Screen Arts 18/8

Saturday Morning Cartoons (Woohoo!)

In the beginning animation was created and viewed in the cinemas. It was looked down on as the poor version of film and not considered as good. 1915's Felix the Cat was the first animation to establish a lucrative line of merchandise. Walt Disney is credited with streamlining the animating process using model sheets and cel animation techniques to enable assembly line style animating. This meant the quality of the animations became more realistic and they could focus on the narrative.

The first public tv showing was 1926 in the UK and the first non-experimental broadcast in NZ was 1960. The Paramount Decision in 1948 which prevented studios from owning distribution centres/theaters opened the way for smaller studios to show in the cinema. The lawsuit was brought in 1928 but it took until 1948 for the major 10 corporations to be found guilty. As a side effect of losing the extra money, the big film studios made cuts to their animation sectors. 

!950s animation Crusader Rabbit was animated so that the characters only moved once every 4 seconds to reduce costs. This meant they stayed in static poses for most of the animation. Off the back of Crusader Rabbit, creator Jay Ward went on to make Rocky and Bullwinkle, Fractured Fairy Tales and Dudly-Do Right.

Saturday morning programming consisted of a live host and a studio audience full of kids listening to sponsor product ads inbetween short animation cartoons. One example of this was Acrobat Ranch. Due to film studios not producing animated shorts and theatres not showing them, TV companies started to buy up all the old cartoon libraries. Paramount sold 1800 shorts in 1955 for $3.6mill, CBS bought Terrytoons for $5mill. Mighty Mouse Playhouse began airing in 1955 from CBS.

MGM was a studio in charge of creating animated shorts to accompany feature films from 1937. William Hanna and Joseph Barbera were two animators working for MGM when they created Tom and Jerry. They were so popular that Jerry appeared with Gene Kelly in Anchors Aweigh(1945). While they started with a budget of $35k-$45k per 5min short, as soon as they created their own production company they had to adjust to only having $2700 per 5min short. To meet the low budget, they stuck to limited animation which consisted of nothing complex, repeated movement cycles, few expressions and simple graphic forms. A lot of the characters had wide collars to enable efficient mouth and head animating. They were also one of the first to "bookend" old animations with new, to cut costs. The Huckleberry Hound Show was the first half hour animated series to air without a host. The shows were created in colour, anticipating the tvs switching to colour in the future. 

Closer to my childhood was The Flintstones and the Jetsons, both are based on the 1950s sitcom nuclear family with a conservative dad, stay-at-home mum and obliging kids. HB are the creators of Yogi Bear and action-adventures cartoons The Fantastic Four and Scooby-Doo. Pierre Culliford created The Smurfs for HB in the 1980s with a total of 256 episodes produced between 1981-1990, only ending because NBC phased out saturday morning cartoon shows.

Action for Childrens Television

ACT was founded by Peggy Charren in 1968 to ensure diversity and quality control in tv programming that targeted kids and teenagers, and remove commercial abuse. ACT demanded that program length commercials get removed, and studios add educational content to their broadcasts.

Filmation characters would break the fourth wall at the end of the animation to speak a moral message linked to the episode the children had just watched, this was to satisfy the ACT requirement for educational content. Well known series were He-Man, She-Ra and DC Justice League. Ted Turner from CNN wanted a 24hr cartoon network so he bought the entire HB library, combined it with MGM's library and launched the Cartoon Network in 1992. 2014 was the first moment in over 50yrs that there was no saturday morning cartoons on US tv. ACT is credited with dumbing down cartoons from the 1960s, which helped drive the animations to cable tv as it didnt have the same educational requirement restrictions placed on it.