Tubby the Tuba had his start as the main character in a 1945 children's story for orchestra and narrator, by Paul Tripp and George Kleinsinger, originally performed by Tripp himself, and recorded most famously by
Danny Kaye, though many other actor-narrators have performed the piece on record as well, including
David Wayne (who also provided a voice for the '71 feature film). The success of the
Decca Records track encouraged George Pal, the Puppetoon artist, to make a 1947 short based on it. It would later receive an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Short. A full-length version of
Tubby the Tuba was announced in 1974 by Alexander Schure, the millionaire founder of the New York Institute of Technology. He set up the production at its
Westbury, New York facilities, in the Animation Department, Visual Arts Center and Tech Sound Lab of that campus. In order for it to compete with the works of children's film leader
Disney, he rounded up a celebrity cast (led by
Dick Van Dyke and
Pearl Bailey), as well as Tripp, the librettist, and a man known as "the dean of Broadway musical directors",
Lehman Engel. Schure, however, did not know anything about the animation process at the time he started working on it. Because of this, he hired the industry's best artists from the Eastern Seaboard, among whom were
Sam Singer from
Courageous Cat and Minute Mouse, and John Gentilella from the classic
Popeye series. Schure found the progress on the new
Tubby was very slow, hindered by the tedious frame-by-frame process occasionally encountered in the hand-drawn art. In response, he turned to an interest in the young field of
computer graphics, and recruited several consultants and scientists from NYIT so that the project could go on. Two of the later crew members were
Edwin Catmull and
Alvy Ray Smith, the future founders of
Pixar Studios. Thus, it should have marked the first time that computers were ever used in the making of an animated feature, but it ended up being done the conventional way after all. When the film wrapped up production, the first test screenings did not do as well as the crew had hoped it would. As a result, Catmull removed Sam Singer's name from the final prints, taking a credit in Singer's place. He later went on to say about the initial reaction to
Tubby: Of director Schure, Catmull's partner Smith observed: "We realized […] that he really didn't have what it takes to make a movie". Neither of the duo were satisfied with what the finished film had to offer. ==Release==