August 21 - Vance Gerry

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On this day, in 1929, Vance Bryden Gerry was born in Pasadena, California. Vance studied at the famed Chouinard Art Institute before joining the Walt Disney Studio in 1955. His first position with Disney was as assistant inbetweener, which goes to show how much the place had expanded since the early days; Walt couldn’t afford anything below regular inbetweener in the beginning. Like most enormously talented people at the studio, Vance didn’t stay on the bottom rung for long. He was quickly moved into the Layout Department. His first projects in that department were for the burgeoning television division and were all a bit… well, goofy. Goofy with a capital G, that is. Vance helped put some zaniness in specials like The Goofy Success Story, Goofy’s Cavalcade of Sports and Goofy’s How to Relax. He also lent his talents to the Shorts Department (although since shorts were on their way out, those films were now being called featurettes). His layout work can be seen in The Truth about Mother Goose and the eternal educational classic Donald Duck in Mathmagicland. By the early Sixties, Vance was in the Features Department full time, working on One Hundred and One Dalmatians and The Sword in the Stone. At the end of production on Stone, Walt decided to move him once again, this time to the position he was born to have.

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Although you might not realize it by looking at it, story development for The Jungle Book was a long almost tortuous process. Walt considered the first several drafts to be too dark for a children’s movie (even though they were pretty faithful to the book). He rotated through a number of people on the writing team (one of whom, Bill Peet, would actually leave the studio over disagreements about this script) before joining it himself and taking a bigger interest in an animated feature than he had in years. The final four man writing team (and yes, in those days it was all men) included Vance and getting to work that closely with Walt was an experience he never forgot. He once commented that Walt had a certain aura about him and you felt his presence in a room even before you saw him. And Walt’s laser focus on creating strong characters was a lesson Vance took to heart for the rest of his days.

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Vance would go on to become a legendary story man in not just at Disney, but in the animation industry as a whole. Don Hahn, the producer of The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast, described him this way: you could probably find someone who drew better than him or wrote better than him or communicated characters better than him, but absolutely no one could do all three at once better than, or for as long as, Vance did. Vance himself once described his writing style as very loose. He preferred to only have a picture’s title rather than a script. Titles encouraged exploration and dreaming. Scripts, he felt, were fairly constricting. Necessary to the process, of course, but something that could come later on as far as he was concerned. One thing everyone could agree on, was that Vance could convey not only characters but whole sequences, complete with camera angles and how a character would react to the general mood, with only a few quick pictures on a storyboard. Ask anyone in animation at the time who the most charismatic, respected and all around fun to be with story man was and they would all tell you: Vance.

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After Walt’s passing, Vance continued to work his story magic in the Features Department for pretty much the rest of his life. He made major contributions to The Aristocats, Robin Hood, The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, The Rescuers (including the scene where Madame Medusa crushes Penny’s dreams of adoption), The Fox and the Hound, The Black Cauldron, The Great Mouse Detective (for which he also received story adaptation credit) and Beauty and the Beast. Starting in 1995, at the age of 66 (you know, when most people start a new phase of their careers), he began focusing more on character design and overall visual development. In that capacity, he helped shape Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Tarzan, Fantasia 2000 (particularly the Carnival of the Animals sequence, the one with the flamingos and the yo-yo), Hercules and Home on the Range.

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If all his work with Disney wasn’t enough to keep a man occupied (and in this case, clearly it wasn’t), Vance also had a side gig going for most of his life as well. Starting in 1963, he started his own book printing business, Peach Pit Press. As a teen during World War II, he’d worked for a printer basically because he and his family needed money and the job was available. The profession didn’t turn into an interest until almost two decades later. He changed the name of the business to Weather Bird Press in 1968 and spent decades making small batches of lavishly illustrated books that are highly collectable today. Most people have never heard of Weather Bird, mainly because Vance wasn’t much of a guy for self-promotion, but those who know about this sort of thing covet his creations.

