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 28 - it's a small world

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On this day, in 1966, it’s a small world began sending guests on a whimsical journey of international goodwill in Disneyland’s Fantasyland in Anaheim, California. Walt was already under contract for three attractions for the 1964 World’s Fair, when he was approached by Pepsi to create a fourth one. The board of directors at Pepsi knew they were going to have a pavilion at the fair (it would be commercial suicide to not have a presence) but had procrastinated over what they wanted in their pavilion. Hollywood legend Joan Crawford was a member of that board by way of her marriage to the late Pepsi CEO Alfred Steele. She got fed up with the rest of the board’s dithering, asked her friend Walt Disney to come up with something and basically browbeat everyone into accepting whatever was presented, in spite of the fact that Walt would have less than eleven months to produce. Because Walt knew how to bring out the best in people (and had the best people to work with), everything worked out just fine.

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It was decided that the proceeds from the ride would benefit the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) so the basic theme was “Children of the World” and that became its working title as well. Because of the recent international tensions over missiles in Cuba, the theme was expanded to include brotherhood and peace (which may seem like it’s implied in an endeavor based on kids, but it really isn’t). The overall design of the attraction fell to the Legendary Mary Blair, who had already lent her considerable talents to shaping the look of films like Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland. Unlike those projects where she merely influenced things, this overall look would be pure Mary. The simple clean shapes used in deceptively complex ways and the cheerful color palate combined to make a classic ride that endures and delights right up to today.

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Not that Mary didn’t have help along the way. The Legendary Marc Davis, as he did on so many Disneyland attractions, designed the scenes guests would travel through and many of the characters in them. His wife, the Legendary Alice Davis, designed the costumes the dolls wear and the Legendary Rolly Crump took care of the rest of the props and figures. The Legendary Blaine Gibson designed and sculpted the dolls with input from Walt himself, who insisted that every doll, no matter what country it represented, had an identically shaped face. It’s no coincidence that so many of the people who worked on this particular ride have gone on to achieve Disney Legend status (except for Walt himself, who has never been given the award; I know that it would be a fairly redundant gesture, it’s just something that makes me smile when I think about it), they are all that good.

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Which brings us to the music (I can hear some of you groaning already because, let’s be honest, the song has probably been playing in your head since you started reading this article). In its original form, Children of the World was going to have snippets of each country’s national anthem playing near the dolls from that country. It  was a plan that only sounded good on paper. In real life, it was a jumbled up, headache inducing wall of noise. So Walt brought his resident songwriters, the Legendary Sherman Brothers, into the project. He gave them just two guidelines: the song they wrote had to able to be done in a round (so it was infinitely repeatable without a beak) and it had to be easily translated into many different languages. They came back with It’s a Small World, a slow ballad about the universal theme of friendship. Walt said bring me something more cheerful. So they sped their song up considerably and replayed it for the boss. Walt liked the second version so much, he renamed the entire attraction after it. Love it or hate it, the Sherman Brothers’ ultimate ear worm has easily been played over 50 million times over the years making it the most played piece of music ever created, beating out the number two song by over 40 million plays. Of course, the fact that it is playing somewhere in the world at literally any moment of the day helps.

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The success of it’s a small world (and, yes, writing it without capital letters is the proper way to refer to the attraction) at the World’s Fair cannot be undersold. The ride’s high capacity (especially compared to other Fair attractions) meant that there was rarely a line, in spite of the overwhelming number of people who experienced it. Over the course of the two and a half years the Fair ran, over 10 million tickets were sold for small world resulting in over $8 million dollars being raised for UNICEF. At the Fair’s end, it was dismantled, transported back to Southern California and installed in its permanent home. When the Magic Kingdom opened five years later, it included a version of the ride, with the queue area moved indoors. Tokyo Disneyland, Disneyland Paris and Hong Kong Disneyland each have their own versions as well, so it’s fairly accurate when Disney claims that the sun never sets on cheerful children of it’s a small world.

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In 1997, Disneyland began a new holiday tradition with their version of it’s a small world. At the end of October, they add in almost a million twinkling lights as well as various Christmas decorations and costumes for the dolls. The soundtrack also gets changed to include international versions of Jingle Bells and Deck the Halls. The holiday version has proven so popular that it’s spread to every other park around the world except one. The Magic Kingdom ride stays unaltered (mainly to keep the change as something unique in the United States to its sister park).

