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Understanding the Early Television Cartoon

by

Tyler Solon Williams

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy

degree in Communication Studies in the

Graduate College of

The University of Iowa

May 2021

Thesis Committee: Timothy Havens, Thesis Supervisor

Thomas Lamarre, Thesis Supervisor

Kembrew McLeod

Christopher Goetz

Laura Rigal

Copyright by

TYLER SOLON WILLIAMS

2021

All Rights Reserved

To Pablo and Emma

ii

“An analysis of the simple surface manifestations of an epoch can contribute more to

determining its place in the historical process than judgments of the epoch about itself. … The

underlying meaning of an epoch and its less obvious pulsations illuminate one another

reciprocally.”

Siegfried Kracauer

“The Mass Ornament”

Frankfurter Zeitung, 1927

iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I have worked on my research on the television cartoon in different forms for 12 years.

I’ve reached this point through connecting with many people, in different kinds of roles. I’ve

surely forgotten to include some, but I wish to graciously acknowledge all. Thank you.

Working together with a graduate writing peer has been the central factor that enabled me

to complete this dissertation. I first worked with Pablo Rodríguez Balbontín, while he was

writing his dissertation in Spanish Literature; I thought up many of these ideas in our long phone

conversations. Working with Emma Rifai during her dissertation writing in Religious Studies

proved to be the accountability I needed to finally sit down at my computer to type up my ideas

in these words. I have been privileged to work closely with these peers. And, finding time to

hang out has kept me sane.

I thank my dissertation advisors, who have overseen my research and writing, provided

important feedback, and kept me on track. I began working with John Durham Peters during my

first year at the University of Iowa. I learned much of what I know about media theory in the

process, and teaching his undergraduate Core Concepts in Communication Studies course with

him served as the equivalent of a wonderfully challenging graduate course. Adding Tim Havens

as co-advisor helped me to bring my thinking down to earth, better understand the medium of

television, and teach my own cultural history of broadcasting course. In the middle of my

doctoral studies, Tom Lamarre stepped in for John, and has since guided my thinking about

animation in large and small ways. My other committee members have each integrally

contributed to this research. Kembrew McLeod has been a frequent sounding board on research,

iv

method, and administration since before I arrived in Iowa City, and I was lucky to first teach

popular music with him. I learned about studying the rich history of the United States through

dialoguing with Lauren Rabinovitz, and more recently Laura Rigal. Meeting Christopher Goetz,

a video game scholar, added the final secret ingredient my research needed to achieve relevance

to other objects of study.

I might not be where I am today had I not learned from many professors I had the

privilege to study with in coursework during my higher education. During my undergraduate

years at Reed College, I learned in rigorous seminars with Mark Hinchliff, Paul Manning,

Christine Mueller, and Pete Rock. I found thoroughly inspiring teachers at the University of

Minnesota, whom helped me change fields: Penny Edgell, Qadri Ismail, and Michelle Lekas.

Brian Southwell first suggested that I apply for an MA. At the University of Amsterdam during

my Master’s, I had the chance to meet and study with Sudeep Dasgupta and Charles Forceville.

After I transferred to New York University, I was lucky to be able to take graduate courses with

Alexander Galloway, Lisa Gitelman, Nicholas Mirzoeff, and Erica Robles-Anderson. During my

doctoral tenure at the University of Iowa, I took excellent courses with Corey Creekmur and

Kyle Stine. David Hingtsman kindly prodded me to apply for funding and move towards the end

of this project. A number of other Iowa professors have helped me learn important professional

skills, including Steve Duck, Naomi Greyser, Jenna Supp-Montgomerie, Erica Prussing, and Rita

Zajacz.

The turning point in my research was my taking the initiative to contact professional

animators and animation scholars in Los Angeles. During a lull in California between natural

disasters and a global pandemic, I had inspiring conversations with the following people,

including some outside of the area after my trip. While not everyone is quoted in the text, all

v

were invaluable to improving my understanding of animation. Jerry Beck, Tony Benedict, Spike

Brandt, Tony Cervone, Harvey Deneroff, Sean Derek, Jerry Eisenberg, Maureen Furniss,

Thomas Herpich, Willie Ito, Don Jurwich, Marsha Kinder, Tom Klein, Hye Jin Lee, Curtis

Lelash, Glenn Leopold, Mike Mallory, Chris McDonnell, Floyd Norman, Iraj Paran, Kevin

Sandler, Ellen Seiter, Jeff Shuter, Linda Simensky, Tom Sito, Carol Stabile, and Carlin Wing. As

I was beginning to write, I contacted a number of other animation scholars to test out my early

thinking; my project is better for having received their feedback. Suzanne Buchan, Alan

Cholodenko, Karl Cohen, Nichola Dobson, Eric Herhuth, Tim Jones, Esther Leslie, Lev

Manovich, Misha Mihailova, and Dan Torre. I can’t conclude this long list without mentioning

colleagues who helped me connect with these experts in the first place, including Adam Dix,

Gavin Feller, Fred Gardner, Timothy Jones, Jesse M. Kowalski, and Andrew Myers.

After I slowly learned how to write a grant applications, I was pleased to find that I could

receive funding for my research. Receiving a Dissertation Award from my department of

Communication Studies at the University of Iowa helped me get moving with my research.

Receiving a Summer Fellowship from the University of Iowa Graduate College, with assistance

by Shelly Campo, helped me complete this research. In dry spells, I have relied upon individual

financial contributions from family friends. I would not have been able to complete this large

project without support from Terence Buie, Bud Bloch, Sharon Carpenter, Kathy Gundel, Diane

and Michael Lookman, Jim Quigley and Carol Stewart, and John and Karla Williams. My

department administrative staff have helped me figure out how to step my way through my

degree. My research benefited greatly from the resources of the University of Iowa’s Main

Library. My friend on the inside Donald Baxter greased the wheels of the Service Desk for me,

as well as served as something of a general fixer for my life; most significantly, he volunteered

vi

to completely assemble a new bicycle he helped me buy online, when my existing 60-year-old

bicycle began to break down. The Interlibrary Loan Office somehow miraculously worked

behind the scene to provide me with every obscure book and article I requested, providing the

fuel for this research.

Meeting amazing colleagues has made my professional life livable. I have more

colleagues to acknowledge than I probably should include in one place, but I can’t imagine my

academic life without Josie Torres Barth, Jane Batkin, Lev Cantoral, Peter Chanthanakone,

Yanyun Chen, Ethan Chetkov, Joonseok Choi, Christopher Clough-Hunter, Malcolm Cook, Jon

Crylen, EmmaJane Gabriele, Dan Hartley, Eric Herhuth, Matthew Houdek, Harriette Kevill-

Davies, Brandon McCasland, Alan Nguyen, Phillip Ricks, Kevin Sandler, Emily Saidel, Kyle

Stine, Lin Sun, John Witte, Crystal Wotipka, and Nicholas Yanes. I’ve also been grateful to give

and receive support from Leah Allen, Peter Balestrieri, Lance Bennett, Mary Blackwood, Emily

Buehler, Ian Faith, Andrea Ferguson, Jean Florman, Peder Goodman, Aurora Heller, Brian

Kaldenberg, Volha Kananovich, Bailey Kelly, Lisa Kelly, Braden Krien, Al Martin, Megan

Matthews, Ben Morton, Wanda Osborn, Ericka Raber, Annika Ross, Patrick Sullivan, Mary

Taylor, Axel Volmar, Cynthia Wang, Chang Min Yu, and Melissa Zimdars.

At times in graduate school, working into the middle of the night, it can feel like you

have no friends. I cope by reminding myself that I just haven’t been living in the same place as

my friends. Just knowing that you are out there helps me find peace of mind in hard times like

these. Thinking of you, Tim Baglio, Alisha Baines, Harris Bin Munawar, Ellen Barton, Anna

Callner, Beatrice Choi, Tanya Cornejo, Jomil Ebro, Greg Gioia, Elaine Gold, Caitlin Hamilton,

Jeff Harrison, Jill Holaday, Paul Ingram, Amy Jordan, Alex Koch, Yana Landowne, Tom

Landry, Jimena Lara, Zach Mallahan, George McCargar, Marguerite Miller, Becky O’Day,

vii

Tessa Rayburn, Camille Reyes, Moneer Rifai, Jacqueline Ristola, Nathaniel Unrath, Susan Vdh,

Anja Waleson, and Anna Wisdom.

Lastly, my family. I thank you for sticking with me, through thick and thin. Richard,

Fran, J. Scott, Charlotte, Alan, Brian, Ying, James, and Mina. (I will get a real job soon.)

viii

ABSTRACT

The television cartoon emerged in the postwar United States when animation mediated

television and television simplified animation. This vibrant media form has long since outgrown

comparisons with cinema animation, for today its influence is everywhere. Traditional artistic

animation may be a technique particular to cinema, I suggest. What remained after the radical

reforms needed to adapt to television, the first home screen-based electronic medium, was a new

kind of designed cartoon.

Part 1 begins by uncovering media precedents that made this possible, including print

cartoons and radio comedy. The creators of early television cartoons trained at early cinema

cartoon studios. In the 1940s, Disney’s elaborate animation process caused a counter-reaction,

and newer studios chose to limit animation. Jay Ward and Alex Anderson first succeeded in

producing a “comic strip of television” in 1950. Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera then undertook a

decades-long enterprise of sending simple but entertaining characters out to viewers.

This dissertation builds upon the tentative consensus of earlier accounts to proposes a

theoretical model to explain the early television cartoon as a media form through seven familiar

principles, largely in Part 2. These include rationalization, story, character, style, sound, and

performance. This is how animation survived in new forms, and the industry transformed. In the

end, the graphical interfaces of early personal computers and video games borrowed the

economical model of limited animation, building a foundation for future digital media devices.

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PUBLIC ABSTRACT

When television and animation intersected in the postwar United States, television was

mediated and animation simplified. Instead of comparing it to cinema animation, this dissertation

takes the early television cartoon seriously on its own terms. I propose here a theoretical model

explaining it through seven familiar principles, which interpret it as a format specific to its

medium. Cinema animation could not be made for television; the solution was to simplify it into

a newer kind of cartoon. The relatable characters viewers watched in entertaining stories were

less like the animation of the golden age, and more like the simple cartoons of early cinema

animation.

Part 1 here is a cartoon history different from earlier accounts of animation, beginning

with print cartoons and proceeding through radio comedy. Walt Disney achieved art in his

animated feature films, but a younger generation of artists rejected his elaborate production

methods in favor of sparer modern designs. Jay Ward and Hanna-Barbera learned to make

cartoons for television by stylizing them visually and adding rich soundtracks. The result was a

kind of illustrated radio.

Part 2 analyzes the early television cartoon as a media form, presenting a model of how

to understand its rationalization, story, character, style, sound, and performance. Digital devices

would communicate with users through adopting these same techniques. For this newer form of

media transformed the industry, and kept animation alive into the digital era.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES ..................................................................................................................... xiii

PREFACE .................................................................................................................................... xvi

INTRODUCTION WHAT IS THE EARLY TELEVISION CARTOON? ....................................1

PART 1 THE EARLY TELEVISION CARTOON IN CONTEXT ..............................................27

PART 1 INTRODUCTION .....................................................................................................28

CHAPTER 1 THE SPECIFICITY OF THE CARTOON FORMAT ON EARLY

TELEVISION ..........................................................................................................................32

1.1 Cinema and Television as Media ................................................................................ 35

1.2 Animation and Cartoon as Formats ............................................................................ 39

CHAPTER 2 MEDIA PRECEDENTS: PRINT CARTOONS, EARLY CINEMA

CARTOONS, AND RADIO COMEDY .................................................................................56

2.1 Early Print Cartoons .................................................................................................... 58

2.2 Early Cinema Cartoons ............................................................................................... 64

2.3 Radio Comedy ............................................................................................................ 81

CHAPTER 3 CINEMA ANIMATION AND ITS LIMITATION ..........................................89

3.1 Golden Age (Cinema) Animation ............................................................................... 90

3.2 “Limited Animation” Emerges ................................................................................. 102

CHAPTER 4 TELEVISION’S NEW CARTOON: WARD-ANDERSON AND HANNA-

BARBERA .............................................................................................................................120

4.1 The Ward-Anderson Studio ...................................................................................... 121

4.2 The Early Hanna-Barbera Studio .............................................................................. 129

CHAPTER 5 THE PRINCIPLE OF CARTOON: THE EARLY TELEVISION

CARTOON AS ILLUSTRATED RADIO ............................................................................166

5.1 The Historical Coupling of Animation and Television............................................. 167

5.2 Lack of Fit between Disney’s Principles and Television.......................................... 171

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5.3 Saturday Morning Cartoons and the Animation Renaissance .................................. 174

5.4 Technological and Ontological Implications ............................................................ 183

5.5 The Early Television Cartoon as Illustrated Radio ................................................... 188

PART 1 CONCLUSION........................................................................................................200

PART 2 PRINCIPLES OF THE EARLY TELEVISION CARTOON .......................................203

PART 2 INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................204

CHAPTER 6 THE PRINCIPLE OF RATIONALIZATION: THE LIMITATION AND

EXTENSION OF ANIMATION ...........................................................................................212

6.1 The Rationalization of Cartoon Production .............................................................. 215

6.2 Limitation Strategies: Restricting Character Animation........................................... 230

6.3 Extension Strategies: Expanding the Cartoon to Fill Time ...................................... 238

CHAPTER 7 THE PRINCIPLE OF STORY: CONTEXT AND DRIVE ............................253

7.1 Cartoon Story and Premise ....................................................................................... 256

7.2 The Television Cartoon’s (His)Story ........................................................................ 259

CHAPTER 8 THE PRINCIPLE OF CHARACTER: PERSONALITY VOICE ..................267

8.1 Cartoon Character ..................................................................................................... 269

8.2 The Cartoon Story World.......................................................................................... 276

8.3 Cartoon Vocal Acting History .................................................................................. 278

8.4 Stereotypes and Archetypes ...................................................................................... 285

8.5 Cartoon Voices.......................................................................................................... 289

CHAPTER 9 THE PRINCIPLE OF STYLE: DESIGN AND CARICATURE ....................297

9.1 Kinds of Cartoon Style.............................................................................................. 299

9.2 Cartoon Caricature .................................................................................................... 303

9.3 The Style of Graphic Animated Cartoons ................................................................. 312

CHAPTER 10 THE PRINCIPLE OF SOUND: PRIORITY AND STRUCTURE ...............327

10.1 The Sound of the Early Television Cartoon ........................................................... 328

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10.2 Sound Effects in Cinema and Early Television ...................................................... 334

10.3 Music in the Cinema Cartoon ................................................................................. 345

10.4 Music in the Early Television Cartoon ................................................................... 358

CHAPTER 11 THE PRINCIPLE OF PERFORMANCE: STAGING AND TIMING .........369

11.1 Staging and Timing as Cartoon Performance ......................................................... 371

11.2 Performance History ............................................................................................... 378

11.3 Staging and Timing the Early Television Cartoon ................................................. 384

11.4 Variety amidst Repetition ....................................................................................... 390

PART 2 CONCLUSION........................................................................................................396

CONCLUSION THE MEDIA LEGACY OF THE EARLY TELEVISION CARTOON ..........405

BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................................432

CHRONOLOGY..........................................................................................................................446

GLOSSARY ................................................................................................................................451

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1. Hanna-Barbera characters from the Yogi Bear segment of the Huckleberry Hound

Show, printed on a refrigerator magnet sold at Jellystone Park (now on author’s refrigerator) ... 15

Figure 2. “Animation” according to Chuck Jones ........................................................................ 41

Figure 3. “‘Modern’ animation” according to Chuck Jones ......................................................... 42

Figure 4. Some of Leonardo da Vinci’s “grotesques.” Possibly earliest known caricature

drawing studies, circa 1490s ......................................................................................................... 60

Figure 5. Charles-Émile Reynaud’s Pauvre Pierrot (1892), a “luminous pantomime” that

tells a story about relatable human characters. The figure in the 9th

image is entering through

a door ............................................................................................................................................ 67

Figure 6. Frame from Winsor McCay’s Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), a moment of tromp l’oeil

illusion when the artist steps into the film .................................................................................... 70

Figure 7. Frame from John R. Bray’s early film Col. Heeza Liar’s African Hunt (1914) ........... 72

Figure 8. Frames from Terrytoons’ 1931 cartoon Canadian Capers, indicating the artist who

animated each, including future Disney animators Art Babbitt and Bill Tytla ............................ 74

Figure 9. The cast of The Jack Benny Show performing on stage before a live audience, 1939 .. 87

Figure 10. Author’s interpretation of the 12 Disney principles, divided between general

approaches for making animation entertainment and specific techniques about how to

animate characters ......................................................................................................................... 94

Figure 11. Mickey Mouse first meets Minnie, in Steamboat Willie (1928) ................................. 97

Figure 12. Snow White and the Witch, in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Disney, 1937) .... 99

Figure 13. Frames from Chuck Jones’ 1942 Merrie Melodies short The Dover Boys ............... 113

Figure 14. Frames illustrating the stylization of UPA’s Gerald McBoing Boing ....................... 116

Figure 15. Frames from the pilot episode of Anderson and Ward’s Crusader Rabbit ............... 126

Figure 16. Mike Kazaleh’s cover art for 1990 VHS release of Colonel Bleep. The main

characters, at top, respectively represent the present, past, and future ....................................... 137

Figure 17. Photo of the initial staff of H-B Enterprises (later Hanna-Barbera) on its opening

day. George Sidney poses between Joe Barbera and Bill Hanna ............................................... 138

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Figure 18. Frames from the first two Ruff and Reddy segments. Photographed in color, the

show ran in black and white........................................................................................................ 142

Figure 19. Frames showing Huckleberry Hound’s antics in an early episode of Hanna-

Barbera’s Huckleberry Hound Show .......................................................................................... 148

Figure 20. Jonny Quest collector’s cel, showing the show’s new straight adventure aesthetic.

The slight doubling shows that the foreground is a celluloid layer, separate from the

background .................................................................................................................................. 151

Figure 21. Tony Benedict depicts his reaction to the H-B studio’s uninspiring new direction .. 154

Figure 22. Caricature “gag” drawings of Joe Barbera and Bill Hanna’s personalities at the

studio, on display to a journalist, by Tony Benedict ................................................................... 164

Figure 23. A flat, two-dimensional drawing of Mickey Mouse and a “solid,” three-

dimensional drawing of Mickey ................................................................................................. 174

Figure 24. Bart Simpsons’ “genuine Itchy & Scratchy animation cel” ...................................... 188

Figure 25. A now-rare 1939 Westinghouse radio, including added television screen ............... 190

Figure 26. 1948 ad for the a National radio/television, lacking the words “radio” or

“television” ................................................................................................................................. 191

Figure 27. A studio exposure sheet from the days of cel animation. Instructions at center top

show that the character’s body and tail will remain still, while their hands and eyes move ...... 247

Figure 28. The eponymous hero of Cambria Production’s series Clutch Cargo (1959-1960),

with large jaw and live-action human lips .................................................................................. 251

Figure 29. Common cartoon mouth shapes for animating character speech, circa 1960s .......... 293

Figure 30. Hanna-Barbera model sheet showing how to draw Fred Flintstone’s mouth shapes

for each speech sound ................................................................................................................. 294

Figure 31. Scott McCloud’s understanding of the cartoon image as “amplification through

simplification”............................................................................................................................. 305

Figure 32. Two cartoon heads without caricature exaggeration ................................................. 308

Figure 33. A cartoon face modeled for caricature, with its five elements marked ..................... 309

Figure 34. Three models of caricatured cartoon faces with different kinds of visual

relationships ................................................................................................................................ 310

Figure 35. Caricature of actor Robert Pattinson, male lead in the Twilight film series .............. 311

Figure 36. Caricature of actress Kristen Stewart, female lead in the Twilight film series .......... 311

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Figure 37. The change in design aesthetic from Earl Hurd’s Bobby Bumps and Fido (1916) to

Walter Lantz’s Dinky Doodle and Weakheart (1925); the eyes have it ..................................... 314

Figure 38. “Marky Maypo,” reluctant child spokescharacter created and animated by John

Hubley, for Maypo brand maple-flavored oatmeal ..................................................................... 317

Figure 39. A realist way of drawing an anthropomorphic bear, a loose resemblance to

Harman-Ising’s Barney Bear. And a simplified, caricatured way to draw an anthropomorphic

“funny animal” bear, a spot-on drawing of Hanna-Barbera’s Yogi Bear ................................... 319

Figure 40. Early Fred Flintstone model sheet by Ed Benedict (“EB” written in lower-right

corner). Grid in upper left analyzes the design of Fred’s face .................................................... 322

Figure 41. Ed Benedict’s notes on his designs of Fred Flintstone, giving drawing instructions

to animators ................................................................................................................................. 323

Figure 42. Richard Williams’ caricature of his encounter with great animator Grim Natwick,

who explains the importance of timing and spacing in animation.............................................. 374

Figure 43. Illustration by Richard Williams demonstrating animation timing ........................... 375

Figure 44. Illustration by Richard Williams showing animation spacing .................................. 376

Figure 45. Illustration by Richard Williams showing relationship of animation spacing and

timing .......................................................................................................................................... 377

Figure 46. Atari Space Invaders game freeze frame and box art. The fantastic box art

interprets the cryptic images on screen for the player ................................................................ 417

Figure 47. Nintendo Super Mario Bros. game freeze frame and box art, among the earliest

video games consistently resembling an animated cartoon ........................................................ 419

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PREFACE

Who cares about cartoons? Any academic scholar might ask this question under their

breath when I to tell them what I study. While I haven’t encountered this one much, cinema

animation historian Donald Crafton was clearly asked this question early in his career in the

1980s. In the preface beginning his second book, he responds to such skeptics, explaining the

broader significance of animated cartoons as media.

[T]he chronological development of cartoons and comics and the causes and

ramifications of that development have seldom been the subject of academic discourse—

if we bother to think about it at all… Yet, like all institutions, these media are … deeply

embedded in the thicket of chronological, social, textual, artistic, psychological,

ideological and technological tangles that make up the unexplored underbrush of modern

culture.1

The television animation studio most central to this dissertation, Hanna-Barbera, now seems little

more than a trifle to most scholars who study animation, television, or the United States.

However, for reasons that will become clear, every television cartoon has by necessity and

choice followed the production system and textual models established in the earliest television

cartoons. On one hand, I admit that the last Hanna-Barbera cartoon I found entertaining viewing

in my everyday life was The Smurfs, around 1984, when I was four years old. Nevertheless, on

the other hand, I began studying the television cartoon to study The Simpsons, a television

1 Crafton, Emile Cohl, Caricature, and Film. I cite many sources in this dissertation. But, I will admit up

front that I have not managed to track down the exact page numbers for even the majority of them. I have

relied to a great extent on Google’s search tools. As a reader, if you need to find a page number, you may

consider using a similar digital method.

xvii

cartoon which profoundly shaped my life. That revolutionary show initially patterned itself on

Hanna-Barbera’s Flintstones, and on the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons.2

In the 1950s, the early television cartoon kept the Hollywood animation industry from

dying in a moment of crisis, when television was making inroads in houses across America.3 Just

two upstart studios were founded to attempt to adapt animation for television. This dissertation is

devoted to exploring how the success of their cartoons reshaped animation, television, the U.S.,

and media. Television effectively carried animation forward in history until the early years of

digital media in the 1980s, I believe, when the new technology adopted the simplified animation

techniques of earlier television cartoons.

I am an unlikely person to be writing this big dissertation on the television cartoon. The

idea of going to graduate school only occurred to me five years after college, while trying other

things. I studied philosophy at Reed College. When I graduated in 2002, I found a very complex

2 Simpsons creator Matt Groening has said in several interviews how much he enjoyed watching the

Rocky and Bullwinkle shows.

I was fascinated by the minimal animation, and the sloppiness, that it could be so good. I thought

about it a lot and came to the realization the animation doesn’t matter that much. It’s good

writing, good voices, good music that made Rocky and Bullwinkle so much fun to watch. Louis

Chunovic, The Rocky and Bullwinkle Book, Bantam Books, 1996, 24-27.

Somewhere else, I recall reading an interview in which Groening said that whenever The Flintstones was

on, he was watching it. But, he also said that he always felt it could be better than it was. The Simpsons

was initially pitched to the Fox network as a “Flintstones for the ‘90s.” The early seasons of The

Simpsons show many similarities with The Flintstones. Perhaps most prominently, in the opening

sequence of both shows, the father rushes home from work, and the sequence ends with them turning on

the television. Pixar animation director Brad Bird worked on the first eight seasons of The Simpsons. In

an oral history about the show, Bird has explained how Fox came around to the show’s unconventional

approach to comedy.

[N]obody had really done a show like that—to some extent Rocky & Bullwinkle and The

Flintstones. The idea of doing an animated show for adults in prime time was considered really

off-the-wall at the time. And because Fox was a new network, they were willing to try that. John

Ortved, The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History, Faber & Faber, 2009, 75.

I see The Simpsons as a hybrid of the deeply funny writing of Rocky and Bullwinkle, the narrative

premise of The Flintstones, and something like the visual style of The Smurfs. 3 Animation historian Michael Barrier has made this point to me, by email. “You’re not the only person

who believes that Hanna-Barbera, for all its shortcomings, was vital to the rebirth of animation.” Email

correspondence, July 7, 2018.

xviii

world, in turmoil after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. I became fascinated with the

way President George W. Bush and his political strategist Karl Rove manipulated public opinion

through the media.4 After largely working temporary jobs, in 2008 moved a world away, to

Amsterdam, to start my Master’s degree in media and cultural studies in continental Europe. But,

I missed the popular culture of my home country.

At the University of Amsterdam, I met my professor Charles Forceville, and asked him

about his research. “Oh—I study comics, animation, video games—that kind of stuff.” I hadn’t

yet met anyone who studied subjects like this, which American scholars at the time looked down

on. Homesick, I started writing about a friendly subject, a television cartoon I had watched for

nearly 20 years, The Simpsons. Professor Forceville encouraged me. Had I started studying

media in the United States, I might have done something completely different. I realized only

later that Amsterdam is at the northern end of a vibrant comics culture, stretching south into

France. “European scholars have long studied the cartoon. They consider it a serious reflection of

society’s inner vision,” American cartoonist Randall P. Harrison has written. “They see [the

cartoon] as a vital form of art and communication which, in turn, shapes a society’s

perceptions.”5

I carried my object with me when I transferred to study at New York University to finish

my Master’s. I did the same when I moved to study at the University of Iowa, where I am finally

now completing my PhD. Perhaps fortunately, I was never able to figure out how to write about

The Simpsons. After I passed my comprehensive exams at Iowa, my two advisors, Tim Havens

and John Durham Peters, sat down with me to talk about my upcoming research. If I was going

to write about The Simpsons for my dissertation, they asked, what did I have to add to what had

4 People called Rove “Bush’s brain.”

5 Harrison, The Cartoon - Communication to the Quick.

xix

already been written about it? Jonathan Gray had already written a good book, called Watching

With The Simpsons. I was unable to give a coherent answer. They basically responded by saying,

“What else have you got?” Well, I said … I had written a paper about The Flintstones for Susan

Murray at New York University, called “The Flintstones and the Invention of the Cartoon

Sitcom”. “That sounds promising,” Tim and John said. “Say more.” Answering this prompt led

me from studying the contemporary television cartoon back in history to study the early

television cartoon, decades before what I had planned to write about. At the time, it seemed less

interesting. But, I’ve come to think that this early history is actually more interesting, because the

identity of the television cartoon was worked out early. While the television cartoon has changed

dramatically in how it is written, its basic visual and aural techniques are actually quite similar to

its roots.

It took me three and a half years after that point before I was able to begin writing this

dissertation in earnest. When I did start writing, I wrote a lot, producing the equivalent of two

dissertations, my Part 1 and Part 2. What took me so long? people like my family members have

asked me. Well, when I started this research project in 2015, there were only a handful of

academic and popular books that took the television cartoon seriously as a legitimate object of

study. Consequently, I needed to do a great amount of basic research. Given the lack of primary

historical sources, in 2017, I traveled to Los Angeles and interviewed about 30 animation

scholars and practitioners. These professionals helped me conceptualize this project in a more

interesting way, studying the television cartoon as an object different from cinema animation. I

have taken a magpie approach to sources, gathering whatever is available, and evaluating

information myself as I go along. In most cases this has been necessary. Nearly as a rule,

academics have avoided taking this object seriously. Instead, most have sniped it when

xx

necessary, to safely protect the beauty of cinema animation from mixing with the entertainment

of the television cartoon. Still, there are no academic journal articles I know of that study the

television cartoon broadly, by analyzing more than two different programs.6 Consequently, this

dissertation represents a great mixture of popular and academic sources, what Kenneth Cmiel

and John Durham Peters call “promiscuous knowledge.”7

By the time I finally began writing consistently, in the fall of 2019, I found that there are

a small number of specific attributes that many people have mentioned as defining what the

television cartoon is, as a form of media relatively different from cinema animation. I realized

that each of these aspects is important enough to theorize as defining qualities that shape what

this is, more than just incidental attributes. With unusual boldness, I decided to call these

principles, putting them theoretically and practically on par with the 12 principles typically used

to explain the Walt Disney studio’s cinema animation. I pieced together the six chapters

collected here as Part 2 by focusing a chapter on each of these aspects, approximately presenting

them in the order they occur in during the process of animation production: rationalization, story,

character, style, sound, and performance. Admittedly, the early television cartoon and cinema

6 Admittedly, there have been many journal articles published—they allege that television cartoons

probably cause violent and antisocial behavior in children. Norma Pecora and coauthors do the best job of

summarizing that differently oriented research, in Pecora, John P. Murray, and Ellen Ann Wartella (eds),

Children and Television: Fifty Years of Research, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2007. Luckily, this

fearful narrative has been dying down lately. Or, perhaps it has been shifting to newer frontiers of

children’s media. As of this writing in early 2021, academic and popular books taking the television

cartoon seriously are being published with more frequency. One of the best I know of is Jo Holz’ book

Kids’ TV Grows Up: The Path from Howdy Doody to SpongeBob, 2017. Holz does an admirable job of

detailing the social and cultural contexts which shaped children’s television. But, her discussion is

frequently a survey. She does not attend closely to many shows. For instance, she devotes only one

cursory sentence to what I think is among the most important early television cartoons. “The following

year, Hanna-Barbera followed up with the Huckleberry Hound Show, featuring another lovable animated

mutt.” 67. My account attends less to the cultural context, although this is important; my general focus is

to understand these early television cartoons on a deeper level as media texts. 7 Kenneth Cmiel and John Durham Peters, Promiscuous Knowledge: Information, Image, and Other

Truth Games in History, University of Chicago Press, 2020.

xxi

animation overlap greatly. But, I propose to distinguish these fairly strictly, as a way to better

highlight what is different about the television cartoon.

Writing these six chapters took a lot of time and effort, because each basically overviews

a completely different topic, with its own academic, professional, and popular literature. After

finishing this writing, I thought I had finished writing my dissertation. But, in trying to write the

introduction, I found it difficult to clearly explain these fairly general and abstract attributes

without more context. It seemed like I should write a first chapter to follow the introduction, to

more clearly propose a model or theory of the television cartoon, which could help make sense

of the later chapters.

I began that new chapter by talking about the specificity of the television cartoon as a

media form, and then fell into historical research on its precedents. I wrote my way back up to

the starting point of my history, focusing on the evolution of limited animation, and its transition

into the early years of television. I decided to make a new principle, “cartoon,” one including all

the other six principles. By the time I had this chapter finished and ready to send to my advisors

Tim Havens and Tom Lamarre, I found that it had become over 100 pages long. It became clear

that I treat this giant chapter as a collection of chapters; thus I now had a new Part 1.

Realistically, this dissertation may be too long for almost anyone to read completely. (If

you end up reading anywhere near that much, it would be nice to hear from you.) Part 1

establishes the broad context about this object, and Part 2 goes into specifics. But, Part 1 and Part

2 can be read separately. The chapters in Part 1 proceed in order, but the chapters in Part 2 could

be read separately. Ultimately, in the future, I may decide to publish the two parts as separate

books. The many footnotes are intended as conversational asides, delving a bit deeper where it is

interesting; these are not necessary for understanding the main text. The bibliography contains

xxii

the best sources I have found on the many topics I discuss; I believe each source is worthy of

seeking out in its own right. This is a doctoral dissertation, and the concepts get complex. I

italicize important terms; for each italicized word, there is an entry in the glossary at the end.

But, I have tried to make the text accessible to any reader. Despite some hair-pulling, I have

enjoyed the writing. Even if it involves some hair pulling for you, I hope you enjoy reading.

1

INTRODUCTION

WHAT IS THE EARLY TELEVISION CARTOON?

“TV or not TV” … for animators in the 1950s, that was the question: could cartoons be

made for television?1 Animation was then typified by Walt Disney’s theatrical full animation,

and it seemed impossible to make this for television. Just two initially small studios were formed

to attempt the feat. It is commonly said that television cartoon studios compromised to produce

limited animation, a production mode which rationalized and simplified the extravagant

production values of traditional cinema; but limited animation was already made in cinema.

What these young television cartoon studios did to adapt to the new medium was to combine

limited animation with planned animation, a necessarily strategic process of systematizing

animation production, to efficiently meet the stringent requirements of broadcasting. Many

animators refused to work in television, such as Warner Bros. animation director Chuck Jones,

who decried the new cartoons as some crude kind of “illustrated radio.” Taste judgements aside,

I believe Jones was right. To take him at his word means concluding that what was made for

television was actually not really animation, but instead a new media form of animation’s

simpler opposing twin, the cartoon.

Understanding the early television cartoon as a modern or contemporary media form is

the purpose of this dissertation. I see the cinema animation that preceded it, by contrast, as a

classical or traditional media form. These are relative terms, because animation and the cartoon

1 Beck, Animation Art, 178. Animation historian Michael Mallory poses this question in an essay with the

same title, about the transition of animation to television. He takes this phrasing from the first episode of

The Honeymooners (1955-1956), an early television urtext. Most famously, that series directly inspired

the Hanna-Barbera studio to create The Flintstones (1960-1966). This title is a reference to Hamlet’s

soliloquy, “To be, or not to be, that is the question”.

2

are always intertwined. While cinema animation and the television cartoon are typically thought

of as similar, I adopt these admittedly debatable terms to emphasize a fundamental break

between the two media. This was a profound shift from the golden age of animation, a

phenomenon of cinema, to the limited and planned animation taken up to make cartoons for

television. The moment of transition, from the traditional paradigm of animation as cinema to a

contemporary paradigm of cartoon as television, guides this inquiry throughout.

This admittedly fairly long discussion takes seriously the intersection of television as a

medium and the cartoon as a format. Chuck Jones saw television cartoons as aural, not visual.

Conflating the innovative early television cartoons with the Saturday morning cartoons which

commercialized the production model starting in 1966, Jones told an interviewer in 1969 that

“Saturday morning television is really what I call illustrated radio. It’s a radio script with a

minimum number of drawings in front of it … if you turn the picture off you can tell what’s

happening, because you hear it all.”2 To accept Chuck Jones’ concept of the television cartoon as

illustrated radio fundamentally characterizes it as something other than animation. Consequently,

the standard measure of the animation of cinema, Walt Disney’s 12 principles of animation, is

not sufficient to explain the cartoon of television. In the 1950s, animation mediated television,

and television streamlined animation, into a new kind of cartoon, with large and previously

unnoticed implications for future electronic media. To understand digital media generally today,

I propose that we need to understand the form animation took on the first electronic screen-based

medium, television.

Part 1 of this dissertation constructs a pre-history of the early television cartoon,

revealing a kind of alternative cartoon history of animation, an altogether different history that

2 Chuck Jones, “Witty Birds and Well-Drawn Cats,” interview by Joe Adamson, Maureen Furniss (ed)

Chuck Jones: Conversations, 2005.

3

should be understood separately from the established history of cinema animation. There I

propose that the television cartoon arose from a series of five historical antecedents, but most

specifically Paul Terry’s early cinema Terrytoons cartoon of the 1920s. Many seem to have

forgotten the time before Walt Disney’s defining interventions, which revolutionized the cartoon

into seemingly living animation, mostly in the 1930s, but I believe there are new insights to be

found in those early days. Part 2 of this dissertation proposes new formal principles for the early

television cartoon, ones that accord with the tentative but often unstated consensus about the

form that has held previously. There, I propose seven newer formal principles that I suggest

more explain the modern early television cartoon than classical cinema animation. The most

general is that I accept that the central life force of animation is its visual character movement,

but I suggest that animation is largely something particular to cinema. Contrarily, the television

cartoon lives most through its dynamic soundtrack, especially the vocal dialogue of characters,

the beginning of a cartoon lineage extending into the digital media of today.

Animation in the mid-1950s was in a state of unrest and peril. Many animation short

production studios were closing, but there was nowhere else to work in the field. The changes of

the postwar period in the United States of America were in full swing: television and the car

provided the means for young families in new houses to remain connected as many older big

cities were expanding into new suburbs. But television had no immediate answer for parents

trying to entertain their children. For the majority of the 1950s, the only cartoons anyone could

see on television were ancient shorts from the early days of black-and-white cinema animation,

like the ridiculous travails of Paul Terry’s Farmer Grey being outfoxed by the animals on his

4

rural farm.3 Fearing for their children’s impressionable minds, Parents’ Magazine & Better

Homemaking saw in these unknown relics of an earlier era “sadistic … violence,” a TV of

terror.4 Animators, like parents, recognized the need for new, contemporary cartoons made for

television. Yet creating animation for television was “a production model that had never been

done before, and which some believed could not be done,” as Hanna-Barbera character designer

Iwao Takamoto recalled later.5 To many, it seemed possible that animation might permanently

die, that the industry would disappear.

Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera were the team of animators who found a solution. They

founded their new Hanna-Barbera (H-B) studio specifically to bring a new generation of

contemporary cartoon characters to the small screen. Through a production system they called

planned animation, in 1958, Hanna-Barbera introduced the world to one Yogi Bear in The

Huckleberry Hound Show (1958-1961). The bear is a rascally but friendly creature ever hatching

a scheme to steal his next meal. Parents’ Magazine was pleased with H-B’s new show: “these

new cartoons emphasize character rather than sadistic action.” Visual action in general seemed to

frighten parents. This suited Hanna-Barbera fine, who realized that elaborate animation did not

“read” well on the new medium of television, anyway. Instead, they made the soundtrack the

focus, and made just enough animation to make the cartoons watchable.6 Indeed, it’s often not

noticed that, from its earliest days, the low definition of television’s black-and-white “small

screen” was counterbalanced by the high fidelity audio delivered by its built-in FM radio

3 Beckerman, Animation. In the original release of the cartoons beginning in 1915, Terry’s character was

called Farmer Al Falfa. Howard Beckerman cites Terry’s cartoons as being common on television in the

1950s, along with Messmer and Sullivan’s Felix the Cat and the Fleischer brothers’ Koko the Clown. 4 Ardmore, “TV Without Terror.”

5 Takamoto and Mallory, Iwao Takamoto.

6 Beckerman, Animation. Animator and historian Howard Beckerman describes limited animation as

“enough animation.”

5

technology.7 “The emphasis in cartoon movie making had been on action,” Bill Hanna explained.

“For television, … [w]e discovered that a character didn’t have to move, move, move to make a

point.”8 A keen critic tried to make sense of what was happening in these cartoons in a 1961

essay called “A Purple Dog, a Flying Squirrel, and the Art of Television”:

What we hear on television is more important than what we see on the small screen; in

television at its most effective, and in contrast to movies, what we hear is primary, what

we see secondary. But the visual images should underline, enforce, complement,

integrate with what we hear.9

By studying the lessons of past cartoons and animations, Hanna and Barbera constructed

a new kind of cartoon for television that was still satisfyingly entertaining. They did this by

shifting cinema’s visual fascination on movement to television’s aural highlighting of voice

acting and sound. In a sense, the soundtrack here performs an animating function like animation

did in cinema: both dynamic images and dynamic sound are life-giving forces. Ultimately,

Hanna and Barbera simply put relatable characters into funny stories. Ironically, Joe Barbera

made his own first cartoons at Paul Terry’s studio, where the very same primitive early cinema

cartoons that frightened postwar parents were made. Animation historian Thad Komorowski and

contemporary animation director Bob Jaques have recently created a conversational but

invaluable podcast called Cartoon Logic. Their third episode, on the Tom & Jerry cartoon “Tee

for Two,” has given me innumerable insights. Jaques describes Barbera’s early efforts as “wild,

7 Petri Launiainen, A Brief History of Everything Wireless: How Invisible Waves Have Changed the

World, 2018. 8 Ardmore, “TV Without Terror.”

9 Martin Williams, “A Purple Dog, a Flying Squirrel, and the Art of Television.” These emphases are

mine. There is no relation to the author.

6

inane cartoons in which nothing really happens.”10

Instead of imitating Disney and making what

people then thought of as animation, using sound, story, and character to dazzle the viewer with

beautiful animated visual movement, Barbera drew on the early-career cartooning craft he

learned working for Terry. By skimping on animation while strengthening character, story, and

sound, Hanna and Barbera crafted a new kind of cartoon for the new medium of television.

Barbera explained the studio’s back-to-basics approach to a journalist from Popular Mechanics

in 1960.

[W]e have returned to the basic idea of a cartoon. [W]e exaggerate a character’s

appearance and actions on purpose. We hunt for plausible story situations and we use

satire and absurdity and slapstick. … We use simple drawings without too much detail.

The result is fairly good comedy, good cartooning. … Today’s cartoons to a great extent

are the roughs of the past.11

Hanna-Barbera didn’t pretend to make visual art; they simply produced humble, funny cartoons

by economical means. In doing so, they popularized a new kind of cartoon, which began to

create an alternative kind of animation industry.

Not everyone was happy. Many animators apparently believed that Hanna-Barbera was

destroying the glorious legacy of cinema animation wholesale. Animation director Chuck Jones

spoke for many when he decried the cartoons of television as not animation, but something little

more than radio with pictures. While he pretended otherwise, Chuck Jones actually had a unique

insight into coining the term illustrated radio: in 1942, he was the one to produce the first

commercial Hollywood cartoon short made with limited animation. Over 50 years later, animator

John Kricfalusi (John K.), creator of The Ren & Stimpy Show (1991-1995), also spoke for many

10

Thad Komorowski and Bob Jaques, “Tom & Jerry (Tee for Two),” Cartoon Logic (podcast), September

29, 2019, https://cartoonlogic.libsyn.com/cartoon-logic-episode-03-tom-jerry-tee-for-two. 11

Stimson, “TV Hit From A Cartoon Factory.”

7

when he said, acknowledging that short, that limited animation “was all worked out by Chuck

Jones in The Dover Boys.”12

I propose to reclaim Chuck Jones’ epithet illustrated radio to help understand the early

television cartoon better. Jones’ term can be interpreted as a Marshall McLuhan-esque

provocation about media that reveals more about the specificity of the television cartoon than

Jones may have meant. Planned animation displaces its life from the visual to the aural. Naming

this sound-dependence shows that this is a technical difference of media. It is only because of the

visual bias of Western culture that sound is thought of as lesser than. The concept of illustrated

radio rebrands the television cartoon, I suggest, as a sound form supported by image.

Television’s limited/planned animation is better understood to be animation’s simpler sibling, the

cartoon. The cartoon image is inherently simple, but this reflects that it is not autonomous:

cartoons always pair the image with the semantic meanings of language, dialogue, or

commentary. Limited animation could also be thought of as a discontinuous flow, a stopping-

and-starting but ongoing stream of the early television cartoon.

The curators of a 2016 Norman Rockwell Museum exhibit celebrating Hanna-Barbera’s

oeuvre defended their cartoons by saying: “Illustration and cartoons are the people’s art”.13

This

recognition is certainly welcome, but I believe there is a better way to respond to criticism. I

12

John Kricfalusi, “‘My Intended Audience Was Everybody’: An Interview With Mighty Mouse: The

New Adventures’ John Kricfalusi,” interview by Harry McCracken, Animato 16, Spring 1988. John

Kricfalusi’s legacy has recently become irredeemably troubled, with revelations about inexcusable social

transgressions in his personal life. I respect the views of anyone who might take issue with my decision to

discuss John Kricfalusi in this dissertation. But, I believe his historical importance should be

acknowledged, to the degree it is relevant. Here, it is frequently relevant. As a daring and talented artist,

he has thought deeply about issues of importance to the television cartoon, including its early years. His

historical importance, and his personal failures, are explored in a recent film. Ron Cicero and Kimo

Easterwood (dirs..), Happy Happy Joy Joy: The Ren & Stimpy Story, Ladies & Gentlemen, Inc., 2020. I

sincerely support broader discussions about the historical legacy of sexist men. 13

Kowalski, Jesse M. “Hanna-Barbera: The Architects of Saturday Morning.” I believe this online article

fully reproduces the rare but expansive museum exhibition catalog, Jesse M. Kowalski et al. (eds.),

Hanna-Barbera: The Architects of Saturday Morning. There is useful information here, but also factual

errors.

8

actually agree with cinema animation scholars that feature film animation is the province of art.

What if the cartoon is understood not as bad art but as non-art?14

Cartoons seek not the aesthetic

ambiguity and complexity of art but an entertaining comic simplicity. This move means that the

age-old criticism that television cartoons are bad animation need not be accepted—because these

cartoons are not trying to be animation. While not devoid of art, by contrast, the cartoons of

television are better understood as a simpler and more functional craft of design. It’s probably

not a good move to try to justify television as art in the first place. It may be news to some that

famed French cinema critic André Bazin, when not out at the cinema in the 1950s, enjoyed

watching television at home. “TV is not an art,” he provocatively titled a section in an essay on

the medium. “[T]his technical problem seems to me rather fortunate. Because of it, TV is

condemned from the start to simplicity.”15

To be made for television, animation needed to revert

back to its simpler underlying cartoon form, which had been its identity until Walt Disney

upgraded it to animation in the late 1920s. I use the different terms planned animation and

limited animation in this dissertation somewhat interchangeably to refer to the television cartoon,

to highlight what is new about television. But generally, I try to use the term “the early television

cartoon” instead of either limited animation or planned animation; while all terms are commonly

used to refer to this object as a format of entertainment, I more frequently make the argument

that the television cartoon is not really animation.

The age of television after World War II was a defining moment in U.S. history, when

the US first began to emerge as a world power, in no small part because of its media and culture.

I believe that the era of television was also a defining period in the history of animation, broadly

conceived. Animation historians frequently romanticize Walt Disney’s cinema animation of the

14

Karl E. Fortess, “Comics As Non-Art,” David Manning White and Robert H. Abel (ed), The Funnies:

An American Idiom, The Free Press, 1963, 111-112. 15

Bazin, Andre Bazin’s New Media.

9

1930s and 1940s, but much of that important history occurred before the war, during the Great

Depression, a time now 80-90 years ago. It was a classical kind of moment: cinema animation

from the time has since become revered as an art form. I see the aesthetics of cinema animation

as classical or baroque in their elaborate complexity.16

By contrast, the simple style of the

television cartoon is modern and spare in its emphasis on a new and pervasive simplicity,

following in the footsteps of the modernist aesthetics of United Productions of America.17

Although admittedly, television is so much of an entertainment form that the concept of art or

aesthetics does not really apply to it. The foundation of all animation and is certainly important,

but to nostalgically privilege cinema animation to the exclusion of the new forms animation took

on television is, I think, is to mistakenly believe that the whole history of animation is to be

found in films.

For better and worse, animation after World War II in the United States became bound up

with the sociological shift of populations from cities to suburbs. When the television entered the

new single-family home, at a time of a boom of births, it brought animation with it, making this

the first time in history when children began to encounter cartoons in their own home from a

young age. The baby boomers were the first generation to grow up watching cartoons in their

own home, a paradigmatically modern phenomenon that has continued in successive generations.

Animation inker and painter Martha Sigall has reflected on how deeply television brought

16

The concept of prewar American cinema as classical is admittedly vexed; Miriam Hansen has

problematized it. Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses.” Nevertheless, I see this as a helpful

heuristic or rule of thumb for making a theoretical distinction. I see the complex aesthetics of golden age

cinema animation as similar to Angela Ndalianis’s concept of blockbuster cinema as having “neo-

baroque” aesthetics, in her book Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment, 2004. In a

sense, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was the Hollywood special effects blockbuster of its time, as

Tom Lamarre has suggested to me in conversation. 17

I take my usage in part from how Amid Amidi describes the style of the limited cinema animation of

the 1950s as “cartoon modern.” Amidi, Cartoon Modern. Thomas Lamarre adopts an account with similar

terminology in The Anime Machine.

10

cartoons into life at this time, thinking of her own children. “Television was a boon to the

cartoon business … for television used cartoons extensively. The children of that generation …

grew up watching not only the new cartoons being generated, but those of the early years as

well.”18

As the most visible and prolific television cartoon studio of the 20th

century, Hanna-

Barbera established what would become the media diet for the largest generation to that point,

arguably the first contemporary generation, the baby boomers. This generation grew up

inhabiting a new American Dream unlike any before it had experienced, and this cultural ideal

radiated around the world, in subsequent decades, in large part through television, radio, and

cinema that baby boomers created.

The meeting of animation and telecommunications in the early television cartoon in the

1950s postwar moment appears to be a historically new phenomenon in media culture. The

broadcast of cartoons made for the new medium of television recalled the time in the 1910s and

1920s when animation was first simplified for a new medium. While many have seen the

transition of cinema animation into the television cartoon as a loss, it can alternatively be seen as

an aesthetic refinement, or perhaps a new humility in simplicity. Animation changes the

perceptual basis of television, transforming it from the machine-generated vision of live action

video into a human-generated vision. Despite the rationalization inherent to the television

cartoon, its images were all created by human hands. The economization of animation on

television in the postwar era democratized production, opening animation up from the exclusive

terrain of the world’s most talented animators into an everyday media format accessible to mass

audiences on the first electronic, screen-based medium. Cinema animation is widely

18

Sigall, Living Life Inside the Lines. Sigall believes that the diverse diet of cartoons that television

served up trained the new generation to distinguish between good and bad cartoons. “It was from this

generation that we now have a multitude of cartoon buffs, historians, and others at all levels within the

industry. It is these people who regard the 1930s, the 1940s, and the 1950s as the ‘Golden Age of

Animation.’”

11

acknowledged to be an art of vision. By contrast, I claim that the early television cartoon, related

to radio, should be understood as a craft of sound. In another light, the admitted technical

“limiting” of animation on television can also be seen as an “unlimiting” of the potential of the

resulting cartoon in the new medium of television. Television cartoons challenge the founding

concept of television still dominant today, revealing that, while based around live broadcast,

television is actually mediated in many ways.

This dissertation is in part about the ways in which animation has changed television.

Before photography, humans were largely only able to create images by hand; such pictures are

what media theorist Vilém Flusser calls “traditional images.”19

The photographic camera was

among the first mechanical means of creating images, a precedent that would become dominant;

later photographic devices included the film camera and the television camera. Such mechanical

pictures are instead “technical images.”20

In the early 1950s, television had been an exclusively

live medium based in photographic live action images. In part by changing how content was

made for television, animation made television less live and more mediated.21

Animation and

related methods like motion graphics offered broadcasters flexible ways of controlling what was

shown and heard over their airwaves, by introducing non-photographic media. Since cartoons

are created as fictions by humans, and not captured from reality like a photograph, they can also

19

Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography. Vilém Flusser proposes this distinction here. He later

continued this line of thinking by delving deeper into electronic images, in Flusser, Into the Universe of

Technical Images. 20

Flusser, Photography; Flusser, Technical Images. 21

Laughton, TV Graphics. By the mid-1960s, motion graphics designer Roy Laughton realized that

making cartoon commercials fundamentally changed the nature and practice of his work. He wrote,

As time went by the demand for cartoon style commercials decreased but the experience gained

in the making of these films for television effected a modis operandi for graphic designers who

had little or no previous knowledge of full scale animation.

12

be called counterfactual.22

In fact, there is no inherent relationship between animation and the

physical world, only a symbolic one. Animation and cartoon recreate the world in caricatural

terms legible to humans, a process dependent on human perception and norms of

communication. Animation is a fundamentally personal way for humans to communicate with

other humans; hand-rendered images are immediately comprehensible to any human, even

somehow to young infants. By contrast, technical images progressed from analog photography,

based in single image impressions on paper, to the data arrays of digital “photography,” which is

no longer stored as an image but as data. People can’t turn away from cartoons, but these mean

nothing to computers, because computers are not even inherently oriented around the human

senses.23

Humans needed photographs and live action video as ways to capture reality. Then we

needed cartoons and animation as a way to reinvent reality. Without animation, television might

simply be a crude, helpless system of video monitors, lacking the ability to modify their images.

When television began incorporating animation, this allowed much greater subtlety and

complexity to visually and aurally enter television, as it gained the ability to create new

meanings not based in photographic fact. Ideas are one such new form, which advertisements

inherently rely upon: like cartoons, advertisements must always have language explaining the

concept of the sales pitch. Profound formal changes also followed. As cinema films created

frame by frame, animation is related to the fundamental cinema technique of montage or cutting

as a means of creating a new sequence. Because of this, the importation of short cartoon films

like advertisements facilitated the segmentation and decoration of the previously cold images of

mechanical television cameras, which can only capture what is shown before them. Unlike the

22

I acknowledge that animation is actually created through photography, But animation images are

photographed drawings, while traditional photographs are images of the world. 23

Alexander Galloway, “If the Cinema Is an Ontology, the Computer Is an Ethic.”

13

raw live action images of its early days, broadcast historian Lynn Spigel has described this as a

shift to “TV by design.”24

Another way to describe it is as an audiovisual control revolution, a

“dramatic leap in our ability to exploit information.”25

Recall the unlikely lesson the conservative British stateswoman Margaret Thatcher taught

in 1991: that Europe was created by history, and that America was created by philosophy.26

While inherently acts of artifice, cartoons became blended into the evolving hybrid that is

television. Television was itself increasingly a central part of the evolving fiction that is life in

the United States. Around the very same time, cultural historian Margaret Morse compared the

experience of watching television to the experience of driving on a highway and going shopping

at a suburban mall: all cause “an attenuated fiction effect, … a partial loss of touch with the here

and now, dubbed here as distraction.”27

Over time, television became less about thinking and

more about feeling.

This dissertation is more, though, about the ways that television has changed animation.

Television slowed animation down, owing to its smaller budgets, and stretched it out, to fill half-

hour time slots. Television reduced animation in size from the massive scale of the wall-sized

“big screen” of cinema to the kitchen cutting board-sized “small screen” of television. It

24

Spigel, TV by Design. 25

Beniger, The Control Revolution. Quoted in Peters, “The Control of Information. “ Review of James R.

Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society. 26

This is a paraphrase of several lines from a speech that Thatcher gave in 1991. Her full remarks are

these.

Americans and Europeans alike sometimes forget how unique is the United States of America.

No other nation has been created so swiftly and successfully. No other nation has been built upon

an idea—the idea of liberty. No other nation has so successfully combined people of different

races and nations within a single culture. Both the founding fathers of the United States and

successive waves of immigrants to your country were determined to create a new identity. … And

America herself has bound them to her with powerful bonds of patriotism and pride. The

European nations are not and can never be like this. They are the product of history and not of

philosophy. You can construct a nation on an idea; but you cannot reconstruct a nation on the

basis of one.” Thatcher, “Speech at Hoover Institution Lunch.” 27

Morse, “An Ontology of Everyday Distraction.”

14

converted animation from drawings simply captured and replayed photographically, as in

cinema, to those captured photographically, broadcast electromagnetically, and recreated by an

electron gun tracing the raster rectangle of the television in split seconds. Television visually

deprioritized these new cartoons visually, which at first were shabby shadows of their former self

on the black-and-white television screen, and instead elevated its soundtrack. It reduced the

complex and dynamic image of cinema animation into the simple and relatively static image of

the early television cartoon. Whereas cinema is a theatrical medium, television is a domestic one.

Television increased the exposure of its cartoons, aired in series, at regular intervals, week after

week, year after year. There were many more characters and much more novelty. But the cartoon

stars that persisted on television, like the stars of cinema cartoon series, sometimes survived for

decades.

Part 1 also explores what defines the early television cartoon at the level of media and

form. Inherently, this newer kind of cartoon is not cinematic; instead, it can be called telematic,

an electronic kind of video cartoon. Animation or cartoon is not a medium in and of itself; it is

better understood to be a format defined by technique which can be realized in many different

motion picture media. I believe that the formal specificities of animation in different media

create formally distinct varieties of animation, owing to the differences between those media.

This evolution of technique was happening at the same time that the television-friendly

commercial electronic videotape standard was replacing the earlier film technology of the

kinescope.28

The dramatic experience of watching animation on the “big screen,” isolated in

darkness in the city theater, gave way to the cartoon of the humble “small screen,” viewed in the

everyday environs of the domestic house. This Hanna-Barbera refrigerator magnet shows Yogi

28

Lafferty, “‘A New Era in TV Programming’ Becomes Business as Usual.” US electronics research

company Ampex introduced the first commercial professional broadcast quality videotape machines in

1956. The use of tape for video accelerated after that point.

15

Bear and his co-stars against a staticky background invoking the media specificity of analog

viewing on a 20th

-century cathode-ray tube television set.

Figure 1. Hanna-Barbera characters from the Yogi Bear segment of the Huckleberry Hound

Show, printed on a refrigerator magnet sold at Jellystone Park (now on author’s refrigerator) 29

Source: Yogi Bear’s Jellystone Park, recreational vehicle campground, Bremen, Georgia

Television is a media system of distribution and connection through which humans

communicate and interact with the world. But there is nothing exotic or even special about the

experience of watching a cartoon on television. If anything, this simple but entertaining kind of

cartoon, which did not overly draw attention to itself, like cinema animation did, unobtrusively

assumed a place alongside other aspects of everyday domestic life. Cartoons were a known

quantity, and it seemed that they were just being imported into a new medium. But the very

29

Note that the background of each character portrait are analog television-style scan lines. This intention

is confirmed by the background of the top center portrait of Boo Boo Bear, jagged lines which are

unmistakably a reference to cathode-ray tube-style analog color television broadcasting. This was

common in the United States from the 1970s to the 1990s. I purchased this magnet at a well-tended

Hanna-Barbera-branded RV campground west of Atlanta, Georgia, the home of Cartoon Network.

16

accessibility of this earliest counterfactual video format by anyone in the home represents a sea

change in social life, especially for children; while for their parents, cartoons were a special treat

seen at a movie theater before the feature film, children began watching cartoons on television as

a new normal. Growing up with this kind of new-fashioned, non-photographic electronic

plaything arguably facilitated baby boom kids’ ability to mature into adulthood with the ability to

work professionally with any manner of new forms of media technology and knowledge bases.

The formalist analysis in this dissertation proceeds in part through undertaking a

genealogical approach to this alternative cartoon history of animation, by tracing recognizable

historical antecedents of this media form, which together represent a genealogy hiding in plain

sight that reveals truths about contemporary media. This introduction is followed by an

introduction to Part 1 on the early television cartoon in context. Chapter 1 begins to make the

argument that animation (or cartoon) takes a different specific form in different media. Chapter 2

begins to trace this alternative to the traditional histories of animation that have become so

common, a genealogical history of five media forms that I propose made the early television

cartoon possible, beginning with print cartoons, the early cinema cartoon, and radio comedy.

Chapter 3 suggests that limited animation may not really even be animation at all, in the sense

that classical animated feature films are animation. (Hopefully this clarifies my sometimes

confusing use of the terms “animation” and “cartoon” as approximate equivalents; I do this to

write clearly more than to make theoretical statements.) The third chapter begins by explaining

how Walt Disney enriched the bland early cinema cartoon into his newly vibrant cinema

animation, through adding fluid character animation, sound synchronization, color, and depth of

field. Fundamentally, through the process of doing this, Walt Disney and his “Nine Old Men,”

the team of key artists creatively and technically crafting his films, created what is now

17

understood to be “animation” itself, through innovating “the 12 principles of animation.”30

More

specifically, Disney’s technically sophisticated character animation came to typify how cinema

animation broadly continues to be understood to this day. Most other cinema animation studios

in Hollywood followed Disney’s model to compete with him, but it was not long before the

stylistic excesses of Disney’s model prompted the counter-reaction of limiting animation, first

through Warner Bros.’ animation and then more fully at the UPA studio.

