August 4 - Don DaGradi

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On this day, in 1991, Don DaGradi passed away in Friday Harbor, Washington. Born on March 1, 1911, on the East Coast in New York City, Don actually spent most of his childhood growing up on the West Coast in San Francisco, California. After graduating from high school, he took his artistic talents south to Los Angeles and the Chouinard Art Institute. He honed his skills for a few years before joining the Walt Disney Studio in the mid-Thirties, at the height of the Great Depression, as a background painter. He was quickly bumped up to the Story Department, where he contributed gags and minor plot points to many of the studio’s shorts produced at the time.

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As the studio grew, Don's responsibilities grew as well. By 1940, he was the production designer on Dumbo. Throughout World War II, he was put in charge of layouts for in the Shorts Department (really the only thing the studio was producing in those lean years). His work can be seen in classic films including Der Fuehrer’s Face and Victory Through Air Power. Following the war, Don added features to his plate as the layout artist for The Three Caballeros, Make Mine Music and Fun and Fancy Free.  At the end of the Forties, he started designing the color schemes and the overall feel of features. He sharpened the look of The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan.

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As successful as all of Don’s endeavors were up to this point, he didn’t really start hitting his stride until he became a senior member of the story department in the mid-Fifties. He has a full story credit on Lady and the Tramp and contributed additional story elements to Sleeping Beauty (as well as being part of that production’s design team). Then, in 1959, he made the leap into live action movies and blossomed like never before.

Don’s Legendary co-workers, the Sherman Brothers, once said that he wrote scripts with a sketch pad and pencil, meaning that Don’s pictures were worth more than a thousand words. He could draw a quick picture of what a scene looked like in his head and everyone else could see it too. Pages of words could flow from each drawing, most of the time with very little effort. Don’s first effort in the live action arena was at Walt’s personal request. He designed and wrote the underground cavern scenes in Darby O’Gill and the Little People. He followed that up by developing sequences in The Absent-Minded Professor, Pollyanna, Kidnapped and The Parent Trap. For the sequel to Professor, Son of Flubber, Don teamed up with the Legendary Bill Walsh, completely writing that film’s script between the two of them. It was a professional match made in heaven that would last until Don’s retirement nearly a decade later.

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After Flubber, Don and Bill created the script for what is arguably the Walt Disney Studio’s magnum opus, as far as live action films go. Mary Poppins turned out to be as whimsically delightful as it is because of the two men wrote it. Don is credited with creating the visions of everything from people popping out of chimneys and flying through the air to how a tea party on the ceiling might look. His sense of wonder paid off. Audiences have adored the film since its debut and it was honored with five Academy Awards. Don and Bill’s script had also been nominated for an Oscar but lost out to Beckett.

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The overwhelming success of Mary Poppins basically gave Don and Bill carte blanche as screenwriters. While they would never reach those same heights again, they add several more classic Disney films to their resumes. Over the next seven years, the duo wrote Lt. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N., Blackbeard’s Ghost, The Love Bug, Scandalous John and Bedknobs and Broomsticks.

During his career, Don was also tapped to occasionally do some moonlighting over in Imagineering. He designed costumes for Disneyland cast members including the outfits the resident marching band wore. He also designed the look of the exteriors of attractions, like Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, keeping them in line with the looks he helped create for the animated features they were based on. And then, in 1970, after 34 years of making magic on and off the silver screen, the man who often described himself as a misplaced cartoonist retired from Disney.

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Don and his wife of many years, Betty, moved north to the state of Washington, enjoying their post-work life away from the hubbub of Hollywood for the next two decades. When Don passed away in August 1991, it was just a few months before his old company would honor him, and his writing partner Bill, as official Disney Legends. He might have been 80 years old at his death, but in his heart he still saw magic everywhere he looked.

July 28 - Bud Luckey

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On this day, in 1934, William Everett Luckey was born in Billings, Montana. Growing up in Big Sky Country, it’s no surprise that Bud, as all his friends knew him, would spend a summer vacation or two at a dude ranch. He once quipped that the experiences only made him a little bit cowboy but they were great at improving his drawing skills when it came to horses. Following his graduation from high school, Bud served a stint in the Korean War with the United States Air Force. When his tour of duty in Korea was up in 1953, he stayed on with the military, becoming an Artist-Illustrator with NATO forces in Europe. After a year with NATO, Bud spent three more doing the same kind of work with Strategic Air Command, also in Europe and North Africa. After his honorable discharge in 1957, he remained a reservist throughout the Sixties, but his professional life became much more animated.

Bud used his love of drawing and his GI Bill benefits to enroll in art classes at the famed Chouinard Art Institute. Part of his training happened under the direction of Art Babbitt, an accomplished Disney animator who was forced out of the company during the Animator’s Strike of 1941. After graduating from Chouinard in 1960, Bud continued to apprentice under Babbitt at Art’s own studio, Quartet Films, while also beginning to branch out on his own. He managed to get his first screen credit as part of the team that animated The Alvin Show, the first cartoon series to feature David Seville and his chipmunks.

