Interview With a Legend: X. Atencio
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LP: So do you have any advice to some one who wants to follow in your footsteps?

X.: Well, I think it’s the Disney mystique that attracts them. I talk to young kids, like yourself, who always wanted to work for Disney. I run into that quite frequently. They always ask how do I get a job there? Animation is different now than when I was in animation. I’m not sure I have an answer. I think I peaked at the wrong time. I hear about the salaries they’re getting...

LP: Yeah. Dreamworks came along and the salaries doubled.

X.: Yeah. Now the market is saturated, and I understand they’re pulling back.

I don’t know what I would say to somebody who wants to be an imagineer. In my case-being a writer-I fell into it. It’s a talent I didn’t realize I had in myself. Walt put the finger on me and said go and do it. I went and did it and it was one of the greatest things that ever happened to me.

Having two careers at Disney, as an animator and as a writer, which one did I enjoy most? I don’t know. I think the writing has done the most for me. I see the things that I created and realize it’s going to go on for years and years and years. I hear someone singing A Pirate’s Life For Me or Grim Grinning Ghosts and I can say, I did that. It’s great.

LP: I also remember you worked on Mary Poppins. What did you do on that? It’s one of my all-time favorite movies.

X.: Bill Justice and I were working together on stop motion films. Walt assigned us to do the scene tidying up the nursery. Bill was real good on stop motion stuff; he had done the toy sequence in Babes in Toyland. We used some of the toys we had from Babes in Toyland, the soldiers for instance. The soldiers marching into the toy box in Mary Poppins were from Babes.

Bill was very good at this stop motion stuff, I didn’t have the patience for it myself. But he had all the patience in the world. You had to. You moved this piece over, move that one, move that one, click.

LP: How is that different from drawing. A different design for every frame.

X.: Well in drawing if you made a mistake you could erase it. But in stop motion it was more involved. We did Noah’s Ark.... moving all the animals in there. We did it on a piece of glass with the camera looking up from below. We had to move each piece over and over. We had a system. We started with the top left, moved them all, and then click. But then something happens, and you forget, did we move that one? If we didn’t remember, we had to start all over again. It took a lot of concentration. A lot of patience.

LP: Do you continue drawing?

X.: I do it for my grandkids. I draw them birthday cards. In fact I was working on one for my new grandchild. My grandkids over five don’t get one though. I have run out of ideas. I find my hand is getting a little shaky too. I’ll be 80 years old next month. I’m running out of gas.

LP: You said you visit the Studios every few months. Do you go to Disneyland at all?

X.: We do take our annual family Christmas trip down there. Last week we were down for the collectors convention. Tim O’Day sat at our table. He’s involved with the art collectibles for Disney, he wanted to know if I’d be interested in going to Florida in March for another convention. In March, yes.

LP: Speaking of hot and humid weather, I just spent the last week in New York and saw The Lion King.

X.: I saw that. I took my two grandkids, my son, and his wife. It was a hell of a good show. Fantastic. The costumes, including a big elephant rolling down the aisle, scared me good. Are they going to put that on tour?

LP: Yeah. I think they have two traveling companies. They had to figure out some way to translate the stage design and special elements before they could take it on the road. I’m looking forward to seeing how they do that. The New Amsterdam stage was built especially for the show elements. There are a couple great books, including one of the reconstruction of the theatre, you might want to read.

X.: That was one great scene with the stampede. I thought that was well done.

LP: It’s the most emotional moment in the film. The father dies and there is Simba left alone.

Back to Disneyland, I was at the Haunted Mansion 30th Anniversary event. Did you know that they were going to have the Grim Grinning Ghosts out on stage? Did you know they were going to put on a show like that?

X.: No. I had no idea what was going to go on. I think they did a good show that night.

LP: I’ve talked with many friends who hope they do more shows like that. I think it’s great to bring back the people who worked on the attractions and give them a chance to talk about their craft.

X.: It really surprises me how interested people are in talking to us old dinosaurs. Like that night, we were in the Haunted Mansion until 2 o’clock in the morning greeting people as they came in. We had to shake hands with everybody that came in. I said, if one more load comes out of that elevator I’ll die.

LP: Well, Marc and Alice Davis got off easy. They went and sat in the banquet scene.

X.: My poor wife and Buddy Baker’s wife were sitting over at Club 33. They thought we’d be back by 12:30 or 1AM at the latest. At 2 o’clock we still weren’t there.

LP: What was your first involvement with the Haunted Mansion. Who told you to go ahead and write the script?

X.: Well I guess it was Dick Irvine and Marty Sklar. They knew I had done Pirates, so they wanted me to move onto the next assignment. And there again, Claude Coats and Marc Davis had worked out the continuity of the ride, and everything like that, as they did on Pirates. My job was to figure out what was going to be said in it.

As opposed to the Pirates, where I had to use a pirate’s dialogue, this was just straight narration. I had to try and get it in a kind of spooky frame of mind, but not too spooky. I hired Paul Frees to do the narration, he was a great voice.

LP: At the Haunted Mansion event, I got the impression that Paul Frees had done a lot of improvisation.

X.: He was a great talent. One take and that’s all it took for Paul. He’d come up with things that you can’t write. He’d get the flavor of it. But he didn’t do as much of that with Haunted Mansion as he did in Pirates. There were other things he worked on. Like he was Professor Von Drake. Paul Frees did a lot with that.