Chapter 4, the third and last historical chapter, explains how “Television’s New Cartoon”

came into existence, through a rough and ready process of trial and error. The first half focuses

on Jay Ward’s studio, creatively led by animator Alex Anderson, a collaboration I and a few

others have called Ward-Anderson.31

Anderson first brought the modernist limited animation of

UPA’s shorts together with a new planned animation production model, enabling their show

Crusader Rabbit to be produced on a shoestring budget. The second approximate half of the

fourth chapter explores in more depth the second studio, the longstanding if sometimes

adversarial partnership between Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, better known as Hanna-Barbera.

Chapter 5, the last chapter of Part 1, begins presenting the model of the early television cartoon

mostly proposed in Part 2, with the principle of “Cartoon.” This meta-principle encompasses all

30

It would be nearly 50 years before Disney’s principles were documented by two of the last surviving

Nine Old Men, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, in an art book that became the canonical reference for

understanding Disney animation. Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, The Illusion of Life: Disney

Animation, 1981. 31

Some, like Karl Cohen, call the partnership of Alex Anderson and Jay Ward “Ward-Anderson,” similar

to how Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera indicated the name of their studio partnership.” Karl Cohen, “Straight

from the Moose’s Mouth (Review of Keith Scott, ‘The Moose That Roared’). Officially, Anderson’s and

Ward’s studio was called Television Arts Productions. While Jay Ward owned the studio, Anderson was

the primary creative force. In the 1960s, Variety described Jay Ward’s studio as “Ward-Scott,” referring

to Bill Scott, the creative force that brought the Rocky and Bullwinkle series to life. Variety, “Ward-Scott

On Animation Spree,” Vol. 221, Iss. 13, Feb. 22, 1961, 33, 47. Anderson himself discusses the tendency

to underestimate his contributions in an excellent interview in comics studies publication Hogan’s Alley.

Alex Anderson, “Alex Anderson (Interview),” interview by John Province, Edition 8, Volume 2, Number

4

https://web.archive.org/web/20101026035438/http://cagle.msnbc.com/hogan/interviews/anderson/home.a

sp.

18

the other six principles that are each a building block of the early television cartoon. The term the

television cartoon refers to a form of entertainment broader than just this cartoon’s elemental

caricature, similar to how cinema animation refers to an art form wider than the simple animation

of movement.

In Part 2, I present the six principles that constitute most of my model of the early

television cartoon, each in a separate chapter: rationalization, story, character, style, sound, and

performance. These are approximately ordered to reflect the animation workflow or production

pipeline of the planned animation mode of production. This form is inherently rationalized, and

before production begins, the process must be planned out carefully, to fit within the time and

budget available. Narrative story is a driving force of meaning here; this imperative doesn’t exist

in the same way in cinema, where animation’s visuals transcend its meaning. By character, I

most mean personality voice, the capacity for television cartoon characters to speak out out loud

in the soundtrack to develop their personality, instead of needing to move, as in cinema. Style

refers to the caricatural process of stylization which inherently defines the simplification of

planned animation. Sound in analog television takes precedence over the image; I understand the

primacy of sound to be the most defining single aspect of the early television cartoon.

Performance here refers to the staging of characters on the two-dimensional plane of the image

and the timing of these poses. While the concept of performance in general may more define

cinema animation, the performance of the early television cartoon is about the attractiveness and

believability of static poses and the drawn-out timing required to present them to the broadcast

audience.

The focus of this discussion is on theory-building, not on textual analysis. I hope to draft

a companion book project to this in the near future. It will instead be focused on history, and on

19

interpreting what I see as the seven most influential early television cartoons of these early years,

airing between 1950 and 1965. For the sake of context here, I will summarize the basic history I

intend to write in that separate volume. The television cartoon first emerged in 1950 as Jay

Ward’s Crusader Rabbit, a five-minute “comic strip of television” not dissimilar to a radio play,

which first established planned animation as a stable production model. In 1955, Disney

Productions’ hour-long Mickey Mouse Club featured just two minutes of “full animation” of

Mickey, proving how difficult Disney’s animation was to adapt to television. In 1958, the one-

year-old Hanna-Barbera studio released The Huckleberry Hound Show, the first cartoon program

without a human host, composed of only original cartoons made for the new medium. This early

television cartoon remains understudied, but was a technical accomplishment that also became a

popular phenomenon, began laying a foundation for the new television cartoon industry in the

public eye. The slapstick-style show presented three ongoing seven-minute cartoon series

mimicking prior MGM cinema cartoon shorts but executed with dramatically simpler means, in

doing so unleashing one Yogi Bear into our the popular cultural media landscape.

Despite the crudely hewn animation created in Mexico in the first outsourced cartoon

production, Jay Ward’s 1959 Rocky and His Friends embraced subversive adult dialogue about

political adult topics like the vagaries of American Cold War politics, a media-discursive feat

that has yet to be truly equaled in another television cartoon since. Hanna-Barbera’s The

Flintstones refashioned this new kind of cartoon into a mature and stable form tailored for

television. The first cartoon sitcom, it was also the first half-hour cartoon starring the same

characters (not a collection of two or three shorter segments), and the first television cartoon

largely about human characters (not anthropomorphized “funny animals” like Yogi). Japanese

studio Mushi Production’s 1963 Astro Boy kicked off Japanese television “anime” in a technical

20

feat combining both action and limited animation. Adapted to the United States market in the

same year, these science fiction and action themes influenced the first straight (non-comedic)

American adventure television cartoon, Hanna-Barbera’s 1964 Jonny Quest. This early history

will conclude with the stage now set for the programming trend of boy-focused Saturday

morning action cartoons that became the norm of children’s programs for the next 25 years.

The middle era of the Saturday morning cartoon, from 1966 to 1988 follows the early

years. This subsequent historical period is outside of the scope of this history, but I occasionally

refer to it.32

By the end of the early years in 1965, the basic technique and business model of the

television cartoon had now been established; what remained was to use it to monetize it, bringing

a new universe of characters to the fore for kids on Saturday mornings. This shift happened

decisively in 1966 because in that year all cartoons on television shifted to Saturday mornings,

and the first straight superhero cartoons were aired that fall. Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera had just

sold their animation studio to Cincinnati-based Taft Broadcasting, and primarily the studio

focused on pumping out increasing quantities of commercial “kidvid” cartoons. Past FCC

commissioner Newton Minow described television in 1961 as a “vast wasteland,” citing in part

its cartoons, a warning that proved to come true during the future time of Saturday morning

cartoons.33

Around 1988 and 1989, a late era of the television cartoon was beginning as several brave

studios reimagined the art and craft of the television cartoon. In Mighty Mouse: The New

Adventures, Ralph Bakshi and John Kricfalusi returned to tried-and-true animation production

32

Kevin Sandler’s forthcoming book on Hanna-Barbera’s Scooby-Doo franchise should prove to be the

long-awaited history of the Saturday morning cartoon era we’ve been waiting for. Sandler, Scooby-Doo:

The Art and Business of an Animated Icon. 33

Minow, “Address to the National Association of Broadcasters (Television and the Public Interest).”

21

techniques from the golden age of cinema animation.34

In The Simpsons, Matt Groening, James

L. Brooks, and Sam Simon brought the daring approach to creative freedom in writing that

Brooks had pioneered in The Mary Tyler Moore Show to a new television cartoon for adults.35

The brazen cultural statements these shows made, elevating creativity over commercial

priorities, set off a sea change in the animation industry, contributing to the broader animation

renaissance of the 1990s, which also marked by stunning achievements in cinema animation.

Ascendant cable television networks forged a new business model of creating smart, off-color

shows to 18-34-year-old adults, the dominant television cartoons during the 1990s animation

renaissance.36

Television has to date taken at least three major forms, which very roughly correlate with

these three periods. In its early years, from the late 1940s to the 1980s, television was a medium

of analog broadcasting. During this time, the United States had only three or four networks

available. In a middle period in the 1980s, the new medium of cable television was becoming

more available, culminating in the 1990s mainstreaming of cable networks. In the late period, in

the early 2000s, digital broadcasting began to arrive, followed by internet streaming. Other

scholars have proposed similar tripartite accounts. British television scholar John Ellis has

described “the first era of television” as one of “scarcity,” and the second as an era of

34

Cantoral and Williams, “Saturday Morning Trojan Mouse: The Origins of the Creative-Driven

Television Cartoon,” forthcoming 2021. 35

James L. Brooks is credited with bringing a new warmth and a human touch to the situation comedy

genre, beginning with The Mary Tyler Moore Show. “In [its] ... early ... sitcoms ... MTM knew how to

provide the right combination of warmth and sophistication. / It would appear that [James L.] Brooks,

[Allan] Burns et al. arrived at the ... formula through a process of experimentation.” Feuer, “The MTM

Style.” For The Simpsons, Brooks hired Sam Simon, with whom he had worked on Taxi, to hire the

writers. “So here you have this guy who personally assembled the equivalent of the Manhattan Project, or

the 1924 Yankees [as the original Simpsons writers room would come to be regarded by TV writers].”

Ortved, The Simpsons. 36

Tom Sito has told me that his next book will focus on the 1990s animation renaissance. This should

prove to be a well-written history of the period.

22

“availability”. Digital broadcasting began to arrive around the year 2000, when his book was

published, marking the beginning of the current era of “plenty.”37

In a history of video, Michael

Newman proposes an early phase of “video as television” and a middle phase of “video as

alternative.” In contemporary times, for him, video has generalized across a variety of digital

media, meaning a general category is most fitting: “video as the moving image”.38

Newman

interestingly posits television’s cultural status as related to these three technical eras. Altogether,

I hold that we should acknowledge the ways that television, and the television cartoon, have

changed over time. Being specific also means extrapolating into categories, but hopefully this

periodization I’ve laid out is generally uncontroversial to you as my reader.

Video technology has been advanced by the rationalization of animation for television.

The development of animation-related video techniques represent a mediation away from

photographic representation, into interfaces designed to be accessible to users. Video games

inherited the legacy of limited animation, I believe, as another television technology with

simplified visuals; one early advertisement referred to video games as “cartoons you can

control.”39

When Disney’s revival of its traditional animation production reached its apex with

The Lion King (1994), upstart Pixar picked up the baton Disney dropped the very next year in

Toy Story (1995). Pixar carried Disney’s approach to animation forward into animation’s

37

Ellis, Seeing Things. 38

Newman explains.

In the first phase, the era of broadcasting's development and penetration into the mass market,

video was another word for television. The two were not distinct from each other. In the second,

TV was already established as a dominant mass medium. Videotape and related new technologies

and practices marked video in distinction to television as an alternative and solution to some of

TV's widely recognized problems. … In the third phase, video as digital moving image media has

grown to encompass television and film and to function as the medium of the moving image.

These phases are defined in terms of their dominant technologies (transmission, analog recording

and playback, digital recording and playback) but more importantly by ideas about these

technologies and their uses and users. Video Revolutions. 39

I read this in a magazine from the 1980s while doing research on the Nintendo Entertainment System. I

don’t recall now where I read this.

23

odyssey in computer generated imagery (CGI) filmmaking. This was a paradigm shift from

traditional classical cinema animation to an entirely new kind of digital cinematic imagery,

although in its storytelling, Pixar sought to both adopt and challenge Walt Disney’s model of

making animated feature films. Elsewhere in the 1990s, digital graphic user interfaces (GUIs) of

computers become standard, leaving text-based interfaces for specialists. GUIs represent non-

photographic interfaces inherently reliant upon animation for communication. Thus, during the

lean years between the Golden Age of Animation and the internet age, television kept animation

alive, modernized it, rationalized it, reformed it, and multiplied it.

This dissertation presents several key implications for my three core fields, media studies,

animation studies, and television studies. I believe that many cinema animation scholars

understand animation to be basically the same wherever it occurs. My training in media studies

leads me to a contrary point: that each medium is unique. Cinema and television, while

superficially similar, are opposites in many respects. I bring this media point to animation studies

to express one of my most central original contributions, that animation arguably takes different

forms in different media. As typified by the Disney studios’ features, the cinema art form of

animation did not attempt to change for television; animated features continuing their own

trajectory is a prime reason I suggest that animation is specific to cinema. The cartoon that

sprung up on television may be more akin to a new generation, something related to but distinct

from cinema animation. Cinema cartoon series, like Warner Bros.’ Looney Tunes, largely fell

out of favor; television carried this new kind of cartoon forward, where it eventually met digital

media.

Most animation scholars recognize that animation is formally distinct from live action

film. Animation is composed of drawings, while live action film is composed of photographs.

24

Many television scholars also rightly assume this distinction, but I believe many still focus more

on textual interpretation only loosely guided by form. I propose that television scholars need to

more actively highlight television’s formal properties in analysis. An older school of television

studies was agnostic about television as a medium, largely analyzing its content. Such past

scholars view the cartoon as a simply one genre among others on television. While the cartoon is

indeed a genre, my dissertation sides with a newer school of television studies, to attend more

closely to the formal properties that I see make the cartoon of television different from earlier

animation and cartoon.

I suggest that the planned animation of television, an “illustrated radio,” is not really

animation. Because it is so different from cinema animation, instead of carrying on with this

customary name (limited animation and/or planned animation), I more try to normalize this by

calling it “the early television cartoon.” While it does have some animated movement, as a rule it

is a simpler and less animated form, a cartoon. Many animation scholars have seen this as a loss.

But I believe this refinement of animation makes the television cartoon more important, not less.

If cartoons were still rare and expensive, our media landscape would be very different from what

it is like now. In cinema, animation was a special event, but this gave way to the democratization

of the cartoon as an everyday form of television. This newer kind of cartoon leaves behind the

visual flux of cinema in favor of a dynamic soundtrack. Many television scholars accept that

television ceased to be live, for similar reasons. But more animation scholars could consider

studying television as a worthy object of study. Isn’t it old-fashioned to still only venerate an

author-centric concept of animation, as if newer electronic cartoons departing from this makes

them uninteresting? I believe that much more has happened in television and electronic media,

which makes these cartoons important to study and understand.

25

Animation is an elemental basis of current media culture. Towards concluding,

techniques of animation are central to the production of much of today’s media. Inherently,

animation constructs representations in terms other than the strict sequential photographic

recording of the world that characterizes live action cinema and television. For instance: much

cinema is now adjusted frame by frame;40

media often include many different heterogeneous

elements together, such as green-screen recording; most mobile media have simplified

representations; audio is frequently replaced or modified. If this is granted, that much media are

made with fundamental manipulations, then understanding television cartoons is important for

understanding media today.

Through making these points, I propose that the television cartoon broadly represents the

modern missing link between what might be called the classical artifice of traditional cinema

animation and the evolution of contemporary digital media. Television connects viewers to a

sophisticated real-time electronic media network over which many kinds of content can be

distributed. While classical cinema’s rapid projection makes its images appear alive, they are

actually static captures of past time; without an electronic link, movie studios have distributed

films to theaters as Blu-ray discs via mail. In my account, radio is harder to classify. It has

modern aspects it shares with television, like its robust electronic network. But, since it has no

visual element, I do not see it as truly modern.

Some talk about cinema as the predecessor of digital media.41

But the technological gulf

between classical cinema and digital media like the internet is fundamentally discontinuous—

40

Manovich, The Language of New Media. 41

Lev Manovich spends most of New Media talking about cinema. Alexander Galloway makes this

argument. Galloway, Gaming.

26

television should be considered the bridging technology that connected one to the other.42

The

graphical efficiency of limited animation set a precedent that facilitated the ability of many later

digital devices to display graphics in the first place. Many electronic devices after television have

had comparatively small screens, and have inherently relied on simplified non-photographic

interfaces to achieve an intuitive connection with the user. In the internet age, ubiquitous digital

hardware and software has made physical film obsolete; in the words of novelist Thomas Wolfe,

“you can’t go home again.”43

We now depend on the simple sounds and graphics of our personal

smartphones, and increasingly cannot recall what life was like before these personal, civilization-

ordering devices.44

42

I acknowledge that Sheila Murphy published a book in 2011, How Television Invented New Media. I

see her as an ally with whom I share in my dissertation a basic mission: to present an account of media

history that gives reasons why new media scholars should study television and television scholars should

study new media. Murphy writes: “[T]he formative texts and theories in the emerging field of new media

studies have, perhaps unwittingly, created both a hierarchy of media types and a set of connections and

comparisons that link new media to cinema while often overlooking television’s contributions to how

new media is approached and understood.” Her title says that she will explain the specific ways in which

television made digital media possible, answering the “how question,” but I found myself largely unable

to determine the specifics of her argument. 43

Thomas Wolfe titled a 1940 novel this: You Can’t Go Home Again. 44

Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media.

27

PART 1

THE EARLY TELEVISION CARTOON IN CONTEXT

28

PART 1 INTRODUCTION

Culture is what a society teaches to its children, some anthropologists say.45

In the

Western nations, especially, children are often socialized through television cartoons, learning

the normative behaviors of social life through the dominant media of their time. The television

cartoon has often been stigmatized as a children’s medium. It is certainly true that children are

the primary audience of cartoons. For reasons that appear not well understood, the cartoon holds

a special place in the child’s heart. The cartoon appears to be a way of softening cultural

representations to better introduce them to children. The things we come to know as children

define our later lives.

Arguably, after World War II, the Baby Boom generation needed television to attempt to

comprehend the paradoxes of the Cold War in the United States.46

At that time, Walt Disney’s

golden touch in animation had slipped; his “silver age” films were not always generation-

defining events, as his Golden Age films had been. Despite parents’ qualms, nearly every

household in the second half of the 20th

century had a television. To grow up without a television

was unusual and a fundamentally different kind of childhood. Watching a cartoon on TV is the

opposite of the supposed norm of television as an unmediated window on the world; it is a highly

mediated experience that communicates social messages through dynamic sound and repetitive

but familiar images. Growing up in a commercialized culture in the 20th

century meant that

45

Peter Metcalf is one such anthropologist. He writes, “we can define culture as all those things that are

instilled in a child by elders and peers as he or she grows up, everything from table manners to religion.”

Metcalf, Anthropology. 46

Psychologist Bruno Bettelheim has argued that children need television. Bettelheim, “Do Children

Need Television?”

29

childhood innocence largely disappeared.47

But when children become literate with media, they

become fluent in living in mediated society. The Baby Boom generation was the first to grow up

with cartoons in the home, but despite the loudly voiced fears of many moralists, they did not

become a blasé generation of corrupted delinquents; in fact, they became deeply engaged with

the social world around them.

Chapter 1 considers the nature of the cartoon format on early television, by contrasting it

with animation’s medium, cinema. It begins to point to how different the new television cartoons

were from earlier cinema animation. One of my central interventions in this dissertation is that

the cartoon and animation, while often casually equated and actually overlapping in practice,

should be understood to be two different things. If television cartoons are understood only in a

narrow sense, as if all animation is the same or if all television is the same, they are not really

very interesting. They become more interesting in light of the fuller context in which they exist,

acknowledging the differences between media and the different formats that the technique of

animation takes in different media. Considering their media and format under an analytical

microscope, I believe, reveals animation to be a form of cinema and cartoon to be a form of

television.

Chapters 2, 3, and 4 in Part 1 are historical chapters that explain how the early television

cartoon took shape through five earlier forms of media. Narrative illustration emerged in Japan

as early as the 1200s, a tradition that slowly filtered into Europe over the following centuries,

although this earliest history is outside the scope of this discussion. The television cartoon can be

understood through the antecedents that Chapter 2 presents: print cartoons, early cinema

cartoons, and radio comedy. Beginning in the 1700s in Europe, first, print cartoons developed

over hundreds of years. French and U.S. artists competed to create the first animated cartoons, in

47

Jenkins, “Introduction: Childhood Innocence and Other Modern Myths.”

30

the 1890s and the 1900s. It was largely American newspaper cartoonists who then, second,

carried cinema cartoons forward in the 1910s. Early cinema cartoons initially shared the

unanimated visual stasis of newspaper comics. In the 1920s and 1930s in the U.S., live comedy

found a vibrant new home in the sound of early radio, third, a radically new kind of electronic

medium which channeled the rich sound of comic voice acting and music into homes around the

United States, and later the world.

Chapter 3 takes several risks. It asserts that Disney-style animation could not be made for

television, and that UPA’s limited animation was not entertaining enough to succeed on

television. The next antecedent is Walt Disney’s breakthrough of the 1920s and ‘30s: Disney

upgraded the early cinema cartoon into cinema animation, culminating in his feature film

animation in the late 1930s. Walt Disney’s studio employed and trained hundreds of animators

during this time, but Disney’s fixation on telling old-fashioned fairy tales in spectacular fashion

would push a younger generation of artists out of the studio. In the 1940s, fifth, the main

response to Walt Disney by younger artists was, to simplify his elaborate, conservative art of

animation into a more contemporary design-oriented cartoon, best represented in UPA’s shorts.

UPA’s “limited animation” should not really be thought of as animation, I think, because it did

not move much; but their films were not really cartoons, either, because they largely eschewed

gag humor. That studio’s unusual aesthetic ambition makes it something of a historical oddity.

Just two upstart U.S. animation studios were created in the 1950s to specifically to make

cartoons for television: the short-lived collaboration of Jay Ward and Alex Anderson and the

long-lasting partnership between Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera. Chapter 4 tells their stories. I show

that the creative half of both studios started out made cartoons in the 1930s in Paul Terry’s

durable Terrytoons cartoonery. This New York City holdover from the 1920s era of silent

31

cartoons was aesthetically and geographically a world away from the younger California studios

of Disney in the 1930s and the UPA in the 1940s. Their important early television cartoons,

Crusader Rabbit and The Huckleberry Hound Show, both unmistakably bear the stamps of

Terry’s sturdy vaudeville-style cartoons.

After the history of the three previous chapters, Chapter 5 presents what I call the

“principle of cartoon,” more deeply theorizing the coupling of animation and television. Here I

take seriously Chuck Jones’ criticism of “illustrated radio” and to explore its implications, in the

first of many chapters devoted to a principle of my model of the early television cartoon, in this

case, “Cartoon.” The 12 principles of Walt Disney’s cinema animation don’t explain the

television cartoon well; Jones’ concept actually sheds productive light on the early television

cartoon. Ultimately, I think this model emerged as far back as 1892, in the French proto-cinema

of Charles-Émile Reynaud. 60 years before Crusader Rabbit, and even before cinema itself,

these primitive but narrative performances represent a similar kind of suspended animation.

Reynaud began telling stories in stopping-and-starting cartoons very similar to the television

cartoons that emerged 60 years later, at a time before even cinema. This kind of cartoon remains

today the basic model for contemporary television cartoons: visually static and aurally dynamic.

This petrified unrest, a discontinuous flow, is what makes the cartoon of television different than

the fluid spectacle of cinema animation.

32

CHAPTER 1

THE SPECIFICITY OF THE CARTOON FORMAT ON EARLY TELEVISION

The television cartoon is a touchstone aesthetic form of longstanding global reach. It

represents a meeting point between two media not commonly thought to overlap: television and

animation. The early television cartoon took shape in parallel with the historical period known as

“the present,” both of which begin in 1950.48

For the next 50 years, the television became and

remained a center of family life, a new form of communication that satisfied a deep human need

in a contemporary form. The television cartoon appears to be television. Most people’s

impression is that it appears to be animation. But television is typically thought to be a live

medium; this implies that cartoons are not really television. This puzzle of medium points to the

relevance of more specifically studying the formats within a medium. Animation and live action

can be considered to be two different formats within the same medium.

Many scholars of cinema and animation believe, in my view, that animation is basically

the same sort of thing wherever it occurs. “[A]nimation as an expressive form is indeed

autonomous, and there is no need of examples to prove it,” animation historian Giannalberto

Bendazzi wrote in 1995. Many still debate the “essence” of “what animation is,” in print and in

conferences. My field of media studies, founded by Marshall McLuhan, has grown with the

understanding that each medium has specific technical properties that make it distinct from other

media. While media do overlap technically and influence each other formally, generally each

operates autonomously, as part of the broader media ecosystem of a culture. The specificity of

media leads me to a belief contrary to taking a universal approach to animation, that animation

48

Wolff, “When Is the ‘Present’?”

33

and cartoon take a different form in every medium. So, I understand the planned animation of

television to be qualitatively different than the limited animation of cinema. This view is based

on understanding that animators have needed to closely attend to the particular affordances and

restrictions of their particular medium, as John Halas and Harold Whitaker have written.

A director must be aware of the differences in the format they are working in. … [For a

feature film, n]o expense can be spared … [With a]nimation for television … to keep the

limited-animated … lively, the plots are usually carried along by means of dialog.49

Halas and Whitaker implicitly raise the question about the format of animation and

cartoon; they use the term format to mean medium. Indeed, these are not media; they are

techniques that can be implemented in multiple different kinds of media. Animation and cartoon

are formats. Historically, the concept of format is newer. While there is less understanding about

the formats that compose each medium, I believe media and format are tightly intertwined. In

recent years, some have extended the wisdom of media studies to a new kind of “format studies,”

to distinguish the specificity of the different formats or protocols within a medium. Jonathan

Sterne has explicitly developed this new area of study in his 2012 book MP3: The Meaning of a

Format, and explains why it is necessary, in doing so explaining how formats manifest in analog

and digital media.

If there is such a thing as media theory, there should also be format theory. Writers have

too often collapsed discussions of format into their analyses of what is important about a

given medium. Format denotes a whole range of decisions that affect the look, feel,

experience, and workings of a medium. It also names a set of rules according to which a

technology can operate. In an analog device, the format is usually a particular utilization

of a mechanism. An old record player may play back a variety of formats such as LP, 45,

49

The Technique of Film Animation, 1971.

34

78, while a tape deck might only take compact cassettes. In a digital device, a format tells

the operating system whether a given file is for a word processor, a web browser, a music

playback program, or something else.50

Lisa Gitelman persuasively summarizes the necessity of format study position. Calling formats

norms and standards, she also describes each moment of history as specific.

Although they possess extraordinary inertia, norms and standards can and do change,

because they are expressive of changeable social, economic, and material relationships.

Nor are technological nuclei ... stable ... So it is as much of a mistake to write broadly of

‘the telephone,’ ‘the camera,’ or ‘the computer’ as it is ‘the media’ ... —naturalizing or

essentializing technologies as if they were unchanging … Instead, it is better to specify

telephones in 1890 in the rural United States, broadcast telephones in Budapest in the

1920s, or cellular, satellite, corded, and cordless landline telephones in North America at

the beginning of the twenty-first century. Specificity is key. Rather than static, blunt, and

unchanging technology, every medium involves a ‘sequence of displacements and

obsolescences, part of the delirious operations of modernization,’ as Jonathan Crary puts

it (1999, 13).51

Incidentally, in a similar way, I believe that the specificity of media creates an attendant

specificity in the genres that work well in it. To take the meta-genre of comedy, the situation

comedy is a genre particular to broadcasting, and not something one sees in films. The film

comedy is something altogether different than a situation comedy, as are its subgenres, like the

romantic comedy. This is a broader point for another study, and I’m not making this distinction a

50

MP3: The Meaning of a Format, Duke University Press, 2012, 7-8. 51

The MIT Press, 2006, 8.

35

part of the theoretical work of this dissertation. But, a similar distinction informs my thinking

about how animation was adapted for television.

I see cartoons being made for television as a decisive signal that television cannot be

understood as a purely live medium. The question then becomes how the early television cartoon

is different from cinema animation. The dramatic difference between television cartoons and

cinema animations, in my eyes, point to a fundamental difference between the two media forms.

Unifying the divergent traditions of early cinema cartoons with radio comedy acting, the

television cartoon is arguably something different than cinema animation.

1.1

Cinema and Television as Media

To begin to answer the question of what the early television cartoon is, it is simplest to contrast

television with cinema. Television and cinema are two fundamentally different media, whose

resemblance is only superficial, as film scholar John Belton has pointed out52

: cinema developed

from photography, while television developed from radio. Television itself is an evolution of

radio, in its technology, economics, and programming.53

Despite an overlapping resemblance,

TV is a medium fundamentally distinct from film. Television’s “technology is … an extension of

the telegraph, the phonograph, Marconi’s wireless telegraph, and the radio, not [inherently] of

photography or the illusion of movement.”54

Media theorist Friedrich Kittler writes that,

52

Seeking to correct this misconception, Belton writes,

[T]elevision and video have traditionally been misperceived—by the average viewer, at least—as

outgrowths of film. First came the movies, and then came television. This may be historically

accurate, but it is not technologically correct. The two technologies evolved separately, not

successively. “Looking Through Video.” 53

“Radio haunted television at every turn, clinging ever-present to the new screen medium and providing

both ready-made solutions to common production problems and a convenient foil against which television

could define itself.” VanCour, “From Radio to Television.” 54

Belton, “Looking Through Video.”

36

“[u]nlike film, which simply inherited all the complexities of the image as accoutrements,

television is … high-tech”.55

Through its motion photography, cinema captures time in a documentary sense, and

allows it to be replayed on special occasions; as film theorist and critic Andre Bazin has shown,

the experience of “cinema is objectivity in time,” or a sense of “that-has-been.”56

Many have

reasoned that television, by contrast, is defined by “an insistent ‘present-ness,’” as film theorist

Mary Ann Doane has written, a “This-is-going-on.”57

Television is still often understood to be an

inherently live medium58

, but increasingly it more presents an ideology of liveness than it can be

strictly understood in these terms. But there is ample evidence that television stopped being a

purely live medium decades ago—when broadcasting networks began to shift to “telefilm”

production, reflected in content as normal as any kind of graphics. In the early 1970s, television

may still have had the appearance of being a live medium that flows, as British critical theorist

Raymond Williams has observed (no relation to me). But I believe that in the 1980s, as the

remote control and cable television became the dominant paradigm of the medium, television

became, in the words of Jane Feuer, “a dialectic of segmentation and flow.”59

Feuer has

55

Kittler, Optical Media. 56

Andre Bazin makes this point in “The Ontology of the Photographic Image”: “[P]hotography does not

create eternity, as art does, it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption.” What Is

Cinema? 57

The phrase “that-has-been” and this quote belong to Mary Ann Doane. “Information, Crisis,

Catastrophe.” 58

While his account is more traditionally philosophical than most studies of television, Paddy Scannell’s

2014 book Television and the Meaning of Live reflects this understanding of television. 59

Jane Feuer has explained that television projects an ideology of liveness actually counter to its

increasing mediation.

[A]s television in fact becomes less and less a ‘live’ medium in the sense of an equivalence

between time of event and time of transmission, the medium in its own practices seems to insist

more and more upon an ideology of the live, the immediate, the direct, the spontaneous, the real.

… [I]n terms of this simplest conception of the “live,” current American network television is

best described as a collage of film, video and “live,” all interwoven into a complex and altered

time scheme.” “The Concept of Live Television.”

37

explained that television projects an ideology of liveness actually counter to its increasing

mediation.

Television was sold to the world, starting in the 1950s, as a “window on the world,”

transparently bringing far-away events up close, to the comfort of the domestic living room. By

the 1970s, in Western countries, there was near-universal adoption of the new medium. Even

film scholars have needed to acknowledge “the sheer fact that television exists,” as a troubled

Stanley Cavell confessed.60

But, especially after the marketing revolution of the 1960s,61

“it

would be more appropriate to define the typical discourse of this medium not as naturalistic but

as naturalized,” as cultural theorist Stuart Hall has written, “not grounded in nature but producing

nature as a sort of guarantee of its truth.”62

Langdon Winner has observed that “television is a

phenomenon that, in the larger sense, cannot be ‘turned off’ at all. Deeply insinuated into

people’s perceptions, thoughts, and behavior, it has become an indelible part of modern

culture.”63

Television has become a part of the contemporary human condition.

At the time, U.S. viewers were becoming accustomed to living through electronic media

at a deep, everyday level. After the war, citizens simply wanted comfort and reassurance. Like

many around the world, Americans had faced years of deprivation during the Great Depression

and the Second World War; subsequently, there was an understandable if problematic impulse

for the reassurance of material plenty.64

Film critic David Thomson grew up in the United

Kingdom at this time and reflected on this cultural moment; after decades of writing books about

films, he finally wrote a “biography” of television in 2016. “[T]elevision’s magic has always

embraced safety, the possibility of “useful” intimate company, and the thought of time elapsing

60

Cavell, “The Fact of Television.” 61

Keith, “The Marketing Revolution.” 62

Hall, “The Rediscovery of Ideology.” 63

Winner, The Whale and the Reactor. 64

Admittedly, this was a very different experience than in many European countries.

38

restfully but constructively. It’s the sofa as church.”65

Across the course of the 1950s, animation

on television—in animated programs, animated commercials, and station branding—eased

people into a more mediated environment. At the time in the 1950s, new consumer technologies

placed glass between the consumer and the material reality, whether that was the windows in

cars or television’s screen. At that time, things in the world had often become too far apart or too

intense to experience directly, so in a sense they became experienced indirectly, through

representation.66

United States citizens needed something to comfortably fill the space of their

new houses and the time they spent inside at home after hours. This circumstance compelled

design to provide, an impulse itself created by manufacturers switching from making war

munitions to new consumer products. For animation, design provided uniformity for the mass

production and consumption of entertainment. This was not animation art to be regarded with

quizzical contemplation. Studios needed to ruthlessly streamline their animation to make enough

to fill the new half-hour cartoons.

Postwar media became naturalized and equated with their content.67

Television attempted

to fill the voids left by the rapid and sometimes violent changes of recent history by offering

entertainment, especially, as a simple comfort. The United States looked to TV to reconstruct its

domestic familial ideals for the new moment, such as the effort of families to come together

around the television set in a new “togetherness.”68

In the new suburbs, cultural conformity and

assimilation minimized differences between White groups, while often excluding people of

color, who were compelled to stay behind in dense urban areas. Television became a one-size-

65

David Thomson, Television: A Biography. 66

Steven Johnson talks about the significance of glass to the contemporaneity in How We Got to Now. 67

John Durham Peters implies this when he writes that 20th century media traffic in content, specifically

in providing unifying stories to the society at large. The Marvelous Clouds. 68

Spigel, Make Room for TV.

39

fits-all solution, a general means for meeting needs that had previously required a variety of

different technologies, as cultural scholar Raymond Williams has written.

[Before] the Second World War, [the] varying needs of a new kind of society … were

met by … specialised means: the press for political and economic information; the

photograph for community, family and personal life; the motion picture for curiosity and

entertainment; telegraphy and telephony for business information and some important

personal messages.69

In 1939, before the United States’ entrance into World War II, 85 million Americans apparently

went out to see a movie every week, as journalist Margaret Thorp reported at the time.70

That

figure represents a stunning two-thirds of the national population of the time.71

After World War

II, television broadcasting emerged as a central means by which masses of people could achieve

a newly middle class way of life—and without leaving home. “Broadcasting [came] … to serve

... as a form of unified social intake,” a generalized “new and powerful form of social integration

and control.”72

1.2

Animation and Cartoon as Formats

Having attended to television and cinema, let’s take up the status of animation and

cartoon. Formally, animation has long been thought to be a genre, an understanding that has

prevented understanding its basis in media technique. “Cartoon” has been caricatured as the style

of animation, perhaps rightly. The words animation and cartoon have come to refer both to the

kind of image that they refer to but also to their typical general entertainment format. But

69

Williams, Television. 70

Thorp, America at the Movies. 71

US Census Bureau, “1940 Census of Population.” 72

Williams, Television.

40

distinctions about media specificity reveal that animation is also a mode of production.

Historically, television has been talked about as the hardware here, so to speak, while the cartoon

is the software. Actually, the situation is more complex, because animation production’s basis in

technique actually makes it part of the medium in which it appears.

In the model of the early television cartoon I present in this dissertation, I take cinema

animation scholars and critics, especially, at their word. When they name the television cartoon

to be “limited animation,” I conclude that we should just admit that the television cartoon is not

really animation. For Chuck Jones, animation is visual drawing, and its goal is “moving three-

dimensional objects in space in a believable manner.”73

Jones believed that the television cartoon

generally, based around its soundtrack, makes the image redundant. In a 1974 essay, Chuck

Jones himself illustrates what he means by what he calls “animation” and “modern animation.”74

This first image communicates Jones’ concept of “animation.” One implication is that animation

is a classical form of the past.

73

Yowp, “A Reply To Chuck Jones.” 74

Jones, “Animation Is A Gift Word.”

41

Figure 2. “Animation” according to Chuck Jones

Source: Chuck Jones, “Animation Is A Gift Word”75

The drawing shows fluid, overlapping frames of Jones’ character Coyote across the motion of a

jump. This second drawing shows Chuck Jones’ concept of “modern animation.”

75

AFI Report (Vol. 5, No. 2).

42

Figure 3. “‘Modern’ animation” according to Chuck Jones

Source: Chuck Jones, “Animation Is A Gift Word”

In the second image, the run of the Coyote (now a robot) is represented in a single, static midair

pose. Jones’ parentheses are apparently ironic, implying that this is actually not animation at all,

but a modern facsimile of it. I accept Chuck Jones’s criticism. In this chapter and dissertation, I

answer the question of what the early television cartoon is with this response: it is not

animation—it is a kind of cartoon.

Walt Disney and his animators developed the studio’s 12 principles of what came to be

called the fluid full animation of cinema in the mid-1930s, when making the studio’s first

animated feature film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). After World War II, adapting

animation to television required limiting many traditional animation production practices in

favor of new and stricter guidelines. Many observers since have mourned that the vivacious

“life” of animation “died” in the transition to television. This tragic narrative inherently

privileges cinema animation as more artistic and ignores the design lineage of television

43

animation, in which a diversity of beloved cartoons have found voice on television. While the

term limited animation is descriptive, the term also continues to carry with it an aesthetic

hierarchy from cinema animation. The term planned animation may be more neutral, but it is not

a widely-used term. Idealism and nostalgia for cinema animation tended to distance television

cartoon production from cinema animation production, and to reify these as rigid modes of

production. Each industry has had a generally distinct and stable mode of production. But, it is

important to acknowledge that cartoon and animation exist on opposite sides of a shared

continuum, the former defined by stasis and the latter defined by movement. Maureen Furniss

explains.

Two-dimensional (2D) animation can be described as fluctuating between two aesthetic

poles: full animation and limited animation. … Full and limited animation are two

stylistic tendencies that can achieve different aesthetic results, with neither being

inherently pleasing nor repellent, but both being subject to creative or uninspired

applications.76

It is interesting to try making an 80/20 rule about this. We might characterize the full animation

of cinema as 80% original movement and 20% static poses supporting dialogue. Television

animation, then, appears to be nearly opposite: 80% static poses supporting dialogue, and 20%

original movement. While this is surely an oversimplification, it might be a useful heuristic.

“Animation” is often understood to be an art. But animation has always embodied a

tension between art and design, whether in cinema, television, or digital media. Full animation is

closer to art. Limited animation is closer to design. Thus, cinema animation is more an “art

form” and television animation is more a “design form”. But cinema animation today uses many

limiting techniques, and television animation today uses many cinema techniques. Really,

76

Furniss, Art in Motion.

44

limited animation is the flip-side to full animation; each balances and reinforces the other. A pure

full animation is difficult to conceive of; it probably would be abstract, because any characters

present would not be able to stop to talk. A pure limited animation would not be animation at all,

but more resemble storyboards or comics. Thus, the stasis of animation supports the movement

of animation; the static poses are held moments in between movement. Limited animation and

full animation are not firm positions, but tendencies and conventions positioned within a broad

spectrum.77

Animation and cartoons are drawings created frame by frame. Because of this, they are a

fundamental other to live action photography. Scholars typically understand animation to be just

one thing: wherever it exists, it is animation. Given this, certainly, it has seemed to most people,

cinema has better animation than television cartoons do. “[T]here is television,” Bendazzi

admits, “however … [its] market … does not provide the economic conditions necessary to

encourage a careful creative process.”78

“Animation” is a general form of cinematic

entertainment foregrounding but not ultimately reducible only to the animation of movement. On

the other, figurative end of the aesthetic continuum of animation/cartoon, the television

“cartoon” is a broad kind of home entertainment emphasizing but not reducible to its dynamic

soundtrack. “What Is a Cartoon?” British author John Geipel asks in a 1972 book.

While retaining [the] late nineteenth-century sense [of a satirical illustration], the term

‘cartoon’ has continued to expand in all directions, so that it now embraces a wide variety

of only loosely kindred species of popular illustration, from the para-realism of Batman

and Barbarella to the geometric stylisation of the Flintstones.79

77

Thomas Lamarre, my co-advisor, makes this point in The Anime Machine. 78

Bendazzi, Cartoons: One Hundred Years of Cinema Animation. 79

Geipel, The Cartoon.

45

In general, in discussions of animation, there has been a casual assumption that the

concept “cartoon” means “animation”—that both refer to “animated cartoons. But in this chapter

and dissertation, I separate the two. In a historical perspective, I understand the term “cartoon” to

arise from the centuries-long concept of the print cartoon, generally a single static image;

television inherited this concept. The concept of “animation” arose with cinema and its

animation, and remains most associated with animated films.

Before television, when Walt Disney was making animation in the 1930s, aesthetics had

a cultural and political power now difficult to fathom. Disney brought to his films a conservative

nostalgia. When he came to lean in on this, I think the effect was pernicious, creating an ideal for

an imagined past that never existed, with unknown social consequences. Before the Great War

(World War I), Western culture was oriented around a faith in material progress, a creed that

played a founding role in the development of the United States of America. For 19th

century

critic Matthew Arnold, culture was “the best which has been thought and said.”80

Philosopher

Friedrich Nietzsche disagreed, claiming that every individual experiences the unique perspective

of the flow of their particular life, and that the appearance that universal aesthetic transcendence

can supersede the individual human mind is an illusion.81

In the first World War, human

civilizations destroyed each other with rational efficiency. The national trauma that followed

caused a rift in blind faith in progress, which came to be filled with other social currents.

Dadaists believed that teleological rationality led to the war. In response, they disdained “pretty”

pictures and instead created “anti-art.”82

As the Nazis were taking control of Germany in the

80

Arnold, Culture and Anarchy. 81

Rivkin and Ryan, "A Short History of Theory." These author’s commentary on the validity of

Nietzsche’s point? “He was right, of course.” 82

Hugo Ball, one of the central creators of Dada, wrote that, “For us, art is not an end in itself ... but it is

an opportunity for the true perception and criticism of the times we live in.” Loggia, “The Legacy of

Dadaism.”

46

mid-1930s, Walter Benjamin witnessed aesthetics distorting political consciousness. “The logical

outcome of fascism is an aestheticizing of political life. … All efforts to aestheticize politics

culminate in one point. That one point is war.”83

Indeed, Nazi Germany’s cultural and territorial

ambitions would precipitate a second World War in Europe before the end of the 1930s, which

would lead to the destruction of much of the material history of Europe.

Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein saw in Walt Disney’s early bouncy animation

after 1928 a fundamental reimagining of the way the world works. Eisenstein marveled at the

“plasmatic” animistic life on full display in Disney’s early cartoons, sensing a profound

opportunity for revolutionary aesthetic change.84

Film historian Jay Leyda countenanced

Eisenstein’s perspective in these terms.

Disney provided direct grounds and material for an analysis of the ‘survival’ of animism

and totemism in modern consciousness and art. … In Eisenstein’s view, the very

mechanism of a flowing ‘omnipotent’ contour [line] was an echo of the most concealed

depths of pre-memory.85

Film critic Robert Sklar witnessed the unbounded aesthetic freedom of expression in Disney’s

early films, too, and wrote about it in his rich history of U.S. movie-going, Movie-Made

America: A Cultural History of American Movies. But, Sklar observed a deep political shift in

the moral tone of Disney’s filmmaking, beginning in The Three Little Pigs, writing that “by 1933

a whole new world view had emerged”.

83

Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (Second Version).” In

Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on

Media, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin. Harvard University Press,

2008 84

Film scholar Jay Leyda collected Eisenstein’s writings on Disney after his death, in Eisenstein,

Eisenstein on Disney. This collection has recently been re-edited by Oksana Bulgakowa and Dietmar

Hochmuth as Disney. 85

Eisenstein.

47

The later cartoons are tales, many of them moral tales. They rejoin the straight and

narrow path of time. They have beginnings and endings, and everything that happens in

between has consequences. … Don’t be too imaginative, don’t be too inquisitive, don’t

be too willful, or you’ll get into trouble—though there’s always time to learn your lesson

and come out all right. This idealized world [expressed] the spirit of social purpose, the

reenforcing of old values, in the culture of the later 1930s.86

This essay was collected by brothers Danny and Gerald Peary for an important 1980 anthology,

The American Animated Cartoon: A Critical Anthology, along with much of the other best

writing about animation to that point. Reprinted in 2017, the book remains an invaluable

collection.

While Walt Disney brought many artists to his studio, the painstaking creative labor Walt

demanded of his artists in realizing the baroque aesthetics of his classic fairy tale feature films in

part caused some artists to grow disillusioned with Walt’s nostalgia. Young artists, especially,

hungered to explore contemporary social themes in a simpler, kind of cartoon with contemporary

aesthetics. This impulse slowly created the UPA studio. When less work was required to create

animation, the artists could better search for new aesthetic frontiers. Commenting on the

significance of this shift, critic Gilbert Seldes wrote in 1952 that the wonder he felt actually

reminded him of Disney’s first animations of 25 years prior.

[E]very time you see one of [United Productions of America’s] animated cartoons you

are likely to recapture the sensation you had when you first saw “Steamboat Willie” …

the feeling that something new and wonderful has happened, something almost too good

to be true.87

86

Danny Peary and Gerald Peary, The American Animated Cartoon: A Critical Anthology, 1980/2017. 87

Seldes, “Delight in Seven Minutes.”

48

Cinema animation by the early 1950s arguably needed a new direction; it had explored

many different aesthetic possibilities over a half century, but it had exhausted many through

overuse. 88

The whole business model of Hollywood filmmaking was changing. Cinema

animation shorts studios were closing, because urban movie theaters were losing their audience,

as suburban families instead stayed in to watch television. Television had a problem of a

different sort, initially. In its early years, television had not yet found its business model. Early

television evening broadcasts centered around a stage model of live performance. The broadcast

networks were mounting elaborate stage spectaculars, wild and wooly affairs that were

expensive, demanding, and unpredictable. Entertainers with regular live programs were burning

out due to overwork.

Television networks needed the ability to control and manipulate their signal to a greater

degree, to limit the liability and expense of live broadcasts. Bringing animation to television was

a primary to shift from liveness to mediation. A number of creative and technical leaps were

required to transfer earlier kinds of limited animation to television. Making this new kind of

cartoon for television required reimagining what the cartoon had been previously and what it

could be in this new, electronic form. In general, the animation of cinema remains primarily

about its spectacular visuals; the sound technology that Walt Disney so famously introduced to

animation was put in support of the dynamic visuals. By contrast, the cartoons of television

remain dedicated to their rich, high-fidelity soundtrack. On television, the spare visual

techniques so venerated at UPA became the de facto norm at the new early television cartoon

studios of Jay Ward and Hanna-Barbera, supports for the engaging soundtrack.

88

Paul Wells makes this point in a 2003 essay, saying that cartoons had become “exhausting”. Wells,

“Smarter than the Average Art Form.”

49

By the time animation became part of the media system that is television, viewers were

accustomed to moving images; rather than being a special event on a night out, animation

became a daily mode of experience via television. Cartoons made for television effectively

transcends the time when animation needed to constantly move to show its life. Animation

become a normal part of everyday life through television, through a process of domestication:

animation as a wild being that moved in unpredictable ways was tamed for television into a

predictable means of serving many different purposes, like communicating ideas about brands.

Being welcomed to television allowed animation to colonize an entirely new medium and to

evolve as part of this growing production and distribution system. The new cartoons kept

viewers company at home, in large part through talking, like civilized people did, and avoiding

“action,” which could easily turn into violence.

Animation and television found a marriage of convenience, putting laid-off animators

back to work, and over the years television turned into a mediated procession of non-live

segments. Animation methods helped the U.S. broadcast networks become more customized,

designed, and humanized, refining their aesthetics into forms easier to brand.89

Some level-

headed observers realized the significance of what animation producers of the time were

achieving for the medium of television.

A cartoon’s virtues lie in simplification, distortion and caricature. … In America, … the

roots of the cartoon film lay in the comic strip, which blew a blast of crude but fresh air

through the cobwebs of European fantasy. … The tendency to exaggerate the proportions

between the head and the body in favour of the head and eyes is a feature of American

cartooning … The main development of the cartoon for television has taken the designer

89

Spigel, TV by Design.

50

back to the early days of black-and-white animation. … The graphic effects must all be

broad and clear.90

The introduction of animation to television had dramatic consequences. In the late 1950s,

U.S. television was in a “golden age” of live drama, a kind of theater of the air in which

television networks broadcast live stage-style theater. But, in the late 1950s, the small American

Broadcasting Company (ABC) embraced “telefilm” production as an early counterprogramming

strategy against the more established Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) and National

Broadcasting Company (NBC). Its cartoons were just one part of a broader slate of programming

that included Western adventures and crime dramas. Some viewed this move as destructive to

the live integrity of the medium, like mass communications historian James Baughman, who

later wrote that, in the process, ABC “destroyed … American television”.91

British Motion graphics designer Roy Laughton suggested that a broader definitional

change of television was occurring in the 1960s, and that the production of early television

animation advertisements and series were fundamentally changing the way that television was

made. “As time went by the demand for cartoon style commercials decreased but the experience

gained in the making of these films for television effected a modus operandi for graphic

designers who had little or no previous knowledge of full scale animation.”92

British television

production designer Gerard Millerson spoke of opposition in the industry to mediated production

like animation: “The dictum that television is essentially a live medium dies hard.”93

But the

90

Halas and Manvell, Technique of Film Animation. 91

Baughman, “ABC and the Destruction of American Television, 1953-1961.” 92

Laughton, TV Graphics. 93

Millerson, The Technique of Television Production, and early edition.

51

aesthetic significance of networks corralling the messiness of live broadcasting into a new form

of mediated broadcast signal control represents a kind of analog “control revolution.”94

Early television had “zero-degree style,” John T. Caldwell has written, a functional

model of performance without embellishment by aesthetics. “Early television was frequently

sloppy, a least from a classical perspective that values art for its unity and formal coherence. In

many genres, like the comedy-variety show, television was formally excessive and

heterogeneous.” Norman Lear’s sitcoms of the 1970s continued this “antistyle” trend. “The

technical apparatus was in place only to allow the televised stage play to unfold,” a videographic

model which he believes lives on on CNN. But most television networks since the 1960s built

their brands around a more distinctive aesthetic look, which Caldwell describes as a model of

“televisuality,” like the radical style of MTV in the 1980s.

The zero-degree … styles … worked well, until … an appetite for more distinctive

programming and different … looks … developed … Televisual practice … challenged

television's existing formal and presentational hierarchies. Many shows evidenced a

structural inversion between narrative and discourse, form and content, subject and style.

What had always been relegated to the background now frequently became the

foreground. Stylistic flourishes had typically been contained through narrative motivation

in classical Hollywood film and television. In many shows by the mid-1980s however,

style was no longer a bracketed flourish, but was the text of the show. The presentational

status of style changed and it changed … markets and contexts [on television

generally].95

94

This term comes from James Beniger’s book The Control Revolution. 95

Caldwell, Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television, 1994.

52

If cinema animation is more artistic than technical, the television cartoon is more

technical than artistic. The task of planning out how to make animation for television was in a

sense a process of engineering; in fact, the man to perfect the system was Bill Hanna, who was

originally trained as an engineer.96

In the early years of television in the 1950s, the cartoons that

were made were historically influential, because television programming itself was still novel.

By the beginning of the Saturday morning period of television cartoons in 1966, the

technical means of creating a cartoon for television were well-established. In a development that

echoed what happened in the 1920s, following the early days of the early cinema cartoon, the

biggest task then became to make enough cartoons to satisfy the demand of commercial

television networks for them, rather than to create artistic statements with them. This was the

founding quandary of the Saturday morning cartoon: broadcast networks needed enough

cartoons to fill the three to four hours they devoted to showing cartoons for kids on Saturday

morning; television animation studios were left to try to catch up. The consequences for

animation were admittedly disastrous, but this should not mean that the entire media form of the

television cartoon should be conflated with the Saturday morning cartoon, as film commentator

Leonard Malten and many others have understood it. Maltin’s opinion reflected the opinion of

many when he wrote in 1980 that “Television, which might have been a spawning ground for

great new animated films, became the cartoon’s graveyard instead.”97

It’s certainly not true that, since the television cartoon is not conceived as art that it

cannot be perceived as such. The literature on media reception that the meanings we as viewers

96

Bill Hanna’s engineering training actually followed the trade of his father, William John Hanna, who

first trained and worked as an engineer. The younger Hanna recalls in his autobiography the first time his

family moved out of the tiny frontier town of Melrose, New Mexico, where he was born, a town of just

several hundred people between Albuquerque, NM, and Lubbock, Texas. The family moved to similarly

remote northeastern Oregon, where the elder William J. Hanna “was assigned to work on the construction

of the Balm Creek Dam … where he supervised the crew.” Hanna and Ito, A Cast of Friends. 97

Maltin, Of Mice and Magic. The first edition of this book was printed in 1980.

53

perceive in mass media texts can often be quite different from the intended meanings. Among the

earliest adults I’ve found to write intelligently about children’s cartoons is science fiction author

Harlan Ellison. In a December 1968 column for the Los Angeles Free Press, Ellison wrote,

“Now the truth is revealed. My guilty secret. I am a devout Saturday morning cartoon watcher.

… I must confess boldly that I watch the Saturday morning cartoon shows because they are a

consummate groove. I dig them; that simple.”98

The textual codes of a genre in a medium are

what reinforce the taken-for-granted meanings shared between producers and consumers, as

cultural studies scholar Stuart Hall has shown, and such textual codes are inherently flexible to

great degrees.99

Magpie media theorist Henry Jenkins memorably spoke out on behalf of the

subculture of Star Trekkies in his 1992 book Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory

Culture.100

There is nothing stopping viewers from occupying or “poaching” off of the sign

power of mass media texts, for whatever reason they wish, Jenkins wrote, following whim or

creed is meaningful to them.

Bill Hanna, in particular, seemed to be bewildered by the sometimes bizarre ways that his

and Joe Barbera’s cartoons had been received by viewers over the decades. Hanna would

allegedly not allow The Cartoon Network to launch its evening Adult Swim programming block

for adults; it was only launched in 2001 after his death. The early Adult Swim shows were

radical reboots of lesser-known Hanna-Barbera cartoon series from the 1960s and 1970s which

dramatically subverted their original textual codings by simply rescanning the original animation

artwork and manipulating it digitally, in a novel hyper-low-budget, do-it-yourself (DIY)

aesthetic. Space Ghost (1966-1967), for instance, a conventional superhero cartoon, became

98

When Ellison gathered his regular column essays on television from the late 1960s together in book

form, he provocatively titled it The Glass Teat. 99

Hall, “Encoding/Decoding.” 100

“Trekkies” referring to fans of Gene Roddenberry’s long-running science fiction television series Star

Trek.

54

Space Ghost Coast to Coast (1994-2004), a late-night cartoon talk show. One of the hallmarks of

the reboot was an exceedingly unconventional approach to character interaction in which pauses

between spoken statements were stretched out to the point of awkwardness, and conversation

devolved into nonsense. Any actual “animation” on the shows was limited to brief clips from a

bank of momentary gestural movements. If the original Hanna-Barbera series was “limited

animation,” I have proposed, the animation of SGC2C is more limited than limited—perhaps a

“minimal animation.”101

Television cartoons do actually talk more than they move. But to fault television cartoons

as not living up to the standard of cinema animation is to misunderstand the differences between

television and cinema. The purpose of television cartoons is to entertain, not to amaze, which

remains the purpose of cinema animation. Full animation and limited animation are each one

side of a continuum. Their intertwined history can be read as a Hegelian dialectic, in which the

pendulum of convention across history has swung from one extreme, the dominant paradigm of

cinema animation represented in Disney’s features, to the other extreme, the limited animation of

UPA and Hanna-Barbera’s early television cartoon. It can be said of the television cartoon that it

is “not animation,” but to privilege animation over the cartoon is ultimately an arbitrary

distinction of taste. Every animation and cartoon can be located at a point along this spectrum.

While both are relatively distinct modes of production, there are certainly cinema animations

which are relatively limited, and television cartoons which are comparatively full of

animation.102

Since each needs the other to distinguish itself as distinct, neither full animation

101

I hope to publish a case study of early Adult Swim shows on this theme. In 2017, I presented an early

draft of this as a talk at the 2017 Society for Cinema and Media studies annual conference. Centered on

the 1994 Cartoon Network series that was the prototype for Adult Swim, called Space Ghost Coast to

Coast (1994-2004), I titled my talk “The Origin of Adult Swim’s ‘Minimal’ Animation.” 102

I think of the Despicable Me franchise (2010-present) as cinema animation that is generally limited.

(In fact, some evidence suggests that it was directly influenced by the production of The Simpsons Movie,

55

nor limited animation could exist without each other. Ultimately, full animation and limited

animation are theoretically intertwined and in practice constantly in dialogue.

a television cartoon made into a movie. I’m thinking of a source I can’t recall, which talked about a

development person seeing the innumerable drawings of Homer Simpson strewn about the film’s

production studio. Evidently this led to the creation of the Minions, which resemble Homer Simpson, in a

mutant kind of way. Gru resembles Mr. Burns.) Rick and Morty (2013-present) is a television cartoon that

actually has quite a bit of animation, so much so that its animators at one point went on strike.

Revealingly, this television cartoon was directly inspired by the Back to the Future film franchise. Rick

was inspired by “Doc,” the mad scientist, and boy Morty was based on teenager Marty.

56

CHAPTER 2

MEDIA PRECEDENTS:

PRINT CARTOONS, EARLY CINEMA CARTOONS, AND RADIO COMEDY

The early television cartoon is a hybrid media form because it represents a coming

together of television and animation. But this does not yet provide a complete understanding of

its identity, because television and animation are also hybrid media forms. The three central

media of this chapter distill what I see as the major influences that made the television cartoon

possible: the print cartoon, early cinema animated cartoons, and radio comedy. The print cartoon

established visual stasis and caricature; the early cinema cartoon introduced some movement into

this; and radio comedy added its lively sound collage.

The cartoon’s antecedents for animation extend back into antiquity and prehistory, to the

drawings of animals early humans painted onto cave walls, which appeared living in the flicker

of firelight. Here, I am only tracing the history back to the development of caricatured drawings,

and the migration of these to the United States. Beginning in the European Renaissance,

animation developed through the science of optics and the study of the peculiarities of human

perception. The rich history of the optical devices of the Victorian period, as well as photography

and early cinema technology, are well-covered in histories of animation and cinema, and are

outside of the scope of this chapter. Between 1900-1910, animation was initially an abuse of

cinema, a cinema by other means, in which the recording movie camera was stopped and a

drawing was photographed.103

Cartoon series production became possible with the development

of the cel technique by Earl Hurd, the fundamental means of rationalizing animation production

103

Pavle Levi, Cinema by Other Means, 2012.

57

through stacking celluloid layers to create composite cartoon characters. The early silent cinema

cartoons made by John R. Bray and his founding animators at the time realized only halting,

intermittent movement; effective animators were able to prevent the viewer’s noticing that by

instead emphasizing the story. The exception to this early full, lifelike character animation made

by the talented Winsor McCay, whose truly animated films threw open the doors to dramatically

lifelike motion. The Fleischer brothers recreated animated motion mechanically through the

rotoscope, but it was not until Walt Disney that animation could be created organically. Visually,

my history begins in the understudied animated cartoons before Disney.

