THE FIRST THING I did upon my return to WED was march upstairs to get a whiff of that wonderful fragrance of oil paint wafting from the artist’s offices as a welcome home. It was like comfort food for the nose. The second thing I did was learn the new Wang word processing system (the next step up from an electric typewriter before there was such a thing as a desktop computer) upon which I would be writing and printing the project scopes.

Waiting for me in my new office, located on the ground level in the main building, was a new word processor and a request for three new project scopes: one was for Maelstrom; another for a “freak storm–themed water park” being considered for Walt Disney World that was so early in development it didn’t even have a name; and a third for a dark-ride concept inspired by the Disney movie The Black Cauldron (an idea that soon went to pot).

On my first Monday back at the company, I was already behind in my work because one of the scopes was due on that upcoming Friday. To catch up, I worked long hours Monday through Thursday researching and writing, and then late into the night on Thursday-into-Friday to keep that little printer wheel on the Wang whizzing as sheets of paper emerged out the other side like a spooling roll of paper towels having convulsions. Each page had to then be torn from the long and serrated printout.

As luck would have it, I had just enough paper left to print the scope, which I had finally completed by 2:30 a.m. Good thing, too, because it was due in six hours. I laid the long printout, not yet torn into individual pages, across my office floor until it stretched out the door like a thin carpet runner and dropped to my knees to start tearing and sorting. That’s when I heard a strange jingling sound approaching my office. When I looked through my door, what should appear but the furry face of a perky puppy! Feature Animation was making Oliver & Company across the street and in my dead-tired delirium I thought one of their model mutts had escaped. But on the other end of the jingling leash appeared Chuck the chipper security guard. “Chopper’s making the rounds with me,” Chuck reassured me.

I was down on the floor because I was about to tear the printout into pages, but Chopper interpreted that as a friendly human getting down to his level to play. He reacted to that assumed invitation with great gusto and ran towards me directly over the entire length of my printout, all the while doing what excited puppies do on paper. There wasn’t a dry sheet in the house. Chopper turned my entire night’s work into a doggie Slip ’N Slide. While the puppy did his darnedest to clear my puddled pages with his high-speed, windshield-wiper tail, Chuck apologized and offered to help clean it up. But I sent them both on their merry way with a plan to let the pages dry and send them through the copy machine for a clean fresh copy. Good thing we didn’t have color copiers then.

Later that morning, when I reviewed the water park concept scope with show designer Richard Vaughn, I found out to my great surprise he had a link to my past. Richard, whom I worked with on the concept development of many fun projects over the years, was the son of bandleader Billy Vaughn, of whom my dad was a huge fan. While growing up I heard Billy Vaughn’s records a lot because Dad had them spinning on his phonograph every weekend throughout my wonder years. Dad’s favorite song of Billy’s was “Sail on Silvery Moon,” which was the tune Richard’s doorbell played when he was growing up (I’ll bet I still heard that tune more often than he did). One weekend when Billy Vaughn and His Orchestra were playing at Carnation Gardens at Disneyland, Richard invited me to go see them as his special guest. Hearing the music I grew up with being performed live sitting next to my colleague (who grew up with the actual guy who was performing the actual music) really added to the uniqueness of my already unique past-life-connects-with-my-Imagineering-life life!

Richard and I worked together on some of the experiences and visual gags for Typhoon Lagoon and Blizzard Beach, which makes me think of Randy Bright, the man, the mentor, who helped me take the creative division by storm.

Randy was the vice president of creative and the head of show writing at that time. He and I attended many of the same meetings while I was gathering information for the project scope documents. Randy liked the way I had written the descriptions of the projects in the scopes and noticed the way I squirmed restlessly in concept meetings because, as a scope gatherer/hunter (and not a creative contributor), it wasn’t my place to toss out ideas or add anything to the lively and most exciting early-concept discussions being enjoyed by “the creatives.”

Although I had enough pent-up energy and gumption to change the world, I’d sit there silently biting my tongue, just like the days in advertising when I had to lay out stuff I wanted to change but couldn’t. Randy would oftentimes read my body language, wink at me, and interrupt a brainstorm to ask for my thoughts about the subject, at which time everyone would cross their arms and stare at me. It was fantastic! Upon these most-welcome valve-releasing invitations I’d unleash a steady stream of ideas and opinions related to the topic, or toss out a different topic altogether (does it have to be a light bulb?) and sometimes they would stick! Then I’d read the room and shut up so as not to push my luck.

