August 30 - Fred MacMurray

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On this day, in 1908, Frederick Martin MacMurray was born in Kankakee, Illinois. Fred’s performing abilities came down from his father’s side of the family: dad was a music teacher and his aunt spent time on the vaudeville circuit and appeared in a slew of silent films. By 1910, the MacMurray family had moved to the Madison, Wisconsin area, near where his mother had been born. During his adolescence, Fred developed his vocal talents and began playing the saxophone. He earned a full ride scholarship to Carroll University in Waukesha, Wisconsin but failed to graduate. Maybe that was inevitable given his creative tendencies, but his time spent singing and playing with a variety of local bands certainly contributed to his dropping out. Not that it hurt him any in the long run.

In 1930, Fred was a featured vocalist on not one but three songs: All I Want Is Just One Girl with the Gus Arnheim Orchestra and I’m in the Market for You and After a Million Dreams, both with George Olsen’s band. This exposure helped him get into Broadway shows. The first was a musical revue, Three’s a Crowd, that ran for 271 performances starting in October of 1930. Two years later, Fred starred in Jerome Kern’s musical Roberta, alongside Bob Hope and Sydney Greenstreet, all three of them just waiting to become big Hollywood stars. That show ran for 295 performances, ending just in time for Fred to move to California to start his path to stardom as a contract player with Paramount Pictures.

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Fred jumped right into the deep end of movies almost as soon as he got to Hollywood, appearing in seven movies in 1935 alone. Throughout the rest of the Thirties and into the Forties, he worked with most of the heavy hitters in Tinsel Town: Katherine Hepburn, Carole Lombard, Billy Wilder, Humphrey Bogart, Claudette Colbert, Joan Crawford, Marlene Dietrich, Barbara Stanwyck, the list goes on and on. Part of Fred’s genius was the ability to do just about any role. He could be the smart guy in a comedy, the bad guy in film noir and could hold his own in a musical. Because of his versatility, Fred quickly rose to the top of his profession. By 1943, he was the highest paid actor in town pulling in over $420,000 that year (the equivalent of over $6.2 million today). And most of his best known work was still to come.

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One of the great film noir performances, for Fred or anyone else, happened in 1944 when he took on the role of Walter Neff, the unscrupulous insurance salesman who not only conspires to murder Barbara Stanwyck’s husband but plans to make the insurer he works for pay for it in Double Indemnity. Fred pulled off another less than savory character a decade later opposite Humphrey Bogart as Lieutenant Thomas Keefer in The Caine Mutiny. His third famous go-around as a guy you’d like to punch in the face came in 1960 when he played Jeff Sheldrake, an adulterous businessman vying with Jack Lemmon for Shirley MacLaine’s um… affections in The Apartment. He once reported that women would publically berate him for Sheldrake’s sleaziness following the release of the now classic film. Arguably, though, his biggest roles were much nicer guys and mostly came about through a long relationship with the Walt Disney Company.

The names Fred MacMurray and Walt Disney were first joined together in people’s minds in 1959 when Fred was cast in the studio’s very first fully live action movie, The Shaggy Dog. Playing the father of the titular dog, he was able to help propel the movie to the biggest financial success Disney had ever enjoyed to that point (co-starring with Annette Funicello and Tommy Kirk didn’t hurt). I’m not saying this was a key factor in making Fred one of Walt’s favorite actors, but it certainly helped. So did the success of his subsequent films. In 1961, Fred reteamed with Tommy and first played Ned Brainard, nerdy scientist and creator of a super substance called flubber, in the smash hit The Absent-Minded Professor. That performance earned him a Golden Globe nomination, the only time the vastly underrated actor ever got any nomination. Professor was so popular it spawned Disney’s first sequel just two years later, The Son of Flubber, which Fred and Tommy of course returned for. In between the two flubber flicks, Fred and Tommy joined Jane Wyman for a family vacation comedy, Bon Voyage! Three more light hearted comedies followed: 1966’s Follow Me, Boys!, 1967’s The Happiest Millionaire and, finally, 1973’s Charlie and the Angel. Fred’s seven pictures with Disney comprised more than half of his last dozen film appearances and probably more than three quarters of what he’s recognized for today. And those seven pictures became the basis for Fred achieving another Disney first when, in 1987, he was declared the inaugural Disney Legend.

