July 28 - Bud Luckey

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On this day, in 1934, William Everett Luckey was born in Billings, Montana. Growing up in Big Sky Country, it’s no surprise that Bud, as all his friends knew him, would spend a summer vacation or two at a dude ranch. He once quipped that the experiences only made him a little bit cowboy but they were great at improving his drawing skills when it came to horses. Following his graduation from high school, Bud served a stint in the Korean War with the United States Air Force. When his tour of duty in Korea was up in 1953, he stayed on with the military, becoming an Artist-Illustrator with NATO forces in Europe. After a year with NATO, Bud spent three more doing the same kind of work with Strategic Air Command, also in Europe and North Africa. After his honorable discharge in 1957, he remained a reservist throughout the Sixties, but his professional life became much more animated.

Bud used his love of drawing and his GI Bill benefits to enroll in art classes at the famed Chouinard Art Institute. Part of his training happened under the direction of Art Babbitt, an accomplished Disney animator who was forced out of the company during the Animator’s Strike of 1941. After graduating from Chouinard in 1960, Bud continued to apprentice under Babbitt at Art’s own studio, Quartet Films, while also beginning to branch out on his own. He managed to get his first screen credit as part of the team that animated The Alvin Show, the first cartoon series to feature David Seville and his chipmunks.

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In 1961, Bud was hired as an Art Director and Producer for an ad agency, Guild, Bascom, & Bonfigli. For the next six years he worked with classic characters like Tony the Tiger, Toucan Sam and Snap, Crackle and Pop. He created the Bosco Dumbbunnies for a series of Bosco Chocolate Syrup commercials and won a Clio Award in 1966 for a Betty Crocker spot titled Magic Faucet. GBB was a large agency, encompassing not only television commercials but television shows as well. The head of the show division was Alex Anderson, the creator of Rocky, Bullwinkle and Dudley Do-Right. Bud was able to cross division lines within the agency and got experience working on with all three of those characters. He also dabbled a bit in the agency’s political division, working on ad campaigns for John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey.

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Several special friendships evolved during Bud’s tenure at the GBB Agency. He worked on several commercials with a young Jim Henson (probably the Wilkins Coffee ads) and the two became friends, working together off and on until Jim’s death nearly 30 years later. Bud was also an integral part of the Dolly Madison account, which used the Peanuts characters in their ads. After being made Senior Art Director of all things Charlie Brown related, Bud made frequent visits to see Charles Schultz, the creator of Peanuts, and Bill Melendez, the director behind such classics as A Charlie Brown Christmas. The friendship and respect that blossomed between Bud, Charles and Bill was so tight that, when Bud started his own studio in 1969, Charles and Bill insisted he still be involved with all ads concerning the Peanuts and the ad agency had to contract with Bud for several more years in order to keep the account.

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Now working in his own studio, the Luckey-Zamora Picture Moving Company (and no that’s not a typo), Bud capitalized on his friendship with Jim Henson and began producing animated shorts for Sesame Street. He created all kinds of classic pieces, some of my favorites being #7 The Alligator King, The Old Woman Who Lived in a 9 and Martian Beauty. He also did work in animation of the non-Disney type (it being a dark era in the company’s history, that was probably wise). Bud has credits on the Mad Magazine Television Special (a 1974 pilot that was never actually aired but lives online in infamy), 1977’s The Extraordinary Adventures of the Mouse and His Child and Don Bluth’s first feature after leaving Disney, 1982’s The Secret of NIMH. In the mid Eighties, Bud merged his studio, which for years had been the largest animation studio in the San Francisco area, with Colossal Pictures which freed him up to make the move to another fledgling studio in 1990.

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Bud joined the team at Pixar as their fifth artist, immediately becoming a character developer, storyboard artist and animator (it was a small company, everyone wore more than one hat). Toy Story was his first foray into computer animation, but he once said that the kids who learned their numbers on Sesame Street from his animation were now teaching him how to animate with numbers and that was a good thing. Bud is credited with moving the character of Woody from a ventriloquist's dummy to a talking toy with a pull string (and the guy we all know and love today).

Bud stuck around at Pixar for a total of twenty-four years. He designed characters for A Bug's Life, Toy Story 2, Monsters Inc, Finding Nemo, Cars, Toy Story 3, Ratatouille, WALL*E and Up. In 2003, his animated short Boundin' premiered in front of The Incredibles. I say his because he designed it, wrote it, composed the music for it, sang in it and played the banjo for it. Boundin' was nominated for an Academy Award and won the Annie Award for Best Short. 

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It would have been enough if that were Bud's only association with The Incredibles, but he also got in front of the microphone for the film as the voice of Rick Dicker, the federal agent who oversees the Superhero Relocation Program. Bud would provide the voice of two more Disney characters in the course of his career. First he played the small but pivotal role of Chuckles the Clown in 2010's Toy Story 3 and the subsequent shorts Hawaiian Vacation and Small Fry. Then, in 2011, he took a gloomier look at life as Eeyore in Winnie the Pooh.

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Bud retired from Pixar and the world of animation in 2014. One of the things people who knew his animation work were surprised to learn was that he had also designed and illustrated over 100 children's book during his lifetime, including Sesame Street coloring books and Little Golden Books featuring Pixar characters. He removed himself to the East Coast to enjoy his twilight years, which only numbered a few. On February 24, 2018, Bud suffered a fatal stroke at his home in Newtown, Connecticut. He was 83.

