Linus The Lionhearted: The Flyin' Lion

In case you missed the comment a few posts back, Brubaker has mentioned and provided a link for "The Flyin' Lion", which was the pilot that sold the Ed Graham Prods series of Linus The Lionhearted. If you need more background on the show, just punch Linus into the searcher at the top of the page. Here's the comment:

http://www.hitopstv.com/tv.cfm

select "Linus the Lionhearted" and click episode 4.

I'll just mention that although the soundtrack cover above has Graham's New York office stamped on it, all of the writing, animation, etc., was totally produced in Los Angeles (although not necessarilly the soundtrack itself.)

Thanks Bru!

Irv Spector At Ed Graham Prods: Esoterica

Odd and ends from The Linus The Lionhearted Show:

Old School: Vinyl tracks for the pilot "The Flyin' Lion". These were given to the animators to work from.

Below: Story outline and all final decisions surrounding story had to be approved by the advertising agency Benton & Bowles, whom I imagine ran it first by General Foods. Here, you can see that somewhere along the line the agency or sponsor did not want a reference to the Berlin Wall. Too bad, looks like it had the potential to be the best gag in the cartoon. I guess it was okay to push a sugar saturated product down kid's throats, but not to *write your own here*.

The second season was the last that my father was involved with The Linus the Lionhearted Show. Most readers here probably know that the show saw it's eventual demise several years later when the FCC decided that the line was blurred -- to put it mildly -- between the show and the sponsor's product.

Ironically, this was not the only time my dad was connected with the negative scenario of a children's show being to closely tied to a sponsor. Not long after Linus went off the airwaves, my dad was working for Pantomime Pictures as supervising director for their Saturday morning cartoon show Hot Wheels. Not only did the show's characters drive around in boss-looking fast cars, but the main sponsor, Mattel, had their Hot Wheels toy cars newly on the market. Apparently now, 40 years later, Hot Wheels, the toy, is hot again.

A little anecdote about Hot Wheels, as it was told to me at the time by my father: Hot Wheels was one of the first, if not the first, commercial cartoon show to have some of it's action animated by computer -- the fast driving sequences, I believe. Anyway, my dad senses that something is off with the animation and checks that the computer's timing is accurate to what he himself believes to be true. The two aren't matching up. Several times he comes up with a different number than the computer spits out, and each time he goes to others in the studio and mentions what's happening, always getting a reply something to the effect of, "C'mon Spec, it's a computer. They're not wrong." ...uh, do I really need to finish this story for you?

Irv Spector at Ed Graham Prods: Enter The Albino Gorilla

The first season of The Linus The Lionhearted Show debuted at the end of September 1964. My previous post noted how the whole staff was laid off during the off season and my dad took to work for Chuck Jones. Many of the staff came back on board for season two but things were not to be quite the same. Ed Graham Prods also changed office locations. No longer within the general vicinity of most other animation studios, they moved to a location on Woodley Ave., by the Van Nuys Airport and "...near Ed's planes.", as someone hand-wrote on the notice. I think it was around this point that Graham had closed his east coast office and moved to L.A.

I don't have the original albino gorilla for "Winner and Still King".

This one is from a different story titled "Hand Car". However, you

are getting an authentic Irv Spector coffee cup stain in the deal.


In a letter from May 1965, from Ed Graham to Benton & Bowles and cc-ed to my father, Graham writes, "Irv Spector told me today that he is considering quitting Warner Brothers and coming back to work here..." Graham wants to, "...grab him while the grabbing's good", and relates a story outline my dad has come up with for the second season. This is why my father's end-credit slips from Supervising Director in the first season to among those credited as Story in the second. The end of the second season's credits now say, Produced and Directed by Ed Graham. All stories, as per the first season, have to go through the ad agency, who then pass it on to General Foods for final approval.

Most likely because of the studio switch, I don't possess much in the way of his first season's work. However, here is most of his storyboard for the second season's Winner and Still King. Because certain parts are missing I'm including his original story outline (so you won't lay awake at nights wondering how it all ends!) Much of the studio's output was drawn on a sort of carbon replication paper -- to save money I guess. Hence, what you are seeing in many of the model sheets and boards I'm posting are just that.

