Chuck Menville
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Charles David "Chuck" Menville (April 17, 1940 – June 15, 1992) was an American animator and writer for television. His credits included Batman: The Animated Series, Land of the Lost, The Real Ghostbusters, The Smurfs, Star Trek: The Animated Series, and Tiny Toon Adventures.
Menville was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, but moved to Los Angeles at the age of 19 with aspirations of becoming an animator. There, he got a job with Walt Disney Productions and served as an assistant on The Jungle Book. Unhappy with the climate at Disney, Menville soon branched out into writing, and in the 1960s began a long working partnership with his friend Len Janson.
During the late '60s, Menville and Janson co-produced a series of short live-action films, among them the Academy Award-nominated Stop, Look and Listen, an innovative stop-motion experiment in which the main characters "drive" down city streets in invisible cars. In the early 1970s, the team began a stint at Filmation, during which they brought their irreverent take to Star Trek: The Animated Series. (Menville authored an episode titled "The Practical Joker" for that series, which is now seen by many within Star Trek fandom to have been the genesis of the holodeck.)
In the 1980s, Menville contributed to a number of Saturday morning series, including The Smurfs, The Real Ghostbusters, and Kissyfur. Among his last projects before his death in 1992 was the episode "Opah" of the live-action Land of the Lost, for which he was nominated for the Humanitas Prize in Live-Action Children's Programming.
Menville was the author of The Harlem Globetrotters: Fifty Years of Fun and Games, a history of the famed basketball team. It was published by the D. McKay Company in 1978.
Chuck Menville, who died of non-Hodgkins lymphoma in Malibu, California at the age of only 52, was the father of Scott Menville, an American musician and voice artist and Chad Menville, an American writer.
