It's hard to imagine that any of the others would still be alive by now:
Myron Waldman, Who Drew Cartoon Stars, Is Dead at 97 By DAVE KEHR February 6, 2006
Myron Waldman, an animator and illustrator who worked on such celebrated characters as Betty Boop, Popeye, Superman and Casper the Friendly Ghost during his long career, died Saturday at New Island Hospital in Bethpage, N.Y. He was 97 and lived in Wantagh, N.Y. Myron Waldman helped develop characters including Betty Boop. The cause was congestive heart failure, his family said.
Born in Brooklyn, Mr. Waldman attended the Pratt Institute and was hired as an inker and fill-in artist by the Fleischer Studios in 1930. The studio, located at 1600 Broadway in Times Square and operated by the battling brothers Max and Dave Fleischer, was America's pre-eminent animation workshop, though its status would soon be challenged by Walt Disney's West Coast operation.
Mr. Waldman was promoted to animator on the 1931 short "By the Light of the Silvery Moon," one of Fleischer's long-running series of "Screen Songs" famous for their "follow the bouncing ball" sing-along device. With Mr. Waldman's second assignment as an animator, "Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nellie" in 1932, he first encountered the studio's rising young star, a flapper with a Brooklyn accent and a famously fluty voice (provided by Mae Questel). At that point, the proto-Betty Boop was still a doglike character with floppy ears, vestigial characteristics that would disappear as the Fleischers, with the help of animators like Mr. Waldman, Seymour Kneitel, Willard Bowsky and Dave Tendlar, developed the character into a sultry, sexy, fully human figure who gave Mae West a run for her money in the heady days before the censorious Production Code was fully enforced.
Credits for early animated films are notoriously difficult to establish, and while the Fleischer Studios usually gave the producing credit to Max and the directing credit to Dave, it was often the animators who were effectively the authors of individual shorts. Subsequent generations of animation scholars have identified Mr. Waldman with the gentle strain of whimsy (so different from the often abrasive, sexually charged surrealism of his colleagues) that began to appear in the Fleischers' "Color Classics" series, initiated in 1934 in direct imitation of Disney's "Silly Symphonies."
In 1938, Mr. Waldman went with the Fleischers when, backed by a loan from Paramount Pictures, the brothers moved their studio to Miami, where they planned to concentrate on more upscale, Disney-like fare, beginning with the feature-length "Gulliver's Travels." When "Gulliver" proved only a modest success, the studio moved into the production of two-reel color specials, based on the Superman stories licensed from DC Comics and E. C. Segar's comic strip character Popeye the Sailor (already a star in Fleischer black-and-white cartoons). Mr. Waldman assumed a major role in several of these productions, and in 1941 he became the principal animator (some sources simply call him the director) of "Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy," a 17-minute special based on the Johnny Gruelle children's stories that many critics regard as the finest of the late Fleischer productions.
Paramount foreclosed on the Fleischers after the catastrophic failure of their second feature, the 1941 "Mister Bug Goes to Town," and the studio was reorganized in New York as Famous Studios.
Mr. Waldman stayed with the new company, but under Paramount's control, the studio lost its grand ambitions and adult sensibilities, falling into a series of routine shorts intended for children and featuring lesser characters like Baby Huey, Herman and Katnip, Little Lulu and Casper. Though officially the studio's head animator, Mr. Waldman found his true affinity in the Casper series, curiously morbid fantasies centered on an infant ghost. Animation buffs often cite Mr. Waldman's "There's Good Boos Tonight" (1948), which ends with the death (and resurrection as a ghost) of a lovable fox character, as a particularly traumatic childhood experience.
Mr. Waldman left Famous in 1957 but continued to work, mainly for television. In his later years he traveled and lectured, creating paintings for galleries and working on a musical feature that never came to fruition. In the 1990's he was honored with retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art, the American Museum of the Moving Image and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
His wife, Rosalie, a cooking instructor whom he met when she was an animation checker at the Fleischer Studio in the early 1940's, survives him, as do two sons, Robert, a television writer and producer in New York, and Steve, a sales executive in Hollywood, Fla., as well as three grandchildren.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/06/arts/television/06waldman.html
