May 24 - Ed Love

Image courtesy scoobydoo.fandom.com

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.

Image copyright Disney

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.

Image copyright Disney

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.

Image copyright MGM

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.

Image copyright Hanna-Barbera

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.