Ultimate Disney did a great article with Interview with John Musker and Ron Clements: The writing-directing duo behind The Princess and the Frog where they said some wonderful things about working with Jim Cummings. I’ve just pulled out the quotes specifically about Jim Cummings below but I do encourage you to read the whole article here. It is a great read!

Q: I had the pleasure of interviewing Ray’s animator Mike Surrey a few months back. He said Jim Cummings made his job easy. What made you choose him for Ray? 

John Musker: Jim Cummings was a riot to work with. We have worked with him in the past but what we didn’t know was that he had spent years in New Orleans where he worked alongside Cajuns whose speech patterns he picked up.

Q: Being a Louisiana native, it’s eerie and extremely entertaining how well you got the Cajun character down. Was there a lot of research involved in Raymond and the film as a whole?

John Musker: We wanted to do right by Louisiana and the culture there including the great Cajun populace. John Lasseter really wanted authenticity, so we took several trips down there. We met with a number of people including a man named Reggie who was our bayou tour guide. We noted his speech patterns, and picked up more phrases at jazz Fest. We also did research where we read stories written in a “Cajun” voice and found Cajun glossaries online. Best of all though, we cast Jim Cummings as our firefly. When he auditioned, he did a great Cajun accent and we learned he had a home there for several years and had worked with Cajuns in the Merchant marines. He was able to improvise in his Cajun speak, so he added a lot of flavor to our gumbo.

There is a great, 15 minute interview with Jim Cummings available to listen to in full here.

Jim Cummings fans will love this new interview from ABC News.

There was another big feature on Jim Cummings this weekend in the Ventura County Star which is the same website that did the feature on JC when he was selling his house a while back.

Long time readers will recognize this video from the article about Jim Cummings selling his house a while back but since Ventura County Star repeated this video with their newest article I figured I would repeat it here in turn. If you didn’t get a chance to watch it the first time, it’s a great interview with Jim doing multiple voices.

“This year I’m going with either Vanessa or Amy,” Cummings said, summing up his competition. “I think folks go down the line and go: ‘Jim Cummings? I don’t really know who that is. Oh, Joan Rivers, Vanessa Williams, I love her; let’s vote for her.’ You can’t fight that. I understand why they do it.” [SOURCE]

The Jim Cummings Emmy publicity tour of all media continues with an interview in Newsarama.com today.

This interview delves into his work as Pooh and Tigger touching on the transition from Paul Winchell:

His real breakthrough into lead work came in 1988, when he did his first job as Pooh in Winnie The Pooh Friend-ship: Tigger-ific Tales. As intimated before, Holloway was long gone from this planet, but Paul Winchell was still Tigger at that time. Cummings would first step into the role of Tigger in 1996 with a Pooh Halloween special entitled Boo To You, Too. Things started to get interesting after that.

“I absolutely did know Paul,” says Cummings. “I knew him well during the last years of his life, when he was going back and forth from South Africa, doing research. He was really like Da Vinci. He designed one of the prototypes for one of the first artificial hearts. He was also going back and forth to Africa to try and solve some of the hunger problems there. In fact, how I got the role of Tigger is initially when he would go I would pinch hit for him.”

Indeed. In 1998, on A Winnie The Pooh Thanksgiving special, both Cummings and Winchell are credited on the role of the terrific tiger. By 1999, it was handed over completely to Cummings with The Tigger Movie. From that point on, Cummings would voice both Pooh and Tigger. There’s some controversy over the transition. Rumors said Winchell didn’t take losing the job too well, apparently. Cummings has his own point of view.

“What actually happened is they decided to recast the entire cast,” he says. “They then did some tests and I came in first as Pooh and second on Tigger. Now when Paul was around, he was certainly Tigger. Then in 1999 he apparently decided to retire and I’ve been the voices of Tigger and Pooh since then, full time.”

You can read the article in full here. As always, when the site takes the article down, we’ve kept a copy in our archives.

Talkin’ Tigger With Star Jim Cummings

Some highlights:

On being a little bitter about not being in the Pooh loop:

“You know what? I don’t know what’s in there. They never tell me anything. Honestly, I love Disney, but get a load of this…Winnie the Pooh had his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and they didn’t tell me. I’ve been doing the voice of Winnie the Pooh since 1987 and Disney doesn’t call! As much as you love them, its not like they want to make you the star—they want the character to be the star, which is cool. I understand that. [And] who knows? Maybe they’re afraid I’ll ask for a raise. [Laughs]“

On his favorite characters:

“Pooh, Tigger, Darkwing Duck, Don Karnage from TaleSpin, and there was a great little guy called Mr. Bumpy on an ABC series called Bump in the Night. It’s the stuff that used to get me kicked out of class, now the joke’s on them.”

As always, you can find the whole article in our News archive after the original site takes the story down.