José Cuauhtémoc "Bill" Melendez (November 15, 1916 – September 2, 2008)[1][2] was an American animator, director, producer, and voice actor. Melendez is known for working on the Peanuts animated specials, as well as providing the voices of Snoopy and Woodstock. Before Peanuts, he previously worked as an animator for Walt Disney Productions, Warner Bros. Cartoons, and UPA.
After animating a few shorts under McKimson's belt, Melendez was fired by producer Edward Selzer. Afterwards, he moved over to United Productions of America (UPA), where he animated on cartoons such as Gerald McBoing-Boing (1950). Melendez also produced and directed thousands of television commercials, first at UPA, then John Sutherland Productions and Playhouse Pictures.[4] In 1963, Melendez founded his own studio in the basement of his Hollywood home. Bill Melendez Productions is still active and is currently run by his son Steven C. Melendez.[5]
In addition to animation, Melendez was once a faculty member at the University of Southern California's Cinema Arts Department.
Melendez was referenced in the 1961 Looney Tunes short The Pied Piper of Guadalupe, directed by Friz Freleng. In it, Sylvester tries to learn how to play the flute by getting music lessons in order to lure the mice from a small Mexican town. He was referenced as J.C. Melendez, alluding to the name he was credited with in a few dozen Warner Bros. shorts during the mid '40s to early '50s (excluding his first few cartoons where he was credited as C. Melendez).
Peanuts franchise (1959–2006)
In 1959, Melendez was hired to do some animated television commercials featuring characters from the comic strip Peanuts for the Ford Motor Company. These animations were seen by documentary producer Lee Mendelson, and Mendelson hired Melendez to do some interstitial animations for a film he was producing about the comic strip entitled A Boy Named Charlie Brown.
Melendez was the only person Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz trusted to turn his popular comic creations into television specials. He and his studio worked on every single television special and direct-to-video film for the Peanuts gang and Melendez directed the majority of them. He provided the vocal effects for Snoopy and Woodstock in every single production, voice acting the characters in the studio by uttering gibberish, and the voices were mechanically sped up at different speeds to represent the two different characters, although some later specials had Snoopy speaking in a clear voice, reflecting how he would be thinking to himself in the comics.
According to an article in The New York Times published shortly after his death, Melendez did not intend to do voice acting for the two characters. "Schulz would not countenance the idea of a beagle uttering English dialogue, Mr. Melendez recited gibberish into a tape recorder, sped it up and put the result on the soundtrack."[1] He also directed, did the animation for, and provided voice acting in the first four Peanuts theatrical films, A Boy Named Charlie Brown (1969), Snoopy, Come Home (1972), Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown (1977), and Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown (1980), as well as the video games Get Ready for School, Charlie Brown! (1995) and Snoopy's Campfire Stories (1996).[6]
On September 2, 2008, Bill Melendez died at Saint John's Health Center in Santa Monica, California at the age of 91.[9] He had been in declining health after a fall a year earlier. No cause of his death was made public.[1] Melendez was cremated and his ashes were given to his family.
^National Student Film Institute/L.A: The Sixteenth Annual Los Angeles Student Film Festival. The Directors Guild Theatre. June 10, 1994. pp. 10–11.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
^Los Angeles Student Film Institute: 13th Annual Student Film Festival. The Directors Guild Theatre. June 7, 1991. p. 3.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)