Hello. Thanks so much for the welcome.
1. No, those reports are not true. I have never met Chip and I have no problem with him. I sincerely wish him the best and hope he can finish up the season on a high note. I think he was put in a very tough situation, one where it was almost impossible for him to not come across as the bad guy. I feel like Disney only made things harder for him by not bothering to get my ideas for the end of the season, ideas I would have been happy to share, even if he ultimately wanted to chuck them and pursue a different direction.
If Disney had been more open and honest with me in the way they handled my termination, I feel I could have even called/emailed the cast and crew and vouched for Chip in the spirit of "passing of the EP torch." The way Disney managed the whole situation was bad for Chip, bad for me, and bad for the show.
The stories that I refused to hire Chip at the beginning of the season are true. But I never accused him of scabbing and have no first-hand knowledge of him writing during the strike. When I was first hired, the show's writing staff came to me and told me that they were upset because Disney was planning to give a freelance script to a writer who had written on the previous season of the show while they were walking the picket lines. I never threw any tantrums or even made any judgements about the whole affair, only told Disney that I was concerned that using him would be disrespectful to the writing staff. I had no idea that this person was Judd Lynn, a name I would have recognized from watching the show. I only heard him called "Chip." And if I had known who it was, I still would have refused to hire him because it was clearly something that the writers on the show felt strongly about and I didn't blame them.
2. I watched the show pretty regularly during the old days, back in the 90s. I just loved the general spirit and fun of the series. I was working in animation and the show just seemed so unlike anything else that was out there. When I was hired onto the show, I went back and watched everything I could. My whole DVR was packed with the recent seasons of the show.
Ultimately, I came to believe that the show was in desperate need of a real change, a shot in the arm. It's not even that I felt the show was bad or anything like that. There were elements in all the seasons, including Jungle Fury, that I really liked. It had more to do with the simple fact that the show was feeling tired after having been on the air for so many seasons. There were times it felt like the characters were just going through the motions, sleep walking, and it felt like somewhere along the way, the audience had fallen asleep along with them.
For better or worse, I decided that I wanted to do something that would literally reach out through the TV screen and slap viewers across the face.
