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A Friday Visit with Jim Korkis: Tom K. Morris on Dreamfinder and Figment



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.

TOM K. MORRIS ON DREAMFINDER AND FIGMENT

By Jim Korkis

Starting at Disneyland in 1973 as a teenager selling balloons, Tom K. Morris worked for roughly forty-two years at Disney. In 1979, he moved into Imagineering and his first real assignment was working on the original Journey Into Imagination pavilion for Epcot Center.

(c) Disney

Morris was involved in dozens of both big and small projects throughout his career and recently retired. I talked with him in December 2017 and here are some secrets of Dreamfinder and Figment that he shared with me.

Imagineer Steve Kirk was the artist who came up with the original physical designs for Dreamfinder and Figment but it was Imagineer X. Atencio who did the final designs.

Morris had originally requested that actor Paul Frees, noted for his many vocal contributions to Disney park attractions (e.g. the auctioneer in Pirates, the Ghost Host in Haunted Mansion), be the voice of Dreamfinder, but was told that Frees was just too expensive for the budget for the project.

WED hired actor Chuck McCann, a showbiz veteran by the age of 17, who performed his nightclub act on popular television shows. He has had a career as a serious actor (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter in 1968), a comic actor (Silent Movie in 1976), an Oliver Hardy impersonator (along with Jim McGeorge in the Stan Laurel role), and as a voice artist in dozens of animated cartoons, including the original syndicated animated series Duck Tales (Duckworth and the Beagle Boys) and many more.

A man of many voices, McCann based the voice of Dreamfinder on actor Frank Morgan’s performance as the Wizard in MGM’s The Wizard of Oz (1939). However, during the recording of the original sessions, there was some dispute (which has never been clearly explained) and McCann left the project.

I asked Morris if he knew the reason and he claimed that he did not but that “there are still people alive today who do know.”

The Imagineers found a “sound alike” in Ron Schneider, who had been an understudy for actor Wally Boag at the Golden Horseshoe Revue in Disneyland. Schneider recorded the remaining lines for the character after intensively studying McCann’s already recorded tracks and was hired to be the first walk-around Dreamfinder character.

Morris also originally requested actor Robin Williams to do the voice of Figment. However, Williams had just finished doing the successful television show, Mork and Mindy, and was infinitely more expensive than Frees. When Morris told me the fees asked by Frees and Williams, they did not seem outrageous for that work, but Disney has always been “cost efficient.”

Actor John Byner was brought in to audition for Figment. At the time he was doing the voice of the anthropomorphic creature known as Gurgi in Disney’s animated feature The Black Cauldron (1985) and did an amusing, high-pitched nonsense, garbled voice. Imagineer Tony Baxter felt it didn’t quite sound childlike enough.

The first official ride through the original attraction of Journey Into Imagination was on December 4, 1982, for Kodak executives who loved it. Morris has a photo of all of them, along with countless other photos (some Polaroids) and slides, some taken backstage, which I hope will find their way into one of the books he is planning to write. He already has contracts with Disney Editions for The Architecture of Disneyland and The Alchemy of Imagineering, or perhaps the photos could be in another book of their own.

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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, Secret Stories of Mickey Mouse, 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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