I got the chance to do things that I dreamed of when I was a kid: I got to travel around the world I had my own 'Goosebumps' attraction at Disney World I've been on TV and had three TV series.
The great dream merchant Disney was a success because make-believe was what everyone seemed to need in a spiritually empty land.
Romance is dead - it was acquired in a hostile takeover by Hallmark and Disney homogenized and sold off piece by piece.
Someone's career that I admire would have to be Justin Timberlake's because he started off on Disney and he made this huge film career and huge solo music career. I really respect him as an artist.
There is a relationship between cartooning and people like Mir= and Picasso which may not be understood by the cartoonist but it definitely is related even in the early Disney.
I couldn't have been happier with the relationship we had with Disney it couldn't have been easier.
We've been able to access deals that under our former relationship with Disney - with tax advantages and strategic partners - that we just weren't able to do.
I love all the old classic Disney movies. 'Pinocchio.' There are obviously tons of them that anybody growing up on that stuff takes with them their whole lives and I'm an admirer of a lot of classic animation and fairy tales. I grew up on a book of Grimm's fairy tales that I kind of wore out again and again. That's all stuff that lingers with you.
I was influenced when I was younger by the cartoon movies that Disney put out like Cinderella and what not. I watched those movies over and over when I was younger and the music is ingrained into my head. Nowadays I'm still humming the tunes. It taught me the fundamentals.
I'm so grateful for what Disney gave me and the experiences that I got but at the end of the day I can do so much more than what I did on that channel and in those movies.
We did it Disneyland in the knowledge that most of the people I talked to thought it would be a financial disaster - closed and forgotten within the first year.
There's not one major greatest influence on my career. It would be film and great artists and great imagineers - Jim Henson Walt Disney Charlie Chaplin people who understand the joy of the imagination.
Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world.
Bad psychoanalysis would say I enjoyed pleasing people working really hard and pleasing people which is probably related to my father in some way. But I really liked working hard. When I worked at Disneyland I'd do 12 hours straight and go home thrilled.
Is Walt turning over in his grave? A man named Joe Roth runs Disney right now-he gave me the go-ahead and total freedom to do whatever I wanted to do.
Tyler Perry's brand is faith family and this whole thing that I've built while my company 34th Street Films is like Disney's Touchstone. We can do anything. People don't know what to expect from me yet.
You know one of my biggest dreams in life is to play a Disney princess.
One of the best animated films I've seen come out of Disney was the Tarzan movie. I wasn't crazy about the story or the design on Tarzan's face but the traditional animation was spectacular.
When I was little we had a Golden Book that had all these Disney characters in one portrait on the first page. My dad used to read from it every night. We'd play this game of find Pluto or find Donald Duck. He'd read us stories and do all the voices. Those are great memories.
I have always thought of Walt Disney as my second father.
The cool part about working for Disney is that they've allowed me to be a change agent.
The cool parts - the parts that have won Dubai its reputation as 'the Vegas of the Middle East' or 'the Venice of the Middle East' or 'the Disney World of the Middle East if Disney World were the size of San Francisco and out in a desert' - have been built in the last ten years.
They're very uh you know I don't come from the suburbs and a jolly Disney type of lifestyle. I come from something totally different. And they're cool and bare minimum so it's not always a money issue for me.
I have a 6-year-old and his thing is to turn on Radio Disney in the car and I get such an allergic reaction to listening to that music and the context into which it falls. I'm really working on him about that.
I went to Catholic high school for half a year and religion wasn't the cool thing to talk about even at a catholic high school. It never came up.