As if appearing in a fair number of hit movies throughout the Sixties wasn’t enough success for one man, Fred was also appearing weekly in a hit television show as well. In 1960, he was cast as Steven Douglas, an aeronautical engineer and widowed father of three sons, on the aptly named My Three Sons on CBS. The series also starred William Frawley (of I Love Lucy fame) and one of Fred’s co-stars from The Shaggy Dog, Tim Considine. For the next five years, My Three Sons was part of the bedrock of ABC’s lineup. When the network declined to pony up for a changeover to color filming, CBS gladly snapped it up, colorized it and ran with it for seven more years, finally ending it in 1972. With 380 episodes, it’s the ranks as the #3 sitcom (in terms of number of episodes) behind The Simpsons and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. And yes, just like The Simpsons has become, that final season was kind of unwatchable.

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Fred’s final acting gig came in 1978, during the disaster movie craze. He played the mayor of a Texas town being invaded by killer bees in The Swarm (which was apparently even worse than you can possibly imagine it) and decided to retire. Because, let’s face it, he didn’t need any more money. Not only was he once the highest paid actor in Hollywood, but he’d made some fantastic investments over the years and was estimated to be worth something in the range of $150 million when he died. So retiring to his 1750-acre ranch in Northern California wasn’t a bad deal at all. At least it wouldn’t have been if he hadn’t had a string of severe health problems. Fred, a lifelong smoker, was diagnosed with throat cancer in the late Seventies, shortly after ending his career. He beat it, but the cancer recurred in 1987. In the early Eighties, he was diagnosed with a mild form of leukemia, which he lived with for a decade. In 1988, he suffered a stroke that paralyzed his right side. He was able to recover about 90% of his movement over the next few years but it didn’t matter in end. In 1991, he contracted pneumonia and that was the final straw for his beleaguered body. Fred passed away in a Santa Monica hospital being treated for the pulmonary disease on November 5, 1991. He was 83.

August 26 - Retta Scott

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On this day, in 1990, Retta Scott passed away in Foster City, California. Born on February 23, 1916 in the tiny town of Omak, Washington (it had less than 1,000 residents at the time), Retta and her family moved four hours east to the Seattle area when she was a fairly young girl. Art was her favorite subject in school and she first thought about doing it as a career when, in the fourth grade, she won a scholarship from the Seattle Art and Music Foundation. She was able to stretch that award into nearly ten years of art classes, continuing to get local training well past her 1934 graduation from Roosevelt High School. Her dedication to honing her craft paid off when she then won a second scholarship, this time for three years of study at the famous Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, California. Retta packed up her belongings, moved a couple of states south and set her sights on becoming a fine artist. She ended up making history.

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While at Chouinard, Retta would spend a lot of her free time at the Griffith Park Zoo, just a short distance from the school. Her bold sketches of the animals there caught the attention of one of her professors. He recommended that she apply for a job at the Walt Disney Studio. Retta said no thanks, cartoons did not appeal to her. The professor explained he had more of the type of artistry present in the recently released Snow White in mind and understood, through some contacts of his, that the studio was looking at doing an adaptation of Bambi next. Retta’s expertise with animal drawings would be a natural fit. Retta was finally convinced to apply and, almost to her surprise, was hired.

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Retta began her Disney career in 1938 in the Story Department, a fairly unusual start given that most women at animation studios were almost always relegated to the tediousness of the Ink and Paint Department. Her time spent at the zoo came shining through in her story sketches and character development work. Both David Hand, Bambi’s director, and Walt himself were impressed with the intensity of her drawings. When the movie moved into the actual production phase, Retta was moved into the actual animation department, put under the tutelage of the Legendary Eric Larson and assigned to the sequence where the hunting dogs are chasing Faline. Her amazing work led to a full-fledged on-screen credit as an animator for Bambi, making her the first woman at Disney ever to receive that honor.

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Over the next few years, Retta continued on as an animator for both Fantasia and Dumbo (although she gets no official credit on either of those films) as well as contributing to at least two Donald Duck shorts, Donald’s Snow Fight and Donald Gets Drafted (again sans credit). Retta was working on animating the weasels for the studio’s adaptation of The Wind in the Willows when she made an on-screen appearance during the filming of The Reluctant Dragon in 1941 (she presents the film’s star, Robert Benchley with a caricature of him as an elephant). Later that year, as things became increasingly tight for Disney just prior to World War II, she was briefly laid off with a number of other animators, but by the beginning of 1942, she was hired back into the Story Department. She worked on several animated shorts and educational films until she married a submarine commander and retired from Disney in April 1946.