Television extends backwards into history in unrecognized ways that have not been fully

explored. While several volumes trace the individual technical innovations that made television

possible,104

television’s historical antecedents could be interpreted quite widely. Speculative

precedents might be found as far apart as early humans’ storytelling around a fire, in Greek

theater, in the ritual of populations reading daily newspapers, or in parents reading picture books

aloud to children. The earliest direct technical antecedent is probably the electrical telegraph,

beginning in the 1840s, but the shared drama of broadcasting only came to life recognizably in

the 1920s, when early radio technology spread across the country. The formation of commercial

networks and their support by advertising occurred in the early 1930s; this allowed for regular,

live programs to be staged and recorded. Radio broadcasting network chains transitioned into

television, but television also literally inherited radio’s broadcasting technology.105

A vibrant

strand of radio’s innovations were its memorable, seemingly off-the-cuff comedy shows;

numerous great cartoon voice actors began on such radio comedy shows.

104

I have in mind Abramson's The History of Television, 1880 to 1941. 105

Launiainen, Everything Wireless.

58

2.1

Early Print Cartoons

Print cartoons are simplified, caricatured drawings, typically depicting people of social

relevance, accompanied by cultural commentary in accompanying text. All images before the

first photographs were hand-rendered. Because cartoons make people laugh, we might think

them unserious. But people of influence have not taken their graphic jabs lightly. Cartoonist

Randall P. Harrison describes the cartoon as a “communication to the quick”: “The cartoon … is

fast … lively … [a]nd … penetrating”.106

Cartoons became an essential visual element of the

new mass medium of print, and a tool of mass literacy, facilitating the widespread exchange of

ideas within cultures.

Symbolic manipulation of worldly materials is a fundamentally human activity, and the

results became the stuff of life in the developed world.107

Symbolic mediation of perception

facilitated the technical evolution of humankind and the increasing ability and desire to create

new social realities dissimilar from the gritty subsistence conditions other animals live with.

“[The] practice of symbolic organization and mediation of life … signals the advent of fully

modern way of life.”108

The printing press, which could reproduce both letter type and images,

enabled the development of literacy, democracy, and empire.109

It’s often not recognized that, in

large countries like the US, pre-electronic networks, namely the postal system, became a vitally

important link and among the first media forms to unify the country. It did this by enabling

106

Harrison, The Cartoon - Communication to the Quick. 107

Anthropologist Clifford Geertz has shown this. Geertz, “Thick Description.” 108

Soffer and Conkey, “Studying Ancient Visual Cultures.” 109

Founding Canadian media theorist Harold Innis has partly spoken to this in The Bias of

Communication. Philosopher Jürgen Habermas has also addressed this in The Structural Transformation

of the Public Sphere.

59

people even in remote areas to receive newspapers and magazines at their homes.110

In a sense,

television provided a different means of meeting the same human need for information and

entertainment.

Print cartoons became a part of the newspaper media ecology of their day, commenting

on public life by caricaturing popular and unpopular figures. The passing of decades showed

cartooning to be a modernizing cultural force, contributing to literacy, debate, and social change.

Print cartoons coupled allusive social meanings with caricatured drawings. The roots of this

graphic tradition lay in the East, in narrative illustrated sequences created in Japan as far back as

the 1200s.111

Cartoons began to assume their recognizable form in the European Renaissance,

beginning in the 1490s, when founding polymath Leonardo da Vinci aesthetically explored

ugliness in his “grotesques.” 112

110

Winifred Gallagher goes so far as to claim that “the post office created America.” How the Post Office

Created America: A History. Penguin Books, 2017. 111

Koyama-Richard, One Thousand Years of Manga. 112

Hoffman, Caricature from Leonardo to Picasso.

60

Figure 4. Some of Leonardo da Vinci’s “grotesques.” Possibly earliest known caricature drawing

studies, circa 1490s

Source: Open Culture, “Leonardo da Vinci’s Bizarre Caricatures & Monster Drawings”113

Later artists in Italy and Britain developed caricature into a craft of representing a person in a

drawing more striking than a portrait. The term is derived from the Italian “caricare,” meaning

“to charge or load.” Thus, the word “caricature” essentially means a “loaded portrait.”114

While I

113

September 29th, 2017, https://www.openculture.com/2017/09/leonardo-da-vincis-bizarre-caricatures-

monster-drawings.html. 114

Murrell and Chipman, “Nast, Gladiator of the Political Pencil.” Lynch, A History of Caricature.

61

have not read this, I believe that Leonardo sharpening his artistry through rendering caricatures

enabled him to capture the paragon of universal human beauty in the Mona Lisa (1506).

British and German artists developed caricature into a fully-fledged form of social satire.

Briton William Hogarth created artistic drawings and paintings of morality tales in sequence in

the 1730s, like the corruption of a young girl. His introduction of sequence would prove to be a

founding impetus towards the development of story in cartooning. In the Americas, Ben Franklin

helped to marshalled the colonies against the British two decades before the Revolutionary War

by printing among the earliest reproduced images in colonial America in 1754, an admonition in

the form of a political cartoon of a dead snake cut into pieces, with the caption, “Join, or Die.” In

the 1820s, Rodolphe Töpffer, a Swiss artist was encouraged by German author Goethe to publish

his doodled sequential drawn stories, which lampooned the pretensions of 19th

-century high

society. The publication and popularity of this lighthearted visual-verbal satire in the 1830s, art

historian David Kunzle has proposed, makes Töpffer the father of the comic strip.115

Photography was created in France in the late 1830s as the daguerreotype,116

which began to

persistently change visual norms. When the world could be captured in photographs, drawing

could more freely leave realism behind in favor of the visual artifice of caricature.

In the mid-19th

century, a series of Germans and Eastern Europeans carried cartooning to

the United States. The earliest, German Thomas Nast, first politicized cartooning stateside by

skewering political leaders in the 1860s, making him the father of the American cartoon.117

Nast

chronicled the battlefields and soldiers of the U.S. Civil War at a time before photography, and

his drawings represented a visual journalism people could relate to. President Abraham Lincoln

115

Kunzle’s 2007 book overviews Töpffer’s legacy, Father of the Comic Strip.. 116

Fischer, Them Damned Pictures.

Louis Daguerre and Nicéphore Niépce are credited with pioneering the creation of photography. 117

Fischer, Them Damned Pictures.

62

came to call Nast “our best recruiting sergeant”.118

In the 1870s, German Joseph Keppler co-

founded a series of illustrated humor magazines in St. Louis, evidently a hotbed of print

invention in 1860s and 1870s. The postbellum U.S. Puck established a rowdy new civic form of

graphic humor.119

Hungarian Joseph Pulitzer, a recent immigrant beginning in journalism in St.

Louis, met Joseph Keppler. Both moved to New York City in the 1880s, where Keppler

continued publication of Puck, and where Pulitzer became the first press baron, after

resuscitating the ailing New York World newspaper. Pulitzer began revolutionizing the domestic

newspaper by emphasizing the entertainment value of a feisty, muckraking populism, and also

by pushing sensational stories of human interest, crime, disaster, and scandal. The playful

visuality of Pulitzer’s New York World contributed to the origin of a new media species, the

newspaper cartoon, as a driver of circulation.

It appears that Pulitzer began publishing a color Sunday supplement including cartoons in

1893120

because he became a target of Keppler’s caricature artists in Puck, and realized the

popularity of cartoons in other newspapers. I have not seen this documented by others, but it

appears true to this media historian. The editor of Pulitzer’s supplement then stole a popular

cartoonist Richard F. Outcault, away from Puck to cartoon for the World. In the World in

January 1895, Outcault created the first recognizable newspaper comic. The comic centered on

the sassy, hairless “Yellow Kid,” initially in giant, single-panel illustrations taking up a whole

large-format newspaper page, who is thought to be the reason this sensational kind of publishing

came to be called yellow journalism. Circulation soared among denizens of the City, many who

were recent European immigrants without English proficiency, who gravitated towards the novel

comics.

118

Murrell and Chipman, “Nast, Gladiator of the Political Pencil.” 119

Backer, “Uniting Mugwumps and the Masses: Puck’s Role in Gilded Age Politics.” 120

Backer.

63

“It was Pulitzer who first demonstrated the full potentialities of the Sunday newspaper as

a profitable news and entertainment medium,” journalism scholar Edwin Emery wrote in a

textbook in the 1960s, at a time when yellow journalism was still controversial. “The tools which

were now available—linotypes and faster presses, more striking typography and layout, color

printing, cartoons and photographs, skillful writing by larger staffs of reporters and editors, better

communications facilities—all could be used constructively to build better newspapers.”121

Soon

thereafter, wealthy California businessman William Randolph Hearst bought failing competitor

the New York Journal and hired away many of Pulitzer’s artists, including Richard Outcault. The

Yellow Kid appears to have been central to Hearst’s hostile market grab, because he wasted no

time prominently publishing Outcault’s popular comic in his own expanded color supplement.

Soon, in 1897 in Hearst’s Journal, the new comic format spilled into sequence in what

may be the first actual comic strip, Rudolph Dirks’ The Katzenjammer Kids. This very German

comic by German Rudolph Dirks, created the format that would become standard over time: a

series of 4:3 rectangles of the same size, printed in a horizontal sequence, on Sundays occupying

2-3 rows of such strips. This pitched battle between these two highly graphical and increasingly

powerful New York City daily newspapers would earn the “colorful” publications the title of the

yellow journals, evidently named after the same ragamuffin kid the papers were fighting over.

History scholar Isabelle Lehuu describes this print culture of the antebellum United States as a

liminal “carnival on the page,” reflective of national social dynamics in transition.122

Journalism

scholar David Spencer sees the battle as no less than the means by which America emerged as a

world power.123

121

Emery, The Press and America, 2nd

edition. 122

Lehuu, Carnival on the Page. 123

Spencer, The Yellow Journalism.

64

2.2

Early Cinema Cartoons

Cinema emerged at almost the exact same time and place as the comic strip, in 1895, in

New York City. The two share an obvious formal similarity: both set individual pictures into

sequence. Much has been written about the origins of comics,124

and likewise much has been

written about the origins of cinema,125

although I’m unaware if someone has written about the

two parallel origin stories of comics and cinema.126

After the first short films were released as

brief slices of life, animation took another 20 years to become common, around 1915. When Brit

J. Stuart Blackton was creating the first halting animation, beginning around 1900, animated

drawings were just one among a number of optical tricks. Winsor McCay introduced the world to

animated cartoons in dramatic fashion in 1914, but it was Earl Hurd’s cel technique that enabled

the studio of John R. Bray studio to consistently produce animated shorts with enough regularity

to sustain a market. Efficiency more than creativity drove most early cinema cartoon releases. By

the late 1920s, the form seemed nearly played out and to be teetering on the verge of oblivion.

The man who changed this was Walt Disney, who both technically and creatively revolutionized

the cartoon by remaking it less as a form of cartoon than as a new kind of animation. However,

Walt Disney’s lavish production values set an impossibly high standard that few others could

completely duplicate.

124

Thierry Smolderen’s recently translated book may be the best one on the subject: The Origins of

Comics. 125

My favorite is Stephen Neale’s Cinema and Technology. 126

Indeed, I hope to address this in publication with my paper “The Emergence of the Newspaper Comic

from the Urban Newspaper and Film in 1890’s New York City”.

65

Perceptive scholars have recognized that the limited animation of the early television

cartoon has important ties back to animation from the earliest days of cinema animation.127

The

roots of television cartoon storytelling can be glimpsed in early silent-era cinema cartoons, like

those made by John R. Bray, Earl Hurd, and Paul Terry. Theirs was a narrative lineage that was

older and to some degree distinct from the visual aesthetic naturalism of the animation of Winsor

McCay and, later, Walt Disney.

The early cinema cartoon has a lineage longer and more consistent than Disney’s

animation. Much has been written about the optical devices of the 19th

century. Enough authors

have positioned these devices as anticipating cinematic animation, and indeed, cinema itself, that

this has become a consensus position. In the 1600s, lenses made the telescope and the

microscope possible, dramatically advancing scientific knowledge and understanding of the

world. “Lenses in the seventeenth century were something like computer code today: the cutting-

edge technology.”128

In the 1800s, human vision itself was becoming an object of study. Study of

perceptual impressions like afterimages led to exploration of visual illusions. The earliest

Victorian-era optical toy, the thaumatrope, was created in 1827. The thaumatrope was simply a

thin piece of cardboard with different images drawn on either side, suspended by two pieces of

string; twisting the string causes the paper to spin, creating a composite image in the viewer’s

vision. Tom Gunning has made an interesting case that the thaumatrope is the first optical device

that created a perceptual “technological image” seen only in visual perception. “Through the

device the observer is ‘made to see’ something not otherwise visible.”129

Many other

127

Conrad Smith has most directly expressed this in his essay “The Early History of Animation.” Norman

M. Klein expressed a similar view in his book Seven Minutes: The Life and Death of the American

Animated Cartoon. 128

Cmiel and Peters, Promiscuous Knowledge, 24. 129

Tom Gunning, “Hand and Eye: Excavating a New Technology of the Image in the Victorian Era,”

2012, 500. The thaumatrope is attributed to Brit John Ayrton Paris.

66

“philosophical toys” would follow, creating true animation through displaying short sequences of

drawings in loops.130

The subsequent emergence of cinema in late 1895 has been thoroughly

studied; it was then that the Lumière brothers first projected short films for the public, in Paris.

The earliest single instance of clearly animated cartoons with characters is most

important for this history. This took place several years before the debut of cinema, in 1892 at a

museum in Paris. There, inventor and artist Charles-Émile Reynaud began presenting what he

called “optical theater” programs of “luminous pantomimes” to audiences. Reynaud hand-

painted simplified cartoon-like figures in color in 500-700 different positions as moments of a

story on a roll of a flexible, transparent material.131

In his “Théâtre Optique” system, Reynaud

advanced the image sequence slowly, by hand, apparently while he narrated for the characters,

accompanied by piano music and possibly sound effects. To move the characters to new

positions, he advanced the film more quickly, creating a momentary illusion of motion. His 1892

piece Pauvre Pierrot is five minutes long and takes place in only one setting. Two men compete

for a woman, with one prevailing in the end. Many pauses and gestures indicate the presence of

dialogue. The characters assume their positions with momentary animation, but mostly stand in

place, or gesture. Might we call this “suspended animation?” The parallel to the early television

cartoon is surprisingly natural, to my eyes.

130

An excellent film series about these optical devices, which demonstrates and films their use, is Werner

Nekes’ Media Magica (2005). 131

Remarkably, Reynaud figured out that he could use a form of hard but elastic gelatin, which Walt

Disney and others have confirmed.

67

Figure 5. Charles-Émile Reynaud’s Pauvre Pierrot (1892), a “luminous pantomime” that tells a

story about relatable human characters. The figure in the 9th

image is entering through a door

Source: Freeze frames from YouTube, compiled by author

Here, “[a]nimated optical culture begins to tell stories,” as animation historian Esther

Leslie has written about Reynaud. Pointing out that he was the first to combine image and story

together in an audio and visual sequence, Leslie writes, “[this] marks [the] beginning of a form

of entertainment that will come to be [called] cartooning and animation”.132

Notably, Reynaud

was working at a time before cinema, when the very concept of a film telling a story did not yet

exist. “The ingenious Reynaud, with his ribbons of hand painted moving figures, can be

considered one of the true forerunners of modern animation, and indeed of cinema itself,” writes

animation historian Stephen Cavalier.133

132

Leslie, “Animation’s Petrified Unrest,” in Suzanne Buchan (ed), Pervasive Animation. 133

Cavalier, A World History of Animation, 38.

68

Walt Disney himself later recognized Charles-Émile Reynaud as this creator of this

“prototype of the animated cartoon.”134

While I might be splitting hairs, it seems to me that, in

calling Reynaud’s optical theater a “prototype” of the “animated cartoon” that Disney recognized

Reynaud’s accomplishment as promising but primitive, something different than his own

sophisticated “animation.” I believe that Reynaud created an efficient system very similar to the

means by which cartoon stories would be efficiently told in the future in newer media, first in

cinema cartoons and then in television cartoons. To my knowledge, no one has yet

acknowledged that Charles-Émile Reynaud’s optical theater system was much more like the

early television cartoon form than classical cinema animation. The cartoon figures held still for

long periods while dialogue was read, for instance, and movement could only be accomplished in

brief moments.

After cinema began, the recognizable “cartoony” style of the animated cartoon evolved

gradually over several decades through the work of a succession of early animators. Around

1900, J. Stuart Blackton was the first American to discover animation, while filming his

“lightning sketch” vaudeville stage performances. Blackton realized that he could make his

drawings move by photographing discrete drawings in sequence, rather than filming his quick

drawing, which he also did. Blackton regarded animation as a special effect, and the films

featuring it were known as “trick films.” French caricaturist Emile Cohl was inspired by a stop-

motion film by Blackton to make the first film in 1908 that is nearly all animated drawings,

Fantasmagorie. Donald Crafton calls Cohl the first animator, and describes his aesthetic

134

Walt Disney (contributor), “The Story of the Animated Drawing,” Disneyland, November 30, 1955.

Walt Disney devoted an episode of his first anthology television series, Disneyland, to the subject of the

history of animation. Historically, this excellent episode, available on YouTube, could represent a

founding moment for animation studies, when the master pulled the curtain back to share his

understanding of his art. In the process, Walt Disney highlights Charles-Émile Reynaud.

69

philosophy as radically bizarre in its emphasis on metaphosis, in comparison to the more

straightforward narration in early U.S. cartoons.135

The earliest animator to pioneer the 20th

century style of visually cartoony characters was

Winsor McCay. McCay was a vaudeville performer whose stage acts were intended to thrill his

audiences by putting his dramatic skills as a draftsman on display. McCay’s first film dramatizes

McCay betting his artist friends, who drew other newspaper comics, that he could create

“pictures that move.” The original title for the film is actually an advertisement trumpeting the

artist’s accomplishment: Winsor McCay: The Famous Cartoonist of the N.Y. Herald and His

Moving Comics; now it is known as Little Nemo, featuring characters from his momentous comic

strip Little Nemo in Slumberland in a brief animated sequence. The animation in the middle

begins with the words asking the audience to “Watch Me Move,” as if they will not believe what

they will see. What follows is not a story but a steam-of-consciousness spectacle, a surrealistic

exploration of the plasticity of animated space. McCay’s breathtaking draftsmanship is on full

display. The new visual spectacle of animation was so confounding to many viewers, who had

never seen anything like it, that many claimed the film must have been an optical trick of

photography of real people.

This challenged McCay to top the feat in his breakout vaudeville and film performance,

unveiled in early 1914, not long before the outbreak of the Great War. In a flashy vaudeville

stage presentation possibly billed at the time as Gertie the Trained Dinosaur, McCay ran

135

Crafton writes this at the beginning of the book’s last chapter, “Incoherent Cinema.”

When Emile Cohl’s films are viewed, one is struck not only by their technical ingenuity but also

by their bizarre humor. … Cohl’s films are extraordinary in their outrageousness, their

outlandishness, and, frequently, their incomprehensibility. They do not imitate the physical

knockabout gags of the vaudeville stage or the domestic farces of the type that Cohl himself had

once written. They rely instead on a peculiar dry, cerebral wittiness that makes his films stand out

alone in pre-World War I cinema.” Emile Cohl, Caricature, and Film, 257.

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animation he made of a long-necked brachiosaurus dinosaur and pretended to interact with her

from the stage.

Figure 6. Frame from Winsor McCay’s Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), a moment of tromp l’oeil

illusion when the artist steps into the film

Source: Wikimedia Commons

In these appearances, McCay single-handedly created the first character animation: he

brought a long-extinct creature to life, who moved in stunningly lifelike animation resembling

that of a real creature. The stage show was released as a film. That he advertised Gertie as a

“trained” dinosaur suggested that she was real, and his shtick in the performances was to interact

with Gertie as if she were real. That this was an in-person stage show is significant, because it

meant that people present witnessed this wonder before their very eyes.

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McCay was not interested to commercialize his techniques, however, which ironically

became necessary to meet the new public demand for cartoon films that he himself created. That

role was taken up by John R. Bray, who created the first industrial-style animation studio in

1914, the same year as McCay’s film performance. Bray recruited Earl Hurd, a young newspaper

cartoonist from Kansas City, who probably created much of what came to be called the cel

process, using cinema’s own technology of celluloid as the basis for minimizing the artistic labor

required to make an animated cartoon. Bray and Hurd patented their techniques between 1914

and 1916 and formed what they initially called “The Bray-Hurd Process Company,” a nearly

monopolistic legal patent trust by which the two enforced licensing agreements of their

technology for all animators using celluloid, for over 20 years.136

This was the real beginning of

the commercialization of animation through limiting techniques. Despite its mass commercial

orientation, Bray Productions became a creative environment in which the new animated cartoon

was fleshed out by the first generation of animators, each in their own cartoon series.

The Hollywood cartoon style appears to chronologically develop and refine most, I

believe, in the cartoons of Earl Hurd, Paul Terry, Max Fleischer, and Otto Messmer. John R.

Bray himself started what is probably the first cartoon series in 1913, Colonel Heeza Liar, but he

did not seem to understand how to tell entertaining stories in the new form.137

136

Bray and Hurd, “Bray-Hurd: The Key Animation Patents.” 137

It seems that Bray did copy the idea of a cartoon series from the early cartoon series The Newlyweds,

based on George McManus’ newspaper comic strip, now lost, which John Canemaker says were released

between March 1913 and January 1914. Canemaker, Felix, 14. Bray’s first Heeza Liar cartoon, Col.

Heeza Liar in Africa, was released in November 1913. Stathes, The Bray Animation Project.

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Figure 7. Frame from John R. Bray’s early film Col. Heeza Liar’s African Hunt (1914)

Source: Cartoon Roots, Blu-ray disc by Tommy José Stathes’s imprint, Cartoons on Film

Earl Hurd, Bray’s partner, advanced cartoon storytelling beginning in 1916 with his series Bobby

Bumps, about a 7-year-old boy and his dog. At this early stage, Bobby and his dog Fido are still

rendered in a detailed, illustrative style resembling newspaper comics. But the charismatic boy

and his dog may be the first cute cartoon characters, fitting endearing stereotypes.

The first person to grasp the uniqueness of the animated cartoon as a medium for

storytelling, though, appears to have been Paul Terry: his character Farmer Al Falfa was the first

flawed, funny character who has unlikely comic misadventures filled with slapstick antics. Paul

Terry began dedicating his life to making animated cartoons in 1915, a year before Hurd. Terry’s

early cartoons still have jerky motion, like Bray’s cartoons, but Paul Terry appears to be the first

artist whose style consistently departs from the naturalism of newspaper illustration, beginning to

fashion a playful, loose aesthetic for the new cinema cartoon aesthetic. “Paul Terry’s cartoons

prefigure the [cartoony] visual style of Hollywood cartoons of the 1930s,” Conrad Smith has

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written, “as well as narratively add dimensions to characters, beyond the primitive stereotyping

of Bray’s Heeza Liar and Hurd’s Bobby Bumps cartoons.”138

There is actually evidence that Paul Terry created a similar cel process to Hurd and Bray

for his own earliest cartoons in 1915, but he didn’t patent it. John R. Bray used his and Earl

Hurd’s patent trust to compel Terry to come to work for him in order to continue making

animated cartoons with the technique.139

Terry’s Farmer Al Falfa is a cantankerous, wizened

rural human farmer who is constantly upstaged by his animals, although he is so ridiculously

flawed that he becomes likeable.140

Terry was the first to develop the slapstick impulse in

animation storytelling: his characters communicate more through gestural pantomime than

speech, and they are prone to tumbling around in escalating gags. Animator Dick Huemer, who

played pivotal roles in developing animation beginning in the earliest days, agreed in an earlier

interview. “Terry was the first one to really make money in this business. … Terry’s cartoons

were a little better; at least the characters were cute.”141

138

Smith, “Early History of Animation.” 139

If anyone addresses this, it seems it would most likely be W. Gerald Hamonic, who published a book-

length study of Paul Terry: Terrytoons: The Story of Paul Terry and His Classic Cartoon Factory. 140

Donald Crafton calls the protagonists in this category “the Old Men.” Before Mickey, 273. 141

Dick Huemer, “Richard Huemer (1898-1979),” interview by Joe Adamson, Didier Ghez (ed) Walt’s

People, Volume 4.

74

Figure 8. Frames from Terrytoons’ 1931 cartoon Canadian Capers, indicating the artist who

animated each, including future Disney animators Art Babbitt and Bill Tytla

Source: Babbitt Blog142

Brothers Max and Dave Fleischer employed their rotoscope technique to introduce a

dramatic new realism into early cinema cartoon characters. The rotoscope technique, which they

created around 1918, is a simple mechanical means for creating the smooth, fluid movement

Winsor McCay had achieved in his films, through his sheer artistic talent and effort. Max

recorded Dave hamming around for the camera in a Coney Island clown suit. The film frames

142

“‘Canadian Capers’ Draft,” January 28, 2013, https://babbittblog.com/2013/01/28/canadian-capers-

draft/

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were individually projected onto a drawing board. Then Max simply traced the frames of Dave to

create sequential moving drawings. When Dick Huemer arrived to work with the brothers in

1924, he redesigned the clown and created a fictional dog character, changes that allowed the

Fleischers to move away from strict dependence on the photorealism inherent to the rotoscope

aesthetic and into the bouncy cartoon style they became known for in the 1930s.143

The Hollywood cartoon style arrived more fully in 1919, when Otto Messmer created the

cat character who would become Felix, with producer Pat Sullivan. After the end of the first

World War in late 1918, Messmer and Sullivan were asked to create a cartoon by Earl Hurd, who

was falling behind on his own output. Messmer took up the challenge and created a new

character series, patterning the character’s poses on Charlie Chaplin’s performances. “I made a

little film for [Paramount] about a cat,” Messmer later recalled, plainly. “He was chasing some

mice around and it was full of gags”144

. Apparently without much reflection, Messmer started

one of the most defining trends in animation history: animal characters as protagonists, instead of

human characters. Felix’s exaggerated but simple design gave him visual appeal and

recognizability. Unlike earlier stock cat and mouse characters, Felix had a devil-may-care

attitude that distinguished him as an individual. “‘Felix the Cat’ … was the quintessential

cartoon of the 1920s and the favorite of a growing number of aficionados of the medium,”

comments Donald Crafton. 145

By this point in the early 1920s, the visual signature of the

animated cartoon was mostly established. Before sound, slapstick humor became a mainstay for

gags that needed to be visually funny.

143

Huemer interview by Adamson. 144

Messmer describes the kind of gags in the earliest cartoon: “[A] mouse [ran] up a grandfather clock,

taking the minute hand off, [and threw] it like a spear, nailing the cat’s tail to the floor. The title was

Feline Follies.” Crafton, Before Mickey, 305. 145

“The [early] animated protagonists were either humans or animals; a shift in interest from the former

to the latter was discernable in the 1920s,” Donald Crafton has written. Before Mickey, 272; 301.

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While these early cinema cartoons are often called animation, should they really be

understood as animation, especially considering Walt Disney’s films to be the measure of

animation? “Suspended animation” was a concept of fascination in the 19th

and early 20th

centuries. At a time when “animation” literally meant real world movement, people were

fascinated by the concept of life that could be arrested. This concept is about as close as I have

found to a term that captures both the stasis and movement in early cinema cartoons. Literature

scholar Nathalie Op de Beeck has described children’s picture books as suspended animation, by

looking to the way a series of static images and texts creates a cumulative perception of a

received narrative. “‘[S]uspended animation’ [refers] to the way a picture book’s words and

frames constitute a narrative. Storytellers compose the sequence and audiences forge imaginative

connections by reading across the pages, experiencing a sort of extracinematic montage.”146

Esther Leslie proposes a subtle interpretation of Reynaud’s films as a combination of

stillness and movement. “Reynaud[‘s a]nimation is … a matter of movement set in relation to

stillness. [Thus s]tillness and movement in combination coalesce at the origins of this mechanical

optical entertainment culture.”147

Leslie describes Reynaud’s halting animation as “petrified

unrest.” To me, “suspended animation” or “petrified unrest” can’t really be animation, which

moves more noticeably than it stands still. I think it makes more sense to understand this early

cinema not as animation but as cartoon.

McCay achieved a Jurassic Park-like special effects coup, 80 years before that film. To

McCay, Bray and Hurd’s intervention represented a degradation of the art of cinema animation

that McCay created. At a dinner for animators in 1927, McCay’s resentment about this bubbled

over when he was addressing the crowd. He berated the practitioners in a revealing moment of

146

Nathalie op de Beeck, Suspended Animation: Children’s Picture Books and the Fairy Tale of

Modernity. 147

Leslie, “Animation’s Petrified Unrest.”

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anger, saying, “Animation is an art. That is how I conceived it. But as I see, what you fellows

have done with it is [to] make it into a trade. Not an art, but a trade. Bad Luck!”148

Walt Disney’s

animation clearly follows in McCay’s footsteps, seeking to recapture McCay’s uncanny ability to

capture the seemingly living spirit of a creature in a cinema film. Walt Disney, beginning to

make animation around the same time, figured out how to balance the animated cartoon’s artistry

with a rationalized mode of production. In doing so, he charted a solid path forward that opened

animation production up as a field to many new voices.

Persistent moments of stillness in cinema animations became somewhat rare in Disney’s

films. They are usually quite narratively dramatic. In Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

(1937), stillness becomes a central trope in the story: near the end of the film, after biting the

poison apple, Snow White lays in state, unmoving. While she is not dead, she is not really alive,

either. Unmoving, the dwarfs mourn her as if she has died … and then she wakes up after a kiss.

Why has there remained so little interest in the origins of animation, now a worldwide

industry? These early days of the cinema cartoon now seem easy to willfully forget. Walt

Disney’s work has cast such a long shadow that many apparently find it uninteresting to look

back to the primitive cartoons that were typical before Disney. There have been valuable studies.

Donald Crafton’s Before Mickey: The Animated Film, 1898-1928, which ends with Mickey

Mouse’s debut in 1928 is I think one of the best. Writing in the early 1980s, Crafton begins his

book with a similar question.

Even in the most comprehensive studies … on the origins and early development of the

animated film … [t]he authors clearly have regarded the works as being significant as

148

John Canemaker, Winsor McCay: His Life and Art, 199.

78

‘forerunners,’ but as having little intrinsic interest. … Some people will no doubt be

surprised to learn that there was any animation at all before Mickey.149

In technical terms, early cinema cartoons lack color and sound. Creatively, their

characters and stories are fairly simple and without the kind of emotional charisma that

audiences expected later characters to show. For much of the 1920s, animated cartoons played

out the innovations of the 1910s, without improving upon them. Founding animator Dick

Huemer started in animation at Raoul Barré’s studio in New York City, which I believe was the

first animation studio ever and the model for John R. Bray’s studio; he has talked about the crude

standards of what passed for cartoon entertainment in the 1910s.

Animation in those days was not a difficult art. If it moved, it was good. … [T]he novelty

carried it. … [Our cartoons were only] funny as a crutch. … They weren’t funny,

actually. We got very few laughs. ... [T]he stuff really wasn’t built up to the way Disney

subsequently learned to do. That is, to prepare, to establish things. … There’s gotta be

logic in humor, I guess. … I can remember taking my family to see some … animation I

was particularly proud of, and just as it went on, somebody behind me said, “Oh, I hate

these things.”150

Scott Bukatman has recently shone a welcome light on Winsor McCay’s early work in

his interesting 2012 book The Poetics of Slumberland: Animated Spirits and the Animating

Spirit. I love reading anything Scott Bukatman has written, but despite the title, animation per se

149

Crafton, Before Mickey, xvii-xviii. 150

Dick Huemer, “Richard Huemer (1898-1979),” interview by Joe Adamson, 1969, in Didier Ghez (ed)

Walt’s People, Volume 4. This difficult-to-locate piece reprints in full six interviews founding animator

Dick Huemer completed with animation historian Joe Adamson in 1969. The piece runs 45 pages.

Huemer’s recollections and interpretations reach back to his experience working for Raoul Barre in what

was probably the first animation studio ever. Huemer’s insights are so good and rare that I find myself

harboring a desire to approach Joe Adamson someday about trying to publish that collection as a small

book.

79

is not his main focus in the book. I will need to read more closely, but to judge from his many

images, a cursory calculation finds that 9% are of McCay’s films or other animation, 8% are

about live action films, and 81% are about either comics or art.151

I wish that Bukatman would

have spent more space actually doing scholarship on animation than theorizing about novel

topics like “animatedness.” The book seems to be an exercise in imagination, a dreaming about

concepts the author infers from the pages of McCay’s groundbreaking newspaper comics.

Even Bukatman’s general focus on McCay is at best, I think, incomplete. McCay did

light the match that brightly illuminated the possibilities of animation for all to see, in Gertie.

But most of the first generation of animators that followed him to make cartoons found it is very

difficult, if not impossible, to animate beautifully fluid films like McCay did. Max and Dave

Fleischer found a method, the rotoscope, although it involved not cartoon draftsmanship but just

mechanically copying of photographic film frames. Paul Terry’s situation is interesting: his

career was directly inspired by seeing McCay perform his Gertie show; but the kind of cartoons

he made were not art but craft. “While J. Stuart Blackton and Winsor McCay demonstrated the

potential of cartoon animation as a curiosity, it was John Randolph Bray, the ‘Henry Ford of

Animation’ and Earl Hurd who made the medium economically feasible.”152

Bray and Hurd’s

production model became the standard one: easily manufactured, largely static cartoons, with

precious little magic to be found. McCay himself produced only one more inspired animated

film, a proto-cinéma vérité dramatization of the sinking of the British passenger ship Lusitania,

with no characters featured except the larger-than-life-sized ship.153

Walt Disney would find a

151

Bukatman’s illustrations are listed from xi to xiii. 152

W. Gerald Hamonic, Terrytoons: The Story of Paul Terry and His Classic Cartoon Factory, 2018. 153

After Gertie (1914), McCay devoted three years to making a very long 12-minute animated film in an

ambitious but strange attempt to recreate an unphotographed story from the headlines, the sinking of the

British passenger ship RMS Lusitania in 1915. The 1918 film The Sinking of the Lusitania proves to be a

80

way to operationalize McCay’s lifelike character animation, and this flourished for decades in

cinema. But that model would not translate to electronic media like television.

Here are two paragraphs collecting my observations about the significance of this period.

In the second half of the 20th

century, interest in the films of this early period was so low that

many of the original film prints nearly disintegrated beyond repair. Recently, around 2014, a

brave young archivist named Tommy José Stathes arrived on the scene and is endeavoring to

rescue those early cartoon films that can be saved, digitizing them in high quality, and releasing

them on Blu-ray discs.154

I am convinced that there is much to be learned about the early

television cartoon, and later television cartoons and digital cartoons, from this early period of

cinema cartoons, especially about Paul Terry and his Terrytoons studio. In 2017, animation

historian W. Gerald Hamonic published a book overviewing Terry’s life and output, which he

spent at least 20 years researching: Terrytoons: The Story of Paul Terry and His Classic Cartoon

Factory.155

Media industry historian Derek Long believes that the book has issues but “does till

new soil for future research.”156

By the 1920s, animated cartoons were settling into a rut, as Paul

Terry kept his studio rigidly cranking out an Aesop’s Fables release every week for most of the

decade. It seemed that each release became more similar to previous ones. Michael Barrier,

somewhat depressed about the studio, expressed what I find to be a compelling insight, writing

the following before I was born.

work of a new kind of animation, effects animation, decades before similar practices became common on

Hollywood blockbuster films. 154

Tommy José has started a small DVD-pressing label called Cartoons on Film. In 2014, he began

issuing limited quantity pressings of early cinema cartoons. Tommy José, http://www.tommyjose.com/. 155

Hamonic, Terrytoons. 156

Long, Review of Hamonic, Terrytoons, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2019.

81

This emphasis on the technical, rather than the artistic, spilled over into the animation

itself. … The animation in a Paul Terry cartoon of the twenties, say, is so mechanical and

repetitive that it is strongly similar to the animation in a television cartoon of today.157

When television arrived in the 1950s, and it was realized that Disney-like animation

could not be economically created for the new medium, the legacy of these early cinema

cartoons seemed to call out for more attention. Both Joe Barbera and Alex Anderson learned to

make animation at Terrytoons, in the 1930s and 1940s, respectively. I think they clearly

patterned their models of planned animation on the limited animation studio techniques of the

Terry studio. While Paul Terry’s cartoons were not overly innovative in the 1920s, they were

entertaining. Paradoxically, a young Walt Disney, then in his 20s, said that he went to see “every

one” of Terry’s films, and aspired to emulate them. When Walt Disney and his cartooning staff

moved from Kansas City to California in 1923, Leonard Maltin believes that “their major

influence was Paul Terry’s Aesop’s Fables.”158

“Disney admitted that one of his earliest

ambitions was to produce able quality to Paul Terry’s animated shorts,” W. Gerald Hamonic

recently wrote.159

With such historical facts in mind, Bob Jaques ventures that “Terrytoons is the

root of all animation!”160

While not literally true, there is a surprising amount of truth here. Sad,

and funny.

2.3

Radio Comedy

The arrival of radio transformed civic life in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. At a time

of material privation during the Great Depression, radio offered to individual households

157

Barrier, “Of Mice, Wabbits, Ducks and Men: The Hollywood Cartoon,” 1974. I was born in 1980. 158

Maltin, Of Mice and Magic, 27. 159

Hamonic, Terrytoons. 160

Komorowski and Jaques, “Tom & Jerry.”

82

something altogether different from what everyday life was like then: information and

entertainment in a new way at once inexplicable, invisible, and instantaneous. After the arrival of

television, radio has come to occupy itself with mostly music and talk, but before television,

radio offered to listeners what television has since come to offer to viewers: access to any and

every kind of programming. Radio comedy, in particular, was a pioneering force then reshaping

popular entertainment. Americans seemed to feel a deep need for the reassurance and connection

that such live radio comedy offered. Cultural comedy plays a unique role in creating cohesion

within groups. And at this time before the standardization of the situation comedy on television

in the 1950s, comedy on radio was live, freewheeling, unpredictable, and deeply social. By the

early years of television, the comedians who cut their teeth in radio were already veterans. Voice

acting for animation seemed to be actually quite similar to radio for many voice actors, because,

like radio, it involved speaking into a microphone, in a quiet studio. Talking about her

experience even doing silly voices like dogs barking, Bea Benaderet, voice of Betty Rubble on

The Flintstones, told a reporter in 1960 that “It’s wonderful. Just like the old radio days.”161

Admittedly, “sound is easy to overlook as a precedent … because it offers no visual idiom.”162

I

believe that the legacy of radio comedy represents an invisible prehistory of television comedy,

and a central building block of newer television formats like the cartoon.

Radio was the first medium of nearly instantaneous live electric broadcast, a fundamental

temporal and spatial shift foregrounding the immediacy of the present moment. Radio’s active

signal was invisibly sent into the home from miles away, without cost. It was always live and

could be integrated into any home activity as background. Listeners experienced a powerful new

experience of being part of an “imagined community,” a disconnected group of individuals

161

Arnold Zeitlin, "With Arf and Aroo-o-o," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, August 9, 1960. Reposted by Yowp

at "A Ruff Stone," Yowp, 19 July 2017 http://yowpyowp.blogspot.com/2017/07/a-ruff-stone.html 162

Gitelman, Always Already New.

83

unified by a simultaneous experience of a shared media text.163

The evanescent invisibility and

ephemerality of radio’s broadcasting signal epitomizes its significance as a modernizing force of

mass communication, according to broadcasting scholars Christopher Anderson and Michael

Curtin.

The radio and television signals that endlessly circle the globe … are invisible to the

naked eye and silent to the ear alone. … These signals – weightless yet dense, ephemeral

yet enduring – are an embodiment of modernity, an expression of the contradictions

inherent in the historical period that began with the consolidation of industrial capitalism

in the nineteenth century. ... By transforming the experience of space and time, electric

communication lies at the very heart of the historical processes of modernity.164

While radio itself has faded in popular memory, could it be in part because it effected

material change to social life by making music and talk ever-accessible, a shift that has

normalized its sound and so rendered it invisible?165

Marshall McLuhan saw its significance in

even more transformative terms. The medium effects a noticeable reversal of the dispersed

character of society. Live radio comedy, broadcast from a theater stage in front of a live

audience, opened up a typically urban phenomenon to country folk; in doing so, its aural liveness

imbues in all a sense that the self is in inexplicable communion with humankind. In his words,

McLuhan sees radio as countering many of the norms of existing print culture. “Radio provided

163

In Hilmes, Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922-1952. 164

Christopher Anderson and Michael Curtin, “Writing Cultural History: The Challenge of Radio and

Television.” 165

Sound historian Tim Wall has made this argument in “Radio Sound: Blind-Alley Analysis And

Intellectual Knot-Tying In Radio Studies”. “When television replaced radio as the main domestic medium

academics somehow lost track of radio, even though this was the very moment it became ubiquitous in

our social world.”

84

the first massive experience of electronic implosion, that reversal of the entire direction and

meaning of literate Western civilization.”166

At the time, during the Great Depression, the United States was undergoing a fitful

transition from an economy based in production to one based in consumption. In the 1930s, new

programming formats emerged that created entirely new forms of mediated entertainment. For

readers outside of urban areas, this was one of the first times they experienced the kinds of

events that cost good money for city-dwellers to attend. By introducing listeners to a newly

commodity- and leisure-oriented way of living, the new medium was producing new kinds of

needs different from the material bases of survival, as media historian Kate Lacey has

observed.167

Historian Susan Douglas offers an evocative portrait of what it might have been like

to live through this new “ethereal world,” in which the ether became alive with human

connection through sound.

Arriving alone at night, in the darkened car, reassured by the nightlight of the dashboard,

or lying in bed tuned to a disembodied voice or music, evokes a spiritual, almost

telepathic contact across space and time, a reassurance that we aren’t alone in the void:

we have kindred spirits. You engage with a phantom whose voice and presence you

welcomed, needed. … [T]here is a sense of camaraderie and mutuality coming from the

sky itself.168

At this historical moment in the 1930s, the two largest commercial broadcasting

networks, NBC and CBS, were linking up affiliate stations to form giant chains across the

country. U.S. government regulator were giving the commercial radio networks a complex task

of great importance to the nation: to balance the needs of the populace for information with its

166

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 300. 167

Kate Lacey, “Radio in the Great Depression: Promotional Culture, Public Service, and Propaganda.” 168

Susan Douglas, Listening In: Radio And The American Imagination, 1999.

85

desires for entertainment.169

To meet its need to provide information, radio began offering news

about the world. Broadcast news was just coming into existence as a format during this time.

What made for good entertainment in the 20th

century? Music aside, the networks found

that, in the words of critic Gilbert Seldes, “[c]omedy is the axis on which broadcasting revolves.”

This is now taken for granted as natural. At the time, though, “the truth [was] that the central

position of comedy on the air [was] a totally new phenomenon in the history of

entertainment.”170

Many genre formats of the 1930s have persisted to this day, representing

precedents by which formats developed into semi-stable genres, such as the situation comedy,

the soap opera, and the talk show.

A newly street-smart kind of talking was increasingly taking over the broadcast spectrum.

a “linguistic slapstick.” This transgressive form of verbal dueling in the radio comedy of Amos

‘n’ Andy, George Burns and Gracie Allen, and Jack Benny extended the innovative physical

comedy of vaudeville into the ethereal sound world of broadcasting. Radio personalized verbal

comedy by dialoguing with linguistic and cultural situations of everyday life, which were

changing dramatically at the time. The only means a voice actor had for expressing their

character was to channel all of their expression through their voice, an approach that in essence

radicalized existing ethnic identities for the purposes of humor. This was an auditory

exaggeration of the longstanding norms of vaudeville stage humor, and a restless expression of

independence by aural voices of often regional dialects. Susan Douglas describes this unsettling

and exciting new social phenomenon of the time. Frequently it seems to have been difficult to

even understand such rapid-fire street-style talk.

169

David Goodman, Radio’s Civic Ambition: American Broadcasting and Democracy in the 1930s. 170

Seldes, “The Prevalence Of Comedy,” in The Public Arts.

86

Radio reshaped the spoken word in America ... [and] pushed the use of language to the

center stage of American life ... [L]inguistic slapstick in the 1930s ... was the contrast

between types of voices, with different timbres, accents, and affectations … the jokes lay

as much between the sounds and pronunciations of different voices as they did within the

voice of one character. … Linguistic slapstick asserted that America was as vibrant,

pliable, inventive, absorptive, defiant, and full of surprises as its language.171

Young comedian Jack Benny, perhaps the most talented radio comic ever, had a problem

maintaining a regular weekly live radio show, though: he was running out of jokes. Many radio

comedians apparently routinely filled up their time with an endless string of single jokes. A

comic genius, Benny blazed a trail as one of the first showrunner producer/writer/performers in

the history of broadcasting. … In putting together an evolving comedy and musical program,

week after week, Benny and his right-hand man, writer Harry Conn, developed a mixture of

regular settings, dialogue, and memorable characters as a formula for keeping existing narratives

running for weeks, months, or years. “Benny and Conn had thus created a comedy-generating

machine,” Kathryn Fuller-Seeley writes, which would endure from 1932 to the end of Benny’s

career in broadcasting and live performance in 1974.172

“Benny and his writers were able to

create seemingly endless streams of humor, not by reworking stock gags from joke books, but by

creating characters with odd traits and quirky personalities who made their comedy by

interacting with each other.”173

171

Susan Douglas, Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination. 172

Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, “How Jack Benny and Harry Conn Stumbled onto the Formula for Situation

Comedy,” Humanities, 2017, https://www.neh.gov/article/how-jack-benny-and-harry-conn-stumbled-

formula-situation-comed. 173

Fuller-Seeley, Jack Benny and the Golden Age of American Radio Comedy.

87

Figure 9. The cast of The Jack Benny Show performing on stage before a live audience, 1939174

Source: Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, Jack Benny and the Golden Age of American Radio Comedy,

2017

Mel Blanc became the the voice for most of the panoply of colorful characters in Warner

Bros.’ Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies shorts in 1937. Blanc is probably the most talented

and famous cartoon voice actor ever. Before, during, and after that, Blanc divided his time

between recording voices at Warner Bros. and acting on radio. Daws Butler, Hanna-Barbera’s

founding voice actor, also began his career in radio, but really developed as a performer in ex-

Warner Bros. animator Bob Clampett’s early television puppet show Time for Beany (1949-55).

Butler was one of two voice actors who voiced an array of puppets for the half-hour show,

174

This photo is from a print ad by the ad agency representing Jack Benny’s program at the time, Young

& Rubicam. It is reproduced in Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, Jack Benny.

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broadcasting live most every week for six years. By the time Butler was hired as one of Hanna-

Barbera’s only two voice actors, he was an expert with a finely trained craft.

Incongruity is the basis of most media comedy, humor theorists have realized. Audiences

will laugh at situations that fail to accord with logical patterns of behavior, ones that set up a

logical result but instead deliver a ridiculous, absurd outcome. “The highest form of humor,

[Jack Benny’s friend Stephen Leacock] thought, past puns and jokes and incongruity and vivid

characters, ‘is the incongruity of life itself, the contrast between the fretting cares and the petty

sorrows of the day and the long mystery of tomorrow.”175

More implicitly than golden age cinema shorts of the 1940s, radio comedy was

responsible for the norms of behavior Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera picked up in the 1930s, which

informed their early television cartoon-making in the 1950. By that later period, the norms of

radio comedy had become taken-for-granted sketches, characters, and comedy “bits.” Comedy

on the radio was perhaps the genre most responsible for making comedy the baseline of what

networks would provide in scripted episodes. Measures of how shockingly new radio was in the

1930s are that a number of now accepted norms of life in the U.S. were only just arriving at the

time: cars, electricity, government entitlement programs, the national broadcasting networks

themselves. While it lacked a picture, radio was a forward-looking electronic mass medium.

Radio has created many modern social norms now taken for granted, such as the availability of

free, continuous and timely content; thus it can be seen as a precursor to the ‘always on’

character of contemporary media.

175

Fuller-Seeley, Jack Benny and the Golden Age of American Radio Comedy.

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CHAPTER 3

CINEMA ANIMATION AND ITS LIMITATION

To understand the early television cartoon, it is still important to understand Disney’s

cinema animation. But the television cartoon is not very similar to Disney’s cinema animation.

This third chapter first tells the history of how Walt Disney built up the cinema cartoon into

cinema animation, most specifically by looking at the principles of animation he and his key

animators created in the mid-1930s. But this discussion focuses on the costs of Disney’s

elaborate production methods, including its high demand for labor, high cost, and conservative

aesthetics. Second, this chapter talks about the oppositional reaction against the costs of Disney’s

process. This reaction would unite a handful of young animators more interested in innovating a

spare, modernist graphic animation for the present moment. This was the coming together of the

animators who led United Productions of America (UPA), whose most influential style would

come to be called limited animation.

Starting in 1927 and 1928, Walt Disney advanced the cartoon into a new kind of

animation, initially mainly with the help of his talented animator Ub Iwerks, who solely

animated most of Disney’s early films. In under 10 years, between 1928 and 1937, Walt Disney

fundamentally transformed the craft of the figurative cartoon into the realist art of animation.

Animation was so changed in the process that few wanted to return to the earlier model of the

cartoon that Disney left behind. This was the first time since Winsor McCay’s 1914 film Gertie

the Dinosaur that naturalistic cartoon animation made its way into theaters. Cartoon animation

involves exaggeration not only within each drawing but also across the multiple drawings within

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the animated movement, too, a reason why simply filming a live person and tracing over their

moves in the physical world, like the Fleischer brothers did, could not capture the elastic wonder

of Disney’s and McCay’s films.

Some of Disney’s peers in the Golden Age of Animation were able to come close to

capturing what his studio did. The MGM studio had the highest budgets in the industry outside

Disney; there, Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, and Tex Avery, were able to come close to Disney’s

achievements, although they could not recreate the magnetic characters and story sense that

Disney had. Despite his protestations that he didn’t make illustrated radio, Chuck Jones’ Looney

Tunes shorts do rely on things he criticized television animators for, including strong poses,

punchy soundtracks, and techniques of limiting animation.

This third chapter lays out how Walt Disney reinvented the early cinema cartoon into a

newly vibrant animation. Admittedly, this will not be an impartial discussion of Disney’s

animation, because the focus is on understanding how animators following Disney, for better and

for worse, needed to reject much of what he added, reducing animation back down to the

cartoon. The first half is on Disney’s cinema animation and the second half is on UPA’s limited

cinema animation, which was a direct reaction against Disney’s animation.

3.1

Golden Age (Cinema) Animation

Walt Disney’s animated cinema feature films are still today the standard to which

animated feature films are compared. What exactly was it that Disney achieved in his

animations? Fundamentally, it was full character animation: the art of expressing a character

through animating the way they move their body. There is relatively clear evidence that the

measure which Walt initially held himself to was Winsor McCay, who first realized character

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animation in 1914 in Gertie the Dinosaur.176

Most cinema cartoons, though, were unlike

McCay’s films; he had labored for years on each of his films, and only produced a few

significant films during this lifetime. Walt Disney clearly believed that he could recreate

McCay’s achievement in a new way, and to populate his new animations with any of a wide

array of different kinds of anthropomorphized animal/human characters. During the four year

production period of his first animated feature film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937),

Disney and his main animators codified their learning of how to understand animation into what

came to be called “the 12 principles of animation.” The lessons of these principles are still taught

as standard curriculum to animation students today.

But even Disney’s own studio struggled to maintain this high standard for animation

production. For a brief time, between 1935 and 1945 or so, most other studios produced

animated films similar in many ways to Disney’s films. But after 1945, there was a growing

awareness that not only was it not necessary to continue making the same labor-intensive kind of

animation, it might not even be desirable. After 1945, many studios simplified their animation

production. Broadly speaking, these newer cartoons at least partly returned to the old model of

early cinema cartoons. A model is needed as a way to understand these newer cartoons because

Disney’s principles of animation often don’t even apply to them.

I understand “animation” here to largely refer to just one thing: the art of animated

movement that Walt Disney and his key animators created, and to the cinema feature film

featuring that animation. This view accords with a common assumption about what animation is.

This assumption should be more clearly articulated, I believe. I put the term “cinema” in the title

of this section in parentheses because I believe that animation is specific to the cinema, meaning

176

For an episode of Disneyland, the first Disney television anthology series, the studio reenacted Winsor

McCay’s vaudeville stage performance in which the artist “interacted” with Gertie, the trained dinosaur.

Walt talks about the great debt he owes to McCay. “The Story of the Animated Drawing.”

92

that to refer to animation is to implicitly refer to cinema, meaning that “cinema” animation is

redundant. As I understand this customary view, which typically refers to Disney’s feature films,

animation is the art of “bringing to life” an imaginary character by photographing slightly

varying sequential paintings of that character’s changing body movement, and playing the film

of those images back with added sound at 24 frames per second.

What is animation, more fundamentally? There seem to be as many different answers to

this question as there are people who study animation. Defining animation is difficult, and even

the greatest animators do so differently. Preston Blair was a successful character actor that

became a teacher to many other animators. Blair published an early and influential instructional

book in 1949 called Animation: Learn how to Draw Animated Cartoons.177

Likely this served as

the basis for an updated instructional book published near the end of his life, called Cartoon

Animation. In that 1994 book, Blair defined animation in this way.

An American art form, animation is the process of drawing and photographing a

character—a person, an animal, or an inanimate object—in successive positions to create

lifelike movement. Animation is both art and craft; it is a process in which the cartoonist,

illustrator, fine artist, screenwriter, musician, camera operator, and motion picture

director combine their skills to create a new breed of artist—the animator.178

When Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston are faced with explaining the essence of animation, they

initially demur, and look to Disney animator “Bill” Tytla, who they see as “the first animator to

bring true emotions to the cartoon screen.” Tytla played a central artistic role in Snow White: he

and another artist, Fred Moore, were responsible for designing the seven dwarfs and defining

much of their personalities through innovatively expressive character animation. Tytla thought of

177

Foster Art Service, 1949 178

Walter Foster Publishing, 1994.

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animation as a holistic, hybrid form of carefully timed drawings which capture specific

emotional expressions.

“Animation is not just timing, or just a well-drawn character; it is the sum of all the

factors named. … [It is not just] force or form, or well-drawn characters, timing, or

spacing animation—[it] is all these things, not any one. [A]n animator … convey[s] a

certain feeling … you do all sorts of things in order to get it.”179

To understand animation, Thomas and Johnston’s 575-page art book, published in 1981,

is clearly the most central single source. It is considered the “bible” of how to understand

animation. I propose my model of the television cartoon to be a kind of companion to cinema

animation, not to replace Disney’s model for the cinema animation. “[P]eople don't go to school

to learn [limited animation] like they do for classical animation,” so practically, they should not

be a threat.180

Thomas and Johnston overview all 12 principles in their third chapter. In my first

complete dissertation draft, I included an appendix excerpting Thomas and Johnston’s basic

summaries for each of Disney’s principles, as well as well as summaries by a later animation

teacher, Nataha Lightfoot, whose interpretations Thomas and Johnston endorsed. I decided to

remove the appendix, because of possible issues with copyright. The amount of quoted text I

reproduced was not necessary. Instead, I have made this diagram summarizing the basic point

about how I see Disney’s principles. In my interpretation, Disney’s Principles 1, 2, 3, 9, 10, 11,

and 12 explain the studio’s broader general approaches to making their animation. Then, I

understand Principles 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 to describe specific techniques Disney animators adopted

for how to animate in practice.

179

Quoted in The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation, 1981. 180

Maureen Furniss (animation professor) email communication with the author, February 2019.

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Figure 10. Author’s interpretation of the 12 Disney principles, divided between general

approaches for making animation entertainment and specific techniques about how to animate

characters

Source: Created by the author

In chapter five, I will show how each of these principles fully applies, partially applies, or does

not apply at all to the early television cartoon. I don’t wish to question the status of these

principles as the gold standard of how to make animation for cinema. But, ultimately, I maintain

that they are not sufficient for explaining the new cartoon of television, and that the seven new

principles of the early television cartoon I propose in this dissertation are needed to understand

that newer kind of cartoon. But first, some history about the Disney studio and how it influenced

what came after it.

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It is essentially not possible to describe in words the sad state of animation before Walt

Disney’s innovations, and how revolutionary his animated films were when they first arrived,

between 1927 and 1937. Despite being nearly a complete unknown at the time, and having very

little money, Walt Disney took a big gamble and departed from the played-out, roughly animated

cartoons of Paul Terry. Instead, in 1928, Disney followed the intimidating early lead of Winsor

McCay to develop animation into a sophisticated visual art. Over the next decade, Disney and his

artist team of “9 old men” refined the principles of what became the style of animation, by

analyzing and creatively reinventing every aspect of the animation they were creating, seeking to

more deeply breathe life into these two-dimensional characters. Disney achieved great power and

subtlety through his studio’s animation by coupling groundbreaking cinema technologies with

game-changing animation techniques.

I will paint a brief picture about the creative production process that Walt Disney made

standard for an animated cartoon.181

Story writers would gather in a meeting to brainstorm and

establish the basic plot or story of a cartoon. They would prepare a typed outline of the plot and

sometimes dialogue. Then, the traditional “writing” process occurs, which is called

storyboarding. Using the story writers’ outline, a story artist then renders each shot of the

cartoon visually, by sketching each of the character poses and approximately framing them in a

smallish rectangle as the characters will be shown in the end scene. The story artist wielded more

creative control here, because they actually determined how each shot looks, and they probably

needed to fill in many details not provided in the outline. Any accompanying dialogue would be

written below the image. Disney emphasized the importance of the storyboard writing process,

and may have been one of the first studios to use this practice. Many consider this to be the real

181

My great thanks go to my colleague Lev Cantoral, an independent animator, who helped me

understand the animation production process in depth.

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creative work of the animation production process. The soundtrack begins with the voice actors

recording their lines, which are finalized at this point. The director often directs and records the

voice actors, establishing many aspects of the performance in the process.

In traditional or hand-rendered animation, which is still most common in television, the

layout artist would then take the rough storyboard and carefully render each as a strong or natural

pose on a larger sheet of paper. These “extreme” poses are called the key poses or keyframes of

the animation; they become the points of reference around which the visual animation

performances are drawn. The animator was often an in-betweener. They would take the key

poses, and draw each frame of the animation in between needed to connect the two key poses.

The final drawings would be traced by an inker onto a celluloid cel. A painter would then color

in the outlines. All cels would be stacked for each frame of the film and photographed.

1928 famously saw both the introduction of animation sound and soon-to-be worldwide

star Mickey Mouse in one film, Steamboat Willie. Mickey Mouse soon overshadowed the

character that was then the previously most popular silent animated cartoon character, Felix the

Cat.

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Figure 11. Mickey Mouse first meets Minnie, in Steamboat Willie (1928)

Source: Disney Video (online)

In 1932, Disney licensed a sophisticated new “three-strip” color technology from

Technicolor to use to color his animations, years before color photography arrived in mainstream

feature films. In 1933, Disney’s character animation reached a new maturity, culminating in an

even bigger breakthrough film, The Three Little Pigs. Perhaps buoyed by the success of this film,

in that year, Walt Disney apparently began the great unknown of how to produce an animated

feature film. That film, what became Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, pursued a heightened

realism through using a sophisticated multiplane camera system to achieve depth of field. The

artistic innovations achieved during the production of the first of Walt Disney’s fairy tale feature

films became an odyssey of artistic discovery within the studio, and the basis for the 12

principles of animation.

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How should the significance of what Walt Disney accomplished in his animation in his

golden era of the 1920s, 1930s, and early 1940s be evaluated? The fluid, bouncy movement of

Walt Disney’s first Mickey Mouse cartoon to be screened publicly in 1928, Steamboat Willie,

represented a breakthrough of character animation at a time when cartoon characters were

frequently static. Its sound synchronization made the film a kind of killer app for the new

medium of the sound film, the software that gets everyone to adopt the hardware, or the first

must-see animated sound film. Walt’s artistic partner since his early days, Ub Iwerks, directed

the film and did all of the original animation in the film himself; Disney was the idea man and

very involved in the creative process, as well as overseeing the sound synchronization. It took

Disney’s young studio time to recover after Iwerks departed in 1930 to organize his own

competing studio. But within a decade of Steamboat Willie, Disney released Snow White, a

mind-bogglingly sophisticated evolution of his animation. The Three Little Pigs (1933) was

perhaps Disney’s most important key development between those two important films. It made

use of the new Technicolor process to achieve the bright color hues and bold saturation that

Disney was here making possible for animation. Based around a fable, the film was also rich in

story. Disney biographer Bob Thomas (no relation to Frank Thomas) describes the film as a

“triumph of character.” While each of the three pigs resembled each other in design, different

artists animated each and endowed each with a distinctively different style of animation, suiting

the different personality of each. “The characters are distinguished from each other by their

lifelike motions. … Character, plot, and songs [were] combined in 8 1/2 minutes of rare

entertainment.”182

182

Thomas, Disney’s Art of Animation.

