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1-3 of 3
- Director
- Animation Department
- Producer
Hamilton Luske was an American animator and film director from Chicago, who spend most of his career at the Walt Disney Animation Studios. He served as the supervising director of several of Disney's films. He was also the supervising animator for the character of Snow White in the feature film "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" (1937), tasked with making the character more believably human and realistic than any previous Disney character.
Luske graduated from the University of California- Berkley, where he majored in business. He started his working life as a newspaper cartoonist in Oakland. Luske was hired by Walt Disney Animation in 1931, and received most of his training as an animator there. His early work included several of the studio's short films, both in the anthology series "Silly Symphonies" (1929-1939) and the long-running character-driven series "Mickey Mouse" (1929-1953). His first major assignment was serving as the supervising animator of Snow White in "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" (1937). He was rewarded for his success by becoming a supervising director in subsequent films.
Luske served as a supervising director in the feature film "Pinocchio" (1940), which he co-directed with Ben Sharpsteen. He co-directed "The Pastoral Symphony" segment of the anthology film "Fantasia" (1940), which focused on characters from Greco-Roman mythology. Luske served as the supervising director of the animated segments of the feature film "The Reluctant Dragon" (1941), while the live-action segments were directed by Alfred Werker.
Luske subsequently co-directed "Saludos Amigos" (1942), "Make Mine Music" (1946), "Fun and Fancy Free" (1947), "Melody Time" (1948), "So Dear to My Heart" (1948), "Cinderella" (1950), "Alice in Wonderland" (1951), "Peter Pan" (1953), "Lady and the Tramp" (1955), and "One Hundred and One Dalmatians" (1961). He directed an animated sequence in the live-action musical film "Mary Poppins" (1964), and won an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects for his efforts.
Luske's last significant assignment was directing the animated short film "Scrooge McDuck and Money" (1967), marking the first animated appearance of Scrooge. Scrooge McDuck had been a recurring character in Disney comics since 1947, but had received no adaptations in film until Luske's short film.
Luske died in 1968, in Bel Air, California, at the age of 64. At the time, Disney's other veteran animators had started leaving or retiring, marking an end of an era for the studio. Luske was posthumously named a Disney Legend in 1999. Luske's son Tommy Luske worked as a voice actor in the 1950s.- Actor
- Additional Crew
Prolific character actor Ralph Dunn was born in Titusville, PA, in 1902. He attended college for a while, but dropped out to join a traveling vaudeville troupe, and performed in minstrel shows and melodramas until 1935, when he headed to Hollywood, but not for the usual reasons vaudevillians made that trip--his parents lived there and his father was in poor health, so he went to help his mother take care of him. In order to make some money he signed up with Central Casting, where his stocky tough-guy look secured him a succession of jobs as cops, thugs, bouncers, bartenders, fight managers, and the like.
His Hollywood career lasted more than 30 years, during which time he kept his hand in stage work. He appeared in the 1951 Broadway production of "The Moon Is Blue" and played the pajama factory owner in the Broadway classic "The Pajama Game", a role he repeated when it was made into a film in 1957. He had more than 300 credits to his name, including television work. His last film role was as a priest in Black Like Me (1964), and his final appearance was in an episode of the series N.Y.P.D. (1967).
He died in Flushing, NY, in 1968.- Writer
- Additional Crew
- Director
Brock Williams was born in April 1895 in Truro, Cornwall, England, UK. He was a writer and director, known for I'm a Stranger (1952), The Root of All Evil (1947) and The New Adventures of Charlie Chan (1957). He died on 19 February 1968 in Richmond upon Thames, Surrey, England, UK.