Sixty-four Years Ago ...

Prez Emeritus Tom Sito tells us:

March 27, 1952 - U.P.A.’s John Hubley cartoon “Rooty-Toot-Toot” premiered. It’s music score was by jazzman Phil Monroe, the first African American to receive a screen credit for scoring a movie.

Because most of the lead artists were ex-Disney animators, many feel the character of Johnny is a caricature of Walt. ...

Regarding Mr. Hubley, Nick Rossi writes:

... One can make a rather strong argument that the heart and soul of early UPA was John Hubley. Having paid his dues over at Disney over the course of 10 years, Hubley left after the labor disputes of 1941. While at Disney he worked mainly on backgrounds, perhaps most notably (for the purposes of this particular weblog) on the animation of Igor Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" (1913) for Fantasia ...

[UPA's] success was not only critical, but popular as well, receiving academy awards for both 1949's "The Ragtime Bear" (featuring Hubley's most well-known creation, a caricature of a McCarthy-ite named Mr. Magoo) as well as 1950's "Gerald McBoing-Boing" (based on a story by Dr. Seuss). ...

"Rooty Toot Toot" was a visual reflection of much of what UPA was about at the time. Alvin Lustig had designed UPA's initial 1940s logo as well as their 1950 re-branding which is now instantly recognizable and somewhat iconic. Both designs represent the modernist aesthetic at its finest. John Lautner, the father of Googie Architecture and a student of Frank Lloyd Wright, designed the UPA Burbank studio in 1949 around the same time he designed West Hollywood's landmark Googie's coffee shop. And there was a strong contingent of modern jazz fans among the UPA ranks, Hubley in particular. ...

As Mr. Rossi notes, UPA's Burbank studio sat on the banks of the L.A. River, a stone's throw from the Smokehouse Restaurant. Decades after its construction, Roy Disney purchased the building and lot, tearing the old studio down and erecting a multi-story building to house Roy's company Shamrock Holdings.

Interesting how Walt and his extended family continue to intersect with so many far-flung corners of animation.