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.

May 17 - Ralph Wright

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On this day, in 1908, Ralph Waldo Wright was born in Grants Pass, Oregon. Beyond his place of birth, there is no information on Ralph’s life until he shows up in Burbank, California in 1940 and starts working at the Walt Disney Studio in the story department.  His fellow artists sometimes poked fun at his appearance, calling his too-short pants and suspender ensembles country bumpkinish, but no one doubted his ability to come up with seemingly infinite variations on every gag in a picture. His first project with the studio was Goofy’s Glider, the very first How To… short starring Goofy. Ralph is generally credited with creating the format of the would-be hero comedically failing at something over and over. The Disney Studio itself would use the formula many times, especially with Goofy, but the highly successful trope spilled over into other studios, most notably at Warner Brothers with their Roadrunner shorts, and is still in use today.

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Over the next two and a half decades, Ralph quietly added elements to (or flat out wrote) the stories for all sorts of films at the studio. His feature credits include Bambi, Saludos Amigos, The Three Caballeros, Peter Pan, Song of the South, Sleeping Beauty and Lady and the Tramp. His other credits include the Oscar nominated shorts Donald’s Crime and Lambert the Sheepish Lion, several more How To Goofy shorts and a number of Donald Duck and Pluto shorts. And, of course, when the studio started getting into television in the Fifties, it was all hands on deck and Ralph did his share, writing several episodes of The Wonderful World of Disney anthology show.

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Ralph was no stranger to freelance work during this period either. In the late Forties he wrote for Gaumont British Animation, working with former Disney animator David Hand on his Animaland series. In the early Sixties, he dabbled in writing episodes of different cartoon series that began popping up on all the networks, including Popeye the Sailor, Mr. Magoo, The Dick Tracy Show, and Snuffy Smith and Barney Google. He even contributed dialog to Warner Brother’s first animated feature, Gay Purr-ee, which starred Judy Garland (in her only animated role) and Robert Goulet (in his first feature film).

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In the mid Sixties, the time for Ralph to do things quietly came to an end. As the studio was developing its first Winnie the Pooh short, the team of writers (which included Ralph) began modeling one of my favorite characters, Eeyore, the old gray donkey, on the pleasantly gloomy guy with the deep voice in the Story Department whose name was… Ralph Wright. As the time came to assemble the voice cast, director Wolfgang Reitherman asked Ralph to make a test recording for Eeyore. Ralph was brilliant at it and got the part. When Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree debuted in 1966, his voice became synonymous with the beloved sad sack of the Hundred Acre Wood.  Ralph would reprise the role he was born to play for 1968’s Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day, the 1977 feature The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh and 1983’s Winnie the Pooh and a Day for Eeyore (his final project).

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Following his triumphant turn as Eeyore, Ralph didn’t let all that fame go to his head. He saved the drama for the recording booth and continued making the stories Disney told as funny and as heartwarming as he could. He nabbed several more story credits over the remaining years of his career, adding his touch to The Aristocats, The Jungle Book and Bedknobs and Broomsticks. As the Seventies came to a close, Ralph retired from Disney to spend more time with his wife and play with his grandchildren. On December 31, 1983, he suffered a fatal heart attack at his home in Los Osos, California. He was 75.