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 25 - Tim Burton

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On this day, in 1958, Timothy Walter Burton was born in Burbank, California. It’s hard to say what influenced Tim’s decidedly quirky, fairly macabre worldview the most, but the fact that his mother once owned a gift shop themed entirely around cats gives us a good start (although growing up at the epicenter of the entertainment industry would probably have darkened even the perkiest of kids). Tim began experimenting with stop motion animation in his backyard at a fairly young age. He spent a lot of time making soundless super 8 films that could have been spent shoring up his mediocre grades, but then we might not have ever gotten to experience some of my favorite movies.  Tim’s grades were good enough, however, to allow him to move on from Burbank High School to study character animation at CalArts, and really that’s all that matters in the long run.

While at CalArts, Tim wrote, directed and drew the animation entirely by himself for an animated short that caused quite a stir among his fellow students. Stalk of the Celery Monster depicted an unconventional dentist office that employed the titular monster as a sort of dental hygienist. Only fragments of it survive, but in the minute and a half that does, you can see most of the signature Burton aesthetics are already in place. Which really makes what happened next kind of strange: because of the glimmers of strange brilliance evident in Celery Monster, Disney offered Tim an animation apprenticeship.

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At the tail end of the Seventies, Tim started a relationship with the Walt Disney Company that, quite frankly, was doomed from the beginning. Over the next several years, he would be tried out in several different roles, none of which bloomed into anything. He spent time as an animator on The Fox and the Hound. He was moved to the art department and became a conceptual artist on The Black Cauldron, except none of his concepts were ever used (and that film could have used a whole lot of different concepts). He was given storyboard, graphic design and even some art direction work. None of it seemed to fit. And things didn’t get any better when Tim worked on projects of his own.

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In 1982, Tim was able to complete his first short, a stop-motion animated piece called Vincent. It’s a brilliant six minute poem about a little boy who likes to pretend that he is Vincent Price and the best part is that Tim got Vincent Price to narrate it. Disney played it for two weeks in exactly one theater in Los Angeles before the movie Tex (remember that one? Yeah, neither do I). Tim then directed a live action adaptation of Hansel and Gretel for The Disney Channel. Given a distinctly Japanese flavor, the movie features and all Asian cast and culminates in a kung fu fight (even though that martial art is really Chinese) between the siblings and the wicked witch. Disney aired it one time on Halloween 1983 with little warning and no promotion. Tim’s next project was the 1984 live action short Frankenweenie. It’s both a spoof and an homage to the original Frankenstein. Although Frankenweenie was later seen in the United Kingdom in front of Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend (another film you won’t remember, although this one you don’t want to), it was never shown in the United States, in spite of the fact that it cost nearly $1 million to produce. Those two facts apparently gave whoever in management who didn’t like Tim all the ammunition they needed. He was accused of wasting company resources on a picture that was deemed too scary for kids and fired. The good news for his fans is that the spark that fueled his subsequent fire had already been made.

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Paul Reubens was one of the few people who actually got to see Frankenweenie and he loved it. Paul was looking to put his popular character Pee-wee Herman into a big screen romp of some sort and decided that Tim was just the guy to direct it. Tim in turn asked one of his favorite rock stars, Oingo-Boingo front man Danny Elfman, to write the music. The rest, as they say, is history. Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure was a bona-fide hit, taking in $40 million on an $8 million budget, putting Paul, Tim and Danny firmly on the entertainment map and Tim and Danny forged a relationship that has seen Danny score all but three of Tim’s films.

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Tim took a breather, directing some episodes of a new version of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and , before moving on to another feature film. He took a quirky script that was languishing around the offices of Warner Brothers, gave it a rewrite with a lot more comedy thrown in, cast a bunch of folks who were relatively unknown (but wouldn’t be for much longer) and spent the most money he’d ever been allowed to, $15 million. The result was Beetlejuice, a classic comedy that grossed over $74 million worldwide and convinced Warner Brothers that Tim was ready for what they called the big leagues: they gave him the greenlight on his version of a Batman movie.

