Talk:Disney's Nine Old Men

Untitled
Content should be merged with Nine Old Men; one or the other should be made into a redirect. -- Infrogmation 05:53 Mar 24, 2003 (UTC)


 * Done. -- Paul A 06:37 Mar 24, 2003 (UTC)

Can a dead person "enjoy" a cameo?
Modified the following:

"Thomas and Johnston retired in 1978, and both later enjoyed cameos in the Brad Bird-directed films The Iron Giant (Warner Bros., 1999) and The Incredibles (Pixar, 2004)."

I seriously doubt that they were in any capacity to enjoy something that happened years after their death. 147.70.242.40 (talk) 15:14, 15 April 2008 (UTC)


 * I have undone your edit, as Thomas and Johnston were still alive and voiced animations of themselves in The Incredibles. Frank Thomas died in September of 2004, and Ollie Johnston died yesterday (April 14, 2008).  Ruyn (talk) 20:55, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

Rather un-encyclopedic
"wonderful scene" and "especially unique" seem rather worshipful, and certainly not in the tone one would expect from an encyclopedia. Parts of this article almost approach hagiography. --Piledhigheranddeeper (talk) 19:56, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

Contradiction
"Marc Davis (March 30, 1913 - January 12, 2000) started in 1935 on Snow White, and later he went on to develop/animate... Maleficent and the raven (in Sleeping Beauty).... Davis was responsible for character design for both the Pirates of the Caribbean and Haunted Mansion attractions at Disneyland."-Marc Davis's own page credits him with Aurora and Maleficent but doesn't mention the Raven. It also credits the Pirates of the Caribbean costume design to Davis's wife, not Davis himself. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 116.125.84.175 (talk) 04:46, 22 January 2009 (UTC)

The core animators
They are called the core animators. It is more correct to say that they were amongh the most important animators at Disney at a given period in the studio's history. Hamilton Luske, Norm Ferguson, Fred Moore, Bill Tytla and Art Babbitt were their just as important in their time. But most of the the old men were important in that they built the bridge between the old generation and the new genration who would take over when they retired, by educating them and learn them the basic principles and such.

From an interview with Frank Thomas:

"The reason we were called "Nine Old Men" was that we had a board of animators who determined all possible job-related issues that affected the entire department. We varied in number, but at one time Walt asked about how many people who sat in the board. We were nine at the time, and he said, "Hi, I have my nine old men, too, just as Roosevelt with his Supreme Court! You are all old and have not had a new idea for ever so long. "We said, 'Walt, we've only just passed thirty." He continued to joke about it, so the name stayed."

"It was only a half dozen animators at the studio - Ollie, Milt, Eric, Marc and me - who really was interested in developing characters that the audience could take home and keep in their hearts. We had learned it from Fred and Ham Luske. Woolie - who had learned from Norm Ferguson - and Ward and the others in their departments never cared about working the way we did. Johnnie Lounsbery was somewhere in between, and Les Clark worked in much the same way as they did in the old days."

When asked about Les Clark or John Lounsbery:

"I'm not talking so often about them actually, because they were the first who died, so we worked a long time without them. We worked very rarely on the same projects. They were in a different department and worked with other sequences than I did."

Also, according to Neal Gabler in his book about Disney, the board of animators (that Frank Thomas says varied in numbers), was established after the war, somewhere between 1945 and 1947, as part of a reorganization at the studio to reduce its costs. (Besides the animators, names like Jack Reeder, Fred Leahy, Harry Tytle, Walt Pfahler, Jack Lavin, Chuck Wolcott and Ub Iwerks were given responsibilities within their own areas).

Gabler also mentions that around 1960, new changes were done. Seven persons at the animation studio had key positions at that point: Ken Anderson as artistic leader, Woolie Reitherman as main director, Bill Peet as the scriptwriter and Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston, Milt Kahl and John Lounsbery as the four leading animators. Bill Peet left during the production of The Jungle Book.

