Magenta Panther
Well-Known Member
Yeah, that doc is crud. At the very least, Walt could draw. He wasn't the draftsman Ub Iwerks was (few people were), but he certainly had talent. But as his studio grew he opted to run it and oversee production instead of doing the animation himself, and thank goodness he did. I don't think I have to itemize the reasons why this was a good thing.
As for the other junk...it's been debunked by people with better street cred than Melendez, (who helped organize the animator's strike and so def had an axe to grind with Walt) so rest easy. (And speaking of Melendez, he's credited for bringing Peanuts to television, but most of the specials he helmed were pretty awful, so he doesn't have much cred as an animation producer either. Production-wise, his cartoons were crap, frankly. As proof as to what could have been done with the Peanuts strip by a GOOD animator, I urge you to check out "Happiness is a Warm Blanket, Charlie Brown", the new direct-to-DVD Peanuts special that came out a few months back. Its animation is superb, and the character designs adhere very closely to the way the Peanuts characters looked in the 1960's, when Peanuts was at its peak. It's written by Stephan Pastis, the creator of the "Pearls Before Swine" strip, and he did a good job of choosing which strips to condense into a solid story. Sorry for the digression, but really, the DVD is awesome. It made me fall in love with the Peanuts strips all over again, and proved what a hack Bill Melendez actually was, for all his awards and such).