John David Wilson, a pioneering animation producer and director who worked on everything from Lady & the Tramp and an Igor Stravinsky ballet film to Grease, died June 20 in a nursing home in Blackpool, England. He was 93, The Hollywood Reporter said.

The Englishman, schooled in the art of animation by David Hand, the director of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and Bambi (1942), founded Fine Arts Films in the 1950s.

Wilson's five-minute animated shorts, featuring popular songs like Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” and Jim Croce's “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown,” were seen on The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour in the 1970s, long before the era of MTV.

Wilson's credits also include Exploring, the 1960s NBC News educational series that won a Peabody Award, and the 1971 feature Shinbone Alley, a tale about a poetic cockroach that was voiced by the likes of Carol Channing, Eddie Bracken and John Carradine.