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In 1961, Bud was hired as an Art Director and Producer for an ad agency, Guild, Bascom, & Bonfigli. For the next six years he worked with classic characters like Tony the Tiger, Toucan Sam and Snap, Crackle and Pop. He created the Bosco Dumbbunnies for a series of Bosco Chocolate Syrup commercials and won a Clio Award in 1966 for a Betty Crocker spot titled Magic Faucet. GBB was a large agency, encompassing not only television commercials but television shows as well. The head of the show division was Alex Anderson, the creator of Rocky, Bullwinkle and Dudley Do-Right. Bud was able to cross division lines within the agency and got experience working on with all three of those characters. He also dabbled a bit in the agency’s political division, working on ad campaigns for John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey.

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Several special friendships evolved during Bud’s tenure at the GBB Agency. He worked on several commercials with a young Jim Henson (probably the Wilkins Coffee ads) and the two became friends, working together off and on until Jim’s death nearly 30 years later. Bud was also an integral part of the Dolly Madison account, which used the Peanuts characters in their ads. After being made Senior Art Director of all things Charlie Brown related, Bud made frequent visits to see Charles Schultz, the creator of Peanuts, and Bill Melendez, the director behind such classics as A Charlie Brown Christmas. The friendship and respect that blossomed between Bud, Charles and Bill was so tight that, when Bud started his own studio in 1969, Charles and Bill insisted he still be involved with all ads concerning the Peanuts and the ad agency had to contract with Bud for several more years in order to keep the account.

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Now working in his own studio, the Luckey-Zamora Picture Moving Company (and no that’s not a typo), Bud capitalized on his friendship with Jim Henson and began producing animated shorts for Sesame Street. He created all kinds of classic pieces, some of my favorites being #7 The Alligator King, The Old Woman Who Lived in a 9 and Martian Beauty. He also did work in animation of the non-Disney type (it being a dark era in the company’s history, that was probably wise). Bud has credits on the Mad Magazine Television Special (a 1974 pilot that was never actually aired but lives online in infamy), 1977’s The Extraordinary Adventures of the Mouse and His Child and Don Bluth’s first feature after leaving Disney, 1982’s The Secret of NIMH. In the mid Eighties, Bud merged his studio, which for years had been the largest animation studio in the San Francisco area, with Colossal Pictures which freed him up to make the move to another fledgling studio in 1990.

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Bud joined the team at Pixar as their fifth artist, immediately becoming a character developer, storyboard artist and animator (it was a small company, everyone wore more than one hat). Toy Story was his first foray into computer animation, but he once said that the kids who learned their numbers on Sesame Street from his animation were now teaching him how to animate with numbers and that was a good thing. Bud is credited with moving the character of Woody from a ventriloquist's dummy to a talking toy with a pull string (and the guy we all know and love today).

Bud stuck around at Pixar for a total of twenty-four years. He designed characters for A Bug's Life, Toy Story 2, Monsters Inc, Finding Nemo, Cars, Toy Story 3, Ratatouille, WALL*E and Up. In 2003, his animated short Boundin' premiered in front of The Incredibles. I say his because he designed it, wrote it, composed the music for it, sang in it and played the banjo for it. Boundin' was nominated for an Academy Award and won the Annie Award for Best Short. 

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It would have been enough if that were Bud's only association with The Incredibles, but he also got in front of the microphone for the film as the voice of Rick Dicker, the federal agent who oversees the Superhero Relocation Program. Bud would provide the voice of two more Disney characters in the course of his career. First he played the small but pivotal role of Chuckles the Clown in 2010's Toy Story 3 and the subsequent shorts Hawaiian Vacation and Small Fry. Then, in 2011, he took a gloomier look at life as Eeyore in Winnie the Pooh.

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Bud retired from Pixar and the world of animation in 2014. One of the things people who knew his animation work were surprised to learn was that he had also designed and illustrated over 100 children's book during his lifetime, including Sesame Street coloring books and Little Golden Books featuring Pixar characters. He removed himself to the East Coast to enjoy his twilight years, which only numbered a few. On February 24, 2018, Bud suffered a fatal stroke at his home in Newtown, Connecticut. He was 83.

May 6 - Joe Grant

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On this day, in 2005, Joe Grant passed away in Glendale, California. Born on May 15, 1908 in New York City, Joe and his family moved to Los Angeles, California when he was two. His father was a newspaper art editor, which gave Joe exposure to the possibilities of the art world from an early age. Following high school, Joe attended classes at the famed Chouinard Art Institute. His first professional gig was drawing caricatures of celebrities for a local newspaper. One of the readers of that paper was Walt Disney, who was impressed enough with Joe’s style to invite him to submit some caricatures for incorporation into the 1933 short Mickey’s Gala Premier.

