Caffeinated Clint
John Ratzenbeger will be forever known as postman ‘Cliff’ on the ’80s TV hit “Cheers”, but it’s his voice-over work in Pixar films that’s paying the bills these days. In this interview, Moviehole talks to Ratzenberger about the latest job that put food on the table, “Toy Story 3”.
It seems like a no-brainer to want to do a movie like ”Toy Story 3”, but was anyone hesitant to do the movie? I mean, everyone’s just waiting for Pixar to have a dud – did you at anytime think, ‘Oh god, this could be their first dud?’!
It’s interesting. I was having a conversation with somebody about this other day: When did we become a society that honors failure instead of success? Everybody’s waiting for Pixar’s first dud. Why? It used to be we encouraged success, but now everybody’s like vultures on the side of the road, waiting for a car to hit an armadillo.
Well, thankfully – this film is as good, if not better than the first!
It’s really because they really consider every film they do as their first one. They forget that they’ve won 26 Academy Awards. They forget that they’re at the top of the heap. They give themselves a challenge in every single film, and they accomplish it. They work as hard on the 12th film as they did on the first one.
They’d likely work harder…
Oh yeah, because they have a standard to maintain. That’s the beautiful thing about Pixar: They maintain a standard.
Did you have a favorite toy growing up?
I grew up across the street from a shipyard. My favorite toy? I would just get scrap wood stuff. There was a dump nearby. I would go through the dump. My mother – God bless her, she’s still here with us – she used to get me old radios from rummages sales, and she cut off the cord, and I would take them apart. I would just be making stuff. I loved pounding nails and climbing a tree. Kids can’t do that today, obviously, because of political correctness. The Woodstock Nation destroyed that. Just climb a tree and scrape your knees.
I think all of us grew up doing that – making our own toys and fun…
It’s the tinkering spirit. Every industry on the face of the earth started with one person inventing one thing. And every single one of those inventors started off as a child doing what your son did: tinkering objects from different places. It had nothing to do with toys or proscribed activities. It was all just getting junk and putting it together. A cardboard box could be anything.
You’re exactly right – but it doesn’t happen much now…
If you go to my website, Ratzenberger.com, I have a foundation. We set up schools nationwide through the Association of Community Colleges and their camps, just to do that with kids now. Go to Ratzenberger.com, and it’ll lead you to Nuts, Bolts 9& Thingamajigs] Foundation. So that’s the long answer to a short question. I just like putting things together. But going through the dump, my mother thought I was getting a little squirrely, so she had me try out for Little League, like the rest of my friends. I could care less?
How do you think the “Toy Story” movies have affected kids and how they look at toys?
Kids will have a fascination with sandboxes. I had a fascination with sandboxes. I had a fascination with sandboxes, because it’s the first place where a child learns common sense. If you use your hands, it’s common sense not to hit your thumbs with a hammer. A sandbox is beautiful because you learn not to eat sand. In those worlds that you live in, whether it’s on a beach or playing with a cardboard box, as a child, you control that world. That’s your world, and everything else is controlled by adults. So I think that’s what the toys in “Toy Story” and everything else, when you start playing with them, this is your kingdom, this is your empire; you are the god of everything you’re creating, and I think that’s the important thing.
Kids just don’t seem to be interested in doing anything other than playing video-games these days…
And that’s actually affecting us as a civilization. I used to do this show called “Made in America.” I traveled the country for five years and visited over 300 companies. The biggest worry is that children are graduating from high schools without the ability to read a ruler … Kids out of high school cannot do that. Consequently, when you’re building airplanes, or whatever it is, the infrastructure, to be a welder, you have to know how to measure and you have to know angles. And one of the complaints is that engineers graduate with a degree, and they design things that can’t be built, because they didn’t build things when they were growing up.
Yeah, its a worry
It’s completely different now. In six to 10 years, the industry just may grind to a halt. They stopped giving shop courses in schools now, in the last 25 years, because everyone had to go to college and be fabulous. Well, OK, now we have a lot of people with degrees in sports management who can’t even change the tires of their cars.