In 2004, around the time the last animated feature he worked on was being released, Vance was diagnosed with cancer and it didn’t take long for the disease to consume him. He passed away from it on March 5, 2005 at the Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena, in almost the same place he came into the world 75 years before.

August 14 - Steve Martin

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On this day, in 1945, Stephen Glenn Martin was born in Waco, Texas. Steve’s father was a realtor and an aspiring actor, two professions that warranted a move to Southern California (even if the latter one never panned out). He did most of his growing up in Garden Grove with his sister, Melinda. Steve’s association with the Walt Disney Company started way back in 1955, when he was just ten years old. On weekends (and full time during the summer, labor laws were obviously much different then), he sold guide books at the entrance to Disneyland. There’s even some documented proof of his employment. In 1956, the Barstow family of Wethersfield, Connecticut won a trip to California that included a stop at Disneyland. The Barstow’s took extensive home movies of their vacation that were eventually edited into a short subject film called Disneyland Dream (which has since been included in the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress). If you’re watching closely at just past the twenty minute mark, little Steve Martin makes his film debut in a top hat, dark vest and pink striped shirt as he strolls through the frame hawking his guide books.

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Steve spent three years as a guide book salesman, but that wasn’t the only thing he was doing in the park. He spent a lot of time in the magic shop, learning sleight of hand tricks and the importance of presentation to customers. He was also striking up a friendship with the Legendary Wally Boag, a performer at the Golden Horseshoe Saloon who would become a big influence on Steve’s stand-up comedy. By 1960, Steve had a full time job in the magic shop, where he honed not only his skills at magic but perfected his juggling act and balloon animal talents, often receiving tips for his ability to entertain guests. He stayed there throughout his teens, balancing his shifts with his school work and the cheerleading he did for Garden Grove High School.

After graduating, Steve moved on to Santa Ana College and began developing his stand up comedy routines. He was part of a troupe at Knott’s Berry Farm for a while and became romantically involved with a young woman who convinced him to transfer to the University of California, Long Beach to be a philosophy major. The relationship didn’t last (she went to UCLA and they drifted apart) but the philosophy classes would have a profound impact on the rest of Steve’s life. He began creating purely conceptual stand-up routines using concepts like if there wasn’t ever a punchline, what would happen with all the tension he was building?

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As he began trying his ideas out on actual audiences, the reviews for Steve’s act were initially mixed but he began to build a following. It helped that he was able to wrangle a job writing for The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in 1967. Not only did the show give him his first television appearance in 1968, but he won an Emmy in 1969 as part of the shows writing team. Steve went on to write for The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour and The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour, all while building his stand-up career to a level usually reserved for rock stars. In the mid-Seventies, Steve became a regular on NBC’s new late night show Saturday Night Live but, contrary to popular belief, never actually became part of the cast. He was happy to guest host 15 times (and make several other appearances) but didn’t really need to make it a full time gig. His stand-up sets were literally selling out stadiums. Back-to-back Grammy winning, platinum selling comedy albums in 1977 and 1978 didn’t hurt either. And then, in 1981, with no fanfare and no warning, he stopped doing stand-up altogether and moved on to what had been his goal all along: movies.

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Steve’s first big screen appearance was a small role in 1972 in a political satire produced by Bob Epstein, another writer for the Smothers Brothers, called Another Nice Mess. Five years later, he wrote and starred in a short film, The Absent Minded Waiter, which was nominated for an Academy Award. His breakout role came in 1979 when he played Navin R Johnson in The Jerk, a film he also gets a writing credit for. Since then he’s been seen in four dozen more films, twelve of which he wrote himself or helped write with one or two others. Highlights of his career so far include a cameo in The Muppet Movie  (1979), All of Me (1984), Three Amigos (1986), Roxanne (1987), Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987), Parenthood (1989), L.A. Story (1991), The Prince of Egypt (1998), Cheaper by the Dozen (2003) and The Pink Panther (2006).

