In the mid-1970s, Michelle Pfeiffer played Alice from Alice in Wonderland, performing in the Disneyland Main Street Electrical Parade.
Chief creative officer at Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios John Lasseter was a Jungle Cruise captain in 1977 and 1978. He is known to recount his favorite pun from the tour: “As the boat approaches the natives with shrunken heads, the guide says, ‘They’re doing their famous I-can’t-find-a-bathroom dance.’ Pause. ‘That’s why they’re called head hunters.’ ”
Kevin Costner, another Jungle Cruise skipper, met his first wife, Cindy, at work in the Anaheim park. Cindy signed autographs and posed for photographs as Snow White while Kevin narrated the cruise.
Starting in 1955, at a newly opened Disneyland, Steve Martin sold guidebooks and twirled lassos in Frontierland and demonstrated magic tricks and balloon animal-making for the following three years at the old Merlin’s Magic Shop in Fantasyland. “I knew every nook and cranny of the shop,” he has said.
In 1980, Desperate Housewives creator Marc Cherry portrayed Stromboli, a villain from 1940’s Disney animated film Pinocchio, in the Flights of Fantasy Parade.
Dick Cook, former chairman at Walt Disney Studios, got his start in the company as a monorail and steam locomotive ride operator at Disneyland in 1970.
Teri Garr‘s first role was playing “the Statue of Liberty on roller skates in Show Me America,” a 1970 summer spectacular. Said Garr, “I carried a torch that spewed confetti or Ping-Pong balls.”