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Figure 12. Snow White and the Witch, in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Disney, 1937)183

Source: Official film DVD

“[T]he cross-breeding of realism and the old formulas” that Disney realized in his films

of the time, as Michael Barrier has written, “resulted in caricatures with all the force and

personality of living creatures. … This meant that animation could be an extension of life, taking

us where our own bodies and emotions could not otherwise go.”184

Disney’s new illusion of life

through animation cast a magical spell upon nearly everyone, and fundamentally changed what

animation was and could be. After Disney’s full-animated realism made waves around the world,

many other studios sought to incorporate the lessons of his animation into their own. Hugh

Harman and Rudy Ising, who got their start working with Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks in Kansas

183

Because images from the film are not widely available online, I made this freeze frame from my own

DVD copy of the film. Honestly, Disney’s films are difficult to “excerpt” in a freeze frame like this,

because nearly the whole plot occurs in animated movement through time. 184

Barrier, “The Hollywood Cartoon.”

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City, sought to outdo Disney by embracing his tendencies more than he did; this was actually the

founding house style of the Warner Bros cartoon studio.185

Bill Hanna got his start working in

the animation studio of Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising. Hanna clearly learned much about the

craft of making animation working with Harman and Ising, and from Disney’s films, although he

apparently tried to avoid mentioning this, to elevate his own work. Bill later admitted that he got

the idea for the name Hanna-Barbera from Harman and Ising’s studio name, Harman-Ising,

which is pronounced “harmonizing.”

Even competing animation producers and directors, who one would think might criticize

Walt Disney as a professional tactic, were often reverential in their praise. In a 1969 interview

animation historian Michael Barrier conducted with Chuck Jones, Jones describes the animation

he practiced as literally being made possible by Disney’s earlier efforts to legitimate animation.

“Disney … to me … created an atmosphere where animators could flourish. In so doing, he

pointed the way for everybody else to animate creatively.”186

The principles allowed Disney and

his team to capture not just the movement of characters but something like their holistic essence.

It should also be acknowledged that, at great risk and expense, Disney pioneered the use of the

cinema technologies of sound, color, and the multiplane camera that helped all later animators

add additional life to animated films. Likewise, after their publication in 1981, Disney’s twelve

185

Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising actually worked with Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks in Kansas City,

before they all moved to Los Angeles. I suspect that Harman and Ising’s roly-poly animation style might

have actually inspired Ub Iwerks’ designing of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and especially Mickey Mouse.

Either way, after the success of Disney’s characters, Harman and Ising began the Looney Tunes and

Merrie Melodies series at Warner Bros. through Leon Schlesinger Productions in 1930, patterning the

concept on Disney’s Silly Symphonies series. Harman and Ising mimicked Disney’s Mickey Mouse with

their character Bosko, a joyful young African American boy who accentuated the references to blackface

minstrelsy latent in Mickey Mouse’s design, making these central to this new story world. Bill Hanna

joined the Warner Bros. studio in 1930 and trained under Harman and Ising. Chuck Jones joined the

Schlesinger studio in 1933. Although Harman and Ising actually left the studio the same year over budget

disputes, Jones’ early cartoons were also quite cute. Soon, Tex Avery converted Jones over to his own

subversive style of cartooning. 186

Chuck Jones, “An Interview with Chuck Jones,” interview by Michael Barrier and Bill Spicer,

reprinted in Maureen Furniss (ed), Chuck Jones: Conversations, 2005.

101

principles of animation became a foundational canon, and are still taught to animation students

today.

It is understandable why Walt Disney is so lionized today, and why he remains the most

studied figure in animation studies. With all that being said, in life, Disney was a perfectionist, a

demanding boss, and he gave very little public credit to his artists. His intransigence about the

working conditions and pay for the hundreds of people that came to work for the studio to make

his canonical feature films precipitated a profoundly important labor strike in 1941, which

planted the seeds for the limitation of animation that followed. And since his death in 1966,

Disney’s centrality to animation studies and popular opinion about animation has created a cult

of personality around the man.

A hard-won insight that I arrived at early in my graduate studies is that the naturalistic

realism that Walt Disney so endlessly pursued in his features is ultimately not a magical

universal ideal but instead simply a relative standard. His drive towards realism reflected

Hollywood’s broader pursuit of verisimilitude, a trend that continues today. Disney’s nostalgia

and realism can be read as a conservative idealization, which breathtakingly naturalizes

animation as an art form, but which can be seen as a perversion of the inherent difference of

animation from live action film. Founding film critic André Bazin has written about this drive

towards realism in his essay “The Myth of Total Cinema,” showing that the history of film can

be seen as a progressive movement toward heightened realism, as if an ultimate verisimilitude

should be cinema’s goal. In his important book Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and

Modernity in the 19th Century, Jonathan Crary gives a reminder that realism is never some

immutable, universal art. It has always been socially constructed in specific historical moments

with material means that are ultimately arbitrary.

102

[S]ome of the most pervasive means of producing ‘realistic’ effects in mass visual

culture, such as the stereoscope, were in fact based on a radical abstraction and

reconstruction of optical experience, thus demanding a reconsideration of what ‘realism’

means in the nineteenth century. … There never was or will be a self-present beholder to

whom a world is transparently evident.187

The standard of realism in animation is different than in photographically-based media.

In a good book evaluating the significance of Disney’s cinema animation, J. P. Telotte shows

that the specific practical techniques of Disney’s principles are intended to create not reality but

the impression of reality. “[T]he concept of film realism depends on a variety of ‘reality effects’

that are constantly in flux”.188

In a sense, the central mission that Walt Disney set his most

talented artists to figuring out in the mid-1930s was how to identify techniques, no matter how

bizarre, by which to achieve such an impression of realism. Disney’s principle 10, Exaggeration,

is a perfect example of this. Disney’s artists faced the challenge of creating an impression of

realism that was actually produced through gross exaggeration. Telotte points to how Disney’s

realism and its principles have been naturalized as the highest expression of the ‘art’ of

animation. When, actually, Disney’s animation is simply an ideologically-constructed fiction.

3.2

“Limited Animation” Emerges

The “limited animation” that UPA created was a clear reaction against the full animation

of Disney’s cinema animation. The decision to limit animation in part arose from a specific

historical event, the bitter 1941 labor strike at the Disney studio, which fractured the profession

of animation. Thus, the history and aesthetics of limited animation are intertwined in this

187

Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century, 1992. 188

Telotte, The Mouse Machine.

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historical break with the past, which became the origin point of something new. By this point

Disney’s full cinema animation was becoming canonical and classical. The younger generation

of animators recently entering the field, though, would ultimately pursue a simpler modern

cartoon design aesthetic.189

The stylistic and technical development of limited animation was a reaction to the

elaborate production process that Disney’s studio made standard across the animation industry.

The oppositional spirit of limited animation might actually be seen to emerge earliest at the

Warner Bros. studio. Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising, who founded the Warner Bros. animation

studio with Leon Schlesinger 1930, installed a very Disney-esque house style early on. Chuck

Jones joined the studio in 1933, and his early cartoons are, surprisingly, very cute and sweet, like

Disney’s cartoons. Perhaps the most influential animator to put their foot down and counter this

Disney’s sentimentality was animation director Tex Avery, who joined the Warner Bros. studio

in 1935; within a few years, Avery had transformed the Warner Bros. style into a subversive,

street-smart tradition of madcap animated shorts. Admittedly, the Fleischer brothers were

probably first to counter Disney: they began making their Betty Boop and Popeye cartoons in

1930 and 1933, respectively; animation historian Mark Langer has interpreted Fleischers’ 1930s

cartoons as a major aesthetic challenge to Disney.190

Avery first worked for Walter Lantz,

making Woody Woodpecker shorts, plying Lantz’s subversive spirit in making his own cartoons.

But even Tex Avery needed to learn from Disney’s technique: this can be seen in how he

imitated features of Disney’s films. Avery later admitted that the Warners studio’s character

Bugs Bunny grew out of the irreverent hare in Disney’s 1935 film, The Tortoise and the Hare.

Daffy Duck has similar in temperament to Disney’s Donald Duck. Avery probably made the

189

Thomas Lamarre characterizes cinema animation and television animation in these terms in The Anime

Machine. 190

Mark Langer, “Regionalism in Disney Animation: Pink Elephants and Dumbo,” 1990.

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most significant and lasting aesthetic challenge to Disney’s style of any animation director: he

subverted Disney’s leisurely sentimentalism in favor of a brash speed and sarcasm. Gary Morris

pithily summarizes Avery’s intervention in these terms.

Disney’s ‘cute and cuddly’ creatures, under Avery’s guidance, were transformed into

unflappable wits like Bugs Bunny, endearing buffoons like Porky Pig, or dazzling crazies

like Daffy Duck. Even the classic fairy tale, a market that Disney had cornered, was

appropriated by Avery, who made innocent heroines like Red Riding Hood into sexy jazz

babes, more than a match for any Wolf. Avery also endeared himself to intellectuals by

constantly breaking through the artifice of the cartoon, having characters leap out of the

end credits, loudly object to the plot of the cartoon they were starring in, or speak directly

to the audience.191

The young Chuck Jones quickly adapted his style to accord with Avery’s by the late 1930s.

Limited animation began most specifically at Disney in 1941, and ironically, then Chuck Jones

helped to establish it in a 1942 Merrie Melodies short. From there, the development of UPA’s

style is clear, culminating around 1950. Understanding UPA’s mature style is the main focus of

this section.

What is limited animation? This newer production standard stripped previously standard

but expensive elements out of the animation production system that Disney and his artists had

worked so hard to put into place, like complex character animation, leaving these

embellishments out as so much unessential decoration. A handful of ambitious, progressive

animators, many who left Disney’ studio, would pioneer a new style and philosophy for

191

Morris, Gary. “What’s Up, Tex? A Look at the Life and Career of Tex Avery.” Bright Lights Film

Journal, September 1998. Some keen reader posted this quotation on Tex Avery’s Wikipedia page, where

I first saw it. It is funny to recall that Tex Avery was hired by Leon Schlesinger when he falsely claimed

to be an experienced director. Yet that is what he soon became there.

105

animation. They sought to transcend what they saw as Walt Disney’s outmoded and rigid

approach to animation aesthetics by leaving behind much of the finely-wrought style they had

learned for feature films in favor of short cartoons with spare, bold designs giving aesthetic

expression to the dramatic changes then occurring in society. John Hubley was one of the

animators that most creatively led UPA and most clearly defined its new technical and creative

approach. Hubley penned something of a manifesto in 1946 with Zachary Schwartz, declaring

his intention to create a newly graphic cartoon style. “We have found that the medium of

animation has become a new language. It is no longer the vaudeville world of pigs and

bunnies.”192

The future UPA animators forged a flexible means of wrestling with the problems of

the day. “Animation artists around the world are breaking out of the limitations of the fairy tale

to confront contemporary issues.”193

Indeed, Zagreb Film was beginning to revolutionize

animation in Europe nearly in tandem with UPA.194

The central production difference between full animation and limited animation may be

that in full animation, the key poses are transition points, hinges around which the animation

revolves. In limited animation, the key poses would much more often stand on their own, so to

speak; the poses would be held for longer moments, minimizing the need for animation to

connect them. In television, later, the whole cartoon would be carefully planned out and

192

John Hubley and Zachary Schwartz, “Animation Learns a New Language,” 1946. 193

John Hubley, “Beyond Pigs and Bunnies,” 1975. Hubley may have written this earlier, but he it in

retrospect in this later essay, near the end of his life in 1977. 194

Most animation historians believe that Zagreb was inspired by UPA. Howard Beckerman, for instance,

writes

It was the stylized, simplified UPA cartoons that showed the way. Their impact was felt very

strongly in Zagreb, where The Big Meeting, a seventeen-minute cartoon with a modern look,

came out in [1950] after two years of concerted effort. Animation.

But the artists of Zagreb had been working on graphic cartoons before UPA most dramatically showcased

this style in Gerald McBoing Boing, which was released in 1950, so it seems there is more to say here.

106

rationalized. More often in television, the cartoon may be written by a writer who types up a

script, which is the basis for the storyboard.

Certainly, the central element of the early television cartoon is the timed pose. The role of

the pose is to communicate visually what the character is thinking or feeling, as Derek Hayes and

Chris Webster explain. “In a piece of limited animation, where there isn’t chance to do much

more than pose her, her body language needs to seem like a reasonable response to what is going

on, while being a pose that could reasonably be held. … [The] pose [should] read well and …

show what the character is thinking.195

Gene Deitch, an important director of limited animation

at Terrytoons in the mid-1950s, describes the ultimate animated scene as an outcome of the

particular timings of the performance poses.

The key positions, or ‘poses,’ are the main ‘way-stations’ along the line of action, from

the beginning to the end, of the scene you are animating. The [timing] numbers assigned

to these key poses … establish the basic ‘acting’ … of the scene.196

The director’s task is to take the poses composed by the layout artists and decide on the timings

that best communicate the message of the scene to the audience. It is especially true in television

that “the “golden pose” is the one that says what you want the animation to say in that scene.”197

Limited animation and planned animation are often casually equated, but they are

different. Preston Blair explains how. Limited animation began in cinema, and was most

developed by UPA. Blair says limited animation refers to a process of rationalization in which

character body parts are divided across multiple layers of cels, to make movements more

195

Derek Hayes and Chris Webster, Acting and Performance for Animation, 2012. 196

Gene Deitch, “The Basics of Animation Timing.” I’m not sure what Gene Deitch means by “phase

numbers,” which I replaced here with “timing” for ease of explanation. (I found a possible explanation in

a technical paper, Frederick I. Parke, “Computer Generated Animation of Faces,”

https://www.cs.drexel.edu/~david/Classes/Papers/p451-parke.pdf). 197

Hayes and Webster, Performance for Animation.

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efficient. “Limited animation is based on dividing a character into as many as four cel levels and

a dialogue system,” he wrote. Importantly, limited animation preceded television, and was most

developed by UPA. Planned animation appears to have been created for television, by Alex

Anderson and Bill Hanna. Planned animation refers to planning out each part of a cartoon, to

more efficiently complete the work required for each part. Blair describes it this way.

Planned animation is a system of combining animation methods and planning the reuse of

the artwork for many different scenes. It is used to produce the considerable film footage

of a television cartoon series. … Animation, backgrounds with overlay backgrounds, and

camera fields and trucks are planned for use in many combinations. Thus, the production

work gets more ‘mileage.’198

The UPA artists pioneered limited animation in pursuit of aesthetic ideals related to those

in modern art and modern architecture. In the process, they opened many people’s minds up to

new ideas about what animation was and could be. The very concept of cartoon style is closely

associated with the limitation of animation that accompanied the departure from Disney’s

universalizing naturalism. The comic cartoon more typical of television is figurative, which is to

say that it is cartoony and exaggerated in its presentation. Basically, to limit animation in a

figurative, less realist way, one needed to decide how to stylize it. “[A]ll cartoon animation that

follows the Disney output is a reaction to Disney, aesthetically, technically and ideologically,”

animation theorist Paul Wells has written. “American animation is effectively a history of

responses to Disney’s usurpation of the form in the period between 1933 and 1941.”199

While the

limited approach is still called “animation,” to my eyes, what UPA made is not really animation,

because it generally avoids animating the movement of characters. This is the reason I put this

198

Blair, Cartoon Animation. 199

Wells, Animation and America, cited by Bashara, Cartoon Vision.

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section’s title, “limited animation,” in quotations: because I don’t see it as animation. But UPA’s

films were not really cartoons, either, because these are usually clearly comic in tone and

frequently deploy familiar visual and aural conventions to perform narrative work. UPA was

striking out with high hopes into the aesthetic unknown, hoping to pioneer a brave new aesthetic

standard for animated cartoons.

The earliest conscious reduction of animation actually came not from U.S. artists but

from European artists. Amid Amidi believes that Americans’ first exposure to the stylized

approach of limited cartooning was due to architect Frank Lloyd Wright visiting the Disney

studio in 1939, and screening a 1934 Soviet Russian film called Tale of Czar Durandai for the

Disney artists, directed by Ivan Ivanov-Vano and scored by Dmitri Shostakovich. Animation

scholar Jennifer Boivin has described the style of this rare Soviet film, based on a Russian

fairytale, in her 2017 PhD dissertation.

Soviet animated fairytale films represented what Soviet life was supposed to be like and

formed an alternative utopian reality to what Soviet society was experiencing in reality.

… [T]he concept of children and childhood … represented the new blooming nation and

the possibility of a better (Soviet) world. … The changes in stylistic elements serving the

Soviet national ethos under Stalin—the fairytale structure, a new aesthetic, and the

display of Russian national culture—can be seen, for example, in The Tale of the Tsar

Durandai (1934) by Ivanov-Vano, Zenaida and Valentina Brumberg. The film is

representative of the period between post-revolutionary animation and the blooming of

socialist realist animation.200

200

Jennifer Boivin, “Animation and the National Ethos: the American Dream, Socialist Realism, and

Russian émigrés in France,” PhD thesis, Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies,

University of Alberta, 2017.

109

The style of Czar Durandai seems to have been caught between formalism, futurism, and

Soviet realism. Boivin says that this film is a transitional statement balancing earlier graphical

formalism with a new realism demanded by the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, and even that it

shows the influence of Disney. But Amid Amidi thinks that the fact that the film was shown by

influential architect Wright is significant. Wright’s aesthetic “unwavering[ly] … progressive and

modern” style “must have been quite a jolt to the Disney artists.”201

Amidi writes that John

Hubley, who would go on to creatively lead the UPA studio, described “the excitement generated

by this film among the studio’s graphically oriented artists,” and said that he was deeply inspired

by both Wright’s visit and the Russian film.

The glimpse this Russian film offered the Disney artists into the alternative graphical

tradition of animation appears to have opened a stylistic door to a new way of doing animation.

Ironically, this aesthetic shift emerged at the Disney studio around the very same time as

Disney’s feature animations were reshaping the identity of animation. The Disney studio’s

production process was documented in a 1941 film loosely structured to feature the stages and

techniques by which the Disney studio made an animated feature film, called The Reluctant

Dragon. In the scene about storyboarding in the Disney documentary-style film, the camera

hovers a sequence of simple, still, stylized drawings tacked across a wall, while an artist narrates

what’s happening to a visitor. What unfolds through this process is the storybook-like tale of

“Baby Weems,” a cute and precocious baby boy.202

Sprinkled into the sequence are imaginative

touches of slight but effective animation that charmingly dramatize actions and transitions in the

201

“When Frank Lloyd Wright Met Disney,” Cartoon Brew, December 14, 2006,

https://www.cartoonbrew.com/old-brew/when-frank-lloyd-wright-met-disney-2397.html. Didier Ghez

reprints the beginning of a transcript of this event on his blog, Disney History. Didier Ghez, untitled blog

post, Dec 14, 2006, http://disneybooks.blogspot.com/2006/12/on-february-25-1939-at-old-hyperion.html. 202

The Reluctant Dragon is a kind of anthology film of sequences unified around the theme of the

technologies and techniques the Disney studio was using in 1941, at the height of its influence.

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story, but largely leave the viewer to animate the story in their imagination. The largely

unanimated drawings of the storyboard each remaining on screen for a moment proved to

perceptive observers that it was possible to tell a story with drawings that did not move much.

The sequence was created by Joe Grant and Dick Huemer, two Disney artists. “It was really an

attempt to make these still drawings tell the story,” Huemer later told Joe Adamson. “We could

have animated this, … [b]ut the over-all story suggested that kind of treatment.”203

(Incidentally,

in Adamson’s six interviews with the animator in 1969, I believe that Dick Huemer offers

perhaps the most insightful history of animation I know of, by one of the most influential artists

to work in the art form, drawing on his career spanning animation production since its earliest

days.)204

Meanwhile, Walt Disney was running the premiere animation studio of the early 1940s.

The great amount of work required on the multiple feature films the studio was producing

brought many talented young artists through its doors to train with more experienced animators.

Disney implicitly normalized his lush animation style as a universal art that every studio should

aspire to. But, to a younger generation of artists, the romantic narrative tone of Disney’s films

increasingly felt sentimental and the baroque artistic styling of the fairy tale stories felt old-

fashioned, unwieldy, and needlessly extravagant. The evolving divide between the sensibilities

of these younger progressive artists and their older teachers suddenly heightened into a schism in

May 1941, when a labor strike broke out among the artist-laborers at Disney’s studio, over low

pay and lack of credit. Walt was unmoved by the strikers’ demands, including higher wages and

more creative credit. This caused many artists to leave the studio to seek their fortune in their

own animation practice. Animation historian Amid Amidi discusses this turn of events in

203

Huemer interview by Adamson. 204

Huemer interview by Adamson.

111

Cartoon Modern, his 2006 book chronicling the animation studios of the 1950s, the ones that

pioneered the modern style of animated cartoon-making; multiple such studios were founded in

the aftermath of the Disney strike.

The Disney style was firmly entrenched in nineteenth-century pictorial realism with the

aim of creating an “illusion of life.” … the drive for realism often trumped the graphic

possibilities inherent in the art form. … The Disney studio strike of 1941 was a seminal

moment in the history of animation design, representing a symbolic parting of the

industry’s traditional and modern artists.205

Many of animators who left Disney’s studio subsequently rejected this naturalism in their work,

instead pursuing a cleaner and bolder aesthetic aligned with modern design. A handful of these

ambitious artists founded a new studio, which would come to be called United Productions of

America (UPA). Working with limited financial resources, UPA is credited as pioneering a

creative but economical system of limited animation.

The idea of telling an animation-like story through largely still images seemed to enter

the air. Warner Bros. director Chuck Jones was the first to consciously explore this aesthetic in a

1942 Merrie Melodies short known as The Dover Boys. “As the director, Chuck Jones had been

encouraged to simplify his more elaborate design tendencies, and this was the result.”206

The

cartoon has about as small an amount of animation as a Hollywood cartoon short could; actually,

the cartoon seems to go out of its way to not be believable. The cartoon is mostly composed of

very odd aesthetic choices. Color choice, character design, narrative devices, and timing are all

exceedingly eccentric. There is a lot of camera movement, action cycles, and kitschy singing.

205

Amid Amidi, Cartoon Modern, 8, 13. What were artists like John Hubley and Ward Kimball

influenced by? Amidi writes: “During the 1950s, animation artists drew inspiration from a wide range of

modern art sources, including the fine arts, magazine cartoons, graphic design, children’s book

illustration” (20). 206

Cavalier, World History of Animation, 141.

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Jones said later that he considered the film his only overt experiment with animation. Jones’

boss, Leon Schlesinger, was apparently furious at Jones for turning in a stylistic exercise rather

than an animated cartoon. He attempted to fire Jones, but ultimately relented when no other

qualified animation director could be found. It seems that Jones learned his lesson, to stay within

his lane at the studio; he did not attempt to confuse the viewer or his boss in his official capacity

again. Nevertheless, the film lived on, with a life of its own. “The Dover Boys … is often cited

as the first example of the simplified, stylized animation that became the hallmark of the UPA

studio in the next few years,” writes animation historian Stephen Cavalier.207

207

Cavalier, World History of Animation, 141.

113

Figure 13. Frames from Chuck Jones’ 1942 Merrie Melodies short The Dover Boys208

Source: Freeze frames of digital copy, selected by author

Chuck Jones would certainly beg to differ about the following statement. But, while

Chuck Jones later railed against the “illustrated radio” of television cartoons, I feel like he was

trying to flip the script because he felt vulnerable to similar criticisms. Jones clearly encouraged

the UPA artists early on in their careers and taught them a lot. Jones worked with the young

leftist artists who would go on to found UPA on an important early films of theirs, Hell-Bent for

208

The title card above shows that, officially, the short has the following baroque-classical title, which I

believe is intended to make the film seem more complicated than it actually is: “The Dover Boys at

Pimento University or The Rivals of Roquefort Hall”. Another distraction the film creates is to call the

students’ alma mater, Pimento University “PU,” throwing this little joke across the screen with enormous

size. Apparently, this colloquialism about a bad smell was hilarious in its day.

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Election (1944), a re-election advertisement for Franklin D. Roosevelt. Jones worked nights with

the artists and took no credit.

Jones’ lead animator on The Dover Boys was Bobe Cannon, who would later memorably

crystallize UPA’s limited animation style in a film he directed, Gerald McBoing Boing (1950).

Jones is caught by one interviewer in a great irony: that he generally tries to avoid dialogue, but

if he cannot, he embraces it. “I feel that the best way to express myself in animation is to

accomplish as much as I can without dialogue,” Jones said. “Otherwise, I may tend to lean on

dialogue.”209

One can see in Jones’ mature Looney Tunes cartoons that his forcefully strong

character poses, held for boldly long periods of time, frequently prevent the need for elaborate

animation. Jones makes a comedic style out of characters “snapping” into poses, and he directs

Mel Blanc as his voice actor to deliver the script’s dialogue emphatically. Tom Sito has

presented evidence that a limited animation style is also evident in Jones’ other Looney Tunes

films.

Ten years before Hanna and Barbera created the “limited” system of TV animation

Chuck Jones tried to use graphic artistic styles as a way to economize. Animator Ben

Washam said that, when you think of it, even the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote

cartoons could be considered limited animation, because they utilized lots of head shots,

repeated use of running cycles, and long holds.210

While Chuck Jones did not pursue this radical aesthetic more in his own films, I imagine Jones

teaching the younger animators what he knew. Jones often claimed that his films were not

“illustrated radio” because one could watch them without sound and still know what was

happening. Yet Jones used other techniques of limited animation liberally. Essentially, Jones

209

Michael Barrier and Bill Spicer, in Chuck Jones: Conversations, 2005. 210

Tom Sito, Drawing the Line.

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passed the torch of limited animation over the future UPA artists, for them to carry it on in their

own explorations.

In 1950, United Productions of America found the perfect vehicle for their limited

animation, a story about a young boy not so different from Baby Weems. Gerald McBoing

Boing, adapted from a story by Dr. Seuss, was a breakout film by UPA in 1950. The film

imagines a 7-year-old boy who cannot talk; instead, when he opens his mouth, sound effects

come tumbling out. UPA’s new cartoons were flat, with fanciful, impressionistic design in color,

sound, and character. There was not much animation; characters would “pop” from one peculiar

pose to another, and back again. Sound carried a dramatic amount of the weight in the cartoon.

The themes were cosmopolitan in tone, and there was almost no slapstick interaction. There were

not always clear jokes, either; the impression was not always comedy so much as a kind of

unconventional social imagination. The new film’s “deliberate antirealism established UPA as

the front-runners in progressive animation,” animation historian Stephen Cavalier notes, who

then talks about the creative process of character and background designer Bill Hurtz, who

seemed to jettison most known elements of an animated film, instead impressionistically adding

in hints to cue the viewer. “Looking for simplicity, the designer Bill Hurtz reduced the design to

a few elemental lines, getting rid of all walls, floors, horizon lines, and skies, and complementing

this with a graceful spread of muted flat colors, which subtly change with the mood of the

story.”211

The film was a milestone in animation graphics, animation historian Howard

Beckerman has said, referring to the ability of static designs to communicate in the absence of

animation. “The emphasis was on storytelling through design.”212

211

Cavalier, World History of Animation. 212

Beckerman, Animation.

116

Figure 14. Frames illustrating the stylization of UPA’s Gerald McBoing Boing

Source: It’s Nice That213

Walt Disney had believed animated characters to be “live, individual personalities—not

just animated drawings.” Contrarily, as Amid Amidi notes, the new generation of innovative

animation designers “embraced the fact that cartoons were, in fact, a visual composition of lines

and shapes drawn upon and seen in two dimensions.”214

Disney characters were designed as

rounded, three-dimensional characters with a clear “centerline” orienting their body structure.

The new flat cartoons often lacked such a clear centerline, enabling artists to design characters

with unconventional, angular, graphic structures. Dan Bashara’s new book on UPA’s “postwar

aesthetics” breaks this down in more detail. UPA’s aesthetic featured

213

“Gerald McBoing Boing,” It’s Nice That, November 6, 2007,

https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/1266-gerald-mcboing-boing. 214

Walt Disney quoted in Amidi, Cartoon Modern. The second quote is of Amidi, from the same source.

117

hard-edged, simplified forms; bold, unmodulated colors; an evacuation of detail; a

minimalist environmental surround often reduced to geometric patterns or even a flat

color plane; the avoidance of rounded, centerline character design; and a relaxed (at best)

implementation of Renaissance perspective.215

In Eastern Europe, a graphic tradition of cartoon animation rose up in parallel with UPA.

Zagreb Film, a lean animation studio founded in Croatia in the early 1950s, produced a wave of

influential limited animation films that politically “challenged … utopian ideologies and the

East-West binaries of the Cold War,” as Paul Morton has written in a recent dissertation.216

Zagreb’s The Great Meeting (1951) was the first professional Croatian animated film, and

metaphorically figured Yugoslavia’s split with Stalinism. Animator Adam Snyder sees Zagreb’s

work as representing a groundbreaking stylistic departure in Europe away from the realism of

Disney films, one that inspired a new generation of European animators.217

Morton sees Zagreb’s

films, which included a television series, Inspector Mask, as “transform[ing] the cartoon from a

cinema of attractions, which celebrated the technology which gave it birth, into a cinema of the

laborer, which celebrated the humble artisan behind the technology.”218

What exactly did UPA accomplish in Gerald McBoing Boing? It is a quiet, seemingly

unassuming film. But, here these young artists were dramatically changing the minds of many

who had become accustomed to Disney’s realism, helping them suddenly realize that Disney’s

style had lost its founding essence of wonder. Numerous observers who witnessed a screening of

215

Bashara, Cartoon Vision. Quoted in Kevin Sandler, “Limited Animation, 1947-1989.” 216

Paul W. Morton, “The Zagreb School of Animation and the Unperfect,” PhD dissertation, University

of Washington, 2018. From the abstract,

https://digital.lib.washington.edu/researchworks/handle/1773/42259. 217

Adam Snyder, “The Zagreb Studio,” in Beck (ed) Animation Art, 2004, 138-9. 218

Morton abstract.

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UPA’s film came out of the theater seemingly seeing the world in a new way. Michael Barrier

comments that

The impulse behind the UPA cartoons was essentially negative—a reaction against the

excesses and deficiencies of Disney-derived animation, by men who could … see Disney

animation’s unrealized possibilities. … The UPA cartoons’ great virtue was that they

shed many of the conventions that had been building up like a crust around animation in

the thirties and forties, even while great advances were being made.219

For better and for worse, it was not long before the early television animators I’m

highlighting in this dissertation seized upon a similar but different limited animation mode of

production less for aesthetic reasons than for its economic efficiency. Both UPA’s iconoclasm

and Hanna-Barbera’s cost-cutting became defining aspects of the legacy of limited animation.

Chuck Jones’s criticism of the television cartoon as illustrated radio is similar. But to me, Chuck

Jones and Walt Disney appear to be making a distinction of taste here, criticizing limited

animation as bad when they simply didn’t like it.

By the 1950s, Disney and UPA were engaged in a very real contest over whether full

animation or limited animation was superior. In Disney’s hands, animation became a wondrous

spectacle. But nostalgia has largely mystified his technical and creative achievements, which

have challenged the ability to critically evaluate the benefits and costs of his animation. The

founders of United Productions of America (UPA) essentially changed the subject, to explore the

potential of animation’s opposite—the spare, graphical, often static and sound-driven cartoon. It

is a bit hard to call what UPA created cartoons, though, because they aspired to break out of the

established confines of the cartoon to explore new aesthetic artistic statements. Many have said

that the television animators simply adopted the kind of limited animation UPA pioneered. “Not

219

Barrier, “The Hollywood Cartoon.”

119

too long after [Gerald], static bodies with mobile mouths became a mainstay in the production of

low-budget television animation,” Howard Beckerman has written. “UPA kicked off a wave of

limited, stylized animation—and everyone else followed.”220

But, while UPA was just about (but

not quite) the first studio to limit animation as a reaction to Disney’s films, UPA had tried

making a cartoon series for television in their limited animation style in late 1956, The Gerald

McBoing-Boing Show (1956-1957). While popular with critics, it was almost a complete failure

with audiences, in part because it was not very cartoony and not very funny. Today, this show is

almost completely forgotten.221

The next chapter finally comes full circle to television, to

consider the history of how television reconciled with animation to create a new kind of cartoon.

220

Beckerman, Animation. 221

The Gerald McBoing Boing Show is not currently commercially available. Copies are rare, but do

exist.

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CHAPTER 4

TELEVISION’S NEW CARTOON:

WARD-ANDERSON AND HANNA-BARBERA

In the mid-1950s, making cartoons for television seemed like an impossible fantasy.

People understood that the dazzling spectacle of Walt Disney’s cinema animation could not

survive on television, a medium of very low visual fidelity, technologically indebted not to

cinema but to radio. Some early cinema cartoons became available on television, but these relics

of a bygone age made little sense to the younger audiences of the new medium. In 1950, Alex

Anderson and Jay Ward had begun blazing a trail for cartoons into the television wilderness,

with Crusader Rabbit (1950-1952). The benefit of hindsight makes it clear that “Crusader

Rabbit … served as a primitive template for the economics and aesthetics of limited animation

on television that would take hold in the late 1950s.”222

At the time, though, while this show was

a modest success, it did not yet seem like a cartoon format with broad appeal. For six long years,

between 1952 and 1958, a tacit acknowledgement settled in that perhaps it was not really feasible

to make an entertaining program-length cartoon for television. Animation shorts studios were

closing across Hollywood. If all closed, it seemed that animation production might end.

In 1958, Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera figured out how to make an entertaining cartoon for

television that resembled the cinema animation shorts people were familiar with, but did not

follow the elaborate principles of animation that Walt Disney and his animators created.

“[T]elevision was ready for new specially made animation… A new era of animation dawned

222

Sandler, “Limited Animation.”

121

with Hanna and Barbera’s launching of the half-hour Huckleberry Hound Show in 1958.”223

UPA’s big splash with Gerald McBoing Boing had earlier prompted reflection on whether

animation could be made differently. But I suggest that, to do this, looking for earlier precedents,

Ward-Anderson and Hanna-Barbera regressed back to the functional, durable, if unexciting

animation that Paul Terry and Otto Messmer were making in the 1920s, similar even to the

suspended animation Charles-Émile Reynaud was making in the 1890s.

The first half of this fourth chapter tells the story of how the first cartoons were made for

television by Jay Ward’s studio. The second half describes how the Hanna-Barbera studio

approached making their early television cartoons. The next chapter, the last in Part 1, presents

the model of the early television cartoon this dissertation proposes.

4.1

The Ward-Anderson Studio

In the mid-1950s, dramatic socioeconomic shifts were ushering in a newly prosperous,

middle-class American society, which was broadly reflected in the demographic exodus from

cities into new suburbs.224

Cinema animation was undergoing a slow, near-death experience.

Most cinema cartoon short studios were closing, and the new medium of television was

spreading across the nation like wildfire, sapping life away from cinema in general. Most

observers then understood “animation” to mean Disney’s norms of cinema animation, and there

seemed to be no good means of adapting the storied art form of cinema animation to the

plebeian, domestic medium of television. A quiet revolution was occurring throughout the

decade. The familiar paradigm of animation as cinema was slowly giving way to a new one of

223

Beckerman, Animation. 224

At the time, these changes were naturalized as “progress,” to the degree that the details of these

historical changes are sometimes only beginning to be written now. Developments included shifts in the

economy, marketing, law, politics, demographics, urban planning, technology, and culture.

122

animation as television, although what was happening may not have been clear to most people at

the time.

Before the 1950s, animation was always confined to the movie theater. In the early

1950s, it was novel to simply see a cartoon on television, but over several years, this became

more and more common. Soon, “[c]artoons … began showing up in people’s homes on a daily

basis,” as animation historian Amid Amidi has written. The earliest television animation was

made for commercials, and was part of a broader shift in the advertising industry. “Animation

played a crucial role in Madison Avenue’s efforts to break away from the antiquated “hard sell”

advertising technique and instead woo viewers with lighthearted wit and whimsy.” By the end of

the decade, it’s estimated that one out of every four ads on television was animated. A dramatic

simplification in the appearance of animation was occurring. In part this was driven by frugal

economics. But it was also the limitations of the screen of the new medium that “demanded a

simplified graphic language that could be read quickly by the eye while retaining its core graphic

appeal.” The style of this new cartoon animation featured bold shapes and thick black lines

around characters; simply-designed human characters with big heads became common.225

There was limited animation even before television, surprisingly enough at the Disney

studio. Dick Huemer and Joe Grant at Disney discovered that even just the use of static

storyboard images, with subtle hints of animation, could tell a believable story. “Labeled

variously animatics, slide motion, or filmographs, the Baby Weems approach became an industry

staple and depended on the creative use of camera moves and the panning of artwork.”226

Alex

Anderson openly credits seeing the Baby Weems segment with inspiring him to make Crusader

Rabbit: “Baby Weems … was very limited, but I thought to myself that this was every bit as

225

Amidi, Cartoon Modern. All quotations and comments in this paragraph are from this excellent

source. 226

Amidi, Cartoon Modern.

123

entertaining as the full animation for The Reluctant Dragon. I began to think there was a way to

do comic strips for television with just enough movement to sustain interest and having a

narrator tell the story.”227

Anderson only had his training from his uncle Paul Terry to go on, but

while there, he apparently sought input from animators who had worked during the early days of

cinema cartoons.228

In 1947, Anderson announced his plan to capitalize on the medium everyone knew would

change the world. Together with his college friend Jay Ward, then a real estate developer, the

two set up a makeshift animation studio at Anderson’s house in Berkeley. Assembling a few

artists, Anderson and Ward created three short cartoon pilots in an extremely limited cartoon

style, resembling the kind of “story reel” test film made during animation production, before any

actual animation occurs. They pitched the three pilots to NBC as the concept of The Comic Strips

of Television. NBC was modestly interested and green-lit the cartoon with the cutest and most

charismatic character; the network assigned television producer Jerry Fairbanks to generally

oversee the upstart production.

Television initially inherited the cinema animation model of human-like

anthropomorphized funny animals.229

It seems that anthropomorphized funny animal characters

227

Anderson interview by Province. 228

Fred Patten elaborates.

After Anderson graduated from the University of California in 1946 he moved to New York to

work at the Terrytoons studio. While he learned the current Hollywood animation trade, he also

picked up technical tips on the limited techniques of 1920s animation from the old-timers of

Terry's silent-cartoon days. “2½ Carrots Tall … The Story Behind Crusader Rabbit.” 229

Paul Wells writes in The Animated Bestiary that that “the animal/human divide and the nature/culture

divide are key thematic aspects of cartoon narratives.” He posits a tension between animals and humans,

reflecting the tension between the natural world and the cultural world. There is a “bestial ambivalence”

in animation between animals and humans, Wells concludes. He proposes a model accounting for four

positions that oscillate in tension with others in cartoons, in the following block quotation.

A “pure ‘animal’” is represented only through animal traits and behaviors. When an animal

becomes an “aspirational human,” their animal traits are used to dramatize positive human

qualities, like heroism. This is opposed to a “critical human” character in which an animal’s traits

are used to critique humankind. A final hybrid “humanimal” is possible, in which the character’s

124

are perfect for slapstick-style cartoon plots.230

In this model, Crusader Rabbit is about an

endearingly earnest, diminutive rabbit who takes on grand, if comical, quests. He dreams of

becoming a brave hero in the comic adventure style of Cervantes’ Don Quixote (this connection

was more explicit in an earlier version of the character, a donkey Anderson named Donkey

Hote)231

. Ward-Anderson reassembled a team and began production. Long before a market

existed for animation on television, the budget the two were given to produce the show

“wouldn’t have bought lunch at Disney”.232

Lucille Bliss, who voiced the titular character, later

said that often the only people in the studio to be paid were the people who needed the money

the most.

What was different about characters in an early television cartoon? The small screen

offered intimacy and regularity. Animation further personalizes television, bringing cartoon

characters into the home. The quirky series was drawn for children but written with adult wit. It

was heavy on writing, acting, and sound. Beyond that, the task of how to actually make this

concept into a watchable cartoon was a mystery. Anderson “thought of his creation as ‘comic

strips with some movement,’ and felt that ‘if the story was worth telling,’ then only a limited

amount of movement would be required.”233

Anderson treated the project as a kind of sandbox

for experimenting with animation tricks to prop up the narrative while generally preventing the

traits are “shared by the parallel terms [that] define and explain both the human and animal

world.” For instance, in Disney’s classic animated feature The Jungle Book, “there is a parallel in

the power and agency a tiger wields within the animal kingdom and how power and elite culture

is recognized in (Western/English) society. For Shere Khan, this is demonstrable in the

juxtaposition of being an English aristocrat and holding a position of superiority in the assumed

great chain of being within the animal kingdom. (51-2) 230

Wells proposes that “funny animals in modern cartoons were a cure for the ills of modern life,” 13.

And that “The animated form almost inherently resists coherence as a textual currency,” 50. 231

“I wanted to create a character that followed the theme of Don Quixote,” Anderson said later. “I

thought, wouldn't it be good to have a donkey, and called him Donkey Hote. And have another character

who would play the role of Sancho Panza." Alex Anderson, “Alex Anderson” Television Academy.

Quoted in Scott Collier, The Hare Raising Tales of Crusader Rabbit, 2018. 232

Donald D. Markstein, “Crusader Rabbit,” Toonopedia, http://www.toonopedia.com/crusader.htm. 233

Cohen, “The Origins of TV Animation.”

125

need for much animation. He rendered broad, quirky, and goofy character drawings. The story

dynamic of the series relates to a mismatched pair in the vaudeville tradition: the small guy,

Crusader, a rabbit, is quick-witted; the tall guy, a kind-hearted tiger named Rags, is brave but

dim. Anderson ruthlessly simplifies and stylizes any and all elements besides the actual

animation to hold the audience’s attention: funny backgrounds, ridiculous wordplay and farcical

conceits in his scripts, clever voice acting, variable timing, banked animated gestures, static cut-

outs, unexpected references, a smoothly animated opening sequence, short length episodes in a

sequential, serial structure … the series just goes on and on like this.

Despite its primitive visuals, the cartoon was filled with sound. The narrator set the stage,

the characters read their lines, moods were created with stock music, and actions were

accompanied by somewhat clumsy, B movie-style sound effects. As the first cartoon made for

television, its approach for the new medium was completely unique. “There had never before

been a studio like Jay Ward’s,” animation historian Darrell Van Citters has written. Anderson

and Ward jettisoned most of the trappings of cinema animation in favor of something at once

humble and revolutionary.

At first glance, [this] looked like any other producer of animated cartoons but unlike its

forebears—Disney, Warner Bros. or UPA—there was no effort to mimic reality, no

interest in predator/prey relationships and no pretense about making art. They made an

adventure series without action, produced animation that was written to be heard rather

than seen and had characters routinely break the fourth wall.234

Despite its superficial resemblance to Hanna-Barbera’s later cartoons, Kevin Sandler sees

marked differences between both studios’ approach to cartoon-making.

234

The Art of Jay Ward Productions, 2013.

126

[Anderson and Ward’s] off-center, irreverent satires of fables, history, melodrama,

current events, and the television apparatus itself were in sharp contrast to the [later]

cartoons of Hanna-Barbera or even its forebears Disney, Warner Bros., and UPA. …

[The] array of cultural references, intellectual jokes, hyperbole, outlandish plots, and

shameless puns served very different comedic purposes than the more slapstick-oriented

work of Hanna-Barbera.235

Figure 15. Frames from the pilot episode of Anderson and Ward’s Crusader Rabbit

Source: Created by the author from a digital copy

What did Crusader Rabbit accomplish for the nascent television animation industry?

Alex Anderson’s and Jay Ward’s show was the first successful show of its kind on television.

Despite the 4-minute cartoon airing in syndication at the whim of local stations, Crusader Rabbit

235

Sandler, “Limited Animation.”

127

(1950-1952) caused a minor sensation in parts of Hollywood and with some viewers. Its spare,

graphic style and minimalist approach to cartoon-making gradually set a tentative new precedent

that it was possible to create a cartoon for television. To the people who were there, like Bill

Hanna and Mike Lah, “Crusader Rabbit [represents] the cornerstone of today’s TV animation

industry.”236

Drawing on scattered ideas from multiple sources, Ward-Anderson pioneered the

use of the planned animation techniques that enabled animation to be produced at a cost low

enough for television. Hanna-Barbera’s initially similar model of planned animation would

become the standard for television, so Anderson and Ward creating the production model for TV

animation in this show had far-reaching implications.

By the end of the 1950s, independent producers embraced and refined cost-saving

“shortcuts” for their own series: … energetic narration, zany sound effects, dynamic

camera movements (zooming, panning, shaking), expressive musical score, witty

dialogue, and resonant vocal performances, in addition to the standardized cycle

moments, close-ups, reaction shots, and mouth and eye movements.237

Syndicated to local NBC stations, but without the fanfare of a network-wide advertising

campaign, the 5-minute cartoon seemed to pass many viewers by. To those paying attention,

though, the show apparently felt like the small beginning of something big. Animator Willie Ito

told me in an interview that when “Crusader Rabbit hit the air” during his high school years, its

combination of simple drawing and sophisticated writing made an impact on him. “I was …

blown away by the simplicity of it and the story-telling,” he said.238

Ultimately, though, the show

was too early for its own good. NBC never figured out how to schedule and market the show; the

network’s indecision caused two lengthy production delays mid-series, before the network

236

Cohen, “Animation Made For Kid’s TV Before Crusader Rabbit, 1938-1950,” 1989. 237

Sandler, “Limited Animation.” 238

Willie Ito (retired animator) interview with the author, July 2017, Los Angeles, CA.

128

canceled it in 1952. The show became embroiled in legal wrangling when producer Jerry

Fairbanks declared bankruptcy and a hostile takeover bid emerged, from well-heeled Los

Angeles businessman Shull Bonsall. The ordeal eventually forced Anderson and Ward to sell the

show and the rights to Bonsall for a small sum. Anderson, thoroughly disenchanted, retired from

animation series production to pursue a career in advertising in San Francisco. Despite his

foundational role, this unfortunate series of events has led to Alex Anderson, the creative force

behind the first television cartoon, being forgotten.

A certain conventional wisdom has persisted that UPA was the studio whose limited

animation would be taken up in television. I believe this is indirectly true, but not directly true.239

Ward-Anderson begun making their comic strip of television in 1947, three years before Gerald,

and the series began airing before that short screened.240

Ward-Anderson started the early

television cartoon off with an unvisual aesthetic, even an “anti-visual” one, given the emphasis

on sound. UPA certainly got people’s attention, making a big splash with their little cartoon. But

the studio which most inspired both Ward-Anderson and Hanna-Barbera was not the

cosmopolitan UPA but the primitive Terrytoons, where Alex Anderson and Joe Barbera each

worked in the 1930s. The cartoon comedy that Paul Terry spent a lifetime regularly pumping out,

while far from innovative, was durable and offered clear lessons for how to make entertaining

cartoons affordably. Anderson and Ward warily stepped completely around Disney, never

intending their television comic strip to be animated. In these ways, the limited animation of

early cinema was imported into television production as a “new” mode of production, and

239

Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons,” 547. Michael Barrier is a scholar who agrees there is little evidence of

direct influence from UPA to Hanna-Barbera. Barrier points more to Hanna and Barbera’s influence by

Tex Avery. “Unlike Avery's MGM cartoons, the Hanna and Barbera cartoons never showed much

influence from UPA; they showed instead the effects of tighter budgets”. 240

Ward-Anderson’s Crusader Rabbit began airing nationally in August 1950. UPA’s Gerald McBoing

Boing was released in November 1950.

129

became planned animation. In the television cartoon, figurative but intimately voice acted

character dialogue replaced the grand spectacle of cinema animation with personal and social

departures into verbal comedy.

Walt Disney beat Hanna and Barbera to television, first in his elaborately-produced hour-

long anthology series Disneyland, which began in 1954 as a marketing vehicle to promote the

opening in 1955 of Walt Disney’s new fantasy theme park, and then in 1955 with The Mickey

Mouse Club, an ambitious anthology program oriented around a cast of real live kids who sang

and danced in little Broadway-style sequences. Only two minutes or so out of the 45-minute

running time of the program was devoted to new weekly animation of Mickey Mouse, a creative

and production decision that still placed Disney in the “attraction” model of cinema animation.

Walt Disney also exhibited an early black-and-white Mickey Mouse short in each program at this

pre-color time in television. Needless to say, Walt Disney was not interested in diminishing his

reputation by trying to create a dinky but long cartoon in the new television style. Mickey’s

squeaky falsetto voice was initially supplied by Walt Disney himself, a sound design decision

that did not lend itself easily to dialogue.241

Economically, it was clear that it could never be

possible to make a television program composed only of Disney-style full animation.

4.2

The Early Hanna-Barbera Studio

In the 1950s, it was a daring gambit to create a whole animation studio devoted to

making cartoons for one new medium, television. Hanna-Barbera was not competing with

241

Mickey’s squeaky mouse voice was actually provided in a falsetto voice by Walt Disney himself. It

would be difficult to have subtle and ongoing dialogue with Mickey’s squeaky voice.

130

cinema animation studios, because generally “H-B stuck with TV”.242

It was a feast or famine

proposition, and we know how that turned out—new cartoons became a mainstay of television.

Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera’s first television cartoon was an underwhelming attempt to just try to

get some kind of show out the door. Titled with possible exasperation over the new restrictions

imposed in television animation, it was literally called The Ruff and Reddy Show (1957-60). In

technique, it closely modeled itself upon Crusader Rabbit (1950-52); in character, it modeled

itself after their own Tom and Jerry series. It did not come close to achieving the animal

magnetism of either. If nothing else, the uninspired show’s modest success was, like Crusader

Rabbit, a proof of concept, a demonstration that, after five long years, a new studio could make a

cartoon for television. In this way, The Ruff and Reddy Show served as a dry run for Hanna-

Barbera’s future productions. “The time-saving and labor-saving techniques developed for Ruff

and Reddy by … Hanna-Barbera Productions in 1959 …would serve as the studio’s mode of

production for the next three decades,” Kevin Sandler writes.243

The following year, Bill and Joe’s next show, The Huckleberry Hound Show (1958-

1961), became the first big television cartoon hit. There, Hanna and Barbera brought similar

modest production means to the table, but found a winning formula in emulating the

entertainment value of popular cinema series from MGM. Ultimately, Bill Hanna and Joe

Barbera were seeking to make an entertaining, Disney-style cartoon for television, at a fraction

of the price. Hanna and Barbera improved upon the nearly non-existent character animation of

Alex Anderson and Jay Ward’s show, to the point where it had just enough animation to tell a

story.244

Hanna-Barbera’s first cartoon with humans, The Flintstones, began to outgrow slapstick

for a more realist aesthetic, in doing so setting the basic human-centric model that most future

242

Mark Arnold, Think Pink, 82. 243

Sandler, “Limited Animation.” 244

Beckerman, Animation.

131

television cartoons would follow. Hanna-Barbera’s original house style was comic in design,

character-focused, structured by sound, and economical. The success of Huckleberry Hound

suddenly made this the customary style of the early television cartoon.

After learning their trades and doing journeyman animation work earlier in the 1930s,

Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera began making their own animation in the last years of the 1930s,

during the pinnacle of the golden age of animation. Arguably, Hanna and Barbera absorbed the

ambition swirling in the animation industry as the innovations of Walt Disney’s and Tex Avery’s

films were sinking in; their Tom and Jerry series was clearly made with high production values

to compete against the best other studios. Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera’s Tom and Jerry shorts are

deeply influenced by both Disney’s and Avery’s animation crafts and timings. They clearly

studied both of their cartoons and emulated them. Hanna and Barbera made their inspired cat-

and-mouse cartoons for MGM for almost 20 years (1939-1957), balancing artistry with series

production. Despite being a hybrid of many different elements, the Tom and Jerry cartoons took

a particularly pure approach to personality animation: Tom Cat and Jerry Mouse develop entirely

through pantomimed slapstick movement, literally having no dialogue, except for nonverbal

yelps and growls. The two were so comfortable in this cat and mouse series formula that they

continued making cartoons with the same two characters for 17 years, ultimately producing 114

individual cartoons.

A sudden but not unexpected change occurred in May 1957. Hanna and Barbera’s

business manager received a phone call from higher-ups at MGM. “Close the studio,” was the

message. “Lay everybody off.” In both of their autobiographies, Bill and Joe dramatize how

crestfallen they were. “With that phone call, conveyed to us secondhand,” Barbera recalled, “a

132

whole career disappeared.”245

Yet there is now ample evidence that both Hanna and Barbera had

known at least vaguely that change was coming down the pike.246

While neither mentions many

other creative endeavors at the time in their autobiographies, a hidden history has begun to come

to light, revealing that Bill and Joe may each have separately broken their partnership and started

making television animation before their much-publicized formation of their new joint animation

studio in 1957. Reader, indulge me for the next 10 pages or so as I sleuth around to try to piece

together an account of what might have happened around this historical juncture. Some of this

material is hearsay, but this is the information I have found, and documented in these footnotes.

Joe has admitted to working on secret projects with Bill while at MGM “in

confidence”.247

The earliest of their independent work known is that, in the late 1940s, Joe

Barbera collaborated in secret with Harvey Eisenberg for several years on several comic book

series, Red Rabbit and Foxy Fagan, according to Harvey’s song Jerry.248

I imagine that Joe

suspected at the time that comic books might be the next big thing. Hanna and Barbera’s earliest

work in television occurred in 1951, when Bill and Joe acknowledge that they animated the

original opening for the soon-to-be-influential sitcom I Love Lucy after hours, without telling

245

Barbera, My Life in ‘toons, 1994. 246

Tom Sito (animator and animation professor) interview with the author, Los Angeles, July 2017. Sito

said that industry colleagues have told him that Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera were working outside of

MGM, because they “were already anticipating [that] the boom’s gonna come down.” 247

Barbera, My Life, 112-113. 248

Yowp interviewed Jerry Eisenberg, a rare role for Yowp.

Yowp: “Joe Barbera was briefly in the comic book business with your father. Did your dad tell

you anything about it?”

Jerry: “Somewhere in the late ’40s, he and Joe teamed up. It was all secret. They

published a copy of comics called Red Rabbit and Foxy Fagan. It was being printed back in

Chicago. And I remember my father saying to me, I was a kid, “Don’t say anything to your

friends because I’m under contract to Western Publishing and Joe was under contract to MGM.”

And it probably lasted a couple of years and I guess they both got too busy to continue it. Or

maybe the sales started lagging or something.”

Yowp, “Jerry Eisenberg, Part Six, Final,” Yowp, https://yowpyowp.blogspot.com/2011/03/jerry-

eisenberg-part-six-final.html. Harvey was a talented comic book artist, and went on to draw the comic

books versions of many of Hanna-Barbera’s famous characters, like Yogi Bear, who had a very long-

running print comic series.

133

Fred Quimby, their boss.249

“We did get a taste of TV, even while we were still turning out the

Tom and Jerrys,” Joe wrote in his autobiography, and mentioned some cartoon

advertisements.250

But it appears that Bill and Joe may have each had their own ideas about how

to make a television cartoon, and each may have tried to best the other with their effort at a

different studio. “The two very briefly went their separate ways,” believes lay historian Josh

Measimer.251

By mid-1955, when MGM animation head Fred Quimby retired, and Bill Hanna and Joe

Barbera jointly assumed his position, it was becoming clear that the writing was on the wall and

that the studio might close.252

MGM closed Tex Avery’s unit in March 1953, leaving only Hanna

249

When Lucille Ball’s new television program I Love Lucy began production in 1951, an agent

apparently called Hanna and Barbera, asking them to animate the opening and interstitial segments of new

series (although in later syndication the animation was removed). Without Quimby’s knowledge, they

agreed to work on the project after hours, and began animating stars Ball and Desi Arnaz as stick figures.

Once the animation was on the air, Barbera recalled, “Quimby called us down. He said, ‘Fellas, if you

want to see the best stuff in animation, watch I Love Lucy.’ But we didn’t say a word.” Joe Barbera,

“Joseph Barbera,” Television Academy Interview. Jesse M. Kowalski writes about this in the book he co-

authored in 2017 for the Norman Rockwell Museum’s Hanna-Barbera exhibit; it is also posted online.

Jesse M. Kowalski, “Hanna-Barbera: The Architects of Saturday Morning,” Norman Rockwell Museum,

Jan 19, 2017, https://www.illustrationhistory.org/essays/hanna-barbera-the-architects-of-saturday-

morning. There is more info on this rare animation at Billy Ingram with Dan Wingate, “The Lost Lucy

Themes (And How Desi Arnaz Revolutionized TV Sponsorship),” TV Party,

tvparty.com/unseenlucy.html. Bill and Joe could not admit their involvement because it would have been

a breach in their exclusive contract with MGM. This suggests that the two were thinking about television

animation as early as 1951, I would imagine after noticing the modest success of Crusader Rabbit in

1950. 250

“I had a friend at the advertising agency that was handling Pall Mall cigarettes. He approached us, in

confidence, to talk about our doing animated commercials for his client’s product.” Barbera, My Life,

112-113. 251

Josh Measimer, “History of Hanna-Barbera: ‘Ruff & Reddy’ - The Birth of Hanna-Barbera,” Reel

Rundown, April 23, 2020, https://reelrundown.com/animation/Ruff-Reddy-The-Birth-of-Hanna-Barbera. I

find Josh Measimer, the blogger animation historian who wrote about this, to be a generally reliable

writer. He has blogged about many different television cartoons on the website Reel Rundown. But,

Measimer does not cite his sources, so it is not clear where he came upon this information, and

consequently it’s unclear whether it is true, or hearsay. 252

Keith Scott, The Moose That Roared: The Story of Jay Ward, Bill Scott, a Flying Squirrel, and a

Talking Moose, 2000. Keith Scott has written about this in his amazing book chronicling the history of

Jay Ward’s involvement in animation in careful detail.

134

and Barbera’s unit active.253

While Bill did not admit to this in his own autobiography, Joe wrote

in his that “[t]here was one curve in the road, when Bill was approached with another job offer.

That might have ended our partnership right then and there.”254

Several years after the original

Crusader Rabbit ended, around 1954 or 1955, Jay Ward wanted to try to revive the show in a

new color version, and had approached Bill Hanna about forming a new production studio to do

this. Excited by Ward’s proposition, “Hanna and the talented animator Mike Lah formed an

independent studio called Shield Productions, Inc.,” writes Ward historian Keith Scott, “[which]

was to make new Crusader Rabbit episodes in color.”255

Shield Productions is well-documented,

if not well-known. While setting up the new studio, Bill Hanna would probably have huddled

with Alex Anderson to learn about his knowledge working out a system for how to plan

animation production for television. Anderson had nearly singlehandedly created the foundation

for planned animation for television in the original series, and Hanna at this time had only been

working in cinema, on Tom and Jerry, for about 15 years. Bill later claimed that he and Joe had

developed the idea for what would become their first show “on the side” during their last year at

MGM.256

Yet evidence shows that he actually used Shield to start a side-project to this side-

253

Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons, 545. 254

Barbera, My Life, 115. I’m not sure whether Barbera is talking about what happened for Bill next, but

it is the only possible alternative position of Bill’s that I know about. 255

Scott, 2000. Interestingly, Mike Lah was Bill Hanna’s brother-in-law, making them natural

collaborators. Lah was married to Alberta Wogatzke [Lah], the twin sister of Violet Wogatzke [Hanna],

Bill Hanna's wife. Yowp, “Lah Land,” Yowp, March 11, 2015,

https://yowpyowp.blogspot.com/2015/03/lah-land.html. The two other partners in Shield Productions

were MGM background artist Don Driscoll and Don McNamara, whom Yowp describes as “a buddy of

Ed Benedict’s who had been working on CinemaScope remakes of old Tex Avery cartoons”. All four

were working “on spec,” in hopes that their work would pay off, but without any guarantee that it would.