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The success of Joe’s work in Gala led to him being offered a full time job with the Walt Disney Studio as production on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was ramping up. Joe was given the task of designing the Queen and her alter ego, the Wicked Witch. Supposedly the old hag’s appearance (but not, presumably, her evil intent) was fashioned after a woman who lived across the street from Joe at the time. He continued working on character designs for Pinocchio before switching over to the story department when production began on Fantasia. Not only did Joe help develop the plot of several of the segments in Fantasia, he assisted in helping Walt and Leopold Stokowski choose what music would be used in the first place.

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Joe received credit for co-writing the script on his next two films, Dumbo and Saludos Amigos. As World War II raged on, he went back to the Shorts Department (of course so did everyone else, really; even the features during that period were just shorts that had been cobbled together). His input can be seen in the propaganda shorts The New Spirit, Reason and Emotion and the Academy Award winning Der Fuehrer’s Face. Following the war, Joe served as Production Supervisor on Make Mine Music. He then began working in earnest on a story he’d first conceived of in 1937. While watching the antics of his English springer spaniel after his daughter was born, he made some sketches and wrote a bare bones plot for a film that was known for years as Lady, after his spaniel. Even though Joe tinkered with the story off and on for almost a decade, Walt was never quite satisfied with the direction it was taking. After reading a 1945 short story, Happy Dan, the Cynical Dog, Walt thought that merging it with Joe’s story just might do the trick and Lady and the Tramp was born.

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Joe didn’t stick around to see his story develop into a classic film, though. He left Disney in 1949, six years before Lady hit theaters, but not because of any animosity or hard feelings. Wanting a new challenge in his life, Joe left to open his own ceramics studio. Some years later, he started up his own greeting card company. Throughout the years, no matter what else he was doing, he would still occasionally come over to the Disney lot to consult on a character’s design or a particularly sticky situation in a movie’s plot, chat with the boys and then return to his pots or cards.

In 1989, when Joe was 81, the age when most people have long since retired, he was apparently looking for another new challenge. Whether it was because the Disney Renaissance was just starting to hit its stride making animation exciting again or Joe just missed the good old days, he returned to work at Disney, forty years after he left. And not just on a consulting basis, but actual full time work. He would come into the studio at least four days a week from then until his death, over fifteen years later.

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Joe became part of the Visual Development team on Beauty and the Beast. From there he added Character Design back into his repertoire and did both tasks on The Lion King, Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules and Tarzan. He added to the stories of Mulan and Lilo and Stich and came up with the concept of giving yo-yos to a flock of flamingoes for the Carnival of the Animals sequence in Fantasia 2000 (making him the only person to contribute new material to both Fantasia movies). In 1992, long before he was done making significant contributions to the company but decades after he had started, Joe was declared an official Disney Legend

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Joe’s final project was a short called Lorenzo, which he thought up after observing another pet of his, this time a cat, after it had been in a fight with two poodles. He thought What would happen if my cat lost its tail and what would that look like set to tango music?  Lorenzo was initially supposed to be part of a third Fantasia film, but when that project fell apart it was released on its own in 2004. The following year it received an Oscar nomination and won the Annie Award for Best Animated Short. Just over two months later, Joe was sitting at his drawing desk at home (it being one of the few days he didn’t go to the studio), doing one of the things he loved most in this world, when he suffered a fatal heart attack. The Legendary story man was just nine days short of his 97^th birthday.

May 3 - California Institute of the Arts

On this day, in 1969, a groundbreaking ceremony was held as Lillian Bounds Disney turned over the ceremonial first shovelful for the new campus of the California Institute of the Arts. CalArts, as it is usually called, was incorporated in 1961, but it's story actually began forty years earlier. In 1921, Nelbert Murphy Chouinard founded an art school in Los Angeles, California. The whole point of the Chouinard Institute of Art was to bring some prestige to the West Coast art scene. It worked, with the help of another fledgling company that came along in 1928.

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Walt Disney's relationship with Chouinard began almost as soon as his studio did. By 1929, Walt was making sure his inexperienced animators were taking weekly classes at the Institute. He knew that the better his staff became at their craft, the better his studio would do. By the early Thirties, instructors from Chouinard were coming to the Disney lot to teach classes. By the mid Thirties, Walt was treating the school like a personal breeding ground for new talent, filling the ranks of the Snow White team as fast as he could with its graduates. And that's how things went for the next two decades. Dozens, if not hundreds, of Disney artists attended classes there over the years, including several of Walt's Nine Old Men, Mary Blair and Imagineer Herbert Ryman. More than a couple also taught classes.

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In the mid Fifties, Nelbert Chouinard suffered a terrible stroke and was unable to continue in her duties as head of the school. Walt said not a problem and the Disney Studio basically took over the administration of the place (Walt wasn't about to let go of the best trainers his staff ever had). But even with the administrative and financial help of Disney, the Chouinard Institute was struggling to stay open at the turn of the Sixties.  At the same time, the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music was also hitting hard times. Seeing an opportunity to expand Chouinard's scope and strengthen both arts schools, Walt proposed that they merge into one entity. The leadership of both institutions agreed and CalArts was born, at least on paper.

