The Walt Disney Family Album - Frank Thomas (1985)

The Walt Disney Family Album was a monthly series on the recently launched Disney Channel that showcased the people Walt Disney collaborated with on many of his creations. The development of this series was a perfect storm. The brand new Disney Channel needed new content, there were a bunch of young people recently starting out at the studio learning from these masters, and many of these people were working on the lot or retiring and wanted to share their stories with the world. At the time people had their entire careers at Walt Disney Productions. Not so today.

The series was produced on a shoestring budget. Pretty much the crew was sent out with cameras to interview various people and put these shows together. It was a pet project of former Disney CEO Card Walker who'd been at the studio since the 1938 when he started as a mail clerk and personally knew all of these people and their important contributions to the studio. Walker cared very much about history and understood the importance of the Walt Disney legacy being preserved.

Walt's friend and Disney Legend Buddy Ebsen narrates the series. He starred in several Walt Disney films including Davy Crockett and The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band. He was also the first live action reference model for what became audioanimatronics. The theme song was written by future film score composer John Debney. His father had been a producer on the lot for decades and John started out his music career with Disney. The opening title was put together by John Lasseter in one of his final projects for Walt Disney Feature Animation. He was trying to get computer animation in at Walt Disney Productions and was eventually fired for he. He would eventually become one of the driving forces behind Pixar and would return to head Walt Disney Feature Animation in 2006.

In the long run, the Walt Disney Family Album proved to be a tremendous historical record as many of these people passed away shortly after being interviewed. There were plans to continue this series but when the Eisner regime took over, they shut it down because it was a Card Walker project. It's a great tragedy because who's stories never got to be told because they were robbed of this opportunity...There needs to be a revival of this series to chronicle the careers of the people at Disney in the 80's and 90's as they're retiring and could be gone in the coming decades.

The Walt Disney Family Album aired on the Disney Channel in reruns off and on up through the early 2000's when it aired on Vault Disney. It hasn't been seen since but sometimes interviews have been excerpted in other documentaries.

This eleventh episode focuses on Disney animator Frank Thomas. He was one of Walt's legendary Nine Old Men. Most of the Nine started with the studio in 1934/35 at the height of the Great Depression. These became the core group of animators Walt would rely on from the 1940's on. Each one specialized in a different type of animation performance. Thomas was known for the personality relationships of the characters in his animation. He often collaborated with his best friend Ollie Johnston.

Frank started out on the animated shorts but quickly moved into the animated features. He animated the dwarfs crying over Snow White in the funeral scene, a breakthrough for animation. No one had ever cared for a cartoon character anymore. He also did some some other scenes with the Dwarfs adding the hitch-step to Dopey. Other notable moments in Walt Disney animation animated by Thomas include the ice skating sequence in Bambi, the spaghetti dinner sequence in Lady & the Tramp, the Wizards Duel in The Sword in the Stone, the Penguins dancing with Dick van Dyke, and others. Characters animated by Thomas include Pinocchio, Ichabod Crane, Captain Hook, Merlin, Lady Tremain, the Queen of Hearts, the three fairies in Sleeping Beauty, and others. With his best friend, Ollie Johnston, it's estimated that they animated more than half of The Jungle Book between them.

Thomas was also the piano player for the Dixieland jazz band made up of Disney artists called The Firehouse Five plus Two. The band was active for over two decades.

In the 1970's, Frank began mentoring the next generation of animation artists. After retiring, he co-wrote the definitive textbook on hand drawn animation with Ollie, The Illusion of Life. The two friends wrote a series of animation books together. In 1995 he was the subject of a documentary film, Frank & Ollie, created by his son Theodore. Frank and Ollie also had cameos in the Brad Bird films The Iron Giant and The Incredibles.

In 1989 Frank Thomas was named a Disney Legend along with the other Nine Old Men and Ub Iweks. They were the bedrock of the animation studio. Thomas passed away in 2004.

Original air date April 3, 1985

Posted for historical purposes. This channel is not affiliated with the Walt Disney Company.