Yowp talks about this in my favorite of his blog posts, which I think may be his most interesting. Yowp,

“Bill and Joe and Tom and Jerry and Ruff and Reddy,” Yowp, December 14, 2011,

https://yowpyowp.blogspot.com/2011/12/bill-and-joe-and-tom-and-jerry-and-ruff.html. 256

Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons, 561.

135

project: the US Copyright Office has a record in May 1956 with Shield’s name as the copyright

holder for the earliest episodes planned for Ruff and Reddy.257

Suddenly, then catastrophic legal trouble arose. Unbeknownst to Hanna and his

collaborators, Los Angeles businessman Shull Bonsall had bought the rights to Crusader after

producer Jerry Fairbanks declared bankruptcy. Ward hadn’t mentioned it because he hoped he

would beat Bonsall for the rights in court; Ward lost the rights to Bonsall. Lucille Bliss, the

original voice of Crusader Rabbit, had already recorded 11 episodes of voice tracks with Daws

Butler, who was assuming the role of Rags the Tiger. Near the end of her life, in 2003, Bliss

recalled Hanna throwing up his hands in defeat. “What can I do? We’re a new company. We’re

starting on the ground,” she recalled him saying. “So we had to destroy [all the work],” Bliss

said, “and Bill never wanted to talk to [Jay] again.”258

Around 1956, Joe Barbera may also have worked on an earlier television cartoon show

on his own. Slight but tenuous evidence suggests that Barbera briefly collaborated with Robert

Buchanan, the creator of the first color television cartoon, Colonel Bleep (1957-1960), at

Buchanan’s Miami-based animation company Soundac. The main characters of this little-

remembered show are an odd trio representing the past, present, and future. People exist who

posit that it was while Bill was attempting to remake Crusader Rabbit with his brother-in-law

Mike Lah, it appears that “Joseph Barbera … went over to Soundac and helped with the pre-

production work creating ‘Colonel Bleep’.”259

It is thought that Joe Barbera could have sketched

257

Yowp, “Bill and Joe”. Yowp has uncovered this very strange and surprising fact that the US

government copyright catalog has a record from May 1956 of Shield productions copyrighting Ruff and

Reddy. This stunning evidence suggests that Bill Hanna might have used Shield Productions not just to

work on remaking Crusader Rabbit but also to begin working on Ruff and Reddy, even before Joe

Barbera was involved. 258

Lucille Bliss, “A Tribute to Daws Butler,” YouTube, July 2003,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIsTgtbY7u0. 259

Measimer, “Ruff & Reddy.”

136

these characters as a concept artist, and even that he has been credited as a co-creator of the show

because of this.260

Others doubt this happened, including Yowp, an amateur historian, who may

nevertheless be the single most knowledgeable expert about the early Hanna-Barbera studio.261

I

may be reaching here, but Yowp, referring to Joe’s comic book work, has elsewhere said in

passing once that “Barbera had at least one side project while at MGM … Hanna did something

outside the studio as well.”262

To me, Colonel Bleep’s skewed visual style seems fitting for Joe,

and I can’t imagine him sitting on his hands if Bill was off trying to start something without him.

260

Measimer, “Ruff & Reddy”. When I wrote this chapter in July 2020, Joe Barbera’s IMDb biography

page and his Wikipedia page also indicated his involvement with the show, although I didn’t note whether

it was as a co-creator. As of December 2020, these mentions of his involvement are no longer on

Barbera’s pages. Kevin Sandler said to me by email that he has read about Joe Barbera’s involvement

with Colonel Bleep. Although Sandler personally checked with artists who worked on the show, and they

had no memory of Barbera being around. Kevin Sandler email with the author, July 13, 2020. 261

“Yowp” is a pseudonym assumed by this blogger, possibly for reasons of online privacy. I originally

learned about his writing when Jerry Beck described him to me as perhaps the most knowledgeable writer

about Hanna-Barbera. Jerry Beck (animation professional and historian) interview with the author, Los

Angeles, July 2017. Yowp, the blogger, appears to have a lifelong fascination with an unnamed, short-

lived dog character from the Yogi Bear series. In the earliest post on his blog, the blogger introduces

himself: “Hello, all. I’m Yowp. You’ll remember me from the Yogi Bear cartoon Foxy Hound-Dog and a

few others.” Yowp, “Yowp!,” Yowp: Stuff About Early Hanna-Barbera Cartoons, February 21, 2009,

http://yowpyowp.blogspot.com/2009/02/yowp.html. This is not a funny animal like Huckleberry

Hound—this dog walks on four legs and only barks, in a characteristic hound dog sound: “yowp—

yowp!” Across the life of this blog, which is still active as of 2020, Yowp has dissected every episode of

Hanna-Barbera’s second show, The Huckleberry Hound Show (1958-1961), and H-B’s third show, Quick

Draw McGraw (1959-1961). Regarding Soundac, Yowp told Kevin Sandler that he could not believe that

Joe Barbera would have flown across the country from Los Angeles to Miami while still actively working

at MGM. Yowp, email to Kevin Sandler, June 27, 2016. For this reason, Kevin has said that he plans to

leave that detail out of his forthcoming book on Scooby-Doo. 262

Yowp, “Bill Hanna's Christmas Mouse,” Yowp, December 22, 2015,

https://yowpyowp.blogspot.com/2015/12/bill-hannas-christmas-mouse.html. This strong emphasis is

mine, not Yowp’s.

137

Figure 16. Mike Kazaleh’s cover art for 1990 VHS release of Colonel Bleep. The main

characters, at top, respectively represent the present, past, and future

Source: Jerry Beck, “The Colonel Bleep Show,” Cartoon Research263

Nevertheless, if Barbera did work on this other show, the venture was short-lived, and Barbera

soon returned to his day job at MGM.

Whether or not Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera broke off ties and went into business without

each other, after “the axe fell” in May 1957, they apparently reconciled their differences and

tried to figure out how to move forward. Michael Barrier, who interviewed Hanna, recounts this

transition.

263

Jerry Beck, “The Colonel Bleep Show,” Cartoon Research, September 12, 2018.

https://cartoonresearch.com/index.php/the-colonel-bleep-show/.

138

Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera … tried to get into television commercials, making some for

Schlitz beer. Dick Bickenbach worked for them on the commercials and, he said, roughed

out the animation for the titles of a [new] TV show, to be called Ruff and Reddy, ‘the last

two days I was at MGM.’

In July 1957, two months after the fateful call, Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera relatively quickly

started their own new studio, initially called H-B Enterprises.264

Figure 17. Photo of the initial staff of H-B Enterprises (later Hanna-Barbera) on its opening day.

George Sidney poses between Joe Barbera and Bill Hanna

Source: Michael Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons265

264

Hanna and Barbera’s new office was initially rented in a location at Kling Studios, which, several

decades earlier, was occupied by Charlie Chaplin Studios. 265

1999, 560.

139

Hanna and Barbera partnered with Hollywood feature film director George Sidney in founding

their studio. Sidney connected them with Screen Gems, a subsidiary of Columbia Pictures, “the

only studio operation that, at the time, was serious about television,” Joe later wrote.266

Screen

Gems was apparently just starting to try to finance an earlier television cartoon, but were not

enthusiastic about the product.267

Joe described the cartoon, developed by cartoonist Al Singer,

as “revolving around a character named Pow Wow the Indian Boy. By necessity, Singer’s

cartoons were cheap, and they looked it.”268

As Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera were casting about for ways to make an appealing

television show, the limited animation that had been the norm a generation earlier in the

innovations of John R. Bray, Earl Hurd, and Paul Terry, apparently appeared as an alternative.

When Hanna and Barbera needed to make animation for television quickly and cheaply, they did

so by largely departing from the visual spectacle of the Disney tradition, and stretching their

cartoons out in time by leaning on story and character dialogue. The UPA studio showed how to

do this in a contemporary, entertaining way in the early 1950s, although Bill Hanna and Joe

Barbera were not moved by UPA’s highbrow approach to art-making; they paid more attention

to Alex Anderson and Jay Ward, whose show was the only successful television cartoon at the

time. Joe drew a storyboard at home, and his 12-year-old daughter Jayne colored it in. To call

266

Barbera, My Life, 114-8. Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera were even roped into “tak[ing] in some of the

Cohn boys,” (Barrrier, Hollywood Cartoons, 561) giving Harry Cohn, the intimidating leader of

Columbia Pictures, who had previously tried to fire them, and his brothers, an 18% stake in the new

company. Hanna and Ito, Friends, 81-83. They were evidently not exactly the most friendly people.

Barbera described their new partner.

I had made contact with some tough men at MGM, including Louis B. Mayer, but Harry Cohn,

who had transformed Columbia Pictures from a collection of shanties on Hollywood’s so-called

Poverty Row into the powerhouse studio it became, ruled his kingdom as an absolute despot. 267

Hanna and Ito, Friends, 83. 268

Barbera, My Life, 115-116.

140

this a “show” is actually a bit of an exaggeration: each half-hour episode of the series was a very

modest affair in which two 3.5-minute serialized cartoons, with exceedingly limited animation,

were wrapped around the unrelated content of an avuncular human host and airings of now-

forgotten Columbia animated cinema cartoons.

When Bill and Joe pitched Ruff and Reddy to Screen Gems, the studio found it superior to

their earlier cartoon and bought it … very cheaply. Screen Gems’ sales vice president John

Mitchell acted as the go-between, helping Hanna and Barbera produce the new show. “When

nobody thought cartoons could be made to work on the kind of budgets available for television in

those days,” Joe wrote in his autobiography, “Mitchell was determined to make them work.”

Hanna later described the genesis of their first show this way. “Ruff and Reddy was slated to be

the opening and closing acts for a half-hour children’s show that aired on Saturday afternoons.

The show was [to be] hosted by a live host co-starring with puppets, and also featured reruns of

old Columbia theatrical cartoons.”269

Joe described differently, it in these words.

It had taken all of John Mitchell’s formidable powers of persuasion to talk [Harry] Cohn

into financing the creation of new cartoons for television. All Cohn had wanted to do is

rerelease venerable theatricals, which could be had for even less than what he was paying

us to produce new ones. Mitchell managed to sell him on the idea of mixing in new

material, created expressly for the tube, with the old. There would, then, be nothing so

ambitious as a ‘Ruff and Reddy Show,’ but, instead, a package of theatrical cartoons with

a new ‘Ruff and Reddy’ inserted at either end.

“So we formed a partnership,” Hanna said.270

He admitted that they could not afford the

luxury of time to think the matter over. “Right of wrong, there was only one direction we could

269

Hanna and Ito, Friends, 83. 270

Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons, 561.

141

go and that was ahead. … We now had to combine every bit of our respective professional

abilities and experience in cartoon-making to devise the cost-wise and creatively innovative

system of limited animation.”271

Joe was emboldened by the strength of Hanna’s technique and

by knowing that they would not be alone in figuring out how to make a cartoon for television.

Our secret weapon was the “limited” or “planned” animation technique we had developed

when we were working on the Tom and Jerry pictures. We had used the technique to

create full-length trial runs of each cartoon we did. … We had another inestimable

advantage. MGM had fired a complete animation studio—and the best in the business at

that. All we needed to do was make a few phone calls, and we would have, ready-made, a

highly seasoned staff who knew all the shortcuts.272

271

Hanna, Friends, 78, 83. 272

Barbera, My Life, 115.

142

Figure 18. Frames from the first two Ruff and Reddy segments. Photographed in color, the show

ran in black and white

Source: Freeze frames from YouTube, selected by author

Hanna-Barbera’s Ruff and Reddy should probably be considered a very close descendant

of Crusader Rabbit.273

At the least, as Yowp agrees, it appears Bill Hanna and Mike Lah created

or at least began work on Ruff and Reddy without Joe Barbera.274

To me, Joe Barbera’s absence

would explain why Ruff and Reddy lacks a compelling original premise, story, and characters,

because Joe Barbera’s inspired work from that time typically has these elements creatively baked

273

Karl Cohen, “The Influence of Crusader Rabbit on Ruff and Ready,” 1989. 274

Based on the US copyright records, Yowp writes,

What is clear is the idea of Ruff and Reddy … was in Bill Hanna’s head before he found out the

MGM studio was closing and that it was tied in with a cartoon house separate and apart from Joe

Barbera. Yowp, Bill and Joe and Tom and Jerry and Ruff and Reddy.

143

in. Even if the accounts of Joe’s recent side-project is untrue, Bill and Joe’s development on Ruff

and Reddy was clearly rushed. I imagine that the rubber hit the road for Bill and Joe in May

1957, when they were notified that the MGM studio would close,275

and that the two scrambled

to get together whatever work they had. Their available materials would have been Bill’s aborted

Crusader Rabbit work and their own Tom and Jerry work. Blending the two, it seems like they

quickly came up with an acceptable product to submit to their new distribution company, Screen

Gems. Mike Barrier has a dimmer view of what then transpired.

In the summer of 1957, [Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera] set up shop in Hollywood and

began producing short cartoons especially for television. Unlike Disney, whose television

cartoons had not strayed far from theatrical standards, Hanna and Barbera were eager to

comply with television's harsh demands for quantity and predictability. They reduced the

animation, the stories, the dialogue, and the characters to increasingly rigid and

predictable patterns, the better to facilitate production; in their hands, limited animation

became a matter of using so few drawings that even Paul Terry might have hesitated.276

While the first cartoon that Bill and Joe produced was not much to write home about, it did

represent a successful proof of concept. The marriage of Joe’s attractive, quirky artwork with

Bill’s logistical savvy brought to television a new kind of cartoon, about the strange things that

happened to a dog and a cat who were buddies.

It appears that both Bill and Joe had actually planned by that point to form their own

studio to transition into television, because it only took them two months after the news of

MGM’s studio closing for them to open their new joint venture.277

I see a foundation for Bill

Hanna’s organizational skills in Hanna’s committed involvement in the Boy Scouts of America

275

Joe Barbera confirms this timeline. My Life, 1994. 276

Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons, 561 277

Barrier, 560-562.

144

since a young age. The scout motto is “Be Prepared,” which are the last words on the

Distinguished Eagle Scout Award Hanna from the Boy Scouts of America received in 1985.278

The influential 1908 book Scouting for Boys explains the significance of the scout motto.

BE PREPARED, which means, you are always in a state of readiness in mind and body

… by having thought out beforehand any accident or situation that might occur, so that

you know the right thing to do at the right moment… You ought to be learning some

proper trade to take up[.]279

When Bill Hanna arrived in Hollywood, in 1922, as he writes in his autobiography, the

town was not much more than a dusty street trolley stop. The young Hanna, then age 12, camped

with his troop in the Hollywood hills, likely even before the Hollywood sign was erected in

1923.280

Hanna’s subsequent training as an engineer would have rested upon on this earlier

foundation. The practical skills he learned to survive in the wild, I believe, would have given him

savvy preparation for colonizing the new frontier of the television cartoon. Joe Barbera’s artistic

skills are what gave Hanna’s organizational genius fodder with which to craft the new production

protocol. Barbera proudly begins his autobiography with praise for the book by Steven

Spielberg, who spoke to the pair’s accomplishments in building out an entirely new media

format.

278

A photo of the award is reprinted in Mallory, Hanna-Barbera Cartoons, 1998. 279

Robert Baden-Powell, Scouting for Boys: A Handbook for Instruction in Good Citizenship, Oxford UP,

2004 (includes the full original 1908 edition).

280

Bill Hanna writes in his autobiography of this experience.

The most adventurous activities involved camping. … I can remember one special trip where we

all boarded a streetcar known in those days as the “Red Car” which carried us into Hollywood.

The streetcar’s route ended at the bottom of a little narrow dirt road known as Cahuenga Pass.

There we disembarked and hiked up the pass to a Boy Scout camp in the Hollywood Hills, where

we spent the weekend. / This was back in 1922. Despite its growing reputation as a primary

motion picture center, Hollywood remained in great part a rustic community.

Leo Braudy chronicles the history of the sign in The Hollywood Sign.

145

Joe Barbera … and his partner, William Hanna, [left] lasting and laughing impressions in

a whole series of groundbreaking animated sitcoms. When we marvel at the success of

The Simpsons, we must also marvel at the millions of miles of pipe first laid by this

animation pioneer.281

In 1955, two years before Bill and Joe founded their studio, Paul Terry had popped up on

the television radar. Recognizing that he had a unique opportunity on the eve of his retirement,

Terry sold his animation studio and cartoon library outright to CBS. The network repackaged his

Mighty Mouse cartoons into the first all-animated Saturday morning cartoon, Mighty Mouse

Playhouse, which would run for the next 12 years. Although I have no evidence, I imagine that

Barbera heard about Terry’s decision by reading about it in Variety, and recalled how he used to

make cartoons at Terrytoons in his early days, where he made his own first cartoons from start to

finish. A comment Joe makes suggests that he probably took note of Terry selling his studio and

library, and that this might have been a factor in his own decision to make a go of making

animation in his own company. In his autobiography, describing his life before leaving New

York, Barbera reflected. “Paul Terry ... got into animation on its ground floor in 1915. He

pioneered many of the techniques that became standard … Terry did not command an empire,

but he was making a modest fortune from his operation.”282

While Terry’s cartoons were old-fashioned, even at the time Barbera was working for

him in the mid-1930s, I imagine that Terry’s model seemed to suddenly appear to Joe Barbera as

an alternative to Disney’s and UPA’s aesthetic models of animation production, as a solid means

of entertainment. Broke and unemployed, making a solid living must have seemed pretty

281

At the time, in 1994, Hanna and Barbera were collaborating with Spielberg on what would become the

extraordinarily successful the live-action Flintstones film. Spielberg is certainly referring to the thousands

of individual half-hour cartoon episodes that Hanna-Barbera produced over their four decades of

operation. 282

Barbera, My Life.

146

attractive to Joe Barbera then. Whatever the reason Barbera joined Alex Anderson in returning to

Terry’s early model of the pre-animation cinema cartoon, I suggest that Terry’s studio practices

represent a de facto foundation for the early television cartoon. Originally, Tom Sito has written,

Terry honed his craft while working for John R. Bray, making Bray’s system the original

ancestor.283

But, I think it was Terry who most figured out how to make funny, relatable cartoons

regularly—a central means was filling his cartoons up with gags, to tickle the viewer’s funny

bone. Then, Crusader Rabbit can be seen as providing the raw materials for the construction of

the television cartoon, serving as a hinge-point around which much future animation on

television revolved. CR established the planned animation techniques, the emphasis on sound,

and the cheeky writing, framed around its memorable characters.

Hanna-Barbera’s first sophisticated television cartoon was their next one, The

Huckleberry Hound Show (1958-1961). Now that they had worked the kinks out of their new

planned animation television production mode, they began to step away from the influence of

Crusader Rabbit to draw more upon the work of great cinema animators, namely Tex Avery,

their colleague at MGM in the 1950s, and Walt Disney. The new show was a half-hour

composed of three 7-minute cinema-style cartoon shorts. Before television, there were series of

cartoon shorts, but television largely took over the cartoon series model from cinema in its early

years: TV cartoons of the time were three-to-seven-minute cinema-like short cartoons, whose

popularity grew with the decline of the cinema cartoon short. Evidence suggests that each of the

three new series reverse-engineers a successful MGM cartoon series.284

Huck Hound is derived

from Avery’s Droopy and Southern wolf characters; Yogi Bear partly takes off from Rudy

283

Sito, Drawing the Line. 284

I read somewhere that Bill and Joe called a meeting with all of their staff in 1957. Possibly because of

the weakness of Ruff and Reddy, for future series, starting with Huck Hound, a decision was reached to

creatively look back to the familiar cinema series Bill and Joe either worked on or supervised for

inspiration. I haven’t yet recalled where I read about this meeting.

147

Ising’s Barney Bear; and the mice and cat Mr. Jinks are transparent adaptations of their own

Tom and Jerry cartoons.285

But possibly because they secured coveted sponsorship from cereal

maker Kellogg’s, Hanna and Barbera spent more time and care on developing and executing the

new cartoon, ultimately realizing holistic characters similar to Disney’s or Warners’, novel but

familiar. Hanna-Barbera embraced Terry’s slapstick impulse much more than Anderson and

Ward did; gags tumbled forth from new television sets to receptive viewers around the country.

285

I realized this after reading Mark Mayerson’s 1978 essay, “The Lion Began With a Frog: Cartoons at

MGM,” and I several of Yowp’s blog posts, like “Riding the Barbecue.”

Hanna and Barbera weren’t above borrowing from Avery in other ways. Avery brought a voice

actor into the MGM fold by the name of Daws Butler and, eventually, had him voicing a low-key

Southern wolf in cartoons such as “Billy Boy.” Low key? Southern? Daws Butler? Sound

familiar? “Riding the Barbecue,” March 28, 2015,

http://yowpyowp.blogspot.com/2015/03/riding-barbecue.html

Of course, Yowp is talking about how Daws Butler voiced the character Huckleberry Hound.

148

Figure 19. Frames showing Huckleberry Hound’s antics in an early episode of Hanna-Barbera’s

Huckleberry Hound Show

Source: Images from Yowp: Stuff About Early Hanna-Barbera Cartoons286

The Huckleberry Hound Show became widely popular with audiences around the country,

not just with kids and parents, but also with bar patrons, Southerners, even Ivy Leaguers.287

When the show won the first Emmy for an animated television show and a grassroots campaign

286

“Huckleberry Hound — Barbecue Hound,” June 12, 2010,

https://yowpyowp.blogspot.com/2010/06/huckleberry-hound-barbecue-hound.html 287

Joe Barbera told a story for years about bar patrons in Seattle who were asked to be quiet when the

show was on. Huckleberry Hound, the lead character, spoke with a Tennessee Southern accent, which

appealed to viewers in the Southern United States; it is possible that the term “blue dog Democrat” may

have even emerged because of this show. “The scholarly Yale Alumni Bulletin made a survey of

undergraduate viewing tastes and revealed that Huckleberry Hound was among the four top programs

with Yale men,” Yowp wrote later. “You Can Meet Huckleberry Hound.”

149

formed supporting “Huckleberry Hound for President,”288

“the hound entered television annals

as the first cartoon superstar.”289

Owing to the success of this early series in particular, some

insiders have referred to Hanna-Barbera as “the house Huck built.”290

There was a realization that the new medium of television would continue to demand new

characters. The studio’s biggest success arrived after only two years, a legitimate cultural

phenomenon: The Flintstones (1960-1966). Unlike Hanna-Barbera’s previous shows, The

Flintstones was the first native television cartoon only composed of a full half hour narrative, in

this case the first cartoon sitcom.291

Here, Hanna-Barbera stepped away from emulating cinema

cartoon shorts and modeled the new cartoon after the television sitcom. In the process, they

created the first animated sitcom, what might be considered the first “native” television cartoon

to establish a new genre specifically for the new medium; instead of three 7-minute shorts, this

show was a full half-hour narrative. Television initially inherited the cinema animation model of

funny animals. The Flintstones established the beginning of a television cartoon trend that has

continued to this day: the use of human characters. While slapstick humor was still central to that

new show, the studio dispensed with the wackier conceits and gimmicks of Huckleberry Hound

and made a grounded show largely tethered to the constraints of the physical world; in this way,

the show is more like a live-action sitcom than an animated cartoon.

288

Broadcasting, “Huckleberry Hound’s Presidential Bandwagon Really Gets Rolling,” Vol. 59, Iss. 6,

Aug 8, 1960, 76; Yowp, “Huck Hound For President,” Yowp, October 19, 2011,

https://yowpyowp.blogspot.com/2011/10/huck-hound-for-president.html. 289

Ted Sennett, The Art of Hanna-Barbera, 1989. Sennett must be understood to be referring to Huck

being the first television cartoon superstar, for he stood on the shoulders of many earlier cinema cartoon

superstars. 290

Bill Burnett, “The House Huck Built,” from Hanna-Barbera Essays. Bill Burnett has graciously

reprinted these previously internal memos on his blog. Bill Burnett, “Hanna-Barbera Essays,” Bill

Burnett, https://billburnett.wordpress.com/hanna-barbera-essays/. 291

In 1960, this first cartoon sitcom was 25 minutes in length. By 1990, when The Simpsons debuted,

such a cartoon sitcom was generally about 22 minutes in length, allowing for one more minute of

advertising on each of the three commercial breaks in the half hour.

150

In 1963 in Japan, Osama Tezuka produced Astro Boy, a grand science fiction adventure

and the most seminal television adventure cartoon. The series kicked off the course of Japanese

television cartoons, and was also localized to the United States in the same year. Joe Barbera was

probably responding to this cartoon when, in a surprising aesthetic evolution in 1964, he began

working with adventure comic book artist Doug Wildey, whom he asked to create Jonny Quest

(1964-1965). This cartoon was the first to push the U.S. television cartoon away from its familiar

but aging funny animal comic style and into a realist, adventure-type style, in a truly innovative

science fiction/action series. Thus, Hanna-Barbera was the first television cartoon studio to jump

from the figurative end of the cartoon spectrum over to the realist end, where cinema animation

typically lives. Jonny Quest appears to be the first cartoon where Bill and Joe delegated more of

the creative work. Joe conceived the show’s premise together with artist Doug Wildey, an

experienced comic book artist. Wildey largely developed the show, conceiving a fantastic but

realist world featuring “technological stories of demented scientists, electrical monsters, and

oversize carnivorous lizards featuring realistic human characters and action sequences”.292

While

still technically produced with many planned animation techniques, the show generally pointed

in the direction of full animation, featuring photographic-like characters, backgrounds, and

animation, a straight aesthetic opposed to the studio’s established funny house style. Producing

this show posed problems, actually, because “nobody at Hanna-Barbera—the writers, animators,

or layout people accustomed to the techniques of planned animation—understood how to draw

292

Sandler, “Limited Animation.” Michael Mallory has described the influences on Jonny Quest:

The idea to try an animated action show arose after Barbera saw the first James Bond film, Dr.

No, in 1962. The earliest plans were to base the show on the old radio program Jack Armstrong,

the All-American Boy, with a dollop of the adventure comic strip Terry and the Pirates thrown in

for good measure. “Jonny Quest: Drawn to Adventure,” Mystery Scene, Winter #98, 2007,

https://mysteryscenemag.com/article/3133-jonny-quest-drawn-to-adventure.

151

convincing human figures, faces, gestures, and attitudes”.293

The dramatic expense required to

pull off this ambitious production did not pay off, unfortunately; the show was not renewed for a

second season. Nevertheless, Jonny Quest clearly set the model for a new kind of adventure

cartoon that would begin to colonize Saturday morning network schedules in 1966: the superhero

cartoon craze.

Figure 20. Jonny Quest collector’s cel, showing the show’s new straight adventure aesthetic. The

slight doubling shows that the foreground is a celluloid layer, separate from the background

Source: Google Image search

In 1966, Bill and Joe sold ownership of their studio to Cincinnati-based media company

Taft Broadcasting. Following this move, it seems that faced pressure to commercialize their

293

Sandler, “Limited Animation.”

152

output. Their cartoons needed to follow all other television cartoons in switching from the adult

world of prime time to the kid world of Saturday morning. This was at least partly due to CBS

daytime network programming executive Fred Silverman, who decided to take the Saturday

morning time slot seriously and program action-adventure shows that boys would want to watch.

Filmation’s The New Adventures of Superman defined a new trend, the action-packed superhero

cartoon, and advertisers took notice.294

Similar boy-focused cartoons dominated Saturday

morning network timeslots for the next 15 years.

Happily or unhappily, Bill and Joe were confined to the genre of kidvid cartoons during

this time. Hanna and Barbera chased the money, and sold more shows every year, with admitted

sacrifices in quality. Due to Hanna’s production engineering, the studio seemed to increase the

number of shows it could produce at one time every year. If the studio’s output was not a

chronicle of greatness, it at least kept the industry busy. “Hanna-Barbera was the kind of studio

that everyone worked in sooner or later,” animator Tom Sito has written. Sito was president of

IATSE Local 839, The Animation Guild, the union representing animators, from 1992 to 2001,

and wrote the definitive labor history of animation in 2006. Within several years of selling their

studio, Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera already lacked enough artists to fill the volume of their

animation work paid for by broadcast networks and sponsors. At that point, they began

establishing animation studios internationally, what the industry refers to as “runaway

production.” The volume of cartoon-feet of film produced in these years became unfathomable.

By the late 1960s, Hanna and Barbera felt they had maxed out the Los Angeles talent

pool and needed to go abroad for more production. In 1971, they created a studio in

Sydney, Australia, to subcontract television production. ... Hanna and Barbera then

looked to Taipei, Spain, Mexico, and South Korea for low-cost artists. … By Hanna-

294

Grossman, Saturday Morning TV, 347

153

Barbera’s peak in 1978, the big studio was turning out ten thousand feet of film a week.

Even with two thousand employees in its Los Angeles headquarters, three-quarters of the

work had to be animated outside the studio. Small wonder Time magazine called Hanna-

Barbera the “General Motors of cartoons.”295

Hanna-Barbera’s prodigious output in the 1960s and 1970s reshaped public perception of

animation. “Animation” increasingly meant “Hanna-Barbera” more than “Disney”; Disney

studio did produce some great films after Walt’s death in 1966, but often floundered.296

Jerry

Eisenberg considers the years when he worked for Fred Silverman as president of ABC, starting

in 1975, to be good years.297

But, many artists despaired about the thoroughly uninspiring work

they were being asked to create. Some artists, like Tony Benedict, left during the sale.

295

Sito, Drawing the Line. 296

Kevin Sandler has made this point to me in personal communication. I believe he will make this point

in his upcoming book on “the art and business” of Hanna-Barbera’s long-running series Scooby-Doo. 297

Eisenberg recalled “The one network that continued that concept of creative freedom was when

ABC—when Fred Silverman was in charge of Saturday morning. He was a real cartoon fan.” Jerry

Eisenberg and Tony Benedict (retired Hanna-Barbera animators) joint interview with the author, Los

Angeles, July 2017.

154

Figure 21. Tony Benedict depicts his reaction to the H-B studio’s uninspiring new direction

Source: Tony Benedict, The Last Cartoonery: The Glory Days of the Hanna Barbera Cartoon

Studio and Beyond298

Many professionals in the industry seem to recall the 1970s and 1980s as something of a

dark age. Tex Avery spoke for many in 1975 when he voiced his disdain in print for how

animation became cheapened on television. Contrasting it with the golden age, Avery pays

homage to his once competitor Disney, and laments Hanna-Barbera’s animation as simply

technical “computer animation”:

Disney's accomplishments were more than technical ... his stylized adaptation of [motion]

to the realm of animation elevated the movement in his films to previously unknown

298

Tony Benedict, “Changes,” The Last Cartoonery, April 10, 2015,

https://lastcartoonery.wordpress.com/2015/04/10/changes/. About the title of Tony’s blog, I differ on his

interpretation of the Hanna-Barbera studio’s place in history. I think it would be more accurate to describe

Hanna-Barbera as perhaps the first cartoonery, the first studio that made bank making cartoons for

television.

155

heights, and made it an element worth watching for its own sake. ... Eventually, Hanna

and Barbera set the scene for doomsday with their television-aimed computer animation

(Huckleberry Hound was the first...). Great cartoons with care put into them became

history, like everything else with care put into it.299

Tom Sito, a much younger animator, contrarily lamented those animation aficionados who only

romanticized the past. In a letter written to Michael Barrier, editor of the fan magazine

Funnyworld, in 1981, he makes his case, referring to several ambitious young animation

directors of the time.

Animation is a strange medium. It’s an industrialized, unionized, mass-produced art form

… [which] nostalgic[ally] overindulge[s] in our past. When reverence and respect reach a

level of over-saturation, it excuses negative growth. … Perhaps, with an attitude more

pointed at the future with the lessons of the past in hand, you’ll get more Richard

Williamses and Bruno Bozzettos to write about. / If not, well, let’s sit back and listen

again as to how Fantasia evolved and who was second-unit assistant to Bill Tytla on

Dumbo.300

Reflecting on that time in 2017, Tom Sito told me: “Disney was like an old folks’ home

of … 120 old men.” But, one thing that was not a problem for him and many other artists was

finding work. By all accounts, anyone who wanted to work in animation could find work at

Hanna-Barbera. “H and B was sort of the lifeboat.”301

The studio’s work had a never-ending

pace, so much so that employees like him could even pick up extra work from other studios that

H-B hired for production support. With hyperbole that reveals the culture of the studio at the

time, Sito writes,

299

Avery and Adamson, Tex Avery. 300

Tom Sito, letter to the editor, Funnyworld 22, 1981. 301

Tom Sito interview with author.

156

Hanna-Barbera was booming with new television production … The TV production

houses also used smaller subcontracting houses to freelance work that was in town …

Many [H-B] staffers picked up freelance work after hours from small houses that were

subcontracting from Hanna-Barbera. I recall working so hard on my freelance assistant

work that one day I fell on my bed and slept for twenty-four hours. My roommate

thought I was dead.302

The burnout risk notwithstanding, Sito has fond memories of working at the studio. “Hanna

Barbera was a wonderful mix of old veterans from the golden age of Hollywood and the young

artists who would spark the 2D animation boom of the 1990s.”303

Bill Hanna’s and Joe Barbera’s

leadership of the company lasted until 1992, when media mogul Ted Turner bought the studio

and cartoon library to found Cartoon Network.304

How should the achievements and legacy of the Hanna-Barbera studio be assessed? In

the early years in which they created television animation as a new industry, in the eyes of many,

Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera became a new kind of friend to animation. Like Walt Disney’s

feature films set the standard precedent for cinema animation, Hanna-Barbera’s work defined

what the television cartoon was and could be. Both studios said that they respected the children

in their audience and would not talk down to them. Aesthetically, the two did not look to UPA,

as television scholar Jason Mittell acknowledges. Terrytoons was the original model, I believe,

for Hanna-Barbera’s “pared-down visual style, emphasizing dialogue, sound-effects, and

repetitive motion[.]”305

But, contrary to the caricatured perception of television cartoons that

302

Sito, Drawing the Line. 303

Sito, Drawing the Line. 304

This move recalled, in a way, CBS’ purchase of Paul Terry’s animation studio and library in 1955,

which happened around the time Bill and Joe founded their studio. 305

Jason Mittell, “From Saturday Morning to Around the Clock: The Industrial Practices of Television

Cartoons,” 2004.

157

took hold during the Saturday morning cartoon years, in their early years from 1950 to 1965,

Hanna-Barbera reached an audience of both kids and adults, by skillfully crafting cartoons that

spoke to each group. “[Hanna-Barbera’s] goal of reaching the ‘kidult’ audience was achieved not

through … unified cartoons with universal appeals, but by … ‘creating children’s visual shows

and adult audio shows’ [as] Howdy Doody’s Bob Smith suggested in 1961.”306

At the time, far

from dumbing down animation, Hanna-Barbera’s productions “were viewed … as actually

broadening the genre’s appeal through intelligence and sophistication.”307

Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera rightfully deserve credit for turning limited animation into

planned animation as a feasible mode of television production. Their basic institutional decisions

set the parameters of the performance and timing of the early television cartoon. By their own

account, to make cartoons for television at the level of technique, Hanna, a trained engineer, cut

their previously elaborate animation production process down and down, past the point where it

seemed necessary to stop. In adapting to television, Hanna and Barbera cut out most of the actual

production process of animated movement, and left the earlier stages of layout and timing to do

much of the work in the cartoon. They acknowledged this, comparing their finished animation to

the rudimentary early version of timed layout poses, the pose reel or animatic. The studio simply

“[took] away much of the second half of cartoon production, keeping the finished product more

like pose reels”.308

“The biggest saving of all was obtained by eliminating the work of the in-

betweener. By eliminating the in-between drawings, the number of cels is reduced by half,”

Barbera said, referring to the basic job of the animator to animate the intermediate frames

306

The breakout success of … Kellogg’s … Huckleberry Hound (1958–62) [and] Quick Draw McGraw

(1959–62) … led to an overhaul of what animation would look and sound like for years to come. …

[As a] TV Guide reviewer [noted,] “Children like [Huckleberry Hound] because of the action and the

animals.... Adults like the show for its subtleties, its commentary on human foibles, its ineffable

humor. Mittell, “Saturday Morning.” 307

Mittell. 308

Joe Barbera, quoted in Sandler, “Limited Animation.”

158

between poses.309

For better and worse, this effective economization of their planned animation

system was a major breakthrough.310

Operationalizing a new form of cartoon-making for the new

electronic medium, H-B’s model of planned animation for television allowed cartoons to be

made freely—some would say indiscriminately—across the medium of television. Essentially

every cartoon that followed them onto television adopted a similar mode of production.

While Bill and Joe essentially created the television animation industry in the 1960s, by

the 1970s, Bill and Joe’s success came at great cost to animation as an art form. While Bill and

Joe certainly kept the California animation workforce employed, when they sold their studio, the

two producers transitioned from a creative approach into a money-making approach. Their

business tactics became ruthless. I have read that allegedly, when Bill Melendez was preparing to

direct the first peanuts television special, A Charlie Brown Christmas, in 1965, Melendez called

Bill Hanna to ask for production advice, and Hanna refused to help him.311

Joe Barbera and Bill

Hanna chased every conceivable ridiculous premise during the Saturday morning years, in the

name of increasing their output volume in the battle for market supremacy. It’s hard to avoid

concluding that Bill and Joe became a new kind of enemy to animation.

“Why did you sell out?”, journalist Morley Safer asked Joe Barbera in a 1985 piece for

60 Minutes, referring to his decision to sell the studio to Taft in 1965. ”Greed, I guess,” Barbera

managed. “Who has ever heard of that much money before?” “But you can’t look back,” Joe

309

Stimson, “Cartoon Factory.” 310

I recall Joe Barbera saying that in going to television, the studio reduced the number of individual

drawings needed to compose one of their cartoons by 95%, to just 5% of their prior workload . Estimates

put the decrease in their budget at a reduction of 90%, to 10% of their prior budget from MGM. If my

math is correct, this would seem to mean that they would still have a 5% profit margin. 311

The original story is apparently in this interview recording posted on Cartoon Research, although I

have not been able to verify this yet. Bill Melendez and Bill Littlejohn, “A Chat with Bill Melendez and

Bill Littlejohn,” interview by Martha Sigall, Cartoon Research, March 18, 1998,

https://cartoonresearch.com/index.php/a-chat-with-bill-melendez-and-bill-littlejohn/.

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said. “Just don’t mention it.”312

Bill Hanna gave very few interviews after the early years of the

studio; while his creative work was everywhere, Hanna was something of a closed book, perhaps

because he became defensive about being criticized. Eugene Slafer was given permission to

conduct a rare interview with Hanna in 1980.

Eugene Slafer: How do you compare your recent cartoon series to your first animation

ventures in the late fifties and early sixties?

Bill Hanna: Our recent series are not as good. Again, it’s the economics: we

simply don’t have the time to accomplish what we want. …

ES: Have you ever been ashamed of your work, especially since parents have

ranted about the general lack of quality on Saturday morning cartoon shows?

BH: Actually, I feel like I should crawl under a seat sometimes.313

Despite some reservations, by all appearances, like Barbera, Hanna consistently sacrificed his

pride for his craft in the name of making a buck.314

And yet … this was not a new problem. The sacrifice of creative control in the 1970s was

essentially the same problem that the early cinema cartoon faced in the 1920s. Here is an

unfortunate parallel with Paul Terry. Michael Barrier has credited Terry with “establish[ing]

cartoon production on an industrial basis’ in the early 20s.”315

While Paul Terry was inspired to

make cartoons by Winsor McCay, Paul Terry turned away from McCay’s artistic creativity,

instead extending the Bray studio’s factory-like animation production pipeline into an even more

312

Safer, “The Sultan of Saturday Morning.” This story is referenced on among the only Hanna-Barbera

fan sites I have found, by a writer calling himself Iludium Phosdex. 313

Eugene Slafer, “A Conversation with Bill Hanna,” in Peary and Peary, American Animated Cartoon. 314

Tony Benedict has depicted Bill Hanna in particular as ruthlessly greedy in a number of his gag

drawings of him. The following unnamed post is one, depicting Bill and Joe standing outside their studio

building. While Joe wears a congenial grin, Bill betrays an evil smile. Both stand amidst endless stacks of

money. Tony Benedict, The Last Cartoonery, June 17, 2016,

https://lastcartoonery.wordpress.com/2016/06/17/2257/. 315

Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons, 35.

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rigidly assembly-line model. Terry seemed to justify this decision by telling stories about being

unable to sell his product for a profit to theaters and distributors, implying that since his

creativity was not valued, he would instead pursue profit by sheer volume. “Way back in the

early days,” Terry recalled talking to a theater owner. “‘Well, yes, we use Terrytoons,’” the

owner said. “‘We run the feature and then we put on a Terrytoon and that drives the people out

of the house!’”316

Terry told an interviewer that “The quality of the pictures didn’t make any

difference. They’re sold like ribbons.”317

But Terry never apologized or even changed his mode

of production, frequently boasting with an evident blue collar pride that “Disney is the Tiffany’s

in this business, and I am the Woolworth’s.”318

Derek Long sees Terrytoons’ films as revealing

what happens when creativity is subjected to an economic instrumental rationality: “Terrytoons

would seem to offer an ideal case study in the industrial constraints of cartoon production, from

the specific aesthetic implications of rock-bottom budgets to the broader consequences of

programmatic distribution.”319

Looking back, I suggest that Disney’s elaborate cinema animation techniques did not

directly influence the new cartoon craft of television. Indirect influences are visible, though, in

Hanna-Barbera’s desire to approximate Disney’s convincing animation with simpler production

methods. If there is any doubt, I’ve found an obscure 1971 blurb in Forbes magazine in which

Bill Hanna spills his praise for Disney, indicating that their own studio’s growth owes to

316

Maltin, Of Mice and Magic. 317

Maltin. 318

Maltin. Woolworth’s was an affordable, unglamorous department store founded in the late 19th

century, perhaps the east coast equivalent of what Sears and Roebuck was in the Midwest. I myself am

old enough to have gone into a Woolworth’s in the downtown business district of my home town of

Bellingham, WA, in the mid-1980s, before many such businesses closed when our town’s first shopping

mall opened in 1988. Tiffany & Co. remains today a luxury jeweler and specialty retailer, known for their

diamonds. It is telling to me that in Disney’s first feature film, the seven dwarfs actually mine diamonds

for their work. This might be where Terry picked up this notion. 319

Long, review of Hamonic, Terrytoons.

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Disney’s legacy. “Disney is the oak tree in this business and we are the acorn,” Hanna said.

“Like all acorns, we will grow. And the closer we pattern ourselves to Disney, the better we like

it.”320

As for UPA, that studio and Hanna-Barbera operated in different social worlds. Indications

suggest that Joe Barbera did not especially like the UPA style.321

Joe Barbera’s drawing style was clearly influenced by Paul Terry, a slapstick style

ultimately descending to vaudeville, befitting his origins in New York and the East Coast

animation style he learned working for Terry; some have criticized him for that old-fashioned

style.322

It is telling to me that I don’t believe Hanna-Barbera hired any UPA artists for their new

studio. In order, the studios they hired the most from appear to have been: MGM, Disney,

Warner Bros., Terrytoons.323

Paul Wells suggests that Hanna and Barbera’s early television

cartoons reimagined personality animation, distancing itself from realist cinematic sound

references to ally itself with the lively figurative paradigm sound paradigm of radio comedy.

“Hanna-Barbera had to … re-invent the nature of personality animation … and … move from the

… soundtrack as a set of aural signifiers … to a model more in line with radio, and the primacy

of the voice as a determining factor in the suggestion of movement and action.”324

In terms of

technique, apart from the experimentation of Dick Huemer and Joe Grant, Disney’s studio

mostly negatively affected television cartoons by effectively imposing the expense of its

principles of full animation, which prevented their adoption for television; Disney’s high

aesthetic standards has also led to television cartoons being trivialized by critics and academics

to this day.

320

“We Are the Acorn,” Forbes, May 1, 1971. 321

Komorowski and Jaques, “Tom & Jerry.” 322

Komorowski and Jaques, “Tom & Jerry.” 323

With the decline of UPA in the later 1950s, most UPA staff who continued to work in the animation

industry went to work for Jay Ward’s and Bill Scott’s studio. Darrell Van Citters published profiles of

many of them at the end of The Art of Jay Ward Productions. 324

Wells, “Smarter than the Average Art Form.”

162

Bill and Joe efficiently ran their studio by each handling a largely separate part of the

animation production pipeline or production workflow sequence. This also served to keep the

peace between them, because their duties hardly overlapped at all. Joe supervised the creative

aspects of the studio: creating the show premises and characters, approving storyboards of

episodes, recording the voice actors, as well as pitching shows to the networks and sponsors. Bill

supervised the production end of the studio, which was probably ultimately many more people.

Barbera brought the comic gags and skilled drawing, while Hanna brought warmth, discipline, a

keen sense of timing, and sophisticated organizational knowhow.325

After both of their deaths,

Warner Bros. Animation president Sander Schwartz explained that “Bill created a landmark

television production model and Joe filled it with funny, original show ideas and memorable

characters[.]”326

Basically, I think theirs was a professional marriage of convenience: Joe

Barbera joined his creativity with Bill Hanna’s efficiency.

It’s been observed that Hanna-Barbera’s style is on the one hand a hybrid of Bill Hanna’s

Los Angeles-based West Coast style, indebted to Disney, through his training by Walt Disney’s

Kansas City collaborators Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising, and that Joe Barbera’s New York City-

based East Coast style, with roots in Van Beuren and Terrytoons.327

This push and pull can be

seen in their early series. To my mind, Barbera’s Terrytoons-influenced east coast penchant for

325

CBS News, “Cartoon King Joseph Barbera Dead At 95”, December 18, 2006,

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cartoon-king-joseph-barbera-dead-at-95/. 326

WarnerMedia, “Animation Legend Joseph Barbera Died Today,” December 18, 2006,

https://www.warnermediagroup.com/newsroom/press-releases/2006/12/18/animation-legend-joseph-

barbera-died-today. 327

Bill Hanna titled the chapter in his autobiography where he met Joe Barbera “East Meets West.” Mark

Langer uses these terms, East Coast style and West Coast style, in his article “Regionalism in Disney

Animation.”

163

street smarts clearly was the source of Yogi Bear, who was originally conceived as a hobo.328

As

he admitted, Bill Hanna was both a hothead and a softie. Hanna closely identified with the Jackie

Gleason-esque Fred Flintstone.329

The influence of Disney on Hanna-Barbera may be more

complex. Bill and Joe were also unconventional business partners, because they had completely

opposing personalities. Joe told stories throughout his career that hint at their tense interpersonal

dynamic. “People sometimes ask me how Bill Hanna and I managed to work together making

cartoons for more than fifty years without fighting,” Joe has written. My answer is always the

same: I say, ‘We did fight ... the first week ... and we haven’t spoken since!’”330

I only realized

recently that Joe also told a flipped version of this joke. “In all this time we’ve only had one

violent argument. But it’s lasted 50 years.”331

Hanna-Barbera writer/artist and “gagman” Tony

Benedict caricatures the essential differences between Joe’s and Bill’s personalities in this gag

cartoon, imagining how a journalist might see them acting at work in their natural state.

328

About developing Yogi Bear, Joe Barbera writes in his autobiography: “I had drawn two itinerant

bears—hobo bears, really…” Bill Hanna, in his autobiography, writes: “I think Joe and Yogi Bear are

kindred spirits.” Barbera, My Life. 329

In Bill Hanna’s preface to his 1996 autobiography, he writes:

Fred and I have a great deal in common. We have both been rather explosive at times in

temperament … But Fred, as I like to believe I am, was also basically good-hearted, down to

earth, and fiercely loyal to his friends. Hanna and Ito, Friends. 330

Joe Barbera, Foreword to Mallory, Hanna-Barbera Cartoons. 331

Gansberg, “Hanna-Barbera: 30 Years of Drawing Power.”

164

Figure 22. Caricature “gag” drawings of Joe Barbera and Bill Hanna’s personalities at the studio,

on display to a journalist, by Tony Benedict

Source: Tony Benedict, The Last Cartoonery332

The history of the two initially small studios founded in the 1940s and 1950s to attempt

to make cartoons for television shows that their influences didn’t arise from their contemporary,

UPA, as is often assumed, so much as the faded legacies of the studios of early cinema

animation, especially Terrytoons and the early Warner Bros. Harman and Ising productions. The

new cartoons admittedly regressed the art form of animation back into a cartoon design craft,

generally shifting attention away from the static and repetitive visuals and towards a newly

dynamic soundtrack. The early television cartoon was a new kind of animation for a new

332

I can’t currently locate this image on Tony’s website, but I did get it from there.

165

medium, the first form of non-photographic, counterfactual content made for an electric home

medium with a screen. By building upon an old craft, it was built upon a sturdy foundation.

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CHAPTER 5

THE PRINCIPLE OF CARTOON:

THE EARLY TELEVISION CARTOON AS ILLUSTRATED RADIO

The concept of “illustrated radio” describes the uncanny push and pull between

movement and stasis in the planned animation of the early television cartoon. It is an irregular

visual rhythm accompanying a smooth soundtrack. Charles-Emile Reynaud first created it in his

proto-cinema cartoons, which subsequently defined much of the early cinema cartoon, before

reaching the television cartoon. The characteristic visual form of the television cartoon

represents a surprising middle point between the supposed endless flux of the ideal of full

cinema animation and the complete stasis of the print cartoon. There is a direct line between

early cinema cartoons and early television cartoons, I suggest, via Terrytoons. Illustrated radio is

not perceived as death, even when it is largely static; like a jack-in-the-box, it holds inherent

potential for laughter when anything unexpected happens. But in electric media, death by stasis

does not seem like it happens, as it risks in film. Far from a deficiency, I think this economy and

resourcefulness has encouraged new forms of creativity that evolved animation out of an

obsession with elaborate movement in the exclusive medium of cinema into a lean, powerful

form on television that further adapted to many other electronic media. Music may be a helpful

metaphor: silence creates potential, and when sound occurs, it is all the more powerful. But

listening to silence on radio is not to forgo life for death; it is surprising and becomes a guessing

game about what will happen.

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This fifth chapter develops my Principle 1, “Cartoon.” This principle is the first of the

seven principles I propose in this dissertation. I understand the word “cartoon” to describe the

general media form of the early television cartoon, in a similar way that the term “animation”

describes the general media form of classical cinema animation. As I develop it in this chapter,

the cartoon began with the print cartoon. The early cinema cartoon was made by newspaper

cartoonists, who brought a similar, generally static, aesthetic to it. When television was not

suited to the cinema animation’s attractions, it bypassed it, finding this earlier precedent. The

success of the illustrated radio of early television established this animation production model for

the television cartoons of the future. Admittedly, the concept of illustrated radio is so different

from the everyday understanding of a cartoon that it is something of a thought experiment to

grasp the concept. Just recall that the cartoon of television is opposite to animation.

5.1

The Historical Coupling of Animation and Television

Television and animation needed each other during the postwar era. In the mid-1950s,

cinema animation was dying. Television did not yet have the means to control its live

audiovisual signal, which would arrive in the early 1960s with the animation technology of

motion graphics. When Hanna-Barbera realized a new kind of “rough and ready” cartoon for

television, audiences did not reject their shows because they did not live up to the standards of

cinema animation. Instead, The Huckleberry Hound Show was the first television cartoon to find

wide acceptance among the U.S. television-viewing public, who seemed unconcerned about its

technical compromises. While viewers had not settled their feelings about the new technology

and content yet, intuitively they acted like they didn’t need the grand spectacle of cinema

animation much anymore. In addition to the information of live action news journalism, they

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needed the entertainment of cartoons, and for this programming to reach them where they were

living, in new single-family houses in new suburbs.

My central intervention in this dissertation is that the cartoon and animation, while often

casually equated and actually overlapping in practice, should be understood as two different

things. To be sure, many aspects of cinema animation and the television cartoon overlap, so it is

not completely possible to separate the two. But, for the sake of correcting the vague confusion

of two, I here treat them as largely separate.

Every studio that makes animation or cartoon does it differently, and there were at least

two distinct strands of limited animation. The artists of UPA were recognized for their efforts to

create a more aesthetically pure limited animation. They had no love lost for what passed as

cinema animation and cartoons at the time. In essence, UPA pursued a vision of a new kind of

cartoon animation that was neither animation nor cartoon, as Hubley and Schwartz imply here.

Select any two animals, grind together, and stir into a plot. Add pratt falls, head and body

blows, and slide whistle effects to taste. Garnish with Brooklyn accents. Slice into 6oo-

foot lengths and release. / This was the standard recipe for the animated cartoon.333

Around the same time, a different kind of limited animation was arriving: the seed of all

television cartoons was Alex Anderson’s and Jay Ward’s Crusader Rabbit (1950-52). A “comic

strip of television,” it was the antithesis of animation, instead presenting a new-fashioned kind of

illustrated, serialized radio play. Hanna-Barbera copied many of Ward-Anderson’s methods, and

returned to just the kind of earlier slapstick cartoon humor that Hubley and Schwartz despised.

Across the pond, perceptive Europeans took notice of how animation was being reshaped in

America through television. In 1956, animator John Halas commented that the Americans’

general drive towards simplified animation actually suited television’s small screen well.

333

Hubley and Schwartz, “Animation Learns a New Langauge.”

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[T]he technical requirements of television lend themselves well to animation. The small

screen and the necessity for keeping both the background and the foreground flat and

simple is completely within the province of the cartoon medium … television films can

be handled by very small units with every chance of retaining the original conception of

ideas. (1956: 6, 13)334

Despite their similarities, the Ward-Anderson and Hanna-Barbera studios were vastly

different in approach and culture. Character design, layout (staging), and timing are three areas

of great difference, according to Kevin Sandler. Gauging by the standard of my principles, I

believe the two studios approached essentially every one of my principles differently. In general,

Jay Ward sought greater variety and subtlety than Hanna-Barbera. “Jay Ward definitely

showcased more aesthetic variety in its many segments of Rocky and His Friends than Hanna-

Barbera did across all its output until Jonny Quest in 1964.”335

Unfortunately for Jay Ward, his

production values for visuals and sounds were both quite low. Hanna-Barbera’s were “the best-

drawn” television cartoons, Donald Heraldson commented in 1975.336

Interestingly, for a young

Matt Groening, the rough-hewn, DIY aesthetic of Jay Ward’s cartoons, what many saw as a

defect, appealed to him; if nothing else, it was unpretentious. The subtle writing and amusing

voice acting were definitely calling cards for Ward-Anderson. When Groening first designed the

characters of The Simpsons in 1987, Groening has said that he patterned his approach on that of

Anderson and Ward:337

he sought to create a show that was visually unappealing, while

nevertheless giving it smart, entertaining writing.338

By that point, the unvisual convention of

334

Wells, “Smarter.” 335

Sandler, “Limited Animation”. 336

Donald Heraldson, Creators of Life: A History of Animation. 337

Groening named Homer Simpson after Jay Ward. Homer’s middle initial is J, and his middle name is

… Jay. 338

Louis Chunovic, The Rocky and Bullwinkle Book.

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early television cartoons was so well established that, even when the creators of the 1990s

cartoons had access to budgets that could have enabled a more cinematic visual style, they chose

to keep a rough-hewn design aesthetic.339

The television cartoon was conservative in its writing from early on in its years, a

narrative effect of its origins in the generally paranoid U.S. political climate in the 1950s and

1960s, a time when Junior Senator Joseph McCarthy singled out progressive figures across

public life and essentially blacklisted them from their professional work by accusing them of

being Communist traitors. “As a result, films of the latter years of the 1950s are soft and lacking

in those strengths that were prevalent before fear gripped the artists who made them.”340

Hanna-

Barbera generally avoided any possibility of invoking politics in their shows, significantly

softening its capacity for parody and satire. Jay Ward and his writer and voice actor on the

Rocky and Bullwinkle shows, Bill Scott, were not cowed by political pressure, and actually went

out of their way to pointedly confront many powerful figures in their cartoons, including their

own network, sponsors, celebrities, and even US government figures. While no UPA artists went

to work at Hanna-Barbera, to my knowledge, many UPA artists did go to work at Jay Ward’s

studio. Nevertheless, the Ward-Anderson and Ward-Scott studios had “none of the austere and

formal sensibility” of UPA. “Ward instead embraced a warmer, goofier, and more non-

traditional design, a style that was unique and appropriate for its use as a tool for humor.”341

When the purists at UPA tried to make a television cartoon show, The Gerald McBoing

Boing Show (1956-1956), critics but few laypeople watched it. By contrast, the Ward-Anderson

and Hanna-Barbera early television cartoon studios were pragmatists, not purists, about visual

339

Michael Mallory (animation historian) interview with the author, Los Angeles, July 2017. Maureen

Furniss has also made this point to me. 340

Beckerman, Animation. 341

Van Citters, Jay Ward Productions.

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art. They largely left whatever kind of limited animation UPA made to the artists, instead seizing

upon the old-fashioned limited animation of early cinema, tracing a lifeline back to the working-

class, almost agrarian, Terrytoons. In doing so, Alex Anderson and Jay Ward, and Bill Hanna

and Joe Barbera, created a new kind of cartoon of the air that spoke to adults and kids alike.

5.2

Lack of Fit between Disney’s Principles and Television

In its mature form under Disney, cinema animation elevated visual spectacle over sound.

By contrast, the early television cartoon instead emulated radio in prioritizing dynamic sound

over its visual design. The 12 principles of cinema animation that Walt Disney and his animators

created continue to be the gold standard for that medium. But, those principles only partially

apply to the television cartoon, and are not suited to its specificities. This should make sense,

actually, since the purpose of Disney’s principles is to create naturalistic movement. By contrast,

early television cartoons generally try to avoid movement. For this reason, I conclude that the

Disney principles are not sufficient to explain the early television cartoon.

The following table shows each of Disney’s 12 principles and whether or not it applies to

television. The name of the Disney principle is in the left column.342

If a principle applies partly

or fully to the early television cartoon, I make a note in the center column. If a principle does not

apply or partly does not apply, I make a note in the right column.

342

I talked these details over with my animator colleague Lev Cantoral.

172

Table 1: The General Ill Fit of Disney’s Animation Principles with the Early Television Cartoon

Disney Principle Applies to TV Doesn’t Apply to TV

1. Squash and Stretch Half only: Some No on other half: Little Squash and

Stretch

2. Anticipation Yes: Anticipation

3. Staging Yes: Staging

4. Straight Ahead Action

and Pose to Pose

Half only: Pose to Pose No on other half: Straight Ahead

Action

5. Follow Through and

Overlapping Action

No Follow Through and Overlapping

Action

6. Slow In and Slow Out Little Slow In and Slow Out.

Mostly the Opposite: Fast in, fast out

7. Arcs Little use of Arcs.

Mostly the opposite:

Opposite: Angular, point to point.

8. Secondary Action Little Secondary Action

9. Timing Yes: Timing

10. Exaggeration Yes: Exaggeration

11. Solid Drawing No Solid Drawing.

The opposite nearly a rule:

Flat drawing

12. Appeal Partly only: Appeal

largely in design

Little Appeal in animation

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In quantitative terms, only four of Disney’s principles apply directly to the early television

cartoon. Five do not apply. Three only partly apply. In a future draft, I plan to create another

table indicating which core attributes the authors who talk about the television cartoon each

highlight.343

This task of comparison is technical and not terribly befitting academic argument. But I

will address one principle that is a particularly poor fit for television. “Solid drawing” (Disney

principle 11) is an approach Disney animators took to animating their characters in an illusion of

three-dimensional space. “Solid” means showing depth, and the opposite of “solid” is “flat.” Flat

or two-dimensional drawing in cinema seemed wooden and artificial to the Disney artists, who

preferred the naturalism of lifelike three-dimensional drawing, or what Tom Sito described to me

in an interview as “drawing in the round.”344

By contrast, solid drawing is not really possible in

early television cartoons; instead, flat drawing is the norm. This is a pair of drawings that Frank

Thomas and Ollie Johnston present, showing the difference between a flat pose, on the left, and a

“solid” pose, on the right. While they do not use the word “flat,” interestingly, they show the flat

drawing on the left tipping over and falling on the ground, as if it were a thin wooden cutout

posed for effect. The “solid” pose on the right has a subtle use of perspective to give the

appearance of depth, and shows that it is securely grounded in three-dimensional space.

