By BRODIE H. BROCKIE
While every skipper on the Jungle Cruise pretends to pilot their boat in different rivers all around the globe, we recently spoke with one skipper who really did host the attraction on two opposite sides of the planet.

Jim Smith worked at the Jungle Cruise in Tokyo Disneyland during the summers from 1990 to 1992, then later worked part time at the Jungle Cruise in Walt Disney World from 1995 to 1998.

In the following interview, conducted via e-mail, Jim talks about his time as a cast member in Tokyo,compares his experience on two very similar attractions in two very different parks, tells us about jokes he added to the Tokyo spiel, and how he learned to love lady skippers.

BRODIE BROCKIE: Can you tell me about how you wound up working at Tokyo Disneyland?

JIM SMITH: My folks were missionaries in Japan. This is important because only with a "dependent" status visa could I be eligible to work there as a US citizen. After ninth grade in the US, we returned to Japan and moved into a place that happened to be about 12 minutes walking from Tokyo Disneyland (TDL). My first job was the only job you could have under 18 years old - Guest Control for the Electrical Parade. It was only six hours a week, but I got up to 20 during the summer. That got my foot in the door.

BB: Did you seek out your position as a Jungle Cruise skipper or was it assigned to you?

JS: I knew I wanted to be a Jungle Skipper the day I started at TDL. Since I couldn't until I turned 18 (and with a recommendation/permission from my High School Principle), I asked for a copy of the spiel about 6 months before my birthday. Chinese characters used in Japanese are very difficult to read, and a good chunk of that time, I was deciphering the script into phonetics. Since I wasn't status'd there, I couldn't get an official copy, so they made me a photocopy, which I kept for years and finally lost.

BB: From what little I know of the Tokyo attraction, I gather it's physically quite similar to the version in Florida. Is that correct? Are there any different scenes, animals, effects, or other differences?

JS: Ashamedly, and never mind the fact that I've worked both thousands of trips, I don't remember. I seem to recall that the tiger in the ruins at TDL had green eyes and that the one in Florida had orange/red eyes. Or was that vice versa? That could have changed by now. The boats were a bit different but much closer to each other than Disneyland's. Also, we ran clockwise rather than counter clockwise in Florida. The entryway to the Jungle Cruise at TDL shares a building with the Western River Railroad. A bit of a theming difference, but it worked well.

BB: Were the boats in Tokyo the classic white boats with the colorful striped canopies or the all earth tone versions we see in the US parks today?

JS: When I was there, they were the classic tan fiberglass boats with a huge rubber rudder (that we had to take off if we needed to tow). Canopies were white with green, red, or blue stripes. We had 13 boats and the names were all a girls name preceded by a river name with the same first letter (ie: Sankuru Sadie, Irrawaddy Irma, etc). The exception was Orinoco Ida.

BB: The Tokyo Jungle Cruise offers the attraction in two different languages, right? How is that handled? Are there different queues for English and Japanese? Are the skippers all bilingual and prepared to perform either version*?

JS: At TDL, I was actually prohibited from doing the spiel in English. It is a Japanese-only theme park and despite my pleadings and references to precedent (ie: bilingual headsets in the back row of some of the 'show' attractions), it always fell on deaf ears. That being said, in the three Summers I worked the ride, I only had one crew that was all non-Japanese speaking. But they were Chinese and they didn't care about anything I said, so I just pointed out animals and called them by their English name. "LOOK! HIPPO!" "Ooooo... HEEEPO!" I still got a standing O after that cruise, and I don't think anyone, especially me, knew why.

BB: A lot jokes on the Jungle Cruise are puns or other kinds of wordplay. Is the Japanese script just a straight translation of the English script? Are there completely different jokes for some areas?

JS: Boy, that's a real tough one. Most was a translation, but they omitted most word play and came up with their own. For instance, "The butterflies can grow with a wingspan between 12 inches and a whopping one foot" could have been "...between 100 cm and a whopping 1 meter". There was one around Chief Namee (also known as Head Salesman, Sam). He had a quota that he had to meet or else he'd be fired. The Japanese word for getting fired is similar to being beHEADed (Kubi).

I came up with one that I think some still use out there. Where the gorilla and the alligator are playing, it's a pretty bland script. Rock paper and scissors is real popular in Japan, so they say: "Look, there's an alligator and a gorilla playing rock paper and scissors. See, the gator with his mouth is scissors, and the gorilla with his fist is rock. Looks like the gorilla wins!" I had a problem with that because the gorilla always wins and they keep playing. So I had to throw in paper some how. "Pa" is paper in the Japanese version of RPS, and it's the same word they use for crazy. So in my version, the gorilla is rock, the alligator is scissors, and the skipper is just "pa" crazy. So no matter how often you ride, it's always a tie.

BB: While some jokes are universal, it seems like different cultures can have pretty different senses of humor. Can you think of any ways that affected the script for the Tokyo attraction?

JS: That was one example of Walt Disney's brilliance. He intended with the original Disneyland to transform folks out of their every day culture and take them into a surreal culture where there was a disconnect from the "real world". Though some of the jokes were different, the feel of the ride was almost the same. Culturally, we were in the Amazon, the Nile, and the Irrawaddy - but with jokes and humor a-plenty.

