In Passing
Los Angeles
Iwao Takamoto, animator
Iwao Takamoto, an animator whose most celebrated creation was the endearingly klutzy canine Scooby-Doo but who also left his mark on dozens of other Hanna-Barbera classics, including “The Jetsons” and “The Flintstones,” has died. He was 81.
Takamoto died Monday of heart failure at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.
Takamoto found inspiration for his career in a place he rarely spoke of: The Manzanar relocation camp for Japanese-Americans, where he and his family spent much of World War II.
Sketching to amuse himself, he caught the attention of two fellow internees, former art directors who encouraged Takamoto to go into animation.
After returning to Los Angeles, he was quickly hired by Walt Disney Studios just before the end of the war in 1945.
By the early 1960s, Disney was cutting back on animated features so Takamoto decided to take a chance on television. He joined Hanna-Barbera, a fledgling studio that would dominate Saturday morning cartoons by the 1970s, and started drawing for “The Flintstones” (1960-66), the first animated series in prime time.
While developing a teenage mystery show for CBS, he came up with Scooby-Doo. Joseph Barbera, who died in December at 95, suggested adding a dog to the mix because it had helped liven up other shows he had created, including “Jonny Quest.”
Takamoto insisted that making Scooby big and clumsy would give the dog more comic potential. From a breeder of show dogs, he “found out what made a prize-winning Great Dane and went in the opposite direction,” Takamoto told the Sydney Morning Herald in 1997.
Petaluma, Calif.
Pete Kleinow, musician
“Sneaky” Pete Kleinow, a steel guitar virtuoso who helped create the genre of country rock by introducing rock audiences to one of country music’s cornerstone instruments while performing with the Flying Burrito Brothers, has died of complications brought on by Alzheimer’s disease. He was 72.
Kleinow died Jan. 6 in a nursing facility in Petaluma, Calif., where he had been living since last year.
Country rock pioneer Gram Parsons spotted Kleinow playing with a country band in a small North Hollywood club in 1968, and when he and fellow Byrds member Chris Hillman decided to leave that group and form a band that could wed country emotion with rock attitude, they wanted Kleinow to be part of it.
From his springboard in the Flying Burrito Brothers, Kleinow went on to become one of the most respected and sought-after steel guitarists in the music business, playing in hundreds of sessions over the next 30 years for such acts as the Rolling Stones, John Lennon, Stevie Wonder, Fleetwood Mac, Ringo Starr, Jackson Browne and Linda Ronstadt.
In addition to his musical efforts, Kleinow maintained a parallel career in film animation and special effects that began when he moved to California in 1963 and found work doing stop-motion animation for Art Clokey’s “Gumby” cartoons.
He contributed special effects to such movies as “The Empire Strikes Back,” “The Terminator,” “Terminator 2” and “Gremlins” and more recently to music videos, commercials and video games.