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    The Voice of Milhouse on Saying Goodbye to ‘The Simpsons’

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    After 35 years of voicing Bart’s unlucky but indefatigable best friend, Pamela Hayden is retiring. She still has high hopes for his future.When you answer your phone to hear a grown woman shouting “Wazzzuuuuup?” in the voice of a 10-year-old boy, you can be pretty sure that you’re talking with Pamela Hayden. For some 35 years, Hayden has played many distinctive characters on “The Simpsons,” the long-running animated Fox sitcom, but none with more nerdy exuberance than Milhouse Van Houten, the hapless but good-hearted best friend of Bart Simpson.On Wednesday, however, Hayden announced that after having played Milhouse since before “The Simpsons” was even its own series (and having amassed a roster of other roles including the bully Jimbo Jones and Bart’s sweetly pious neighbor Rod Flanders), she has retired from voice acting. Her final “Simpsons” performances as Milhouse and Jimbo will be shown on Sunday night.Hayden, 70, whose voices have been heard on numerous animated shows since the 1980s, said in a phone interview on Thursday that voice acting is not vastly different from on-camera acting. When you’re putting yourself in the mind-set of a voice character, she said: “You’re thinking to yourself, what do I want? How bad do I want it? What happens if I don’t get it? And Milhouse has to think a lot about what happens if he doesn’t get it, because he hardly ever does.”Dave gets a surprise greetingOur reporter was expecting a call from Pamela Hayden, just not her opening line.And with the same soft-spoken compassion she has brought to her performances, Hayden said she understood why Milhouse became the most enduring and best-known of all the characters she played.“Milhouse is somebody who’s having a rough time a lot of times, but he doesn’t take it personally,” she said. “It doesn’t ruin his life. He wakes up the next day and he still feels like things are going to be better, even if they’re not.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Saudi Arabia Sentences Producer to 13 Years in Prison Over Netflix Show

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      In a video plea for help, Abdulaziz Almuzaini — a dual Saudi-American citizen — described how the authorities had accused him of promoting extremism through a cartoon franchise.From the outside, the past few years looked like the peak of Abdulaziz Almuzaini’s career.As the head of an animation studio in Saudi Arabia, he signed a five-year deal with Netflix in 2020. A sardonic cartoon franchise that he helped create, “Masameer,” likened to a Saudi version of “South Park,” was soon streaming to audiences around the world. And as the conservative Islamic kingdom loosened up, Mr. Almuzaini was being publicly celebrated — as recently as a few months ago — as one of the homegrown talents shaping its nascent entertainment industry.Behind the scenes, though, he was on trial in an opaque national security court, as Saudi prosecutors — who accused him of promoting extremism through the cartoon series and social media posts — sought to ensure that he would spend the rest of his life in prison or under a travel ban.Mr. Almuzaini, a dual U.S.-Saudi citizen and father of three, recently described his plight in a video pleading for the Saudi leadership to intervene, saying that he was awaiting a final ruling from the kingdom’s Supreme Court.“I might bear the consequences of what happens after this, and I’m ready,” he said in the 18-minute video, which he said he was filming at his home in the Saudi capital.The video was published on his social media accounts late last month and deleted the same day. In it, Mr. Almuzaini, sporting a black beard graying around the edges, spoke in front of a wall covered with colorful sticky notes.A screen shot from a video posted on Mr. Almuzaini’s social media accounts late last month that was later deleted.via XWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Is Homer Simpson a Good Dad Now?

