‘Bambi,’ Howdy Doody among artist’s credits

While playing polo on the fields of Southern California in the late 1930s, Mel Shaw met Walt Disney and was soon playing on his team, the Donald Ducks, that took on the president of Mexico’s personal team in 1938 — and won.

As Shaw told the story, one day Disney handed him a stack of papers and said: “You like to draw animals — read this and see what you can do.”

It was the script for “Bambi,” and the beginning of Shaw’s long affiliation with Disney as a visual development and design artist. He help set the style for that 1942 animated classic and many others, including “Fantasia” (1940), “The Fox and the Hound” (1982) and his final Disney project, 1994’s “The Lion King.”

Shaw, 97, died of congestive heart failure Nov. 22 in California, said his son, Rick.

Outside of the studio, Shaw was perhaps best known for drawing the title sequence of the 1977 movie “The Rescuers.” The animated prologue shows a character placing a plea for help in a bottle and tossing it into the high seas.

During World War II, Shaw left Disney to serve in the Army Signal Corps as a combat photographer in Southeast Asia. He also worked on a documentary on the Burma campaign.

Back home, he opened a design business with Bob Allen, a former MGM Studios animator. Through Allen-Shaw Productions, Shaw illustrated the first “Bambi” children’s book for Disney, designed children’s toys and conceived pieces for Metlox, the noted Manhattan Beach Mel Shaw was involved in nearly every sequence of “Bambi” and drew the title sequence of “The Rescuers.” pottery manufacturer. moved with his family to

The partners received Los Angeles, where he almost no attention for attended the Otis Art Intheir late 1940s redesign of stitute as a teenager. Howdy Doody, the marioAt 14, he ran away to nette on the popular 1950s Utah to become a cowboy. NBC show. The original Four months later, he was Howdy Doody resembled back in Los Angeles lying “Pinocchio with fuzzy about his age to get a job at hair,” Shaw said in the Pacific Title and Art Stu“Walt’s People, Vol. 12,” a dio, where he created title collection of interviews cards at the end of the with artists who had silent-film era. worked with Disney. They Two Disney animators reconceptualized him as a — Hugh Harman and Rudy “hayseed,” he later said. Ising — hired him to join Allen came up with the their studio to conceive freckled face, Shaw made and animate stories in the the model for the head, early 1930s. He also helped and they had a “little cowOrson Welles storyboard a boy costume” created. version of “The Little

But when the new HowPrince” that was never dy Doody was revealed, the produced. partners were never given Mel Shaw’s first wife, credit for the design, Shaw Louise, died in 1984. He is said in the book, so they survived by their two chilpatented it in 1950. dren, Rick Shaw and Me

His second tenure at lissa Couch-Deranleau; Disney began in 1974, three stepchildren, Ken when he was brought in to Lounsbery, John Lounsmentor younger animators bery and Andrea Gesselas the older generation Severe; 14 grandchildren; retired. and a brother, Bob Shaw.

He was born Melvin His second wife, FlorSchwartzman on Dec. 19, ence Lounsbery, was the 1914, in Brooklyn, N.Y., the widow of John Lounsbery, second of four brothers of one of the pioneering an attorney and his wife, Disney animators known an opera singer. as the Nine Old Men. She

In the late 1920s, he died in 2004.