January 8th, 2013, just a little over one week away from my setting down these words, will mark the fifth anniversary of the sudden and tragic death of one of the industry’s most unique talents, Iwao Takamoto. It hardly seems like five years have passed, since I rarely go a [...]

What would the holidays be without A Charlie Brown Christmas, which, believe it or not, premiered 47 years ago? And what would any Charlie Brown special be without the late, great Bill Melendez, who produced and directed countless Peanuts-related television specials? Bill enjoyed one of the longest continuous careers in [...]

Some eighty years ago, after it was decided that cartoons should be heard as well as seen, the song scores in many cases became the driving forces for the shorts. An entire crop of now-heralded composers–Oliver Wallace, Scott Bradley, Carl Stalling, and by proxy, Raymond Scott, among them–contributed greatly to [...]

Over the weekend I had the opportunity to come face to face one of the many, many people I knew only over the telephone, having conducted interviews with them from afar. In this case it was animation director Yvette Kaplan. I introduced myself by saying, “If I’m not mistaken, you [...]

Some things stay with you for a lifetime. When I was a kid I read a Yogi Bear comic strip in the newspaper in which Ranger Smith punks Yogi by filling his enormous Christmas stocking with an enormous artificial foot. It sounds like a simple, obvious gag, but the memory [...]