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Tim had been developing his concepts for the Caped Crusader for a couple of years before getting the go ahead. He was making his superhero a much darker entity than the Superman of the Seventies and wasn’t afraid to court controversy. He insisted on making Batman a regular guy who used super gadgets and cast Michael Keaton, who he’d just worked with on Beetlejuice, as his lead over the objections of every fanboy out there who cried over a comedic actor landing the role. Then he cast Jack Nicholson as his villain, who came with a cloud of demands that threatened to overwhelm the production. Tim then had to constantly butt heads with Warner Brothers’ management to keep the tone of the whole thing from getting campy. And then the budget ballooned from thirty million dollars to forty-eight. The whole thing could have been a disaster. But it wasn’t. Batman opened to good critical reviews, Keaton and Nicholson were both praised for their performances and the film grossed over $400 million. Tim was now an established Hollywood director, one that even Disney was willing to listen to.

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As Tim was ramping up production on what is arguably his best film to date, Edward Scissorhands, he couldn’t forget about a little project he’d left behind when he’d been forced out of Disney. It was a three page poem, titled The Nightmare Before Christmas, that he first thought would make a great children’s book but might also work as a half hour television special. He asked around about it and discovered that Disney still owned the production rights to it. However, his former company was interested in talking to him about producing something based on it (isn’t it amazing what success will do for people’s perceptions of you?). Tim was interested but had a magnum opus to finish first. He hired a young Johnny Depp for his lead, converted a Florida subdivision into a giant movie set (in one scene you can see a sign for Publix in the background; that might not mean something to most of you but Floridians love it) and managed to get Vincent Price in for his last major film scene before he passed away. Edward Scissorhands is probably the most autobiographical film that Tim has ever made and is one of his biggest critical successes as well.

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After Edward, Tim found himself with two projects on his plate. At Disney, The Nightmare Before Christmas was becoming a feature length film. At Warner Brothers, a second Batman movie was being developed. Wanting to avoid the tediousness of three years of stop motion animation work, Tim opted to produce Nightmare and direct Batman Returns. He handed the reins of his holiday extravaganza over to another former Disney animator, Henry Selick, who created one of my favorite films of all time. Nightmare did moderately well at the box office in its initial run but has since become a cult classic that seems to continue to grow with each passing year. In a karma fueled twist of irony, Tim’s name, once derided at Disney for being too dark and weird (and therefore easily fireable), had to be put in front of Nightmare’s title in an attempt to draw in his growing fan base. Three years later, Tim and Henry would collaborate again (as producer and director respectively) for Disney’s second big stop motion feature, 1996’s James and the Giant Peach.

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Meanwhile, over at Warner Brothers, Tim demanded and received total control over Batman Returns. The result, much to the dismay of studio executives, was an even darker movie than the first one, with overtly sexual overtones. The sequel was a critical and financial success (albeit at half the rate of the original) but left management too worried about the direction Tim was taking the superhero. For the third installment, they relegated him to the role of producer only and after that he wasn’t even allowed to do that. I’m not saying the franchise suffered because of that decision, but I’m guessing we wouldn’t ever have had to see Batman and Robin if things had gone down differently.

In the decades since leaving Gotham City, Tim has directed 14 more films, all but one of which have been commercially successful. The lone money loser, Ed Wood, is actually one of his biggest critical successes (and a Touchstone Pictures movie). It’s a pretty good film but it’s also a biopic about an obscure director of terrible movies. If you aren’t interested in the subject (and even now, most people would be hard pressed to tell you who exactly Ed Wood is), you just aren’t going to care. Outside of that, Tim’s movies over the years have appealed to a wide swath of the viewing public. Whether you’re interested in summer popcorn fare (Planet of the Apes, Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children), quirky bios (Big Eyes) or more of his signature macabre (Sleepy Hollow, Corpse Bride, Dark Shadows), he’s done something for just about every taste, a sentiment boosted by the fact that his films have grossed over $4 Billion. That figure has been greatly helped along by the three pictures he’s done for Disney since Nightmare: a live action Alice in Wonderland, an animated Frankenweenie and, his latest project, a live action Dumbo which have a combined box office of nearly $1.5 Billion (and, incidentally, are all kind of remakes that were done in the opposite medium from the originals). There is currently no word on what might be up Tim’s sleeve for his next project, but we know that whatever it is, it will not only be fun to watch, but probably more than a little bit off the beaten Hollywood path and that makes the anticipation just that much sweeter. Happy 61^st birthday, Tim!