BB: What are some of the other ways working in the Japanese park was different from the American counterpart?

JS: At the time I was at Tokyo Disneyland, they were still relatively new. I think it was their 7th year of operation and they were still very much in tune to Walt Disney's philosophy and 1960's way of doing things. Some ways that was great. In others that was bad. It was good in that we strove to ensure SCSE - Safety Courtesy Show and Efficiency. All four of those aspects were related to each other and didn't independently stand on their own. For example, it was a courtesy to run the ride efficiently to reduce wait time. Show was important and if an animation wasn't working right, they'd 101 it (shut it down) until the problem was either removed or fixed. Safety was always a concern. I think only one guest ever fell in the water. As for the bad, as employees, we had no park privileges. I had to pony up my own money for an annual pass to go to the park on my day off.

BB: No park privileges? That's too bad! Besides the pride associated with working in a Disney park, were there any other perks? Discounts? Anything?

JS: We got a blanket 20% off anything in the company store. The discount didn't work in the park, but if we saw something we wanted in the park, we could write down the UPC number and order it through the store for a discount.

BB: Any particularly fun or funny stories about your experiences as a skipper in Tokyo?

JS: One time, working Guest Control for the ride (outside 'barker' announcing the ride), I had another cast member run up to me telling me that they needed me to translate for a guest. When I got to the guest, the guest spoke only Chinese. White folk here in the US assume that I speak Chinese because I grew up in Japan, but that was the first time that a Japanese person grabbed me to try and speak Chinese to a guest! Another interesting time, and one of the ONLY times we went 101 for weather was in the middle of a typhoon. The winds were bellowing and the rain was horrible, but there were still about 4 of us working. I think there were only 7,000 guests in the park for most of the day with a total attendance not topping 10,000. But the ride never the less opened with four crew and like two boats 30 minutes before the park closed! Another time being at Guest Control, and this really worked great at night, I would stand as still as I could trying to be a statue. When some cute girls would walk up to me thinking I was a statue, I'd move and spook them. One couple of girls screamed all the way to the bathroom about 100 yards from me. Almost got in trouble for that one. It was freakin' funny though!

Often, due to backup at unloading or for any other assorted reason, we would have to dispatch empty. When there were 12 boats on the water, and if everyone's timing was right on, a boat coming up on Schweitzer Falls always met a boat on the back side of water. Sometimes I would duck behind the edge of the boat and pop up like a Haunted Mansion ghost, or lay over the edge of the railing like I was skewered by an arrow. Then, sometimes, I would be reciting the spiel to my invisible guests, and other times, I would act like I was looking for them. In our REALLY BAD days, we would sometimes open fire on the other boat. OK. Bad show, but it was funny.

The most enjoyable time that I had was my last day. Nothing brings a tear to your eye like seeing folks lining up at that dock waiting for YOUR boat. I did a "J" that day. "J" stood for "Justice" - a punishment for being late to work or for some other infraction. It meant you were on the boat for your whole shift and didn't get off. You pulled the boat out and you took the boat back in. I had one 10 minute break the whole day - and that was on the boat for one trip by myself eating a sack lunch in a way that no guest saw me in an 'off time' on stage.

BB: How about from your time in Florida?

JS: My time in Florida was fun. I was actually status'd in the reservation center and I would work the Jungle for whatever OT I could get. I think that the operation in Florida was a lot more 'free spirited' in some ways, and not really as structured as an environment. At TDL, I felt like I was in the Marines. At WDW, I felt like I was in a marshmallow factory. Lots of part-timers at WDW, so there was not near the commitment on the part of the cast members. Most were only there for 6 months at a time. Some of the ad-libs were hilarious, but some got so out of control that we had a manager reel us back into no absolutely no ad-libbing off the script (there were some ad-libs written into the script, if that's not an oxymoron). The political correctness at WDW sometimes got a bit annoying. And I wasn't a big fan of women skippers (being really old school). But then I realized that some of them were really cute and I didn't mind them so much any more.

BB: I take it there were no female skippers in Tokyo then?

JS: Not when I was there. That has since changed.

BB: Do you have a favorite of the two version of The Jungle Cruise in which you worked? And, if so, what are the reasons?

JS: In general, I liked working at Walt Disney World more because they were a lot more relaxed and you had a lot more freedom. But in tradition, purity, and professionalism, Tokyo Disneyland was a better overall experience.

BB: What are some of examples of the relative strictness of the TDL management vs. WDW?

JS: Training was probably the biggest example. We had a very strict training regiment to the tune of knowing how many fire extinguishers there were in the queue and where they were. They were pretty strict on ticketing, too. When I worked there, it was still an "E" ticket ride. Someone actually gave me an E ticket from Disneyland and my boss wouldn't let me take it. In that case, rules seemed to supercede customer service. What a bummer! I should have snuck them in and kept the ticket! By the way, they kept using tickets until the late 1990's.

*Whoops. I was thinking of the Jungle Cruise in Hong Kong Disneyland, which is available in three languages.