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      In a recent episode of “The Simpsons,” Homer suggested he would abandon one of his best-known bits: throttling his son. It is the latest example of the show tailoring itself to evolving tastes.Homer Simpson may be maturing, or so he says.The character, voiced by Dan Castellaneta, hinted that he would no longer choke his son, Bart, appearing to acknowledge that one of the oldest recurring bits on “The Simpsons” was a clear form of animated child abuse that was played for laughs.In the third episode of the current season, the show’s 35th, titled “McMansion & Wife,” Homer meets a neighbor who compliments the grip on his handshake.“See Marge? Strangling the boy has paid off,” Homer says to his wife in the episode, which aired on Oct. 22. “Just kidding. I don’t do that anymore. Times have changed.”It was not clear whether this signaled a lasting shift in the show, which was renewed for a 36th season this year. A spokesman for Fox, the network that has long aired “The Simpsons,” declined to comment.“The Simpsons,” created by Matt Groening, has made moves in recent years to update its humor to fit with evolving standards. In 2020, Hank Azaria said he would no longer voice the character of Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, an Indian convenience store owner who became known for his catchphrase, “Thank you! Come again.”Apu had long been a sore point among viewers of Indian descent, many of whom viewed the character, which Azaria had voiced since 1990, as nothing more than a racist caricature. Azaria has said the voice was inspired by South Asian clerks he heard growing up in New York, as well as Peter Sellers in the 1968 film “The Party.”The discussion took off in the public sphere after the release of the 2017 documentary “The Problem With Apu,” in which the comedian Hari Kondabolu spoke to other Indian American actors and performers who said the character had become emblematic of the marginalization they faced in the entertainment industry.But there isn’t a consensus among people of South Asian descent, as evidenced by the Indian American comedian Akaash Singh, who argued in a 2022 YouTube special titled “Bring Back Apu” that the character was a positive portrayal of an immigrant story. Apu has not been seen since Season 33.The “Simpsons” creative team responded to Kondabolu’s documentary through the show, then in its 29th season, in a 2018 episode titled “No Good Read Goes Unpunished.” In the episode, Lisa Simpson breaks the fourth wall and says: “Something that started decades ago and was applauded and inoffensive is now politically incorrect. What can you do?”The shot immediately pans to a framed picture of Apu. Marge chimes in and says, “Some things will be dealt with at a later date,” to which Lisa replies, “If at all.”The show has long been self-referential, and has been so with the choking bit on several occasions. One episode — “Love Is a Many Strangled Thing,” from Season 22 — examines the roots of Homer’s choking impulses, with the help of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (as himself) and Paul Rudd (as a therapist). A newly empathetic Homer swears to never choke Bart again, which then sends Bart on a spree of bad behavior, as he is no longer afraid of his father’s rage.The Season 11 finale, titled “Behind the Laughter,” was a parody of the VH1 documentary series “Behind the Music.” After Homer is shown choking Bart, he says, “And that horrible act of child abuse became one of our beloved running gags!” More

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      How It Takes an Old ‘Beast Wars’ to Make a New ‘Transformers’

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      The Canadian-made computer animated series “Beast Wars: Transformers” serves as the unlikely basis for the latest film in the popular franchise.This summer’s “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts” is the latest of seven films in the long-running series of live-action films based on Hasbro’s hugely popular toy franchise; the first since the critically acclaimed 2018 spinoff, “Bumblebee”; and the first mainline installment since the Michael Bay-directed “Transformers: The Last Knight” (2017). Like all of the films in the series to date, “Rise of the Beasts” is based on characters first designed in 1984 as a line of children’s action figures, much like Mattel’s Masters of the Universe or Hasbro’s own G.I. Joe. But this new chapter also pulls from an unusual source: “Beast Wars: Transformers,” a somewhat obscure Canadian television show that ran from 1996 to 1999.A scene from “Beast Wars: Transformers.”Alliance Atlantis Communications“Rise of the Beasts” takes place largely in New York in the 1990s, and follows the action-packed exploits of a race of powerful robots who live in disguise as cars and trucks, including the series hero Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen, reprising his role as voice actor from all of the previous films). This time around, Prime and his allies are joined by the Maximals, time-traveling Transformers from the distant future who turn into animals rather than vehicles: They include the rhinoceros Rhinox (David Sobolov), the falcon Airazor (Michelle Yeoh), the cheetah Cheetor (Tongayi Chirisa) and the gorilla Optimus Primal (Ron Perlman), a descendant of Prime. All of the new animal Transformers have been faithfully lifted from “Beast Wars,” which featured these characters living on a barren alien planet and doing battle with the nefarious Blackarachnia (a spider) and Scorponok (a scorpion), among other foes with similarly literal names.“Beast Wars” was produced in Vancouver, British Columbia, by the animation company Mainframe Studios, which had previously developed “ReBoot,” a pioneering computer-animated series from the ’90s, for the popular Canadian children’s entertainment network YTV. Also fully computer-animated — at a time when that technology was still in its infancy — “Beast Wars” looked a little like a starker, more rudimentary version of “Toy Story,” with colorful, bulbous character models moving simply around sparse environments. The series ran for three seasons on YTV (under the more kid-friendly title “Beasties”) and in syndication across the United States, winning a Daytime Emmy for outstanding achievement in animation in 1998 and inspiring a TV sequel, several comic books and two video games — and now, almost three decades after its debut, a feature film (sort of).Were it not for some of its characters and designs resurfacing this month in “Rise of the Beasts,” it seems likely that “Beast Wars” would have continued to recede into a lasting obsolescence, forgotten to all but the most nostalgic ’90s kids and most dedicated “Transformers” fans. And while the somewhat tangential connection to the source material may prevent the movie from kicking off a sudden torrent of interest in the Canadian series — “Rise of the Beasts” has not been especially billed as a “Beast Wars” movie, and the show has scarcely come up during press for the film — it’s still a good occasion to give the series its long-awaited due. Happily, the entire original run of “Beast Wars” was released on home video by Shout Factory in 2011 and is now available for purchase on Amazon Prime Video. More

