July 20 - Verna Felton

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On this day, in 1890, Verna Felton was born in Salinas, California. When she was ten, Verna performed in a San Jose benefit for the victims of the Galveston Flood of 1900. She attracted the attention of the manager of a travelling show in the area, who offered her a contract. Verna's mother declined on her behalf. Shortly thereafter, her father died, leaving the family in bad financial shape. Verna's mother then contacted the show manager, who quickly produced a contract and she spent the remainder of her formative years in the theater.

Verna toured with the Allen Stock Company up and down the West Coast of the United States and Canada. Initially she was billed as "Little Verna Felton, the Child Wonder" but by 1907, she had become one of the company's leading ladies. In 1910, one of the troupe's shows was The Defiance of Doris, which had been written specifically for Verna. By the Twenties, Verna had stopped touring and settled in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. She was ensconced in the Empress Theatre there, again as one of their leading ladies.

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Verna moved to Hollywood in the Thirties and became a staple on radio programs from coast to coast. She started in 1937 as the mother in The Cinnamon Bear, a serial designed to air between Thanksgiving and Christmas and was rebroadcast every year for decades (you might even be able to find it somewhere in the world this holiday season). From there, Verna moved on to have recurring roles on The Great Gildersleeve, The Jack Benny Program, Point Sublime, The Abbott and Costello Show, The Joan Davis Show, The Judy Canova Show, A Day in the Life of Dennis Day, The Red Skelton Show, December Bride and My Little Margie. She was queen (or aunt or nosy neighbor) of the airwaves for two decades, right up until television began to capture people's imaginations. And she really only slowed down enough to change mediums.

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As television clawed its way to the top of America's entertainment heap, Verna rode the wave of radio programs that made the leap. She reprised roles that audiences had only heard her in on the new versions of The Jack Benny Program, The Dennis Day Show and December Bride. Her portrayal of Hilda Crocker on Bride, and its spin-off Pete and Gladys, earned her Emmy nominations in 1958 and 1959. One of Verna's most famous roles came in the early Sixties, when she was a semi-regular on The Flintstones as Pearl Slaghoople, Fred Flintstone's demanding mother-in-law. She also enjoyed guest appearances on I Love Lucy, Wagon Train, The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show and the final episode of Dennis the Menace.

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Verna's most enduring body of work, though, came through her long association with the Walt Disney Company. Any one of the characters from her list of Disney voice credits would make a performer proud, but she could boast all nine of them. She started in 1940 with dual roles in Dumbo, playing both the circus' Elephant Matriarch and Mrs. Jumbo, Dumbo's mother. Next, she became everyone's favorite Fairy Godmother in Cinderella, a role she actually reprised twice afterwards on the radio, once for Screen Directors Playhouse and again for Hallmark Playhouse. Verna's next role took a villainous turn when she brought to life the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland. She followed that up with Aunt Sarah in Lady and the Tramp (her son, Lee Millar, actually voiced Jim Dear), Flora, the red fairy, and Queen Leah in Sleeping Beauty and Eloise in the 1960 short Goliath II. Verna's final role for Disney was as Winifred, Colonel Hathi's wife, in The Jungle Book. All that and she hasn't been granted Legendary status. Shameful.

Verna worked right up to the end of her life (The Jungle Book was actually released posthumously). On the evening of December 14, 1966, she suffered a fatal stroke and passed away, just hours before Walt did the following morning. She was 76.

June 26 - Woolie Reitherman

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On this day, in 1909, Wolfgang Reitherman was born in Munich, Bavaria, Germany. Woolie, as he was generally known, and his family moved to Southern California when he was but a babe. He graduated from Pasadena Junior College and became a draftsman for the Douglas Aircraft Company. His interest in the more artistic side of drawing felt stifled at Douglas, however, and he began taking classes at the Chouinard Art Institute. Woolie graduated from Chouinard in 1933 and was immediately hired on at the Walt Disney Studio as an animator.

Woolie began in the Shorts Department (of course, it was the only department for a few more years) with his first project, the Silly Symphony Funny Little Bunnies. He then lent his talents to classics like The Band Concert, Elmer Elephant and Goofy and Wilbur. As most of the crew was being pulled into the new Features Department in the mid Thirties, Woolie was tasked with doing all the Magic Mirror sequences for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. He continued to mostly work on features from that point on. For Pinocchio, he was in charge of the dramatic parts with Monstro the Whale and he specialized in action sequences after that.

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Woolie's talent, combined with his seemingly endless amount of energy, helped him rise to the top of studio's animation pool and he became part of the elite group Walt affectionately called his Nine Old Men. He managed to tackle the dinosaur fight in the Rite of Spring part of Fantasia and produce several scenes with Timothy Q. Mouse in Dumbo before World War II interrupted his career. In 1942, Woolie left the studio to join the United States Air Force. He served as a pilot in Africa, India, China and the South Pacific,  becoming an ace and earning both the rank of Major and the Distinguished Flying Cross. He received an honorable discharge in 1946 and returned to work at the Walt Disney Studio.