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.

May 26 - Sam Edwards

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On this day, in 1915, Sam Edwards was born in Macon, Georgia. Sam’s parents had met as performers on the vaudeville circuit, so it’s no surprise that his first appearance on stage was as a baby in his mother’s arms in a show called Tess of the Storm Country (a 1914 film version starred Mary Pickford). Shortly after Sam’s birth, his parent’s marriage ended in divorce and Sam, with his older sister Florida (care to guess where she was born?) stayed with their mother, Edna. He would never know who his birth father was until a chance meeting in Hollywood over thirty years later. Edna married another actor in 1917, Jack Edwards, and they would soon add a third child to the family, Jack Jr.

The Edwards relocated themselves to the Jacksonville, Florida area, started their own theater troupe and travelled around the country performing in all kinds of plays. Sometimes the kids would be cast alongside mom and dad, but not always comfortably. Sam recalled the first time he could remember being on stage, in Why Men Leave Home, as his mother’s daughter (he wasn’t apparently a very convincing actor at that age; he said most of the audience could tell he was a boy in spite of the lacy underwear that was part of his costume).

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As the Edwards children grew, the family transitioned from the stage into radio. Now based mostly in San Antonio, Texas, Jack managed a movie theater, interspersing the new fangled medium of moving pictures with short live performances done by Edna and the kids. As he moved into his teens, Sam began participating in and winning local singing contests. Jack Sr. and Edna were already performing on WOAI, one of the first radio stations in Texas, when they began producing a show starring Sam and Jack Jr. In 1933, The Adventures of Sonny and Buddy became one of the first weekly serials to ever be broadcast. Sam would enjoy a long, prolific career on the airwaves. His whole family appeared as a fictionalized version of themselves on The Edwards Family. He was part of an early soap opera, One Man's Family, and an early kid's adventure show, Speed Gibson of the International Secret Police. Over the couple of decades that radio reigned supreme, Sam had recurring roles on Father Knows Best, Guiding Light, Meet Corliss Archer, The First Hundred Years, Dragnet, Gunsmoke, This is Your FBI and several others.

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Sam broke into movies almost by accident. In 1937, He tagged along with his brother to the set of a movie Jake was in, intending to be an extra, mostly for fun. His radio expertise, however, not only got him noticed but also got him a speaking part in High Hat. While never becoming a movie star, Sam would occasionally appear in films for the next four and a half decades. He had significant parts in Twelve O'Clock High with Gregory Peck, Operation Pacific with John Wayne and The Beatniks (which was featured in an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000). His final film role came in 1981 as a Ticket Clerk in the remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice with Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange.

When radio transitioned into television, Sam transformed himself as well. While he would never have a starring role like he did before, he would start appearing on the small screen in the mid Fifties and add more than 60 different series to his resume over the years. He is probably most remembered as Bill Anderson, the banker on Little House on the Prairie, but he had recurring roles on Dragnet and Gunsmoke (hold overs from his radio days) and guest shots on everything from The Andy Griffith Show to Mission: Impossible to Happy Days. He even, in another throwback to his earlier career, had a stint on Days of Our Lives. 

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Sam joined the Disney family pretty early in both his career and the history of features at the studio. In the 1942 classic Bambi, he brought the adult part of Thumper to twitterpated life. A great deal of his work for Disney came through Disneyland Records. He played both the Cowardly Lion and the Tin Woodman for a series of Wizard of Oz albums. He played Tigger, Rabbit and Owl on a whole bunch of Winnie the Pooh records. He also served as the narrator for many of the Disneyland Storyteller series. Throughout the Seventies, he appeared in a string of live action films for the company, including Escape to Witch Mountain, The Biscuit Eater and two episodes of Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color, Hog Wild and The Flight of the Grey Wolf. His final 'appearance' for the company was as the voice of Ollie Owl opposite Burl Ives' Sam the Eagle in the patriotic Disneyland attraction America Sings, that ran from 1974 until 1988.

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In the early Eighties, Sam retired from acting, mostly. He did some traveling around with his wife of three decades to old time radio conventions, meeting up with old friends and often giving live readings of favorite episodes from back in the day. But mostly he spent time with his family enjoying life. In 1992, he had bypass surgery, recovered nicely and spent another twelve years living peacefully in Durango, Colorado. Then, on July 28, 2004, three days after suffering a heart attack that revealed a hole in his heart, Sam passed away, surrounded by family. He was 89.

