Gordon had some experience with cartoon cavemen, having worked on the “Stone Age” series of animated shorts for the Fleischer Brothers Studio back in 1940. Although many talented people had a part in creating what would become The Flintstones, Bill Hanna generously points to Gordon. “Now you may not get the same response from anybody else, Bill Hanna recalls, ”but to me, Dan Gordon is responsible for The Flintstones. He came up with the basic concept of doing it with cavemen in skins.”[11] And Joe Barbera recounts in his autobiography that, ”the first two Flintstones were the work of Dan Gordon and myself; I controlled the content, and Dan did the storyboards.” ...
"He was one of the artists who helped build the early framework of animation. He was a wise and witty man, a droll man who, in a quiet way, pulled rugs from under pompous and false heroes, transformed giants into pygmies and inauspiciously extracted the teeth from snarling paper lions. He was with animation through all its growing pains. Whatever animation became, he helped to shape it, drawing by drawing, idea by idea."
The climax to 1955's Lady and the Tramp, rendered in pencil by Disney veteran Ed Aardal, brought to us by Mega Collector ...
Ed had a long career at Walt Disney Productions, and a long career after WDP. He was laid off after Lady and the Tramp, and he told Mr. Mega an amusing story about the layoff when Ed and Mega worked together in the mid '70s. In Mega's words:
Ed was the sweetest, gentlest, most kind-hearted guy. And very generous with his knowledge. He took me under his win when I was lucky enough to work with him in 1976 ...
This was when Ed Told Mega the story up above. (If it's not there yet, it will arrive shortly.)
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Mega Collector comes up with something different: Droopy in three dimensions.
This was a Droopy string dispenser, designed to hang on a wall. And dole out string through the Droopster's mouth.
The contraption came out in 1945. I have no idea ... and neither does Mr. Mega ... how many of these things were sold. But MC has one.
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The Mega Collector gives us still more of his Bill Tytla collection, all of it undated, but coming (most likely) from the 1920s and 1930s ...
Here's a pair of Tytla's figure studies.
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The legendary Disney animator created some artwork in the 1920s and 1930s that MegaCollector bought seventy-plus years later ...
Below, some rough sketches that Tytla did in the late 1920s, when he was studying art in Paris.
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When in doubt ...
When out of things to write about ...
Turn to the Mega Collector ...
(Mega wondered why we never put up this Fred Moore drawing, circa 1942. We're rectifying that oversight now.)
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Belated, but still worth posting ...
The above is the 1957 holiday card from UPA, then a thriving animation studio picking up awards left and right, now (sadly) a memory.
If you can't tell, this is a BIG art piece that unfolded to large proportions. In real life, it's a couple of feet wide, and maybe four feet long.
The Christmas greeting is brought to us by our esteemed friend, Mega Collector. (Like you wondered?)
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In the early sixties there was a new (but not overly loved) Disney character by the name of Ludwig Von Drake ...
Drake showed up in the Fall of 1961 to introduce color to Walt's revamped anthology show, then moving from ABC to NBC.
Drake continued showing up for some years thereafter, and I, a kid at the time, always found him irritating. (Maybe it was Paul Frees' fake German accent, maybe it was Von Drake's frenetic personality. But whatever the underlying issue, I found the fowl forced and unfunny.)
L.V.D. had a short-lived comic book (four issues), and he's appeared sporadically in various animated products throughout the years. Mega Collector -- who own the drawing up top -- doesn't know who did the thumbnail board, but speculates it was done early in Von Drake's professional life, probably '61 or '62. (By Ward Kimball? Ward once told me he animated Von Drake at a breakneck pace, drawing him small on the hole-punched paper so he wouldn't waste a lot of pecnil mileage on him.)
But I can understand why Mr. Kimball would work on L.V.D. has quickly as possible. The bird is something of a pain in the backside.
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Magilla Gorilla was a Hanna-Barbera staple in the go-go sixties. Here we have animation poses of the twinkle-toed ape from the talented pencil of Irv Spence. ...
Add On:
Irv Spence was a veteran MGM animator who jumped to Hanna-Barbera when Joe and Bill got the operation running. (Other drawing of Mr. Spence can be viewed here and here and here.)
These drawings come, naturally enough, from the extensive animation library of the Mega Collector.
(Kindly note: As I post this, I realize there is a middle drawing missing from the series ... that I will put up tomorrow. Drawing 41. So why do I put this up NOW? Because I'm impatient.)
Add On: And the missing post is now UP.
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One more art piece from Mega Collector. ...
Interesting story about this one: Mega saw the Mickeys advertised on an art sales website, and recognized it as being done in the middle thirties by Fred Moore.
"I know Fred's drawing style, and knew right away it couldn't have been done by anyone other than Fred ..."
Happily, the seller had no idea who drew the Mickey studies, and so Mega got the drawing for a good price.
Moral: When you've got more knowledge in a negotiation than the other guy, you usually come out okay.
Click here to read entire postBelow the fold, a newly acquired original from the MegaCollection ... a further sample of Fred Moore's work that would never have appeared in a Disney movie.
UPDATE: We've updated the above graphic to a less blurry version.
Our first Megacollector post for 2011 starts off with a Fantasia model sheet by Fred Moore. The other images below the fold are by Ken Muse (1910-1987).
Muse started his professional career as an assistant on Fantasia, then graduated to animator on several Mickey and Donald shorts. He left Disney after the 1941 strike and signed on at MGM, where he spent seventeen years in the Hanna-Barbera unit, working on over one hundred and twenty shorts.
After MGM closed he followed his mentors to the new Hanna-Barbera studio, where he animated the pilot episode of a new show called "The Flagstones," and eventually worked on pretty much every show at the studio until he retired. (Little known fact: late in his life he did some uncredited assisting on The Fox and the Hound.)
And here is Ken Muse's best-known animation: the Gene Kelly meets Jerry Mouse sequence from Anchors Aweigh (1945):
Click here to read entire post... For the holidays!
Two more from the Megacollection ... A production animation drawing of Mickey from The Brave Little Tailor, as animated by Riley Thompson ...
... and the Giant, as animated by Bill Tytla.
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Herewith a couple of animation drawings by animator Ray Patterson, for the short Flirty Birdy (circa 1945).
Ray Patterson began his career at Charles Mintz in the late 1920s. (You can view some of Ray's Mintz-era artwork here, courtesy of ASIFA.) In 1940, he went to work at Disney, where he animated on Fantasia, Dumbo and a clutch of shorts.
In 1941, Ray departed Disney after a job action that unionized the studio. He spent the next twenty years working at M-G-M, then another thirty animating and directing television cartoons. He retired as a Hanna-Barbera Vice-President in 1993.
(Ordinarily we would crop and tweak the images above, but ordinarily our Photoshop software works. Apologies for the raw pictures, but the hungry blog must be servied.)
Click here to read entire postToday's treasure from the Megacollector's vaults is from the pen of an artist who only spent three years in animation.
Walt Scott (1894-1970) spent three years as a layout artist for Disney on "Bambi," "Pinocchio," "Fantasia" and "Dumbo". For most of his career he was a comic book artist for NEA and Dell, best known for his series "The Little People", which he drew and wrote from 1950 until his death.
Above is the cover art for the 1958 Dell comic "The Little People and the Giant". However, the cover is not by Walt Scott -- it's the work of another ex-Disney artist, Mel Crawford.
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Courtesy of the Megacollector, from Terrytoons artist Jim Tyer.
From Ralph Bakshi's website, a podcast of his reminiscences of working with Connie Rasinski and Jim Tyer.
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