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Following the war, Woolie slipped back into his old role of head animator directing parts of Fun and Fancy Free as well as the Headless Horseman for The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr Toad. Over the next dozen years he directed sequences in Cinderella (Gus Gus and Jacques), Alice in Wonderland (the White Rabbit), Peter Pan (Captain Hook and Tick-Tock Croc), Lady and the Tramp (Tramp and the rat) , Sleeping Beauty (Prince Phillip's fight with Maleficent) and One Hundred and One Dalmatians (the Twilight Bark). Then, in 1963, Walt did something he'd never done before and made Woolie the sole director of The Sword in the Stone (up to that point multiple directors were in charge of various scenes in a film).

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Following Stone, Woolie would continue to be sole director of whatever he did. His next project was Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree, the studio's first Pooh short. He then helmed The Jungle Book, followed by Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day, which won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short. When Walt passed away during the production of those last two films, Woolie was credited as the one that managed to corral everyone's egos and keep them focused on getting the job done without their guiding light of the last thirty years. For the remainder of his career, he also added the role of producer to his resume, the position formerly held by Walt.

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Woolie charged on successfully throughout the Seventies, adding his name to the list of the highest grossing directors in the process. He produced and directed Robin Hood, The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh and The Rescuers. His career ended on a slightly sour note. His last film for the studio was The Fox and the Hound, for which he was initially slated to co-direct. He had some pretty epic conflicts with Art Stevens, his co-director, however and was taken off the project, being left with a co-producing credit instead. Following that, he tried to get a couple of ideas off the ground only to be vetoed in favor of The Black Cauldron. Seeing the writing on the wall, Woolie chose to retire in 1981 after 47 years making animation magic.

Woolie's life ended tragically just a few years later. On May 22, 1985, the car he was driving veered into a tree blocks away from his Burbank, California home, killing him in the process. He was 75 and the third of the Nine Old Men to pass away. Four years later, Woolie would be officially named a Disney Legend along with the rest of the Men in just the second class of Legend inductees.

June 25 - Milt Kahl

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On this day, in 1934, Milton Erwin Kahl began working at the Walt Disney Studio. Born on March 22, 1909 in San Francisco, California, Milt loved drawing so much he dropped out of high school to follow his dreams of becoming a cartoonist. He started by working in newspapers layout artist for first the Oakland Post-Enquirer and then the San Francisco Bulletin. After getting his feet wet, he went out on his own, starting a commercial art business, just in time for the Great Depression to begin its strangle hold on the nation's economy. Milt struggled to keep his shop open until one day, in 1933, when he went to the movies for a mental health break and saw a Silly Symphony, The Three Little Pigs. He thought it was the most fantastic thing he'd ever seen and was immediately hooked on animation. By June 1934, his own enterprise was at an end and he applied at the Walt Disney Studio for a job. His talents were so impressive, he skipped the inbetweener position and began as an assistant animator.

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Milt began his Disney career in the Shorts Department, making contributions to classics like The Lonesome Ghosts, Mickey's Circus and the Academy Award winning Silly Symphony The Ugly Duckling. It didn't take long for him to move up to animator. I mean pretty much everyone got promotions once production started on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, but Milt really deserved his. For the studio's first feature, he was in charge of animating the Woodland Animals and the Prince. By the second feature, Pinocchio, all of Milt's peers were awe of his talents. Ollie Johnston remembers Fred Moore coming into his office one day just raving about Milt's drawings. Ollie went to look for himself and was blown away. Walt was so impressed he made Milt Pinocchio's supervising animator.

Not only did Milt become one of Walt's Nine Old Men (as did Ollie), he's generally considered the leader of the group. He was comfortable and talented enough to do technically hard things like realistic looking fawns or stag antlers, he could also do artistically hard things like humans. Throughout the decades, Milt was responsible for finalizing the look of hundreds of characters in dozens of films. The list of characters he personally animated is almost mind blowing:

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Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs - Forest Animals and Prince

Pinocchio - Pinocchio and some of Jiminy Cricket

Bambi - Bambi, Thumper, several deer

Saludos Amigos - riding a llama sequence

Make Mine Music - The Martins and the Coys

Song of the South - Br'er Rabbit, Br'er Fox, Br'er Bear (especially the Tar Baby sequence)

Fun and Fancy Free - Lulubelle, Lumpjaw and various bears

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Melody Time - Johnny Appleseed, Guardian Angel, Slue Foot Sue, Pecos Bill