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Retta and her husband, Benjamin Worcester, moved east to Washington, DC where she continued her art career as an illustrator. She would work with the Walt Disney Company several more times over the years, most notably on Little Golden Book editions of Disney movies. Her illustrations for the Cinderella Big Golden Book are what make that book a must have for collectors. She was praised for a picture book that didn't look exactly like the film but yet still felt like it came directly out of it. Other vintage non-Disney Little Golden Books she is famous for include The Santa Claus Book and Happy Birthday.

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In the late Seventies, Retta returned to the world of animation when she was hired by Martin Rosen, a British filmmaker, to help animate The Plague Dogs released in 1980 (it's said to be a pretty decent movie in spite of a terrible title). She moved to San Francisco to work on the picture (having divorced her husband around the same time), teaming up with a youngish Brad Bird (who would go on to direct The Iron Giant and The Incredibles). And even though four decades had passed since the last time she had to prove herself in an animator's workroom, the men in the room were reportedly both surprised by her talents and awed by them. Unfortunately, some things take longer to change than we might like.

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After production wrapped up on Dogs, Retta would join another future member of Pixar, Bud Luckey, at his studio, doing animation for commercials like Cookie Crisp Cereal. She worked there until 1985, when she suffered a stroke that spared her life but robbed her of the ability to produce quality work. She would live quietly for another five years before passing away at her home in Foster City. The pioneering animator who helped open doors for generations of women after her was 74. Ten years later, in 2000, Retta would posthumously be declared an official Disney Legend, for reasons that should be fairly obvious.

August 16 - Fess Parker

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On this day, in 1924, Fess Elisha Parker Jr. was born in Fort Worth, Texas. The Parker family soon moved out to the rural part of Tom Green County, Texas and the open prairie seemed to suit young Fess just fine. He grew to be a strapping lad of 6 feet 6 inches. Which was a great height to be right up until he wanted to serve his country. After graduating from high school, during the latter part of World War II, Fess joined the United States Navy with dreams of becoming a fighter pilot. Turns out he was too tall for that position. Okay, how about being a radioman gunner, then? Sure, let’s give it a whirl. Nope. Turns out he was too big to fit in the rear cockpit as well. He was finally transferred to the Marine Corps and made into a radio operator. He was sent to the Pacific theater of war, arriving just in time for Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the end of the war.

After his honorable discharge in 1946, Fess used his G.I. Bill benefits to enroll at Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, Texas. He was active in the drama club there and continued to act when he transferred to the University of Texas a year later. He graduated in 1950 with a degree in history and, since he still had a year of military benefits left, moved on to the University of Southern California to start a master’s degree in theater history.

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Fess’ professional acting career began in 1951 when he began earning $32 a week as an extra in a production of the play Mister Roberts. It didn’t take long for him to nab a small role in the Western Untamed Frontier with Joseph Cotton and Shelley Winters. Shortly after that, he was given a contract at Warner Brothers and began appearing a string of Westerns. That rolled into roles on Western television anthology shows like Death Valley Days in 1954.

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Also in 1954, Walt Disney was looking for someone to star as Davy Crockett in a five episode arc for his own anthology show. Walt was seriously considering James Arness, who later came to fame on Gunsmoke. While watching James do his thing in a sci-fi flick called Them!, Walt was actually more intrigued by someone in a smaller role in the same film. Fess played a pilot who gets committed to an insane asylum after claiming his plane was downed by giant insects. Walt saw that pilots commitment to the truth in the face of official pressure to say otherwise as the exact same qualities that Davy Crockett frequently displayed and brought Fess in for an audition. He brought his guitar, met briefly with Walt, sang a song and went on his way. He then heard nothing for weeks. Enough time passed that Fess figured that opportunity had passed him by. Then he got the phone call that changed his career (and arguably the history of television, at least the merchandising part).

Fess was cast as Davy Crockett over several better known actors, including James and the man who was cast as Crockett's sidekick, Buddy Ebsen. Even though Fess was only in five episodes of Disneyland he became one of the biggest television hits ever. Pretty much anything Crockett related started flying off store shelves but kids in the mid Fifties went absolutely gaga over coon skin caps. Widely considered to be the first television miniseries (even though the term wouldn't be coined until the early Seventies), the first three Davy Crockett episodes were even spliced together and released theatrically. The huge popularity of the series led to a contract for Fess with the company. And that eventually led to big problems for Fess.

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Once the last of the Davy Crockett scenes was filmed, Fess began appearing in full theatrical releases for Disney. He was in The Great Locomotive Chase, Westward Ho, the Wagons!, Old Yeller and The Light in the Forest. While the films were fairly successful, Fess began to chafe more with each one. He felt that every part he was doing was exactly like the one before it. And he wasn't wrong. Not only was Disney pigeonholing him into one specific role, Walt refused to let him do anything outside of that role. Fess had to pass on Bus Stop with Marilyn Monroe and The Searchers with John Wayne. When he was cast in a small role in 1959's Tonka, Fess decided enough was enough. He refused to do it, was put on suspension from his contract and ultimately parted with Disney.

