Animation Artifacts &Daily post 20 Jan 2008 09:19 am

Meador’s Forbidden Planet

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Thanks to Jonathan Annand for pointing me to the upcoming Heritage auction which features a number of oversized animation drawings to the film, Forbidden Planet. This is the 1956 Sci Fi film that featured some magnificent animated effects by Joshua Meador.

Meador was loaned to MGM by Walt Disney to supervise the animated effects. The Id Monster he created is made of shimmering blades of fire. When the film was first distributed to television, they thought the creature was too frightening for children and cut out a lot of the animated scenes. Of course, they eventually replaced them.

The movie is an original take on Shakespeare’s The Tempest although it significantly alters the plot points. The music for the film, created by the married team of Louis and Bebe Barron, is a groundbreaking electronic score – more effect sounds than music. It’s somewhat similar in ways to what Bernard Herrmann did for Hitchcock’s The Birds.

This film runs every so often on Turner Classic Movies, and if you’re not familiar with it, you should be. The next showing will be Feb 2nd at 9:15am.


(Click any image to enlarge.

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Josh Meador was an effects animator at Disney’s. He joined the studio in the 1930′s and quickly rose through the ranks moving to the effects animation department and ultimately supervising the effects on Pinocchio and Fantasia. He shared an Oscar for his effects work on the big Disney feature 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

He lived in La Crescenta, California for years and was an inveterate painter, an artist represented by numerous galleries.

The Disneyland show, “Tricks of the Trade,” gave me Josh Meador’s name back in the 50′s, and I searched it out ever after. I wrote a piece about sending a letter to him in another post.

While in the Navy, I was stationed in Monterey, California. There was a gallery in Carmel that had a one man show of his artwork. I made numerous trips to the gallery, hoping that he might be there one of those trips. No such luck. And I was too shy to try to seek him out on my own.

He died in 1965 of a congenital heart defect.

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These images were taken from the Disenyland TV show “Tricks of the Trade”. Meador reenacts the study of boiling bubbles for Fantasia’s Rite of Spring segment.
As a teenager, for an early 8mm film of my own, I shot in super-slow motion boiling gravy my mother was cooking. The lens fogged through much of it creating an eerie mist. It ended up being very interesting footage I used for one of my early films.


Here’s Meador flanked by Jack Boyd, on the left, and Dan McManus, on the right.
They were other leading effects animators at the studio.

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- Getting a bit more current, Brad Bird appeared yesterday as a guest on NPR’s news game quiz show, Wait, Wait. Don’t Tell Me !.

You can hear his segment here on the NPR site.

9 Responses to “Meador’s Forbidden Planet”

  1. on 20 Jan 2008 at 6:31 pm 1.Eddie Fitzgerald said …

    Meador and the Barrons were terrific, and “Forbidden Planet” was the greatest science fiction film ever made. I saw it in a theater when I was a little kid and it absolutely devastated me. This, together with “Seventh Voyage of Sinbad” and “Jason and the Argonauts” were the pillars of my childood.

    You can’t get Generation Z to watch it, I don’t know why. Maybe it’s the slightly cheesey love story, or the goofy cook.

  2. on 04 Jun 2008 at 12:31 am 2.Jayne Bell said …

    The guy on the left, Jack Boyd, was my grandfather…pretty cool to see him in this shot!

  3. on 04 Jun 2008 at 8:05 am 3.Michael said …

    Jayne, thanks for checking in. Your grandfather has been a name in my life. I was big fan of Disney animation effects, and tried to learn as much as I could about them. I first read his mini-”filmography” in Bob Thomas’ 1958 book, “The Art of Animation” and ever after sought out his name among the credits.
    It’s great to have reduced the degree of separation, however slightly.

  4. on 29 Apr 2010 at 5:38 pm 4.ed carter said …

    Meador did not win an Academy Award for 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA. The Award went to the Walt Disney Studio. See: http://awardsdatabase.oscars.org/ampas_awards/DisplayMain.jsp?curTime=1272522869765

  5. on 13 Oct 2010 at 12:03 pm 5.WMM said …

    TRIVIA: Meador’s assistant on the show was a very young Joe Alves who would go on to design spaceships in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Bruce the shark in JAWS, JAWS 2 and JAWS 3-D.

  6. on 18 May 2012 at 12:16 am 6.Eric Zimmer said …

    So we finally know who Joshua Meador, Dan MacManus & Jack Boyd are & look like! ‘Cause sometimes after hearing about a person for a while, you want to know what they look like! Speaking of which, do you know or have any pictures of 2 other Disney effects animators from this time–specifically meaning George Rowley & Blaine Gibson? If so, can you please make a page for them, too? Thanks!

  7. on 18 May 2012 at 1:25 am 7.Michael said …

    Blaine Gibson
    https://www.facebook.com/pages/Blaine-Gibson-Disney-Artist-and-Imagineer/106918381574?sk=photos

  8. on 12 Jun 2012 at 8:57 pm 8.Eric Zimmer said …

    Thanks for that on Blaine Gibson, Michael! Do you know anything about George Rowley? He was another leading effects animator alongside Joshua Meador!

  9. on 22 Dec 2016 at 6:40 pm 9.Ray Kreps said …

    Gentlemen,

    I usually don’t enter into on-line discussions. But when it came to Forbidden Planet I had to respond. In 1957 when Forbidden planet hit the theaters we lived in Portland Oregon. On Holoween night the Fox theater in down town Portland showed the movie at midnight at a reduced price. Our mother was flexible on such subjects (staying up late for such things) so my brother and I went to the movie. To this day Forbidden Planet stands pretty much by itself in the science fiction genre. And I, like so many others, have been caught up trying over the years to figure out what the Krel looked like. I think I’d move to Altair IV if I could.
    Sincerely, Ray Kreps

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