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 1967 film
The Jungle Book. Unhappy with the climate at
Disney, Menville soon branched out into writing, and began a long working partnership with his friend
Len Janson. During the mid-1960s, 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 pixilation experiment in which the main characters "drive" down city streets in invisible cars. Disney and other
Hollywood studios saw little use for pixilation, which became largely forgotten after McLaren moved on to using other animation techniques for later films. Menville and Janson revived the technique, introducing it to a new generation. Menville and Janson followed
Stop Look and Listen with their 1967 short film
Vicious Cycles, a comedy shot in
16 mm, featuring a gang of hard-core
bikers intimidating a
motor scooter club. Menville played the head of the scooter club. Clips from the film were featured in a 1970 summer television series on the
ABC network called
The New Communicators and made Menville's pixilation technique famous in the USA.
Gulf Oil soon hired them to do a series of pixilation commercials for its "no-nox" gasoline, which allowed them to increase the production value of their films. They graduated to
35 mm with their next short film, 1970's
Blaze Glory, a spoof of cliche western movies in which heroes and villains rode around the Old West, without horses. Menville played the title character. It was an ambitious and elaborate short film, in which a full-scale
stagecoach, with no wheels, was physically animated, along with an animated moving camera, frame-by-frame for a complex robbery scene. The film, with its other elaborate animated
sight gags, was a hit short film at
midnight movies in the early 1970s. They followed this with two more 35 mm short films,
Sergeant Swell (1972), and
Captain Mom (also 1972), the first a spoof of "
Northwestern" stories and the other a spoof of
superheroes. The later film was mostly live action with a minimum of their now-trademark pixilation animation technique, and failed to garner a large audience, but by then Menville and Janson had established themselves as a creative force within Hollywood animation production circles. In the mid-1970s, the team began a stint at
Filmation, during which they brought their irreverent style to
Star Trek: The Animated Series, writing two episodes: "
Once Upon a Planet" and "
The Practical Joker". The "rec room" in the latter episode is seen by many within
Star Trek fandom as the genesis of the
holodeck. ==Later career==