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Fess didn't have to wait long to get picked up. Paramount considered Disney's loss to be their gain and put him under contract. Over the next few years, he made a handful of appearances in small roles, but his movie career never really took off. Television was always were he shined and once he returned to it in 1962, he would only ever appear in one more film, 1966’s Smoky. But return to the small screen he did, filling the shoes of Jimmy Stewart in a television adaptation of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. After one season of playing the new senator from an unnamed state, Fess moved on to the stage for a year. He (naturally) played Curly in a touring production of Oklahoma! When the tour finished, he was cast in his next big role, one that is often confused with his iconic portrayal of Davy Crockett (and for good reason).

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Starting in 1964, Fess played the second role of his lifetime, Daniel Boone, another figure from the frontier days of American history. He was again a hit. Daniel Boone ran for six seasons on NBC and was a top rated show during its entire run. Not only did Fess star in the show, but he helped produce it and even directed several episodes. Interestingly, the producers of the show initially wanted it to be about Davy Crockett, but Disney refused to relinquish the rights to that character, so they had to settle for Daniel Boone. While the show was popular it never quite attained the same level of craziness that Fess’ earlier run did. Even though Boone wore a coonskin cap that the creators made sure was mentioned in the theme song (just one more reason that people can’t seem to differentiate between Fess’ two major roles).

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To confuse matters even more, Fess became interested in opening a Davy Crockett inspired theme park during the filming of Daniel Boone. He went so far as to option some land in Northern Kentucky for the venture, but he was a little too late to make it happen. The King’s Island amusement park started construction less than two hours away from his site and investors didn’t think the area could support more than one park. Since King’s Island was already on the way, they’d have to pass on Fess’ idea.

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Daniel Boone ended its run in 1970 and, even though he didn’t have to, Fess ended his run, too. He could have rolled right on into a new show, McCloud, but felt it was too similar to things he’d already done. Dennis Weaver was more than happy to take that opportunity of his hands. When a pilot for his own sitcom, The Fess Parker Show, failed to get picked up by a network in 1974, Fess retired from acting completely. He did not, however, spend the rest of his life sipping gin and tonics by the pool. He opted instead for a nice glass of chardonnay.

In the late Seventies, Fess, his wife Marcella and their two children settled down in Santa Ynez, California. He acquired 1,500 acres of prime land in nearby Los Olivos, planted a variety of grapes and opened the Fess Parker Family Winery, a venture he devoted the rest of his life to. Over the years, the winery has produced several award winning vintages and every bottle sports a label with a golden coonskin cap on it, hearkening back to Fess’ acting days. You can also buy actual coonskin caps in the tasting room’s gift shop, as well as Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone inspired bottle toppers. The winery brought Fess back into the entertainment world (sort of) in 2004 when it became the setting for the fictitious winery in the Academy Award winning movie Sideways.

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Even though he didn’t do any acting during the last several decades of his life, Fess was still bestowed with a few honors for his talents. In 1991, in spite of the somewhat acrimonious end to his relationship with the company, he was declared an official Disney Legend. In 2003, the Texas Cultural Trust awarded him the Texas Medal of Arts for his faithful portrayal of Davy Crockett. And in 2004, giving further evidence that there wasn’t any hard feelings on Disney’s end, Fess was given a coveted window in Disneyland. It isn’t located on Main Street USA, however, but is more appropriately on display in Frontierland above the Pioneer Mercantile. It reads “Davy Crockett - Coonskin Cap Supply Co - Fess Parker Proprietor.”

Fess enjoyed the remainder of his life working on his winery. And it truly was (and is) a family affair. His son is currently president of operations and his daughter is vice president of marketing. Fess himself is no longer part of venture, though, having passed away quietly in his sleep on March 18, 2010. He was 85.

August 14 - Steve Martin

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On this day, in 1945, Stephen Glenn Martin was born in Waco, Texas. Steve’s father was a realtor and an aspiring actor, two professions that warranted a move to Southern California (even if the latter one never panned out). He did most of his growing up in Garden Grove with his sister, Melinda. Steve’s association with the Walt Disney Company started way back in 1955, when he was just ten years old. On weekends (and full time during the summer, labor laws were obviously much different then), he sold guide books at the entrance to Disneyland. There’s even some documented proof of his employment. In 1956, the Barstow family of Wethersfield, Connecticut won a trip to California that included a stop at Disneyland. The Barstow’s took extensive home movies of their vacation that were eventually edited into a short subject film called Disneyland Dream (which has since been included in the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress). If you’re watching closely at just past the twenty minute mark, little Steve Martin makes his film debut in a top hat, dark vest and pink striped shirt as he strolls through the frame hawking his guide books.