The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad - Angus MacBadger, Rat, Mole, an angry mob, Brom Bones

Cinderella - Fairy Godmother, Prince Charming, The King, The Grand Duke

Alice in Wonderland - Alice, the White Rabbit, the Dodo, flamingos and hedgehogs

Peter Pan - Peter Pan, Wendy Darling, John Darling, Michael Darling, Mr and Mrs. Darling, Nana

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Lady and the Tramp - Lady, Tramp, Beaver, Trusty

Sleeping Beauty - Prince Phillip, King Hubert, King Stefan, animals, Samson

One Hundred and One Dalmatians - Roger, Anita, Pongo, Perdita

The Sword in the Stone - Wart, Merlin, Sir Ector, Kay, Archemedes, Madame Mim, dogs

Mary Poppins - Master of Hounds, hounds, fox

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The Jungle Book - Mowgli, Baloo, Bagheera, Shere Khan, King Louie, Kaa, the Vultures

The Aristocats - Thomas O'Malley, Duchess, Madame Bonfamille, Edgar, George

Bedknobs and Broomsticks - King Leonidas, Secretary Bird

Robin Hood - Robin Hood, the Sheriff of Nottingham, Little John, Allan-a-Dale, Maid Marian, Friar
 Tuck, King Richard

The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh - Tigger, some Winnie the Pooh, a little Piglet

The Rescuers - Madame Medusa, Mr. Snoops, Penny, Brutus and Nero

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Once you've wrapped your mind around that list, realize this: not only did he animate all those characters, but for the titles in bold, he was also that film's directing animator. Meaning he animated his characters and made sure that all the other characters were being handle correctly as well. I don't think it's an understatement to say that if Milt's commercial art business hadn't failed, the Walt Disney Studio wouldn't have been as successful as it was.

Milt retired in 1976, as production was wrapping up on The Rescuers and after 42 years creating magic for millions of moviegoers. He moved back to the Bay Area and spent the remainder of his days making wire sculptures of ballerinas and other human forms. On April 19, 1987, Milt succumbed to pneumonia at his home in Mill Valley, California. Just two years later, in the second class of inductees, Milt and his fellow Old Men would be declared official Disney Legends. If he'd been there to accept the award, he would probably have declared, with his usual humility, "Aww... You're full of it!" And indeed, every time we watch a Disney classic, because of Milt, we are full of It.

June 22 - Floyd Norman

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On this day, in 1935, Floyd Norman was born in Santa Barbara, California. While still in high school, Floyd began dabbling in the art of animation, creating short films on his own. One of his first jobs out of school was as an assistant to comic book artist Bill Woggon, the creator of the Katy Keene character featured in Archie Comics. During this same time he took classes at the Art Center School in Pasadena, focusing on illustration. After two years of instruction, Floyd was hired at the Walt Disney Studio as an inbetweener in 1956, the first black man to ever do so with Disney.

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And now we have to take a small detour from our regularly scheduled post into the Land of Finer Points. When asked the question “Who was Disney’s first black animator?” a large number of people will give Floyd’s name as their answer. And yes, Floyd was the first black man to work in the animation department at the Walt Disney Studio. However, as another section of the populace will be quick to point out, while he did many marvelous things in other departments at the studio for years, he never actually ascended to the position of Animator. For decades at Disney, an artist had to produce over 100 feet of film in order to get screen credit as an Animator. As petty as it might sound to people outside the industry, only a select few ever earned the title of Animator. By those standards, Ron Husband, who joined the studio in the Seventies, is Disney’s first black Animator, having risen to the position for Cody in The Rescuers Down Under. Ron worked on most of the movies that came out during the Disney Renaissance only to find himself out of a job in 2004, when the company mostly stopped doing hand drawn animation. So there you have it: first black man doing animation at Disney, Floyd Norman, first black Disney Animator, Ron Husband. Now back to our post.

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Floyd’s first project with Disney was doing inbetween work on Sleeping Beauty. Shortly before that film’s production wrapped up, however, his career was interrupted with a draft summons from the United States Army. He fulfilled his patriotic duty, returning to the studio when his tour was over in 1960. He continued as an inbetweener on One Hundred and One Dalmatians and The Sword in the Stone. At this point, Walt saw some of the sketches Floyd periodically made to entertain his co-workers, saw some potential in him and moved him into the Story Department. He spent the next couple of years with Walt and Larry Clemons, trying to turn the darkness of The Jungle Book into a light, breezy animated movie. When Walt died in December 1966, Floyd decided to strike out on his own and created Vignette Films, Inc. with Leo Sullivan, another black man working at the studio (I hesitate to say the other black man, but let’s just say the studio got a lot less colorful when these two talented guys left; it was not good for the studio’s diversity).

