Interviews

James Bodrero was an important member of Joe Grant's model department at the Disney studio in the late 1930s and early '40s. Milton Gray interviewed him, as part of the research for Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age, in January 1977.

Hugh Harman was, with Rudy Ising, the man who brought Warner Bros. and then MGM into the cartoon business. When I interviewed him in 1973, we talked about his early association with Walt and Harman's ambitions for the animation medium.

Joe Grant was a leading light at the Disney studio in its glory years. I interviewed him in 1988, when we talked about his crucial role in the production of such films as Fantasia, Dumbo, and Make Mine Music. An audio clip accompanies the interview.

Brad Bird wrote and directed The Incredibles, the most exciting animated feature of recent years. I interviewed him on February 16, 2005, a few days before the Academy Awards ceremony at which The Incredibles was a candidate for four Oscars.

Fess Parker burst into stardom fifty years ago, playing Davy Crockett during the first season of Walt Disney's Disneyland TV show. In this interview—a composite of three interviews I recorded in 2003 and 2004—I spoke with him about Walt and about the twists and turns his film career took at the Disney studio and afterwards.

Frank Tashlin was one of the great Warner Bros. cartoon directors, serving two stints under Leon Schlesinger in the late thirties and early forties. In between, he worked on Disney stories during that studio's glory days and headed the Screen Gems studio when it enjoyed its one creative surge. I conducted the interview with him here—one of the few he ever gave, and the only one to discuss his cartoon work in detail—in 1971, a year before his death. An audio clip of roughly a minute accompanies the interview.

Lloyd Turner was a comedy writer for decades, generating laughs with Bob Clampett, Jay Ward, and Norman Lear. He got his start writing cartoon stories for Art Davis at Warner Bros. in the forties, teamed up with Bill Scott, and those years are the subject of the interview excerpts on the site.

John McGrew, another Warner Bros. alumnus, designed the groundbreaking Chuck Jones cartoons of the early forties.I interviewed McGrew in 1995, at his home in France. Accompanying this interview is an audio clip of just under a minute, as well as five examples of McGrew's color layouts for such Warner Bros. cartoons as My Favorite Duck and Flop Goes the Weasel.

Also still available are excerpts from my third interview, in 1986, with Art Babbitt, one of Walt Disney's leading animators in the thirties and later one of his most implacable foes. Both sides of his Disney experience are reflected in this interview, in which Babbitt talks about working on The Country Cousin, one of the most charming of the Silly Symphonies, as well as about his collisions with the studio in court in the early forties.

Still available as well are excerpts from my third interview, also in 1986, with Ward Kimball, another of Walt Disney's great animators. Kimball was always frank and opinionated in our interviews, qualities evident in this transcript, especially in his account of how he fell under the shadow of Walt Disney's disapproval in the early sixties, thanks to a run-in over Kimball's role in the live-action musical comedy Babes in Toyland.

Also still available is my 1988 interview with Charles M. Schulz, creator of "Peanuts," by all reckonings one of the last century's handful of truly great comic strips. I interviewed Schulz not for Funnyworld or as part of the research for my book Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age, but for an article in the business magazine that employed me at the time. The interview is, accordingly, business-focused, and licensing-focused in particular, but I think its relevance to broader discussions of Schulz's life and career is self-evident.

Like the Kimball and McGrew audio clips, the Schulz audio clip runs about a minute, and it will take a correspondingly long time to download on a dial-up connection. The John Kricfalusi excerpt in the Commentary section is about as long, and the Babbitt clip is even longer. If the waiting time seems not to be worth it, please let me know, and I'll try to offer shorter excerpts in the future, as with the audio excerpt that was the first I made available, in connection with my interview with David Hand, Walt Disney's second in command during the production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Bambi.

I recorded my first interviews with people in animation and the comics in 1969, on my first visit to Los Angeles. Mel Blanc was the first person I interviewed, and in the days that followed I hauled a tape recorder (the reel-to-reel kind—cassette recorders were still very new) to interviews with Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett, Billy Bletcher, Roger Armstrong, Carl Stalling, and Ward Kimball. Future visits to California, and then to New York and other places, yielded hundreds more interviews. Milt Gray was along for many of my interviews, and he recorded many interviews without me in between my visits to L.A.

The idea was to publish the interviews in Funnyworld, at first—the Clampett, Jones, Stalling, and Blanc interviews from my first trip all wound up appearing there—but then Milt and I began recording interviews on a much larger scale as research for Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age.

Hollywood Cartoons quotes extensively from thousands of pages of transcripts, but there was no way I could use even a small fraction of the most valuable material. I'll be sharing in this section excerpts from some of the most interesting of the interviews.