May 25 - Barbara Luddy

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On this day, in 1908, Barbara Luddy was born in Great Falls, Montana. Information about Barbara's early life is scarce, but we do know that she did some singing on the vaudeville circuit as a child and was educated at the Ursuline Convent there in Great Falls. She broke into silent movies in 1925 as Janet in Columbia Pictures' An Enemy of Men. She would appear in several more films over the next few years before becoming a world traveler as part of the cast of an Australian production of Lombardi, Ltd in 1929.

Barbara began a prolific career in radio upon her return to the United States. Her longest running role was as lead female for seventeen years on The First Nighter Program, a show generally credited with being the first to run a different, complete story each week. She starred opposite Les Tremayne from 1936 until 1943 and then opposite Olan Soule until the program went off the air in 1953. Barbara was also part of the cast of the more dramatic Chicago Theater of the Air, played Veronica Gunn in the comedic Great Gunns and appeared on several soap operas, including Lonely Women, The Road of Life and Woman in White. As radio began to give way to television, she had a handful of appearances on early shows like Hazel and Dragnet, but nothing much beyond that.

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Barbara joined the Disney family in 1955 when as the original voice of Lady in Lady and the Tramp. She returned four years later as Merryweather, the blue fairy, in Sleeping Beauty. For 1961's One Hundred and One Dalmatians she brought Rover to life and played the dual roles of Mother Rabbit and Mother Sexton in 1973's Robin Hood. Her longest running role for Disney started in 1966. Debuting in Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree, Barbara brought the mother figure of the Hundred Acre Wood, Kanga, to life for the next eleven years, including the shorts Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day, Winnie the Pooh and Tigger, Too and the combined feature The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh in 1977.

Barbara passed away on April 1, 1979 in Los Angeles, California from complications brought on by lung cancer. She was 70 years old.

May 24 - Ed Love

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On this day, in 1910, Edward H. Love was born in Tremont, Pennsylvania. Ed found himself in Los Angeles, California by 1930, desperately looking for work as the Great Depression began settling in for the long haul. As he dug through the newspaper looking for employment leads, he noticed an an ad for animators over at the Walt Disney Studio. Ed had enjoyed drawing as a child, but knew nothing about animation. He didn't have a job, but he did have a car and he was able to track down someone in the animation business who was willing to trade lessons for the use of that car. I haven't been able to find out who that teacher was, so that part of the story must be taken with a grain of salt, but what is verifiable is that in early 1931, Ed brought a piece he'd animated of Mickey Mouse playing the violin over to the Disney studio and was hired the same day. Starting as an inbetweener for $18 a week, he would be moved up to full animator within two months.

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Ed worked almost exclusively in the Shorts Department during his time with Disney. One of his first assignments was on the first cartoon in glorious three strip Technicolor (all previous color cartoons had only been lowly two strip wannabees), the Silly Symphony Flowers and Trees. His work can also be seen in the great Mickey shorts Lonesome Ghosts and Mickey's Trailer. Ed often (semi) joked that he was responsible for the position of assistant animator (otherwise known as clean up man) being created at Disney. Since he had no formal art training, he was terrible at cleaning up his own animation. Someone had to be assigned to him to help turn his rough drawings into finished product. Some of the older guys around the studio felt that if Ed could have an assistant, why not them. And the animation team went from an animator paired with an inbetweener to a three man process.

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One of Ed's last projects with Disney was The Sorcerer's Apprentice. Originally slated to be an extended Silly Symphony, Apprentice became the centerpiece of Walt's great experiment in animation, Fantasia. Only a few months after the release of Fantasia, the animators at the studio went on strike in early 1941. Ed, in a move he would later label as stupid, was one of the leaders of the fight. The strike would get resolved, but Ed (who was making $81 a week plus bonuses at that point, over $72,000 a year today) was one of its casualties. After a decade with the studio he was once again unemployed.