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It didn’t take long for Floyd and Leo to become involved in several high profile projects. They began writing and animating segments for Sesame Street, which debuted in 1969. They were instrumental in developing the original Hey Hey Hey It’s Fat Albert television special that came out the same year. They also produced training films for the United States Navy and made some of the first movies to document black history. Floyd also began his long association with Hanna-Barbera during this period as a layout artist on the Josie and the Pussycats and Sealab 2020 television series.

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In the early Seventies, Floyd returned to Disney briefly as an uncredited assistant animator (the level just under the coveted Animator) on Robin Hood. He spent the rest of the decade at Hanna-Barbera, working mostly as a layout artist on series ranging from Goober and the Ghost Chasers to Scooby’s Laff-A-Lympics to Godzilla. As the calendar rolled on into the Eighties, Floyd was promoted to the position of Story Director and contributed to The Smurfs, Pac-Man, Snorks, and Super Friends.

In the mid-Eighties, Floyd returned to Disney again, this time in the Comic Strip Department. He has the distinction of being the last writer and layout artist of the syndicated Mickey Mouse comic strip before the company discontinued it in 1995. At that point, Floyd was sucked back into the House of Mouse as a regular player, folding right back into the story department of the animation studios. The sad part of that statement is that he turned down the opportunity to help a little studio called Pixar develop a little movie called Toy Story in favor of (what he saw as) steadier work at Disney (they were two separate companies at that point). He contributed story to The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Mulan, The Tigger Movie and Dinosaur. When Pixar asked for his help again (who says opportunity never strikes twice), Floyd made sure he said yes and earned additional story credits for Toy Story 2 and Monsters, Inc.

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When Floyd turned 65, he was given retirement from Disney, whether he wanted it or not. Turns out he didn’t. He combated his ousting by just constantly showing up at the studio, mostly driving his longtime companion, Adrienne, to her job every day. They’d met at the company and she still worked in the Publishing Department. Simply by his presence, Floyd would continue to contribute to all sorts of projects including story elements to Cinderella II and Kronk’s New Groove. His latest productions have been non-Disney related things like the movie Free Birds and Cartoon Network’s Robot Chicken.

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It should come as no surprise that Floyd has racked up a number of awards and honors over the course of his career. In 1979, he was inducted into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame. In 2002, he was the recipient of the prestigious Winsor McCay Award at the Annies. In 2007, he was declared an official Disney Legend. In 2008, he was awarded the Inkpot Award for his dozen years on the Mickey comic strip. He won a Sergio Award in 2013, a DFC Disney Legend Award from the Disneyana Fan Club in 2014, The Friz Freleng Award in 2015, a Special Achievement Award from the African-American Film Critics in 2016 and the Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Cartoonists Society earlier this year. Whew.

Even at 84, Floyd still occasionally makes appearances at Comic Cons around the country but if you’d like to learn more about his life and career, check out the documentary that came out a few years ago, Floyd Norman: An Animated Life, currently available on Netflix and, for a fee, Amazon Prime Video.

May 25 - Barbara Luddy

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On this day, in 1908, Barbara Luddy was born in Great Falls, Montana. Information about Barbara's early life is scarce, but we do know that she did some singing on the vaudeville circuit as a child and was educated at the Ursuline Convent there in Great Falls. She broke into silent movies in 1925 as Janet in Columbia Pictures' An Enemy of Men. She would appear in several more films over the next few years before becoming a world traveler as part of the cast of an Australian production of Lombardi, Ltd in 1929.

Barbara began a prolific career in radio upon her return to the United States. Her longest running role was as lead female for seventeen years on The First Nighter Program, a show generally credited with being the first to run a different, complete story each week. She starred opposite Les Tremayne from 1936 until 1943 and then opposite Olan Soule until the program went off the air in 1953. Barbara was also part of the cast of the more dramatic Chicago Theater of the Air, played Veronica Gunn in the comedic Great Gunns and appeared on several soap operas, including Lonely Women, The Road of Life and Woman in White. As radio began to give way to television, she had a handful of appearances on early shows like Hazel and Dragnet, but nothing much beyond that.

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Barbara joined the Disney family in 1955 when as the original voice of Lady in Lady and the Tramp. She returned four years later as Merryweather, the blue fairy, in Sleeping Beauty. For 1961's One Hundred and One Dalmatians she brought Rover to life and played the dual roles of Mother Rabbit and Mother Sexton in 1973's Robin Hood. Her longest running role for Disney started in 1966. Debuting in Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree, Barbara brought the mother figure of the Hundred Acre Wood, Kanga, to life for the next eleven years, including the shorts Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day, Winnie the Pooh and Tigger, Too and the combined feature The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh in 1977.

Barbara passed away on April 1, 1979 in Los Angeles, California from complications brought on by lung cancer. She was 70 years old.