But to keep that creative torch lit, I started sending follow-up memos to Randy with more thoughts and ideas about the many goings-on going on—and as a result he started calling me into his office to join him in bouncing stuff around. “So, Kev,” he’d say, “I’ve been playing with this idea about some kind of a live show starring Mickey Mouse where he’s staged high up on Sleeping Beauty Castle fighting the forces of evil. What if we had some sort of an inflatable thing that would make Maleficent rise up out of the castle moat, where she turns into the giant dragon and blows real fire around?” Sometimes Randy’s crazy concepts became the real deal, and in this case, his “playing with an idea” ultimately became Fantasmic!

I became Marty’s left-hand man!

Randy, who also started his Disney career at Disneyland, on the Rivers of America as a sailor aboard the sailing ship Columbia, was a real showman. He had a lot of ideas a lot of the time and I loved those occasions when he’d call me in to help answer the question “What if…?” Sometimes he had specific requests for me such as naming a restaurant or shop in one of the parks; and other times he would ask me to help him “knock around” the story for something.

The first big story I ever helped Randy knock around in great detail was for the freak-storm-water-park concept, which started as a request from Walt Disney World for a separately gated water park because River Country at Fort Wilderness campground was extremely popular and not big enough to accommodate our guest demand. Where do you start when you start to ideate something new? You start with a story. “What if a typhoon swept in and turned a resort town upside-down?” pondered Randy. “Everything is topsy-turvy after the storm leaves and it’s all fun and funny. You know, what if the storm had a sense of humor? What are those things, those quick-read, visual-gag things the storm left behind?”

Kathy Mangum had transferred from the Disney Studio to Imagineering to become Randy’s associate producer by that time and she ended up being the real deal producer for Typhoon Lagoon. I was not in the creative division yet, but I got to work with Randy, Kathy, show designers Chris Runco and Richard Vaughn, and a few others who were developing the concepts for the water park. And boy, oh boy, was that fun! (Marty was right when he said, “You can’t make fun unless you’re having fun yourself!”) I even got to name everything in Typhoon Lagoon and became its official show writer, even though I wasn’t officially a show writer because there were strings attached.

In grand Disney tradition, if you sit in enough meetings with Disney artists, you’re bound to see yourself as they see you. This caricature is by Chris Runco.

I was still assigned full-time to produce project scopes under the project-management banner. Essentially, I was moonlighting for Disney creative. Working on many special projects for Randy and a few others on my own time as a show writer wannabe, I’d burn the midnight oil after work and on the weekends, paying my dues and coming up with a lot of stuff that was up to snuff, because it started to find its way into actual park projects. I was starting to contribute creatively, legitimately. I was starting to find my way.

After more than a year and a half of working on many show-writing and story-development efforts with and for Randy Bright to prove to him (and especially to myself) I could really do this, I got the nerve to point-blank ask him, in the same apprehensive, say-a-lot-very-quickly-without-taking-a-breath style Ralphie used when asking his old man for a Red Ryder BB gun in the movie A Christmas Story, if he thought I was good enough to, dare I suggest, transfer out of project management into the creative division as an official show writer. (I actually got to work with Jean Shepherd, one of my favorite storytellers, who wrote and narrated that movie, on the refresh of the Carousel of Progress at the Magic Kingdom in 1993.)

“I do and you are,” he responded with his warm and contagious smile. He then added, “As a matter of fact, I’ve been thinking a lot about that myself. Let’s make it happen.” At that very moment, I felt what Ralphie felt when he was surprised with a Red Ryder BB gun after being told by everyone, including his old man, he could never have one. After thanking Randy, I left his office in a shock-induced dizzy haze of “this really can’t be happening” and leaned against the wall in the hall to take a deep breath and let it all sink in.

Hallelujah! My ticket to creative!

My impossible dream to be in the creative division was coming true. Like Pinocchio, having proven myself to be brave, truthful, and unselfish, Randy pulled a few strings and I became a real show writer.

This was a big deal. Despite the odds and obstacles, I finally made it into creative, the very division in which I was told I’d never be.