A few years back, Rob LaDuca thought retirement was in the cards. A couple projects he was developing were put on pause. But in their place came a chance to breathe new life into an old show he’d once worked on—and the continuation of the career he was clearly destined for.
LaDuca’s mother said that as soon as he could hold a pencil, he started drawing, and his father brought home butcher paper from the family’s Manhattan restaurant, hanging it on the wall for him to sketch on. “I even made a little setup in my basement [with a] magnifying glass and scratching on leader film,” he says, describing the old process of drawing directly on film stock.
Graduating from high school in 1974, LaDuca wanted to attend the prestigious RISD or NYU, but his parents’ restaurant went out of business. “We were broke,” he says. He’d heard about a trade school in the area. It specialized in accounting and chiropractic training, but the man who founded it was a big movie buff, and the school was getting into film.
LaDuca confesses that one of the reasons he chose Long Island’s New York Institute of Technology was because it had brand-new equipment that included a 16-millimeter animation stand. At one point he asked the dean if he could borrow it to shoot a film. He then learned that the school also had a class in animation, but self-taught LaDuca didn’t think he needed it.
Persuaded to at least meet the instructor, he was surprised to find out they were making an animated movie right on campus. When the film’s Animation Director saw LaDuca’s portfolio and indie film, he asked: “Can you start Monday?” LaDuca replied: “Start what?” He didn’t realize he was being offered a job as an In-Betweener on Tubby the Tuba—which would also get him membership in New York’s now-defunct Local 841.
LaDuca describes the estate inhabited by the school as being right out of The Great Gatsby and calls the film department “our own little Termite Terrace on the campus of New York Tech. It was the perfect school for me because it was experimental and I learned on the job.” It was also where he found “his people,” including old hands who had worked with legends like Max Fleischer and Winsor McKay.
By the time LaDuca graduated, he already had connections in New York. But beyond commercials, animation was drying up on the East Coast. LaDuca and his friend, caricaturist Ed Wexler, heard there was work in California, so they headed west. It was the mid-’70s, and LaDuca says: “Hollywood was jumping back then.” He started immediately as an Assistant Animator at Filmation on shows like Fat Albert and Mighty Mouse, and worked in the same offices with Preston Blair at Hanna-Barbera and Tim Burton at Bakshi Productions.
The early 1980s saw LaDuca relocating to San Francisco, animating special effects on ILM films like Poltergeist, E.T., and Star Wars: Return of the Jedi. But his true love was traditional animation. Working back in L.A. in 1985, he received a call from his old friend Art Vitello, who informed him that Disney wanted to start its own television department. Little did LaDuca know, he would be on the ground floor of a thriving division where he would spend the majority of his career. “I think I was employee number six,” he says.
Aside from a few years spent trying out other studios, LaDuca dropped anchor at Playhouse Disney, later to become Disney Jr. He storyboarded on one of the network’s first series, Adventures of the Gummi Bears, rising up through the ranks over the next two decades to direct and produce on shows like Aladdin and Tutenstein, before directing and then executive producing Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.
This was LaDuca’s first EP position, but by no means his last. It ran from 2006 to 2016, and after the series wrapped, he continued to direct and executive produce—all the while asking, “When are we going to do more Clubhouse?” Coming off Mickey Mouse Mixed-Up Adventures in 2022, he was helping develop a couple ideas. The network wanted to test them, and he was asked if he’d mind taking a few months off. “Are you kidding?” he says. “After 40-some-odd years straight through—it was great.” But two months turned into five, and he considered that he might not be called back. Maybe he should prepare for the next stage in his life. He let Disney know he might be retiring, only to be told: “No, you’re not. We really want more Clubhouse.”
The next thing LaDuca knew, he was back as Executive Producer on Mickey Mouse Clubhouse+. Like the original, it would be educational, but it would also have new bells and whistles, including a separate clubhouse for Minnie and screens that modern kids could relate to. In the end, though, LaDuca says: “It’s the interaction of the characters and their individual personalities that keep the show fresh.”
It’s also about the passion of those working on it. Even though LaDuca loved animation from an early age, in some ways he feels that he tripped and stumbled into his career. “But it was something I knew I wanted to do, and I was really passionate about it,” he says. That passion paid off. He’s been an Animation Guild member for nearly 50 years, and he’s still spending his time doing what he loves most.
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