May 4 - Ken Walker

On this day, in 1921, Kenneth David Walker was born in Salt Lake City, Utah. At some point, Ken's family moved to Southern California. I say some point because Ken is one of those folks who did some great work over the decades, but wasn’t well known outside of his industry. That means it can be fairly easy to pull together his professional credits, but there isn’t a whole lot of personal information available. After graduating from North Hollywood High School, he went right to work at the Walt Disney Studio as an inbetweener.

Ken’s first project was helping to finish up production on Fantasia. When World War II broke out, he, like much of the younger staff, did his patriotic duty and joined the United States Navy, spending most of time in the Pacific Theatre. When the war was over, he returned to Disney and became an assistant to Ward Kimball, one of Walt’s Nine Old Men. By the end of the Forties he was an animator in his own right, working on Alice in Wonderland. Ken also worked on a number of Pluto shorts including 1951’s Plutopia and 1952’s Pluto’s Party. It was during production on Plutopia that he appeared on You Asked For It, a television show that answered viewer mail. On the episode with Ken, someone wanted to know how animation was created and he was introduced as one of the Studio’s top animators (incidentally, the picture of Ken above is a screen shot from that clip; I couldn’t find a better picture of him). He might have been the studio’s choice to make a television appearance in 1950, but, for whatever reason (rumor has it he made a bad name for himself in a labor dispute), his career with the studio was over in 1952.

Image courtesy youtube.com

At this point, we lose sight of Ken for more than a decade. We know he did some work for Columbia Pictures. We know he became a member of the Director’s Guild of America. And that’s about it. There isn’t any concrete information on him again until 1965, when he founded his own production company, NYC Totem Productions, which survived under his ownership until 1971. During this period, Ken worked on television shows like Milton the Monster and The Pink Panther Show. He was also the director of Seeds of Discovery, a short his company produced in 1966.

Image courtesy sites.google.com

As the Seventies rolled in, and Ken’s own company went belly-up, he began working for Depatie-Freleng Enterprises, co-founded by Warner Brothers great Friz Freleng. Ken’s credits with DFE include the television series Bailey’s Comets, the special The Bear Who Slept Through Christmas, two educational shorts, The Incredible Indelible Magical Physical  Mystery Trip and The Magical Mystery Trip Through Little Red’s Head (both part of the ABC After School series) and Clerow Wilson’s Great Escape (starring Flip Wilson), all produced between 1973-74. He also was part of the team that did the animated bits for The Mad Magazine TV Special (although it was deemed too crude and never aired). In 1975, he turned to Hanna Barbera as part of the team that produced The Great Grape Ape Show.

Image courtesy cartoonbrew.com

In 1981, at the age of 60, Ken founded a second company, The Funny Bone Film Company, which he owned and operated for the next two decades. During this period, he reteamed with DFE to animate the Emmy winning special The Grinch Grinches the Cat in the Hat in 1982. He also returned to Hanna Barbera as an animator for their 1982 feature film Heidi’s Song. Ken was a director on the 1994 series Skeleton Warriors and an animator for 1992 Kim Basinger movie Cool World. One of the final credits of a career that spanned six decades was as a production designer on the 2000 special It’s the Pied Piper, Charlie Brown. On August 18, 2012, Ken passed away at his home in Laguna Hills, California. He was 91.