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Steve spent three years as a guide book salesman, but that wasn’t the only thing he was doing in the park. He spent a lot of time in the magic shop, learning sleight of hand tricks and the importance of presentation to customers. He was also striking up a friendship with the Legendary Wally Boag, a performer at the Golden Horseshoe Saloon who would become a big influence on Steve’s stand-up comedy. By 1960, Steve had a full time job in the magic shop, where he honed not only his skills at magic but perfected his juggling act and balloon animal talents, often receiving tips for his ability to entertain guests. He stayed there throughout his teens, balancing his shifts with his school work and the cheerleading he did for Garden Grove High School.

After graduating, Steve moved on to Santa Ana College and began developing his stand up comedy routines. He was part of a troupe at Knott’s Berry Farm for a while and became romantically involved with a young woman who convinced him to transfer to the University of California, Long Beach to be a philosophy major. The relationship didn’t last (she went to UCLA and they drifted apart) but the philosophy classes would have a profound impact on the rest of Steve’s life. He began creating purely conceptual stand-up routines using concepts like if there wasn’t ever a punchline, what would happen with all the tension he was building?

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As he began trying his ideas out on actual audiences, the reviews for Steve’s act were initially mixed but he began to build a following. It helped that he was able to wrangle a job writing for The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in 1967. Not only did the show give him his first television appearance in 1968, but he won an Emmy in 1969 as part of the shows writing team. Steve went on to write for The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour and The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour, all while building his stand-up career to a level usually reserved for rock stars. In the mid-Seventies, Steve became a regular on NBC’s new late night show Saturday Night Live but, contrary to popular belief, never actually became part of the cast. He was happy to guest host 15 times (and make several other appearances) but didn’t really need to make it a full time gig. His stand-up sets were literally selling out stadiums. Back-to-back Grammy winning, platinum selling comedy albums in 1977 and 1978 didn’t hurt either. And then, in 1981, with no fanfare and no warning, he stopped doing stand-up altogether and moved on to what had been his goal all along: movies.

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Steve’s first big screen appearance was a small role in 1972 in a political satire produced by Bob Epstein, another writer for the Smothers Brothers, called Another Nice Mess. Five years later, he wrote and starred in a short film, The Absent Minded Waiter, which was nominated for an Academy Award. His breakout role came in 1979 when he played Navin R Johnson in The Jerk, a film he also gets a writing credit for. Since then he’s been seen in four dozen more films, twelve of which he wrote himself or helped write with one or two others. Highlights of his career so far include a cameo in The Muppet Movie  (1979), All of Me (1984), Three Amigos (1986), Roxanne (1987), Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987), Parenthood (1989), L.A. Story (1991), The Prince of Egypt (1998), Cheaper by the Dozen (2003) and The Pink Panther (2006).

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Steve has spent as much of career writing material as he has performing it. In 1993 he finished his first full length play, Picasso at the Lapin Agile, which had successful runs in several cities across the country. In 2002, his adaptation of a 1910 German play, The Underpants, had an off-Broadway run and continues to be staged by various regional and collegiate theaters today. Then, in 2015, Steve collaborated with Edie Brickell on the musical Bright Star, which had its Broadway debut the following year and was nominated for numerous awards, winning a Drama Desk Award and two Outer Circle Critics Awards. Steve followed Star up with a play, Meteor Shower, which nabbed Amy Schumer a Tony nomination in 2018.

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Throughout the years, Steve has maintained a working relationship with Disney that has evolved beyond balloon animals and souvenir brochures. In 1991, he starred in the hit remake of Father of the Bride for Touchstone Pictures and returned for the sequel in 1995. He wrote, produced and starred in Touchstone’s 1994 drama A Simple Twist of Fate, based on the classic tale Silas Marner. He was one of the hosts in Fantasia 2000, introducing the Pines of Rome segment. In 2003, Steve starred opposite Queen Latifah in the hit Touchstone comedy Bringing Down the House. Two years later, he again wrote, produced and starred in Shopgirl, an adaptation of a novella he’d written earlier. The same year, just to bring things full circle, Steve hosted the short documentary that replaced Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln for a while, Disneyland: The First 50 Magical Years. While Abe has been back in action since 2009, you can still catch Steve and his co-host, Donald Duck, in the lobby before each show.