May 23 - George Bruns

On this day, in 1983, George Edward Bruns passed away in Portland, Oregon. Born on July 3, 1914 in Sandy, Oregon, George took plenty of music lessons as a child. His innate talent was evident early on as it didn’t take him long to master the piano, the tuba and the trombone. He began attending Oregon State Agricultural College (now known as Oregon State University) in 1932 and played with the ROTC band in order to afford the tuition. For some reason, George was an engineering student but he didn’t stay one for terribly long. By the age of twenty, he’d decided to drop out of school to be a full-time musician (every parent’s dream). Luckily for George (and ultimately the rest of us), that plan worked out for once.

For the rest of the Thirties and the first half of the Forties, George played with various local groups in the Portland area. Following World War II, he started his own band (which included Doc Severenson of The Tonight Show fame) and began playing gigs all over the Northwest. The group had to remain based in Portland because George’s regular job was musical director of radio station KEX. He also served as the bandleader in the ritzy Rose Bowl room at Portland’s Multnomah Hotel and would occasionally play trombone on recordings with the Castle Jazz Band.

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In 1949, George moved to Los Angeles craving a bigger music scene than Portland could offer. He played tuba in a jazz band (you heard that right, tuba and jazz in the same sentence), created a night club act with his wife, singer Jeanne Gayle, and got the break of a lifetime. In 1953, George was asked to write the music for a short over at United Productions of America, Little Boy with a Big Horn. His work was impressive enough to grab some attention over at the Walt Disney Studio and he was hired the same year to arrange Tchaikovsky’s ballet music and write new score for the upcoming feature Sleeping Beauty.

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During production on Sleeping Beauty, Walt discovered he had a small problem in one of the shows that was being created for the Disneyland television show. There was a three and a half minute gap in an episode about this famous frontiersman. Did George think he could maybe write a song to take care of that? So George sat down with lyricist Tom Blackburn and churned out a little ditty called The Ballad of Davy Crockett. The success of that one song would have been more than enough to cement George’s place in Disney history (it certainly was enough to make him the studio’s musical director), but it was only the beginning.

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Over the next twenty years, George would score more than forty Disney films and television shows, starting with the remaining episodes of Davy Crockett. He wrote several songs for the first two seasons of The Mickey Mouse Club, including Talent Roundup (with studio nurse Hazel George) and I Want to Be a Fireman. In one four year period, he would receive three Oscar nominations, first for Sleeping Beauty in 1959, then for Babes in Toyland in 1961 and finally for The Sword in the Stone in 1963. His most famous composition (in spite of what fans of Davy Crockett think) is hands down a song that plays on continuous loop at all times somewhere in the world: A Pirate’s Life for Me, penned with the legendary Imagineer X Atencio. His other highlights include the scores of One Hundred and One Dalmatians, The Jungle Book, The Aristocats, The Absent Minded Professor and The Love Bug. In 1973, George was nominated for an Academy Award a fourth time for a song he wrote with lyricist Floyd Huddleston, Love from Robin Hood.


After scoring Herbie Rides Again, George retired from the Walt Disney Studio in 1976. He moved back to the Portland area, became a part-time music professor at Lewis and Clark College and continued to compose and play all of the instruments in his repertoire. He did record a new album of jazz music, but it never got much more than local play time. In May of 1983, George suffered a fatal heart attack at the age of 68. In 2001, for composing a large chunk of the soundtrack guests hear snippets of all around Disney theme parks in every corner of the world, he was posthumously declared an official Disney Legend.

April 26 - Eyvind Earle

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On this day, in 1916, Eyvind Earle was born in Manhattan, New York. When he was just two, his family moved to Hollywood, California. When he turned 10, his father, looking to stimulate his young son's mind, gave him an ultimatum: read 50 pages every day or paint a picture every day. Eyvind thought a moment before replying why not do both? His dedication paid off sooner rather than later. At 14, he had his first one man show at a gallery in Paris.

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When he was 21, Eyvind moved from Hollywood to New York City, traveling the entire way by bicycle. Naturally, he paid for the trip by painting and selling watercolors all along the journey. When he finally reached the East Coast, he had a showing at the Charles Morgan Gallery. Each of the next two years saw another showing at the same gallery, the 1939 one ending with the Metropolitan Museum of Art purchasing one of his works for their permanent collection. Throughout the Forties, Eyvind had a contract with the American Artist Group and produced over 800 different Christmas cards for them.

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In 1951, Eyvind signed on with the Walt Disney Studio as an assistant background painter on Peter Pan. By 1953, he was no longer an assistant and was earning credit for his work on films like For Whom the Bulls Toil, a Goofy short, and the Academy Award winning Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom. He kept busy for the next few years doing the backgrounds for more shorts like Paul Bunyon and Working for Peanuts and features like Lady and the Tramp.