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.

July 31 - Casey Jr Circus Train

On this day, in 1955, the Casey Jr. Circus Train ride finally opened for business in Fantasyland of Disneyland. With Walt Disney's love of trains, it's almost amazing that there was only two train attractions when Disneyland opened on July 17, 1955. The major one was the Santa Fe and Disneyland Railroad, with narrow-gauge steam driven locomotives that circumnavigated the park and made stops in three (now four) different lands. The smaller ride was not only designed with smaller riders in mind (who might be afraid of the bigger train) but would capitalize on existing Disney characters as well.

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Even though it's an inanimate object, the Casey Jr. Circus Train is really just as much of a character in Dumbo as anyone else involved with the circus. He has his own theme song and everything. So he naturally translates into an attraction with character of its own. The Circus Train runs on a two foot wide track as opposed to the three foot wide track of the Disneyland Railroad. While being a third smaller might not seem like a lot, anyone of the adult persuasion will have no trouble feeling the loss of space. Which is okay, since Casey isn't really designed with adults in mind. Small pints love it and the ride is short enough that their parents don't mind. Too much. Especially if you get to ride in the cage car. That is pretty fun.

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There are two trains that can run at a time, one loading while the other is zipping around the track. Each train consists of an engine, a calliope car, two open cars with seats, two wild animal cage cars and a caboose. The engine however is not what powers the train. The calliope car is what runs the whole shebang. It houses a diesel engine that runs the calliope, creates the steam pressure for the whistle and brakes and moves the train around the track. At one point, Casey chugs his way up a hill and can be heard chanting "I think I can, I think I can" just like in the movie. For anyone who is a fan of Dumbo, or mini trains in general, it's a sweet ride.

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And Casey is one of those rides that's been around since Disneyland's opening day. Sort of. It was available to ride on July 17, but it was experiencing a lot of operational troubles (much like the park in general). Not many people actually got to ride it that first day. When the park opened for paying guests the next day, Casey was not one of the things they could do. The circus train was the first ride to be closed for future enjoyment. Safety checks were run that second day in the hopes that Casey could open but it would be almost two weeks before all the kinks were worked out and the first paying guests got to tour Storybookland from a train instead of a boat.

July 20 - Verna Felton

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On this day, in 1890, Verna Felton was born in Salinas, California. When she was ten, Verna performed in a San Jose benefit for the victims of the Galveston Flood of 1900. She attracted the attention of the manager of a travelling show in the area, who offered her a contract. Verna's mother declined on her behalf. Shortly thereafter, her father died, leaving the family in bad financial shape. Verna's mother then contacted the show manager, who quickly produced a contract and she spent the remainder of her formative years in the theater.

Verna toured with the Allen Stock Company up and down the West Coast of the United States and Canada. Initially she was billed as "Little Verna Felton, the Child Wonder" but by 1907, she had become one of the company's leading ladies. In 1910, one of the troupe's shows was The Defiance of Doris, which had been written specifically for Verna. By the Twenties, Verna had stopped touring and settled in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. She was ensconced in the Empress Theatre there, again as one of their leading ladies.

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Verna moved to Hollywood in the Thirties and became a staple on radio programs from coast to coast. She started in 1937 as the mother in The Cinnamon Bear, a serial designed to air between Thanksgiving and Christmas and was rebroadcast every year for decades (you might even be able to find it somewhere in the world this holiday season). From there, Verna moved on to have recurring roles on The Great Gildersleeve, The Jack Benny Program, Point Sublime, The Abbott and Costello Show, The Joan Davis Show, The Judy Canova Show, A Day in the Life of Dennis Day, The Red Skelton Show, December Bride and My Little Margie. She was queen (or aunt or nosy neighbor) of the airwaves for two decades, right up until television began to capture people's imaginations. And she really only slowed down enough to change mediums.