343

My current list includes the following 14 authors and sources: Stimson, “Cartoon Factory”; Jones,

Conversations; Karl Cohen’s and Fred Patten 1980s pieces; Barbera, My Life; Solomon, Enchanted

Drawings; Burnett, “Hanna-Barbera Essays”; Hanna and Ito, Friends; Furniss, Art in Motion; Scott, The

Moose Who Roared; Seibert and Burnett, “Unlimited Imagination”; Butler, “Animated Television”;

Amidi, Cartoon Modern; Van Citters, Jay Ward Productions; and Sandler, “Limited Animation.” 344

Sito interview with author.

174

Figure 23. A flat, two-dimensional drawing of Mickey Mouse and a “solid,” three-dimensional

drawing of Mickey

Source: Thomas and Johnston, The Illusion of Life

Without grasping the differences of how animation manifests differently in cinema than

cartoon does in television, the flatness on television might be thought of as a deficiency that

would ideally be remedied. Actually, the figurative style of the early television cartoon simply

excludes the expectation for naturalism in the first place, by stylizing its representations.

5.3

Saturday Morning Cartoons and the Animation Renaissance

For better and worse, Hanna-Barbera was the studio that carried the tradition of the

limited/planned animation of the television cartoon forward consistently, year after year. The

biggest difference between the television cartoon and cinema animation may be the degree to

which the resulting entertainment form is an inspired and unified aesthetic whole. Here also, the

difference in media helps explain this. Animated feature films are by definition unified, singular

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experiences of a roughly conventional length of 80 minutes or so; early television cartoons are

by definition long, open-ended series of standard lengths of about 25 minutes. Admittedly, after

1965, with a handful of important exceptions, each of Hanna-Barbera’s cartoons was generally

less inspired than the previous one. For better and worse, the target audiences watched the

cartoons. Two avid ‘70s TV cartoon fans later wrote a book defending their childhood-through-

cartoons: “A lot of Saturday Morning was crap. But it’s our crap[.]”345

Jay Ward and Bill Scott challenged Hanna-Barbera several times in interviews to take

more risks in their creative expression. In one criticism, Ward singled out their use of highly

repetitive shots and animations. “Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera … [t]heir idea of movement, for

instance, is to keep heads nodding the same way, no matter what the characters are saying. We

call that ‘the Hanna-Barbera palsy.’”346

Ward and Scott were hard-nosed in confronting powerful

people at the height of the Cold War in the early 1960s. By comparison, commercial imperatives

clearly had strong sway over Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, who scrupulously avoided controversy

of any kind in order to continue to make money pumping out TV cartoons. Hanna-Barbera went

with the flow, and probably their art was corrupted by politics and economics. This apolitical

approach to content creation in fact became the norm in the broadcasting industry for decades;

with some notable exceptions, content creators were expected to aim to make their shows “least

offensive programming.”347

Television comedy scholar Nick Marx has pointed out that true

345

Timothy Burke and Kevin Burke, Saturday Morning Fever: Growing up with Cartoon Culture, 1998. 346

Harry Harris, 'Bullwinkle Show' Creators Hate a Strong Story First, the Philadelphia Inquirer,

November 12, 1961. Reposted at Yowp, “Jay and Bill vs Bill and Joe,” Tralfaz, December 2, 2017,

https://tralfaz.blogspot.com/2017/12/jay-and-bill-vs-bill-and-joe.html. 347

David Chase, creator of HBO’s The Sopranos (1999-2007), has explained how the American networks

approached creating programming for the broad audience of broadcast television.

What are the rules of network television? Well, ... the president of NBC ... in the early 70s, I

think, came up with a concept called LOP. Least Offensive Programming. That’s the basic rule. ...

Happy endings. ... Sympathetic. Everyone’s likeable. Seriously, I remember being involved with

things where they wanted the villains to be likeable.” Quoted in “Mark Lawson Talks to David

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editorial independence might likely only come from a divorce of programming from commercial

incentives, like the BBC achieves in the UK.348

But, the American system of broadcasting and

electronic media has always been commercial, so that seems something of a pipe dream. TV was

“the most popular art,” in the words of Horace Newcomb.349

What made Saturday morning television cartoons popular with kids? The particular

model of the cartoon that Anderson, Ward, Hanna, and Barbera created in the founding years

simply worked well for television, it appears. Starting in 1966, Saturday morning cartoons were

made specifically to be enjoyed by boys—they were full of action, effects, and fantastic stories.

Even then, the overriding need of the new medium was aural dynamism, instead of cinema

animation’s visual spectacle. This meant that viewers would perceive much of the action based

on the soundtrack, actually similar to what happens in comics. American kids grew up in a

fundamentally different life after World War II. It was not as easy or desirable to go out to a

movie on Saturday, unlike before the war. While Hollywood films were plentiful for Saturday

matinee screenings, animated films were rare special events unavailable the majority of the time.

It does not actually follow that watching a Disney film each Saturday would be fun, even if there

were one available. By comparison, television offered kid-friendly cartoon entertainment all

Chase,” Janet McCabe and Kim Akass (eds) Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and

Beyond, 200-201.

Incidentally, Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera have described their television cartoons as morally virtuous for

having no real bad guys, in a rare internal document. “[W]e don't see anything funny in violence or sin.

Even our villains are nice guys,” Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, “The Improbable World of Hanna-

Barbera,” The Hanna-Barbera Exposure Sheet, Vol. 1, No. 1, July 1967. 348

Nick Marx made these comments online by video during an online Television Comedy Discussion

hosted by Society of Cinema and Media Studies TV scholarly interest group (SIG). Meeting, June 17,

2020. He related this to his concept of “post-politics,” or lip service in programming to diversity without

taking real risks to address systemic inequalities, like privilege and discrimination. However, others might

point out the contrary point that even the BBC, like all institutions, has its own implicit cultural biases. 349

TV: The Most Popular Art, Anchor, 1974.

177

Saturday morning, every week, and kids could watch whenever they woke up, in the comfort of

their own home.

Ultimately, the question about popularity tends to become general: what is the television

cartoon? This dissertation only claims to explain the early television cartoon, between 1950 and

1965, but in this section, I present my view of its broader history throughout the remainder of the

20th

century, to fill in possible gaps in understanding the television cartoon more broadly. A

unified definition of the television cartoon across history may not be possible, although many

still believe that cartoon made for television must inherently follow the production model

established in the early years. This chapter responds to this kind of question by suggesting that

the early television cartoon was illustrated radio, a newer kind of cartoon. Part 2 of this

dissertation proposes that it is a model defined by six more characteristics that define it more

than cinema animation. The early television cartoon has a rationalized kind of cartoon animation.

Its story drives the text. Its characters develop their personality through the sound of their voice,

more than by their visual movement created by animators. Aesthetically, the early television

cartoon does not aim towards art but towards design; it is a “non-art” of caricature. Sound in this

context is aesthetically prior to vision, and it structures the text. Performatively, this mediated

cartoon was defined by the staging and timing of character poses.

Answering the same question about the nature of television animation, Jerry Beck wrote

the following to me, placing it within its broader historical context.

Limited television animation (approx. 1949-2000) was born out of financial necessity.

But the early artists who worked in this area, by and large, tried to come up with an

appealing way to approach it—Hanna-Barbara cracked the formula. … [L]imited

‘factory’ animation actually started in 1914 when the Hearst International Studio and

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Bray Studios began to create animated films on an assembly line basis. Disney is the

‘factor’ that evolved the art form from 1928-1949. Television animation ‘reinvented the

wheel’ by returning animation to its silent movie roots. Like Spider-Man: Into the Spider-

Verse... animation isn’t just one thing. It’s multiple things—and multiple techniques. The

‘rules’ were implemented by industry that demanded more of the product.350

I agree—as a form of media, the early television cartoon is a mélange of many different

elements. I do acknowledge that every cartoon or animation production is distinct, as Maureen

Furniss cautioned me about at one point. “[T]here isn’t one measure for television, especially if

you consider recent work. … Limited animation has tendencies, but these grow out of the

production contexts in multiple ways and are specific to individual series.”351

But, my task in this

dissertation is to draw commonalities. Roughly, much more than in cinema animation, it is made

via a deep division of labor. To varying degrees, each television cartoon episode is the collective

result of the creative and technical contributions of each person in each role involved in the

show’s production. Officially, the Disney codified its concept of animation in its 12 principles,

which I interpret to be about both specific techniques for drawing characters in the Disney style

and to general approaches for making animation as entertainment. Beck’s conclusion that

television animation is multiple techniques is more or less similar to the definition of cinema

animation that Disney animator Bill Tytla gave a bit earlier, quoted in Chapter 3, Section 1. For

Tytla, animation is not just one thing individually; it is all of its techniques put together.

Even at its nadir in the middle Saturday morning period in the 1970s, in a sense, the

television cartoon was still pursuing an ideal similar to the greatest of Disney’s films from the

1940s. Both ultimately sought to entertain the viewer. Walt Disney achieved an outsize impact

350

Jerry Beck (animation professional and historian) email communication with the author, February

2019. 351

Maureen Furniss (animation professor) email communication with the author, February 2019.

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because he made the greatest animated feature films right at the beginning of that media form.

By the 1970s, cartoons were normalized and accepted as a form of television. Audiences

expected cartoons to be reliably delivered: kids just wanted to watch cartoons. Life-changing

spectacle was nearly impossible, because action was considered violent, and distinctiveness was

basically forbidden by networks. Yet Hanna-Barbera achieved a production feat by the 1970s

that only a decade earlier would have seemed impossible: cranking fully two thirds of all

television cartoons at one point, ensuring that there would be plenty to go around to multiple

networks. Many commentators have seen this as perhaps the television cartoon’s single biggest

moral hazard, that it despoiled cinema animation in pursuit of profit, quality be damned. I don’t

necessarily dispute that—but I do think it is overstated. Walt Disney reached aesthetic heights in

its features during the golden age, although he worked his artists so hard and gave them so little

credit that they went on strike in 1941. Hanna-Barbera reached production heights in the 1970s

that only a decade earlier seemed unfathomable; while it seemed like a workaholic culture, Bill

and Joe at least attempted to go to great lengths to respect their employees, even in the 1980s

keeping the office free of bureaucratic nuisances like time clocks.352

Disney’s achievement was a

creative one, and H-B’s achievement was a technical one. I think both should be recognized.

It is true, though, that the television cartoon did need to change. The unabashed

commercialism of the Saturday morning cartoon lasted for over 20 years, far too long to stand

unquestioned as the dominant model of animation. The middle-period Saturday morning

television cartoon may be a cautionary tale that reminded people that animation is a special form

of art that should be treated with respect—a message that came through most strongly when it

was precisely the opposite of this. The basic factor that changed the television cartoon was the

352

Yowp, “No Time Clocks,” Yowp, December 25, 2020. https://yowpyowp.blogspot.com/2020/12/no-

time-clocks.html.

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nichifying of the television audience.353

Adults began to take an interest in television cartoons in

the late 1980s. Lev Cantoral and I think that the earliest spark came from an unlikely place: a

reboot Mighty Mouse cartoons made for Saturday morning television.

Years before The Simpsons (1989-present) and The Ren & Stimpy Show (1991-1996)

reintroduced American adults to smart television cartoons, Ralph Bakshi and John

Kricfalusi recast the operatic supermouse as the hapless figurehead of a series of surreal

animated misadventures that aesthetically challenged the naïve norms of the Saturday

morning cartoon from within. Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures (1987–88) was a

“Trojan mouse,” a seemingly conventional kids’ cartoon actually produced with

ambitious cinematic techniques that reimagined the art and craft of the television cartoon

as a space for eccentric freedom of expression.354

Two years later in late 1989, The Simpsons would become a new high water mark for a

new kind of television cartoon, one made more for adults than children. Matt Groening’s

subversive but cartoony style may have emerged in the early 1980s from a combination of the

subversive style of underground comix, like R. Crumb’s influential and very strange cartoony

comics in the 1960s and 1970s, and a cartoony aesthetic from Saturday morning cartoons. Many

Saturday morning cartoons until the early 1980s had a straight style opposed to cartoon

caricature, an unexamined, self-serious style with roots in superhero adventure cartoons.

“[N]obody had tried to make a funny cartoon on Saturday morning for … years,” future

Simpsons story artist Jim Reardon later.355

But, a cartoony cartoon aesthetic was in the air, in

graffiti painted on New York City subway trains, and in the emergent style of artists like Keith

353

An excellent account of this can be found in Joseph Turow, Breaking Up America: Advertisers and the

New Media World, 1997. 354

Cantoral and Williams, “Saturday Morning Trojan Mouse,” forthcoming. 355

Quoted in Jeffrey Eagle (dir.) Breaking the Mold: The Remaking of Mighty Mouse, a 2010

documentary about that show included on its DVD.

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Haring. An unlikely stylistic catalyst for may have been The Smurfs, Hanna-Barbera’s cartoon

for young children. “I remember when The Smurfs came on [in 1981],” Jerry Beck has told me.

“[A]t that point things were so bad in animation. … It was a joy to watch. It was something that

was new that looked old, and we liked it.”356

The Simpsons shared with The Smurfs a bulbously

awkward, cartoony design; a goofy attitude, with some countercultural leanings; and a gaudy,

rainbow brite aesthetic.

Groening’s comics stylistically were both cute and unsettling. Whatever the genealogy,

when Groening’s cartoony style and subversive sense of humor became the face of an American

family on The Simpsons, it effected a profound stylistic shift in popular media. Simpsons story

artist and director Wesley Archer later reflected on this shift, referring to people’s challenges

with understanding the humor and being able to draw in Groening’s style.

A lot of animation artists were used to working on shows where the writer was at the

bottom of the [totem pole]. They were either Hanna-Barbera artists or Disney artists.

Wherever they came from, we had to tell them, ‘Look, you gotta see how funny these

scripts are and trust the humor of these scripts.’ And not everyone really understood the

humor. … The first season was really spent trying to figure out the production and how to

organize it and how to get people to draw in that Matt Groening style. A lot of animation

artists were unable to draw that way.357

Keith Haring’s subversive cartoony style seemed shocking to people when he began to graffiti it

around New York City in the early and mid-1980s. Subverting the most popular of popular of

aesthetic idioms appears to have been reassuring to world-weary people suffering through life in

356

Jerry Beck interview with the author, July 2017. 357

Quoted in Ortved, The Simpsons.

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Ronald Reagan’s materialistic United States of the 1980s, a warped acknowledgement of the

strange paradoxes of American life.

The paradigm of the television cartoon was fundamentally changing. The biggest player

effecting this sea change was cable network Nickelodeon, which most holistically embraced the

aesthetic possibilities of animation, and sought to translate it to television in multiple series.

Geraldine B. Laybourne, president of the network Nickelodeon at the time, and believed it

possible that the network could itself create quality signature cartoons authored by talented

creatives. Production manager Linda Simensky was hired to supervise the effort, and later

described Laybourne’s perspective.

Sometimes you can be more effective by working within the establishment and changing

things than you can be from sitting on the outside and complaining. … I think that a lot of

people who were [at Nickelodeon] were sort of not in total agreement with the way that

kids’ TV was, but they found this environment where they could do things differently and

feel proud. … [W]e [didn’t] have to work with the Hanna-Barberas of the world—we

[could] find these creators and we can make things that are better than what is out

there[.]358

Nickelodeon’s three “NickToons” began airing collectively in a block on Sunday mornings in the

fall of 1991: Doug (1991-1999), Rugrats (1991-1994), and The Ren & Stimpy Show (1991-1996).

As a cable television network, Nickelodeon was willing and able to take creative risks in its

programming, which broadcast networks were not. (Fox, a fourth broadcasting network, was a

notable exception, which emulated cable.) The very next year, in 1992, Ted Turner purchased

Hanna-Barbera’s whole cartoon library, and some of the most iconic classic cinema cartoons,

358

Laybourne is paraphrased by Simensky in Sarah Banet-Weiser, Kids Rule!: Nickelodeon and

Consumer Citizenship, 2007.

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and founded The Cartoon Network, clearly to compete with Nickelodeon. To fill up its entire 24-

hour schedule with cartoons, the newer network only broadcast “reruns,” of existing H-B

cartoons, as well as classic cartoons made by Warner Bros., MGM, and the Fleischers’ Popeye.

Cartoon Network’s first significant original show was Space Ghost Coast to Coast in 1994,

which rebooted a little-remembered H-B superhero cartoon as a talk show, with bargain-

basement production values.

Saturday morning cartoons perhaps imitated superhero comic books, and their shots were

visually similar to those static frames. The ambitious new cable television cartoons of the 1990s

took creative risks, the biggest of which was emulating golden age cinema animation production

techniques. The Simpsons looked to the humor of Jay Ward, and coupled it with a story premise

similar to The Flintstones. By the 1980s and 1990s, many different kinds of things were

becoming animated. These early video games used the limited and planned animation model of

television to emulate animated feature films. Pixar’s Toy Story in 1995 was the first animated

feature film made with computer generated imagery, and gives a picture of how fundamentally

animation was being reshaped at the time.

5.4

Technological and Ontological Implications

Television and later electronic media need a hybrid of both live action video and

animation to enable human communication. Cartoon can be considered a counterfactual or non-

photographic representation, a simplified user interface of an electronic device. Live action

video, based in photography that is created by an apparatus, is a factual, technical image

representing the world. Cartoons are a way to communicate with humans, since such “traditional

images” are inherently meaningful to humans. To represent anything counter-to-fact, like ideas,

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designed images and sounds are required. Animation is a necessary technique for showing

change and time, and is nearly universally required for digital interfaces. It needs live action

video to capture reality. But television also needs cartoons and animation to reinvent and

navigate reality. Animated graphics often communicate ideas or information through abstract

images or shapes; the cartoon entertains through characters. Digital designers understand that

cartoon/animation is the basis of user interfaces, that these can help users grasp complex

concepts intuitively. Without cartoon/animation, television might simply be a crude, helpless

system of video monitors, like a security camera system.

Television was the first audiovisual home device with a relatively small, human-sized

screen. Many later devices with smaller screens would rely on simplified graphical interfaces to

a greater degree. Media with small screens tend to have simplified interfaces, while media with

big screens tend to have complex interfaces, as a new media designer once explained to me.359

A

video game played on a smartphone, for instance, is likely to have a stylized, cartoony interface.

A game played on a video game console on a big television, by contrast, is more likely to have

detailed representations similar to photography. The reason for this is that size of the screen

359

Tyler Theo Fermelis, personal and LinkedIn communication, May 2015 and November 2020. I

realized this simple rule of digital media design through having a conversation with 3D animation

character artist Tyler Theo Fermelis on a trip I took to animation studios in San Francisco with my

colleague Peter Chanthanakone in late May 2015. As of 2020, Fermelis is a Digital Sculptor at the Netflix

stop-motion animation studio Wendell and Wild in Portland, Oregon. Contemporary video games are the

example Fermelis mentioned: home console game systems like the Sony Playstation and Microsoft Xbox,

which are played on large home screens, allow for great amounts of detail seemingly seeking to approach

the detail of photographic video. In 2015, he compared this with smartphone screens. Still held in the

palm of one’s hand, these often have very simple interfaces and graphics, resembling cartoons. More

recently in 2020, Fermelis mentions his experience designing for virtual reality (VR) headsets as a

comparison. Early VR headsets were literally just a smartphone held in a simple viewing device, like

Google Cardboard. Up close like this, the pixel structure of even sophisticated smartphone screens

becomes visible. The restricted screen size in this environment presents visual issues like font legibility

that complicate design of the user interface. Specifically, he mentions that he and others avoid using serif

fonts in VR environments, because their pointy ends become distracting; simpler sans serif fonts avoid

this problem. On console games, serif fonts seem to have an aesthetic edge over sans serif fonts, adding to

game realism.

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defines the level of detail in the rendered image. Full animation tends towards naturalism. The

television cartoon tends towards caricature and exaggeration. Cartoons on television are similar

to motion graphics.360

To gesture in a more theoretical direction, when television cartoons became common

after this early period, I consider the television cartoon to be a “stuff” more than a “thing.” I see

this as similar to French philosopher Roland Barthes’ argument that the romantic work, created

by a supposed lone genius author, gave way by the 1960s to a text without an author.361

Cinema

feature films are considered works, like novels are. But a television series, especially one without

narrative closure like the sitcom, shouldn’t be understood to be a discrete “work.” Instead, it is

simply a “text,” a thing spread across media systems—that is, a stuff. It is not a distinct work like

cinema animations are, unique and self-contained. Television cartoons instead are series, which

spread outwards, each episode evoking the series, but none capturing it completely. In important

ways, many television series cannot be completed. Sitcoms and adventure cartoons, for instance,

often begin and end in a similar position of stasis; a problem arises, which is the subject of the

episode, but by the end, the problem has been neutralized, and things return to normal. In such a

system, even all of the episodes together do not provide closure to an open system.

It’s often not recognized that, like other television series, cartoons on television are

inherently coupled with commercials. Media and culture theorist John Hartley has described the

texts of television as “dirty,” in that they blur the boundaries between program and commercial,

violating previously taken-for-granted notions of the separation between culture and

360

The Nintendo Switch can be played either as a handheld device or on a big TV. Interestingly, it adapts

visual simplicity to a larger screen. 361

Roland Barthes makes these arguments in two essays, “Death of the Author” and “From Work to

Text,” in Image-Music-Text.

186

commerce.362

This was a deliberate strategy by U.S. broadcasting networks operating in the wake

of the American marketing revolution of the 1960s.363

Instead of the commercials supporting the

programming, after this point, the programming became secondary in support of the primary

commercials. In important ways, television cartoons themselves became marketing, starting with

Hanna-Barbera’s breakout success, The Huckleberry Hound Show (1958), which incorporated

messages from sponsor Kellogg’s frequently into the show. Cartoons are inherently open-ended

and cannot be formally closed like an animated feature film is to see why they are stuff, not a

thing. These are all influences which pushed the modern early television cartoon (1950-1965)

into the postmodern Saturday morning cartoon (1966-1988). During that second, inherently

commercial time, much of the innovation in programming happened in the relatively higher-

budget commercials, not in the lower-budgeted programs. In this sense, the television cartoon is

like a glue that holds other content together. Interestingly, the first iteration of the influential

cartoon that became The Simpsons was brief animated interludes in a live action comedy show

preceding the commercials, cartoon transitions that served to bond the live action of the show

with the commercials. In some sense, the television cartoon thus indicates the interconnectedness

of the multifarious media that make up the hybrid that is television.

More should be written about the formal significance of breaking animated characters for

television down into different parts, what in the industry is called compositing. This is explored

more in the next Chapter, 6, in the subsection on repetition. This technique important to making

animation efficiently started in television and continued into the digital age. To create any

complex image, multiple element layers must be created to compose it. Manipulating the image

depends on being able to manipulate different layers of that image independently. It appears

362

Hartley, “Encouraging Signs.” 363

Admittedly, a similar dynamic formed in radio in the 1930s, when advertising agencies created much

broadcast content.

187

clear that traditional cinema animators generally disdained this practice, possibly because in their

eyes it compromises the character as an authentic whole, visually and personally; in cinema,

many frames contain a complete drawing of the character as an intact whole. By contrast, the

television cartoon character is typically composed of three to five different layers. The Simpsons,

in an early 1994 episode, shows the viewer that animation is composed of layers of individual cel

sheets. Bart manages to buy a “genuine Itchy & Scratchy animation cel,” in the following shot.

“Oh! That is so cool!” sister Lisa responds. Bart proudly shows the cel to Lisa, who then sees

that the single frame of animation simply has a disembodied arm on it, merely one frame of a

larger moving gesture. In the cel technique, this single layer with one body part is just the kind of

“in between” cel that is created to animate the movement of a character’s arm. As she looks at

the cel, she changes her mind, concluding: “That is so... crappy.”364

364

On a Simpsons fan wiki, there is a page devoted to this incident. WikiSimpsons, “Itchy & Scratchy

Animation Cel,” https://simpsonswiki.com/wiki/Itchy_%26_Scratchy_animation_cel.

188

Figure 24. Bart Simpsons’ “genuine Itchy & Scratchy animation cel”

Source: WikiSimpsons

A far cry from the organic holism of Disney’s feature films, the cartoon character of the

television age is more like a cyborg composed of multiple autonomous parts.

5.5

The Early Television Cartoon as Illustrated Radio

Lastly, I would like to center the understanding of early television cartoons as illustrated

radio, the central theme of Part 1. Talking about his approach to animation, Chuck Jones

describes it as fundamentally visual and based in the quick time of full animation. “I realized I

was working in a graphic field, with drawing the basic tool. To me, drawing is animation, in a

new sense, a consecutive sense. The individual drawing is not very important, it’s the flurry of

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drawings that counts. It requires a whole new drawing style.”365

While, again, I don’t agree with

him that animation is fundamentally visual, I still think that Jones’ term usefully foregrounds

how different cinema animation is from the television cartoon.

The cartoon is usually thought of as visual first. This is a bias I even generally accede to,

in mostly talking about cartoon style as visual in this dissertation. But television represents an

extension of radio: its broadcasting technology is an adaptation of radio and FM radio

technology, which provides its robust sound.366

“[T]he object that we know as a ‘television’

could have been called an ‘enhanced radio’ or an ‘image radio’ or a ‘screen radio’ or even

simply a ‘radio,’” Rick Altman explains during a discussion of the plasticity of new media

during their early years. “Not only could television have been called these things, but it was in

fact called all of these things during its formative period.”367

Early television sets were

essentially a radio with a small, sheet-of-paper-sized screen added.368

Here is a photograph of an

early 1939 radio, with a television picture tube added, manufactured by Westinghouse.

365

Barrier and Spicer, “Funnyworld Revisited”. 366

Launiainen, Everything Wireless. 367

Altman, “Crisis Historiography.” 368

The earliest television sets like this predated World War II

190

Figure 25. A now-rare 1939 Westinghouse radio, including added television screen

Source: Early Television Museum Yelp page369

Following is an advertisement for a less expensive early postwar television set from 1948, which

does not include the word “television” at all, instead emphasizing that its “[t]wo flanking

speakers do justice to FM sound,” and that it “[f]eatures a big 12 1/2-inch picture tube—[the]

369

As of December 2019, this and other televisions are displayed for view at the Early Television

Museum in Hilliard, Ohio. “Early Television Museum,” Yelp, https://www.yelp.com/biz/early-television-

museum-hilliard-2. Myself, I have seen a number of early television sets displayed at the Museum of the

Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, in New York City.

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most popular size of all”. These features would become standard in future televisions; in 1948,

manufacturers deployed complex jargon like that in this ad to sell the public on the new medium.

Figure 26. 1948 ad for the a National radio/television, lacking the words “radio” or “television”

Source: Phil’s Old Radios370

370

“National Model TV-7W Television (1948),” Phil’s Old Radios, https://antiqueradio.org/NationalTV-

7W.htm.

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In important ways, the visuals of the early television cartoon secondarily support its

primary soundtrack. It is true that image and sound merge here, as in all animation, each

reinforcing the other. The visual audio of the television cartoon is a holistic experience. Early TV

sets like this show that television was itself initially considered a form of radio with pictures

added. Television in the early live black and white era was primitive. In a studio, one camera

would be connected directly to the live broadcast infrastructure. Everything was put on screen

live by manual means: titles were shown in cards placed before the camera, and techniques

included jerry-rigged setups like having separate productions set up on sections of a circular

stage, so that they could be rotated behind a sponsor representative, a man who would step up to

the camera during breaks. The American people, who had lived with radio broadcasting for

decades, might implicitly have understood television, a newer form of broadcasting, to be more

similar to radio than movies.

This concept of illustrated radio is useful for understanding the early television cartoon in

part, I believe, because since Crusader Rabbit, it has remained dominated by visual discontinuity

in timing. In part this means that characters assume strong poses, which they hold for awkwardly

long periods of time. When characters do move, it is often sudden, an awkward jumping from

pose to pose. As a viewer, often subconsciously, we are focused on the soundtrack, listening to

characters dialogue in whatever particular quandary they find themselves in. In this context, it

seems that the characters’ exaggerated hesitations and crude visual motions as funny. The script

is usually written to visually vary shot composition to maintain variety, and to foreground

awkward visual pauses, often followed by quick, bizarre motion. Sometimes the repetition itself

becomes a gag.

193

I intend the concept of illustrated radio to be a metaphor for media, like Marshall

McLuhan so frequently deployed, a way to seek to cognitively grasp the television cartoon in a

new way, ironically by embracing the very spirit of stigma it has suffered over 70 decades of

misunderestimation.371

It is a way to understand the early television cartoon. But it should not be

taken literally: obviously, the television cartoon is not radio—it is television; and it is not

illustration—it is cartoon. But thinking of it in this way helps distinguish it from cinema

animation as something inherently different. The metaphor of radio is helpful because radio is a

purely sound-oriented medium.

Understanding the early television cartoon as similar to radio foregrounds that its sound

takes primacy over its visuals. Visually, Chuck Jones appears to use the term “illustration” to

refer in a derogatory way to drawing that is intended to decorate or interpret another kind of

signal, in this case sound, a kind of drawing that does not aspire to art because it merely

duplicates its soundtrack. “Illustration art, aka ‘commercial’ art, is used to embellish, clarify, or

decorate something,” writes one source. … “Illustration [a]rt is something that is almost

universally rejected by today’s art elites”.372

Aesthetes like him often rejected illustration as

merely decorative, in favor of art as aesthetic expression. It is fair to call Chuck Jones

snobbish.373

However, illustration can also be seen in a positive light, as the Norman Rockwell

Museum did in 2016 in a museum-published book accompanying the exhibit. The curators

celebrate Hanna-Barbera’s cartoon of television by remarking that: “Illustration and cartoons are

371

Media theorist John Durham Peters is an important interpreter of McLuhan; in a 2015 book, Peters

writes,

As often is the case with McLuhan, you feel at first that things are upside down ... [but then o]ne

medium reveals another”. McLuhan apparently literally understood media to be metaphors; Peters

quotes him as writing that “[a]ll media are active metaphors in their power to translate experience

into new forms.

To “misunderestimate” is a (George W.) Bushism. Weisberg, More George W. Bushisms. 372

American Art Archives, “What is “Illustration”. 373

Jones’ love of high culture is reflected in many of his films, such as What’s Opera, Doc? (1957)

194

the people’s art”.374

Many if not most Americans don’t have ready access to art; cartoon

illustration is an accessible aesthetic form.

There is slight, growing acknowledgement that sound can animate, like moving images

can. French film theorist and sound scholar Michel Chion has coined the important concept of

audiovision to describe the particular way that sound and image combine in cinema and

television. The coming of sound to film in the 1920s and 1930s created a qualitatively new form

of perception, Chion proposes. Contrary to the common belief that sound and image are separate

and distinct, Chion argues that humans don’t see images and hear sounds as separate channels.

Instead, sound and image combine into a shared audiovision, in which each shapes the other as

greater than the sum of their parts.

[In] audiovisual combination … one perception influences the other and transforms it.

We never see the same thing when we also hear; we don’t hear the same thing when we

see as well. We must therefore get beyond preoccupations such as identifying so-called

redundancy between the two domains and debating interrelations between forces[.]375

From this perspective, Chuck Jones affronting sound as redundant to the image in the television

cartoon misunderstands the coequal relationship between the two. There is even an argument to

be made that the aural realm is richer than the visual one for humans.376

374

Kowalski, “Hanna-Barbera.” 375

Chion, Audio-Vision. 376

Steve Keller, sonic strategy director at music streaming service Pandora, recently made this case on

NPR program 1A. In television commercials, 91% of the assets in the ad are visual, and only 8% are

audio. But, Keller points to recent Ipsos study, which found that viewers remembered this small minority

of audio cues three times more frequently than the visual cues. This is evidence that audio is more

impactful to humans than visuals. In explaining this, he suggests that, in human evolution, sound was

more salient to survival than visuals. Our ability to hear approaching animals before we could see them

helped our ancestors survive. “Designing Our World: The Connection Between a Sound and a Brand,”

December 28, 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/12/10/944884817/designing-our-world-the-connection-

between-a-sound-and-a-brand.

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I have wrestled for years with how to understand television animation in the metaphoric

terms so famously popularized by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, and have not yet found a

satisfactory answer. Since cinema animation is defined by a tendency towards movement, it

presents the viewer with the illusion of “life” through movement; does this mean the cinema

animation character should be thought of as alive, in some sense? By contrast, the early

television cartoon is defined by a tendency towards stasis. Is the implication by opposition is that

we might perceive the illusion of their “death” through their stasis? Most people I have

mentioned this to have responded either by saying “You’re taking this metaphorical concept too

literally” or simply “That doesn’t make sense.”

For a brief time, I had the idea to call the television cartoon “static animation.” I thought

that the term would show limited animation to be halting but still flowing, and that even static

cartoon characters feel alive. In a sense, the media apparatus itself animates even static

characters, because 20th

century cathode-ray tube (CRT) televisions always added a fizzy

fuzziness to television cartoons. I emailed animation studies colleagues for comment, proposing

that “‘[s]tatic animation’ is basically repeated non-moving images that appear to move.” I

received mixed responses. Many were receptive to the idea, but some were puzzled. Alan

Cholodenko, in particular, was troubled by how this term seemed to imply that a static animation

is both still and moving. Referring to television cartoons, he responded: “[I]nsofar as they are not

totally static, don’t call them static.”377

Eric Herhuth wrote that “most animation theorists …

377

Alan Cholodenko (animation theorist) email with the author, January 19, 2019. Cholodenko pointed

out that it can’t be said that television animation is purely static, because it actually does still move, even

if not very much. Going further, he pointed out that even adopting the term “static” is not firm ground.

The “stasis” of photography is never pure, because even the photograph contains a short duration of time.

He makes this argument in his essay “Still Photography?” International Journal of Baudrillard Studies,

Volume 5, Number 1, January, 2008.

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analyze movement and stasis together. You can’t really have one without the other. … why not

… just use the term ‘limited animation,’ which is a common term in our field?”378

Herhuth sagely prevented me from diving down a rabbit hole to nowhere, pointing out

that the term limited animation is conventional but undertheoreized. I did loosely adopt the term

in this discussion. Yet, at some point I want to try to figure out my intuition that there is

something important here. “[I]n limited animation, movement does not merely stop or

disappear,” Tom Lamarre has written. “Instead, it comes to the surface of the image, as

potentiality.”379

Animation scholar Esther Leslie emphasizes that movement is only meaningful

in relation to stillness. “In animation … things that never moved by themselves are mobilized

into movement. … The first animations turned this transition between states of rest and unrest

into the very motif of the drama.”380

Leslie has appeared to similarly wrestle with this impression

of suspended animation when studying Charles-Émile Reynaud’s luminous pantomimes,

proposing the term “petrified unrest.” My intuition is that the television cartoon is defined by

neither the illusion of life or death, but by something in between. The implications, though,

sound crazy. Maybe the television cartoon character is a cyborg, partly living and partly

mechanized—as in Chuck Jones’ cyborg rendering of the Coyote in “modern” animation. Or,

could they be a zombie, dead but moving? In the next chapter, I argue that Hanna and Barbera

disguised the general lack of movement in their early television cartoons by shifting attention to

the audio. This strategy might be called “the illusion of the illusion of life” (!).

Is it true that “[a] picture that has no movement will go ‘dead’ on the screen in only a few

seconds,” as Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston write later in their famous book? “Only two

factors really can keep the footage ‘alive,’” they suggest, “a story idea that moves the audience,

378

Eric Herhuth (animation scholar) email communication with the author, February 2019. 379

Thomas Lamarre, The Anime Machine. 380

Esther Leslie, “Animation’s Petrified Unrest,” 2013.

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or a sound track that has meaning of its own.” 381

Walt Disney actually dramatized this notion in

two of his classic features, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty. In both, the princess is put to sleep.

Asleep and unable to move, they are mourned as if they had died. I don’t agree that stasis on

television is perceived as death, because we recognize that the character could move at any

moment. Surely it is black-and-white thinking to view the cartoon character as either alive or

dead, with no intermediate states in between. Why not a state of locomotive rest, like basically

all animals adopt when they are not moving? Perhaps new concepts might arise during the digital

age, a time of fine gradations of life through media. In a sense, characters’ limited animation on

television is not an active visual performance, like it is in the detached medium of cinema, but a

passive performance in the more engaging medium of television. When a character is not moving

on television, it is nearly always in anticipation of moving; visual stasis might engross us in the

cartoon because we implicitly guess about what will happen when. When some unexpected gag

or joke occurs, the abrupt change throws the stasis into a disorder of motion, and the whole

situation easily becomes funny.

It is possible that illustrated radio’s mixture of expectation and incongruity long ago

became a modern recipe for comedy. Film theorist Tom Gunning has commented that

mechanical rigidity in living creatures is funny by the standards of philosopher Henri Bergson,

because it makes the creature resemble a machine.382

Life is defined by Bergson as perpetual

movement, and a living body is recognized by its flexibility and agility. Situations that halt

natural movement, like clumsiness, are naturally funny. It seems that, as humans, we laugh

because that character’s body is not acting like a living body, but like a machine. “When

381

Thomas and Johnston, Illusion of Life. 382

Bergson writes: “The attitudes, gestures and movements of the human body are laughable in exact

proportion as that body reminds us of a mere machine.” Quoted in Tom Gunning, “Animation and

Alienation: Bergson’s Critique of the Cinématographe and the Paradox of Mechanical Motion,” 2014.

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materiality succeeds in fixing the movement of the soul, in hindering its grace, it obtains a comic

effect,” Bergson has written. “[D]iversion of life towards mechanism is the real cause of

laughter.” 383

Tom Gunning comments that this concept of humor helps make comprehensible the

humor of early cinema cartoons.

Cinema provides the perfect medium for Bergsonian comedy, exposing an inelastic

mechanical rigidity. Animated cartoons, especially early examples such as those of Emile

Cohl or Otto Messmer, would also seem to demonstrate Bergson’s understanding.384

Kevin Sandler extends the line of suspended animation or illustrated radio into Hanna-Barbera’s

cartoons. In cinema animation, the discontinuous cartoon would be considered an early-stage

pose reel, but for television, Hanna and Barbera presented it to the world as the finished product.

Hanna-Barbera delivered to the network or syndicator essentially these pre-visualized

pose reels or nicely illustrated sequences of drawings that suggested a cartoon’s action

and humor but with little of the time-intensive cel animation, ink-and-paint, and camera

work done in the later stages of full-animation production.385

Some percentage of the humor of Family Guy (1999-present) comes from characters not moving,

I think. A gag is that jokes are delivered deadpan with everyone’s bodies completely static, while

father Peter runs his mouth. These jokes are not incidental to the television cartoon, but inherent

to the form itself.

Charles-Émile Reynaud’s suspended animation predated cinema animation by 20 years

and was so different from the future full animation of cinema that Reynaud’s innovations are

often forgotten. But it should be recognized how similar his luminous pantomimes are to early

television cartoons. In the non-photographic representations that dominate digital media, stillness

383

Bergson, Laughter. 384

Gunning, “Animation and Alienation”. 385

Sandler, “Limited Animation.”

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is the default, a state of rest. Video games are a clear example. The player’s character begins

standing still, and moves only when the player commands them to move. When input is detected

from the user, animated movement activates the character or interface. Whenever the player is

not interacting, the character just waits until they receive input again. But in most video games,

the character doesn’t die in the game because the player doesn’t interact with them (in some, the

character becomes bored, and fidgets). Digital media is similar. A smartphone’s interface doesn’t

have a character, but also begins in a static state, awaiting input (without input, the device soon

“falls asleep”). Ultimately, I think characters in electronic media are not at risk of death by stasis

because the medium itself is alive with electricity and algorithms.

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PART 1 CONCLUSION

Understanding television and cinema to be technically distinct media that nonetheless

resemble each other suggests that the limited animation of cinema is different than the planned

animation of television. While the history of cinema animation in the United States is now

exceedingly well-documented, the history of U.S. television animation has only begun to be told.

In part, this dissertation attempts to tell this alternative cartoon history of animation, but I intend

this to be the main focus in my next book, on the history of the early television cartoon, from

1950-1965. Many histories of U.S. “animation” have largely focused on cinema animation. And

many scholars conflate animation with cinema animation, implicitly marginalizing television

animation. While pieces of the history of television animation are told in other histories of

animation, many books privileging cinema animation decline to address television animation, or

even acknowledge it.386

Of the television scholars who do mention television animation, nearly

none have asked what characterizes television animation on its own terms as animation made for

television, as a kind of animation distinct from cinema animation.387

Today in animation studies,

there remains a defining bias in favor of the many accomplished animations of the cinema,

thought of as more artistic, and against the many cartoons of television, thought to be more

entertaining. I admit that this is difficult to deny. But, I believe that allowing such a notion of art

as an exclusive category to be the arbiter of what is good and true is to nostalgically romanticize

386

The animation histories of three authors who privilege cinema animation over television are Maltin, Of

Mice and Magic, Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons, and Giannalberto Bendazzi, Animation: A World History

(3 volumes, 2016). 387

For instance, television scholar Jason Mittell ends his valuable first book, Genre and Television

(2004), with two appendices listing critical rankings of the “greatest cartoons”. Nearly all of these were

made before television and thus have no inherent relation to the subject of his book, television.

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the past and to obscure the nature of contemporary society. This bias is so pronounced that I am

unable to identify any academic animation researcher who self-identifies as a scholar of

television animation. I am proposing to be the first such scholar.

Chapter 1 here attended to the differences in media technology between television and to

the differences in formal technique between cartoon and animation. Chapters 2 and 3 sought to

explain how the early television cartoon was made possible by five antecedents. Print cartooning

was introduced to the U.S. mostly by Germans, and this craft developed to become the

kingmaker of the first visual urban newspapers in the 1890s, the yellow journals of New York

City. Young print cartoonists became the first generation of animators in New York City in the

1910s, where Earl Hurd introduced the cel technique that is the basis of 20th

century animation,

while his partner John R. Bray ran the first commercially successful cartoon studio. The United

States found an electric connection with radio in the 1920s and 1930s; some voice actors

proceeded from there to work in cinema and television animation. Walt Disney refashioned the

early cinema cartoon into his spectacular but nostalgic cinema animation, basing his studio’s full

animation cinema production mode on his 12 principles. A younger and more liberal group of

animators split with Disney’s studio in the 1941 strike. With the help of Chuck Jones, UPA

worked its way towards the unconventional limited animation of their characteristic film, Gerald

McBoing Boing (1950).

At that point, television modernized the subtle complexity of golden age cinema

animation into the initially simple stylization needed for broadcast. This adaptation of animation

meant a deep rationalization and commercial management, which recalls animation’s beginnings

in the early commercial short film series of the 1910s. Through establishing the economic

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viability of cartoons made for television,388

Hanna-Barbera played the largest role in saving

animation from dying in the 1950s.389

In persisting for the next 40 years, H-B also carried

animation into the digital media of the information age in the 1990s.390

Over the years, animation

fundamentally changed television into a modern media system, humanizing its visuals and

sounds by enabling greater aesthetic control; this anticipated digital techniques decades in the

future. The story often told of animation on television is often one of destruction and loss. But

animation did evolve over its time on television, and achieved its own new artistic and cultural

forms in the animation “renaissance” of the 1990s; I believe television more than cinema was the

real driver of change in media and culture at the time, although that point is up for debate. Ted

Turner bought the Hanna-Barbera studio and cartoon library in 1992 and used them to establish

The Cartoon Network, enabling a new generation of animators to reanimate their contemporary

characters and stories by employing H-B’s classic methods.

This dissertation proposes that the television cartoon is the modern missing link between

classical cinema animation and contemporary digital media. The basis of this claim is that, in its

early years, television successfully simplified animation into a more sustainable cartoon form for

the first home medium with an electronic screen. Television worked out how to tell stories in the

new electronic media. The stability of this new mode of production allowed animation to survive

in the television age in its reduced cartoon form, where television and animation formed a close

bond not just in programs, but also in commercials, network idents, credit sequences, and

specials. Television and animation became a new kind of mediated hybrid via which both could

expand and thrive.

388

Kevin Sandler, “Limited Animation.” 389

Tom Sito has described “Hanna-Barbera [as] the kind of studio that everyone worked in sooner or

later.” Drawing the Line. 390

“Hanna Barbera was a wonderful mix of old veterans from the golden age of Hollywood and the

young artists who would spark the 2D animation boom of the 1990s.” Sito, Drawing the Line.

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PART 2

PRINCIPLES OF THE EARLY TELEVISION CARTOON

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PART 2 INTRODUCTION

The context surrounding the early television cartoon, and the elements that bonded

together to form it, don’t necessarily explain its formal, structural features. The longstanding

heart of this dissertation is the following analysis of the remaining six “principles” that define it,

in each of six subsequent chapters. I suggest that a new holistic model is needed to explain how

animation evolved in the medium of television into a new kind of cartoon. The model this

dissertation proposes is constituted of seven principles total, each of which explains a central

aspect that I believe defines the cartoon of television more than the animation of cinema:

Cartoon

Rationalization

Story

Character

Style

Sound

Performance.

Admittedly, each of these attributes first arose earlier in cinema, but I believe these all ultimately

became secondary to the primacy of visual animation in Walt Disney’s films. At the formal level

of technique, cinema animation is typically understood through 12 fundamental principles that

Walt Disney and his key animators developed to create their art of animation. A principle is a

rule of thumb, a defining aspect that has stood the test of time. Film writing consultant Robert

McKee says that “A rule says, ‘You must do it this way.’ A principle says, ‘This works … and

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has through all remembered time.’” 391

While Disney’s principles remain the standard in

animation education and in the animation industry today, they do not explain the more restricted

design practice of cartooning standard in television. Television cartoons should be understood on

their own terms.

Cartoon, the quality just covered in Chapter 5, refers to the cartoon as a holistic

entertainment format. This meta- or macro-term encompasses the other six qualities. You may

notice that I am not including animation as one of my principles of the early television cartoon.

Animation is something I consider to mostly exist in cinema, and not to any full degree in

television. The principle of “Cartoon” is the closest thing to a principle of animation in this

dissertation, just covered at the close of Part 1. For Walt Disney and his Nine Old Men,

animation is a complex entity which they took 12 principles to define. They do not even claim to

be able to sum it up as a single principle.

To those in the animation community, the term principles will bring to mind the Disney

studio’s “principles of animation.” But this second part of this dissertation is motivated by the

belief that the early television cartoon can’t be explained by Disney’s principles of cinema

animation. Accounting for the formal specificity of the early television cartoon instead requires

new principles. Some of Disney’s principles apply to television, but others do not. Some Disney

principles that do not apply are actually contrary to the principles of the television cartoon I

propose here. I don’t intend to question the primacy of Disney’s principles. In fact, I propose that

animatophiles can maintain their allegiance to Disney’s principles as the fundamental basis of

what the art of cinema animation is. But the television cartoon is an altogether different kind of

design craft. Grounded in the simple cartoons of the early years of cinema, between 1892 and

391

McKee, Story.

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1927, it was only after Disney’s innovations, in the 1940s, that some artists sought to counter his

influence by simplifying animation back into the cartoon.

A tentative consensus has developed about the features defining the early television

cartoon as distinct from cinema animation. I wanted to create a table comparing and contrasting

how many writers mention each particular aspect, although I didn’t complete this. Yet I don’t

believe that any author has yet asked: how might these newer principles be brought together to

form a holistic model of the early television cartoon? The present model attempts to do this,

through articulating techniques fundamental in television. Instead of presuming authority to coin

novel concepts, I rely on concepts already recognized as explaining television. I approximately

order these principles to follow the television animation production pipeline, and propose seven

principles total explaining the technical specificities of how animation was adapted for

television. While I recognize that these rigid categories can feel cumbersome and restrictive, I

hope you as a reader will find them useful as interpretive lenses that frame this research object

and clarify its basic stakes in simple, general themes.

Rationalization is the condition of existence of the early television cartoon, analyzed in

the next Chapter, 6. While unromantic, technical control is what allowed cartoons to be made for

television in the first place. How exactly did Alex Anderson and Bill Hanna plan out their

production in their new planned animation production system for television? Little literature has

detailed the specific methods by which the new cartoon achieved economy, but I see seven

general sub-principles of rationalization: division of labor, cel stacking, (ongoing) series

production, subcontracting, focused creativity, and labor management (or Taylorization).

Separate from these, three more specific strategies or methods of limitation allowed the Ward-

Anderson and Hanna-Barbera studios to shrink the scope of the production, largely by avoiding

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the need to make animation in the first place: omission, reduction, and diversion. Lastly, five

strategies or methods of extension then allowed the studios to expand the new cartoon to fill the

time needed to complete an episode: simplicity, stasis, cycling, repetition (banking), and artificial

movement. Hanna was characteristically modest about their accomplishment, claiming that he

and Joe Barbera had used a similar system when working in cinema.

It would be flattering to claim that the development of our limited animation process was

akin to re-inventing the wheel in cartoonmaking. I think it a more apt description to say,

however, that we installed a new gear in the system. All of the elements that would

ultimately be incorporated in television cartoons had been present in theatrical

cartoons.392

Nevertheless, even if Anderson and Hanna refined methods they already previously used, the

new system was no small achievement. They did stand on the shoulders of cinema animators.

But theirs were the first cartoons made for television anywhere in the world, to my knowledge,

especially if the measure is the sustainability of the studio’s production model over multiple

years. No one else had previously succeeded in both creating a sustainable new business model

and then operationalizing it over decades of hard work.

Story is the context in which this cartoon is meaningful, and this is the focus of Chapter

7. Narrative drives the texts, which occur in series. Animated feature films are vehicles driven by

the visual aesthetic expression through time of the animators. In television, story is the premise

of the open-ended series, the articulation of the creator’s vision of the nature of characters, their

relationships, and the world in which they live. Once episodes are in production, the writer

begins the process by conceiving and writing the script. Ultimately, the television viewer’s

392

Hanna and Ito, Friends.

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immersion in the story world takes their attention off the less visual and largely static image. In

other words, episodes are moments in the series which each perform different social meanings.

Character is the cartoon’s vessel for personal expression, the subject of Chapter 8. The

story is given flesh when the personality of characters is established through the way that they

talk, act, and interact. Of course, there are characters in animated films, too, but in cinema, the

animator develops character visually through character animation, hand-rendered pantomimed

movement. In television, the voice actor effectively animates the character through the sound of

their voice. The character’s ineffable aural signature to the character, their personality voice, is

the combination of the vocal expert’s acting talent with the embodied “grain” of their vocal

chords, the sound of their specific body creating the character’s voice. This is nowhere more

clear than in Hanna-Barbera’s 1960s Flintstones, the first television cartoon sitcom, which

emphasizes burlesque voice acting of long scripts over its rudimentary animation. The television

cartoon is fundamentally personality-driven, in part because for a cartoon character to express

themselves, they need to speak. In cinema, characters could express themselves simply through

the motion of their body, as in dancing sequences; in television, characters that can’t speak can’t

express their personality through their voice, and so can’t really act.

Style is the adaptation that adds comment through caricature and design, seen in Chapter

9. Once characters are conceived, they must be given a simple, stylized appearance. Walt

Disney’s modus operandi was to set naturalistically lively characters into enchanting, three-

dimensional motion. In a contrasting modernist spirit, animators at rival cinema studio United

Productions of America (UPA) embraced cartoons as the two-dimensional lines on a page that

they are, a design space which Hanna-Barbera soon adopted for television. The early television

cartoon’s figurative, caricatural style is how it departs from the naturalism of the photograph.

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The creative human visual signature is what makes the cartoon appealing to human eyes.

Abandoning volume, the stylization of the television story world is flat and angular, a curious-

looking design mode that cleverly compensates for the stark limitations of the form. While

economics are one reason for this, there were also technological reasons: the small television

screen demanded visual economy. It helped that visually abstracted design increases humans’

visual interest in characters, even if they don’t move very much, because it makes their

appearance quirky and funny.

Image is secondary to the early television cartoon, however. Sound is the primary means

of communication in television, historically, the theme of Chapter 10. Sound is a perceptual

modality that we invisibly hear and internalize, perhaps somewhat like scent. Cinema is based in

the “motion” of sequential visual photography. Television, by contrast, is an advancement of

radio technology; this explains how television had high-fidelity FM sound technology built in, to

compensate for the crude, low-resolution image quality television had for the remainder of the

20th

century. Sound structures every cartoon in time, a sonic blueprint that guides the creation of

the images. When the director records the voice actors delivering their lines and these are edited

to their satisfaction, the timing and delivery of the voice recordings structures the subsequent

creative work of the cartoon. In the final mix of the soundtrack, effects are added, which aurally

punctuate actions, a comic flair that compensates for their lack of visual emphasis. Music sets the

emotional tone, facilitates transitions, and maintains continuity, arranged to roughly match the

timing of the cartoon near the end of the production process. Warner Bros. director Chuck Jones

diminished the sound-oriented television cartoon as “illustrated radio” where the soundtrack does

the acting work, not the image; but in doing so, he actually provided a helpful heuristic which

clearly distinguishes this form from cinema animation as fundamentally different.

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Performance is the emotional tone of the creative execution of the limited means

available in this mode of production, unveiled in the last Chapter, 11. In cinema, Walt Disney

embraced Stanislavski’s classical acting “method,” and pursued lifelike animated movement of

seemingly embodied three-dimensional characters. Hanna and Barbera did not go as far as UPA,

which deconstructed Disney’s model by embracing a radical flatness and lack of form. While

their characters were truly flat, in that they only very rarely turned around in three dimensions,

H-B’s cartoons had a basis in slapstick, and still pursued the appearance of solid bodies, often

knocking each other around in two-dimensional space that seemed like three-dimensional space.

“Performance” may be too advanced of a word to explain the fairly modest means of the

television cartoon, but I chose it for its multiplicity of meaning. The basis of this cartoon’s scaled

down performance is simply two elements: the character is staged through “strong,” static poses;

and each pose is timed naturally by holding it for a specific amount of time. Character transitions

between poses are lightly animated, but not enough for such animation to really communicate

much as a performance. Such static character poses can’t reflect the more subtle facial acting that

animated cinema characters accomplish. The performance arises from the storyboard artist’s skill

in posing the character in a clear pose that can be held still for long moments without appearing

awkward, and from director’s skill in timing the character poses to create the specific comic or

dramatic effect. The voice actor’s earlier acting, inflection, and delivery becomes the soundtrack

that partially establishes the timing of poses; moments between dialogue are also timed for

narrative effect. Some limited animation usually happens in the transitions between shots and

scenes, although in television cartoons this is often truncated by editing or figuratively rendered

with effects, helped by wacky sound effects.

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The cartoon should be recognized as a design craft, one encompassing its figurative basis

in humor. The cartoon is unavoidably artistic in execution, but the early television cartoon’s

limited animation is more based in design. “Animation” is often understood to be an art. But

animation has always embodied a tension between art and design, whether in cinema, television,

or digital media. Full animation is closer to art. Thus, cinema animation is more an “art form”

and television animation is more a “design form.” The line is admittedly more blurry than this:

cinema animation today uses many limiting techniques, and uses sound deeply; and television

animation today uses many animation techniques from cinema. Really, it is important to

appreciate that limited animation is the flip-side to full animation, on the continuum that

animation and cartoon share. Limited and full animation each balances and reinforces the other.

A pure full animation is difficult to conceive of; it probably would be abstract, because any

characters present could not stop to talk. A pure limited animation would not be animation at all,

but more resemble storyboards or comics. Thus, the stasis of animation supports the movement

of animation; static poses are held moments in between movement. While limited and full have

become stable professional production standards, they are tendencies rather than rules. Within

and between the two, there is inherently great variety, because both are constantly in dialogue.393

393

Thomas Lamarre, my co-advisor, makes this point in The Anime Machine..

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CHAPTER 6

THE PRINCIPLE OF RATIONALIZATION:

THE LIMITATION AND EXTENSION OF ANIMATION394

Adapting animation for television meant rationalizing every aspect of the production

process, or thinking through the specific steps required at each stage of the animation pipeline

and putting into place strategic techniques to make these as efficient as possible. In television,

there is a general need to limit the process of animation, without the resulting cartoon appearing

to be limited in its entertainment value. At the same time, the length of the television cartoon

needs to be extended, to two, three, or four times the length of a traditional cinema cartoon. It is

common to understand the production of the television cartoon as similar to an industrial process

of the technological design and manufacture of any commercial product. Cinema animation was

rationalized in a similar way earlier, but then and now invests money and time to uphold its

artistry. The economic necessity and the tighter creative controls of broadcasting meant that,

while it projects the personal faces of its characters to its audience, network, and sponsors, the

early television cartoon must be tightly rationalized, through the application of an efficient,

reason-based plan to produce the cartoon to the exact length and budget given to it, and to deliver

it on time.

The television cartoon is often faulted for being more defined by factory-style economics

than by creativity. While this is true more often than not, these factors should be understood

more as pressures than as rules. If every television cartoon were actually as uninspired and

unredeeming as many observers have claimed, it’s not clear why anyone would watch them.

394

Milic & McConville, The Animation Producer’s Handbook.

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Boring or unpopular cartoon series fail, like happens with any poorly realized entertainment.

Cinema animation may be creative authored more often than not, but the rationalization of

animation serves as the foundation for that authorship. It’s not often noticed that there is more

room for creative or production error in cinema animation, because there is more time for

making changes throughout the production process, and more people are involved. There is less

room for error in television cartoon production, because to stay within shorter production

windows and smaller budgets, it is more important to do the work well the first time. The

California College of the Arts (“CalArts”), what became the premiere animation school in the

world, was not formally established by Walt and Roy Disney until 1961. 1950s television

cartoon productions hired experienced cinema animation creatives who had already learned the

traditional process of making cinema animation first, often at the Disney studio. Bill Hanna and

Joe Barbera hired many of their creatives from Disney, especially after layoffs following the

failure of Disney’s 1959 animated feature Sleeping Beauty to recoup its production budget.395

The specific techniques of how animation has been adapted to television have never

systematically been explained in print, to my knowledge, although many books touch on limited

animation in comparison to full animation.396

Surely explanations existed when all this was being

395

Sito, Drawing the Line. 396

The book I have found which comes closest to explaining the technical bases of limited animation may

be Eli L. Levitan’s 1979 Handbook of Animation Techniques. In a section in a chapter on limited

animation called “Guides and Gimmicks,” Levitan describes how limited animation effects are used to

suggest full animation, sometimes even more effectively than full animation itself does.

While most animated actions are the result of conventional animation processes, many actions

and movements are achieved with other methods. Guides and gimmicks are used frequently in

order to satisfy the varied animation requirements of the commercial film user. A mountainous

pile of drawings and cels is no longer a yardstick by which animated actions are measured. In

many instances, effects that seem to be fully animated are achieved with surprisingly few

drawings. As time and budget savers, the value of these guides and gimmicks is incalculable. The

savings, however, are not made at the expense of the quality of the animation. As a matter of fact,

in some instances, because of the nature of the subject matter, a smoother action can be achieved

with these guides than with conventional animation processes. Besides, animators are a lazy

group of individuals, generally speaking.

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figured out in the 1950s, but I haven’t found any evidence that anything written both survived

and is available to read. It seems like this present volume could not be the first to begin the task

of explaining the standard production model of the early television cartoon, in the detail needed

to understand it thoroughly, yet I have not found another. Because of this, I am guessing about

many of the specific techniques I propose in this chapter; each of the terms I propose are only my

best interpretation of how these cartoons might have been made.397

The first section of this chapter explains six general approaches by which these cartoons

appear to have been rationalized, approaches that started in early cinema cartoons and continued

into early television cartoons: division of labor, cel stacking, (ongoing) series production,

subcontracting, focused creativity, and labor management (Taylorization). The second section

proposes three strategies that appear were used to limit the need to produce actual animated

movement (animation): omission, reduction, and diversion. The third and last section identifies

five apparent strategies for extending the length of the cartoons to fill the time broadcasters

needed filled: simplicity, stasis, cycling, repetition (banking), and artificial movement.

