In this volume I’ve published two full-dress interviews with Jack Kinney, from 1973 and 1976. Those interviews were full dress in the sense that I prepared complete or nearly complete transcripts from my tape recordings and sent those transcripts to Kinney for his review. That has been my standard procedure with most of the hundreds of interviews Milt Gray and I conducted for one or another of my books, most extensively for Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age.
The full-dress interviews have been only part of my research, though—a large part, for sure, but sometimes correspondence has been at least as important. For instance, I’ve published on my website two long interviews with the Disney director Wilfred Jackson, but my files of letters from Jackson are thicker than those transcripts. Other people were also excellent correspondents as well as interview subjects—Dick Huemer comes to mind—and sometimes an animation veteran declined to be interviewed but responded fully to my questions in illuminating letters, as was the case with Claude Smith.
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