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When it was incorporated in 1961, CalArts became the first school of higher learning in the country to offer degrees to both the visual arts and the performing arts. It offers both under- and post-graduate studies in Art, Critical Studies, Dance, Film, Music and Theater. Its first board of directors included Roy O. Disney, Roy E. Disney, Chuck Jones, HR Haldeman (of Watergate fame), Meredith Wilson (creator of The Music Man) and Ralph Hetzel (then vice president of the Motion Picture Association of America), among others. But the process of combining the fortunes of the two schools wasn't a quick one. It wasn't until eight years later that construction could begin on a combined campus.

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Mother nature did her best to derail the new campus, dumping massive amounts of rain on the site throughout 1970 and rocking the area with a 6.5 magnitude earthquake in February 1971, but CalArts persevered and moved in during the month of November that same year. Over the next few years the school experienced almost constant upheaval in its administration. The first president, Robert Corrigan, fired most of the instructors from Chouinard and instituted a very laid back atmosphere with cyclical rather than sequential curriculum. He lasted a year. The next president, William Lund (Walt's son-in-law), fired more than 15% of the staff, imposed structured schedules and force the school to operate on a budget. He lasted three years. In 1975, Robert Fitzpatrick took over and offered the school enough stability to find its footing and begin thriving (he lasted 12 years).

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CalArts became and remained for Disney what Chouinard had been before it: a breeding ground for new talent. The list of modern Disney artists that have been through the Institute is quite extensive and includes John Laseter, Brad Bird, Kirk Wise, Tim Burton, Glen Keane, Gary Trousdale, Andrew Stanton, Pete Doctor, John Musker and many (many) more. Going to CalArts doesn't guarantee you a job at Disney, nor are you automatically excluded if you don't, but it sure does help to grease the wheels.

The last thing we need to talk about when it comes to CalArts is the infamous classroom A113. Currently the first year graphics design studio, classroom A113 has also been used extensively by first year Character Animation students and has become an inside joke in the industry. The moniker A113 appears literally every where you look in animated films and television shows. Sometimes it's a license plate number, sometimes it's an apartment number or on a billboard, sometimes it's harder to incorporate it into a story. In Finding Nemo, for instance, you see it as the model number of the camera the scuba diver uses to take a picture before capturing Nemo. In WALL-E, the directive given to prevent Autopilot from ever returning to earth is, you guessed it, code A113. A113 has appeared in everything from The Simpsons to South Park to an episode of Dr. Who. So the next time you're watching your favorite bit of animation, be on the lookout for A113. Chances are, it's in there somewhere.

April 21 - Bob Moore

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On this day, in 1920, Robert C. Moore was born in Los Angeles, California. His father was a violinist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. As Bob was growing up, his father would play on recordings of various projects around town as part of his job. Allegedly, two of those projects were for a fledgling cartoon studio in 1928, soundtracks for a new series of animated shorts starring a scrappy little mouse. One was titled Plane Crazy and the other Steamboat Willie. Whether the fact that dear old dad played for Mickey Mouse sparked little Bob's imagination or not, he began taking classes at the famed Chouinard Art Institute right out of high school. He must have been pretty naturally talented as he didn't stay there long before beginning work at the Walter Lantz Studio in 1938. He was with Lantz for two years, helping to usher in the popular Andy Panda character, before becoming the second person in his family to work for the other Walter in town.

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In 1940, Bob became an animator for the Walt Disney Studio, starting out as an assistant to a third Walter, Walt Kelly. After working under Kelly on Fantasia and Dumbo, Bob became a gag man in the Story Department. As World War II raged on, he contributed to The Reluctant Dragon and The Three Caballeros before being drafted into the Navy to work on propaganda films. He came back to Story for a few years after the end of the war, transferring over to the Publicity Department in 1948. Bob worked under Hank Porter, who had drawn the Snow White and Pinocchio Sunday comics before becoming the head of Publicity Art. Under Hank's guidance, Bob created artwork for movie posters, book covers, greeting cards and any other promotional material you can think of.

When Hank passed away in 1951, Bob was promoted to Art Director of Publicity, a position he would hold for the next three decades. In the early Fifties, in addition to everything he was doing publicity wise, he also began drawing for the Western Publishing comic books the company had licensed. He worked mostly on Donald Duck stories, but his name can be found on Grandma Duck panels and Little Bad Wolf strips. During the same time period, Bob was also illustrating Little Golden Books bearing the famous Disney characters.