The Linus the Lionhearted Show: Roll Call

There was no physical office for Ed Graham Prods during the making of the INA commercials, however once Linus was greenlighted, Graham west opened up in 1963 at 4741 Laurel Canyon Blvd., N. Hollywood, CA. At that point my father began to grab staff from all over. From the production assignments below, rendered in my dad's own handwriting, you can no doubt toss darts and come up with any combination to assemble a dynamite All-Star team of that era's animation industry talent -- several eras, really. Even a casual observer of animation credits will recognize these names, and if not then you've admired their work somewhere along the line and not known it. (Feel free to ask for clarification in the comments section, as some can be confusing. For example, Singer would be George, except near the end where B. Singer is Bob. ) The line-up ranges from pre-WWII buddies to those newer on the scene. All sure-winners. A Rosetta Stone of sorts for exactly who did what in the first season of the Linus the Lionhearted Show.

Layoffs came at the end of the first season's production schedule and everyone got their asses canned. My dad went off to work with Chuck Jones for a bit.

Irv Spector at Ed Graham Productions: Introduction

I intended to post this series in a fine and thorough chronologiocal order, and thought I would have already been into my second post. So much for that idea, there is just too much to scan and organize -- we'd all be waiting awhile. The new plan is this: I will scan often and get it online. All you have to keep in mind is that there are two main parts to my father's involvement with Graham: 1) a series of 5 one-minute commerical spots for INA (Insurance Company of North America) which led to, 2) The Linus the Lionhearted Show. In any given post we will be dealing with one, the other, or both. Simple, right?

The Setup
In the beginning of the 1960s my family was living in NY, when much of the animation business began to migrate from east coast to west. My father made several round trips to Los Angeles to looking for work. Eventually we all moved west. Incredibly, at some point thereafter he actually went back to NY. Somewhere in all of this he meet with Ed Graham Jr., (who I believe was an ex-ad exec) who began his own company for the purpose of producing animated TV commercials (and so was Linus, for that matter!) Graham Prods was working with (not for) the Benton and Bowles Agency. My father already had a sizable number of commericals under his belt in the 1950s, including the first fully-animated 60-second commercial and an award from the NY Art Directors Guild (or something like that.) Graham stayed in his NY office and my dad came back to LA.


INA
For those too ethical to read other people's mail, I've done the dirty work for you. The 3/22/63 letter below lists the five 1-minute spots for INA. Mentioned in a different letter is that my father was to do the animation layouts, animation direction, and background layouts, and assign one different animator for each of the five spots. So far, I have been able to determine the animators for three of them: Rapunzel - Irv Spence; Jack and the Beanstalk -- Herman Cohen; Cinderella -- Dick Thompson (who took over for an ill Tom Ray.) Hopefully the other two will come to light as I dig deeper.

These spots, conceived and scripted by the admen, are billed as "A Very Adult Fable". Below is what I believe to be their shooting script, for Jack and the Beanstalk, as the date on it seems too early in the process to have been done in LA -- although it is possible it had been previously drawn in LA from a written script. Once you view it you will have the concept for the other four. If it reminds you of Jay Ward's Fractured Fairy Tales, you'd be thinking what I'm thinking, ...right down to the Edward Everet Horton narration. I suppose if you're going to rip-off something, rip something excellent! (You know those creatives at agencies.) The cursive handwriting within them is not my father's -- probably Graham or a B&B person.

The following character designs came from an envelope with Tom Ray's name on it:

Linus the Lionhearted Show
From a 6/6/63 letter from Graham to Spector, Graham writes: “...reaching a point where we ought to begin setting up a schedule on this pilot, with particular regard to final delivery date. That show, of course, was Linus the Lionhearted. Obviously, they had discussed it previously. At this point I'll leave you with a few items I already have scanned. Next post will have a lot less text and a lot more eye candy. In the meantime, probably the best general information site I know of for Linus is Ron Kurer’s Toontracker Linus the Lionhearted page. That’s where I go for some of the cold hard facts. I am mainly posting about Irv Spector’s involvement with Ed Graham Prod. Toontracker’s info on the voice talent alone is worth the trip.