Greg responds...

Let me start with Ed, who was great as Baloo. I never met him. Not back in the Talespin days. I only went to some Talespin pick-up sessions, and we had no lines for Ed to pick up.

Of course, I later met Ed working on Gargoyles, where he played the Captain of the Guard at Castle Wyvern. He was terrific. I can't say I got to know him as a person, but I was very impressed with his abilities as an actor.

Anyway, the Talespin days...

When I started at Disney in 1989, production on Talespin was already underway. The big mucky-mucks on that show were Jymn Magon & Mark Zaslove. And I'm afraid I didn't really get to know either of them all that well. I later worked a bit more with both of them, but my job at the time was to give notes (both creative notes and S&P) directly to the individual story editors. I do recall having great sit-down conversations with Story Editor Karl Geurs. Karl really welcomed me to Disney... and we'd sit in his office and talk about the scripts, about animation, about storytelling for ... well... for longer than we probably needed to.

I thought/think that Talespin was a great fun idea. I think some of the episodes are just amazing. There's some really gorgeous stuff there. And I loved Shere Khan. I suppose to Jungle Book purists, it might have been problematic, but if you see the Disney characters evolving into actors, for me it was fun to see them playing different roles.