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In recent years, Steve has virtually stopped acting in order to focus on his musical career. That’s right. The stand-up comedian who filled stadiums turned into an actor who filled movie theaters and has now morphed into a Grammy winning musician. But it isn’t because Steve Martin has decided to cut a few records. It’s because a guy named Steve Martin happens to be really good at playing the banjo. He first picked one up at the age of seventeen, incorporated it into his act (see his Muppet Show appearance for a good example) and has been working on his skills ever since. He is the real deal when it comes to playing bluegrass; this isn’t something he started doing a few years ago on a whim. His final comedy album in 1981 was routines on side A and live recordings of him playing with a bluegrass band on side B. In 2001, Steve played with Earl Scruggs on a recording of Foggy Mountain Breakdown. That song won a Grammy for Best Country Instrumental Performance. In 2009, he released his first all music album, The Crow: New Songs for the 5-String Banjo. That album won a Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album. In 2013, he released an album with Edie Brickell, his collaborator on Bright Star, called Love Has Come for You. The title track from that album won a Grammy for Best American Roots Song. In addition to their album and Broadway musical, Steve and Edie have done extensive touring together, released a second collaborative album and appeared in the award winning documentary The American Epic Sessions together. In 2010, Steve established the Steve Martin Prize for Excellence in Banjo and Bluegrass to bring attention to the genre and highlight current artists within it. The annual prize involves $50,000, a bronze statue and maybe even the chance to perform with him.

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Among all the accolades that Steve has accumulated over the years, he was officially declared a Disney Legend in 2005 for his decades long relationship with the company. Currently, he’s actually made a return to stand-up, doing a bit of touring in a two-man show with fellow funny man Martin Short. And his next project is another one for Disney and again brings his life full circle. He wrote the story for the comedy Magic Camp, about a camp for budding magicians, which will be released on the company’s new streaming service, Disney+, later this year.

August 10 - Ken Annakin

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On this day, in 1914, Kenneth Cooper Annakin was born in Beverly, East Riding of Yorkshire, England. As a young man, Ken was in training to be an income tax inspector (the British equivalent of an IRS agent who shows up at your office and starts confiscating things) in the city of Hull when he decided that maybe that wasn’t the life for him. Financed by an unexpected win at the racetrack, he immigrated to New Zealand and spent a good chunk of his twenties bouncing around the world doing whatever work he could find. The onset of World War II drew him back home to England where he joined the Royal Air Force as a mechanic. Ken was injured in the blitz of Liverpool and discharged in 1942 but he didn’t go far. He became a camera operator in the arm of the RAF that was making training films.

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It didn’t take Ken long to graduate to assistant director and then director. His first gig at the helm of a film was for the short documentary London 1942, which showcased the plucky spirit of Londoners under the hardships of war. Three years later, he directed his first feature length project, the 1945 documentary Make Fruitful the Land. As the British war machine began winding down, Ken continued to make new training films for it until the head of the company that produced his documentaries asked him for a favor. They were starting a new studio to produce fictional films, would Ken like to direct one of those? The result, Holiday Camp, was a fairly bland comedy about a Cockney family who encounters mild mayhem on vacation. Holiday was released at exactly the right time, however. It struck a chord with war weary audiences, became a decent hit and spawned three sequels, all of which were directed by Ken. His career in the cinema was now well established.

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Ken worked steadily for the next three decades. He made comedies like 1948’s Miranda, starring Glynis Johns as a mermaid, and the 1965 classic Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines. He directed thrillers like 1950’s Double Confession with Peter Lorre and 1957’s Across the Bridge with Rod Steiger. He helmed war movies like the comedy Hotel Sahara with Peter Ustinov and David Tomlinson in 1951 and was one of the five directors on the star studded classic, The Longest Day, in 1962. By the mid-Seventies, Ken’s career was starting to slow considerably and he even took a few dips in the smaller pond of television (not nearly the prestigious waters it’s considered today), directing the CBS miniseries The Pirate and a made-for-tv movie called Institute for Revenge.

