Biography
Muse worked briefly at Walt Disney Studio, where he was Preston Blair's assistant on Fantasia (he helped animate "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" scenes). He also provided animation for Pinocchio ("I've Got No Strings" sequence), Fantasia and various Mickey Mouse cartoons such as Mr. Mouse Takes a Trip (1940), Mickey's Birthday Party (1942) and Symphony Hour (1942).
Muse left Disney during the 1941 strike there and joined Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's animation department in 1941, along with fellow animators Ray Patterson, Preston Blair, Ed Love, Walter Clinton, and Grant Simmons. He was assigned to the Hanna - Barbera unit, where he remained for 17 years. He first provided animation for the eighth Tom and Jerry short, Fine Feathered Friend (1942), as well as the very last Hanna-Barbera Tom and Jerry, Tot Watchers (1958), and nearly 120 other shorts in between. Muse also animated Jerry Mouse dancing with a live-action Gene Kelly in the 1945 musical Anchors Aweigh.
When MGM closed their animation studio in 1957, Muse joined his former bosses at their new company, Hanna-Barbera. He was one of the most prolific animators working for Hanna-Barbera's classic period of the late 1950s and early 1960s. He animated many important shows and sequences, including all of the short pilot The Flagstones, from which The Flintstones series was sold, as well as the original opening and closing titles of the series (the instrumental "Rise and Shine" titles, seen in the first two seasons, rather than the later, more familiar "Meet the Flintstones" titles). Muse also animated all of the first-produced episode of the series, "The Swimming Pool" (during the first season, episodes were assigned to one animator, who had only about four weeks each to complete them). Other early episodes animated entirely by Muse include "Hot Lips Hannigan", "The Monster From The Tar Pits", and "The Tycoon" (the J.L. Gotrocks episode). Muse also animated the opening and closing titles for Top Cat (1961). Over a period of three decades, he provided animation for nearly all of Hanna-Barbera's animated television series, including The Huckleberry Hound Show (1958), The Flintstones (1960), The Yogi Bear Show (1961), Top Cat (1961), The Jetsons (1962), Wacky Races (1968), Hong Kong Phooey (1974), Jabberjaw (1976), and Challenge of the SuperFriends (1978).
Muse was the stepfather of singer-songwriter Judee Sill, with whom he had a strained relationship.
Muse died on July 26, 1987, his seventy-seventh birthday, in Templeton, California.
Read more about this topic: Kenneth Muse
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.”
—Rebecca West [Cicily Isabel Fairfield] (1892–1983)
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)