October 8 - Art Babbitt

On this day, in 1907, animator Arthur Harold Babitsky was born in Omaha, Nebraska. Known in life as Art Babbitt, his family moved to Sioux City, Iowa when he was in kindergarten. His father had injured his back, causing the family to struggle financially. Art decided he would become a psychiatrist to help alleviate that struggle, so after high school, he moved to New York to be a pre-med student at Columbia University. He didn't realize how much money that would take. To earn some, Art transformed into a freelance commercial artist, drawing advertising cartoons for companies like Sylvania. Inspired by the Silly Symphony The Skeleton Dance, he got a job with the Terrytoons studio in New Rochelle doing animation. He never did become a psychiatrist.

In the early 1930s, Art moved west to try to get a job with the Disney Studio. He managed to snag one along with a fellow Terrytoon animator, Bill Tytla. Starting as an assistant animator, Art's talent was immediately noticed and he was promoted to animator. His first major work was bringing to life the drunken bumpkin mouse in the 1936 short The Country Cousin. Cousin would go on to win the Academy Award for best animated short.

The next project Art did at the studio, required all hands on deck. For Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, he was part of the team that worked on the Evil Queen, a role that fellow animators acknowledged was probably the trickiest one in the film. Incidentally, the movie also brought Art his first wife, Marjorie Belcher. She was a dance model for the animators to reference. Following Snow White, Art became a directing animator. For Pinocchio, he led a team of 22 in the creation of Gepetto. Art reportedly felt that some of the best work he ever did, and the studio ever did for that matter, was on Pinocchio. His work in Fantasia can be seen in the characters of Zeus, Vulcan and the dancing mushrooms. When Dumbo came along, Art was again a directing animator on the character of Mr. Stork, who looks a bit like his voice actor, Sterling Holloway, thanks to him.

During this period of work on features, Art didn't forget about the shorts. His biggest contribution of all to the Disney family can be summed up in one word: Goofy. Art saw something in the decidedly minor character of Dippy Dawg that no one else did. He gave him a distinctive walk and developed his personality. Art once described Goofy this way: "He was someone who never really knew how stupid he was. He thought long and carefully before he did anything. And then he did it wrong." Art's work on Goofy's character paid off. Goofy had a long string of immensely popular shorts where he taught viewers how to do everything from skiing to driving a car. And his popularity continues to this day. He's had his own movie, his own television series and endures as one of the most beloved characters in Disney history. Love Goofy? Thank Art.

Unfortunately, in 1941, Art's relationship with the Disney Studio didn't just sour, it went full-on rotten. By that time, every animation studio in Hollywood had been unionized, except one. Even though he was one of Disney's highest paid animators, Art sympathized with the lower earning employees. Not only was he one of the few lead people to support unionization, he went a step further and became a leader in the fight. Walt fired Art and 15 other union leaders in May of that year basically for what he viewed as personal betrayal. The next day, 200 employees began a strike that would last for five weeks. Art spent that time rallying the troops and leading the picketing, at one point almost coming to blows with Walt. The studio finally gave in to union demands but the damage was done. Walt never forgave the strikers (in fact he named a bunch of them as communists when he testified before the McCarthy Hearings) and the familial attitude around the place was gone.

Walt was forced to rehire Art following the settlement but immediately looked for grounds to fire him again. The two men would go back and forth several times, Walt firing Art, Art suing the studio, if Art won, Walt would be forced to rehire him and on to the next round. Eventually Art left Disney for good and, along with other strike victims, joined a newly formed studio, United Productions of America. UPA was kind of the anti-Disney studio. While Disney was going for ultra-realism in animation, UPA was all about stylized minimalism. Art was involved in a mess of UPA's award winning shorts. One of the highlights of his time there was an Academy Award nominated short titled Rooty Toot-Toot. Art was also involved in creating the early Mr. Magoo shorts.

Later in the fifties, Art co-owned a firm named Quartet Films, which mainly created television commercials. He would win a Cleo Award for a spot he did for Parkay Margarine. Later he became part of Hanna-Barbera. In the early seventies, Art began teamed up with Richard Williams, a Canadian animator, to give a series of lectures to young (and sometimes old) animators about the craft. It's said that the notes from those lectures constitute the most circulated, most copied, most revered unpublished bible on animation out there.

Art would continue working pretty much right up to his death. His final project was a film with his lecture partner called The Thief and the Cobbler. The movie was independently financed at first and was in production for nearly three decades. Warner Brothers finally agreed to finish and distribute it, but that fell apart when the production went over budget. Cobbler was finished by a bond company and released in Australia. Ironically, two years later, after Art had passed away, Miramax, a subsidiary of Disney, would acquire it, edit the daylights out of it and release it in the US. Art's work had come full circle.

The story goes that in 1991, when Fantasia was released on video, Roy E Disney sent Art a note thanking him for all his contributions to the Disney Company. Supposedly Art was touched by Roy's kindness and released 50 years of animosity toward Roy's father and uncle. People close to Art say that since he was dying at that point, it's possible but considering how vehement his anger towards the Disney brothers stayed well in the late seventies, it's not all that probable. On March 4, 1992, Art passed away from kidney failure, most likely still harboring some justifiable resentment towards the Walt Disney Company. Nevertheless, his former co-workers Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas spoke at his funeral and he was made an official Disney Legend in 2007.

Also on this day, in American history: Great Chicago Fire