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Steve has spent as much of career writing material as he has performing it. In 1993 he finished his first full length play, Picasso at the Lapin Agile, which had successful runs in several cities across the country. In 2002, his adaptation of a 1910 German play, The Underpants, had an off-Broadway run and continues to be staged by various regional and collegiate theaters today. Then, in 2015, Steve collaborated with Edie Brickell on the musical Bright Star, which had its Broadway debut the following year and was nominated for numerous awards, winning a Drama Desk Award and two Outer Circle Critics Awards. Steve followed Star up with a play, Meteor Shower, which nabbed Amy Schumer a Tony nomination in 2018.

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Throughout the years, Steve has maintained a working relationship with Disney that has evolved beyond balloon animals and souvenir brochures. In 1991, he starred in the hit remake of Father of the Bride for Touchstone Pictures and returned for the sequel in 1995. He wrote, produced and starred in Touchstone’s 1994 drama A Simple Twist of Fate, based on the classic tale Silas Marner. He was one of the hosts in Fantasia 2000, introducing the Pines of Rome segment. In 2003, Steve starred opposite Queen Latifah in the hit Touchstone comedy Bringing Down the House. Two years later, he again wrote, produced and starred in Shopgirl, an adaptation of a novella he’d written earlier. The same year, just to bring things full circle, Steve hosted the short documentary that replaced Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln for a while, Disneyland: The First 50 Magical Years. While Abe has been back in action since 2009, you can still catch Steve and his co-host, Donald Duck, in the lobby before each show.

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In recent years, Steve has virtually stopped acting in order to focus on his musical career. That’s right. The stand-up comedian who filled stadiums turned into an actor who filled movie theaters and has now morphed into a Grammy winning musician. But it isn’t because Steve Martin has decided to cut a few records. It’s because a guy named Steve Martin happens to be really good at playing the banjo. He first picked one up at the age of seventeen, incorporated it into his act (see his Muppet Show appearance for a good example) and has been working on his skills ever since. He is the real deal when it comes to playing bluegrass; this isn’t something he started doing a few years ago on a whim. His final comedy album in 1981 was routines on side A and live recordings of him playing with a bluegrass band on side B. In 2001, Steve played with Earl Scruggs on a recording of Foggy Mountain Breakdown. That song won a Grammy for Best Country Instrumental Performance. In 2009, he released his first all music album, The Crow: New Songs for the 5-String Banjo. That album won a Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album. In 2013, he released an album with Edie Brickell, his collaborator on Bright Star, called Love Has Come for You. The title track from that album won a Grammy for Best American Roots Song. In addition to their album and Broadway musical, Steve and Edie have done extensive touring together, released a second collaborative album and appeared in the award winning documentary The American Epic Sessions together. In 2010, Steve established the Steve Martin Prize for Excellence in Banjo and Bluegrass to bring attention to the genre and highlight current artists within it. The annual prize involves $50,000, a bronze statue and maybe even the chance to perform with him.

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Among all the accolades that Steve has accumulated over the years, he was officially declared a Disney Legend in 2005 for his decades long relationship with the company. Currently, he’s actually made a return to stand-up, doing a bit of touring in a two-man show with fellow funny man Martin Short. And his next project is another one for Disney and again brings his life full circle. He wrote the story for the comedy Magic Camp, about a camp for budding magicians, which will be released on the company’s new streaming service, Disney+, later this year.

May 6 - Joe Grant

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On this day, in 2005, Joe Grant passed away in Glendale, California. Born on May 15, 1908 in New York City, Joe and his family moved to Los Angeles, California when he was two. His father was a newspaper art editor, which gave Joe exposure to the possibilities of the art world from an early age. Following high school, Joe attended classes at the famed Chouinard Art Institute. His first professional gig was drawing caricatures of celebrities for a local newspaper. One of the readers of that paper was Walt Disney, who was impressed enough with Joe’s style to invite him to submit some caricatures for incorporation into the 1933 short Mickey’s Gala Premier.