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Over the course of that career, Ken did several high profile pictures for the Walt Disney Company. His first came in 1952 when Disney produced their first version of The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men. Next came The Sword and the Rose, also starring Glynis Johns (who would be a frequent star of Ken’s over the years), and Third Man on the Mountain, a thriller set in the Swiss Alps which inspired Walt to build the Matterhorn Bobsled ride in Disneyland. Ken’s biggest hit with Disney (and one of his biggest hits period) was the 1960 adventure Swiss Family Robinson, which starred  John Mills (Hayley’s father) and inspired its own walk-through attraction in two Disney theme parks, the Swiss Family Treehouse. For all these contributions to Disneyana, Ken was officially declared a Disney Legend in 2002, only the second director to receive the honor.

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In 1978, near the end of his career, Ken made a physical move to Los Angeles, where he would spend the rest of his life. He directed a handful of forgettable films during the Eighties. In 1992, his final project would go unfinished. It was a biopic of Genghis Khan starring Charlton Heston. They were filming in Kyrgyzstan when the Soviet Union fell apart and everyone had to get out of Dodge before they were finished. They never got the chance to go back. Someone bought the footage in 2010, intending to make something out of it, but that film has never materialized either.

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Ken lived his remaining years in Beverly Hills, California, occasionally giving interviews or advising young filmmakers who sought him out. In 2002, he was awarded the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire for his contributions to British cinema and also received an honorary degree from Hull University (who was apparently okay with the fact that he’d abandoned the city’s tax inspection needs so many years before). In February 2009, Ken suffered a heart attack one day followed by a stroke the next. He would linger for two more months but never recover. On April 22, 2009, the director of over 50 popular films passed away quietly at home. He was 94.

August 7 - Wilfred Jackson

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On this day, in 1988, Wilfred Emmons Jackson passed away in Newport Beach, California. Born in Chicago, Illinois on January 24, 1906, Jaxon, as he came to be commonly referred to, had made his way to Los Angeles, California and the Otis Art Institute by 1925. As his artistic talents blossomed from a few years of instruction, he began hanging around a little studio on Hyperion Avenue. It wasn’t a good time to be trying to get a job with the Disney brothers. They’d just lost the rights to their popular rabbit character, half their staff and were struggling to keep their heads above all the red ink. Jaxon was willing to do the most menial of tasks for free, however, and stuck around. He would later quip that at some point someone just stuck a paycheck in his hand, making him the only Disney employee that was never actually hired. One of the first things he ever did with the company, however, would cement his place in Disney history forever.

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Hollywood was a quickly changing place in 1928. The Jazz Singer had hit people’s eyes and ears just a few months before and rung the requiem bell for silent pictures. Walt knew that animation wasn’t going to be any different. The problem was how to get the soundtrack to synch up with action happening on screen, something that is crucial to expressing emotions and invoking laughter in an animated film. The new kid on the block, Jaxon, came up with the solution. He devised a system where the ticks of a metronome could be notated on a musical score and the cel count sheet for a film, causing the drawings and the sound effects and score to be nearly perfectly synchronized. Think of it like a precursor to the modern click track. Disney began utilizing Jaxon’s system immediately, starting with Steamboat Willie. The studio was also able to keep their new secret weapon pretty much under wraps. Competing animation studios spent over a year trying to figure out how Disney was so much better at getting all the elements of their movies to line up that well. Once they did, Jaxon’s notation system swept through the entire industry, revolutionizing entertainment as it went.

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Jaxon’s innovation, along with his meticulous attention to detail, quickly propelled him into the role of Director at the studio. Over the next several years, he would direct more than 35 shorts. Some of them would star Mickey Mouse, like the first time Mickey appeared in color, 1935’s The Band Concert. A lot of them were entries in the Silly Symphony series, three of which won Academy Awards. Jaxon put a little gold statue on the studio’s mantle for The Tortoise and the Hare in 1934, The Country Cousin in 1936 and The Old Mill in 1937. That’s right. He won three times in a four year stretch. Something no other Disney director could match.

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With his successes in the Shorts Department piling up, it was natural that Jaxon would become a sequence director when the studio expanded into feature length films. Starting with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937 and ending with Lady and the Tramp in 1955, Jaxon directed parts of eleven classic Disney animated features. Some consider his direction of the Night on Bald Mountain/Ave Maria segment of 1940’s Fantasia to be his crowning achievement, but he was also responsible for all the animated (albeit seldom seen) parts of Song of the South. His amiable but stubborn adherence to doing things right also elevated Cinderella, Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland.

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In the mid Fifties, as the studio was getting heavily into television, Walt asked Jaxon to be one of his main go-to directors, especially of animated episodes, for Disneyland and Walt Disney Presents. He spent the remainder of the decade directing and producing (and once even appearing in) several episodes of the anthology show, as well as a one-off special in 1955 called Dateline: Disneyland.