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      Reclaiming Place in Animation History for Bessie Mae Kelley

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      The pioneers of hand-drawn animation were all men — or at least that is what historians (men, almost exclusively) have long told us.Winsor McCay made the influential short “Gertie the Dinosaur” in 1914. Paul Terry (Farmer Al Falfa), Max and Dave Fleischer (Koko the Clown, Betty Boop) and Walter Lantz (Woody Woodpecker) each made well-documented early contributions. Walt Disney hired a team that became mythologized as the Nine Old Men.Earlier this year, however, the animation scholar Mindy Johnson came across an illustration — an old class photo, of a sort, depicting the usual male animators from the early 1920s. In a corner was an unidentified woman with dark hair. Who was she? The owner of the image, another animation historian, “presumed she was a cleaning lady or possibly a secretary,” Johnson said.“I said to him, ‘Did it ever cross your mind that she might also be an animator?’” Johnson recalled. “And he said, ‘No. Not at all.’”But Johnson wondered if it could be Bessie Mae Kelley, whose name she had discovered years earlier in an obscure article about vaudevillians who became animators.The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Golden Globe Nominations: Here are some of the most eyebrow-raising snubs and surprises from this year’s list of nominees.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.Rian Johnson:  The “Glass Onion” director explains the streaming plan for his “Knives Out” franchise.As part of an investigation that found Johnson cold-calling people in Minnesota, digging through archives at the University of Iowa and salvaging corroded cans of nitrate film from a San Diego garage, Johnson confirmed her hunch. The woman was Kelley, and she animated and directed alongside many of the men who would later become titans of the art form. According to Johnson’s research, Kelley started her career in 1917 and began to direct and animate shorts that now rank as the earliest-known hand-drawn animated films by a woman.So much for that cleaning lady theory.“History is recorded, preserved, written about and archived from a male perspective, and so nobody had really examined the level of what women did — their contribution was often just passed off as a single sentence, if at all,” Johnson said. “Finally, we have proof that women have been helming animation from the very beginning.”Bessie Mae Kelley directed an animated short with characters from the comic strip “Gasoline Alley.”Manitou ProductionsPreviously, historians had considered Tissa David to be the earliest example of a woman who directed her own hand-drawn work. She was credited on Jean Image’s “Bonjour Paris” in 1953. (The earliest surviving animated film directed and animated by a woman would be Lotte Reiniger’s “The Ornament of the Lovestruck Heart” from 1919. But Reiniger worked in silhouette stop-motion animation, which is very different from the hand-drawn variety.)Johnson will present her findings on Monday at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles. The evening event will include the first public screening of two restored, previously unknown short films by Kelley. One is called “Flower Fairies” and was completed in 1921, Johnson said. It involves composite animation (live footage with hand-drawn animation on top). Sweet-natured, human-looking creatures with wings awaken flowers and dance among them. Kelley completed “Flower Fairies” through the Brinner Film Company, a small Chicago studio that became known for newsreels.Mindy Johnson spent five years searching for evidence that a woman animated and directed alongside many of the men who became titans of the art form.via Mindy Johnson“Her forms are glorious, especially when you compare it to something like Walt Disney’s ‘Goddess of Spring,’ which was about 15 years later,” Johnson said. She was referring to a Silly Symphonies short that Disney based on the Greek myth of Persephone. “Goddess of Spring” is viewed as a critical steppingstone for Disney because it was used to develop techniques for the rendering of human forms, with the groundbreaking “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (1937) as a result.Kelley’s second film had a Christmas theme and was made in 1922. It includes stop-motion animation and finds a girl reading a book beside a crackling fire, a stocking dangling from the mantel. Santa climbs out of the book and sets about his duties.“Mindy has made a significant breakthrough, filling in an important gap in our understanding about the beginnings of this industry and art form,” said Bernardo Rondeau, the Academy Museum’s senior director of film programs. Johnson’s presentation at the museum is part of a series of screenings and talks dedicated to newly preserved and restored films from the Academy Film Archive.The stash of materials that Johnson located in San Diego — in the possession of Kelley’s great-nephew — also included original rice paper drawings used in the creation of the short films; copper prints; a journal and scrapbooks; and photos with notations by Kelley. One of the cans of film included a badly damaged animated short that Kelley directed with characters from “Gasoline Alley,” the comic strip that debuted in 1918.A drawing from “Colonel Heeza Liar,” an early syndicated animation cartoon series that Kelley worked on.Bray Studios, via Manitou ProductionsJohnson also discovered that Kelley helped design and animate a mouse couple from Paul Terry’s influential “Aesop’s Fables” series (1921 to 1933). Johnson noted that Walt Disney spoke about being inspired by the series. (“My ambition was to make cartoons as good as ‘Aesop’s Fables.’”)Johnson, who teaches animation history at California Institute of the Arts and Drexel University, is known for her 2017 book “Ink & Paint: The Women of Walt Disney’s Animation,” a 384-page examination of unsung female artists and writers in the early days of Walt Disney Studios. She is now working on a book and documentary about Kelley — animation’s version, perhaps, of the 2013 film “Finding Vivian Maier,” about a nanny whose previously unknown cache of photographs earned her posthumous recognition as an accomplished street photographer.“I want to help Bess reclaim her legacy,” Johnson said.“It matters, in part because the animation field is still so dominated by men,” she added. “I’ve seen the posture of my female students change when I have told them about Bess. They’re like, yes, I have a place at this table. I have a place at the head of this table.” More