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The success of Joe’s work in Gala led to him being offered a full time job with the Walt Disney Studio as production on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was ramping up. Joe was given the task of designing the Queen and her alter ego, the Wicked Witch. Supposedly the old hag’s appearance (but not, presumably, her evil intent) was fashioned after a woman who lived across the street from Joe at the time. He continued working on character designs for Pinocchio before switching over to the story department when production began on Fantasia. Not only did Joe help develop the plot of several of the segments in Fantasia, he assisted in helping Walt and Leopold Stokowski choose what music would be used in the first place.

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Joe received credit for co-writing the script on his next two films, Dumbo and Saludos Amigos. As World War II raged on, he went back to the Shorts Department (of course so did everyone else, really; even the features during that period were just shorts that had been cobbled together). His input can be seen in the propaganda shorts The New Spirit, Reason and Emotion and the Academy Award winning Der Fuehrer’s Face. Following the war, Joe served as Production Supervisor on Make Mine Music. He then began working in earnest on a story he’d first conceived of in 1937. While watching the antics of his English springer spaniel after his daughter was born, he made some sketches and wrote a bare bones plot for a film that was known for years as Lady, after his spaniel. Even though Joe tinkered with the story off and on for almost a decade, Walt was never quite satisfied with the direction it was taking. After reading a 1945 short story, Happy Dan, the Cynical Dog, Walt thought that merging it with Joe’s story just might do the trick and Lady and the Tramp was born.

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Joe didn’t stick around to see his story develop into a classic film, though. He left Disney in 1949, six years before Lady hit theaters, but not because of any animosity or hard feelings. Wanting a new challenge in his life, Joe left to open his own ceramics studio. Some years later, he started up his own greeting card company. Throughout the years, no matter what else he was doing, he would still occasionally come over to the Disney lot to consult on a character’s design or a particularly sticky situation in a movie’s plot, chat with the boys and then return to his pots or cards.

In 1989, when Joe was 81, the age when most people have long since retired, he was apparently looking for another new challenge. Whether it was because the Disney Renaissance was just starting to hit its stride making animation exciting again or Joe just missed the good old days, he returned to work at Disney, forty years after he left. And not just on a consulting basis, but actual full time work. He would come into the studio at least four days a week from then until his death, over fifteen years later.

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Joe became part of the Visual Development team on Beauty and the Beast. From there he added Character Design back into his repertoire and did both tasks on The Lion King, Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules and Tarzan. He added to the stories of Mulan and Lilo and Stich and came up with the concept of giving yo-yos to a flock of flamingoes for the Carnival of the Animals sequence in Fantasia 2000 (making him the only person to contribute new material to both Fantasia movies). In 1992, long before he was done making significant contributions to the company but decades after he had started, Joe was declared an official Disney Legend

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Joe’s final project was a short called Lorenzo, which he thought up after observing another pet of his, this time a cat, after it had been in a fight with two poodles. He thought What would happen if my cat lost its tail and what would that look like set to tango music?  Lorenzo was initially supposed to be part of a third Fantasia film, but when that project fell apart it was released on its own in 2004. The following year it received an Oscar nomination and won the Annie Award for Best Animated Short. Just over two months later, Joe was sitting at his drawing desk at home (it being one of the few days he didn’t go to the studio), doing one of the things he loved most in this world, when he suffered a fatal heart attack. The Legendary story man was just nine days short of his 97^th birthday.

December 16 - Roy Edward Disney

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On this day, in 2009, Roy Edward Disney, son of Roy O. and nephew of Walt, passed away in Newport Beach, California. Born January 10, 1930, Roy would end up being the last member of the Disney family to take an active part in the company his father and uncle created. He graduated from Pomona College, long considered to be the premier liberal arts college on the West Coast, in 1951 and began working in Hollywood, initially as an assistant editor when Dragnet made the move from radio to television. By 1954, he’d joined the family business as an assistant director and producer on the Tru-Life Adventure series. Six years later, Roy would earn an Oscar nomination for a short film he penned, Mysteries of the Deep.

