BILL Melendez was an Emmy-winning animator who brought Charlie Brown and the Peanuts gang to blithe, blockheaded life on television and in films – and helped keep them alive after the death of their creator, Charles Schulz.
One of the few Hispanic
s in the business when he began his career in the 1930s, Melendez was the only animator Schulz allowed to shepherd his characters on to the screen. He did so in more than four dozen TV specials, four feature films, a slew of Saturday-morning cartoons and scores of commercials.
Melendez won six Emmy awards, starting with A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965), the first Peanuts television special and still a holiday staple. From that programme onwards, Melendez also supplied the "voice", such as it was, of Snoopy.
His other Peanuts work, produced with his long-time collaborator Lee Mendelson, includes the specials You're a Good Sport, Charlie Brown (1975) and Life Is a Circus, Charlie Brown (1980), both of which received Emmys, and the feature films A Boy Named Charlie Brown (1969) and Snoopy, Come Home (1972).
After Schulz's death, in 2000, Melendez animated several more Peanuts specials, among them Lucy Must Be Traded, Charlie Brown, first broadcast in 2003.
José Cuauhtémoc Melendez was born in 1916, in Hermosillo, in the Mexican state of Sonora. His father, a Mexican army cavalry officer who later became a general, was a romantic who gave his children Aztec names (Cuauhtémoc was a 16th-century Aztec ruler).
Growing up, José drew everything in sight: horses, cattle, cowboys. In 1928, his mother moved with him and his siblings to Arizona in the United States so they could learn English. José, then about 12, was placed in a nursery class, a humiliation that forced him to learn his new language in a hurry. The family later moved to Los Angeles.
As a young man, Melendez planned to be an engineer, but the Depression intervened. He held a series of odd jobs, including working in a wood yard, before a friend persuaded him to show his drawings to the Walt Disney company.
Disney suggested formal training; after Melendez studied briefly at the Chouinard Art Institute, Disney hired him in 1938. There he helped animate Fantasia (1940), Pinocchio (1940) and myriad Mickey Mouse cartoons. He also acquired a new name. After asking Disney to bill him as Cuauhtémoc Melendez, he was informed that his name was too wide for the credits and that he would hereafter be known as Bill.
In 1941, Melendez left Disney after an animators' strike he helped organise. He joined Leon Schlesinger Productions (later acquired by Warner Brothers), where he worked on Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Porky Pig. He formed his own studio, Bill Melendez Productions, in 1964.
Melendez and Schulz met in the late 1950s over a Ford Falcon. Melendez had been engaged by the J Walter Thompson advertising agency to produce an animated commercial for the car. The Ford Motor Company wanted to use Peanuts characters in the spot.
Schulz demurred until he saw Melendez's drawings. They were noteworthy for their adherence to Schulz's style; instead of embellishing the comic strip's flat figures and clean, simple lines, Melendez kept them much as they were.
Melendez's other work included the TV special The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1979); he also animated the specials Garfield on the Town (1983) and Cathy (1987), both of which won Emmys.
Melendez's second career as the voice of Snoopy happened entirely by accident. Because Schulz would not countenance the idea of a beagle uttering English dialogue, Melendez recited gibberish into a tape recorder, speeded it up and put the result on the soundtrack.
For his decades of squeaks, squawks and grunts, Melendez received royalties to the end of his life.
Bill Melendez is survived by his wife, the former Helen Huhn, whom he married in 1940, their two sons, six grandchildren and ten great-grandchildren.
The full article contains 677 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
