An Interview With Randy Thornton
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LP: By the way, your six-disk set certainly accomplishes that 100 percent, as I�m sure you know.

Randy Thorton: Thanks.

LP: You decided to put the entire Submarine Voyage on the Disneyland CD. Can you talk about that at all?

Randy Thorton: Well, it�s really weird because, as I said, these things aren�t designed to be on a record or have a listening experience. A perfect example � for years, I tried to get Rio del Tiempo out and I have all the tracks and everything, but when I tried to make it a listening experience outside of the little minute loops that are there, I couldn�t make it work. I mean, the edit sounded funny and timings were different. In one case, they even change keys. It was just a mess, and I just bypassed it and went around it.

Sometimes � well, when I have an idea of what I would like to put on the album or a new attraction or something that�s been overlooked, I�ll go to Imagineering and talk to them and see what it is they would like to represent their attraction. I mean, these are the guys that design the thing and spill their blood over it and get the music recording and hire the music and decide what the thing is going to be. They need to have a say in how that attraction�s going to be represented musically on the album.

So I would go to them and ask them what elements they would like, and sometimes we�ll work with the composer and have them create a track � like Richard Bellis created the new �Reflections of China� suite that�s on the official album for me. Years ago, for the California Adventure album, Bruce Broughton did the �Seasons of the Vine� medley for me.

LP: I loved that.

Randy Thorton: And we try and work with the composer as much as we can. It all depends on their schedules. But more often than not, I�m given all the music cues or the cues that they think best represents the attraction, and for the case of �Submarine Voyage� at Disneyland, as well as �Spaceship Earth,� I was given all the music cues to link them together. Now, again, these are all little one-minute clips because they just completely � we go through the attractions in a linear fashion.

I discovered this when I first did the Haunted Mansion, but when somebody�s in the stretching room, somebody else is in the graveyard sequence. All these things happen at the same time, and all the clips are about a minute long. And you just sort of meander through it as they�re repeating themselves over and over and over again.

So the transfer time to do Haunted Mansion, for example, really only took a minute except it was like 80 tracks wide. The music is one track, and the vocal is one track, and when you�re going through the graveyard sequence, just about everybody � well, Thurl Ravenscroft and the other singing busts � those are two tracks. But every other character is on a separate track because it�s coming out of a separate speaker.

So you have to combine all of these things and build them to create a listening experience. As I said, this isn�t even structured the way a record would be recorded. So I have to manipulate these things to create more of a listening experience through it. And when I get an opportunity for something that�s really melodic or something that has that trigger that�ll send you back in your imagination � granted, I prefer songs and things that are more moving, like �Yo Ho� or �Grim Grinning Ghosts� or things like that, but when you have a terrific score by Thomas Newman for the Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage, and it actually does pull you through, it�s an important thing to include.

I grew up before there were videotapes. The only way I could relive movies is through soundtracks, which is why I have such a fascination with them. And I view the same things with the official albums as well. There are no songs in the Submarine Voyage at Disneyland, but that score really tells a story, and once you�ve been on the attraction, you fill in the pieces yourself. So that was a real neat thing to include finally as well too.

So yeah, there were only two new tracks on Disneyland, but I�ve built these things up from a single disk in 1990 to now both of them are two-disk sets. I had one disk to put all the parks at one point. It was just insane. But now, I�ve been able to build it out where we have two CDs per park, and as things change, and as things evolve, tracks will be removed and new ones will be going on there.

I could probably go into the Finding Nemo track and actually edit that down to a smaller cue to make room for a new attraction that would be coming in.