April 21 - Bob Moore

Image courtesy disneydetail.me

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

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

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

Image courtesy wikimedia.org

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

Image courtesy waltdisneymuseum.org

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