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Luckily for Ed, his jobless stretch didn't last very long. He was soon hired at MGM and became part of the great Tex Avery's studio. For the next five years, Ed worked on classics like Red Hot Riding Hood and What's Buzzin' Buzzard, sometimes animating as much as two thirds of a short by himself. In 1947, he switched studios again to work under Walter Lantz on the Woody Woodpecker series. Unfortunately the financial situation at Lantz's studio was rapidly deteriorating and that job barely lasted two years. So Ed did what many a talented guy before him had: he started his own studio. Not much is known about what Love, Hutten and Love produced (Ed's son Tony was the other Love) during this period. But all three of the firm's namesakes (Bill Hutten was their partner) ended up, where else, Hanna-Barbera.

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Ed got in on the ground floor of several iconic series at Hanna-Barbera. He was part of the original teams of The Flintstones, The Jetsons, Yogi Bear and Scooby-Doo Where Are You? He also worked in the Commercials Department at the studio, inspiring a whole generation of animators with the highly stylized way his characters moved (although he apparently was still horrible at cleaning up his own work, even after decades in the business). His son Tony became a director with the studio and sometimes father and son would work together, mostly on Ed's later series like A Pup Named Scooby-Doo. Ed continued to work at Hanna-Barbera until finally retiring in 1994, at the age of 84. Less than two years later, he passed away at home in Valencia, California on May 8, 1996. He was just two weeks short of his 86th birthday.

May 23 - George Bruns

On this day, in 1983, George Edward Bruns passed away in Portland, Oregon. Born on July 3, 1914 in Sandy, Oregon, George took plenty of music lessons as a child. His innate talent was evident early on as it didn’t take him long to master the piano, the tuba and the trombone. He began attending Oregon State Agricultural College (now known as Oregon State University) in 1932 and played with the ROTC band in order to afford the tuition. For some reason, George was an engineering student but he didn’t stay one for terribly long. By the age of twenty, he’d decided to drop out of school to be a full-time musician (every parent’s dream). Luckily for George (and ultimately the rest of us), that plan worked out for once.

For the rest of the Thirties and the first half of the Forties, George played with various local groups in the Portland area. Following World War II, he started his own band (which included Doc Severenson of The Tonight Show fame) and began playing gigs all over the Northwest. The group had to remain based in Portland because George’s regular job was musical director of radio station KEX. He also served as the bandleader in the ritzy Rose Bowl room at Portland’s Multnomah Hotel and would occasionally play trombone on recordings with the Castle Jazz Band.

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In 1949, George moved to Los Angeles craving a bigger music scene than Portland could offer. He played tuba in a jazz band (you heard that right, tuba and jazz in the same sentence), created a night club act with his wife, singer Jeanne Gayle, and got the break of a lifetime. In 1953, George was asked to write the music for a short over at United Productions of America, Little Boy with a Big Horn. His work was impressive enough to grab some attention over at the Walt Disney Studio and he was hired the same year to arrange Tchaikovsky’s ballet music and write new score for the upcoming feature Sleeping Beauty.

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During production on Sleeping Beauty, Walt discovered he had a small problem in one of the shows that was being created for the Disneyland television show. There was a three and a half minute gap in an episode about this famous frontiersman. Did George think he could maybe write a song to take care of that? So George sat down with lyricist Tom Blackburn and churned out a little ditty called The Ballad of Davy Crockett. The success of that one song would have been more than enough to cement George’s place in Disney history (it certainly was enough to make him the studio’s musical director), but it was only the beginning.

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Over the next twenty years, George would score more than forty Disney films and television shows, starting with the remaining episodes of Davy Crockett. He wrote several songs for the first two seasons of The Mickey Mouse Club, including Talent Roundup (with studio nurse Hazel George) and I Want to Be a Fireman. In one four year period, he would receive three Oscar nominations, first for Sleeping Beauty in 1959, then for Babes in Toyland in 1961 and finally for The Sword in the Stone in 1963. His most famous composition (in spite of what fans of Davy Crockett think) is hands down a song that plays on continuous loop at all times somewhere in the world: A Pirate’s Life for Me, penned with the legendary Imagineer X Atencio. His other highlights include the scores of One Hundred and One Dalmatians, The Jungle Book, The Aristocats, The Absent Minded Professor and The Love Bug. In 1973, George was nominated for an Academy Award a fourth time for a song he wrote with lyricist Floyd Huddleston, Love from Robin Hood.


