A Friday Visit with Jim Korkis: The Bugs of It’s Tough to be a Bug
By Dave Shute
Welcome back to Fridays with Jim Korkis! Jim, the dean of Disney historians, writes about Walt Disney World history every Friday on yourfirstvisit.net.
THE BUGS OF IT’S TOUGH TO BE A BUG AT DISNEY’S ANIMAL KINGDOM
By Jim Korkis
Bugs make up nearly ninety percent of what it referred to as the “animal kingdom” so it seemed natural to include them in some way in Disney’s Animal Kingdom. After many other suggestions, it was decided to do a show inside The Tree of Life.
Then-CEO Michael Eisner himself told the Imagineers to check out the newest Pixar animated feature film that was currently in production, A Bug’s Life, that was scheduled to be released in November 1998.
The animated film was released after the attraction It’s Tough to be a Bug, “a creepy, crawly bug-eyed adventure” opened a full seven months earlier. This made It’s Tough to be a Bug one of the handful of Disney theme park attractions based on a film to open before the film it is based on. The very first was Sleeping Beauty Castle at Disneyland. It opened in 1955 but the film it references was not released until 1959.
The final concept of It’s Tough to be a Bug was that guests would wander through the roots of the tree into a theater space that had been hollowed-out by the bugs and seats approximately 430 guests. Guests then don “bug-eye” spectacles in order to see in three-dimensions the world through the eyes (or multiple eyes) of their insect hosts.
Senior principal production designer Zsolt Hormay, who led an international team of sculptors to carve the animals on the exterior trunk of The Tree of Life, was also in charge of the bugs in the queue line for the attraction. “I get calls all the time,” said Zsolt, “Any leeches? No leeches! Any cockroaches? No cockroaches!”
The Imagineers used Flik the ant and Hopper the grasshopper from the film as key figures in the attraction, but also added a Acorn Weevil (The Termite-ator), Chili, a quill throwing Chilean tarantula, Rolly, the dung beetle and the stinkbug Claire de Room to accompany a cast of hundreds of butterflies, beetles, ladybugs, hornets, spiders and larvae.
Some of the bugs appear on film. Some appear as elaborate audio-animatronics characters. Some only exist as puffs of air and rollers built into the theater seats. The bug-swatter effect is created by fifty high-speed fans hidden thirty feet overhead in the rockwork folds of the theater.
When the acid-spraying termite apparently squirts guests in their face, the harmless water spray comes from the seat in front of you. Imagineers chose an industrial smell officially labeled “earthy” for the stinkbug’s distinctive effect.
“It was a matter of getting our special effects to match the bugs,” said show writer Kevin Rafferty. “All the acts we feature in the show are based on what they do in nature. There really are acid-spraying termites and quill-throwing tarantulas.”
At the time, Hopper was the most sophisticated and advanced audio-animatronics characters that Imagineering ever created, and can perform a wide array of movements that make him as lifelike as possible.
Actor Dave Foley recreates the voice of Flik as he did in the original film. The voice of Hopper is not Kevin Spacey as it was in the film, but rather Andrew Stanton, who was co-director of the original film.
Cheech Marin does the voice of Chili. French Stewart the voice of the “Termite-ator”, Tom Kenny the voices of the Dung Beetle Brothers and Jason Alexander as the voice of Weevil Kneevil. Corey Burton is the announcer and the voice of various bugs.
P.T. Flea, voiced by John Ratzenberger as he was in the actual film, pops in briefly for one line, because Ratzenberger is considered “Pixar’s Good Luck Charm,” having voiced a character in every Pixar film. He is the voice of the villain Underminer in the new Incredibles 2.
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Thanks, Jim! And come back next Friday for more from Jim Korkis!
In the meantime, check out his books, including his latest, More Secret Stories of Disneyland, and his Secret Stories of Walt Disney World: Things You Never You Never Knew
, which reprints much material first written for this site, all published by Theme Park Press.
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