from 2008
BILL ROGERS
talks about his start with Disney

by Scott Wolf

"Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls..." is a phrase that Bill Rogers has repeated hundreds of thousands of times. Succeeding his hero, Jack Wagner, as the "voice of Disneyland," since 1991, Bill is the one who welcomes you to Disneyland, lets you know the fireworks are about to begin, that the latest parade has just stepped off, or that "Disneyland has now concluded its normal operating day." He literally records hundreds of new announcements every month, from park announcements to private events, never heard by the public.  It gives me great pleasure to say, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, please welcome Bill Rogers!

Scott Wolf: Were you a Disney fan when you were growing up?

Bill Rogers: Yes. I grew up, literally, watching Disneyland (the TV series). I was living in South Dakota but my grandmother and grandfather lived (in California) just off of Crenshaw and Wilshire, so in 1955 I ended up with a Disney dollar from Bank of America. In those days, the bank on Main Street was Bank of America’s bank, the Disneyland branch, and in the very, very early days of the park, they actually issued Disney Bank of America collectible dollars that they printed up just for the occasion and I think the promotion ran from ’55 to ’57.

SW: When did you visit Disneyland for the first time?

BR: ’57. I remember being completely blown away. I later took my daughter, who was about four. I was seven when I went for the first time. But I remember, just looking at all the things that I had seen on this little black and white TV, three or four years earlier, and thinking to myself, “This is kid’s heaven!”

The one thing I remember more than anything else is Tom Sawyer’s island. As far as I was concerned Tom Sawyer Island was the epitome of everything that was being a kid. It was just absolutely amazing. I already had read Tom Sawyer, and I had an Aunt Polly, too. I remember my mom telling me that that entire day my younger brother and I spent almost the entire day on Tom Sawyer’s island.

Yeah, I was a big fan of all things Disney when I was a kid.

SW: How did you end up as the announcer of Disneyland?

BR: I came out here in 1986, after Pittsburgh, I lived in Pittsburg for five years, and before that a little town in Wyoming, and before that- it just goes on and on. I was a disc jockey and radio station owner and I dragged my children and then wife all over the country doing various and sundry things radio.

Always having been a little goofy about Disney stuff, I found myself friends with a guy by the name of Brian Cummings, who I had worked with in one of the very first commercial radio stations I had ever worked for. Brian and I had talked when I was living in Chattanooga in 1971. He told me he had been invited to become part of the Mel Blanc school and he was coming out to learn how to do cartoons, and Mel Blanc was going to tutor him. So I thought that was really cool and he and I kept in touch and it turned out that he had gotten more and more things through Disney and I thought, “That’s incredible. That would be a whole lot of fun.”

I get out here in ’86 and I spent a lot of time listening to Jack Wagner (who amongst other duties for Disney, was the official announcer of the theme parks). Jack was a bit of a hero. I tried to figure out how he did all the stuff that he did and what kind of motivation that there was. One thing that I did figure out was that Jack just knew what he was reading. He just felt it and it was a kind of happy emotion that he created just because it was Disneyland, The Happiest Place on Earth, and it was all about the emotion. Well, Bruce (Healey) put Paul Freeman in charge of finding a new voice. Paul is at the time in partnership with Skip Konte, former keyboard player for Three Dog Night, and Skip owns Edit Bay and that’s where they did most of the video editing of all the Fantasmic! stuff, everything that shows on those huge big blowup screens. All of that was reduced to video, it was pulled from film, put onto video and edited at Edit Bay. They were almost literally across the street from what was then The Pond, the Anaheim Arena, and they were right down the street from the park (Disneyland).

Paul had already been a part of all this because he’d been Don Dorsey’s partners on a number of projects and he’d been one of Jack (Wagner)’s fair-haired boys and basically learned a whole lot of stuff about how the park operated from Jack. So Paul was in a good position.

Anyway, Skip Konte’s wife, a longtime friend of mine, she goes to Paul and she says, “I’ve got the guy.” I know exactly the guy you need, and he goes, “You’re full of crud,” basically. She says, “No, seriously, you’ve got to interview him. I’m asking you to do this for me.” I don’t know any of this. She calls me up on the phone and she says, “Paul Freeman’s just moved in, he’s got all this fancy new gear that we’d like you to see because we know that you do a lot of your own stuff, but we figure, maybe you can come over and take a look at this and you can give him some work.” So I go over and see all of his fancy new beautiful equipment, which is really cool. So he finishes with the tour and he says something about Jack Wagner, and I said, “Yeah, the man’s my hero.” He says, “How is it that you know all of this?” I said, “It comes from sitting there and listening to the ticket spiels for two or three hours a month.”

SW: You sat in the park and listened?

BR: I did. I wanted to hear the nuances of what he was doing, but I didn’t go into the park. In those days when you went up to buy tickets at Disneyland, “Welcome to Disneyland, The Happiest Place on Earth. Today Disneyland is open from 10 in the morning until midnight…” and he’d just go on from there. That’s how I learned to “Jack speak.”

SW: But it wasn’t your intention to take over for him one day?

BR: No. I thought everybody wants Jack’s job. So I told Paul this story and he said, “Do you think you do Jack pretty well?” I said, “Well, what I do is not an impression of Jack. What I do is my ode to Jack. It’s my homage.” In those days it was a little bit rougher than it is now. That’s because as you get older you get a little more mellow and you get a little more emotional about things and it’s easier to do.

So he gives me the-lights-made-dim for the Electrical Parade, and he says, “Do your Jack homage on this thing.” I said, “What?” He said, “Go on in the studio and read it.” “You’re kidding?” “No, just go on and do it.” Now I’m starting to shake. I know what’s about to happen. All of the things that could happen, have, and all of the things that might happen after this point are directly in my throat.

I go in. I read it. Paul gives me a little direction on one part of it and says, “Do it again.” I read it one more time and I come out and he says, “I don’t make the final decision on these things, but know that by next Thursday you’ll know that you’re the next voice of Disneyland.”I walked into Denise’s office, gave her a big old kiss on the cheek. She says, “You got it, didn’t you?” I said, “I think so.” She said, “Good for you!”

And the rest, as they say, is pretty much history.