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As television clawed its way to the top of America's entertainment heap, Verna rode the wave of radio programs that made the leap. She reprised roles that audiences had only heard her in on the new versions of The Jack Benny Program, The Dennis Day Show and December Bride. Her portrayal of Hilda Crocker on Bride, and its spin-off Pete and Gladys, earned her Emmy nominations in 1958 and 1959. One of Verna's most famous roles came in the early Sixties, when she was a semi-regular on The Flintstones as Pearl Slaghoople, Fred Flintstone's demanding mother-in-law. She also enjoyed guest appearances on I Love Lucy, Wagon Train, The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show and the final episode of Dennis the Menace.

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Verna's most enduring body of work, though, came through her long association with the Walt Disney Company. Any one of the characters from her list of Disney voice credits would make a performer proud, but she could boast all nine of them. She started in 1940 with dual roles in Dumbo, playing both the circus' Elephant Matriarch and Mrs. Jumbo, Dumbo's mother. Next, she became everyone's favorite Fairy Godmother in Cinderella, a role she actually reprised twice afterwards on the radio, once for Screen Directors Playhouse and again for Hallmark Playhouse. Verna's next role took a villainous turn when she brought to life the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland. She followed that up with Aunt Sarah in Lady and the Tramp (her son, Lee Millar, actually voiced Jim Dear), Flora, the red fairy, and Queen Leah in Sleeping Beauty and Eloise in the 1960 short Goliath II. Verna's final role for Disney was as Winifred, Colonel Hathi's wife, in The Jungle Book. All that and she hasn't been granted Legendary status. Shameful.

Verna worked right up to the end of her life (The Jungle Book was actually released posthumously). On the evening of December 14, 1966, she suffered a fatal stroke and passed away, just hours before Walt did the following morning. She was 76.

June 28 - Herb Ryman

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On this day, in 1910, Herbert Dickens Ryman was born in Vernon, Illinois. When he was 9, Herb's family moved to Decatur. He began following in his father's footsteps as a medical student at the private Millikin University there, until he became deathly ill with scarlet fever. His mother, who had pushed for the medical studies over what Herb wanted to pursue, an artistic career, became concerned for his health and relented, allowing him to enroll in the Art Institute of Chicago. He graduated cum laude and, in 1932, moved out to Los Angeles, California to try his luck at making money with his art. He quickly found a job at the MGM Studio, as a storyboard illustrator. For a while during the studio's Golden Age, Herb was the only illustrator on staff and helped design the looks of such classic films as Mutiny on the Bounty, David Copperfield, the Emerald City portion of The Wizard of Oz and The Good Earth.

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Something about The Good Earth really struck a chord with Herb. He was inspired enough by his work on that film to quit his job and spend a year traveling around China. He made hundreds of sketches and paintings during his Asian tour, publishing many of them in a book when he returned to the states in 1938. As part of his homecoming, Herb had an exhibition of his work at the Chouinard Art Institute which was attended by Walt Disney. Walt was so impressed with Herb's paintings, he asked him if he wanted a job. Herb said sure and became Disney's art director on Fantasia and Dumbo. In the summer of 1941, when Walt and an entourage took a goodwill tour of South America on behalf of the United States government, Herb was one of the artists that went along for the ride. His sketches from the trip influenced the look of both Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros.

Following the end of World War II, Herb got word that 20th Century Fox was developing a film based on the novel Anna and the King of Siam by Margaret Landon. He had actually become an acquaintance of Margaret during his time in China and was interested in working on the film. He amiably resigned his position at Disney and changed studios again. Over the next several years, Herb worked on Fox films including Forever Amber, David and Bathsheba and The Robe.

For two summers, in 1949 and 1950, Herb took leaves of absence from Fox and literally joined the circus. He traveled with the performers of Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey, preserving their way of life through his paintings. During his time with the circus, he became good friends with Emmett Kelly, one of the greatest clowns of all time.