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Throughout his 43 year career with Disney, Bob was tapped to do all sorts of special jobs. One of the little secrets the company doesn't necessarily like to talk about surrounds Walt's signature. He got asked to sign so many things, he simply didn't have time to scrawl autographs and run a company. He authorized a handful of his artists to sign things for him and Bob became one of the best (it's apparently really difficult to tell what is Walt's actual signature and what is Bob's forgery). In 1960, when a new school was built in Walt's boyhood home, Marceline, Mo, and named after the town's most famous citizen, Walt asked Bob to design the artwork for the lobby and gymnasium. After Walt passed away, the United States Post Office wanted to commemorate him with a stamp. Bob was one of the two guys asked to design it (Paul Wenzel, another Disney artist was other). In 1984, when the summer Olympics were held in Los Angeles, Bob, who had been retired for three years at this point, was commissioned to create the official mascot of the Games. Not only did he design Sam the Eagle, but he had to integrate him into hundreds of other signs and logos, for everything from individual events to novelty t-shirts.

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In 1981, Bob retired from his post after over four decades of creating thousands of logos, letterheads, brochures, etc. etc. etc. For all his contributions to the company, Bob was honored in two ways. First an exclusively Disney color was named after him. For years (until everything started being done on computers), there were plenty of tubes of Moore Red all over the Ink and Paint Department. Second, in 1996, he became an official Disney Legend. On November 20, 2001, the man who cheekily referred to himself as Bob Moore, MD (the MD stood for Mouse Drawer) left this world in the same city he entered it. He was 81.

December 6 - Delmer J. Yoakum

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On this day, in 1915, Delmar James Yoakum was born in St. Joseph, Missouri. Del's mother was an artist and her friends were artists, so, growing up he was constantly surrounded by them. In the late Thirties, he was fortunate enough to get a scholarship to spend four summers in a row studying at the Kansas City Art Institute under famed muralist Thomas Hart Benton. When World War II broke out, Del joined the United States Navy as an ensign. When fighting concluded, he relocated himself to Los Angeles, California. There he studied under cubist artist Henry Lee McFee, Italian artist Rico Lebrun and spent time taking classes at Chouinard Art Institute, Jepson Art Institute and the Roski School of Fine Arts at USC.

Starting in 1952, Del began a two decade career as a motion picture scenic artist. He created backdrops and dioramas for use in films like The King and I, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, and the Mount Rushmore scene in North by Northwest. His work can be seen in several Marilyn Monroe films (like 1959's Some Like It Hot which was nominated for a Best Set Decoration Oscar). His creation of the city of Jerusalem for 1953's The Robe helped clinch a Best Set Decoration Oscar win for that movie.

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For the Walt Disney Studio, Del's artistry was used in a new medium. Walt hired him to paint the backdrops for several of the attractions built at Disneyland over the years. The most famous of these works can be seen from the Disneyland Railroad. The Grand Canyon and Primeval World dioramas are the result of Del and his team using over 300 gallons of paint to depict a typical day in that part of the world at that particular time. He also created portions of the scenery for Pirates of the Caribbean, It's a Small World and the Haunted Mansion.

Throughout his life, even more so after his retirement from Hollywood in 1972, Del also created fine art in both watercolors and oil. He won numerous awards for his paintings and some of them can be found in places as diverse as the San Diego Art Museum and Coventry Cathedral in Coventry, England. In spite of his obvious talent, Del once quipped "Painting became my life. If I had to do it all over again, I'd do the same thing, but I'd be better at it." Del quietly passed away on October 25, 1996. He was 90 years old.

November 23 - Fred Moore

On this day, in 1952, animator Fred Moore passed away in Los Angeles, California following complications as a result of a car accident the day before. Born in the same city on September 7, 1911, Fred had very little formal training as an artist. He attended a handful of art classes at the famous Chouinard Art Institute, which he paid for by bartering janitorial services, but the rest was all natural talent. Shortly after graduating from Polytechnic High School, Fred took advantage of the situation when a friend of his had to bail on a job interview at the Walt Disney Studios. The then 19 year old went to apply instead and got the job.

Fred started out in the Shorts Department (mainly because the Features department wouldn't exist for several more years). He became an expert at drawing the studios scrappy little mouse. He was also the main animator for the Silly Symphony of The Three Little Pigs. Walt's comment after seeing the finished Pigs was "at last, we have achieved true personality in a whole picture." The picture won the Oscar for Best Animated Short in 1934. Fred would work on over 35 shorts, earning another Oscar and an additional Oscar nomination in the process.

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Shortly after the release of The Three Little Pigs, Walt put Fred in charge of another group of characters, the dwarfs from the studio's first animated feature. Fellow animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston once declared that the dwarfs were Fred's crowning achievement saying "in the public's eye there have been no more memorable characters than the dwarfs." Fred would continue to contribute to features with the characters of Lampwick in Pinocchio (generally considered to be a self portrait), Timothy Q. Mouse in Dumbo, some of the scenes with the mice in Cinderella, the oysters in Alice in Wonderland and the mermaids in Peter Pan.