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      George Newall, a Creator of ‘Schoolhouse Rock,’ Dies at 88

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      He was the last surviving member of the team that produced the educational cartoon for ABC-TV that informed Generation X.George R. Newall, an advertising executive who was the last surviving creator of “Schoolhouse Rock,” the animated musical snippets that taught young Generation X television viewers grammar, math, civics and science for a few moments during otherwise vacuous Saturday-morning commercial programming, died on Nov. 30 at a hospital near his home in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y. He was 88.The cause was cardiopulmonary arrest, his wife, Lisa Maxwell, said.“Schoolhouse Rock,” series, which ran from 1973 to 1984 and was revived in the 1990s, used quirky cartoons and upbeat music to furtively transform rote learning into euphonious fun during regular programming and before the government, in the 1990s, mandated that stations broadcast a modicum of educational and informative fare.The show won four Emmy Awards.The series spawned books, recordings, live singalong shows and a nostalgia cult that will mark the show’s 50th anniversary next year when the Walt Disney Company presents a prime-time television special; rereleases “The Official Schoolhouse Rock Guide,” written by Mr. Newall and Tom Yohe; and publishes an adult coloring book featuring all of the program’s characters.Among the show’s perennial favorite songs were “Three Is a Magic Number,” celebrating tripods, triangles and even a couple producing a baby; “Interjection!” which depicts a cartoon character getting stuck in the posterior with a big needle; and Mr. Newall’s “Unpack Your Adjectives.”“Schoolhouse Rock” originated in the early 1970s when David McCall, president of the McCaffrey & McCall advertising agency, complained to Mr. Newall, a creative director there, that his young sons couldn’t multiply, “but they can sing along with Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones.”Could Mr. Newall put the multiplication tables to music? he asked. Mr. Newall’s search for a quirky musician who might help led him to Ben Tucker, who played bass at the Hickory House in New York, which Mr. Newall frequented regularly.“I asked Ben, and he said, ‘Oh yeah, my partner, Bob Dorough — he can put anything to music!’” Mr. Newall told The New York Times Magazine in 2018.‘He told me Bob had written a song based on the words on the mattress tag that say, ‘Do not remove under penalty of law,’” Mr. Newall recalled. “So I brought Bob in, and David gave him the assignment. He came back about two weeks later with ‘Three Is a Magic Number,’ and we were all knocked out by it.”The song inspired Mr. Yohe, the agency’s art director and a cartoonist, to start doodling. What was originally conceived as an educational phonograph record morphed into a series of three-minute films that the creative team presented to Michael Eisner, then the director of children’s programming at ABC, a client of the agency.Mr. Eisner happened to be meeting with Chuck Jones, the immortal Warner Bros. animator.“After we played the song and Tom showed them the storyboards, Eisner looked at Jones and said, ‘What do you think?’” Mr. Newall told The Times in 1994. “And Jones said, ‘I think you should buy it right away.’ It was probably the quickest deal in television history.”The first season was followed with themed series on grammar, government (to coincide with the American Bicentennial celebration), science and computer technology.In 1976, Carol Rinzler wrote in The Times, “The ‘ABC Schoolhouse Rock’ animated bits, which teach math and reading concepts and, this year, American history, are a joy. It’s worth sitting in front of your TV all morning to catch the one in which the Constitution is set to music.”Three-minute “Schoolhouse Rock” cartoons like “Conjunction Junction” tried to teach children grammar, math, civics and science.ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content, via Getty ImagesMr. Eisner later became chairman and chief executive of the Walt Disney Company, which acquired “Schoolhouse Rock” in 1996 (including new segments produced in the 1990s with J.J. Sedelmaier Productions) when it bought Capital Cities/ABC.Mr. Newall and Mr. Yohe were the executive producers and creative directors of the original episodes and worked with other collaborators. Mr. Newall composed 10 of the songs.In 1996, Atlantic Records released an album featuring alternative musicians like Moby (who croons a brassy version of “Verb: That’s What’s Happening”), and in 2002 the Disney Company issued a DVD of all the “Schoolhouse Rock” episodes and a timely lyrical explication by Mr. Newall of why some states in a presidential election are more equal than others.In 2013, Mr. Newall spoke about the show and Mr. Dorough performed “Schoolhouse Rock” songs at a free concert at the Kennedy Center in Washington.Mr. Yohe died in 2000, Mr. Dorough in 2018.George Robert Newall Jr. was born on June 17, 1934, in Lakewood, N.J. His father was a builder. His mother, Louise (DeNyse) Newall, worked for the school board in Brick Township.After attending Point Pleasant Beach High School and serving in the Army’s 11th Airborne Division Band at Fort Campbell, Ky., Mr. Newall graduated from Florida State University with a bachelor’s degree in music composition in 1960. He moved to New York City, where, starting in a mailroom at $50 a week, he worked for a number of ad agencies, including Ogilvy & Mather and Grey.At McCaffrey & McCall, he conjured up the Hai Karate brand of men’s toiletries for Pfizer with an advertising campaign that parodied the industry’s customary romanticized appeal to raw sexual passion by including self-defense instructions to fend off libidinous women.In 1978, he and Mr. Yohe started a company to produce animated educational programming. They won another Emmy for “Drawing Power,” an animated series for NBC, and awards for cartoons that promoted nutrition, cartoons that urged young viewers to read (“When You Turn Off Your Set, Turn On a Book”) and cartoons that were praised for being neither sexist nor racist.In the 1980s, Mr. Newall joined Wells Rich Greene, where he produced TV commercials in which Alan Alda pitched Atari computers.Mr. Newall is survived by his wife, the artist and singer Lisa (Chapman) Maxwell; a stepson, Lake Wolosker; and his sisters, Jessie Newall Bissey, Kathy Newall Hogan and Anne Newall Kimmel. More

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      Jules Bass, Co-Producer of TV Holiday Staples, Is Dead at 87

