Here’s a fun fact! A few days ago, Scott Menville responded to a fan on Twitter that his dad, Chuck, did indeed wrote for Tiny Toon Adventures, The Smurfs, Fat Albert and other animated series from the 1970s-1990s! Chuck Menville was also an animator, writer and story editor, and filmmaker. He even also worked at Disney as a character animator (uncredited) for the 1967 film The Jungle Book, but his tenure there was short lived because, according to Wikipedia, he was unhappy with the corporate climate there.
As filmmaker, he along with his friend Len Janson created a series of short subjects using an animation technique called pixilation, a form of stop-motion which involves live action actors posing while at least one frame is taken and do another pose while at least another frame is taken. For example:
Their first film for MGM, 1967′s Stop Look and Listen, was successful enough to be nominated for an Academy Awards nominated for Best Short Subject, Live Action; they went on to produce two more films with pixilation. (They wrote, produced and starred in all films!)
Menville and Janson went on to write for animated TV series. At Filmation during the seventies, they wrote for Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, Star Trek: The Animated Series and others. Later, they moved on to Hanna-Barbera. Among their most notable credits there are writing episodes and served as story editors for the first two seasons of The Smurfs (one of my favorite shows to watch during my childhood)! (Another fun fact: The 7D timing director Joanna Romersa was an animator for the series! By the late 80s, however, Hanna-Barbera winded down its in-house animation production to utilize overseas animation studios in order to save costs.) By this time, Tom Ruegger had started out at H-B and later invited Chuck to write for Tiny Toons when he and other H-B employees moved on to Warner Bros. Animation. Menville and Janson at H-B also wrote for The Biskitts and Kissyfur; and later The Real Ghostbusters. Chuck later returned to Disney to write two episodes of The Little Mermaid TV series in 1992; soon after he passed away. Janson continued his writing career, including working on the original Sonic the Hedgehog series and a staff writer for the 1990s adaptation of Land of the Lost.
On a very heartwarming note, Scott ended his tweet saying that he enjoyed hanging out at the animation studios where his dad worked! He had a very cool and talented father! I actually owned Season 1 of the The Smurfs on DVD and a few collections containing second season episodes, so even though I have had heard of Chuck Menville a long time ago Scott’s tweet made me re-watching it for the first time in a while!