After scoring Herbie Rides Again, George retired from the Walt Disney Studio in 1976. He moved back to the Portland area, became a part-time music professor at Lewis and Clark College and continued to compose and play all of the instruments in his repertoire. He did record a new album of jazz music, but it never got much more than local play time. In May of 1983, George suffered a fatal heart attack at the age of 68. In 2001, for composing a large chunk of the soundtrack guests hear snippets of all around Disney theme parks in every corner of the world, he was posthumously declared an official Disney Legend.

May 22 - Thurl Ravenscroft

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On this day, in 2005, Thurl Arthur Ravenscroft passed away in Fullerton, California. Born in Norfolk, Nebraska on February 6, 1914, Thurl hit the road soon after high school, landing in Los Angeles, California. He began an art education at the Otis College of Art and Design. While at Otis, he became part of a singing quartet known as the Sportsmen Quartet. They could frequently be heard on Jack Benny’s radio show. Thurl’s first brush with the Walt Disney Studio came in 1940. The singing group he was a part of (it’s usually credited as the Mellomen, but that group didn’t form until 1948, so it may have been the Sportsmen) sang a song for Pinocchio called Honest John. The song was cut from the final film. Some sources claim it only ever existed for promotional purposes, but parts of the melody can be heard underscoring scenes with Foulfellow and Gideon, so who really knows anymore. Thurl himself got to remain in the film, though, as he had also been recorded as Monstro the Whale’s ‘voice.’ 

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In 1948 (as near as I can tell), Thurl got together with a few friends a formed a quartet usually known as The Mellomen (they recorded under a variety of names over the years). In addition to singing backup to the likes of Doris Day, Bing Crosby, Peggy Lee and Elvis Presley, the Mellomen made appearances in all sorts of Disney projects. You can hear them as the guards painting the roses red in Alice in Wonderland, pirates and native Americans in Peter Pan, the dogs in the pound in Lady and the Tramp, the elephant patrol in The Jungle Book, the trees in Babes in Toyland, singing the opening to Zorro, as the Honeypot Quartet in the Winnie the Pooh shorts and singing A Pirates Life for Me throughout the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. The group was also featured on several episodes of the Disneyland anthology television series and Disneyland Records albums. The Mellomen performed together well into the Seventies before running out of steam and harmonizing their way into the sunset. 

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Thurl not only racked up an impressive list of Disney credits with his quartet, but he holds iconic solo roles, too. In one of them, he actually gets the dubious distinction of being mistaken for Walt Disney more than anyone else, ever. Have you ever had someone try to tell you that one of the singing busts in the graveyard scene of the Haunted Mansion was Walt himself? It’s not. It’s actually Thurl (must be the whole mustache thing). And for those of you who wonder about that sort of thing, his bust has a name: Uncle Theodore. He is also the voice of the drunken pirate in Pirates of the Caribbean, Buff, the American bison head, in the Country Bear Jamboree, and the first mate on the Mark Twain Riverboat. Thurl can also still be heard every half hour or so in The Enchanted Tiki Room as Fritz, the German accented macaw.  

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Lest you think that Thurl only soloed when it came to Disney attractions, you might recognize his deep bass from any one of the following Disney films: Paul Bunyan in the short Paul Bunyan (what else), Captain the Horse in One Hundred and One Dalmatians, Sir Bart in The Sword in the Stone, Billy Bass, the Russian Cat, in The Aristocats and Kirby in The Brave Little Toaster series (while not created by Disney, they were distributed by the company). In 1995, Thurl was declared an official Disney Legend for all the incredible voice work he’d done over the years. 

Image copyright Kellogg's

Thurl didn’t do a whole lot of voice work outside of Disney, but what he did do is instantly recognizable. He is the uncredited singing voice of the Grinch in holiday classic How the Grinch Stole Christmas. He sang the song No Dogs Allowed for the 1972 Peanuts special Snoopy Come Home. But one of his most famous roles was one he first did in 1953 and continued doing until 2005, long after he’d retired from everything else. For 52 years, Thurl was the (until the end) uncredited voice behind Tony the Tiger, telling everyone how Grrreat! Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes are. He’s been replaced as Tony since then by Lee Marshall, but if you listen closely to the commercials, every once in a while you can still hear a recycled bit of Thurl. Only a few months after recording his last tagline, the great bass voice succumbed to prostate cancer at his home in Fullerton, California. He was 91.