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      The animation company he ran with Arthur Rankin Jr. gave the world “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “Frosty the Snowman” and much more.Jules Bass, who created an animation empire with his business partner, Arthur Rankin Jr., that produced perennial Christmastime television favorites like “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and “Frosty the Snowman,” died on Tuesday in Rye, N.Y. He was 87.His death, at an assisted living facility, was confirmed by Jennifer Ruff, whose mother was Mr. Bass’s first wife.The Rankin/Bass studio was a major force in animated programming, mostly on television, from the early 1960s to the late ’80s. Some of its TV shows and movies used traditional hand-drawn cel animation, but it carved out a separate specialty in the stop-motion puppet animation familiar to viewers since “Gumby” in the 1950s.Rankin/Bass’s stop-motion specials included “Rudolph” (1964), featuring the voice of the folk singer Burl Ives as Sam the Snowman;“Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town” (1970), with Fred Astaire as the narrator and Mickey Rooney as the voice of Kris Kringle; and “Jack Frost” (1979), with Robert Morse voicing the title role.“Frosty” (1969), narrated by Jimmy Durante, used traditional animation.To create the stop-motion effect, animators in Japan painstakingly shot thousands of pictures of the tiniest movements and gestures of inches-tall puppets. When run at 24 frames a second, the images generated a whimsical sort of herky-jerky animation that became the Rankin/Bass signature.“When I saw their cartoons, they left a great impression on me because they had dimensionality versus drawn animation,” said Tom Gasek, a professor in the school of film and animation at the Rochester Institute of Technology who was inspired by Rankin/Bass’s work to become a stop-motion animator. “They were not high quality by any means, but they were charming and their designs were very smart.”Mr. Bass and Mr. Rankin were often credited as the directors of their work and offered input on scripts and storyboards. But they played different roles at the company, said Rick Goldschmidt, the studio’s official historian.Mr. Bass composed much of the music. He hired and worked closely with the musical supervisor, Maury Laws, and ran the company’s business in Manhattan while Mr. Rankin was in Japan supervising the animation.“Where Jules is really the star of Rankin/Bass is as a songwriter and his partnership with Maury,” Mr. Goldschmidt said in a phone interview.Mr. Rankin, who was the studio’s chief executive, also sold the shows to TV networks and made sure they were delivered on time.“After a while, we were never seen together — I’d be doing production in Tokyo and he’d be recording a soundtrack in New York,” Mr. Rankin said in an interview in 2003 with the Museum of Television and Radio, now the Paley Center for Media. “If we were together, one of us wasn’t necessary.”Mr. Bass was rarely quoted publicly, and little is known about his private life. But the two partners spoke during a joint interview with The New York Times in 1982 when their animated theatrical feature, “The Last Unicorn,” was released.When they were asked who did most of the directing — the movie credits both of them — they initially said they did it together.