Joe Murray

Joseph David Murray (born May 3, 1961) is an American animator, cartoonist, illustrator, writer, producer, and director.

He is best known as the creator of Nickelodeon's Rocko's Modern Life, Cartoon Network's Camp Lazlo, and PBS Kids' Let's Go Luna!. Murray is the winner of two Primetime Emmy Awards for Camp Lazlo and the TV film Camp Lazlo: Where's Lazlo?.

Born and raised in San Jose, California, Joe Murray said that he developed an interest in working as an artist as a career when he was three years old, but his father didn't approve.

According to Murray, his kindergarten teacher told his mother that he was the only student who drew zippers on pants and breasts on women.

Murray credits his Leland High School art teacher Mark Briggs for teaching him "so much about my art."

At age 16, he became a full-time artist, drawing caricatures of people and animals at an amusement park in his spare time.

Taking the position of political cartoonist for a newspaper in San Jose, Murray's cartoons often targeted then-President Jimmy Carter.

Murray tried selling the comic book in the late 1980s, but was never successful of getting it in production.

Murray wanted funding for My Dog Zero, so he wanted Nickelodeon to pre-buy television rights for the series.

Murray presented a pencil test to Nickelodeon Studios, which afterwards became interested in buying and airing the show.

After deciding that My Dog Zero would not work as a television series, Murray combed through his sketchbooks, developed the Rocko's Modern Life concept and submitted it to Nickelodeon, believing that the concept would likely be rejected.

According to Murray, around three or four months later he had "forgotten about" the concept and was working on My Dog Zero when Linda Simensky informed Murray that Nickelodeon wanted a pilot episode.

Murray said that he was glad that he would get funding for My Dog Zero.

At age 20, Murray founded his independent illustration company, Joe Murray Studios (or Joe Murray Productions), in 1981 while still in university.

His early attempts at animation date back to 1986 when he joined De Anza College.

Murray created several short animated films, his most successful was made in 1987, which was a two-minute animated short titled "The Chore," which focused on a harried husband who uses his cat as a novel solution while not wanting to do a chore for his wife.

He drew the scenes on typing paper and shot the scenes with 16 mm film.

In 1988, he did two network IDs for MTV, and left in 1991 in hopes of starting his own projects.

One of the MTV ID's Murray created involved the future Rocko's Modern Life character Heffer Wolfe; the ID featured Heffer being pushed out of a building with the MTV logo branded onto his buttocks.

For creating "The Chore" Murray earned the Merit Student Academy Award two years later in 1989.

In the early 1990s, he did the storyboards and layouts on A Pup Named Scooby-Doo, Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, Bobby's World, and The Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat, while working as a freelancer at Drew Takahashi's now-defunct Colossal Pictures studio.

My Dog Zero, released in 1992, was Murray's third independent film and first color film.

Murray said that My Dog Zero was his "most gratifying" artistic project to date because of his own "stubbornness" in resolving the obstacles and issues involved in the production, such as lack of funding and lack of resources.

With a grant he employed twelve people, mostly university students, to cel-paint the film.

According to Murray, when he finished the film, several distributors refused to air it.

He appeared at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco with a copy of the film and persuaded the staff to air the film with the scheduled films.

According to Murray, My Dog Zero received "good response".

To fund the film, Murray initially tried to pre-sell the television show rights to My Dog Zero but instead created a separate television series called Rocko's Modern Life.

In 1992, two months prior to the production of season 1 of Rocko's Modern Life, Murray's first wife, Diane, committed suicide.

Murray had blamed the show being taken as the reason for his wife's suicide.

Murray felt that he had emotional and physical "unresolved issues" when he moved to Los Angeles.

He describes the experience as like participating in "marathon with my pants around my ankles".

Murray initially believed that he would create one season, move back to the San Francisco Bay Area and "clean up the loose ends I had left hanging".

Murray created, and was the executive producer, for the animated series Rocko's Modern Life, which aired on Nickelodeon from 1993 to 1996.

He voiced the character Ralph Bighead in the episodes "I Have No Son" and "Wacky Delly", and a caricature version of himself in "Short Story".

Originally, the character Rocko appeared in an unpublished comic book titled Travis.

In a 2007 entry on his website, he said that he admired Carter's post-presidential work.

Murray has cited Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Walt Kelly, Mark O'Hare, Max Fleischer, Jay Ward, Tex Avery, Bob Clampett, and Chuck Jones as his main influences.

As a young adult, Murray was hired as a designer at an agency.

He invested his earnings from the company into independent animated films.