What has most defined the “limited animation” of the early television cartoon for many

people is what it lacks: it is not “full” animation like is found in cinema. Admittedly, television

imposed an economic imperative: any cartoons needed to be made cheaply. Early television

cartoon studios had neither the luxury of time or money that cinema animation studios have. The

model of the early television cartoon I propose in this dissertation accepts this view and explores

its implications. I admit that I tire of mourning of the loss of a romantic concept of art that

valorizes a genius creator, because after World War II this came to feel old-fashioned. While

397

If any animation professional is reading this and knows of any resources on this, I welcome your

suggestions. Before publishing this as a book, I intend to seek comment from professional animators like

those I met on my research trip to Los Angeles in 2017. Some industry veterans would have hands-on

experience that could better speak to the specific techniques used in commercial production.

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cinema animation more often privileges the director’s vision, it is exceedingly rare that one

person can produce an entire animated film on their own. Television cartoon production, more so

than cinema animation production, is deeply streamlined and dependent on industry standard

cost-cutting practices. As a consequence, often it does not display the signature of one creator.

The broader house style of the studio, arising from the culture of the group, becomes the general

signature of the studio’s cartoons. These contain art, but they are more the products of an

industrial craft of design, one whose function is to entertain. Whereas cinema films can traffic in

the awesome aesthetic ambiguities of art, television has always needed to communicate clearly to

get laughs. To make 20 episodes over the course of one broadcast season, about the length of 5

feature films, requires a high level of practical coordination, and each studio must establish its

own clearly-defined production process that must be rigidly followed.

6.1

The Rationalization of Cartoon Production

For cartoons to exist on television at all meant changing how they are made. When

television was first spreading across the U.S. in the late 1940s, Walt Disney’s model of

animation was dominant. By comparison, it seemed impossible to make a watchable cartoon

series for television. If a television show needed to be filled up with movement every week,

making a show would cost exorbitant amounts of money, far more than was available.

Hollywood trade bible Variety explained the situation Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera faced in 1957.

When Hanna and Barbera tried to pitch their planned animation initially, they were told it

just couldn’t stand up against full animation, represented on tv by the oldie cartoons. [The

216

e]conomic impossibility of full animation in tv [was] underlined by the costs—full

animation of a six-minute short subject runs to about $50,000.398

Bill and Joe worked hard to negotiate a fair price for their first television cartoon. What

was the amount they received per episode, initially? About $3,000. While the episodes were only

3.5 minutes, or half of 7 minutes, this amount was still only about 10 percent of their prior

budget.399

How was it possible to make a cartoon for such a low price? This is the question I

began my 2017 interviews with animation professionals by asking. Cartoon production for

television shares early and late parts of the animation production pipeline with cinema animation,

but many intermediate steps are cut out, like the actual source of animation in cinema features:

the in-betweeners, the junior animators who animate between the key poses created by the senior

animators. An early television cartoon show’s modest schedule and budget needed to be

carefully planned out by the organizational executive producer, dividing resources according to

the basic requirements of each production stage.400

Abandoning art as a luxury, the television

cartoon became a new form of manufactured, designed commercial entertainment. But the

shorter production time meant that, when aired, the mediated cartoon could become a means of

timely social commentary. Clear, funny communication has always been the imperative.

The first two significant television cartoons are a study in contrasts: the first was as cheap

as possible and the second was as expensive as possible. Ahead of their time when they began

production in the late 1940s, Alex Anderson and Jay Ward understood the need to produce many

episodes of their first series, Crusader Rabbit (1950-52). But, there was not yet a market for

television cartoons, meaning that there were no sponsors, so their production budget was

398

Yowp, “The Expanding World of Hanna-Barbera: 1960,” Yowp, December 27, 2017,

http://yowpyowp.blogspot.com/2017/12/the-expanding-world-of-hanna-barbera.html. 399

Yowp, “Bill and Joe and Tom and Jerry and Ruff and Reddy.” 400

Milic & McConville, Animation Producer’s Handbook.

217

impossibly small. Apparently because of such reasons, for Crusader Rabbit (1950-52) Anderson

and Ward proposed to NBC not an animated cartoon but a comic strip. To feasibly produce a

television cartoon in the early years meant deploying strategies targeted to complete each scene

as efficiently as possible. Most of the actual animation was cut out, and replaced by static poses

and short cycles. Five years later, by contrast, Disney’s Mickey Mouse Club (1955-1959) actually

did produce a small amount of animation for each episode—full, cinema-style animation. There

was also a vintage Disney short shown. Otherwise, this show was mostly composed of

Broadway-style song and dance numbers performed by charismatic real-life kids. To pay for the

high cost of both the animation and the live-action production, the show recruited commercial

sponsors on an unprecedented scale. When the show became a hit with child viewers, it

simultaneously became a marketing sensation—so much so that Disney’s show truly kicked off

the merchandizing boom for children’s television programs that has not abated since.401

Hanna-Barbera’s early television cartoons came to market after these and several lesser-

known early landmarks;402

the studio warily sidestepped Disney’s expensive ambitions, instead

following Alex Anderson and Jay Ward’s rational model of planning.403

Bill Hanna, a structural

401

Marketer and children’s television producer Cy Schneider describes this history in detail in Children’s

Television: The Art, the Business, and How It Works. 402

In order, the other early television cartoon shows included Vallee-Video’s Tele-Comics (1949-1951),

Paul Peroff’s Jim and Judy in Teleland (1949), Harry Prichett Sr. and Ed Wyckoff’s Winky Dink and You

(1953-1957), UPA’s Gerald McBoing-Boing Show (1956-1957), and Gene Deitch’s Tom Terrific (1957-

1959, aired on Captain Kangaroo). These shows have some interest, but all were fairly short-lived one-off

productions. 403

An important exception is that Hanna and Barbera apparently learned from Disney the importance of a

musical fanfare in the opening sequence. In The Mickey Mouse Club, the opening sequence is literally an

animation of a parade. This custom in entertainment probably arose first in Broadway stage productions.

Disney’s show was heavily indebted to the whole Broadway approach. Of this “song and dance”

approach, Hanna and Barbera adapted the song into the theme song, and the dance into the lively full

animation of the opening sequence. Only one other fully animated children’s cartoon aired between

Disney’s 1955 show and Hanna-Barbera’s first show in 1957: UPA’s Gerald McBoing Boing Show (CBS,

1956-1957), a noble experiment applauded by many critics but which failed to find a popular audience.

Bill Scott, who took over Alex Anderson’s role as chief writer for the Rocky and Bullwinkle series,

worked on UPA’s early television series. Keith Scott (no relation) recounts this experience in The Moose

218

engineer by training, rationalized his company’s production process ruthlessly, calling his

resulting system “planned animation.”404

For better and worse, looking to Anderson’s and

Ward’s production, to make cartoons for television, Hanna was putting into practice a new

commercial design approach driven by the rationalization of creative labor. Artists who had

previously had more time to explore art-making in producing cinema animation now had to live

within much narrower means in television. By all accounts, though, Hanna-Barbera in the late

1950s and early 1960s was an enjoyable place to work which allowed for individual

expression.405

Rationalization of labor may be the guiding philosophy of television cartoon production,

but in pursuit of its function as entertainment, the cartoons mask this with skillful variations of

all aspects of cartoon production. Responding to the need for new characters for new shows, Joe

Barbera, the other half of Hanna-Barbera, set to work hatching authentic characters familiar from

his life experience, perhaps inspired in part by people he knew from his Brooklyn upbringing,

but more frequently by other media texts. Hanna-Barbera’s television characters cannot move

much, so they must strike convincing poses and talk up a storm. Below the rambunctious

developments on-screen lay a brutally efficient system, perhaps akin to the tunnels underneath

Disneyland, which support the fairy tale fantasy above. From start to finish, an efficient new

philosophy was applied to the existing stages of cinema animation production to create the new

television cartoon.

Through observing H-B’s texts and the contexts surrounding them, this section proposes

six general approaches via which the early television cartoon rationalized its production: division

Who Roared, mainly noting that UPA’s show did not have many jokes, and that Bill Scott’s role was to

insert gags. 404

Hanna and Ito, Friends. 405

Yowp addresses H-B’s early company culture in depth in profiling many important creatives of the

early years on his blog, Yowp.

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of labor, cel stacking, ongoing series, subcontracting, focused creativity, and labor management

(Taylorization).

Division of Labor

The rationalization of the television cartoon production, like the rationalization of cinema

animation, is a twentieth-century division of creative labor. Division of labor became common in

Europe during the Industrial Revolution. Managers in the first factories of the late 1700s

gradually dismantled the holistic labor performed by a single experienced craftsman, who had

previously made shoes and furniture by hand from start to finish, into its component parts,

narrow tasks aided by machines. These were tasks simple enough that anyone could do learn

them quickly, without costly training. In the 1910s in the United States, commercial

manufacturers sought to further drive down costs by more rigidly codifying this process.

Frederick Taylor, a factory consultant, proposed a method of “scientific management”, a

managerial approach which increased efficiency by “rationalizing” each production role, or

redesigning it through reason into an efficient step on the production line. Taylor proposed that

“[E]very single act of every workman can be reduced to a science.”406

His industrial philosophy

would come to be called “Taylorism.”

In the wake of industrialization in the mid-1800s, economic philosopher Karl Marx

despaired about the social significance of the new factories, observing that these labor tasks were

so narrow as to be essentially meaningless as a profession. Man derives his life purpose from his

work, Marx believed. When a factory worker only handled a small part of a complex production

process, they had little opportunity to take pride in the product they were producing. Within such

a factory system, the worker’s ingenuity was not stimulated, and over time they became alienated

from their work.

406

Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management.

220

Americans saw a brighter side to factory production. In the 1910s, Henry Ford created the

first factory assembly lines, reducing the cost of an automobile down to a price that his own

factory laborers could afford. In doing so, Ford converted the automobile from an expensive

curiosity into a practical conveyance, profoundly transforming life nationally in the young 20th

century. In the U.S., it appears people generally felt that the costs were worth the benefits of

factory labor.

In animation, the first manager to divide labor was John R. Bray, beginning around 1915.

I believe that Bray likely copied the approach of competitor Raoul Barré to form the second

animation studio ever, determined to make it more efficient and profitable than the first. In the

late 1920s, Walt Disney grew his studio through similar means, but believed that a superior

product would be worth more to motion picture exhibitors. He allowed greater time and money

to control the quality of his releases. In the late 1950s, Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera were faced

with the daunting task of making 20 half hour episodes in a year—the next year, 40—then 60,

and so on. They tried to split the difference: they hired experienced talent and gave them some

creative freedom, but also cut their system back down to a model close to Bray’s.407

Cel Stacking

The most efficient means of rationalizing animation was a system Earl Hurd, collaborator

with John R. Bray, created between 1914 and 1916. Hurd’s “cel technique” made mass-

producing cinema cartoons possible.408

The cel technique was a technique for limiting creative

labor by splitting it into smaller pieces. Before the cel technique, animation was made on paper,

requiring a full drawing be made from scratch. Winsor McCay himself and Walt Disney’s

animators would more frequently draw complete drawings. But the “cel stacking” of the cel

407

Sito, Drawing the Line. 408

Kristin Thompson describes the cel technique in “Implications of the Cel Animation Technique,”

1980.

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technique involved stacking sheets of transparent celluloid, the same basis of cinema itself, on

top of each other. The elements on different cels or celluloid layers could then align in one

apparent two-dimensional plane, creating an image from a composite of the three to five layers.

When a cartoon character could be broken up into multiple cel layers, their movement could be

controlled and programmed—hence, limited animation became possible.

John R. Bray, Earl Hurd, and Paul Terry all played a role in establishing cel animation as

a more efficient system which required far less artistic labor.409

With this system, most of the

image could be held static across frames, while just the parts that moved were changed with each

409

This may be my longest single footnote, on important historical detail about the origins of cel

animation. John R. Bray evidently stole some of his techniques from Winsor McCay, after posing as a

journalist to talk with him in his workspace, probably around 1913. Bray’s first cartoon in 1913 clearly

copied McCay’s second film in 1912; both feature a creature that explodes. John R. Bray first filed patent

requests for techniques which began to separate the background and foreground of each frame of

animation to be photographed, submitting his first application in January 1914 and a second that July.

Seeking a greater technical advantage, Bray invited Earl Hurd of Kansas City to move to New York City.

Earl Hurd is credited with first patenting the industry standard material of celluloid as a method of

separating the animation of the cartoon character in the foreground of the image, filing that patent in

December 1914. In his patent application, Hurd writes the following summarizing his technique in the

technical language typical for a patent application.

In my process … I have used, in practice, sheets of such transparency that a plurality may be

superposed in succession over the background without materially dimming the clearness thereof,

so that the picture or scene which is photographed, may be made up of the background and one

transparent sheet or a plurality of trans-parent sheets superposed thereon, each having thereon a

part or element of the picture. I believe I am the first to employ a transparent sheet or a plurality

of transparent sheets in conjunction with a background which is photographed therethrough upon

the negative film.” Earl Hurd, “Process of and Apparatus for Producing Moving Pictures.” United

States Patent Office, Patent number 1,143,542.

After Hurd moved to New York, he joined Bray to form a patent trust uniting both of their patents,

effectively monopolizing the rights to the cel technique. Their “Bray-Hurd Process Company” charged

every other animator in the industry royalties for using the technique, apparently as late as the mid-1930s.

Academic journal Film History has collected the highly technical original texts of Bray and Hurd’s patent

applications together as John Randolph Bray and Earl Hurd, “Bray-Hurd: The Key Animation Patents,”

Vol. 2, No. 3, Sep. - Oct., 1988, 229-266. As for Paul Terry, he claimed that he created his own cel

technique in early 1915, and that he used it to make his first two animation shorts that year, “Little

Herman” and “Down on the Phoney Farm,” but he didn’t patent it. John R. Bray’s wife Margaret noticed

Terry advertising his cartoons in a newspaper, and reportedly visited to find him using a matte process

somewhat similar to Hurd’s sytem. “I’d photograph the background first, and then I would reverse the

film and make a male and female of it,” Terry later told Harvey Deneroff. Alleging patent infringement,

John R. Bray compelled Terry to come to work for his studio. When he began working at Bray’s studio,

Terry abandoned this method in favor of Hurd’s cel technique. Leonard Maltin, Of Mice and Magic: A

History of American Animated Cartoons (Revised Edition), Plume, 1987.

222

frame to create animated movement. When Bray and Hurd’s patents expired in the 1940s, the cel

technique became a more sustainable standard of making planned animation. It would become

critical for making the planned animation of television possible.

It appears that Alex Anderson played an early role in creating the system of planned

animation, of planning out resources to divide up the task of creating a television cartoon

episode. Bill Hanna went all-in on the planned animation system based on the cel technique.

Combining it with Anderson’s system of animation planning was a powerful innovation. When

Hanna married these techniques with Joe Barbera’s sophisticated storytelling, Hanna-Barbera’s

second series came into being. The popularity of The Huckleberry Hound Show (1958-1961),

decisively established the commercial viability of Hanna-Barbera’s systems of limitation and

planning, showing that the entertainment value of early television cartoons was not limited, even

if their animation was.410

The head of each character was rendered on a separate cel from that of

their body’s bodies. The possibly noticeable boundary between the two was obscured by giving

the character neck clothing: a shirt collar and tie, bowtie, or ribbon. A 1960 piece in Popular

Mechanics explained how cel stacking was used in television.

Huck and his friends exist in a rather fragmented way … The inkers and painters make

very few complete drawings. Huck’s body may be painted on one cel, his head on a

second, his legs and feet on a third. Stacked in register atop one another, the cels produce

the full figure. This technique allows Huck to talk or walk merely by going through a

410

In “Limited Animation,” Kevin Sandler ackhowledges that “One company became the symbol for

limited animation’s commercial viability and aesthetic deficiency: Hanna-Barbera Productions”. But he

points out that, while the artistry of animation made for television suffered, “the system worked,” and

made the new media format economically viable.

223

sequence of heads or legs and continuing to use the cels that make up the rest of the

body.411

The funny animal model of an anthropomorphized cartoon animal who becomes bizarrely

strained when giving them neck clothing, especially for Yogi Bear, whose collar and tie

seemingly turn him from a wild animal into a white collar worker.

The design aesthetic of the television cartoon arises most fundamentally from this deeply

rationalized, compound nature of the animation image. In television, it appears that characters

were stacked up to 5 cels high; more layers than that would have obscured the images, because

of the slight opacity of the celluloid. The complexity of the television cartoon can be glimpsed

by understanding that the consistent colors of the limbs of every character needed to be carefully

managed: consistent colors could only be achieved by carefully “gradiating” color calibration on

each layer: darker colors lower down in the cel stack were balanced by lighter colors higher up.

Without this control, characters have limbs of slightly different colors than their body. Evidence

suggests that Huckleberry Hound’s odd blue color emerged from the unexpected combination of

colors across cel stacks in early production.

(Ongoing) Series Production

In John R. Bray’s time, movie stars started to emerge, when audience members began to

form emotional attachments with actors and actresses who appeared in multiple films. The first

cartoons were “single shot” cartoons, just one cartoon with its characters and no more, including

Bray’s first cartoon.412

John Bray must have realized that Hollywood’s then-emerging

phenomenon of movie stardom could be adapted to animation. Bray began producing and

411

Stimson, “Cartoon Factory.” 412

John R. Bray’s first cartoon, finished in early 1913, was called The Artist’s Dream.

224

directing the first animated cartoon series in 1913, starring “Colonel Heeza Liar,” an

opportunistic old man resembling Teddy Roosevelt.

While Bray’s ham-handed character is largely forgotten today, the character was

evidently popular in his time, and was the first character to push a whole cartoon series forward.

Bray’s series model is still being followed today in the television cartoon. This is evident

because television cartoons are series nearly as a rule. If the characters are popular, the television

cartoon series can continue on an ongoing basis for years. The Flintstones’ 6-year run must have

seemed like forever.

Subcontracting

Once Bray had his own series in production, he then recruited other producer-directors as

subcontractors, laborers hired to handle a specific task within a bigger system, to join his studio

and make their own series, expanding the scale of his enterprise. Industry (a system of

manufacture) and regularity were the focus of the Bray studio. John Bray soon organized his

studio into multiple cartoon production “units” or groups running at each time, each handling a

different character series. In 1915, Earl Hurd created a more endearing character in the innocent

but raffish young boy Bobby Bumps, modeled after newspaper star Buster Brown. In 1916, Paul

Terry followed, making the first series cartoons in the figurative caricatural style that became the

signature of Hollywood cartoons. The Fleischer brothers followed in 1918, animating by

rotoscope, and later Walter Lantz around 1920. Each director took one month to produce a film.

By staggering the releases of each director, Bray’s studio had one film ready for distribution each

week. This arrangement allowed Bray to delegate work out to other people while keeping profits

in house.

225

In television, the controversial practice of outsourcing can be seen as a continuation of

this urge to subcontract. Economic and productivity pressures led to Jay Ward being the first to

outsource most of a whole production to a cheaper studio in another country, contracting in a

very fraught relationship with new Mexican studio Val-Mar to make Rocky and His Friends

(1959-1961), the first of the two Rocky and Bullwinkle series.413

In the 1970s, Hanna-Barbera

expanded the output of their studio by setting up satellite studios in other countries with lower-

paid workers, including Taiwan, Spain, and Australia.414

Focused Creativity

Once the cel technique was put into place, the issue arose that the same characters

recurring in many different cartoons threatened to make the films creatively repetitious. When

this became a trend in the 1920s, audiences began to get bored with the results; some felt that the

animated cartoon was a passing fad. Animation’s survival depended on reliably delivering

entertainment to viewers. By the mid-1920s, the inane repetition of Paul Terry’s Aesop’s Fables,

released at the rate of one per week, wore down the interest of audiences and the animated

cartoon was increasingly thought of as a passing fad.415

Yet Paul Terry’s Aesop’s Fables series

of the 1920s actually enchanted a young Walt Disney, who said that he saw as many of Terry’s

films as he could.

Starting in 1928, Walt Disney re-energized the cartoon format, making it newly

memorable to theater audiences. Disney put into place new technologies for cartoon-making; his

use of sound and color are well-recognized.416

But in creative terms, animators understand that

413

Keith Scott recounts this history in, The Moose Who Roared (2000). Rocky and His Friends was

succeeded by The Bullwinkle Show (1961-1964). 414

Dan Torre and Lienors Torre, “Hanna-Barbera Australia.” 415

Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons. 416

Disney’s first sound cartoon was nearly the first sound cartoon ever, Steamboat Willie (1928). (Paul

Terry had actually made the first sound cartoon, Dinner Time, earlier that year, but it did not make a

226

Walt Disney also began making character animation, in which distinct characters developed their

particular personality through their telltale visual movements. By 1933, it was clear that Walt

Disney had a knack for realizing compelling characters that kept audiences coming back.417

As Disney grew his studio, he did rationalize his production process, but balanced

economic with creative pressures more successfully than Terry did. The resultant workflow

process allowed the practitioners responsible for every part to do their work well, prioritizing

creative quality and care. Beginning in the mid-1930s, the Disney studio began spending several

years on each feature film. This careful and expensive attention to detail was unheard of at the

time. The model of making a 90-minute feature film on a frame-by-frame basis, beginning with

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ early stages in 1934, was evidently deemed insane. The

equivalent of a Hollywood special effects blockbuster of today, by 1936, the expensive

production made Walt Disney a laughing stock: the unseen film was lampooned as “Disney’s

folly.” Of course, the success of the film in 1938 proved the doubters very wrong, and created an

entirely new business model of filmmaking.418

It would be 30 more years until anyone else could

make a successful animated feature film. By the 1970s and 1980s, when other feature-length

lasting impression.) Disney’s film Flowers and Trees (1933) was nearly the first color cartoon ever. (John

R. Bray had made the first color cartoon, The Debut of Thomas the Cat, in 1920, but it also is not widely

remembered.) 417

Disney’s technical innovations in cartoonmaking took off because he revived “personality animation”

from Winsor McCay, developing his characters’ particular personalities through their movement. I

believe that Ub Iwerks should be recognized as the aesthetic engineer most responsible for Mickey

Mouse. Evidence suggests that Iwerks took Disney’s idea for a mouse character and scribbled furiously

for at least several days until he had hashed out Mickey’s basic design. Evidence of this is in Mickey

largely being composed of circles, which are fast to draw. For this reason, I think Iwerks probably played

a larger role in creating the character than Disney did. In a documentary film of the same title,

granddaughter Leslie Iwerks describes Ub as “the hand behind the mouse.” Walt Disney Pictures, 1999. 418

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs began production in 1934. Conventional wisdom seemed to hold

that Disney was a fool to invest so much in one film, by its release in 1937 eventually the unheard-of sum

of $1.5 million. Walt Disney was vindicated when the film earned nearly five times its budget, $8 million.

It appears that Disney’s film may have been one of the earliest runaway blockbuster successes, which

soon inspired similarly lavish fantasy films, like The Wizard of Oz (1939).

227

animations could be realized, they followed Disney’s intensive, lengthy production process,

making it a standard mode of filmmaking across the industry.

For The Flintstones, Hanna-Barbera dedicated several teams of people, or units, to work

just on that series. This returns to the unit production mode of much cinema animation, in which

a director oversees a small team of consistent artists. This was a means of focusing the creativity

of the team. This practice was expensive, because it required cordoning off a large percentage of

the operation. But, the first prime-time television cartoon needed high production value to ease

its believability.419

Labor Management (Taylorization)

The patents that John Bray and Earl Hurd registered for their “cel system” of animation

production represent, for Donald Crafton, the Taylorization of cartoon-making, extending the

division of labor into an efficient, scientifically-styled system for making cartoons.420

Inherently,

since animated films are photographed frame by frame, they are expensive and time-consuming

to make. Winsor McCay, a preternaturally gifted artist, seemed to make films by sheer force of

will, and it still took him six months to a year or more to complete a single film. Bray has been

scorned by many artists and critics for industrializing animation. But without his advances,

which made animation cost-effective and fast to make, there might be far fewer cartoons in the

world. In the interest of profitability, Bray wanted his directors to complete films using as few

resources as possible, emphasizing the thrift of economy.

“The industrialization of the cartoon” occurred, Donald Crafton writes, “[i]n a very short

time span, from 1913 through 1915 … an entire technology developed, flourished, and became

standard.” Crafton points out that it was not just the cel technique that rationalized animation, but

419

Sandler, “Limited Animation.” 420

Crafton, Before Mickey.

228

also John Bray’s hierarchical, efficiency-oriented approach to organizing his studio and

managing his artists.

Taylor’s 1911 Principles of Scientific Management epitomized the concept of assembly-

line studio animation: ‘In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be

first.’ … It was in this charged environment that the cartoon industry was nurtured. …

Bray’s first patent echoed this thought by stressing that the efficiency of his proposed

technique was as important as the particulars of its functional operation: ‘The main

portion of my invention resides in the steps which I have invented to facilitate the rapid

and inexpensive production of a large number of pictures of a series…’ [163]

“Because television production requires large amounts of screen time, TV animation has

to be planned out carefully, with economy in mind,” Whitaker, Halas, and Sito write.421

It is easy

to see why people thought the task impossible. When cinema animation had run its course by the

1950s, another great leap of Taylorization was needed to bring animation to television. It would

have been challenging enough if the length of new television cartoons were to remain about the

same as in cinema animation, because the new medium offered much less money and much less

time. But the early television cartoon studios faced a double bind: on television, much more

animation was needed. Production output needed to extend to two, three, or four times their

original length. To promote this, Hanna-Barbera paid animators not for the length of their time

but for amount of their output. This encouraged the artists to efficiently use their own time.

Accomplishing this feat required a dramatically streamlined procedure and relatively

aggressive management of all aspects of the studio’s workflow. Bill Hanna himself liked to think

of his studio as like a family. Bill Hanna oversaw all production and managed the artists under

421

Timing for Animation, 1.

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his charge with a sometimes heavy hand. Essentially acting as a studio-wide executive producer,

Hanna managed personnel with either a “good cop” or “bad cop” style.

[T]his primary move to gather all our people from the diverse sub-studios scattered

around town and to centralize them in one location[, a]long with the obvious logistical

advantages, ... such unity was good for morale. … In addition to their involvement with

the mechanics of turning out individual cartoon programs, these folks, many of them

veteran colleagues, had become members of our company family.422

If the Hanna-Barbera studio was like a very large extended family, then Bill Hanna

seemed to effectively rule as head patriarch. The line between work and play in a creative

industry like this is fuzzy. At their own studio, if Bill Hanna caught someone goofing off enough

to not be pulling their own weight in the workflow, he would instantly let them know, in no

uncertain terms. In temperament, Hanna likened himself to Fred Flintstone. “Fred and I have a

great deal in common. We have both been rather explosive at times … and occasionally even a

little belligerent. But Fred, as I like to believe I am, was also basically good-hearted, down to

earth, and fiercely loyal to his friends.”

Being productive would keep Bill off your back at the studio. But, Bill’s heavy hand

would frequently come down on some of the studio’s animators. Hanna is reputed to have said

things like, “Boys, this ain’t no country club. Get back to work. We’ve got a show to get out!”

While Hanna sought to reduce creative waste through criticism, threats, or sometimes firing, he

said that, after he yelled at someone, he would often follow this up with an apology, compliment,

or a small gift.

422

Hanna and Ito, Friends.

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6.2

Limitation Strategies:

Restricting Character Animation

To acknowledge that the “animation” of the early television cartoon is “limited” is to

important to recognize not the way it moves but the ways it doesn’t move. Warner Bros.

animation director Chuck Jones may have been the most vocal critic of the television cartoon.

Ironically, Jones was perhaps responsible more than any other single person for pioneering the

use of limited animation in a traditional commercial cartoon, a 1942 Merrie Melodies cartoon

called The Dover Boys. While Jones berated the ways that limited animation was taking over

television, perhaps because of his insight into limited animation, he actually makes surprisingly

good points. Jones seemed to regard the shift from full to limited animation as an original sin, a

reason the television cartoons’ graphics craft could never live up to the artistry of cinema

animation.

But is it really so bad to see the television cartoon as illustrated radio? It may be

debatable whether the television cartoon has ever repented for its sins. In its defense, I would

respond that the early television cartoon knew it could not pursue beauty like the cinema cartoon

did. In accepting this, I believe that the new kind of cartoon becomes something modern and

efficient. And the painful restrictions were not all bad: reinventing animation for television also

offered the opportunity to reimagine it, to discover new possibilities available in the new format.

The centrality of its soundtrack is the clearest way that the early television cartoon struck

off in a different direction. Its simple, stylized visuals are there to hold the viewer’s eyes, but

these are not the real focus. The animation of cinema follows the cinema’s visual tradition; in

cinema animation, vision came first; so sound, which came later, supports vision. But the cartoon

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of television most directly follows not cinema animation but radio comedy. Most all the early

voice actors in early television cartoons came from radio; for them, performing their lines before

the animation was made, the experience was quite like performing on radio. The vision of the

television cartoon, which came later, actually supports sound. In a sense, the early television

cartoon might even be called anti-visual. It needs to tell a story more by telling and less by

showing.

Nevertheless, the television cartoon as something new comes indirectly, from dismantling

Walt Disney’s expensive artistic process into a more accessible and affordable procedure. The

strategic limiting techniques created to enforce budgets and timelines, for instance, are opposed

fairly directly to Disney’s principles of cinema animation, because they refer to ways in which

the cartoon production prevents the need for actual animation to occur. It’s not that television

animation chooses to be limited; limits are required for animated programs to be made for

television at all. But, successful television cartoons often disguise their limits, so as not to

threaten the audience’s suspension of disbelief. Joe Barbera describes their approach:

“[Maintaining a high] volume of output [for television is a matter of] devising shortcuts in the

production and animation process that do not visibly compromise the creative quality of the

characters and the stories.”423

If the early television cartoon is so limited, how can it still tell a story, while not doing

many things that cinema animation does? Forming their own conclusions, in essence, many

observers have averted their eyes from the lack of visual beauty on the television screen,

preferring instead to think about the overwhelming beauty of cinema animation. Yet, many

artists would tell you that telling a story with the simplest means can actually tell the most

powerful story.

423

Barbera, My Life.

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In this section, I propose three strategic techniques by which the early television cartoon

limits itself from the need to recreate the animation of cinema: omission, reduction, and

diversion. Omission describes how the television cartoon skips over or leaves out parts of the

cinema animation production process. Reduction points out how it scales down or limits the

scope of the parts that remain. Diversion is a distraction which covers up animation which does

not exist, like by interposing an extraneous object in between the viewer and the movement.

Animation in the early television cartoon is often used for transitions; gimmicky diversions are

needed because these transitions are often lacking in grace.

Omission

Animation and its sophisticated techniques are frequently simply left out of the early

television cartoon. The most common means of omitting the need to make animation in the first

place is to adopt a scenario or premise which does not need much animation. The sitcom is a

genre which largely lacks the need to animate characters moving, because characters are often

sitting or standing around in a house, talking. Even for shows which are not sitcoms, it is

common to adopt a sitcom narrative frame in which to begin and/or end the episode. Besides

lowering production costs, it is a familiar genre which begins and ends in an indefinite period of

normalcy or stasis.

In all cartoons and animations, action is often preceded by extended moments of

extended anticipation. When we expect animated motion to actually occur in an early television

cartoon, it is often implied but not shown. Given the slapstick style of many early television

cartoons, when a moving character is about to come violently in contact with something, the

viewer understands to expect a big impact. But instead of showing such a moment of impact, the

new television cartoon nearly always cuts away. Cutting back only after the motion has stopped,

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the shot will show a ridiculously comical static drawing, and let it sink in for a moment. Sound

and effects are key to clearly dramatizing off-screen action. Scooby-Doo co-creator Joe Ruby

started out at Hanna-Barbera as a sound editor, in charge of creating evocative sound effects to

allow for the omission of actions.

[Hanna-Barbera] wouldn’t show an action. For instance, [a character would] say, ‘I am

going to go teach him a lesson.’ And they would zip off scene and then you would have

screen shakes. And that’s where we came in. We had to create sound effects that would

sound like something was funny happening off scene. And then they would cut to the

aftermath of the sound which was a funny picture. So you got the effect that something

was happening but they never had to animate it.424

The meaning of the scene or the whole cartoon can be affected, meaning that plot devices or

even narrative arcs need to be concocted to explain what happened. But such omission is not

dramatized as an absence; it is usually played as a gag.

Despite its reputation for fluidity, cinema films actually also frequently limit their

animation. In order to talk, any cartoon character needs to stop moving. The bodies of talking

characters are generally static; just their mouth and facial features move. In a way, such stasis is

a form of animation omission, because a single drawing of the character’s body can be held for

long moments. In both television and cinema, character performances are oriented around key

poses originally presented in the storyboard. Practitioners Derek Hayes and Chris Webster relate

this in a book on animation acting, drawing a line back to Walt Disney’s studio. Disney’s was

the first studio to use storyboards, a central form of rationalization; each storyboard drawing

represents an extreme keyframe. “Disney animator Ollie Johnston always said, ‘Find the golden

424

Sandler, “Limited Animation.”

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pose, and build the scene around that pose’”.425

The poses are set into storyboards. “The

storyboard and the script are the building plans (like a blueprint), and the film is constructed on

these foundations.”426

In conceiving their early television cartoons, since Hanna and Barbera knew that they

could not provide much animation, they designed the style of their cartoons to be figurative or

caricatured, not naturalistic. In a 1960 story in the Los Angeles Times, Joe Barbera explained

how Hanna-Barbera’s new cartoon philosophy differed from Walt Disney’s approach to cinema

animation. In doing so, he explains how his studio moves characters fancifully between poses,

largely eliminating the need for traditional animation. “Take the Disney method—the old movie

method. It tried to mirror life. We don’t. We spoof reality but we don’t mirror it. Our characters

don’t walk from a scene—they whiz. Movements that took 24 drawings under the old movie

system take us four.”427

Barbera was not exaggerating about characters “whizzing” out of the

screen. On The Flintstones, when a character is done with their pose, some narrative gimmick

often steps in to usher them out of the frame, like being struck with an object. They often nearly

disappear out of the frame in the figurative flourish of a motion-blur effect, like a character on

stage in a cinema cartoon short who is yanked out of the frame with a cane.428

Reduction

After decisions are made about what to omit, in the early television cartoon the remaining

elements are scaled down in degree, to communicate what is needed with only abbreviated

animated movement. Generally speaking, early electronic cartoons “make do” with reduced

425

Hayes and Webster, Performance for Animation. 426

Blair, Cartoon Animation. 427

Sandler, “Limited Animation.” Sandler actually quotes Bill Hanna as making these remarks, but I

think they are Joe Barbera’s. 428

Sometimes, in awkward or funny transitions, the character enters or exits the frame in the same pose,

like when a character’s feet start moving like wheels, and it takes them a moment to gain speed and leave

the frame.

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amounts of whatever is possible to get by with less of. Because the amount of animation is

decreased, fewer artists are needed to complete the draws of only the essential animated

movements.

To climb the steep learning curve of how to produce funny cartoons for television,

Hanna-Barbera hired some of the most talented creatives in the animation industry, who required

little or no training, or could train themselves. Most of their artists were thoroughly trained in full

animation at the Disney studio. Hanna-Barbera were lucky, also, because in the late 1950s, many

animation professionals were out of work. To compensate for necessary reductions of animation

later in the production process, Hanna-Barbera invested time and money on the early creative

stages, like writing and story development. Into H-B’s cartoons walked relatable, charismatic,

and friendly characters, in creatively-conceived stories. Just one experienced animation writer

wrote every episode of Hanna-Barbera’s third cartoon, Quick Draw McGraw (1959-1961),

Michael Maltese.

The very title of this show also reflects the importance that the studio placed on speed

and economy. For the 15 years just before that, Maltese had been working at Warner Bros. on

Looney Tunes short cinema cartoons. Much of the narrative effect of the reduced animation was

handed over to audio specialists, like voice actors. Only two voice actors voiced most of Hanna-

Barbera’s early male characters, Daws Butler and Don Messick, both experienced and versatile

radio comedy actors.

One of the defining aspects of the reduced animation of the television cartoon is its

decreased frame rate. In theory, full animation means making a new drawing for every frame of

film. Much cinema animation does indeed have this during important sequences of movement,

what is called animating “on ones,” but often less consequential movements are animated “on

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twos” every other frame. Television cartoons instead usually animate even important movements

only every second, third, or even fourth frame of film, “on twos,” “threes,” or “fours.” “As a rule

not more than six drawings are produced for one second of [television] animation,” animators

Harold Whitaker, John Halas, and Tom Sito explain at the beginning of an influential discussion

of animation timing.429

Diversion

The early television cartoon is inherently a trickster, because it does not present itself

“straight” to the viewer. It often masks its reduced animation or lack of animation through

deploying a variety of different conceits to distract attention. This needn’t be seen as dishonest,

though, or even unfun. In place of many movements that would require too much animation,

especially transitions, gimmicks are substituted as gags. Audiovisual effects are often substituted

for the animation: the most classic is the motion blur and sharp sound effect accompanying a

character who quickly leaves the screen.430

Ultimately descending to the slapstick antics of the

vaudeville stage, and adapted to film by silent comedians like Charlie Chaplin and Buster

Keaton, instead of being a shortcoming, even before animation, these gimmicks had been played

for comedy for generations. Probably such gags began in Paul Terry’s, Otto Messmer’s, and

Walt Disney’s early cinema shorts. By the time Warner Bros.’ cartoon shorts were maturing,

429

Whitaker, Halas, and Sito, Timing for Animation, 1. 430

I remember when I first discovered ‘The Dover Boys’ I was swept away by the technique of “smears”

that the animators used to get from one pose to the next. … Like other animation tricks, smears are

hypnotically tempting and they can distract an animator from what is more important - the cartoon

itself. … What I later realized was much more important were the poses themselves. If you don’t have

great poses to get to, the smears are wasted.” John Kricfalusi, “Smears and Poses,” John K. Stuff

(blog), July 9, 2009, https://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2009/07/smears-and-poses.html.

Animation director John Kricfalusi talks in this blog post about being deeply influenced by the limited

animation techniques Chuck Jones pioneered in his 1942 Merrie Melodies short, The Dover Boys.

Possibly making an unintended pun, “John K.” particularly notes the cartoon’s use of strong, active poses

and motion smears.

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initially through Tex Avery’s and Bob Clampett’s direction, such gags had become some of

many tropes common to slapstick animated cartoon comedy.

Diversions are typically a gag or a gimmick. The gimmick both repels and fascinates us,

as cultural theorist Sianne Ngai explores in an article, “Theory of the Gimmick.”431

For

animators, as for physical comedians, the gimmick is a labor-saving device which speaks to the

inherent creativity of comedy. It frustrates the viewer’s assumed notions of cause and effect,

Ngai believes, which we have developed living as subjects in a capitalist society.

[G]immicks ... belong to a world of practical and industrial inventions. … The capitalist

gimmick ... is both a wonder and a trick. … [T]he comedy of procedure turns modern

rationality in general into an aesthetic experience, encouraging the reader’s ...

“visualization of cause and effect.” [It] irritates and charms us ... it seems both to work

too hard and work too little. … Toggling between wonder and trick, overvaluation and

correction, the gimmick thus draws into sharper relief ... the workings of comedy[.]432

For animators, again as for comedians, gimmicks are both an asset and a crutch.

Animators have always hid their weaknesses with gimmicks. In Winsor McCay’s 1914 film

Gertie the Dinosaur, when McCay could not figure out how to animate the motion of the extinct

dinosaur standing up from a lying position, he summons a dragon to fly across the sky. Gertie

gets up to look at it—the viewer, likewise, looks at the “flying lizard,” not at the imaginary

Gertie awkwardly lumbering up.

The important role of gimmicks points to the centrality of gag humor to all animation. Joe

Barbera first understood that their animated sitcom could work in the stone age when staff artist

Dan Gordon began doodling what cave people’s consumer gadgets might have looked like, in the

431

Ngai, “Theory of the Gimmick.” 432

Ngai. Sianne Ngai further develops her analysis of this topic in her new book of the same title, released

in 2020.

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incongruous overlapping of the stone age with the postwar era. The Flintstones reflected

Americans’ first world problem of struggling to adapt to the consumer gadgets of the postwar

era. In a recurring gimmick preventing the need for elaborate animation, the enslaved animals in

the show routinely turn their head slightly to address us as viewers, breaking the invisible fourth

wall that separates us from the characters we watch. The animals express their chagrin about

their sad lot in life. Rarely, they express anger, but never revolt. Hanna and Barbera often

employ diversions to protect themselves, by distracting the viewer from seeing the fundamental

absences in their cartoons. By contrast, in the two Rocky and Bullwinkle series, Bill Scott and

Jay Ward more frequently use diversions for satirical effect, like by pointing out the hypocrisy of

powerful people to show the viewer how we as subjects are often distracted by more powerful

institutions of social life like governments and corporations.

6.3

Extension Strategies:

Expanding the Cartoon to Fill Time

The term “limited animation” describes what the early television cartoon is not. But what,

then, is it? Animation planning involved strategies of limitation to economize cinema animation

production into early television cartoon production. With these techniques in place, the early

television cartoon was in a position to grow and spread throughout the new medium of

television. What was needed was a variety of techniques for extending the new cartoons in time.

Sorting this out allowed the new cartoon to become something new, which had not existed

before. Bill Hanna has written: “For many of us who knew and loved cartoons, the term ‘limited

animation’ hardly conveyed the expansive spirit of its initiative and vision …, the huge potential

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growth of [television as] an exciting new communication medium.”433

While in a sense this is

limited animation, in another sense, it is also unlimited animation.434

But how did Alex Anderson and Jay Ward and Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera actually make

their early television cartoons, at the nitty-gritty level of technique? This section proposes five

terms though which it appears that television cartoon studios extended their cartoons to fill the

time of a television episode: simplicity, stasis, cycling, banking, and artificial movement.

Simplicity

The most defining quality of the early television cartoon may be its general visual

simplicity. The television screen being much smaller in size than the film screen, filling the

screen inherently involves less work than filling the “big screen” of cinema animation. The

modernist aesthetic that Hanna-Barbera appropriated indirectly from UPA was based around an

inherently spare and clean approach to design. UPA likely took inspiration from the modern

design movement. In the 1940s, especially in California, design was evolving into the mid-

century modern style, which subsequently proliferated in consumer items across suburbia in the

1950s.435

In animation, UPA’s designs were revolutionary when they were unveiled in the early

1950s because they inherently rejected much of the ornamentation that Walt Disney favored in

his fairy tale films, which look positively baroque by comparison.

“Flat drawing,” character drawing restricted to two-dimensions is what might be called

the aesthetic of Hanna-Barbera’s early television cartoons, compared with the spacious, three-

dimensional-like space of cinema animation, the “solid drawing” of Disney’s Principle 11.

Hanna-Barbera set quite rigid models for its characters, standard ways of drawing them which all

433

Hanna and Ito, Friends. 434

I thought I was the first one to think of this concept. But Dan Bashara titles one of the chapters in his

2019 book on UPA “Unlimited Animation.” 435

Wendy Kaplan, California Design, 1930–1965: Living in a Modern Way, The MIT Press, 2011.

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artists were expected to follow. This began in cinema animation, but the range of motion of

Hanna-Barbera’s characters was much lower than in cinema animation, making the simple

attractiveness of the models more important.

Early in Hanna-Barbera’s cartoons (between 1957 and 1961), the characters were

rendered with thick black outlines. The outlines clearly and simply rendered the characters on

screen. This was important at the time because of the rudimentary state of television technology:

TVs during those years had relatively small black-and-white screens, and the pictures were often

clouded by static or simply low definition. Silhouettes of the characters also further simplified

the image in some scenes. In terms of color, Hanna-Barbera used simple, solid, ungradiated

colors. Following UPA’s abstract backgrounds, the design of early television cartoon

backgrounds is nearly always simple, suggestive, and unobtrusive, quite a contrast with the

nearly photorealistic backgrounds not just at Disney’s but also in some Warner Bros. cartoons.

This remains the convention in the television cartoon today.

The modeled characters of UPA and Hanna-Barbera almost never move out of flatness

into the third dimension; thus, characters are essentially defined by a silhouette. Some believe

this transition had tremendously high costs to the artistry of animation. Animator John Kricfalusi

hyperbolically sees in this transition away from Disney’s lessons as by itself causing nothing less

than the death of animation. “UPA killed the idea that cartoon animation was about well drawn,

funny moving cartoon animation,” John K. writes on his blog. “Flat simplified drawings allowed

amateur artists to get into the business and that’s a blow we have never recovered from.”436

Nevertheless, this simplicity is among the clearest ways that the early television cartoon is

modern, in contrast to the elaborate classicism of cinema animation.

436

John Kricfalusi, “Wally Walrus Vs UPA Part 2,” John K. Stuff (blog), May 16, 2007,

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2007/05/wally-walrus-vs-upa-part-2.html.

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The early television cartoon follows a “pose-to-pose” approach to story, not a “straight

ahead” approach, in the language of Disney’s original principle 4.437

Once the episode story is

determined, the story artist chooses only the most important moments of the story to represent in

key poses on the storyboard. Those poses are then drawn to feel natural for the characters to

hold. Movement, of course, will be needed. But the economy approach encourages the

movements to be small, quick, or abbreviated, and from one pose to another. Especially in early

Hanna-Barbera cartoons, transitional motions are often represented not by full animated

movement but by an abbreviated “motion blur,” created with a wide brush to carry across

multiple frames, accompanied by the “whizzing” effect which Joe Barbera mentioned. The very

economy of limited animation can become a gag in and of itself: Hanna-Barbera often made no

attempt to hide when they were using shortcuts. But, contrary to the stereotype of television

animation being uncomplicated and rough, choosing poses well and representing them naturally

requires a keen ability to express what is needed most simply, because there is little room to

change awkward poses later.

Stasis

Motion is the very definition of “animation.” Contrary to the norm established by Disney

in cinema, the new kind of television cartoon actually did not move much. This overriding stasis

is still among the most defining aspects of the early television cartoon, and one of the easiest to

understand. After a character moves, they simply stop in a new pose. They wait until it is time to

move again, and assume a new motion pose. While not purely static, the early television cartoon

is often largely static. Characters frequently just stand around, taking turns simply either talking,

while moving their mouth, and listening, while often simply blinking their eyes. “You’ll notice

that we often finish a speech with a still picture of the character who is listening,” Joe Barbera

437

Principle 4 is called “Straight ahead action and pose to pose”.

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said in 1960. “Nothing is lost by this, and we can use the same drawing of the listener for many,

many frames.”438

Alex Anderson and Jay Ward would often cut back and forth more frequently,

but leave the characters in pose, to introduce the impression of motion into the cartoon.

Stasis and movement are great opposites, each defining the other by opposition, in a

variety of positions along a spectrum. But they are not absolute. Cinema animation is rarely pure

movement, and the television cartoon is rarely pure stasis. Cinema animation and the television

cartoon each represent a durable average range on the continuum between animation and stasis,

which reflects the standards of each different mode of production, the way animation is made for

that medium.

Even when the picture is largely static, sound is an animating force in the early television

cartoon. The viewer does not notice the lack of visual movement when there is convincing sound

in the shot. The new television cartoon’s stasis is carefully timed, reflecting both my principle of

performance, in its staging and timing, and Disney’s principle 9, “timing.” This stasis is also a

matter of “anticipation,” as in Disney’s principle 2. Stasis is a reflection of the underlying

presence of the storyboard, which is how all animation begins. While the early television cartoon

does not move anywhere near as much as the cinema animation does, the viewer continues to

watch even slowly-paced television animation because something could happen at any moment.

The stasis of the early television cartoon brings it closer to still print comics and farther away

from the motion of cinema animation.

Cycling

An animation cycle is a short animated sequence which can be repeated naturally without

being noticeable. Cycles form a central foundation for how cel animation is produced. The most

recognizable is the “walk cycle,” the animation of a character’s walking gait repeated many

438

Stimson, “Cartoon Factory.”

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times over to achieve efficiency and therefore cost savings across multiple scenes. Cycles in

animation have been a way to spread an action out by repeating it, either at one time or at

multiple different times. The notion of repetition is in fact central to cel animation, which will be

clear in as we will see in the last section of the performance chapter, “Variety amidst

Repetition.” Since the advent of Bray and Hurd’s cel technique, the question has always been:

why draw a character from scratch each time when you can deconstruct them into cel layers that

can be reused and combined as needed? Animation scholar Dan Torre prominently addresses

cycles as the subject of the second chapter of his book, Animation – Process, Cognition and

Actuality.

It could be argued that the cycle is one of the most significant and perhaps one of the

oldest structures within the animated form. … The animated cycle is … a formal

structure … of sequential images that are repeated, at least once, in a consistent order. ...

[While often used] … for reasons of economy … there are many other motivations for its

use, including narrative structuring, informational emphasis, humorous effect, rhythm,

clarification of complex systems and even as an expression of specific emotional

states.439

Television uses animation cycles to a much deeper degree than cinema does.

Conventional wisdom in the animation industry holds that the moment when an animation cycle

becomes noticeable is the moment when it fails. This possibility bothered Chuck Jones, who said

that his animations of Bugs Bunny never had a walk cycle—that Bugs’ walks are animated

differently for each context, frame by frame with different drawings from start to finish.440

I

439

76. 440

Jones explains his thinking.

In all the years I was making Bugs Bunny pictures—and I think I directed maybe fifty of them—I

never had the character walk or run the same way. Never. Why? Because like the Hindus say: you

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believe that Hanna-Barbera were self-conscious of such limitations in their planned animation,

and that they would often introduce movement into their cartoons to distract from stasis. In

artificially creating motion through cycles, Hanna and Barbera often tested the bounds of

outrageous gimmickry. Their frequent use of scrolling backgrounds introduced a queerly

obtrusive level of artificiality into the Hanna-Barbera cartoon universe itself; numerous scenes of

Fred chasing Barney through the house caused this phenomenon to be dubbed “the endless living

room.”441

Joe Barbera openly admitted this glaring quirk in a later interview: “[A]s you know, in

our cartoons, if Fred runs across a living room, that living room is three miles long”.442

At the end of the day, it seems that Hanna and Barbera’s need for such shortcuts trumped

the needs of the narrative. At least one of Hanna-Barbera’s animators became so self-conscious

about this problem that he tried to fix it. To alleviate the ontological problem of the miles-long

living room, Jerry Eisenberg, one of Hanna-Barbera’s lead story writers, at one point conceived a

system for a syncopated sequence repeating backgrounds. So, instead of a background of a

window, say, repeating in a rote sequence of 1-1-1-1…, presumably the cycle would repeat

instead as 1-2-1-2…, of a window alternating with a chair, or perhaps 1-1-2-1-1-2… But,

because of the extra effort this would have added for the cameraman’s process of shooting, the

can’t step in the same river twice. … The difference between Bugs Bunny chasing and being

chased is as great as the difference between a walk and a run. One is a frantic run; the other is a

determined run. Jones, Conversations. 441

Michael Eury has recently made this comment:

Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera were masters of manufacturing cartoons on the cheap, without their

cartoons ever appearing cheap. One cost-cutting measure that became a Hanna-Barbera staple

was the Repeat Pan, where a background would replay on a seemingly endless loop, such as when

Fred Flintstone, being chased by his adoring pet Dino, would run past the same chair, table, and

window over and over again in the Flintstones’ living room. Eury, Hero-A-Go-Go: Campy Comic

Books, Crimefighters, & Culture of the Swinging Sixties, 2017, 226. 442

Marty Pekar and Earl Kress, “Hanna-Barbera’s Greatest Hits ... and Greatest Sproings, Boings, and

Bonks,” Hanna-Barbera Pic-A-Nic Basket of Cartoon Classics, included booklet.

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studio’s veteran camera operator, Frank Paiker, “had a fit.” So, the old, odd system stayed in

place.443

Repetition (Banking)

Redundancy is built into the television cartoon at a deep level. Many elements are created

to be repeated as needed, a concept known as banking. An animation bank is a collection of

many different elements which can be pulled out and deployed to save the work of creating that

element each time. Many such banked elements are so simple as to be difficult to notice. On The

Flintstones, the characters are always shown to be a common height, from a common

perspective, nearly always walking either right or left. “[A]ll the characters move either to the

left or right, rarely away from you or toward you,” Joe Barbera said. “This eliminates the need

for tricky three-dimensional effects that require numerous separate drawings.”444

Doing this

allowed for the reuse of cels and short sequences of the characters, not just across scenes, but

also across episodes and seasons.

In writing/drawing each episode, redundancies would be sought either in advance of it

being storyboarded or afterwards. Constructing episodes with frequently used elements drawn

from a bank of common characters gestures lowers the number of distinct shots and poses of

animated movement that need to be created. Although I have no proof, it seems that artist/writers

at a studio like Hanna-Barbera must have been given instructions specifying what the elements

of the bank system were, so that they could use these to frame their shots and stage their actors

precisely.445

443

I read this on Yowp’s blog, probably in his interview with Jerry Eisenberg. Frank Paiker had been in

animation since some of its earliest days, working for John R. Bray’s studio in 1925. 444

Stimson, “Cartoon Factory.” 445

This is my most educated guess, although I do not have evidence from Hanna-Barbera. Ideally, I

should look for discussion or evidence of this. Or check with the surviving original Hanna-Barbera artists

about it. I do not recall seeing any Hanna-Barbera person talk about an animation bank, like in all of the

246

Much of the rationalization built into the early television cartoon production process

appeared in the director’s instructions for the work animators needed to do to complete each

individual shot. The vast majority of the frames of a television cartoon are compound images

created by stacking multiple different cel layers on top of each other. As director, Bill Hanna

would fill in exposure sheets. The exposure sheet contained all of the elements needed to

complete the shot, and included both work instructions for both the animators and the camera

person. In terms of rationalization, this is where the rubber meets the road, so to speak. The more

rationalized a cartoon production is, the more complex the instructions on the exposure sheet

were. A cartoon character would generally be broken up into between three and five layers of

cels. The body is often the lowest level, with the levels above completing the figure, usually with

the arms/hands or legs, the head, the eyes, and the mouth.446

A technical innovation of The

Flintstones, for instance, was to separate the mouth of the two characters who talked the most

from their head. Fred and Barney each have a grey five-o’clock shadow around their mouth.

Here is an example of an exposure sheet, reproduced by animator John Celestri on his blog. The

middle-right area contains eight columns, each representing one celluloid layer. In this case, the

character is composed of four levels, from the lowest level on the right to the highest on the left:

tail, body, eyes, hands.447

discussions which Yowp covers. However, all the other studios around H-B who made television

animation series have talked about this. Those being Jay Ward’s studio during Crusader Rabbit and the

Rocky and Bullwinkle shows, in which Alex Anderson has talked about banking. Osamu Tezuka of

Mushi Productions in Japan, which produced Astro Boy, has talked this; and Filmation has done so, which

was Hanna-Barbera’s biggest competitor during the 1960s and 1970s. Notably, though, even Filmation,

among the most economical cartoon studios of its time, apparently did not artificially constrain episode

plots to elements of their animation bank in advance. In a discussion of He-Man and the Masters of the

Universe, Lou Scheimer said that these economies were performed after the scripts were written but

before the storyboards were created. Scheimer and Mangels, Lou Scheimer. 446

Technical documents like exposure sheets were not saved after production was finished, meaning that

these can be difficult to find. 447

John Celestri, “X-Sheets, Exposure Sheets, Dope Sheets,” John the Animator Guy, July 16, 2011,

https://johncelestri.blogspot.com/2011/07/x-sheets-exposure-sheets-dope-sheets.html.

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Figure 27. A studio exposure sheet from the days of cel animation. Instructions at center top

show that the character’s body and tail will remain still, while their hands and eyes move

Source: John the Animator Guy

This enabled the studio to separate Fred’s and Barneys’ mouths onto a different cels than

their head, to make their dialogue easier to animate. This meant that the character’s head did not

need to be drawn again with every frame; only their mouth needed to be.448

Eli Levitan writes

that the animator received instructions from the director, and that it was their “responsibility to

instruct the camera department, through his notes on the exposure sheets”.449

Poses and gestures

from the animation bank must have been pulled out at this point and deployed to serve their very

448

Hanna-Barbera creative director Bill Burnett drew attention to this convention in his 1995 inter-office

memorandum, “The Brilliant Invention of the Five O`Clock Shadow,” Burnett, Hanna-Barbera Essays. 449

Levitan, Handbook of Animation Techniques, 31.

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specific functions. Because of the complexity of the task of creating animation from a huge bank

of different elements, Hanna-Barbera needed an experienced person in this important role. Frank

Paiker was a talented camera artist/technician whose experience extended all the way back to the

beginnings of cinema animation in John Bray’s studio. Hanna and Barbera briefly entertained the

comic possibilities of thematizing their penchant for repetition when titling one of their earliest

television cartoon series. Augie Doggie and Doggie Daddy was the final name of one of the three

cartoon series bundled into Quick Draw McGraw, a cheeky but earnest sitcom parody starring a

father and son dog. But their first title for the series? Initially, it was to be called Pete and

Repete.450

Joe Barbera admitted that this kind of mechanical animation is quite restricted in its scope

and expression. “Cartoon character faces are often little more than masks with hinged jaws and

sliding eyelids.”451

Joe Adamson was one of the earliest writers to profile an important animator,

in a book that helped kick-start the discipline of animation studies, in his 1975 book Tex Avery:

King of Cartoons. At that time of hostility to new technology, Adamson and Avery expressed

their disdain for the television cartoons of Hanna-Barbera by likening them to computer

programming, possibly drawing a line back to the unexpressive characters of early animation.

[T]he cartoon characters in the silent days were all puppets. … The characters in

Disney’s Silly Symphonies had the breath of life imparted to them. ... [At Warner Bros.

a] pattern was set in which good comedy, good animation and clever visual effects were

expected and usually delivered. … Eventually, Hanna and Barbera set the scene for

doomsday with their television-aimed computer animation (Huckleberry Hound was the

450

Yowp broke this story in a 2010 blog post, “Hanna Barbera’s Pete and Repete.” Yowp,

http://yowpyowp.blogspot.com/2010/08/hanna-barberas-pete-and-repete.html. Surprisingly, the title of a

completely unrelated but later television show, which I watched a lot as a teenager, Nickelodeon’s live

action series Pete and Pete, seems like a distant echo of that unused title. 451

Barbera, My Life.

249

first, in 1959). Great cartoons with care put into them became history, like everything

else with care put into it.

Nevertheless, the television cartoon was here to stay. After Tex Avery retired from

animation in the late 1950s, he apparently swore that he would never work in television, but in

his last few years, in the late 1970s, Avery was pulled back into the rat race. Bill Hanna

describes his friend Tex Avery’s last days in his autobiography. “By 1979, Tex was in

retirement,” Hanna wrote, “but Joe and I both had a hunch that Tex really wanted to go back to

work.” Indeed, Bill convinced Avery to come to work in their space age cartoon studio building,

where Avery started directing a new Hanna-Barbera series called The Kwicky Koala Show

(1981-1982). However, Tex Avery was not in good health, or spirits. Bill Hanna described

finding his colleague, once a master of the animation form, sitting pitifully diminished behind the

studio one hot summer afternoon in 1980.452

Hanna rushed Avery to the hospital, and he shortly

after that of terminal cancer. In my mind, it seems that Avery wanted to give animation one last

shot, even if it meant working in television. But once he arrived, it seems that the thoroughly

rationalized process of making an industrial entertainment cartoon broke Avery’s spirit.