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On September 26, 1953, Herb received a desperate call from another old friend, Walt Disney, asking for an immediate meeting. Intrigued, Herb agreed. When they came face to face, Walt began describing all his ideas for a new theme park and asked if Herb could produce some drawings bringing those ideas to life. Herb said sure, when do you want them? Walt said how about right now? The two men worked pretty much non stop throughout the weekend to finish several detailed sketches. It wasn't long after that when Roy Disney took those sketches and showed them to the investors who would agree to finance Walt's latest dream. Without them, Disneyland might never have become reality.

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Once the plans for his theme park were securely in place, Walt asked Herb to come back to work at Disney. This time around, Herb worked mainly with WED Enterprises, designing and creating concept images for theme park attractions. For Disneyland, he helped design Sleeping Beauty Castle, Main Street USA, New Orleans Square, the Jungle Cruise and Pirates of the Caribbean. He was integral to the development of Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln for the 1964 World's Fair. He was the chief designer of Cinderella Castle when the Florida Project was taking shape.

In 1971, Herb officially retired from Disney, but like most old timers of the era, he never completely walked away. By 1976, he was back consulting with the company on plans for EPCOT Center, giving style to the American Adventure and the China pavilion. He then helped design a history of Japan show for the opening of Tokyo Disneyland called Meet the World. His last project with Disney was creating concepts for the version of Main Street USA that would eventually debut at Euro Disneyland.

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Outside of his work with various Hollywood studios, Herb was a prolific artist. In addition to his paintings with the circus, he created watercolors of the California coastline and portraits of various celebrities. He was a member of the American Institute of Fine Arts, the Society of Illustrators and the California Art Club. His paintings were collected by the Guggenheims, the Barrymores and Cecil B. DeMille among others.

In late 1988, Herb became ill and he passed away on February 10, 1989 at the age of 78. In 1990, he was officially declared a Disney Legend for all his work shaping the beloved Disney theme parks. That same year, his sister Lucille, along with Marty Sklar, Sharon Disney and Buzz Price, created the Ryman-Carroll Foundation in Herb's honor. The Foundation's main purpose is running Ryman Arts, an organization that provides free art classes with master teachers to Los Angeles area high school students. You can find out more about their work, and the man that inspired them, at rymanarts.org.

May 29 - Danny Elfman

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On this day, in 1953, Daniel Robert Elfman was born in Los Angeles, California. As the child of teachers, Danny spent much of his childhood hanging around the local movie theater (not surprisingly admiring the scores of movies more than the actors in them) and hanging out with the band geeks. While in high school, he started a ska band, dropped out of school and followed his older brother Richard to France for a while. Upon his return to the States, he sort of sat in on a few classes at CalArts (not having a high school diploma prevented him from actually enrolling). Then, when he was nineteen, a formal education ceased to matter all that much. 

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In 1972, Richard formed a band/performance art troupe he called The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo.  Danny was off in Africa at the time studying the violin and percussion instruments, but joined the group when he got back to America. The Mystic Knights played a variety of genres of music, mostly wearing clown makeup, with original performance bits thrown in. Needless to say, they didn’t make any recordings of their shows, in spite of their growing popularity. In late 1975, Richard’s interests began to drift towards filmmaking and he passed the mantel of leadership of the group on to Danny. The Mystic Knights really began to gain a following in Los Angeles and even appeared on the Gong Show in 1976, winning their episode. Over the next few years, they began appearing in independent films and the group’s style began to lean toward pop artists. In 1980, Richard released a film called Forbidden Zone, which was supposed to represent the surrealism of one of the Mystic Knights’ stage performances. It was the first time that Danny would write the score of a movie. Despite receiving poor reviews, the film has become a cult classic and provided a boost to Richard’s film career and Danny’s music career. 

