{"id":66624,"date":"2021-08-06T00:01:48","date_gmt":"2021-08-06T07:01:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/?p=66624"},"modified":"2021-08-05T13:27:10","modified_gmt":"2021-08-05T20:27:10","slug":"in-his-own-words-jack-hannah-on-walter-lantz-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/index.php\/in-his-own-words-jack-hannah-on-walter-lantz-2\/","title":{"rendered":"In His Own Words:  Jack Hannah on Walter Lantz"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><div id=\"attachment_9089\" style=\"width: 260px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-9089\" src=\"https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/jack-hannah-250.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"250\" height=\"229\" class=\"size-full wp-image-9089\" srcset=\"https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/jack-hannah-250.jpg 250w, https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/jack-hannah-250-150x137.jpg 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 250px) 100vw, 250px\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-9089\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Jack Hannah<\/p><\/div><u><strong><\/p>\n<p>\n<p>Suspended Animation #331<\/strong><\/u><\/p>\n<p>Jack Hannah was the first Disney animator I ever met and the first animator I ever interviewed.   I interviewed him several times over the years starting in 1977.  While he is best known for his work at Disney, he worked for two years at Walter Lantz from the end of 1959 to the end of 1962. <\/p>\n<p>For Lantz, Hannah created several new characters including Gabby Gator, Fatso the Bear, Willoughby, the Beary Family, Sam and Simian as well as directing many of the Lantz superstars like Woody Woodpecker and Chilly Willy. <\/p>\n<hr style=\"color: #000000; background-color: #000000; height: 2px; border: none;\" \/>\n<p>Here are some excerpts from one of my interviews with Jack:<\/p>\n<p><strong>Jack Hannah<\/strong>:  Gerry Geronimi, who was a longtime friend of Walter Lantz\u2019s and who I had worked with at Disney, talked to me when Disney let me go.  He had gotten wind of my predicament and told Walter.  One of their top directors, Alex Lovy, was leaving to work at Hanna-Barbera and they needed someone to fill in the slot.<\/p>\n<p>I had never met Lantz before 1959, but he gave me a call and he and Bill Garity, who was Walter\u2019s right-hand man at the time took me to lunch at the Lakeside Country Club and invited me to join them.   <\/p>\n<p>Lantz made me an offer that I would be his supervising director.  Walter wanted to do more traveling, so I would help run the production end of the studio from the creative side, and Garity would be running the business end, when Walter was on his vacation trips.<\/p>\n<p>Walter told me that he was very short on stories and wanted me to bring my first story with me when I came over to start work.  I got Milt Banta to work with me on the story.   Walter paid his writing fee.  I brought Walter the story and he accepted it right away. I always thought that that was very clever that from the moment I walked in as a director I had my first story all ready to go.  It was called <em>Freeloading Feline<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p><center><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/mU_HheJqhp0\" title=\"YouTube video player\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/center><\/p>\n<p>\n<p>When I left Disney, they were breaking up my whole unit.  I took Riley Thompson with me as my layout man when I went to Lantz\u2019s.  I also took Ray Huffine and Al Coe.  Even after I left Lantz later, the people I brought over with me stayed on.<\/p>\n<p>At the Disney Studio you had storymen, a layout man, a background man, and you had all these different departments.  But at Lantz, the director practically did everything himself in the laying out of the picture for animation.  You did a rough layout, anyway.  Paul Smith worked that way.  I changed that somewhat when I brought over Ray Huffine.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/Walter-Lantz-Color-World-600.jpg\" rel=\"prettyphoto[66624]\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/Walter-Lantz-Color-World-600-228x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"228\" height=\"300\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-66632\" srcset=\"https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/Walter-Lantz-Color-World-600-228x300.jpg 228w, https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/Walter-Lantz-Color-World-600-114x150.jpg 114w, https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/Walter-Lantz-Color-World-600.jpg 600w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 228px) 100vw, 228px\" \/><\/a>Lantz didn\u2019t have hired storymen on staff.  The directors usually had some background in story and had a lot of input into each cartoon.  Walter would contract men from outside the studio to come in and do the stories.  Then we\u2019d have a meeting with these storymen telling the story and the director and Walter would sit in on these meetings.  Naturally Walter would add little gags here and there.  He was a pretty good gag man.<\/p>\n<p>He was a gag man back in the old days when the philosophy of animation was \u201cgag for gag\u2019s sake\u201d more than personality type gags, which Disney was more interested in doing.  