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Contrary to Frank and Ollie's assertion about the dwarfs, I think Fred's biggest, longest lasting contribution to Disney was the redesign of Mickey Mouse for 1940's Fantasia. He did principal animation for Mickey on the short Brave Little Tailor, which was the last time the mouse appeared as a "pie-eyed" character. For Fantasia, the biggest change Fred gave Mickey was actual pupils in his eyes, something that made the character exponentially more expressive. He also made Mickey's body more pear shaped than round and changed his skin tone from white to be more Caucasian. Not much has changed for Mickey since then other than his fashion sense.

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One of Fred's other legacies are the sketches he would do of young ladies. Sometimes they were nude, sometimes (at least partially) clothed but they were always in humorous poses. Other animators were constantly asking Fred for drawings of his girls and they even influenced the looks of the centaurettes in Fantasia and Casey's daughters in the short Casey at the Bat, among others.  His unique design eventually became a class of its own known as a Freddie Moore Girl. Animators still refer to that look today.

Fred left the Disney studio for two years in the late Forties to work for Walter Lantz's studio, where he helped redesign another iconic character, Woody Woodpecker. His life would be tragically cut short during work on Peter Pan when he and his second wife, Virginia, were in a head-on collision returning from a football game in November 1952. Fred would survive long enough to make it to St. Joseph's Hospital in Burbank, across the street from the Disney studio. 14 years later, Walt would pass away in the same building. For all of his genius at the drawing board, Fred would be given the Winsor McCay Award in 1983 and be made an official Disney Legend in 1995.

November 7 - Roy Williams

On this day, in 1976, Roy Williams passed away in Burbank, California. Born July 30, 1907 in Colville, Washington, Roy and his mother moved to California after his father died. From the age of 12, he lived most of his life in the Los Angeles, California area. He played football for Fremont High School and drew cartoons for the school newspaper. After graduating in 1925, Roy went to work for the Walt Disney Studio. He said he found out about the job from a conversation with "one of the studio's office boys." Turned out that the office boy's name was on the studio's letterhead.

Walt hired Roy as part of the Art Department and sent him to study at the famed Chouinard Art Institute. As Roy's innate talent became more refined, he moved up to an in-between animator and then to a full fledged Animator. Roy worked on dozens of shorts over throughout the Thirties and Forties. His biggest talent turned out to be the creation of gags for all the different characters he and his team were tasked with drawing. His fellow animators knew that if they asked Roy to think of something funny for Mickey or Goofy or Donald to do, within minutes he could give them a list of twenty different gags for whatever situation they'd already thought of.

As the Shorts Department started to be phased out in the early Fifties, Roy was given the task of drawing storyboards for a new television show in the early stages of production, The Mickey Mouse Club. Roy was also making the rounds of local schools at the time, teaching kids how to draw Mickey Mouse and generally being a public face for the studio. His easy manner with kids, and his big, friendly physique, was key to Walt's decision to make him the co-host of the Club. Roy would become instrumental in the design of the show. He helped choose the initial cast of kids and he is credited with designing the iconic, and now ubiquitous, mouse ears. His quick sketch abilities would feature prominently in almost every episode. Off screen, Roy and his wife would frequently host parties for the cast at their home and he stayed in touch with many of the Mouseketeers long after the show ended.

When the Mickey Mouse Club ended it's run in 1959, Roy was the only cast member who stayed employed with the studio. He resumed more normal duties like he'd done for the prior thirty years. He would occasionally appear in television specials or a parade at Disneyland, of course proudly wearing his mouse ears. By the mid Seventies, Roy's health had forced him to officially retire after nearly 50 years with Disney. He would still show up on the lot and in Disneyland pretty regularly, sometimes just to sketch a few things for fans. After his death, he was cremated and interred at Forest Lawn Cemetery, just like the office boy he'd remained fiercely loyal to his entire adult life. In 1992, Roy was posthumously made an official Disney Legend alongside his Mickey Mouse Club co-host, Jimmy Dodd.

October 21 - Mary Blair

On this day, in 1911, artist Mary Browne Robinson was born in McAlester, Oklahoma. Her family had moved to Morgan Hill, California by the early Twenties. She had already graduated from San Jose State University when she received a scholarship to the Chouinard Art Institute. Mary graduated from Chouinard in 1933 and soon married another artist, and future Disney employee, Lee Blair. Her dream was to have a career in the fine arts but the Great Depression had other plans for her. To make ends meet, she ended up taking a job at MGM, in a medium she felt was beneath her: animation.

Mary continued to paint, and try to sell her work, whenever she could. Both Mary and her husband were devoted to watercolors. Even though her work at this time was saturated with color, few if any fans of her later work would recognize them as "Mary Blairs". Her paintings during the Thirties were probably influenced by the economic turmoil around her as they tend to be dark and moody.

