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A Los Angeles native, Dick Darley graduated from Los Angeles High School before enlisting in the US Navy during WW II. Afterwards he attended the University of Southern California, majoring in radio production, and later worked for an experimental TV station before joining ABC Television in Hollywood. From 1950 to 1955 he directed the live early sci-fi TV series Space Patrol (1950), from its start as a 15-minute local show to its expansion to a half-hour nationally televised series (he was credited as "Dik Darley" on the show, mainly because a TV critic misspelled his first name in a review, and Darley was advised that "Dik" was a name people would remember more than "Dick", so he kept it). He also worked on other TV shows while directing "Space Patrol", notably ABC Album (1953), for which he directed a two-part production of Charles Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities".
When "Space Patrol" ended in 1955 he was hired by Walt Disney Studios to direct their new show, The Mickey Mouse Club (1955). Having worked with child actors before, he got along well with the cast members on the show, and was able to get them to give the performances he wanted without resorting to shouting and bullying, as other directors had done with them. He liked to use film techniques while directing the show, such as crane shots, close-ups and wide-angle views, things that had seldom been done on television up to that time, and certainly not on variety shows. He also helped pioneer the use of the three-camera setup, which shot the same scene from three different angles and eliminated the need for stopping and re-starting scenes for re-shoots, which was a necessity with single-camera setups, and gave the scene a much more fluid look after final editing.
Darley was replaced after the first year, however, when Walt Disney thought the show needed a revamping, despite its tremendous success and very high ratings. In hindsight it seems to have been one of the few mistakes Disney ever made, as the new changes were not popular with the show's audience and the ratings steadily declined in the second season.
Darley left Disney and directed a variety of TV shows in a variety of genres, from comedies to variety shows to dramas. He created his own sci-fi animated series, Space Angel (1962) in 1962. When that show went off the air he returned to episodic TV series, and also branched out into directing TV commercials. In the 1970s he directed several series for Sid Krofft and Marty Krofft. His son Chris Darley is also a television director.
