offices. I give credit to the audio team because I think they did the smartest thing ever, which is that audio track is so long, there’s no way you’ll ever hear the loop. And everything is so paced out. It’s not like one after another. They really are just things that happen once in a blue moon, and I love that about it. But there’s some really fun ones in there. There’s a conversation in the kitchen about a fresh fish delivery, and it’s me and Rafferty just doing puns back and forth.

All those voices you hear are Imagineers just because that was a cheaper way to do it. But I think one of my favorite ones is we have the mysterious stranger shows up and he’s looking for a place to park his airship, and at the very end of it, the Skipper’s like, and also go see Skipper Mark for a permit for that weird purple crocodile thing you have. And of course the voice is like this and it sounds like Dream Finder. We brought Joe Rohde in to play that role because Joe was one of the Dream Finders.

For the opening day of Epcot and for their green screen activity. So it was fun watching him get back into that character after all these years. So I love our audio Easter eggs in there. I think one of my favorite details is up on a really tall shelf. We have a box labeled Jingle Cruise, and it has some Christmas stuff coming out of it. The idea is that when Jingle Cruise isn’t running the other 10 months of the year, that’s where they store all the decorations, which is in this tiny little box on the really top shelf. But I love that little detail, but I think a lot of my love for that location goes to the cast members who are amazing. Every time I’d go in there, they bring you in family, but they’ve taken their role and they owned it so much.

I think they were hesitant originally to let them get into that role. I know they were really hesitant about theming the menu out. I’m like, oh, let me go in and we do some fun names and stuff. They were like, the note was, well, we don’t want people looking at the menu too long. We have to turn over tables. I’m like, I’m naming a chicken dish. I’m not writing an epic. And so that’s why when we first opened only a couple dishes, had some fun names, and afterwards they let me go through and I got to name everything. But yeah, the Skipper crew, they’re fantastic over there. They have so much fun with their role. I love ’em all.

Dan Heaton: And you mentioned too, the storytelling part and just in general with what people expect. I think that leads well into the updates that were made that I know you were closely involved with to the Jungle Cruise, because I feel like it had multiple goals, but just I’m curious to know how cool it was or just being involved with making such significant updates that I think turned out great, how that went.

Kevin Lively: Yeah, that’s an honor to be part of that project. Anything that touches something that Walt worked on, you need to go in there with museum gloves. But at the same time, you have to remember the philosophy that Disneyland isn’t a museum. That’s something I’d have to remind people too. And when it comes to some attractions, people would say, well, what would Walt say if he walked around the park?

And I’m like, honestly, I think a lot of us would be out of a job. He said, why is this still here? I built this in the ‘60s. This is the best you can do. A man who was always, literally always changing stuff. And also when it came to Jungle Cruise reminding people too that it is the most drastically changed attraction, especially I’ll speak on behalf of Disneyland’s history. It was for a time every 10 years that attraction was getting a significant update.

You compare Jungle Cruise now, or a year ago or before our changes, it’s completely different than it was opening day. And that has to do with the skippers, it has to do with the times. It has to do, there’s a million different factors for an attraction that changes entire tone with the addition of all the Marc Davis stuff that speaks volumes to listen. That alone should give us permission to go in there and have some fun and change things up. As long as you keep things in the classic spirit.

I would compare things to those classic attractions are like visiting Grandma you don’t want, it’d be super jarring. You go visit grandma one day and she has a pink mohawk and tattoo sleeves, and that’s not grandma. However, if you go in there and you give grandma, you do her hair up, you get her a new outfit, it’s still grandma, but she looks fantastic and she’s happy, everyone’s happy.

So it’s kind of a way we kind of viewed it as we’re not going in there to change what this attraction is. It works. There were elements about it that straight up just didn’t work. Times have changed, thank goodness. The way I kind of want to see it is I want everybody to feel comfortable at Disneyland. I can tell you, working the attraction, there were those awkward moments. If we can go in there, we can improve the show, we can prove the storytelling at the same time, making it more welcoming for everybody. Cool, awesome. Let’s do it. There’s no reason not to do it.

And so it was a matter of finding that right balance and the team that got assigned to it, Chris Beatty out in Florida and Kim Irvine on the Disneyland side, having Kim Irvine there I think adds a lot of credibility because this is a lady who literally grew up in the industry. It’s in her blood. It was with her mom, it’s with her daughter. Like this is what they do, and there’s no way in hell Kim Irvine was going to go in there and ruin a classic Walt attraction. That just can’t happen. So being able to work side by side with them and our props team, the artists, everybody involved, there was so much heart going into that attraction that everyone knew that magnitude of what we were doing. It was very, as fun as the Jungle Cruise was, it was a pretty serious process.

We wanted to make sure that we were hitting the right notes, hitting the right tone. You’re also working within the limitations of an existing space and an existing ecosystem, so how do you plug in those scenes? So working with not only advisors cultural, but working with the Animal Kingdom team that make sure we got good representation of the animals, which I think actually bettered the show in the end. Everything just, I think worked out really great.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, I mean, given all the different things you were doing, and I think it’s great to make it just modern and more inclusive. And then also you’re trying to be respectful to the past and you’re trying to add cool, fun details. If someone’s never ridden it before, all those different things, it could have not added up. But I feel like it added up really well because like you said, we’ve seen with Haunted Mansion updates or Pirates or others that if you have people that really love the attraction, you’re generally going to have something that comes out that I think at least really works.

