Arthur Rankin Junior, the director, producer and writer who helped establish the famous Rankin/Bass production house and animate The Hobbit in 1977 and The Return of the King in 1980 has died at his home in Harrington Sound, Bermuda. He was 89.
Rankin ran the successful Rankin/Bass production banner with business partner Jules Bass, putting out a many popular cartoon series and specials in a period spanning the early 1960s through to the late 1980s. The pair won a Peabody Award for their work on The Hobbit in 1977. Continue reading “Arthur Rankin Jnr, creator of the 1977 Hobbit and 1980 Return of the King films dies, aged 89”
(CNN) — Author Arthur C. Clarke, whose science fiction and non-fiction works ranged from the script for “2001: A Space Odyssey” to an early proposal for communications satellites, has died at age 90, associates have said. Clarke had been wheelchair-bound for several years with complications stemming from a youthful bout with polio and had suffered from back trouble recently, said Scott Chase, the secretary of the nonprofit Arthur C. Clarke Foundation. He died early Wednesday — Tuesday afternoon ET — at a hospital in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where he had lived since the 1950s, Chase said. “He had been taken to hospital in what we had hoped was one of the slings and arrows of being 90, but in this case it was his final visit,” he said. Arthur C. Clarke 1917 – 2008
