Disney Needs Puppeteers in CA

[jeremyactor]

When i was a kid, i went up to mikey mouse & i tapped him on the back...& he snuffed me....so me being the kid i was ,i pinched him on the butt .well minney saw what i did ,cuz she was there too...learning from his mistake ,she quickly came over to pat me on the haed...see,women are smarter.

I got a chance to shadow the Playhouse Disney show in WDW in Orlando, and all of them told me that Disney has the greatest puppeteer training program they'd ever come across. So yes, they do train their puppeteers a certain way.

Some of them had miles of experience, some had none. Disney hires 80% of its positions from within (though most of that is managerial). It builds lots of loyalty to the company, and makes sure that their cast members do not have a poor attitude about their workplace. They are VERY VERY selective in their auditions, sometimes selecting 1 or 2 out of hundreds of people who audition. They can be downright cruel - one of my friends auditioned to be Alice, and she got to the final stage of the audition and they said "you don't have a good face." Not "you don't have what we're looking for", not "you don't look enough like Alice" - but "You don't have a good face." That's their perrogative, and as crumby as it may seem from the outside, the puppeteers I got to watch both from backstage and from the audience were unbelievably amazing. So they're doing something right.

Jeremy

 

[Phillip]

fishbone,

Please do not use inappropriate language on our forum. Check out the rules for more info.

http://forum.muppetcentral.com/announcement.php?f=2#language

Thanks for your cooperation.

 

[fishbone]

i guess theres a big difference between cali & florida.

 

[Fozzie Bear]

Just working at the Disney Store is enough to make me NOT want to work for them at WDW or otherwise.

I almost went down to Florida's WDW to do puppetry there once, but it would have meant a $6 pay cut and the cost of moving. So, heck no--I didn't go.

 

[jeremyactor]

Just working at the Disney Store is enough to make me NOT want to work for them at WDW or otherwise.

I almost went down to Florida's WDW to do puppetry there once, but it would have meant a $6 pay cut and the cost of moving. So, heck no--I didn't go.

Working at WDW is amazing - I've never been treated better by a management team. I can't speak for the Disney Store, but I can't wait to return to Florida in January to work at WDW for good!

Jeremy

 

[Fozzie Bear]

Hmmm...maybe it was only in the stores that they suppressed our creative abiilities. They took away from us the process of setting up product displays in-store and made us begin doing things in a more graphed way to match other stores. We couldn't do vignettes anymore. Just a lot of it was held back on us.

Not in the beginning, the first 2 years were great, the last 2.5 years made me feel like I was working at a Dollar General store.