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When John Mansbridge passed away in 2016, The Hollywood Reporter wrote:

Mansbridge spent more than two decades at Disney as a designer and supervising art director for live-action features and received his Oscar noms for the studio’s Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971) and The Island at the Top of the World (1974).

In addition to Tron (1982), his lengthy list of Disney credits as an art director/production designer includes The Love Bug (1968) and its sequels, The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes (1969), The World’s Greatest Athlete (1973), Freaky Friday (1976), The Shaggy D.A. (1976), and the Tim Burton short Frankenweenie (1984).

Mansbridge also won an Emmy Award in 1988 for outstanding art direction for his work on the CBS series Beauty and the Beast.

A native of Geddes, S.D., Mansbridge served as an uncredited drafts- man on Citizen Kane for director Orson Welles and worked in the RKO art department under six-time Oscar nominee Van Nest Polglase.

He was brought to Disney in the 1950s by Polglase’s frequent col- laborator, production designer Carroll Clark, a seven-time Oscar nominee known for such films as Notorious, Mary Poppins,’ and The Absent-Minded Professor. He would prove to be Mansbridge’s mentor.

Mansbridge also worked on the 1950s TV show Adventures of Super- man and the 1980s revival of The Twilight Zone.

Didier Ghez: You were already very famous before you joined Disney and you did many things in your career before Disney, but I think that from 1958 to 1960, before being hired by Disney on a per- manent basis, you worked for them on a temporary basis, on a sporadic basis.

John Mansbridge: Yeah, I was a set designer for Carroll Clark. It was between ’28 and ’62 when I settled over there. And it was off and on. I worked on a number of shows for Carroll as a set designer.

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