Kevin Lively: Imagineers. In their heart, they’re fans, and so you kind of just have to put a little trust into them that they’re going to make the right decision and you kind of let them do what they’re going to do. You’re going to get amazing results.

Dan Heaton: Totally. Well, I have a few more quick questions for you if you’ve got a few minutes. One of them is, I know there’s a lot of other projects that you’ve worked on, and we could go through each one, but I’m curious for you, what’s another project that just was especially memorable or really has a good place in your heart that you got to work on?

Kevin Lively: One of my favorite little under the radar ones is it’s in, it’s so small and minuscule when you stand back and look at it, but the fact that we’re able to pull it off is pretty fantastic. And that’s when we updated the safety spiels for Grizzly River at California Adenture and we brought in Ranger Woodlore. It’s so silly and it’s so small, but selling a classic character like Ranger Woodlore is super hard. However, if you get ’em in on a safety spiel, it’s pretty easy. So working with Corey Burton, I think it was, who does the Voice of Ranger Woodlore now, and in that recording session with him and he’s explaining the difference between Ranger Woodlore and Mr. Smee and the slight differences in voices, and it was pretty awesome to get that in there.

So that’s one of my favorite little, I don’t get to brag about that one because it’s a safety spiel update, but it’s still pretty awesome. And then working on the Cars Land holiday and Christmas, sorry, Halloween and Christmas stuff was super awesome. Working with our music department and then flying out to Omaha and flying out to New York to record Larry the Cable Guy and Tony Shalhoub for those songs was a lot of fun.

Dan Heaton: Oh, I can imagine getting to work with both of them and just when you’re going into a holiday update, how tricky is it to pull that off, like Jingle Cruise or these when you have to make a change knowing it’s going to be temporary and not be in for good?

Kevin Lively: So Jingle Cruise, and I would say the Cars Land stuff were completely different beasts just because the nature of what they were. Cars Land had only been there a couple of years. Jingle Cruise were going in there and again, touching a Walt attraction. So for Jingle Cruise, I put together the pitch deck in eight hours.

Again, I was a consultant at the time. I was given eight hours to put together a deck and a presentation. From that little basket of hours, I was able to present it and push it all the way up to top park leadership and get buy off. So working with that also, again, not trying to break the story but only add to it and it’s working with when I was a Skipper working the holidays, you have that sense of especially working on the literal holidays working on Christmas because the park’s open.

So those cast members, bless their hearts, give ’em the respect they deserve because they’re away from their families. And whether it’s in a fake jungle in Anaheim or in a real jungle in the middle of Africa, they’re still away from their families. So that was something we were able to pull off for Jingle In Florida is still doing it every year, which is awesome. So I wanted to make sure we weren’t going in there and it wasn’t going to be like the quest for Santa because that’s not it right now.

The Jungle Cruise already had holiday spiels that Skippers could bust out. It was very rare that they did and wasn’t a big deal. It was just little things you could pepper in throughout your spiel. But going through and updating everything year one, we were really pressed for time, which is why it was so minimalist.

Then year two after, it was during year one that we started getting submissions for more jokes. So it was great to see the skippers taking ownership and submitting material. That’s where we got amazing jokes like fleas navida being a species of bug or missile toe blowing your socks off. Those are fantastic hip heart jokes.

Whereas for the Cars Land stuff, it was something that I think the parks came to us and said that they wanted it. So it was bringing in all those guys from Pixar, Lasseter and Jay Ward, Roger Gould, everybody. We’re sitting in this room with, whenever I had a meeting with Pixar, they always had these rectangular notepads that their artists would just pull out a sharpie and just scribble like stuff I couldn’t pull off if I spent nine months concentrated artwork effort on. They’re just doodling these things as you’re naming them.

When we were doing the drive-in movie posters we’re like, let’s do scary movie Disney Halloween parodies and then Christmas parodies and it was just Jay Ward and I just going back and forth the craziest, Hocus Focus, Coolant Runnings, and things like that. I love things like that. Then just watching everybody from Pixar get just as excited. It was a fantastic collaboration.

Then when it came time for the music, working with Yon, who is doing some amazing work on spectacles and things like that, and then John Dennis for all the ma stuff, he has the connections to amazing talent in Nashville. Then working with, they brought in a writer, a guy who legit worked on a Grammy award-winning artist. They’re like, yeah, we’re going to bring him in and punch up the songs and stuff. And super cool guy. He made some cool suggestions, but he ended up going, you guys don’t need me.

We were just, between us and Roger from Pixar, we were coming up with all these really fun songs and Rafferty had already written the Jingle Cruise, the Jingle Bells one for Luigi’s during the original session because he had hoped to get a Chris overlay for that attraction. And so yeah, just being able to work with them and get everything out there. And then Dave Ancy was in charge of the decoration package that went into there and they just had so much fun. I love the zombie car coming out of the ground and what they called the grills turned into tombstones, things like that. Fantastic. They did an amazing job.

