Walter Lantz’s entry into the animation eatery race, meanwhile, was a quiet — but enduring — success. Lantz’s Woodpecker Ranch opened for business in Toluca Lake, California in August of 1942; low-key, informal, and tastefully decorated by Lantz’s wife Gracie, it was a favorite casual dining spot of Southern Californians for nearly forty years. Lantz’s menu was nothing short of ingenious: the ranch featured carefully-prepared versions of nearly all the creatures Lantz made famous in his cartoons. Wood-Grilled Woodpecker was its signature dish; and Lantz’s was also well-known for its Homing Pigeon au Vin, Penguin Tartare, and Walrus Mignon. For decades, it was one of only three restaurants outside of mainland China to serve panda, which Lantz supplied from the petting zoo/slaughterhouse that was a popular tourist attraction at his cartoon studio. Lantz’s Woodpecker Ranch closed only after it was fire-bombed by Greenpeace in 1979.

Walt’s Your Sign? For years, the menus at Walt Lantz’s Woodpecker Ranch featured the Lantz Zodiac, an ultimately unsuccessful belief system that Lantz patterned after the Chinese Zodiac and believed in with religious fervor. Determined by one‘s shoe size, the zodiac’s signs included the Bear, Homing Pigeon, Penguin, Pig, Rabbit, Woodpecker, and Bushy-Mustached Little Inspector Guy. (Wally Walrus (c) Universal.)

Most animation fans are probably aware that Leon Schlesinger did not take an particularly active creative role in the production of his cartoon studio’s famous Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes. The situation was similar when the portly animation tycoon entered the restaurant business in 1939. “I wanna open a restaurant to promote my cartoons,” he declared to Tex Avery, Friz Freleng, Bob Clampett, Chuck Jones, Carl “W” Stalling, and a few other senior employees at the studio. “Come up with something cheap, fellas.”
The Schlesinger staffers went to work, and the studio soon opened Berrie Medleys, one of the first vegetarian restaurants in the greater Hollywood area. Benefiting from a health-food fad that swept the movie community in the early 1940s, the restaurant was immensely popular. A delighted Schlesinger soon ate most of his meals there, taking a corner table and teasingly lording over Avery, Clampett, Freleng, Jones, Robert McKimson, Norm McCabe, and other studio employees who worked shifts as waiters, busboys, and coat-check attendants.

There You Eat Again Leon Schlesinger and Ronald “the Gipper” Reagan (garbed for a costume ball) share a booth at Berrie Medleys in 1943. The ill-toupeéd cartoon magnate and the future governor of California were fast friends who often vacationed together when their wives were otherwise engaged.

Operating a restaurant while simultaneously producing a full slate of animated cartoons was taxing for Schesinger’s staff. Jones and Clampett argued fiercely over a tip left by Marlene Dietrich, a spat that lasted for decades. Tex Avery left the studio for MGM when Schlesinger proved unwilling to let him tinker with the restaurant’s uninspired selection of salad dressings.

Despite such behind-the-scenes drama, the restaurant continued to prosper. But when Schlesinger sold his studio to Warner Bros., that company in 1944, that company concluded that the restaurant was outside its primary line of business. Warner sold Berrie Medleys to another corporation, which added selected varieties of red meat to the menu and redubbed the establishment the Brown Derby, a reference to the fact that it was shaped like an enormous hat. Shortly thereafter, it laid off all of the Warner cartoonists, who returned to their cartoon-studio duties.
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