Several years before Mickey Mouse, little Virginia Davis was the first star of the operation that would become the Walt Disney Studios. That’s not news, of course; before her passing in 2009 at the age of 90, Virginia, who played the live action lead in Disney’s Alice cartoons of the [...]

One can read any number of histories of the American animation industry and never come across the name Romer Grey. The son of Western writer Zane Grey, Romer whimsically decided to open an animation studio in 1930. Even though the studio never actually turned out a cartoon, it assembled a [...]

In any discussion of the legendary Leon Schlesinger/Warner Bros. cartoon studio, you often hear the words “friendly competition” used to describe the relationships between the various director-driven units. Once in a while you even hear stories about some not-so-friendly competition. But you would never hear things like that coming from [...]

The late Roy E. Disney ranks very high on the short-list of people who worked to make the animation industry what it is today. He was born into the business, of course: his father was Roy O. Disney, Walt’s older brother and business partner, the man who found the financing [...]

I can almost hear the voice of a reader somewhere out there saying, “Joe Barbera again?” Well, yes, actually. Out of the hundreds and hundreds of interviews in my files, I have more material from Joe than just about anyone. This is because we were ostensibly working on a book [...]