Don Figlozzi, the First TV Animator?

Historian Harvey Deneroff has posted a fascinating interview with Fleischer Studios veteran Don Figlozzi that he conducted in 1979. In it, Figlozzi (1909-1981) speaks about working as a “television artist” at WPIX in the late-1940s. If he wasn’t the first regular animator working in television, he was certainly among the first:

“They asked to see some samples, and I realized I wasn’t dealing with anybody that had been used to looking at art samples before. I was dealing with laymen, so to speak, engineers and people like that, and Hank Ross, who was a director, didn’t know anything about the art end of it. So I figured I’d make the stuff as close to TV as possible. I made their call letters and a call background – just like an announcement background. And then I made a series of things like the Twentieth Century-Fox heading that they have now; I originated that for WPIX, where letters come over a skyline; and worked up several different things: maps, little tiny maps – I thought everything had to be drawn small, so I did them small. I worked with a magnifying glass.”