After Walt’s death, Roy was elected to the company’s board of directors, a position he would hold off and on for the next few decades. Fiercely loyal to the ideals of the elder Disneys and staunchly supportive of all things animation, Roy would often have a cantankerous relationship with the company leaders who came after both founders passed away. In 1977, he resigned his position within Walt Disney Productions in protest over the direction the company’s entertainment division had been taking. He knew the string of mediocre-at-best live action movies the company had been throwing out, coupled with the fact that all the old school animators were disappearing without, in his opinion, being adequately replaced, were hurting the company. The Black Cauldron was still a few years away but Roy could see it coming. He retained his position on the board however and several years later, when the company faced a hostile takeover crisis, he stepped up to the plate to save the company.

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One of the first things Roy had to do in 1984 was create a group of investors large enough to keep the company together. In order to effectively do this, he resigned from his seat on the board. Once he had the necessary funding in place, he then set about forcing the current company president, Ron Miller, out. I’m sure this move made for some awkward moments at family reunions from that point on as Ron was married to Roy’s cousin (and Walt’s daughter), Dianne Disney. He then was instrumental in getting Frank Wells and Michael Eisner hired as president and CEO. When the dust settled, Roy came back to the company as vice chairman of The Walt Disney Company and chairman of the animation branch. Since Michael and Frank were like the second coming of Walt and Roy O, Roy E was heralded as a savior who put loyalty to the company over personal considerations.

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Throughout the remainder of the Eighties and well into the Nineties, the Walt Disney Company experienced a rebirth. Animation hits like The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King flowed out of the studio. All seemed rosy for the company, but tensions brewed behind closed doors. Roy clearly didn’t care for the new studio head, Jeffrey Katzenberg. He felt that Jeffrey took too much credit for recent successes and frequently overstepped his place in the scheme of things. When Frank Wells died in a helicopter accident in 1994, Jeffrey demanded a promotion. Roy told Eisner that he would start a proxy war if that happened. Roy would win this round. Jeffrey would leave the company (albeit with a large monetary payout) but his relationship with Eisner would slowly deteriorate over the next decade. This was partly due to the fact that, rather than replace Frank, Eisner simply took on the financial duties of the company (which was not a good move) and partly because the creative juices seemed to be drying up. Again, Home on the Range was a couple years off, but Roy saw it coming.

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During this cooling off period between Roy and Eisner, a couple of bright spots did occur. In 1998, Roy was surprised when he was made an official Disney Legend. Then in December of 1999, Roy’s pet project, Fantasia 2000, was finally released to theaters. The film had been in production for nine years and was meant to fulfill his uncle’s dream of making the 1940 movie Fantasia an on-going, ever evolving picture. Like its predecessor, Fantasia 2000 combined classical music with high quality animation and mostly inventive story lines. And, like its predecessor, it didn’t do terribly well at the box office.

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By 2003, Roy’s relationship with Eisner had not only gone completely south but his influence within the company was evaporating as well, as most of the executives now owed their positions to Eisner. Roy once again resigned his positions with the company and began a second campaign to remove someone he saw as ruining the company from the top spot. Part smear campaign against Eisner, part rally-to-my-last-name-boys bravado, Roy’s efforts eventually worked after he managed to put together a coalition of 43% of shareholders that voted against Eisner at the 2004 meeting. It would take another 18 months of bitter pressure before Eisner would finally resign, but in the end, Roy won that round, too (sort of, Eisner’s second in command, Bob Iger, took the helm). He rejoined the board as Director Emeritus, a non-voting position (although he still retained 1% of all shares) and remained in that position until his death.

In 2008, Roy was diagnosed with stomach cancer, a disease he would battle for over a year before finally succumbing. His passing was truly the end of an era. Other Disneys of his generation were still around, but none of them took an active interest in the company that bears the family name and now even they are gone.