“Anything he can do, I can do better,” Mr. Rankin said.Mr. Bass countered: “He never worked a day on the film. I did everything.”Peter S. Beagle, who wrote the screenplay for “The Last Unicorn” and the novel it was based on, recalled in a phone interview that his dealings with Mr. Bass “were very professional.” But, he added, “he was very private, and I never had a true sense of what was going on deepest in his head.”He added, “I’m grateful that the film came out pretty much as I wrote it.”Arthur Rankin Jr., left, and Mr. Bass in 1965. Both men were credited as producers and directors of their TV specials, but Mr. Bass was more involved with the music and Mr. Rankin with the animation.Miser Bros. Press/Rick Goldschmidt ArchivesJulius Bass was born in Philadelphia on Sept. 16, 1935. His father, Max, was a wholesale beer salesman, and his mother, Bernice (Palat) Bass, was a homemaker.He attended New York University, where he studied marketing from 1952 to 1954, but he did not graduate. He was hired by Gardner Advertising in Manhattan, where he met Mr. Rankin, who was making TV commercials under the banner of his company, Videocraft International.Mr. Bass joined Videocraft in the mid-1950s, and the two men produced commercials, occasionally using animation, for agencies that represented clients including General Electric and the A.&P. supermarket chain. They wearied of commercial production and shifted to animation in 1960 with a TV series, “The New Adventures of Pinocchio,” which used the stop-motion technique Mr. Bass had discovered in Japan.The company eventually changed its name to Rankin/Bass, and its work toggled between stop-motion and traditional cel animation.Although Rankin/Bass was best known for its Christmas programs, it also made TV movies like “The Ballad of Smokey the Bear” (1966), which was narrated by James Cagney,; “Here Comes Peter Cottontail” (1971); and “The Hobbit” (1977), which earned a Peabody Award. They also produced animated TV series like “King Kong” (1966), “The Reluctant Dragon & Mr. Toad Show” (1970), the “Jackson 5ive” (1971),“TigerSharks” (1985) and “Thundercats” (1987).Mr. Bass and Mr. Rankin ended their partnership in the late 1980s after their company was acquired by Lorimar-Telepictures, which was subsequently bought by Warner Communications, which is now Warner Bros. Discovery. Mr. Rankin died in 2014.Mr. Bass later wrote three children’s books. “Herb the Vegetarian Dragon” and “Cooking With Herb the Vegetarian Dragon,” illustrated by Debbie Harter, were both published in 1999. “The Mythomaniacs” (2013), with illustrations by Lawrence Christmas, is about a teenage magician who sends a group of readers of his father’s fairy tales into the books as characters.He also wrote an adult novel, “Headhunters” (2001), about four women from New Jersey who go to Monte Carlo and pretend to be among the world’s wealthiest women. It was adapted into a 2011 film, “Monte Carlo,” starring Selena Gomez.Mr. Bass leaves no immediate survivors. His daughter, Jean Nicole Bass, died this year. His marriages to Renee Fisherman and Sylvia Bass ended in divorce.The power of two of Rankin/Bass’s best-known productions has reverberated for decades since they were released: Both “Rudolph” and “Frosty” remain highly rated cornerstones of CBS’s pre-Christmas programming.In 2014, CBS promoted “Rudolph” on its 50th anniversary with ads that used stop motion to show the renowned reindeer and Sam the Snowman walking around the network’s backlot, meeting the stars of some of its other shows, including Mayim Bialik of “The Big Bang Theory” and Michael Weatherly of “NCIS.”“They’re the fabric of our Christmas hearth, the wood in the Christmas fire,” George Schweitzer, CBS’s former president of marketing, said in a phone interview. “You knew Christmas was coming when Rudolph and Frosty showed up on CBS.” More