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Following the release of Forbidden Zone, The Mystic Knights shortened their name to Oingo Boingo, dropped most of the theatricality from their performances and became a pop octet with Danny as lead singer, rhythm guitarist and songwriter. Oingo Boingo was frequently called a new wave band but in reality, their use of a horn section and continuously surreal imagery put them pretty much outside of that, or any, rock classification. The group would play together for fifteen more years, releasing several  albums, appearing in several films (including Weird Science and Back to School) and influencing future groups like Nirvana and Fishbone. What seemed like an abrupt retirement in 1995, later turned out to be a move of pure self-preservation by Danny. His hearing was shot after all those years in a rock band, and rather than damage it more, he walked away, the group dissolving with his departure. Thankfully, Danny’s second career was well established by that point. 

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In 1985, Tim Burton and Paul Reubens asked Danny to write the score for Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, Tim’s debut as a feature director. Danny was reluctant to take the project on because of his lack of formal musical composition training, but he got orchestration help from Steve Bartek, Oingo Boingo’s arranger, and pulled it off. Danny has called the moment he first heard a full orchestra playing something he wrote the best moment of his life. Tim was more than thrilled with his work. Danny has written the score for all but three of Tim’s movies in a collaboration that is still happening today. His distinctive style melds well with Tim’s and can be heard in classic films like Edward Scissorhands, Beetlejuice, Batman, Batman Returns, Corpse Bride (for which he also provided the voice of Bonejangles) and Sleepy Hollow. 

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Danny became part of Disneyana way back in 1990 when he wrote the score for the Warren Beatty blockbuster Dick Tracy. Three years later, he played an integral part in one of my favorite films, The Nightmare Before Christmas. Not only did he write the music for the film but he provided the singing voice for the lead, Jack Skellington, and the voices for Barrel, one of Oogie Boogie’s henchmen, and the Clown with the Tear Away Face. His other Disney film scores include Flubber, Meet the Robinsons, Good Will Hunting, 2010’s Alice in Wonderland, 2012’s Frankenweenie, Oz the Great and Powerful, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Alice Through the Looking Glass and this year’s Dumbo. In 2015, for all of the delightful music he’s contributed to the company (and will most likely continue to bring us), Danny was declared an official Disney Legend.

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Outside of Disney, Danny has had all kinds of success. Over the course of his career he's earned 24 BMI Awards, two Emmy Awards, a Grammy, an Annie Award, six Saturn Awards, a Sierra Award and a Satellite Award (he's also gotten an additional 39 nominations outside of those 36 wins). Highlights from the dozens of film scores he’s done include the Men in Black series, the first Mission: Impossible, two of Sam Raimi’s Spiderman films and the Fifty Shades of Grey series. He’s written multiple theme songs for television shows like Tales from the Crypt, Batman: The Animated Series, Desperate Housewives and, maybe his most famous composition of all time, The Simpsons. Danny has also been commissioned to compose several classical pieces, not associated with any film or show. So far he’s written a serenade, an overture (to a non-existent musical as he put it), a concerto and a piano quartet. Later this year, we’ll be able to enjoy his work in the fourth MIB movie and he’s already logged in a Doctor Dolittle film that’s slated for next year. We wish Danny a happy birthday and can’t wait to hear where his music will take us next.

May 27 - Ken O'Connor

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On this day, in 1998, A. Kendall O'Connor passed away in Burbank, California. Born on June 7, 1908 in Perth, Australia, Ken began his professional career at the age of 16 as a reporter for the newspaper his father owned. At some point, someone died (he can’t remember who) and no one had a picture of them for their obituary. Ken drew a better than passing portrait of them and became the paper’s resident artist as well. As his interest in art grew, he began taking classes, selling the cartoons and oil paintings his studies produced for spending money. In 1930, Ken’s father started working for the Australian National Travel Association and the whole O’Connor clan moved to San Francisco, California to promote tourism to the Land Down Under. Ken continued his art education at the California School of Fine Arts (now known as the San Francisco Art Institute) and earned money by becoming the art director for a local poster company.

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In 1935, the Walt Disney Studio was desperately hiring artists in order to have a staff that could actually create a feature length Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Ken’s father encouraged his reluctant son to apply. He was quickly hired as an inbetweener and just as quickly moved into the special effects department. His main job was to be a rotoscoper. Rotoscoping is a process where you make a live action movie of something you want your animated character to do (like dancing) and then make rough tracings of each frame of film. Those rough drawings then get handed off to animators, overdrawn with the character and cleaned up, giving you a much more realistic representation of action than freeforming would. It’s a very tedious process but was probably the best way young Ken could have ever learned about how the process of animation differs from a still life painting. And learn he did.

