Chuck Menville
| Chuck Menville | |
|---|---|
| Born | Charles David Menville April 17, 1940 Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA |
| Died | June 15, 1992 (aged 52) Malibu, California, USA |
| Resting place | Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Hollywood Hills |
| Occupation | Television animator and writer |
| Nationality | American |
| Citizenship | American |
| Period | 1967 – 1992 |
| Children | Scott Menville, Chad Menville |
Charles David "Chuck" Menville (April 17, 1940 – June 15, 1992) was an American animator and writer for television. His credits included Batman: The Animated Series, Land of the Lost, The Real Ghostbusters, The Smurfs, Star Trek: The Animated Series, and Tiny Toon Adventures.
Menville was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, but moved to Los Angeles at the age of 19 with aspirations of becoming an animator. There, he got a job with Walt Disney Productions and served as an assistant on the 1967 film The Jungle Book. Unhappy with the climate at Disney, Menville soon branched out into writing, and began a long working partnership with his friend Len Janson.
During the mid 1960s, Menville and Janson co-produced a series of short live-action films, among them the Academy Award-nominated Stop Look and Listen, an innovative stop-motion pixilation experiment in which the main characters "drive" down city streets in invisible cars.
Disney and other Hollywood studios saw little use for the technique, and so the pixilation technique became largely forgotten after McLaren moved on to using other animation techniques for later films. But Menville and Janson revived the all-but-forgotten technique, introducing it to a new generation.
They followed Stop Look and Listen with their 1967 short film, Vicious Cycles a comedy shot in 16 mm, featuring a gang of hard-core bikers intimidating a motor scooter club. Menville played the head of the scooter club. Clips from the film were featured in a 1970 summer television series on the ABC network called The New Communicators and made Menville's pixilation technique famous in the USA.
...
Wikipedia