I'm Alan Alda, and this is clear and vivid conversations about connecting and communicating.

Welcome to a preview of season 29, the first episode of which will hit a computer near you next week.

Executive producer Graham Chet is here to help give you a taste of things to come, and it's a

pretty tasty season, wouldn't you say? Yes, as befits clear and vivid tagline, conversations

about connecting and communicating, all of my guests are great communicators.

No surprise there, because that's why we chose them.

And you opened this season with a fellow actor who clearly had a great time talking with you

about his craft.

Yeah, John Legisamo.

I was glad I had the chance to tell him how much I admire his work.

We were once in the same movie, but we never acted together or really got to know one another.

And one of the things I admire about his work is how spontaneous he is, and at the same time, so carefully prepared.

And a good example of that is when he was the voice of Sid the Sloth in the 2002 movie Ice Age.

You're meticulous in your characters, Sid the Sloth in Ice Age. You had 30 different voices you were trying out for that character.

Yeah, yeah. So, you know, I gave the director, he wanted me to do my own voice and I go, I don't want to do my own voice.

I love Mel Blank, and I always felt like Mel Blank created these voices that felt like they really only existed in those cartoon characters.

You know, Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, Daffy Duck, you just believe them.

So I wanted to do the same thing. So I gave him like, you know, a southern

vort. I talked like this. Maybe a sloth should be kind of slow. He didn't like that. So I said,

what if he was Southeast Asia? Whatever he was from a different country and he had a really

magical, wonderful voice. He didn't like that either. So, you know, I gave him about 30 of those options. And then I said, I sent me some documentary footage on Sloth.

So I studied it and that, you know,

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