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Following the release of Snow White, Ken became an assistant in the layout department. His first project was the 1937 short Clock Cleaners. Because a Mickey Mouse short can be a lot less realistic than Walt wanted his features to look, Ken could take a lot of artistic license to achieve the effects he wanted. Or as he put it, having learned the rules of perspective at art school, he could violate all of them to make the picture much more dramatic. So he did and everyone noticed. Ken’s incredible work on Clock Cleaners marked the beginning of a brilliantly long career in layout, an area of animation most people don’t even know exists.

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A layout artist is quite literally in charge of how you will see everything in an animated movie. They create the backgrounds, or sets, that the action will take place in. They also work with directors to decide what angle the audience will see things from. In live action, a scene can be shot from multiple angles and then cut differently if the first take isn’t something the production team likes. Animation is completely different. If the angle of a scene doesn’t work for some reason, there isn’t different footage that can be spliced in to fix it. What you have is the only thing that was painstakingly drawn. If you look at it and decide it would be better to, say, see a character from the side view instead of dead on, you have to restart the scene from scratch. In the days of hand drawn animation, it was cost prohibitive to do even a small amount of redraws. Determining all that beforehand is the only way to do it. It’s better now with computers and 3D rendering and all that, but even now, better is a relative term.  A good layout artist was and is crucial to creating successful animated movies. It turned out that Ken wasn’t just good, he was one of the best.

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For Pinocchio, Ken crafted the overhead shot of the puppet being led astray by Foulfellow and Gideon, parading through the streets of the town. He filmed some live action reference footage to help with that one. For Cinderella, he designed and built a detailed model of the pumpkin coach, which was approved by Walt with zero (that’s right zero) changes, becoming the coach that’s seen in the film. Having the model improved the action of those scenes immensely. For Lady and the Tramp, Ken knew it was going to be important to be able to show things from Lady’s perspective and shot all sorts of reference film from about a foot and a half off the ground. For Alice in Wonderland, he spent hours working out the proper horizons and vanishing points and multiple perspectives for all the scenes featuring playing cards, knowing that if just one of them was off, the whole scene would look wonky. All told, Ken would work on 13 of the 21 animated features that were released during his years with Disney, making invaluable contributions to each and every one of them.

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Ken wasn’t only good at camera angles, he was good at coming up with new techniques as well. For the Trees segment of Melody Time, he suggested using pastels on the cels and then coating them with lacquer to keep them from smudging to get the unique look of that scene. In Dumbo, when Timothy and Dumbo get drunk, he knew it would be nearly impossible to keep the colors of the pink elephants consistent. What you are actually seeing there is the color of the background. Each individual cel is painted all black except for an elephant shaped clear spot. A simple but highly effective solution. For the Dance of the Hours segment in Fantasia, he deliberately changed the general motifs of the animation each time the music entered a new movement, going from vertical shapes to elipses to diagonals.

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The Shorts Department didn’t let Feature Animation hog all of Ken’s talents over the years. He was part of the teams that created classics like Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom, The Whale Who Wanted to Sing at the Met and several of the educational shorts like 1946’s The Story of Menstruation.

Ken officially retired in 1974, but would continue to consult on a variety of projects. He contributed to the films that became part of the World of Motion and Universe of Energy pavilions at Epcot and the short Back to Neverland, starring Robin Williams and Walter Cronkite, that was a staple of the animation tour at the Disney-MGM Studios for many years. He also spent time as a professor at CalArts, teaching the next generation of animation giants, including Brad Bird, John Lasseter and John Musker. In 1992, for his nearly four decades of making Disney animation the best in the world, Ken was declared a true Disney Legend. Six years later, the Australian reporter who reluctantly turned into an artistic heavyweight would pass away at home from natural causes. He was 90 years old.