As long as your animation was entertaining, Walter would overlook minor flaws in the story because of budget.<\/p>\n<p>Walter was very supportive, especially when I was directing him in the live-action segments for his television show.   I had done several shorts for Walter and he wanted to do a television series with him introducing the cartoons like Disney did on his show.  <\/p>\n<p>Walt Disney had had me join the Director\u2019s Guild so that I could direct the live-action segments on his weekly Disneyland television show on ABC.  Lantz knew that I belonged to the Director\u2019s Guild and that I had experience directing so I was the natural choice.<\/p>\n<p>Unlike Disney, Walter took direction almost too well.  He was pleased with any new ideas I suggested, and wasn\u2019t afraid to try them.  As a result, I think he came off looking really good in these introductions.  He had a free and easy attitude.  He wasn\u2019t self-conscious.  <\/p>\n<p>Woody Woodpecker was well-designed and simple, so there was no problem in working with him.  Gracie, who was Walter\u2019s wife and at that time was doing the voice of Woody, knew the character inside and out, backwards and forwards and she was very easy to direct doing the vocals.<\/p>\n<p>I did a cartoon with a couple of chimpanzees named Sam and Simian, a take-off on the name of the famous San Simeon castle where Hearst lived.  We made one short with them, <em>Jungle Medics<\/em> (1961) where they were inept doctors trying to help a lion with his sore tooth.  <\/p>\n<p>The idea was to have them similar to Chip\u2019n\u2019Dale in that one was a smart guy who was always getting upset over the dumb guy\u2019s antics.   Walter was looking to sell another TV series and this was one of the things we did.  He later ran it as a theatrical short and then put it into the television syndication package.<\/p>\n<p><center><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/MZSItfIyBGw\" title=\"YouTube video player\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/center><\/p>\n<p>\n<p>Another series I developed for Walter to try to sell as a TV series was <em>The Beary Family<\/em>.  The name was a take-off on actor Wallace Beery, who was very popular and seems to have inspired a lot of cartoon bears over the years.  We had a father, mother, and a stupid son and cute little daughter with a ponytail.  It was like a typical TV sitcom but with bears.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/Beary-Family-color-book.jpg\" rel=\"prettyphoto[66624]\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/Beary-Family-color-book-266x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"266\" height=\"300\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-66633\" srcset=\"https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/Beary-Family-color-book-266x300.jpg 266w, https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/Beary-Family-color-book-133x150.jpg 133w, https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/Beary-Family-color-book.jpg 570w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 266px) 100vw, 266px\" \/><\/a>I think Walter was looking at the success that Hanna-Barbera was having at the time and wanted to see if his studio could do something similar.<\/p>\n<p>Walter gave me a lot of freedom as long as I stayed within budget.  That is how his cartoon studio lasted so long when all the other studios had to close.  Disney had stopped making theatrical shorts because they were getting much too expensive.  <\/p>\n<p>Unless he was on a trip, he was around quite a bit.  He was the boss, so sometimes he\u2019d come in an hour later than the rest of us.  I think Walter knew he didn\u2019t have the time nor material to get into a full-length animated feature.  That would have been quite a risk financially.  I don\u2019t even recall him mentioning he was even interested in doing a feature, at least while I was there.<\/p>\n<p>I left Lantz on good terms.  I felt I just needed to move on.  The only trouble is, once you&#8217;ve been at Disney&#8217;s, everything else at another animation studio was just a job. No extra effort was needed and the people you were working with were just not at that level that was at Disney\u2019s.  And as a result, I just got bored there.   I always gave Walter my best and he was terrific to me but I wasn\u2019t feeling challenged and I wasn\u2019t having any fun.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Here are some excerpts about the Lantz studio from one of my interviews with Jack Hannah.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":66634,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[114,2282],"tags":[477,103],"class_list":["post-66624","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-animation-anecdotes","category-suspended-animation","tag-jack-hannah","tag-walter-lantz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66624","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/45"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66624"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66624\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":66637,"href":"https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66624\/revisions\/66637"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66634"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}