‘Cheers’ star John Ratzenberger has warmed audience hearts with his numerous roles in Disney and Pixar films including P.T. Flea from ‘A Bug’s Life,’ Mack from the ‘Cars’ trilogy, and Hamm from the ‘Toy Story’ franchise.
Ahead of his reprisal role as the Abominable Snowman in the upcoming ‘Monsters Inc.’ spin-off Disney Plus show ‘Monsters at Work,’ Ratzenberger criticized how Hollywood portrays skilled workers and tradespeople in an interview with the FOX Business news program ‘Varney & Co.’
“Time and again, you see movies and Hollywood shows with skilled tradespeople as being idiots or being lesser than everybody else,” he told host Stuart Varney. “And why would a young person seeing that… want to do that?”
He added that tradespeople could “anywhere in the world and get a job the next day.” He continued, “So if you’re an electrician, a bricklayer, if you could bake a cake, you’ve got a skill that you own.”
Citing his own past working as a carpenter before breaking into stardom, he explained, “When I was growing up, we had shop classes and I got a taste of carpentry and I gravitated towards it, and low and behold, that’s how I made a living between acting jobs.”
‘The Village Barbershop’ actor added, “We didn’t give them a taste of what it’s like working with your hands.”
Ratzenberger told Varney that Hollywood should portray skilled workers in a more positive light and that schools should offer more courses to teach those skills to help with infrastructure jobs.
“You can throw all the money you want at the infrastructure, but nobody’s showing up to weld the bridges or pound nails because we canceled shop classes 30, 40 years ago.” Ratzenberger continued, saying that “we never gave young people a taste of what it would be like to work in those jobs.”
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