One of the first monsters of the movies was in animated form, and since then, there have been thousands of other reletlves ot Klng Kong, Frankenstein, Godzllla, and the Wolf Man in cartoons, both comic and creepy.
You’ll learn about them here – and Don Glut wlll especially hlghllght the genlus of one great anlmator – Bob Clampett.
Count Dracula visited the Walt Disney studios in 1940 to contribute to the production of that masterpiece of cartoon animation, the feature-length film FANTASlA. This was the Count’s second stint as a Disney employee, the first being as an animated cartoon character along with Frankenstein’s Monster and Quasimodo in MICKEY’S GALA PREMIERE (1933), which starred the studio’s favorite Mouse. But in FANTASlA, Dracula was not to appear as animated character. He had been hired to act before the live action cameras to provide the inevitable movements of yet another cartoon figure.
Perhaps I‘ve been a bit misleading. It wasn’t really Count Dracula who worked on Fantasia, but rather the actor whose name is virtually synonymous with that of the Vampire King – Bela Lugosi. The Hungarian actor was chosen by Disney to emote with broad gestures and expressions (as he had in the role of Dracula) as a model for the fabulous demon of Bald Mountain in one of the segments of FANTASlA. The film presented visual interpretations of great and familiar pieces of classical music, a perfect harmony of sight and sound; one of the most memorable segments of the film was the one for which Lugosi performed, Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain.”
[…]