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      Harvey Awards to Induct New Hall of Fame Members

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      Neil Gaiman, Marjorie Henderson Buell, Gilbert Shelton and Roy Thomas will be honored for their comic book work at New York Comic Con on Oct. 7.The Harvey Awards, which honors exemplary comic book work, will be adding members to its Hall of Fame at New York Comic Con in October. The new inductees are Neil Gaiman, whose best-selling series The Sandman was recently adapted for Netflix, the underground cartoonist Gilbert Shelton, and Roy Thomas, a prolific writer and editor for DC Comics and Marvel Comics.Marjorie Henderson Buell, who died in 1993 and was the creator of Little Lulu, will be inducted posthumously. Little Lulu debuted in 1935 as a single-panel cartoon in The Saturday Evening Post. The character proved popular and Buell, who was known as Marge and who controlled the rights to Little Lulu, spun her into a syndicated newspaper strip and later, comics, cartoons and all manner of merchandise.“We’re thrilled to return to New York Comic Con for our first in-person Harvey Awards ceremony since 2019 and to induct four legendary creators into our Harvey Awards Hall of Fame,” said John Lind, a chairman of the Harvey Awards steering committee. The awards began in 1988 and were named after Harvey Kurtzman, the cartoonist who created and founded Mad magazine, who died in 1993.The Harvey Awards honor comic book work in six categories, including book of the year, best manga, and best adaptation. The nominees are determined via a survey of about 200 industry professionals, librarians, educators and creators who submit candidates for each of the categories. The selections are tallied and pulled into a ballot, which is then open to a vote by all industry professionals, creators and librarians.Looking back, Gaiman shared some fond memories of his Harvey experiences. “The first time I was given a Harvey award, it was 1991, 31 years ago, I had a whole career or two ahead of me and Harvey Kurtzman was still alive. It was the award that bore his name, and was thus the most important award I had ever received,” he said in a statement. “Now, with over three decades of comics career behind me, it’s just as thrilling to hear that I get to join a Hall of Fame named for Harvey. He was one of the greats, and so many of the people who have been inducted already have been people I looked up to over the years. So this is an unalloyed delight for me.” More