Chong (Secret Tunnel Guy)
Dee Bradley Baker (Chong)
They just threw that character to me. I’ve got a pretty good range, so they’ll just throw incidental characters to take a swing at. They said, “Well, this one’s got a little song.” I can sing, great! They sent me the demo of the song. I listened through it, and I thought, “Oh, this is awful. This song sounds terrible!” It didn’t sound right to me. I came into this thinking, “Ah geez, this is not gonna work. I don’t know how to make this work!”
You take your best swing, and you don’t go negative on it, but I really didn’t have any confidence in my ability to make anything from it. We recorded this kind of loopy, kind of halfway out of it, really sweet, spiritual, creative, nonpragmatic fellow. It’s one of my favorite things that I did in that whole show.
Recently, they were traveling around doing the ATLA [soundtrack] in concert. They finished the show with the “Secret Tunnel” song as the encore! I got to perform it a few times on stage, and people just all sang along with it. They all know that song, which is a wonderful thing. It’s fun to occasionally just take a little casual swing and doggone it, you knock it out of the park.