Maybe this could fit into the article in one way or another. 84.210.60.115 (talk) 15:03, 2 February 2011 (UTC)

Notable Works table?
The table says that it includes the work they did "from the 1930s (e.g. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs) to the 1970s (e.g. The Rescuers) or the early 1980s (The Fox and the Hound)." But it only lists works up to 1967, where's the rest of the table?

5.71.158.55 (talk) 11:07, 8 July 2014 (UTC)

Planning to pull out History section inserted by User:Isinbill
The insertion of that passage seems to be in good faith, but it's hard to parse because it's so poorly written and it's not properly sourced. I'm counting on average three errors per sentence and I don't have time to play remedial English teacher right now. Any objections to removal of that section? --Coolcaesar (talk) 17:07, 12 May 2020 (UTC)
 * This is to respond to User:Isinbill's inquiry on my talk page. Here are a few of the most obvious errors: (1) Excessively long sentences in one long paragraph, when most experienced writers would break it up into multiple paragraphs; (2) the company wasn't renamed the "Walt Disney Company" until 1986; (3) repeated confusion between the man and the company; (4) inconsistent capitalization throughout; (5) multiple spelling errors; (6) excessive use of passive voice where most experienced writers would use active; (7) "first", an adjective, and "firsts", a noun, are NOT interchangeable and are used in VERY different contexts in English; (8) excessively wordy arrangements of information between independent and subordinate clauses; and (9) excessive level of detail. The overall effect is rambling and unfocused because you're repeating in prose far too many details that are best delivered in summary form and in fact are already delivered in that form in the next section of the article.
 * When an article about a group already includes an excellent summary of each member's career in the next section, a history section should be a simple high-level sketch of how the group came to be. It doesn't need to ramble through and recapitulate all the career highlights already covered in the next section.
 * The only new information that your paragraph appears to add is that the Nine Old Men evolved out of an internal board whose membership fluctuated and wasn't limited to just those nine men. That could be explained in two sentences. --Coolcaesar (talk) 19:08, 21 May 2020 (UTC)
 * I agree with 's suggestion to focus "history" on the origin of the name/group, without the digressions and tangents about individual careers. That would greatly improve the article. Schazjmd   (talk)  19:14, 21 May 2020 (UTC)
 * User:Isinbill hasn't responded and still hasn't made the most important change, which is to trim that mess down so it doesn't largely duplicate material in the next section. This is to give notice that I'm going to pull that entire section out later this week.  I've worked at enough places to know that if I turned in work product that poorly written, I wouldn't last three days.  In the current version, I'm still seeing at least 5 errors at the syntactic level (2 of which are new) and 3 errors at the semantic level.  A general rule in writing is that when fixing errors in text, it's really important to try not to insert new errors. --Coolcaesar (talk) 04:44, 8 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Save According to researcher Neal Gabler and animator Frank Thomas, a board was formed to study all possible problems affecting the company in relation to its work between 1945 and 1947. One day, in the early 1950s, there were nine members on the board (the number of members varied every day) and Walt Disney named the group "Nine Old Men"[2] somewhere in the article, because the reader needs something to explain why/how "nine old men" became "Nine Old Men". Schazjmd   (talk)  14:01, 8 June 2020 (UTC)
 * I would delete (the number of members varied every day) from the above. Certainly not true. I do agree that the excess, repetitive stuff should be removed. --Janke | Talk 18:47, 8 June 2020 (UTC)
 * I went ahead and made the edit (moving Kimball's retirement/ref down later in the article). Schazjmd   (talk)  21:28, 5 August 2020 (UTC)

False information from IMDb added to the separate nine articles of the nine old men
Why are people adding false information from IMDb such as Pinocchio and Robin Hood on Marc Davis' filmography section on his separate article, Dumbo on Eric Larson's filmography section on his separate article, Bambi on John Lounsbery's filmography section on his separate and Bambi on Wolfgang Reitherman's filmography section on his separate article when those are all incorrect? It's really annoying me. ArthurRead1976 (talk) 23:17, 17 October 2021 (UTC)

Thankfully I removed most of the false info from the articles. ArthurRead1976 (talk) 23:21, 17 October 2021 (UTC)