You may or may not know the name Hoyt Curtin, but there’s no question you’ve heard his work. So has anyone who has owned a television since 1960. Hoyt was the musical director for Hanna-Barbera during their television heyday, and the composer of such classic theme songs those that opened [...]

The passing this week of songwriter Robert B. Sherman at age 86 brings an end to one of the great creative teams of the twentieth century. Bob and his brother Richard were known as “Walt’s songwriters,” having composed not only the Oscar-winning song score for Mary Poppins, but songs for [...]

When early press started coming out about Brave, Disney/Pixar’s summer 2012 release, a lot of it centered on the fact that it was the studio’s first feature film to be directed by a woman. A few short months later that publicity angle flew away like an arrow, when Brenda Chapman [...]

Every aspect of creating an animated feature takes time, except, arguably, for one: the greenlighting of an idea. Back in the days when the Walt Disney Studio was just about the only game in town for animated features, it promoted an idea-pitching process known as “The Gong Show,” in which [...]

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 [...]