Dan Heaton: I think that leads well into my last question, which is you mentioned Kevin Rafferty. I’m just curious if there’s others, whether they were mentors or people that just inspired your work that you just really enjoyed working with or had a good connection with?

Kevin Lively: Yeah, I mentioned before Joey being like a brother to me, my work sister, if you will, Julian Woods, who works with the content team kind of protecting our original stories like SEA and Tiki Room and Haunted Mansion. Her fandom is Haunted Mansion, that’s her cup of tea. It’s like her Jungle Cruise to me, fantastic partners to work with, but also being able to work with people like Tom Morris. I would just pop into Tom Morris’s office when he was up there. We would just talk about his historical stuff. And it was awesome working with Tom Fitz on the Cars Land stuff for Paris was super great. He was really a supportive guy. I was consistently amazed every day.

One of my favorite people to work with before he moved to Florida was Daniel Joseph, who you had on your podcast. He’s one of my favorite human beings. He’s like a demented Mr. Wizard. I love him. But he also used to have a cubicle up on the second story of 1401. And whenever I needed a brain break, I would walk over there and he’s like, hey, you want to see something cool? And I always say, that is the stupidest question. Of course I want to see something cool.

So he would then pull out this thing he bought off the shelf from Amazon and then a laser. Then all of a sudden they’re like pixie dust. And it’s like, how do you do that? Working with these amazing artists who I would go and I think you had Ethan Reed on your show too. He’s sitting in a brainstorm with Ethan and he’s cranking out these drawings. I’ll be completely honest with you, and that is imposter syndrome is a real thing. And it was actually Ethan that broke me of that. We were in a meeting, we were brainstorming something and he’s drawing and I just remarked him. I’m like, it’s amazing that you have your iPad out and you’re cranking out this amazing artwork like nothing. He looks at me and he’s like, yeah, that’s how we feel about you and your puns.

And I was like, oh. Oh, you’re right. Okay. That is my ability. Awesome. Cool. So that’s when it kind of kicked in for me and it took years and years and years for me to actually feel like I deserve to be there because I was working with these amazing people, Lanny Smoot over in R & D. We would give him an impossible challenge and a week later he figured it out. That’s super cool.

It’s one thing I miss is those collaborations of just let’s throw out the crazy stupidest idea and then watch people execute it. My favorite thing still to this day was I have a small collection of Xerox copies of some of the artwork that people did based off of my stupid ideas, just things that would never end up in the park. But just seeing professional artists draw them, it’s mind blowing. I love it.

Dan Heaton: Well, that’s awesome. And you mentioned so many awesome people, some that I’ve talked to and some that are on the list for sure. I’m glad you got to have that experience. Well, this has been awesome, Kevin. I know you’ve also been creating some art on your own. You’re doing some freelance work, so I’d love to, if listeners want to check out what you’re doing or connect with you or anything, I’d love to give you a chance to say where they can go.

Kevin Lively: Yeah, so what I started doing is if you listen to Below the Frame, which is Matt Vogel’s podcast, he’s the performer behind Kermit and Big Bird and stuff. But he always asks, the Muppets is great, but what do you do besides that? Because I think anyone who works for a creative organization, you need to have that brain break where you have your own thing. So I started getting into wood carving and tikis and stuff like that, adventure art for some crazy reason I was drawn to that. I’m not sure why. Maybe it was my years in the jungle. So I started getting into that.

And it’s nice because I don’t have to worry about budgets or creative notes or anything like that. I just go out there and I have fun and I have a shop at skipperkevin.com if you want to check that out. I carve hippos and signs and things like that.

I’m also Skipper Kevin Art on Instagram, and I try to do monthly auctions for charity. I’ve done auctions for Toys for Tots, for primate sanctuaries, for Wild Tomorrow, things like that. It’s kind of my way of giving back and it’s nice to do nice things for other people. Also writing children’s books. My wife and I self-published our first kids book collaboration. I’ve written stuff for Disney Publishing, so I wrote Jungle Cruise Animals and It’s a Small World Shapes and worked on countless other books, but away from Disney self-published the Von Blowhole Miracle Shuteye Sleep Method, which is a bedtime book with a starring and old timey whale character that she created back when she was in college.

You can get signed copies of that on my website, skipperkevin.com, or it’s also selling on Amazon. And then I also have another collaboration book coming out with my buddy Tiki Tony, if you’re familiar in the Tiki community, I’m sure you’ve heard his name. He’s the coolest guy, most chill, relaxed. I call him like the Dr. Seuss of Tiki. He has amazing creations, but he and I are working on a children’s book. Hopefully we’ll have that out pretty soon.

Dan Heaton: Well, excellent. All that sounds awesome. And I’ll put links to all that in the show notes too, if everybody wants to check that out. Well, Kevin, this has been great. Thanks so much for talking to me. The stories were awesome and so many cool attractions.

Kevin Lively: Alright, anytime.