Wealthy customer Fred Kafka liked his drawings on the garage's bulletin board and financed Lantz's studies at the Art Students League of New York.

Kafka also helped him land a job as a copy boy at the New York American, owned by William Randolph Hearst.

By the age of 16, Lantz was working in the animation department of International Film Service studio under director Gregory La Cava.

In the meantime, he worked briefly for director Frank Capra and was a gag writer for Mack Sennett comedies.

In 1928, Lantz was hired by Charles B. Mintz as director on the Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoon series for Universal Pictures.

Nolan's previous credentials included inventing the panorama background and developing a new, streamlined "Felix the Cat".

Meany, Miny and Moe (three ne'er-do-well chimps), Baby-Face Mouse, Snuffy Skunk, Doxie (a comic dachshund), and Jock and Jill (monkeys that resembled Warner Brothers' Bosko) were some personalities Lantz and his staff came up with.

Taking her advice, though a bit skeptical, Lantz created the brash woodpecker character, similar to the early Daffy Duck.

Hardaway showed a prototype drawing of Woody to voice actor Mel Blanc, asking what he thought of it, to which he jokingly responded "Ugliest damn thing I ever saw".

After Rogers went into the service due to World War II, Dick Nelson voiced Woody in 1943's Ration Bored before gagman Ben Hardaway, the man who was the main force behind Knock Knock, became the bird's voice the following year, starting with The Barber of Seville.

Grace also recorded her own version of Woody's trademark laugh, which was used in the shorts from 1950's Puny Express onward, but Mel Blanc's voice was still heard saying "Guess who!?"

Lantz refused and withdrew from the parent company by the end of 1947, releasing 12 cartoons independently through United Artists in 1948 and into the beginning of 1949.

Each half-hour program featured new live-action segments with Lantz himself, hosting the show and demonstrating the animation process.

The Woody Woodpecker Show returned to NBC's Saturday-morning schedule in 1970, minus the live-action appearances by Lantz, and again in 1976.

By the late 1960s, other movie studios had discontinued their animation departments, leaving Lantz as one of two producers still making cartoons for theaters (the other was DePatie-Freleng Enterprises).

Lantz finally closed his studio's doors for good in 1972, because by then, he explained, it was economically impossible to continue producing them and stay in business as rising inflation had strained his profits, and Universal serviced the remaining demand with reissues of his older cartoons.

In 1982, Lantz donated 17 artifacts to the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History, among them a wooden model of Woody Woodpecker from the cartoon character's debut in 1940.

In 1993, Lantz established a $10,000 scholarship and prize for animators in his name at California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, Santa Clarita.

Lantz died at St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank, California from heart failure on March 22, 1994, at age 94.

Some characters in the Walter Lantz cartoons (both cartoons and comics) are Oswald the Lucky Rabbit (formerly), Andy Panda, The Beary Family, Maggie & Sam, Maw and Paw, Space Mouse, Woody Woodpecker, Inspector Willoughby, Homer Pigeon, Chilly Willy, Lil' Eightball, Charlie Chicken, Cartune, Wally Walrus, and many more.