I always visited Walt Disney World dressed like this (not really)
So, a good friend the other day reminded me of my showing Michael Nesmith's wonderful "Elephant Parts" to them on LaserDisc way back when. This reference kind of prompted me to write this particular blog entry. Much like "Elephant Parts", this post is going to contain a bunch of short sketches that have popped up in my (sometimes failing) memory that I wanted to get out there, but aren't big enough to really be their own thing.
Unlike "Elephant Parts", there will be no musical numbers (all of you should count yourselves lucky that you didn't have to suffer through my attempted singing at "The American Idol Experience" at WDW's Hollywood Studios)...
Trust me, it was even worse than what it looks like here...
Without further ado, here goes nothing!...
My First Job
Yes, I am going WAY back for a lot of these entries. One of the things I have been realizing while all of these memories have been flittering through what is left of my grey matter is just how many times The Great Dungeon Master In The Sky has rolled some incredibly high numbers for me (just to be followed by some incredibly low numbers). What my first job (which was a "low number") led to was a couple of wonderful opportunities ("high number") that left a long-lasting impression on me (as well as some great memories).
As soon as I was old enough to work, as well as cow-towing to my father's bitching at me, I went out and got a job at the local Jack In The Box. I was hired to do "Morning Maintenance", which is just as lousy as it sounds - cleaning the bathrooms, scrubbing the drive-thru, sanitizing garbage cans, etc. It wasn't much fun, didn't pay much of anything, and the fact that I had to get up so early every weekday morning to get to the job in the first place made everything about it seem "sub-optimal".
One of my older co-workers I discovered one day was reading through a Bobby Sox Softball rule book. I asked why she was reading it, and she told me that she was the manager of her daughter's team. Out of the blue, she asked me if I might be interested in being an umpire - her husband was the Umpire In Chief for the league, and she knew he was having a lot of difficulty in finding enough umps for all of their league games (it was also a paying gig). I said "sure!", and she handed me the rule book. I memorized the rule book, and started umpiring in the afternoons after school, as well as on Saturdays.
I found out, or I should say that I was told, I was a really good umpire. The coaches & managers seemed to appreciate me, the players put up with me yelling "Strike" or "Out" at them (when appropriate), and the Umpire In Chief started scheduling me for as many games as I was willing to do.
I enjoyed the heck out of umpiring. I also noticed that it paid significantly more than what I was making at Jack In The Box. So, after a few weeks of doing both, I quit my job at Jack In The Box (which pissed off my dad greatly - mission accomplished!). As the season wore on toward the league's playoffs, the Umpire In Chief asked me if I might be interested in umpiring at the District Tournament where each of the area leagues' All-Star Teams would play each other for a chance to go to the National Tournament in Buena Park, CA. I told him I was very interested.
Umpiring at the District Tournament exposed me to larger crowds, better softball, and umpires from other leagues who I could tell didn't know the rules as well as I did. It was fun & exciting and, just when I thought the experience was over, the Tournament Director came over and asked me if I might be interested in going to the National Tournament to umpire. Since the All-Star teams from the league I umpired for were both good enough to win at District, and I could catch a ride with (and stay with) them, I said "absolutely!"
Within a few months I went from scrubbing bathrooms and drive-thrus for little money, to (seemingly) excelling at umpiring enough to be invited to go to the organization's National Tournament in my first year (for more money)...what awesome luck! - the "good" umpiring gig & tournament opportunities never would have happened if I hadn't taken the crappy Jack In The Box job in the first place!
The National Tournament introduced me to some great umpires, and the veterans there seemed to adopt me quickly when they realized that I knew what I was doing. They invited me to breakfasts, dinners, and a couple of them even invited me to go to Disneyland with them (Buena Park isn't very far away, you know)!
I had such a good time that I would come back and umpire for several more years...It is always great when work doesn't feel like "work"...
My Gaming Roots
For whatever reason, as a kid I always loved board games. I had a huge collection of them, and I used to experiment with them making up new games from the pieces & rules of several different games. Things got difficult when I would have to put all of the pieces in their appropriate game boxes after each play session.
I was also fascinated by pinball machines. Our family would vacation at a place called Pine Acres, just outside of Jackson, CA, which had a snack bar with several pinball machines in it. Every afternoon my brother and I would get a dollar each to go and play pinball with. For me, this was the my favorite time of day during those summer vacations.
When Pong came into the world, I was mesmerized (sorry, I was too young to think too much about Space War at the time). As new generations of those early video games would come into the local mall's arcade, I would become even more enchanted as the games being invented were, bit-by-bit, becoming more entertaining & complex.
Due to some high IQ test scores (which we all know had to be some kind of error), I was placed in my Junior High School's "Extended Learning" program. This mainly consisted of we "smart people" having an open period for "advanced studies" (aka "screwing around"), as well as going on several cool field trips. One of them was to Atari's HQ where we got a tour of all of the arcade games they were working on (as well as getting a couple of hours to play games after the tour).
I knew that somehow, someway, I just had to be part of the world where video & computer games were made! My father, ever the supporting soul, would tell me "You can't play games for a living!"...given where I ended up for a very large portion of my "career", his notion makes me laugh greatly (then and now)!
"The Disneyland Adventure" (that never was)
This will be the last one for today... (stop cheering)
During my time at Electronic Arts, I had many, many weird / insane ideas for games / software. Anyone who has ever worked near me for even a little while probably has memories, or maybe scars, from some of the ideas I spewed from time-to-time.
One of these was for a Disney product that my cohorts & I dubbed "The Disneyland Adventure" (this idea was less insane than the others...I actually got a few colleagues to believe in this vision). I am absolutely not going to go into detail about what the product actually was, because it is still an awesome idea that I am not going to give away for free on my way out!
In any case, the co-curator of this idea had a few hooks at Disney, and he managed (to my amazement - then and now) to schedule us a meeting with Roy Disney during the very early days of the Eisner / Wells regime. I can't express how excited I was for just the chance to sit across the table from "Walt's Nephew" and pitch this idea. I was reasonably confident that, even if this idea were not signed outright, it would spawn more discussion that would have (hopefully) led to my little team of Mouskateers all getting hired by Disney. We quickly scheduled a trip to LA, and excitedly traveled to our meeting.
Sadly, the scheduled meeting would never take place - Roy's plans to meet with us had been intercepted by the then head of Disney Interactive. He ended up taking the meeting instead of Roy.
During our "discussion" (in quotes because I don't think he really listened to a single word we had to say), he said some of the most moronic things I've ever heard a gaming executive say about games / software and where the industry was going (he was fired six months later). Needless to say, he dismissed our idea out-of-hand, and our tiny group flew home extremely dejected.
The worst part of all of this for me is, given the way that technology has evolved, this initial software idea could have been the start of a perennial money-maker for Disney that, these days, would have needed to be staffed by a couple of hundred people making updates to it just to make sure the content stayed fresh, relevant, and entertaining...(I wonder if my other Mouskateers feel this way too)...
While I did eventually go work for Disney for one year (which was by far the worst career decision I ever made and will be the subject of a future entry), this was the only opportunity I feel I ever had to really do something for / with Disney that I really wanted to do.
High numbers & low numbers...