By 1940, Lee, who had worked for several studios around Hollywood, had migrated to the Walt Disney Studio and Mary would join him there in April of that year. Her initial time with the studio would prove to be incredibly frustrating for her. She had plenty of work to do, making sketches and concept drawings for a variety of projects, but every film she worked on had already been pretty much conceived and she didn't have any room to let her imagination run wild. She also had to work under various other veteran company artists, so her work never looked like it was actually hers. To top it all off, one of the biggest projects she worked on was a "Baby Ballet" segment for a second version of Fantasia that never ended up being produced. Pretty disgruntled, she would resign her position by June of 1941. Lee, however, stayed on with the company, a decision that turn out to be spectacular for his wife.

In 1941, Walt was to embark on a three month goodwill tour of South America at the behest of the United States Government. He decided to bring a bunch of staff along to see if he couldn't pull some projects out of the trip. Lee Blair was one of the artists Walt chose to bring, mainly because he wanted to know if Lee's wife would also come along. During the time Mary had been with the studio, even though she felt stifled the whole time, Walt had fallen in love with her work. He was excited to see what she could do in South America. So, in August 1941, just two months after resigning, Mary was rehired.

South America would turn out to be the most important development in Mary's career. She experienced a literal color explosion in her work. She also began using charcoals, tempera and gouache in addition to her usual watercolors. As she layered color upon color, she found her true artistic voice and began producing the kind of work most of her fans enjoy and love. One of those fans was her boss, Walt. He was crazy about the pictures she was producing on the tour and gave Mary what she wanted from the beginning: her own artistic license at the beginning of a project, letting her create true concept art.

Mary was highly influential on the development of the two films that came directly out of the South America trip. Both Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros benefited from her color combinations and vibrancy. Walt was so delighted, he assigned her to work on many of the films throughout the late Forties and early Fifties. Mary's designs for Song of the South, The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan made each of those films richer and more beautiful than they ever would have been without her.

By 1953, Mary was ready for a change and once again left the Disney Studio. She would now spend her time raising a family, having two sons, and she became a freelance illustrator and artist. Her best know work from this period would be the Little Golden Books she illustrated, but she also designed ad campaigns for companies like Nabisco and Maxwell House and created sets for Radio City Music Hall.

In the early Sixties, Walt began ramping up several projects for the 1964 World's Fair. One of them was for Pepsi and UNICEF and he knew just who he wanted to design it. Mary was enticed to work for Disney once again, designing It's a Small World. The song that stays stuck in your head for days might be a Sherman Brothers classic, but the look of the attraction is pure Mary. It's a Small World was so successful, that Walt would have it moved to Disneyland when the fair ended. It became such a beloved part of Disneyland, that versions of it would pop up in Florida, Tokyo, Paris and Hong Kong. The sun never sets on Mary's endearing little children dancing in their fanciful settings.

Mary would continue to do occasional work for the Walt Disney Company, mostly in the form of murals. In 1967, she created two murals in Tomorrowland at Disneyland, both of which have unfortunately been covered over. In 1971, she put a 90 foot high mural in the Grand Canyon Concourse of the Contemporary Resort of Walt Disney World. This one can still be seen today. Mary also created a series of Disney note cards for Hallmark.

Mary had lived in Washington and Long Island before returning to Soquel, California in the later part of the Seventies. On July 26, 1978, she passed away from a cerebral hemorrhage. Her legacy, though, lives on. In 1991, Mary was made an official Disney Legend. In 1996, she was awarded the Winsor McCay Award. And on October 21, 2011, Google created a doodle in honor of her 100th birthday.

Also on this day, in American history: First Transatlantic Voice Transmission

September 8 - Frank Thomas

On this day, in 2004, Franklin Rosborough Thomas passed away in La Canada Flintridge, California.

 Born in Fresno, California in 1912, Frank grew up the son of the President of Fresno State College. He figured out what he wanted to do in life pretty early. By the time Frank was nine, he'd already asked his dad how to make a living drawing pictures. When he was a sophomore at (surprise!) Fresno State, Frank wrote and directed a movie poking fun at college life. The local theater even ran it for a while. Frank's career was on its way.

After finishing his schooling at Stanford University, Frank enrolled in the Chouinard Art Institute. He moved into a rooming house in Hollywood where one of the other boarders worked for a little outfit called the Walt Disney Studio. That boarder told Frank he should apply and on September 24, 1934, he became Disney employee no. 224.

For Frank, animation was all about personality. Doing funny things in interesting places wasn't enough for him. "Until a character becomes a personality, it cannot be believed," he said. And no one could infuse their characters with more personality than Frank. Some of the most iconic scenes are as memorable as they are because Frank animated them. Think of the following:

The dwarfs crying at Snow White's grave.

Bambi and Thumper learning how to skate on the ice.

Lady and the Tramp eating spaghetti.

Pinocchio singing in the marionette theater.

Merlin and Madame Mim in their wizard's duel.

King Louie singing "I Want to be Like You" with Baloo.

Scenes with Winnie the Pooh and Piglet exploring life together.

Every one of these scenes has become so much more than ink and paint on acetate because Frank was a master at infusing personality into his drawings. And it wasn't just about touching or rambunctious scenes either. Frank was a directing animator for some fantastic villains, too: Lady Tremaine, the Queen of Hearts and Captain Hook.