May 21 - John Hubley

Image courtesy michaelbarrier.com

On this day, in 1914, John Hubley was born in Marinette, Wisconsin. Right out of high school, John moved to Los Angeles, California and began studying painting at the ArtCenter College of Design. He was following in the footsteps of his mother, artist Verena K Hubley, and his grandfather. After three years of instruction in the finer points of painting, John began working for the Walt Disney Studio in 1935 as a background painter. He would later add layout artist to his resume, working his magic mostly in the Features Department. John’s work can be seen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Dumbo, Bambi and, specifically, in the Rite of Spring segment of Fantasia.

In 1939, Frank Lloyd Wright visited the studio, bringing with him a print of a Russian animated feature, The Tale of the Czar Durandai, looking to inspire Disney’s animators to be more modern. Walt at the time was consistently pushing for ever more realistic animation while Durandai had a very stylized, abstract look. Some of the animators, John among them, were inspired by the Russian drawings, they just weren’t allowed to use that inspiration at work. Their frustration over what they saw as a creatively stifling atmosphere was one thing that led to the great Disney Animator’s Strike of 1941. John was one of the first young bucks to walk out the door and never look back.

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John began creating shorts for Screen Gems, a contractor for Columbia Pictures, with a number of other former Disney animators, including the company’s founder, Frank Tashlin. The artistic freedom at Screen Gems was looser than at Disney, but only marginally. When World War II finally came to America, John became part of the Animation Unit of the Army Air Force First Motion Picture Unit, making training films for the troops. The Air Force only cared about what information was taught, not what the film looked like, so most of the animators got to experience more experimentation than they’d ever enjoyed before.

Image courtesy fandor.com

In 1944, John was asked to help create a reelection film for Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He prepped the storyboards with fellow FMPU worker Bill Hurtz. The studio chosen to make the final short was Industrial Film, which had just been founded by former Disney and Screen Gem employees so John fit right in. Following the successful release of Hell-Bent for Election (yes, that is the actual title), the United Auto Workers approached Industrial to make an anti-racism film and John was chosen to direct. Following the end of the war, Industrial Film became United Productions of America and would go on to become the most influential animation studios of the Fifties.

Image copyright UPA

UPA became the main studio for Columbia Pictures, pushing Screen Gems out of the picture. In 1949, John created one of UPA’s biggest characters, Mr. Magoo. Based on an uncle of his, he directed the first few Magoo shorts and was instrumental in helping Jim Backus find the voice of the obstinate senior citizen by encouraging Jim to improvise much of the dialog. John quickly became unhappy with the direction the studio took his character, in spite of Mr. Magoo’s growing popularity. He felt too much emphasis was being placed on his near-sightedness and the more interesting aspects of his personality were being ignored.

In the early Fifties, John found himself in trouble at work once again. This time, he got caught up in the investigations being conducted by Senator Joe McCarthy and the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Someone branded John a communist and he was hauled in front of the committee. He saw McCarthy for what he was, refused to name anyone else and was blacklisted from all major Hollywood studios. Out of work again, he did the only thing he could do. He started his own company, Storyboard Studios, making mostly commercials, at least to begin with.

In 1955, John married his second wife, Faith Elliot, an artist and fellow animator, and moved his company to New York City. John and Faith continued to do purely commercial projects but made a commitment to producing one independent short every year. They explored just about every kind of animation technique you can think of, as well as using ambient sounds (like their children at play) as soundtracks. The experimentation paid off. They were nominated for an Academy Award seven times, winning three for 1959’s Moonbird, 1962’s The Hole (about the horrors of nuclear war) and 1966’s Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass Double Feature.

Image courtesy laughing-stalk.blogspot.com

When Sesame Street started up in 1969, Jim Henson and company needed lots of content in a short amount of time. John and Faith were more than happy to fill in some of the gaps. Featuring their signatures of jazz music, improvised dialog and abstract images, they helped teach kids about the letters of the alphabet and concepts like danger. They would later do the same thing for The Electric Company, most notably the Letterman bits (voiced by the late great Gene Wilder). John’s final project was in collaboration with a former student of his, Garry Trudeau, bringing to life the characters from Garry’s comic strip, Doonsbury, for a half hour television special. Part way through production, John was diagnosed with cancer. He worked until he couldn’t anymore, leaving Faith and Garry to finish the project in tribute to him (a fitting final note to his career: A Doonsbury Special would earn an final Oscar nomination). John passed away in New Haven, Connecticut on February 21, 1977. He was 62.