Just when you start to think the old rumors about hidden dirty jokes in Disney animated features have died down, they get passed on to a new generation. This was proven to me recently at an event I attended in which animation’s Renaissance man, Tom Sito, was speaking to a [...]

While the late Edward Bernds (1905-2000) was not a toiler in the toon trenches himself, he was on the periphery of the television cartoon industry in the 1960s. Chiefly known as a writer and director for the Three Stooges, Bernds guided the last incarnation of the trio—Larry Fine, Moe Howard [...]

Unlike many toonheads, I’ve long been fascinated with the cartoons of Robert McKimson. McKimson was part of the Warner Bros. animation troika in the post-war years, along with Friz Freleng and Chuck Jones, and the director behind the classic characters Foghorn Leghorn and the Tasmanian Devil. Yet even today, though [...]

Anybody working in any kind of creative pursuit knows that being in the right place at the right time, and making the right decision, is often crucial to furthering a career. In the case of voice actress, casting director, and dialogue director Susan Blu, that right decision came at the [...]

There are very few tragedies in the toon trade (not counting the release of Eight Crazy Nights), but the case of Leroy Poots certainly counts as one of them. Poots (1910-1982) was an animator and story man at the Disney Brothers studio in its earliest days, when it was still [...]