Unfortunately, during this later period in his career, Jaxon’s health went began to decline and by 1961, after 33 years of inspiring everyone around to produce some of the best films in the industry, he was forced to retire. Retirement seemed to suit him, though, as he would live another 27 years, passing away in 1988. Eleven years later, in 1999, for all his lasting contributions to not only the company but the industry as a whole, Jaxon was officially declared a Disney Legend.

August 6 - Oliver Wallace

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On this day, in 1887, Oliver George Wallace was born in London, England. Oliver was classically trained as a musician and conductor in his native Britain before moving across the pond to Canada in 1904 and then on to Seattle, Washington by 1910. He began honing his eclectic musical stylings alongside vaudeville acts and silent movies in Canadian theaters and continued doing so when he moved to America. Oliver is generally credited with being the first person to play a pipe organ to accompany motion pictures but he was just as comfortable conducting a house orchestra. He slowly worked his way down the West Coast, becoming the house organist at San Francisco’s Granada Theater and then the Rialto Theater in Los Angeles. Along the way, he became an American citizen in 1914 and composed a hit song, Hindustan, in 1918.

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Oliver’s ability to write popular music, coupled with the improvisational skills he picked up backing unpredictable silent pictures, would serve him well when movies began arriving at theaters with their own music, putting a lot of other organ players out of business. He began his film score career composing and playing for Columbia Pictures and Universal Studios. For a great example of his mad organ playing skills, listen to the soundtrack of Universal’s Bride of Frankenstein. Then, in 1936, he was hired by the Walt Disney Studio where he would remain until his death.

Oliver was a natural fit for the world of animation. Because of his years of experience playing behind silent movies he could create music to fit any mood or action the animators could come up with, no matter how outrageous. Over the course of his career, Oliver wrote the scores for almost 140 Disney shorts in every category. Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Silly Symphonies, you name it, Oliver has a credit (or twelve) somewhere in there. One of his most notable contributions to the Shorts Department (although his short scores as a whole have been called a virtual textbook for writing music for cartoons) came during World War II when he composed and wrote the lyrics for the title song from the Academy Award winning Donald short, Der Fuehrer’s Face. Spike Jones and his band would reach #3 on the popular charts with their rendition of it. Oliver would score another Oscar winning short, the classic Toot Whistle Plunk and Boom, a decade later.

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But don’t start thinking that the multi-talented Oliver was relegated to just the Shorts Department (even though he was really good at it). Walt had him conduct the orchestra for the studio’s second feature, Pinocchio, and co-write the score for the fourth one, Dumbo. He would be instrumental (literally and figuratively) in developing the songs Pink Elephants on Parade and When I See an Elephant Fly for the picture. Oliver and his fellow composer, Frank Churchill, would go on to win the Academy Award for Best Musical Score for their work, the only win that Oliver received from his five overall nominations. He would go on to contribute to the scores of Bambi, Make Mine Music, Fun and Fancy Free, Peter Pan, Cinderella and Lady and the Tramp.

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As Disney moved into the realm of live action productions, Oliver took the same journey. It turns out that his talent for scoring animated shorts translated very well into scoring the documentaries the studio began making. Most of the 17 shorts in the Academy Award winning People and Places series boast scores by Oliver, including The Alaskan Eskimo, Men Against the Arctic and Japan Harvests the Sea. He also wrote the music for a handful of the True-Life Adventures (most of which were scored by the Legendary Paul Smith), notably doing Seal Island, the first film in the series, and Jungle Cat, the last film. His score for 1958’s White Wilderness was even nominated for an Oscar, a rare honor for music coming from a documentary.

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Outside the realm of non-fiction, Oliver began to build his repertoire of whimsical and dramatic scores for other Disney projects. He is credited for his work on Darby O’Gill and the Little People, Ten Who Dared, Old Yeller (for which he also penned the titular song) and its sequel Savage Sam, Tonka and 1963’s The Incredible Journey. As happened with so many employees at the Walt Disney Studio, Oliver occasionally got roped into lending his voice to a character in a film. He has two acting credits with the studio that we know of: Mr. Winky, the gang leader, in The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad and the Bandleader in Toby Tyler or Ten Weeks with the Circus.

When the fellow that the Legendary animator Frank Thomas once described as a madman who was funny, eccentric, noisy, unexpected and loved by everyone suddenly passed away on September 15, 1963, the 76-year-old was still working at Disney full time. Forty-three years later, in 2008, for his nearly three decades of constantly improving the works of the studio with his musical genius, Oliver was officially, and most deservedly, declared a Disney Legend.