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As work began on Sleeping Beauty, Eyvind was basically given free rein to develop the look and color scheme of the film. He took inspiration from medieval tapestries, adding his own flair to create the movie’s highly stylized look, purposeful in his intention to not adhere to any current beauty standards. As part of his work in the film, he also created the dioramas that can still be seen throughout Sleeping Beauty Castle in Disneyland. His artistic vision didn’t come without controversy, though. As Sleeping Beauty’s production schedule dragged on, changes kept being made in the leadership on the project. When Clyde Geronimi became supervising director rather late in the process, he was less enamored of Eyvind’s backgrounds than his predecessors. The two men had extreme creative differences over how much detail needed to be included, with Clyde’s specific complaint being that he needed backgrounds for the important stuff, the animation, not Christmas cards. As a result of the fighting, Eyvind would leave Disney in March 1958, before production was finished, and Clyde would have Sleeping Beauty’s background paintings softened up a bit before being filmed. The end results are still pretty stunning.

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Eyvind began working for John Sutherland Productions after his hasty departure from Disney (John was a fellow former employee of Walt and was probably quite sympathetic to Eyvind’s tales of woe). John Sutherland Productions produced mainly instructional cartoons for Harding College, but Eyvind also managed to do other types of work as well. One notable project from this period is a 1963 short he animated for a Tennessee Ernie Ford television special called The Story of Christmas. Contemporary reviews declared it beautiful and thought it should be aired every season for years to come. That hasn’t quite happened, but it was digitally remastered in the late Nineties

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In 1966, Eyvind retired from show business permanently to focus on painting. Over the next 34 years he created hundreds of paintings, sculptures and drawings, working steadily right up to his death. In the mid Seventies, he began releasing limited edition prints based on his work, but even with those series, and all the one man exhibitions he had over his lifetime, the majority of his work was never presented to the public. His estate continues to release prints of ‘new’ works to this day based on pieces held in private collections. In spite of walking away from the industry after only fifteen years of work, the Annie Awards presented Eyvind with the Windsor McCay Lifetime Achievement Award in 1998, his contributions over that short period of time were that significant. In 2015, he was declared an official Disney Legend for bringing his spectacular style to Sleeping Beauty and Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom. His Legendary status was bestowed posthumously, though. Eyvind had passed away from esophageal cancer at his home in Carmel-by-the-Sea on July 20, 2000. He was 84.

April 16 - Victor Haboush

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On this day, in 1924, Victor Haboush was born in Cleveland, Ohio. When Victor was just one, his family moved to Indianapolis, Indiana where his father, a Lebanese immigrant, opened a grocery store. Like most teens whose parents own a business, Victor and his brothers got to spend many an hour working (or as he put it, slaving) away with dad. Joining the Coast Guard part way into World War II didn’t mean less work, but it did mean a change of location. Victor ended up being part of the forces that stormed the beaches of Normandy and, once he’d survived that ordeal, switched theaters and spent the remainder of his tour in the Pacific. One of his brothers wasn’t so lucky; he suffered a mortal wound at Leyte. During the war, Victor’s parents moved to Los Angeles, so after he was discharged, he moved into their new home and began attending the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena on the G.I. Bill.

While toiling away at his classes, Victor’s teacher and mentor, Lorser Feitelsen, introduced him to Eyvind Earle, a former Art Center student and current background artist at the Walt Disney Studios. Eyvind was impressed with Victor’s talent and submitted his name to the powers that be at work. The studio was desperately looking for new blood and hired him as an inbetweener at $35 a week. One week into his new job, when it became apparent just how well he could draw, Victor was transferred to the Layout Department and his salary jumped to $160 a week (a mind boggling sum to his dad, especially when all they were asking him to do was draw). He started in his new position in March 1952 on the very tail end of production on Peter Pan.

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Victor’s first real project, and his first screen credit, came on the next animated feature, Lady and the Tramp. He then teamed up with Ward Kimball on two shorts from the Adventures in Music series (okay, it was supposed to be a series but only two were ever produced): Melody and Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom. The latter film won the 1954 Academy Award for Best Short Subject (Cartoon) and is still frequently shown in classrooms today to teach kids about the different kinds of instruments. Victor rounded out the Fifties working under Wilfred Jackson on Sleeping Beauty. He estimates he spent over six months just drawing the thorn forest (and another several weeks trying to teach others the proper way to depict thorns growing).

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Victor was also a part of Disney’s short lived Commercials Department in the mid Fifties. Working closely with Tom Oreb, he produced ads for Cheerios, Hudson cars and Peter Pan peanut butter, among other products. Walt never cared for the work the department did and shut the department down only months after starting it up (reportedly to give his niece something to do).