Frank easily earned his place as one of Walt's Nine Old Men. He even joined Walt on his goodwill tour of South America in 1941. Frank was absent from the studio from 1942-46 as he had joined the Air Force as part of the First Motion Picture Unit, creating training movies, but hit the ground running on his return like he'd only been on a short vacation.

After Walt's death, Frank would spend another 11 years at the studio creating such characters as Pongo and Perdita for 101 Dalmatians, Baloo, Mowgli and Kaa for The Jungle Book, Prince John and Sir Hiss for Robin Hood, and Bernard and Bianca for The Rescuers. After more than 43 years of outstanding animation artistry, Frank retired from the Disney Studio on January 31, 1978. But his work didn't end there.

Throughout his career, Frank was best friends with another of the Old Men, Ollie Johnston. The two were practically inseparable at Disney and they would remain so in retirement. After both had laid down their drawing pencils in 1978, they began new careers as authors. The first book they published together was called "Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life". It is generally recognized as the bible of hand drawn animation. I have a copy myself, not because I'm an artist but because it's a gorgeous, richly detailed book. The duo went on to co-write three other books: Too Funny for Words, Walt Disney's Bambi, and the Disney Villain (which I also own, a signed copy no less, be very jealous).

Several homages have been given to Frank and Ollie over the years. In the 1995 Mickey Mouse short "Runaway Brain", the mad scientist's name is Dr. Frankenollie. Brad Bird, director of The Incredibles movies, loved Frank and Ollie so much he immortalized them in not one but two of his films. He made them the train engineers in The Iron Giant and the two geezers talking about the "old school" in the first Incredibles, which would come out after his death. 

Frank was named a Disney Legend in 1989 along with the other Nine Old Men.

September 4 - Francis Xavier Atencio

On this day, in 1919, Francis Xavier Atencio was born in Walsenburg, Colorado.

Xavier, who frequently went by simply X, moved to Los Angeles, California in 1937 to attend the Chouinard Art Institute. A shy but talented young man, his instructors had to almost force him to submit his work to the Disney Studio for consideration for a job. X later managed to amuse his neighbors when he went running by their houses shouting at the top of his lungs "I got a job at Disney!".

X joined the Disney Studio in 1938 and three years later he was an assistant animator working on Fantasia. By then World War II was heating up for America. X left the studio to join the United States Army Air Forces as a photo interpreter. Stationed in England, he spent over three years analyzing aerial surveillance pictures for information to pass on to the boys at the front. Serving with the 2nd Photo Tech Squadron, X attained the rank of captain before being discharged in 1945.

Upon his return to the Disney Studio, X went right to work as an animator in the shorts department. In 1953, he received his first screen credit for the Academy Award winning "Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom". X also contributed to two other Oscar nominated films: the first stop motion animated film produced by the studio, 1959's "Noah's Ark", and 1962's "A Symposium on Popular Songs." He would become something of an expert on title sequences for live action movies, helping to create the openings for the likes of The Parent Trap, Babes in Toyland and Mary Poppins. You can even find evidence of his artistry in the "I'm No Fool" series that originally ran on the Mickey Mouse Club. But some of his greatest work was yet to come.

 In 1965, Walt asked X to change departments and join the team at WED Enterprises, the group that eventually became known as Imagineers. The first project he worked on was re-purposing animatronic dinosaurs from the 1964 World's Fair Ford pavilion into a scenic view for the Disneyland Railroad.  X then began not only writing scripts for some of most beloved Disney attractions of all time, he wrote music for them, too, much to his own surprise. He once said "I didn't even know I could write music, but somehow Walt did."

The next attraction of X's to open was Pirates of the Caribbean, in early 1967. He wrote the show script for it, wrote its theme song, "Yo Ho (A Pirate's Life for Me)" and provided various voices for it. The next ride boasting an X Atencio script was Adventure Thru Inner Space, opening later the same year. Two years later, in 1969, another X masterpiece opened: The Haunted Mansion. Again, he wrote the script, its theme song, "Grim Grinning Ghosts" and his voice can be heard coming from the coffin in the conservatory. As an added bonus, if you ever get stuck on the Disneyland version of Mansion, X provides the emergency spiel.

X's contributions to Disney attractions continued throughout the 1970s. When the Florida Project came along, X wrote lyrics for Buddy Baker's theme music for If You Had Wings and helped design Space Mountain. When plans for Epcot began rolling out, he had a hand in Spaceship Earth, World of Motion and the Mexico Pavilion. And, just so the sun will never set on his handiwork, in 1983, X made multiple trips to Tokyo Disneyland to supervise all the recordings that went into their version of the Haunted Mansion.

X retired in 1984 after spending 47 years creating a spectacular body of work for the Walt Disney Company. He was officially declared a Disney Legend in 1996 and passed away at the ripe old age of 98 in 2017.