Walter Lantz ran a cartoon studio that made films from roughly 1928 until 1972, most notably of his character Woody Woodpecker but also of Andy Panda, Chilly Willy, The Beary Family and others. Like just about everyone else who made cartoons during his heyday, he began putting them on television in the fifties. The Woody Woodpecker Show debuted on ABC in 1957 then went into the syndication market a year later. I became a regular follower of it around 1958 when I was six and it wasn't the cartoons that delighted me. It was a short live-action segment most weeks when Mr. Lantz himself would teach us how cartoons were made.
I learned a lot of my cartooning skills from that program and also from a book called Easy Way to Draw which was published woth Lantz's signature. I never got deep enough into cartooning to do much of it as a profession…which was fine because writing came to interest me a lot more than drawing. But up until about the time I entered high school, I could draw cartoon characters, Lantz's included, better than most kids my age…and I can still draw Woody about as well as I could when I was eleven.
Woody Woodpecker cartoons never meant as much to me as the output of studios like Warner Brothers or Jay Ward or Hanna-Barbera but I still felt a connection to Walter Lantz, in large part because of those drawing lessons and insights into how cartoons were made. After my mother passed away, I found in a closet in her house, a Woody Woodpecker comic book story that I wrote and drew when I was about eight, give or take a year. Twelve years after I was eight, I was actually writing the real Woody Woodpecker comic book.
Some years after that, I was at the Grand Opening ceremony for an art gallery specializing in animation art and June Foray introduced me to Walter Lantz who, in turn, introduced me to his wife, Grace. Grace was the voice of Woody Woodpecker for a few decades and it's said — I don't know if I believe this — that she got the job by submitting an audition tape without her name on it. In other words, Walter hired the new voice of Woody without knowing it was his wife he was hiring. Do you buy that?
Anyway, I was very glad to spend some time with them and of course I told him how much his work had meant to me and how I'd worked on the comic books and that like it or not, he had a lot to do with the direction in which my life wandered. He was utterly charming and exactly like the guy in those little live-action segments on The Woody Woodpecker Show. Here's a collection of some of them…