By the time he was neck deep in thorns, Victor had already begun doing some freelance work, mostly on television commercials. In 1960, after doing some very early concept drawings for 101 Dalmatians, he left Disney to join Hanna-Barbera as one of the first folks on team producing The Flintstones. Unfortunately, he didn’t get along with Bill Hanna and he took a lot longer to get things done than his new studio could afford (no spending six months on thorns here), so he got fired only a few weeks into the job. While he would occasionally return to do a bit of work on The Flintstones or The Jetsons, and was instrumental in developing the Mr. Magoo series for television over at United Productions of America, Victor mostly used his newfound unemployment as a catalyst to start his own company.

Image courtesy youtube.com

In the mid-Sixties, Victor Haboush and Associates burst onto the commercial scene. Over the next thirty years, Victor would create over 1,500 ads for a wide variety of clients, winning all kinds of Clios and Gold Lions at Cannes. Some of his more memorable campaigns include the "Crashing Bell" series for Taco Bell, "The Hook" series for Kibble N' Bits, the Jonathan Winters ads for Hefty Bag, a whole slew of McDonald's commercials (including "How the Hamburglar Got His Stripes" and "The Day Birdie the Early Bird Learned to Fly") and spots for Schlitz Malt Liquor featuring their Bull. Through it all, he credited his remaining brother as the foundation of the company as the COO with all the business sense.

After three decades of incredible work in advertising, Victor had had enough. He hung up his professional cap and retired to paint full time. He was coaxed back into the world of animation one more time. Brad Bird managed to convince him to do some concept art and character development for his 1999 film The Iron Giant. For the next decade, he quietly made his art, working and reworking each image until it met with his satisfaction. He passed away on May 24, 2009 at the age of 85.

January 8 - Iwao Takamoto

Image courtesy of illustrationhistory.org

On this day, in 2007, Iwao Takamoto passed away from a heart attack in Los Angeles, California. Born in the same city on April 29, 1925, Iwao graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School when he was just 15. Shortly thereafter, Pearl Harbor was bombed, World War II began and Iwao's family was imprisoned in the Manzanar internment camp with tens of thousands of other Japanese Americans. Luckily for him (and for us), he learned the basics of drawing, illustration and animation from two of his fellow prisoners.

When the war ended, Iwao decided to apply for work at the only animation studio he knew the name of, Disney. He was told to submit his portfolio. Having been imprisoned for the four years prior, he of course didn't have one. He bought two notebooks and spent a weekend filling them with sketches of literally everything he saw. Those sketches did the trick and he was hired as an assistant animator in 1945. Iwao contributed to several features during his sixteen years with the company, both as animator and as character designer. He would spend a good deal of his Disney career working directly under Milt Kahl, one of Walt's Nine Old Men, on projects like Cinderella, Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp, Sleeping Beauty and 101 Dalmatians.

Image copyright Disney

In 1961, Iwao left Disney to join Hanna-Barbera Productions. As cartoon television series seemed to bloom on every network throughout the rest of the decade, Iwao left his indelible mark on the genre. He would hold several positions at Hanna-Barbera but his work as a character designer remains the most visible and therefore most impressive. His highlights reel started with Astro, the Jetson's dog in 1962. A few years later, his next big hit was Penelope Pitstop, who starred in Wacky Races and its spinoff show, The Perils of Penelope. But his most enduring character by far is another canine, Scooby-Doo.

Image copyright Hanna-Barbera

When asked how he came up with Scooby's look, Iwao once said that a woman at the studio owned great danes and enthusiastically showed him pictures of them, pointing out all their features. He then drew every aspect of the dogs the opposite of what they were in reality. Instead of a straight back and legs and a small chin, Scooby got a hump back, bowed legs and a large mug. Iwao even purposely made him the wrong color. And yet it somehow all works. Michael Mallory, a Hanna-Barbera historian, makes the claim that if Scooby had looked any different, more like an actual Airedale say, the show probably wouldn't have lasted more than one season. Instead, because of Iwao's genius, Scooby had been on a screen, big or small, almost continuously since his creation.

Image copyright Hanna-Barbera

Iwao would eventually move into the director's chair. One of his biggest projects was the 1973 feature film, Charlotte's Web, which he co-directed with Charles Nichols. He once said one of the hardest things he ever did was creating a spider with a look that inspired people to care about it. The film, which featured songs by the Sherman Brothers, received mixed reviews, with most critics calling out the obviously quick television type animation. But, really, what else would you expect from Hanna-Barbera?

After producing series like The Smurfs, The Addams Family and Hong Kong Phooey, Iwao would settle into the role of Vice President of Creative Design. He was in charge of all of Hanna-Barbera's merchandise and oversaw all the design work going on in the Animation Art Department.  When Time-Warner merged with Hanna-Barbera's parent company, Turner Broadcasting in 1996, Iwao became Vice President of Special Projects for Warner Brothers Animation. He held this position for the remainder of his career.

