John Lasseter formed Pixar Animation with Steve Jobs. He directed the first fully computer-generated movie, Toy Story, as well as A Bugs Life, Toy Story 2, and Cars, as well as exectuive producing the rest of Pixar's feature films. In 2006, Disney aquired Pixar and named Lasseter Chief Creative Officer of Walt Disney Feature Animation and had him begin to serve as creative consultant to Walt Disney Imagineering.
Before all of that, though, he was a Jungle Cruise skipper...
 John Lasseter returns to his old job as a skipper on the Jungle Cruise as part of Disneyland's 50th anniverary celebration on May 5, 2005. |
MARCI: Let's talk a bit about Disneyland. I love Disneyland. I read that you used to work there?
JOHN: Yes. When I was going to college, I worked for a summer as a ride operator on the Jungle Cruise. People who know me canıt believe this, but I was shy once.
MARCI: I haven't known you that long, but itıs hard to imagine you being shy.
JOHN: And I actually credit the Jungle Cruise with bringing me out of my shell. I love that ride. I loved being a ride operator because you are part of the ride. Anybody who has ridden on that, you know that the skipper, he has all of these bad jokes. And trust me, they are really bad jokes. You know, you show people the "back side of water" and so on... But one of the things that I loved was that you have this captive audience and I honed my comic sense of timing because of being on this ride and doing the jokes over and over, and really trying to make the audience laugh. And I loved it!
MARCI: What's your favorite attraction at Disneyland?
JOHN: Jungle Cruise, naturally.
"I couldn't think of anything better than working at Disneyland during the summer breaks from Cal Arts. At first I was a sweeper in Tomorrowland the summer that Space Mountain opened [1977], and then I transferred to be a ride operator on the Jungle Cruise ride. No one really believes this, but the Jungle Cruise taught me a lot of what I know about comedy and comic timing.
"Something just clicked - the combination of having your captive audience in the boat and this script of corny jokes. Soon I learned that the worse the puns and jokes, the funnier they could be, if you knew how to deliver them."
