Stones is sorry he didn’t talk with the Nine Old Men more. In the end, his copy of Nine Old Men and the Art of Disney Animation goes unsigned.

JS: A major subplot of that film is the old dog resenting being replaced by the young one. I wonder if that reflected something going on at the studio about the younger generation of animators coming in around that time?

TS: It’s interesting that at a certain point Chief teaches the younger dog to do things his way: “You’re not friends with this fox, you carry on a vendetta.” This is second- or third-hand, but I was told that in the days the Nine Old Men were the kings of the studio. It didn’t matter how talented you were, there were only a certain number of key spots you were going to get up to; you got to a certain level and that was it. There were a number of people who were held at that second level and that was it. Not because they were held down, but because that’s as good as they were.

By the time the new training program was started in the ‘70s, the guys were looking toward their retirement years and suddenly they were everybody’s uncle, everybody’s grandfather. I look back on that and I’m sorry I didn’t take more advantage of their knowledge. I always felt like I’m bothering you if I knock on your door and chat. I should’ve — they would’ve been happy to do that.

I never got anything signed by the guys because I felt like I was working with these people; I shouldn’t be bothering them for autographs. But at the end of the day, my Art of Disney book is not signed and all my friends have theirs signed.

JS: You mention Woolie Reitherman was the original director on Fox and the Hound, but Ted Berman and Richard Rich are credited as the film’s directors.

TS: And Art Stevens.

JS: Was there a creative decision when Woolie left, or was it when he died in a car crash?

TS: It was before that they switched over. The studio was worrying that he wasn’t handing things over to the younger people they had been training. What they wanted was for him to open it up, but outside of Rich Rich, they gave it to these guys who’ve been around, from our perspective, a billion years; how is that a change? Ironically, I think Fox and the Hound was Woolie’s strongest picture outside of the Charo sequence.

JS: Which sequence?

TS: Charo? I don’t know if I told you this before. Fox and the Hound had some really strong elements and it was very dynamic.

JS: I remember the bear fight at the waterfall.

TS: That was one of the things that was added later. Everything that was the weaker side of Woolie Reitherman pictures — Phil Harris, a dance sequence... Literally there was a dance sequence. When the two foxes are falling in love they hear music and they part some reeds and they see a disco sequence.

Here’s this very shy crane all alone, and they feel sorry for her. They’re just watching this for the most part. And then this goofy crane comes out, he was Phil Harris. Once he gets her to dance she blossoms, and she’s played by Charo. They go into this dance and then the foxes are up on hind legs, the fireflies look like a disco ball. Then the sequence ended and reeds went back together and they went on with the story.

When Art took over one of the first things they did was just cut that sequence. There are people who still love that picture — they love what got up on the screen. I thought the previous incarnation was really strong, the only thing that got stronger was the bear fight, which was John Lasseter, he worked on that.

EPCOT Days
After I did an educational film called Health and Alcohol Abuse, for the studio’s education division they said, “We’d like you to try going over to WED [Disney’s theme park design department]. We’re doing this thing called EPCOT, which is entertainment and education.” That was the fun part of the Disney organization — that it did entertainment in all these different forms. It was nothing I ever thought I’d be going into, but I loved the old, behind the scenes episodes of the Disneyland TV series — “… and here’s the Jungle Cruise, and here’s the Small World model,” and whatever. So I go over there and a lot of those people who were in those old TV shows were sitting there in the model shop.

The major project I did there, which ironically is no longer in the park, was ‘The World of Motion,’ kind of an audio-animatronic tour through history. The best part of that was for about nine months I was in an 8x12 room with Ward Kimball, which was like sitting with a time machine. He was quite a storyteller, not only about Walt, but about his childhood, which he was drawing from in his work: “This is the way the old ice trucks looked, this is how we used to do a go-cart.”