Iwao received two major honors from his peers during the latter part of his life. The first came in 1996 when he was given the Windsor McCay Award, a lifetime achievement statue given out each year at the Annie Awards. The second came in 2005 when the Animation Guild bestowed upon him their Golden Award for his more than five decades in the field. The ultimate honor, though, may have happened when he passed away in 2007. For the next week, Adult Swim, on the Cartoon Network, displayed "Iwao Takamoto (1925-2007)" as one of their bumpers. I think Iwao would have approved.

December 25 - Candy Candido

Image courtesy of wikia.com

On this day, in 1913, Jonathan Joseph Candido was born in New Orleans, Louisiana.  Considering Candy (as he was known) did literally hundreds of voiceovers for pretty much every major studio in Hollywood and was partnered with several stars over the years, it’s surprisingly hard to find even a few nuggets of information about his life. Here’s what I could scrape together.

He was famous for his four octave speaking voice. Candy would frequently start talking in a normal, mid-range voice and then suddenly sound either like a mouse on helium or the lower notes of a tuba. It was this quality that made him perfect for voice work. He spent a few years on the radio program The Jimmy Durante Show. Every week he would utter the phrase “I’m feeling mighty low.” Those four words became so popular with audiences that Candy and Jimmy would record a song with that title and they appeared in a Bugs Bunny cartoon (a sure sign you'd made it, and we’re talking about the words here, not Candy and Jimmy).

Image copyright Decca Records

Before his radio career, Candy had played bass (not guitar, the actual big giant bass) and sung for Ted FioRito’s big band and even made an appearance with them in a 1933 Soundie (think of it like an early version of a music video) singing  Ma, He’s Making Eyes at Me. A couple of years after that, he sang a duet with Fred Rogers in the film Roberta. Following his radio career, we learn that Candy was funny as he started touring the country with the great straight man, Bud Abbott, after Bud’s first partner, Lou Costello, passed away.

Image copyright Disney

For Disney, Candy made a number of roles his own over the course of a few decades.  Several of them were, like many of his roles, uncredited. He began with the Indian Chief in Peter Pan in 1953. His last role would be Fidget the Bat in 1986’s The Great Mouse Detective. In between, Candy lent his voice to one of Maleficent’s goons in Sleeping Beauty, some trees in Babes in Toyland, the crocodile Captain of the Guard in Robin Hood, and Brutus and Nero, the crocodiles in The Rescuers. He can also be heard on a handful of Disney attractions. On Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, listen to the devils; pay attention to the goons throughout the Sleeping Beauty Castle walk-through; he’s the graveyard executioner and a low pitched prisoner in the Haunted Mansion; he reprises his role of Indian Chief for Peter Pan’s flight.

After a long career that covered performances in films as diverse as The Wizard of Oz and Heavy Traffic, Candy passed away quietly in his sleep at his home in Burbank, California on May 19, 1999. He was 85 years old.

November 19 - Eleanor Audley

Photo courtesy of Flickr.com

On this day, in 1905, Eleanor Zellman was born in New York City, New York. Not much is known about her birth or her early life. What we do know is that at the age of 20 she made her Broadway debut in 1926’s Howdy, King, changing her name to Eleanor Audley. For the remainder of the Twenties and all of the Thirties, Eleanor regularly appeared on stage in such shows as 1933’s Pigeons and People, 1934’s Ladies’ Money and 1937’s Susan and God. She made the transition to radio in the Forties, with recurring roles on My Favorite Husband, The Story of Dr. Kildare and Father Knows Best. She even played Cinderella’s stepmother for Hallmark Playhouse.

Photo copyright Disney 

Eleanor’s film career began in 1950 with Three Secrets and Gambling House as she continued her tradition of playing rather snobbish and overbearing characters. Just four years later she would roll onto the small screen, showing up on shows ranging from I Love Lucy to Perry Mason to Mister Ed. Her most famous television role was on Green Acres as Eddie Albert’s disapproving mother, a bit of a stretch since she was only five years older than Eddie.

Photo copyright Disney

Eleanor made three fabulous contributions to the Disney family. She first played Lady Tremaine in Cinderella. It wasn’t exactly a reprisal of her radio effort in the same role but the earlier production probably helped. She next turned up the villain dial as Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty. For both of the evil ladies, Eleanor was not only filmed as the live-action model for the characters but the animators designed their looks to closely resemble her. For her third Disney role, Eleanor went less overtly evil as the voice of Madame Leota in the Haunted Mansion.

Eleanor passed away on November 25, 1991 in North Hollywood, California from respiratory failure. She was 86.