FROM 2008
WALLY BOAG
remembers working with his longtime friend, Fulton Burley
on Walt Disney's Enchanted Tiki Room and in the Golden Horseshoe Revue

by Scott Wolf

Wally Boag is a fun person! That's the best way I can describe him. I just love calling him at home and hearing him pick up the phone with an upbeat, "Wally here!"

The first time Shani & I went to Wally's house and we rang the doorbell, he came down the stairs calling, "Coming, mother!" We were hoping that set the tone for what to expect the rest of the day. We were not disappointed.

Wally pulled out his ventriloquist dummy, the bagpipes he auditioned for Walt Disney with, and of course some "Boagaloons."

It's my privilege to bring you my interviews with a man who has brought me such my joy in my life... an absolute Disney Legend, Wally Boag.

Scott Wolf: Can you tell me about Fulton Burley? (Wally performed with Fulton in Disneyland's Golden Horseshoe Revue)

Wally Boag: We did very well onstage together. We liked to adlib now and then and he was very good.

Fulton and I both were under contract to MGM in 1944. We had six month contracts and we were in a few movies.

SW: Together?

WB: Yeah, we were in one with Esther Williams (Thrill of a Romance). We were Canadian First Lieutenants or something sitting across from the opera singer (Lauritz Melchior). So we had a lot of fun, and we both went our own ways but kept up for years. We played golf a lot.

So to jump ahead, the fellow (Donald Novis) in the Golden Horseshoe show had quit after seven or eight years and so I had played the night before in another town and Fulton was the emcee. The next day I said, “Hey! Why don’t you try out to come over and do a couple shows and take his place?”

So he did, he came over and wasn’t sure he wanted to do it or anything, and everyone liked him so from then on he took the place and played it all the way thru to ’86.


SW: Your letter on the wall from Walt Disney says how fresh and funny it looked every time. Were you having as much as it looked like?

WB: Oh yeah, but I think we held each other together very well. The other fella before him (Donald Novis) was a singer, a beautiful singer and everything but he wasn’t as good a comic as Fulton.

The two of us wrote practically the whole Tiki Room.

SW: How did you get involved in that?

WB: I was only working about six or seven months when Walt called me up and asked me to join WED (now Walt Disney Imagineering) and be a writer. He was smart, I was writing in between shows.

SW: You were writing the Tiki Room between Horseshoe shows?

WB: Yeah, Fulton was next door, so Fulton helped me with it. We worked it out. I was Jose… (he does a little of Jose’s voice for me.) Fulton did such a good job with Michael. The show’s still there and it’s in really good shape now. They’ve redone it and it’s really beautiful.

More from Wally:
Deciphering Fulton Burley's notes

See other interviews