Artificial Movement

Beyond even the most bare-bones animation lies a class of animation limits that

superficially look like animation, but the movement is actually manual physical movement

filmed as live action. Such artificial movement may best be understood as a family of different

techniques which seek to perceptually trick the viewer into believing that they are seeing

animation, when none is present. Perceived motion can be created in many ways, some of which

452

[Tex’s] face was frightfully pale and there was a look of apprehension, actually open fear, that

suddenly chilled me despite the July heat. ‘Tex,’ I said with alarm, ‘you’re not well, are you?’ / My old

friend and mentor looked up at me with eyes that were pathetically childlike in their bewilderment.

‘No, Bill,’ he whispered, ‘but I figured that if I sat here, you’d find me and take care of me.’ Hanna

and Ito, Friends.

250

have been common to the vocabulary of animation since its early days. Camera zooms introduce

movement into animation artificially, by diving into the multiple layers of the rationalized

animation image. Some kinds of limited artificial movement are so crude that they are avoided

by most series. A similarly crude technique, one of Bill Hanna’s early techniques of

communicating an off-screen impact was to set the camera recording into motion (like in live

action) and then to smack it with his hand, to simulate on screen the effect of a great crash.

The most obvious (and unforgivable) example of artificial movement may be achieving

motion by some primitive stand-in for animation, such as cutting a character drawing out of a

piece of paper, and moving the paper cut-out drawing around in front of the camera in real time

as if it were the character moving by animation through different drawings. With a nearly

nonexistent budget, Crusader Rabbit often needed to use similar crude cut-out effects in place of

walk cycles or other character movement.

Depending on your personality, the most memorable or bizarre use of artificial movement

in a cartoon might be Cambria Productions’ technique of animating character lips with real

human lips in their series Clutch Cargo (1959-1960). Frequently completely bypassing animated

lip movements altogether, the studio used a proprietary technique it called “Synchro-Vox” to

artificially separate film of the voice actors’ actual speaking lips and superimpose these

disembodied lips onto the otherwise static faces of animated characters.

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Figure 28. The eponymous hero of Cambria Production’s series Clutch Cargo (1959-1960), with

large jaw and live-action human lips453

Source: Google Image search

The effect of this comically primitive animation is so bizarrely surreal as to be somehow

endearing. Some people see this series as an example of animation “so bad it’s good,” the kind of

creative experiment that became central to Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim programming block

for adults in 2001, others as so disturbing the cartoon order that you can’t unsee it. Television

scholar Ellen Seiter singled this cartoon out to me, recalling her memory of gleeful bemusement

at seeing this show’s bizarrely animated faces when she was in first grade.

While the limitation of television animation is the starting point of many discussions of

the television cartoon, focusing too much on its shortcomings can prevent recognizing that it was

453

It appears that the artists at the studio accentuated the characters’ jaw lines to distract from the

somewhat grotesque spectacle of the human mouth movements.

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through these limits that the means were found for how to produce nearly unlimited cartoons for

television. Alex Anderson and Jay Ward should be credited as the first to figure out how to

accomplish the seemingly impossible task of making cartoons for the new medium; their visually

rudimentary but aurally rich and erudite cartoons remain an inspiration today. By contrast,

Michael Eury’s assessment is that “Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera were masters of manufacturing

cartoons on the cheap, without their cartoons ever appearing cheap.”454

Nevertheless, while Bill

Hanna and Joe Barbera’s cartoons were easier on the eye, as time went on, they suffered from

increasingly great deficits of creative inspiration. The admittedly “rough and ready” techniques

that Hanna and Barbera brought into television nevertheless served as a stable enough foundation

for an emerging empire of the air. Many have pointed out that without Hanna and Barbera’s

contributions, it’s unclear whether cartoons could have been brought to television so

successfully. “[T]here is no question that [Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera] started the television

animation industry,” Michael Mallory writes. “The fact that they took what started as an

economic imperative and then made it such an appealing artistic success is their real legacy.”455

454

Eury, Hero-A-Go-Go! 455

This first quotation is from Mallory, Hanna-Barbera Cartoons. The second quotation is from

Mallory’s email communication with the author, July 2017.

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CHAPTER 7

THE PRINCIPLE OF STORY:

CONTEXT AND DRIVE

“Story … must be considered the heart of the [animation] business,” Walt Disney said.456

Walt Disney’s feature films were often literary fairy tales or cultural myths adapted from books;

it’s clear that the function of story there is to serve as a narrative frame for the film. Characters

live in the world of the film, and the story explains the context of what happens with them; these

events are what Disney’s artists animated. The cartoons of television could not rely on animation

except for brief transitions between poses; their appeal was more in their sound than their

visuals. Narrative storytelling became among the central purposes of the new television cartoons,

but the function of story here is to drive the text forward. Referring to his studio’s television

cartoons, Joe Barbera said: “We just keep the story moving.”457

Based in words and their speech, story in the early television cartoon is meaningful.

Based in drawings, story in cinema animation is visual. It is true that story was important to

cinema animation—Disney’s quote above testifies to that. As the earlier media form, cinema

animation first pioneered many of the innovations I highlight, although these waned in

importance as the Disney studio moved towards the animation of its feature films. The focus of

cinema animation is primarily visual: its purpose is to display an illusion of life convincing

enough to cause the viewer to suspend their disbelief that they were just watching moving

drawings and be visually swept up into the fictional world.

456

Thomas and Johnston, Illusion of Life, 79. 457

Sandler, “Limited Animation.”

254

The execution of the lush animation in Disney’s features ties the films to the paradigm of

the earliest films made, visual marvels whose short length did not allow for narrative

development, films whose novelty was the spectacular display of cinematic motion. Film theorist

Tom Gunning describes such early films as a “cinema of attractions”: “The potential of the new

art ... was a “matter of making images seen.” In these years before the feature film form

coalesced after 1915, “cinema [was] less ... a way of telling stories than ... a way of presenting a

series of views to an audience, fascinating because of their illusory power”.458

Dramatic

moments in Disney films are lightened by visual slapstick comedy. By contrast, television’s

roots are in radio, and it inherited the robust aural linguistic tradition radio developed in the

1930s and 1940s, what Susan Douglas calls linguistic slapstick. Visually, the early television

cartoon was fairly crude. Instead, the entertainment value of an episode of an early television

cartoon series lies in its soundtrack, how it holds the viewer’s attention aurally through story.

The concept of story is a broad and flexible concept that encompasses much of the

fundamental creative work that goes into making any cartoon. While similar to the commonplace

notion of a series of fictional events involving specific people, story is a technical term in

animation. It refers to the sequence of actions that characters perform in their environments, and

to their verbal interactions, which together form a unified narrative. This description of a holistic

narrative applies just as well to history; cartoon stories are nearly always fictional.

Cartoon story relies upon many textual devices that are too numerous to easily list: the

types of characters in the narrative, often anthropomorphized animals, and their personalities.

The relationships between characters, that is, their comfort or tension with each other. The

settings the characters find themselves in, at particular times of day, sometimes a historical

period. The culture of the textual world, the shared social assumptions of what is normal and

458

Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction[s]”.

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abnormal. Tone, ranging from straight, non-comedic depictions to layered comedic commentary.

And mood, the dominant subjective and intersubjective emotions in play.

Unlike live action video, cartoons must create everything on screen and in the soundtrack

from scratch. There are many elements of a story that must be carefully thought out by the

creative team of artists and writers, so that the viewer simply takes them for granted: the visual

style of the world, like the curvy or angular shapes of everything; the aural sounds of the world,

from predictable to wacky; the specific objects or props the characters interact with (assets in

digital animation); and gags interspersed throughout the narrative. Story is not just plot, because

it involves the viewer recognizing the dispositions and motivations of characters and the ability

to interpret character conflicts and resolutions.

Importantly, every story is specific in its context and details. The particular choices the

creator and writer make in how they present the story to us as viewers accounts for how

believable the world is. In general, a cartoon story is probably similar to any story that a person

tells someone else. Analyzing this concept is difficult, because as humans, we just have an

intuitive understanding of what a story is, and how to tell a story well to others. Academic

analysis can be hard-pressed to account for the “witchy power” stories wield over us.459

Story is

central to cartoons because cartoons are human ways of seeing based in mediated artifice;

animation is inherently opposed to the documentary quality of live action video.460

459

Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, 1. 460

Remarkably, even human infants appear to intuitively recognize animation as an imaginary story

created by humans for humans like themselves. Fascinatingly, cartoons transfix infants in a way that live

action images lack interest for them. While photography and live action cinema is exalted for its truthful

verisimilitude, infants’ lack of interest suggests the fundamental artifice of photography and the intuitive

power of hand-created images.

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7.1

Cartoon Story and Premise

Every cartoon begins as an idea a person imagines, although such a kernel idea must be

developed to become a story.461

A television cartoon series has a premise underlying every

episode, a concept framing the story of the series that is often a twist on a common genre

convention. The premise is usually not directly articulated in the story of any particular episode,

although it is typically most clear in the pilot first episode. Cartoon story is crafted via a

storyboard, a collection of early drawings often pinned up in sequence on a board or wall, which

details the basic visual and aural structure of the episode narrative. A storyboard is opposite to a

written script, because it visually depicts the defining moments of the story in a form resembling

a comic book page, rather than limiting the story to simple words on a page. Thus, the basis of

story is its drawn and written form—in this context, story writing is typically both images and

typed or written dialogue writing. Different studios typically create their cartoons in one or the

other format: storyboarding is visual, needing words to accompany the images, while script

writing, grounded in narration, must be translated into images.

A cartoon’s story touches if not defines most of its content: a storytelling approach or

narrative voice is the frame in which plot and character dynamics play out, who is in the cartoon

and what happens to them. Tone is the degree to which the writing is direct and descriptive,

meaning what it says, or how much it comments on the goings-on through layering or distancing

devices, like irony, parody, or satire. In an influential book for aspiring young cinema

scriptwriters about how to craft a movie story, Robert McKee distinguishes character archetypes,

461

Howard Beckerman explains that “To interest an audience, an idea must be expanded into a series of

events that are brought to a satisfying fulfillment.” Animation.

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which he sees as more original in concept, from character stereotypes, which he believes are

more derivative in concept.

The archetypal story unearths a universally human experience, then wraps itself inside a

unique, culture-specific expression. … A stereotypical story reverses this pattern: .. [it]

confines itself to a narrow, culture-specific experience and dresses in stale, nonspecific

generalities. … [When we step into this] … cliché-free zone where the ordinary becomes

extraordinary … we find ourselves. Deep within these characters and their conflicts we

discover our own humanity. We go to the movies to enter a new, fascinating world, to

inhabit vicariously another human being who at first seems so unlike us and yet at heart is

like us, to live in a fictional reality that illuminates our daily reality.462

What makes a film memorable, McKee says, is how the author as an artist creates characters of

recognizable types, but whom are individual enough that the viewer can easily relate to them. To

the degree that we can open our emotional or affective life up to the human stories of characters

in a film, we can experience in a film the human power of story, a reminder that we are not alone

in the world.

In formal terms, television programming is more about sameness than cinema, which is

more about change.463

To speak to terms of McKee’s distinctions, television is probably more

grounded in stereotypes than cinema which is more grounded in archetypes. McKee ironically

caricatures the concept of the stereotype in the service of making archetypes the ideal narrative

trope for cinema. A similarly recognized discussion of story in television is not yet evident.

Archetypes are usually individual and particular to the specific characters, but resonate with

462

Robert McKee, Story. 463

The television sitcom, for instance, begins and ends in the home, at the same thematic position of

stasis. Cinema’s texts are more similar to a literary Bildungsroman novel, in which a young hero leaves

home to meet the challenges of come of age, and returns changed.

258

others based on the themes the story evokes. Archetypes fit the long-form storytelling of cinema.

Universal themes of cinematic storytelling arise through the voices and lives of such characters. I

believe the contrary is true in television: the brevity of a television comedy show makes

stereotypes necessary shorthands for characters, but that this does not make them any less

resonant. Stereotypes are typically social caricatures recognizable as cultural types of person.

Television’s instant mass audience gives weight to stereotypes; it is character differences from

these more universal types that give them meaning and relatability.

Television cartoon story is inherently narrative, because it is grounded in aural dialogue.

The series model of television is fundamentally more about social meanings than individual

films, which are more about aesthetic expression and exploration. Television cartoons can be

understood easily in terms of parasociality, a one-sided social relationship of the viewer with the

main characters of a cartoon. Television series invite familiar characters into personal domestic

space on a regular basis, so as viewers, we naturally form relationships with them. Cinema

animations implicitly take place out of the house in the world, dramatic in part because they only

happen once (unless there are children in the house).

Tom Gunning’s 1986 discussion of the cinema of attractions as a cinema of spectacle

helpfully illuminates the concept of visual display. Especially when it is placed in dialogue with

an essay written by a colleague of Gunning’s around the same time, Donald Crafton’s 1987 essay

about early slapstick film comedy called “Pie and Chase.”464

The novelty of the early cinematic

variety program of a collection of short subjects faded and interest grew in narrative films.

“What happened to the cinema of attraction[s]?” Gunning asks? “The period from 1907 to about

1913 represents the true narrativization of the cinema, culminating in the appearance of feature

464

Donald Crafton and Tom Gunning were close colleagues early in their careers, and they developed

some of their early ideas partly together, while attending a film conference around 1985 about early silent

slapstick comedy shorts. This is documented in the book mentioned in the next footnote.

259

films which radically revised the variety format.” One of the few examples Gunning gives of

“attractions” in contemporary cinema are the special effects of “what might be called the

Spielberg-Lucas-Coppola cinema of effects.” “[E]ffects are tamed attractions,” he concludes.

Donald Crafton helpfully broadens Gunning’s notion of attractions to include comedic

gags like those found in slapstick comedy in the vaudeville tradition. “[Slapstick s]ight gags …

are illustrations of what Eisenstein [and Gunning] called ‘attractions,’ elements of pure

spectacle,” Crafton writes. Narrative in cinema can be seen “as a system for providing the

spectator with sufficient knowledge to make causal links between represented events.” By

comparison, “[r]ather than providing knowledge, slapstick misdirects the viewer’s attention, and

obfuscates the linearity of cause-effect relations.” In a little-known essay, “Response to ‘Pie and

Chase,’” Gunning reflects on his dialogue with Crafton. “Crafton opens … a subject for further

analysis,” Gunning writes. “[Cinematic n]arrative acts as a system of regulation which ultimately

absorbs nonnarrative elements into its pendulum sways. … [I]t is important to maintain this

double vision: the excess of the gags and their recovery by narrativization.”465

Gunning’s

“Attractions” essay, in particular, would go on to reshape thinking about cinema, emphasizing

the role of the visual over narrative.

7.2

The Television Cartoon’s (His)Story

Much writing about the television cartoon treats it as a break from the past of cinema

animation. The predominant focus on cinema animation in animation studies and lack of interest

in the television cartoon reinforces this narrative of disruption, the notion that animation was not

the same after television. I agree with this view, actually, that the technical specificity of the

465

This history is recounted in Wanda Strauven’s oddly-titled 2007 anthology The Cinema of Attractions

Reloaded, which collects these two essays and others on similar themes.

260

medium of television renders its cartoons qualitatively different not just from cinema animation

but also from cinema cartoons. Cinema animation often tries to avoid addressing the television

cartoon. But, because limited animation and full animation are each one side of a broader

continuum, I believe that animation studies has a responsibility to study the television cartoon, at

least to some degree.

Winsor McCay’s visual spectacle existed primarily to impress the viewer, not to tell a

story or even make rational sense. Broadly speaking, John Bray, Earl Hurd, and Paul Terry all

foreground the story and characters of their cartoons, which is reflected in their each making a

series starring a particular single character. Paul Terry represents the contrary tradition,

emphasizing telling a narrative story over animation. Terry appears to have been the animator to

most grasp the need to shift from people to animal characters. “Farmer Al” gradually became

less involved with bumbling through interactions with other humans than being outwitted by the

animals on his farm. Terry has made poignant public tributes to McCay, who inspired him to

make animation, but when he began making his own cartoons, Paul Terry pursued a different

kind of cartoon grounded in story. While animation made the slapstick humor in Terry’s films

possible, Terry’s approach would come to be defined by sound more than visuals;466

for instance,

Terry’s star character Mighty Mouse would sing as he flew to rescue those in trouble.

466

In fact, Paul Terry is recognized as one of the two animators to use sound in cartoons before Walt

Disney did. His 1928 Aesop’s Fables cartoon Dinner Time experimented with using sound effects to

punctuate the slapstick action on screen. The results were not impressive. When Walt Disney was

considering investing in sound for Steamboat Willie, he saw Terry’s short. What was Disney’s assessment

of the short? “Terrible … one of the rottenest Fables I believe that I ever saw. And I should know,

because I have seen almost all of them!” ” I believe Walt’s sentiment is documented in a telegram he sent

from New York City back to his brother Roy Disney in Los Angeles. Brewmasters, “Cartoon Brew TV

#3: Dinner Time by Paul Terry and John Foster,” Cartoon Brew (blog), September 29, 2008,

https://www.cartoonbrew.com/brewtv/cartoon-brew-tv-3-dinner-time-by-paul-terry-and-john-foster-

7499.html.

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The elaborate naturalistic animation of Walt Disney’s shorts and his fairy tale films

follow Winsor McCay in emphasizing the visual spectacle of a cinema of attractions. Joe

Barbera was first inspired to try to make animation himself after seeing Walt Disney’s and Ub

Iwerks’ first Silly Symphony cartoon, The Skeleton Dance, around 1929. Barbera aspired to

work for Disney, but by chance was hired by Paul Terry before he could leave New York. Over

the next year, Joe Barbera learned the craft of animation story at Paul Terry’s Terrytoons studio,

apparently partly from Terry himself, who was impressed with Barbera. As the earliest animator

to make cartoony cartoons through the cel technique, Terry deeply understood what makes a

cartoon made with the cel technique work. Barbera’s recollections of his time working for Terry

in his 1996 autobiography show his debt to Terry. For instance, Barbera was inspired to meet up

with fellow Terry animators at night after work to brainstorm story ideas for their own cartoons.

Barbera had made his own first cartoons there. He later reflected on how he learned animation

story there.

[While working at Terrytoons] a few of us—Jack Zander, Dan Gordon, and I—would

meet at night to work on story ideas. One we came up with was about a goat who ate

everything, including the fenders of an automobile ... We worked over Paul Terry until,

beaten into submission, he let us do the cartoons. … [T]hey were the first cartoons I had a

hand in actually creating from the beginning.”467

While Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera followed Disney’s model in their Tom and Jerry cinema

shorts, when they entered television, they reverted back to Terry’s earlier method, while making

sound the primary element of their new television cartoons.

467

Barbera, My Life.

262

Animator I. Klein later recalled that “[Paul Terry] considered himself Mr. Story

Department for Terrytoons, from whom all ideas originated.”468

I believe that it was while

learning his trade from Paul Terry that Barbera absorbed Terry’s insistence on the fundamental

importance of story to animated cartoons. By that time in the mid-1930s, Paul Terry’s everyman

emphasis on story over animation was actually becoming an old-fashioned approach to cartoon-

making, out of step with Walt Disney’s stunning technical artistry. It appears that Joe Barbera’s

later everyman characters, like Huckleberry Hound and Fred Flintstone, followed the earlier

lineage of flawed but endearing characters that Terry had made famous. Terry’s and Barbera’s

cartoons were so different from the visual focus of Walt Disney’s films that theirs could even be

called an anti-visual style.

The Tom and Jerry cartoons that Joe Barbera subsequently made with Bill Hanna at

MGM between 1939 and 1957 are a hybrid of Disney’s tradition of visual naturalism and Terry’s

cartoonishly simple story emphasis. Every Tom and Jerry cartoon, more or less, told a familiar

but solid cat-and-mouse story, which was Joe Barbera’s essential contribution. Initially,

Barbera’s colleagues could not believe that he would take such a shopworn and clichéd idea of a

cat and mouse fighting to be the central characters of an MGM series. But Barbera persisted,

insisting that the audience would in fact be drawn into the story because of its obviousness.

“Once you settled on a cat and a mouse, half the story was written before you even put pencil to

paper. You have a cat and you have a mouse, ergo, you have the cat chasing the mouse, and the

mouse doing his damndest to keep from getting caught.”469

The Disneyfied animation of Tom

and Jerry was Bill Hanna’s essential contribution, an aesthetically appealing visual spectacle of

468

I. Klein, “On Mighty Mouse,” in Peary and Peary, The American Animated Cartoon. 469

Barbera, My Life.

263

the early Technicolor film color process.470

Especially after the success of Snow White and the

Seven Dwarfs (1937), Walt Disney so profoundly transformed animation that the art of his films

became the dominant paradigm for cinema animation. In order to compete, essentially everyone

else in Hollywood making cartoons needed to respond and work based upon the artistic heights

Disney had popularized.471

Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera’s collaboration represents a meeting of the Los Angeles and

New York styles of animation.472

As an animation director, Bill Hanna was trained by Rudy

Ising, who worked with Walt Disney in Kansas City, and Hanna absorbed the “Disneyesque”

aesthetic and timing approach from Ising, whose style was similar to Disney’s.473

Joe Barbera,

contrarily, learned his craft as an animator working in New York City at the doomed Van Beuren

studio and the working-class Terry studio, making animation in which anything goes.

Komorowski and Jaques conclude that, “With Bill and Joe combining their styles, you kind of

get the best of both worlds.”474

470

Bill Hanna’s visual style is revealed in the first film he directed, in 1936, called To Spring. The story

was sentimental, but the film was beautifully animated, like Walt Disney’s newest films. It may be

surprising to realize that Bill Hanna appears to have chosen the film’s fairy tale theme after Walt Disney

had begun making his first feature but before it was released and changed the cultural landscape,

representing a revealing look into Bill Hanna’s personal style, apart from Joe Barbera. Hanna’s film is

exceedingly Disneyesque, although also quite peculiar. Amid Amidi briefly discusses the cartoon and

presents some of its art in a 2014 post on Cartoon Brew. “‘To Spring’ Is The Weirdest Cartoon Ever

Made About Springtime,” Cartoon Brew, March 17, 2014, https://www.cartoonbrew.com/cartoon-brew-

pick/to-spring-is-the-weirdest-cartoon-ever-made-about-springtime-97411.html. 471

The Fleischer brothers, Paul Terry, and a few other animators remained in New York. This east coast

tradition remained surprisingly resistant to Disney’s influence, although even those studios eventually

needed to come around. The Fleischers went bankrupt during World War II while making two elaborate

fairy tale feature films highly influenced by Disney. Terry’s Mighty Mouse arguably married Disney’s

roly-poly animation in his Mickey Mouse cartoons with a playful homage to Superman. 472

Komorowski and Jaques, “Tom & Jerry.” 473

Recall that Hanna expressed the centrality of Walt Disney’s work to his work before and during

Hanna-Barbera, likening Disney’s studio to the oak tree of the animation business and Hanna-Barbera to

the acorn. Forbes, “Acorn.” 474

Komorowski and Jaques, “Tom & Jerry.”

264

Television cartooning began with an unlikely star in Crusader Rabbit, Alex Anderson’s

comic adventure series starring a tiny but brave rabbit, which had a simple and ridiculous

premise conceived with humor like that in Cervantes’ Don Quixote: the small rabbit called

himself “Crusader” and embarked on fanciful storybook-like quests. In 1957, as television

progressively thinned movie attendance and Hollywood studios succumbed to legal troubles, Bill

Hanna and Joe Barbera set out to write a new chapter and build on the success of Crusader

Rabbit by making their own cartoon for television. They loosely emulated the format of

Crusader Rabbit and married it with Tom and Jerry-like characters to create their first cartoon

series made for television, The Ruff and Reddy Show.

Hanna and Barbera had very little budget to actually make the animation of the series so,

as Bill Hanna recalls in his 1996s autobiography, it was essentially impossible for it to visually

resemble the elaborate animation of Tom and Jerry to any degree. To compensate, instead, Joe

Barbera appears to have dusted off the old-fashioned storycraft he learned from Paul Terry,

because unlike Tom and Jerry, the new series emphasized story and voice acting as ways to

move the cartoons forward, taking the weight off of the lack of animation. Barbera references an

intuition grounded in the limited approach to cartoon-making he had learned as a standard

technique while working for Paul Terry.

[When we were developing The Ruff and Reddy Show,] I did not think that the slapstick

chase approach [of Tom and Jerry] would work on the small screen. Somehow I felt that

the basis of these television cartoons would have to be story, not chase, and a story would

require dialogue—something I had not touched … for the past seventeen years.475

Cartoon story generally refers to the story of one cartoon episode. The notion of premise

is essentially story writ large enough to serve as the foundation for an entire cartoon series, as the

475

Barbera, My Life.

265

unifying concept that explains the cartoon’s uniqueness. Any cartoon premise often involves a

specific kind of character put into specific kinds of situations. These decisions are often related

to the cartoon’s genre: what kind of a text a cartoon is established by its genre, by the kind of

cultural worldview it has. For their two main characters in Ruff and Reddy, Hanna and Barbera

followed the same approach that Alex Anderson and Jay Ward used and that they themselves had

used in Tom and Jerry: a big, dim-witted character and a small, spunky character. Joe Barbera

had a knack for taking a widely-recognized existing premise and twisting it to make the premise

for a series a new spin on an old concept.476

The Flintstones, for instance, became an old-

fashioned blue-collar family sitcom widely acknowledged to be inspired by the mid-1950s live

action sitcom The Honeymooners, starring Jackie Gleason and Art Carney. Gleason was so

steamed about Hanna-Barbera clearly copying his show that he nearly sued the company for

copyright infringement. Cooler heads prevailed when he realized that he could become known to

the new generation of baby boomers as the guy who took The Flintstones off the air. Ultimately,

The Honeymooners has come to be increasingly forgotten, while The Flintstones has become pop

culture canon. What was different about the cartoon, as Joe Barbera said many times for the rest

of his life, was that The Flintstones is anachronistically set thousands of years earlier, in the

stone age.

In fact, most of Barbera’s creations were copies of other successful popular culture texts,

even the studio’s very own earlier successes. The futuristic family sitcom The Jetsons was a clear

counter-response to The Flintstones, essentially “The Flintstones, backwards,” as Tony Benedict

and Jerry Eisenberg, two Hanna-Barbera writers explained it to me.477

In the last few years of his

476

Hanna-Barbera artist/writers Tony Benedict and Jerry Eisenberg confirmed this to me in an interview.

Joe Barbera, they said, was always looking around for emerging trends to capitalize on. Joint interview

with author. 477

Benedict and Eisenberg joint interview with author.

266

life, Barbera finally admitted that he was more an adapter of the successful ideas of others than a

completely original creator. Barbera told an animation journalist in 1996 that, “What I liked

doing was to take something established and create a humorous idea out of it. We would build

something around a familiar setup and give it a new twist.”478

Barbera’s talent for synthesizing a

successful entertainment product out of other elements was similar to how some of the most

innovative figures in history, like Thomas Edison, did not create many entirely original ideas, but

were talented at bringing existing approaches together to create something new.479

While story is important to all animation, it is crucially important to the early television

cartoon. The television cartoon needs premises to unify series, and individual stories, told

through dialogue, to hold the attention of viewers. By comparison, cinema animation is less

conceptual, relying more on creative visual expression. Walt Disney’s emphasis on the visuality

and naturalism of animation, taking cues from Winsor McCay, became the dominant paradigm

of cinema in the 1930s. In Tom Gunning’s language, Disney’s was an animated cinema of

attractions. Joe Barbera and Bill Hanna developed the television cartoon format by looking back,

before Disney, taking story cues from Paul Terry and technical cues from John Bray and Earl

Hurd, who introduced and codified the cel technique. In Donald Crafton’s language, theirs was a

narrative-driven cartoon, emphasizing dialogue over animation. Premise is story adapted from a

single cartoon to a series. But premise can sometimes become a stand-in for story. When that

happens, like happened in the era of Saturday morning cartoons, the lack of the firm center of a

sturdy story can mean that the novelty of the series concept can overwhelm the story of

individual episodes.

478

Anton, “Joe Barbera Speaks His Mind.” 479

Steven Johnson, How We Got to Now.

267

CHAPTER 8

THE PRINCIPLE OF CHARACTER:

PERSONALITY VOICE

“Character always comes first, before the physical representation,” Chuck Jones writes

about his creative process of writing.480

Cinema animation is often taught to art students as

character animation, the art of expressing the idiosyncratic way a character moves their body

around in space, through which they express their personality. The arrival of meant that this

model of character development was no longer feasible as the main approach to developing and

moving characters. The technique of character animation was partly abandoned, although Hanna-

Barbera emulated it with techniques of limited animation. The television cartoon’s artistic lack is

a familiar story, the claim that the void left by cinema animation was filled by something

different and less aesthetically meaningful.

Instead of this depressing narrative, I suggest it’s more true that the early television

cartoon inherited the vibrant aural tradition of radio comedy acting, and found that it could get

by with a small amount of animation to support the soundtrack. In this model, a character

develops by the spoken voice their actor gives them. I’m calling this personality voice. Cinema

animation is based in the physical acting of characters as they express themselves through their

movement, a visual performance that is fundamentally nonverbal. Hollywood’s animated feature

films continue to be popular around the world in part because their visual expression transcends

language. Television cartoon characters, by contrast, express themselves through their

480

Chuck Jones, Chuck Amuck: The Life and Times of an Animated Cartoonist. In the original, Jones

italicizes “always.”

268

personality voice, an aural expression of the semantic and cultural meanings of language. In this,

it is more culturally specific, because the cartoon is based around the communication of social

meanings through the words of a national language, delivered in the skillfully spoken intonations

of voice actors imitating people’s everyday speech.

The cartoon character is generally the “point of entry through which audiences can

identify with the story situation.”481

Donald Crafton has written that viewers are accustomed to

these anthropomorphized cartoon animals, which represent “codified channels” enabling their

entrance to “the dream world on the screen.”482

Funny animals are eminently believable for

viewers, for what I think are deep reasons that speak to the plasticity of human thought and

culture throughout the course of our evolution.

In the character animation of cinema, a character need not speak to express themselves;

although they often do, they primarily develop just through their movement. In the voice acting

of the television cartoon, a character needs to be able to express themselves through their voice.

Even if they are visually an animal, and in “real life” animals cannot speak, in television,

characters express their personality in a fundamentally different way than their cinema

counterparts, because in speaking, they become persons, showing that they are human. It is said

that one can see in the drawings of cinema animation the “hand of the artist”.483

By contrast, the

early television cartoon foregrounds the “grain of the voice,” in philosopher Roland Barthes’

words.484

Here, when the actor reads from the script, the character’s words are produced by the

vocal cords of the actor’s larynx in their body, and these are shaped by the actor’s personal

481

Thomas and Johnston, Illusion of Life. 482

Donald Crafton, Before Mickey. 483

Donald Crafton, “The Hand of the Artist,” Quarterly Review of Film & Video 4, 4, 409-428. 484

Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice,” in Image-Music-Text, 1977.

269

interpretation of how to deliver those lines, based on the acting choices they make to

communicate that character.

For comparison, bear Baloo in the Disney studio’s 1967 film The Jungle Book is a

wilderness creature who develops as a character through a very embodied performance

emphasizing how much larger than boy Mowgli is; at times, Baloo’s performance is highly

choreographed, as his dancing to musical numbers in Broadway fashion. Baloo’s animator acted

his character animation out every step of the way, in creating his drawings, probably by studying

the real-life behavior of actual bears. In Hanna-Barbera’s Yogi Bear Show (1961-1962), bear

Yogi develops through his smooth talk and colloquialisms, as he schemes to snatch the “pic-a-

nic baskets” of unsuspecting visitors to Jellystone Park, where he lives. Joe Barbera initially

conceived Yogi as one of two “itinerant bears—hobo bears, really”.485

Yogi’s voice actor’s

personality voice has frequently been likened to Phil Silvers’ character Sergeant Bilko. This

makes clear how human-like Yogi is, even though he is a bear.

This chapter’s five sections address the nature of the cartoon character, the story world in

which they live, and the history of television voice acting. Then, discussion pans out to consider

the broader the role of stereotypes and archetypes in characterization, and ends with talking

about the mechanics of cartoon voice acting.

8.1

Cartoon Character

It is obvious what a cartoon character is, because the concept is intuitively clear: when

hearing spoken dialogue while looking at a particular arrangement of lines on the television

screen, even young children grasp right away that the aural voice belongs to the character whose

mouth is moving. This does not mean that it is easy to understand the nature of cartoon character.

485

Barbera, My Life.

270

While specific cartoon characters are recognized immediately, this personal relationship with

their familiar face makes us see them as a person. This challenges our ability to analyze the kinds

of creative work necessary to bring them to life on screen. As Joe Barbera said, again, “[c]artoon

character faces are often little more than masks”; as a disguise, a mask mystifies the identity of

the individual wearing it. I invite you as my reader to try to defamiliarize your notion of what a

cartoon character is in this chapter, in the name of understanding cartoon characters more deeply.

A few notes on terminology. The terms I use for the concepts in this chapter are similar,

but I am attempting to make the following distinctions between them. The chapter is called

“Character,” and I’m roughly using the word “character” to simply mean one of the individuals

in a story. Character animation is what I’m calling the model of character development in cinema

animation. I’m distinguishing this from the term personality voice, by which I mean the model of

character development in the early television cartoon.486

I’m using the word “voice” in two ways.

An actor literally uses their own speaking voice to express what the character they are playing

says. In doing so, the actor is using their own speech to express that character’s personality and

agency; in this way, the actor is giving voice to the character, which manifests in the character’s

communication in the story. Because of the central role of dialogue in character development in

the television cartoon, the character’s voice actor seeks not just to express their character but to

become them. Then, the actor’s speaking voice becomes the character’s voice or self-expression.

I’m trying to clearly state the sense in which I’m using each of these terms in the following

sentences, in addition to confirming these meanings with the context of the surrounding

sentences. As my sophomore high school trigonometry teacher would say … “Clear as mud?”

486

Admittedly, many animators and scholars call character animation “personality animation.” Here, I’m

reserving the word personality generally to use in connection with the term personality voice, which I’m

using to describe television cartoon character.

271

Each character in a cartoon series plays a different but related role in the show’s premise,

and the story of each episode. The differences between the characters inform their relationships

with each other. Nearly always, some characters have a comfortable relationship, while others

have an uncomfortable relationship; these conflicts are unexpected and funny to viewers, often as

if the characters are people the viewer knows.487

The main characters of a cartoon series are

bound together by attraction of personality, says animator Joe Murray, but they must maintain

their bonds throughout the friction and conflict of each story. They work through their

differences across the course of each episode and, by the end, the characters change each other.

Because of identification, the characters also change the viewer. Murray offers the aspiring

creator of a contemporary television cartoon show the following advice.

[C]haracter [is] the lifeblood of your series. … The most important function of a main

character is to be your voice, as the creator, to say something with your show, to give it a

reason to be on the air, and to warrant an audience... First, flesh out the attractions the

characters hold for one another. … Next, identify the conflicts and the contrasts that

create friction within the group. … Finally, identify the ways in which the characters will

be able to transform one another. ... [Your] characters are the reasons your audience

comes back to watch.

Since the character roles in a television cartoon must stay consistent, episode after episode,

similar relational situations recur over and over again. Iconic characters effortlessly hold

attention and interest, despite the similarities between different episodes. In fact, familiarity with

each character makes their consistently specific behavior reassuring.

Joe Barbera said that creating a successful cartoon character is the hardest creative work

of any kind involved in animation. In studying him for years, I’ve realized the extent to which

487

Wright, Animation Writing and Development.

272

Joe Barbera often spins and distorts his and his company’s history to improve his and the

studio’s image.488

Nevertheless, character creation was undeniably one of Barbera’s real talents.

He literally created over 1,000 characters during his years in animation, which is referenced in

the title of the autobiography of one of Hanna-Barbera’s most important artists: Iwao Takamoto:

My Life with a Thousand Characters.489

This is not inherently a great thing for the art of

animation; Barbera definitely fell trap to a vicious cycle of diminishing creative returns after he

and Bill Hanna sold their studio in 1965, which contributed to the wholesale commercialization

of television cartoons in 1966, the first year of cartoons made specifically for Saturday morning

television. Nevertheless, one index of Joe Barbera’s success in creating characters is that, in a

1990 encyclopedia by animation scholars John Cawley and Jim Korkis, Hanna-Barbera has more

characters recognized as “cartoon superstars” than either Disney or Warner Bros. Even if these

distinctions are arbitrary up to a point, it is hard to contest the judgement of these two eminent

animation scholars. They recognize H-B as creating five or six cartoon stars; by comparison,

they recognize four by Warner Bros. and two by Disney.490

Anyway, let’s indulge Joe Barbera’s

thoughts on creating cartoon characters in this longer quotation.

Making cartoons means very hard work at every step of the way, but creating a successful

cartoon character—I mean one that will carry cartoon after cartoon after cartoon—is the

hardest work of all. It’s a lot like the task Dr. Frankenstein set for himself: nothing less

488

It’s unclear how much of the history that Barbera tells in his autobiography can be accepted as he

recalls it and how much cannot. Bill Hanna’s autobiography, published two years later, is regarded as

more historically sound, with less embellishment. Nichola Dobson and Kevin Sandler are two animation

scholars who have made this point to me. 489

Takamoto and Mallory, Iwao Takamoto. 490

Cawley and Korkis recognize the following cartoon characters as stars. H-B’s five are (in alphabetical

order): The Flintstones, Huck Hound, Scooby-Doo, Tom & Jerry, and Yogi Bear. (Six if this includes The

Smurfs, which H-B didn’t create but did make famous worldwide). Warner Bros.’ four are Bugs Bunny,

Coyote, Daffy Duck, and Porky Pig. They only recognize Disney as creating two (!): Donald Duck and

Mickey Mouse. Presumably, Disney’s fairy tale characters are not included because those films were one-

offs, not series. John Cawley and Jim Korkis, The Encyclopedia of Cartoon Superstars.

273

than the creation of life or, at least, a reasonable facsimile thereof. ... There are a lot of

cartoons in the world, but only a handful of real, honest-to-goodness cartoon characters,

characters who can sustain a long-running series. I’ll leave it to the reader to make his

own list, but I can assure you that list will be a short one. Just take Disney, for example.

Donald Duck and Goofy are characters capable of carrying a series. But what about

Mickey Mouse? Disney tried very hard to make him a star, but what he really succeeded

in doing is making him a corporate logo—and, as such, Mickey is probably among the

most universally recognized images of all time. But that’s just the point. Mickey Mouse

is more of a symbol than a real character.

Notably, Hanna-Barbera did not make television cartoons based around fairy tales. Jay Ward and

Bill Scott did follow Disney in telling those mythic stories. On television Ward-Scott’s fairy

tales feel strangely out of place.

Walt Disney’s own famous cartoon characters generally predate his switch into feature

films in 1937. John Cawley and Jim Korkis astutely do not recognize Disney’s feature film stars

as cartoon characters. Good evidence of why is in Disney’s first feature film, Snow White and the

Seven Dwarfs (1937). The animation of the character of Snow White in the film was literally

based on rotoscoped drawings of the real-life movements of a human woman; most of the

character animation work in the film was for the dwarfs, who could not have been rotoscoped.491

491

Rotoscope is a technique created by Max and Dave Fleischer around 1917, which involved animating a

character by tracing over individual frames of the photos of a real human who had been filmed with a

movie camera. Margie Bell is the name of the real-life woman who was filmed to become the animated

Snow White. Human dwarfs do not generally exist, and so cannot be rotoscoped. The animation of the

seven dwarfs in the film remains a masterpiece of character animation, because of the un/believable

distinctness of the animation of each individual dwarf as a reflection of their personality. The studio

accomplished this by assigning a different supervising animator to each of the seven dwarfs.

In the first features, a different animator had handled each character. Under that system ... [t]he

new casting overcame many problems and, more important, produced a major advancement in

cartoon entertainment: the character relationship. With one man now animating every character in

274

Since Disney animated but did not create most of his fairy tales and cultural myths, and because

the film’s stars were animation characters more than cartoon characters, Cawley and Korkis

leave all these characters out of their encyclopedia, even though this underrepresents Disney’s

accomplishments.

Since, as Chuck Jones reminds us, the character must come before their animation,

animators develop detailed analyses of the characters they animate, in order to figure out how to

represent their characters visually. At the risk of overquoting, before concluding this section on

understanding cartoon character, I wish to highlight what appears to be one of the most famous

and revealing character analyses ever, a talk that Disney animator Art Babbitt gave to other

studio animators in 1934 about Goofy. This character, whom Babbitt calls “The Goof,” is not

included in Cawley and Korkis’ encyclopedia, although Joe Barbera does mention him as one of

the small handful of “real, honest-to-goodness cartoon characters.” Art Babbitt begins by

presenting his analysis of Goofy’s inner character.

Think of the Goof as a composite of an everlasting optimist, a gullible Good Samaritan, a

half-wit, a shiftless, good-natured colored boy, and a hick. He is loose-jointed and

gangly, but not rubbery. He can move fast if he has to, but would rather avoid any

overexertion, so he takes what seems the easiest way. … Yet the Goof is not the type of

half-wit that is to be pitied. He doesn’t dribble, drool, or shriek. … If he is a victim of a

catastrophe, he makes the best of it immediately, and his chagrin or anger melts very

quickly into a broad grin. If he does something particularly stupid, he is ready to laugh at

himself after it all finally dawns on him. He is very courteous and apologetic and his faux

his scene, he could feel all the vibrations and subtle nuances between his characters. Thomas and

Johnston, Illusion of Life.

275

pas embarrass him, but he tries to laugh off his errors. He has music in his heart even

though it be the same tune forever[.]

Babbitt then describes how he approaches the complex task of animating Goofy.

His posture is nil. His back arches the wrong way and his little stomach protrudes. His

head, stomach, and knees lead his body. His neck is quite long and scrawny. His knees

sag and his feet are large and flat. … Although he is very flexible and floppy, his body

still has a solidity and weight. … He is not muscular and yet he has the strength and

stamina of a very wiry person. … He has marvelous muscular control of his bottom. He

can do numerous little flourishes with it, and his bottom should be used whenever there is

an opportunity to emphasize a funny position.492

This thorough grasp of Goofy by one of Disney’s best animators shows the preparation that an

animator does to prepare for their role of acting for that character with their pencil.

In television animation production, creative development is only the beginning of the

process; maintaining the character’s spark across the character’s many episodic plotlines, while

also keeping them true to the spirit of their personality, is another undertaking entirely. In the

Western world, as a child, we share a nearly universal experience of watching cartoons to learn

how the social world works. We naturally relate to characters similar to ourselves; in this sense,

they reflect us back to ourselves. As a viewer, their visual simplicity and socially-relevant

situations invite our identification with them. Hearing favorite characters express their individual

voice helps socialize children to find their own voice and place in the social world. Far from

what some see as flimsy, flat conceits outgrown with childhood, cartoon characters are mediated

actors that, to varying degrees, stay with us throughout our whole lives.

492

“Character Analysis of the Goof; June 1934,” in Peary and Peary, American Animated Cartoon.

276

8.2

The Cartoon Story World

The early television cartoon’s sound-based model of character development through

dialogue is both technically and thematically opposed to cinema animation’s approach to develop

characters visually through the artist team’s rendering of the character’s movement. The creation

of a cartoon character for cinema or television must follow the creation of the story world, in

which the character resides. The nature of the story world of cinema animation and that of the

early television cartoon is different, because each medium has different genre characteristics.

The differences between these two related but distinct media mean that a television cartoon

character usually stars in a series of cartoons (in the multiple episodes of a television cartoon

series). This is inherently opposed to the stand-alone feature-film model of cinema, in which the

character often only appears in one film, such as with Walt Disney’s classic fairy tale films.

While they each work in a different medium in a different way, the voice actor and the

animator each seek to use their creative talents to express the essence of their character in the

situations the character faces. The animator uses their hand, and the actor uses their voice.

“Believability. That is what we are striving for,” Chuck Jones says about his character animation.

“We are how we move[, which] is unique to each of us. … [I]t is the individual, the oddity, the

peculiarity that counts.”493

Daws Butler was the voice of Hanna-Barbera’s leading characters in

the studio’s early years (including Huck Hound and Yogi Bear, to name just two). While Butler

expressed his characters through his voice, not through his drawings, his approach to voicing his

characters similarly rests on his solid understanding of that character, analogous to Jones’

approach, and Butler describes his approach in the same terms as Jones: creatively expressing the

493

Chuck Jones, Chuck Amuck, 13-14.

277

character’s quirky individuality. Butler describes his approach in his own words in a 2004 book

fellow voice actors Ben Ohmart and Joe Bevilacqua wrote about him.

They’re not voices. They’re characters. ... When I do a character, it grows. It has a life of

its own. … If the sound you are hearing is funny but doesn’t evoke a certain type of

character, the voice actor isn’t doing a good job. … I wasn’t always going for laughs, but

it had to be individual, to fit the character.494

“Daws knew that every voice should have the element of a real person behind it,” Ohmart and

Bevilacqua write. “He wasn’t a static performer of vocalization. ... He could tell anyone how

‘his’ characters would act in any given situation. ... [A]s you do a character, there are little

nuances and shadings of meaning that only the actor, in many cases, can determine.”

Voice actors are cast during the early phases of a television cartoon’s production. A little-

known fact of animation production is that the script is recorded by voice actors before any

animation is made; the actual animation drawing and inking occurs near the end of the

production process. The recording of the voice actors’ reading of the script becomes essentially

the blueprint of the episode, the framework around which the episode is constructed. The exact

timing of the facial animation like characters talking is made to match the original recording, for

instance. Since the character’s voice actor does much of the work of expressing the character, it

is crucial to cast an actor whose speaking voice inherently embodies the character’s personal

voice. On casting actors, Joe Barbera said, “Voices make or break any cartoon that relies heavily

on character and dialogue.”495

What was the most important element for Barbera to get right

during this process? Simply identifying the right voice actor and relying on their ability to

interpret and embody that character. Barbera explained that, while listening to the actor’s voice,

494

These are multiple different quotes from Daws Butler that I edited together. All are from Ben Ohmart

and Joe Bevilacqua’s book Daws Butler, Character Actor. 495

Barbera, My Life.

278

he closed his eyes and pictured the cartoon character speaking through the actor’s voice. It was

clear whether the actor clicked with the character or not.

I … learned that it does not take a complex process of analysis to cast the right voices.

What you do is hand an actor a script, fill him in on the character and the situation, and

then let him take it from there while you sit back, close your eyes, and listen. If you

smile, chances are very good that you’ve found the right voice. If not, you have to keep

looking. Simple? Yes. But exhausting. Casting a single character frequently meant

auditioning sixty, seventy, even eighty voices.496

To maintain authenticity, the television cartoon character’s voice should inherently complement

their visual design. When the right voice actor is cast, then the production can proceed.

8.3

Cartoon Vocal Acting History

Technical and creative shortcomings like the lack of synchronized sound prevented the

animated cartoon from achieving sophisticated believability for much of the 1910s and 1920s.

Mickey Mouse ushered animation sound in, but Mickey didn’t talk much; when he did, Walt

Disney himself provided Mickey’s high-pitched voice. Max Fleischer’s Betty Boop (1930 and

after) and Popeye (first in 1933) had rough and stereotypically female and male voices,

respectively, and were voiced by multiple different voice actors. Clarence Nash’s distinctive

voice of Donald Duck, starting in 1934, pointed the way towards a more distinctively individual

approach to voice acting.

But it was Mel Blanc who fundamentally reshaped the endeavor of voice acting, when he

gave hilariously expressive, individualized voices to Warners’ expanding army of distinctive

characters, conjuring a dizzying array of regional dialects and slang that gave these characters to

496

Barbera, My Life, 118-119.

279

make these characters undeniably believable voice. Blanc was the first voice actor to be

recognized by name in cartoon credits for his “voice characterization.”497

Blanc had extensively

cut his teeth in radio, most notably on The Jack Benny Program from 1939 to 1955. Radio

scholar Kathryn Fuller-Seeley speaks to the sheer innovation that Benny accomplished in this

program after it began airing on both NBC Blue and NBC Red after 1932, including pioneering

the situation comedy format; she speaks to the nature of radio acting in describing Mel Blanc’s

role in the show.

While other radio comedians relied on strings of individual jokes, Benny and

[scriptwriter Harry] Conn used dialog, character, and a regular setting to yield more

humor from the quirkiness of disparate personalities and their conflicts and

misunderstandings. Twenty years later this combination of ingredients would be called

the sitcom. … Through vocal inflections, whispers, sobs, laughter, snideness, singing, or

bellowing, talented radio actors could express a world of emotion, and could unleash the

listener’s imagination …, helping their programs create what would become radio’s …

“theater of the mind.’ … Terming the thirty-seven-year-old Blanc a “one-man crowd,”

Time magazine informed readers that his chameleon-like talents voiced fifty-seven other

characters[.]

Blanc did not do generic character voices, like the stereotypically male voice of Popeye

and the clichéd female voice of Betty Boop. Instead, Blanc voiced unique characters. His first

gig in animation was voicing Porky Pig in 1937, when he gave the character his telltale habit of

stuttering on one word before finally spitting out a different word.498

Donald D. Markstein,

497

Keith Scott, “Mel Blanc: From Anonymity To Offscreen Superstar (The Advent of On-screen Voice

Credits),” Cartoon Research, September 12, 2016, https://cartoonresearch.com/index.php/mel-blanc-from-

anonymity-to-offscreen-superstar-the-advent-of-on-screen-voice-credits/. 498

Mel Blanc discusses this in his autobiography written with Philip Bashe, That’s Not All, Folks!, 67.

280

animation historian and founder of the APAtoons amateur press association, is effusive about

Blanc’s contributions. “Mel Blanc invented the profession of cartoon voice acting.”499

While that

could not literally be true, because there were earlier voice actors, it is difficult to overstate how

fundamentally Blanc changed voice acting as a profession, through his sheer talent. A successor

voicing Mel’s characters Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Sylvester, and Tweety after his death stepped

into some big shoes. In a tribute to Blanc, he shares a knowing perspective.

The true secret of Mel’s success is the power of his delivery. … Surely Mel recognized

that his unique talents were as flexible and outrageous as the imaginative fields of radio

and cartoons themselves. Once ensconced, he enhanced his vocal primacy by locking

onto whatever qualities worked best for any given character (e.g.: a lisp, a cowardly

quiver) sheer volume). … [H]e didn’t just wing it, all that genius. Mel was a very

thoughtful performer. He did his homework.500

“By the late 1940s,” Blanc writes in his autobiography, “I had such a considerable

inventory of voices that many Warner Bros. theatrical shorts feature only me. The most

characters I ever played in a single [cartoon] production, I believe, was fourteen.”501

As the voice

of many beloved characters, Blanc became famous around the world as a behind-the-scenes

voice magician. Mel Blanc’s landmark voice acting and recognition opened the door to a new

generation of voice actors in cinema animation, and a handful of voice actors found work in the

new area of television animation voice acting.

Alex Anderson and Jay Ward first took the risk to make a cartoon for television, and one

of their most central strategies was to shift the emphasis from visuals to sound. “Anderson [in

499

Donald D. Markstein, “Mel Blanc,” Toonopedia, no date, http://www.toonopedia.com/blanc.htm. 500

The voice actor is Joe Alaskey. “Tribute to Mel Blanc,” Ben Ohmart (ed), Mel Blanc: The Man of a

Thousand Voices, 2012. 501

Blanc and Bashe, That’s Not All, 79.

281

particular] conceived of a practical approach to animating for television by simplifying the

visuals and using the soundtrack to carry the story,” animation historian Karl Cohen has

written.502

They gave the starring role in Crusader Rabbit (1950-52) to the young Lucille Bliss,

who thereby became the founding television cartoon voice actress, establishing a precedent that

all others followed. Despite the modest success of Anderson’s and Ward’s show, it only lasted

two years, and had a tortured production history with multiple work freezes while NBC tried to

figure out whether to renew it or not.

At MGM in the 1940s, in their Tom & Jerry cinema cartoon shorts, Bill Hanna and Joe

Barbera took a particularly pure approach to character expression. The impetuous cat and

mocking mouse’s character acting was limited to animated pantomime, conveying the cartoon

story nearly entirely through nonverbal bodily and facial movements. “The Tom and Jerrys never

had any voices in them,” Barbera said, “except a loud scream when a safe fell on Tom once in a

while.”503

Bill Hanna supplied the nonverbal yelps and screams and cries that comprised the

vocal work for Tom, generally the only character who made sounds. “You remember how Tom

would scream?” Hanna has asked. “I did all of the screams for Tom.”504

When Hanna and Barbera moved to television, they found that they needed to take the

exact opposite approach, limiting animation and instead relying mainly on voice acting. Barbera

recalled their situation: “I suddenly found myself in a position of having to do something we

never had to do before and that was voices”.505

“Going from the gag-driven cartoons at MGM to

dialogue-based shows for television dramatically increased the importance of the voice work,”

502

“The Origins of TV Animation: Crusader Rabbit and Rocky and Bullwinkle,” Animatrix 1, 1987. 503

Joe Barbera, quoted in Ohmart and Bevilacqua, Daws Butler, Characters Actor. 504

Joe Barbera, Bill Hanna, Pat Foley, Greg Watson, “Hanna-Barbera Sound Effects Roundtable 1995,”

reposted at Fred Seibert, https://fredseibert.com/post/69009471/hanna-barbera-sound-effects-roundtable-

1995-2. 505

Joe Barbera, quoted in Ohmart and Bevilacqua, Daws Butler.

282

writes Mike Mallory.506

Unlike the situation Mel Blanc had been in when he came to cinema

animation, Keith Scott writes that “all the Hanna-Barbera shows … gave prominent credit to

their voices, aware of their obvious importance in the new age of planned animation.”507

From

1957 to 1959, Daws Butler was Hanna-Barbera’s primary voice actor. “[I]n the early years of

Hanna-Barbera, Butler and [Don] Messick were the voice department,” writes Mike Mallory.

“Between the two of them, they performed practically every role in every show up to The

Flintstones.”508

For their leading roles, Lucille Bliss and Daws Butler should thus be considered

the vocal pioneers in the planned animation of television, the ones who most directly figured out

how to act through their voice in this new kind of animation. Daws Butler later reflected on the

situation he had stepped into.

I had entered the new world of limited animation. And for five years I did most of the

characters they dreamed up, along with Don Messick whom I had introduced to Bill and

Joe at MGM as being a very talented actor. Don and I did all of it except for the feminine

characters.

The official story has been that Daws Butler came to H-B like Ed Benedict did, from Tex

Avery’s unit at MGM, where he voiced a wolf character from the southern U.S., a bad guy who

remained unflappable even in the most extreme of situations. But if the above secret history of

Hanna-Barbera’s founding is true, then Bill Hanna already knew Daws Butler when he first hired

him for Ruff and Reddy. Given that Butler was already working with Hanna and Lah, they would

already have been closely connected and familiar with working together. Before working with

Hanna and Lah, Butler had actually worked in television from its earliest days, as one of the two

central voice actors and puppeteers on Bob Clampett’s influential puppet show Time for Beany

506

Mallory, Hanna-Barbera Cartoons. 507

Scott, The Moose. 508

Mallory, Hanna-Barbera Cartoons.

283

(1949-1955). A versatile radio comic actor, Daws Butler learned to think fast on Clampett’s

show, which aired a half hour live each week.

For the main character of their early success The Huckleberry Hound Show, Butler

recounts that, initially, Hanna and Barbera had asked him to adopt the same voice he had used

for a Southern wolf character in several cartoons for Tex Avery, when Hanna and Barbera were

working in the same studio as Avery in the early 1950s; Butler saw it as a North Carolina kind of

accent. Butler didn’t think it was a good choice, and suggested that a Tennessee accent might be

a better choice. Bill Hanna was pleased, recalling: “The laid-back, sow-belly-and-greens accent

that Daws Butler endowed [Huckleberry Hound with] complemented perfectly the visual image

of our unflappable little idealist.”509

In his vocal recording sessions, Butler said that he ad-libbed

frequently, to “talk around the line and loosen it up”. “Daws knew that … strength and vitality

were the keys to winning the audience over to the characters,” voice actors Ben Ohmart and Joe

Bevilacqua reflect. This linguistic slapstick was perhaps the vocal analog to the intensely

physical acting of a slapstick-informed live action film. “The voices of the characters had to be

larger than life. It made them memorable.”510

Once they founded their television animation studio, Hanna and Barbera’s dialogue

initially heavily relied on Anderson’s and Ward’s penchant for puns and wordplay, and a balance

509

Bill Hanna, quoted in Ohmart & Bevilacqua, Daws Butler. 510

Ben Ohmart & Joe Bevilacqua, Daws Butler. Decades later, in the 1980s and 1990s, Butler offered

vocal workshops to aspiring voice actors at his home in the Los Angeles area. Nancy Cartwright, future

voice of Bart Simpson, was one young voice actor who attended his workshop. “Daws did not teach me

how to do voices,” Cartwright writes in the preface to this posthumous book about him. “He taught me …

how to make that written word my own.” Ohmart and Bevilacqua reproduce a handout on which Daws

Butler gave technical advice to his voice students. Paraphrased, his main takeaways were the following.

Interpolate or add new interpretation to enliven expression. Vary the pace dynamically. Single out

important words to stress above others. Gliss or slide vocal inflection. “Tumble” dialogue, like everyday

talk, to add “an undercurrent of immediacy.”

284

between literary language and contemporary speech idioms.511

But Hanna and Barbera centered

the role of dialogue in their cartoons. On Crusader Rabbit, dialogue was often shtick, delivered

in mock-serious tones by a narrator. In The Huckleberry Hound Show, dialogue became the main

means of character expression. Daws Butler and his voice college Don Messick, who also started

on Ruff and Reddy, were voice actors nearly on par with Mel Blanc, voice of the majority of the

Looney Tunes characters. All three of these men learned their craft in radio and could switch

voices instantaneously, playing two different characters, even in rapid-fire dialogue.

Cartoon voice history changed direction with The Flintstones. “Daws Butler was Hanna-

Barbera’s premier voice actor through the 1950s,” Yowp has mused. “[T]hen things changed.”512

While Mel Blanc (Barney) was familiar, the studio secured other high-profile voice actors from

outside of animation, who had all worked in radio, including Alan Reed (Fred), Jean Vander Pyl

(Wilma), Bea Benaderet (Wilma). The character voices of these actors were not burlesque

imitations; instead, they were close to their own “straight” speaking voices.513

This tendency

away from voice craft continued through the 1980s, by which time there were few single actors

who did a variety of different voices. During the same time, rather than the voice actor, the

cartoon character themselves increasingly became the star.

511

Animation encyclopedia writers George W. Woolery and Hal Erickson, despite being separated by

several decades, both make similar points about Crusader Rabbit. Woolery writes: “A departure from the

mayhem associated with physical action, [Crusader Rabbit] relied heavily on situation comedy, deriving

humor [literary storytelling] and contemporary dialogue.” Children’s Television: The First Thirty-Five

Years, 1946-1981. Erickson writes:

[T]here was the dialogue and narration — never quite as barbed as the material used on Jay

Ward's later Rocky and His Friends, but still chock full of such future Ward trademarks as

deliberately horrible puns, a high level of literacy … and the characters' tendency to …

sometimes vehemently argue with … the narrator. Television Cartoon Shows, 1949 Through

2003, 2005. 512

Yowp, “Why No Daws,” Yowp, August 20, 2014, http://yowpyowp.blogspot.com/2014/08/why-no-

daws.html. 513

John Halas and Roger Manvell mentioned this shift in the early 1970s. “[R]ecently there has been a

tendency to try out straight, or virtually straight voicing of cartoon characters as an interesting variant

from the normal burlesque [cartoon] voice.” Technique of Cinema Animation.

285

8.4

Stereotypes and Archetypes

As early as Ancient Greece, philosopher Aristotle observed that the kind of character a

story features shows what kind of story it is. A comedy has characters that are more flawed than

ourselves; the audience takes pleasure in and pity on these characters, whose shortcomings

appear ridiculous. Contrarily, a tragedy has characters nobler than ourselves; such accounts

arouse intense emotions and end in a catharsis which often changes us as viewers.514

This simple

distinction between what makes a comedy or a tragedy actually explains much about the defining

forms of expression across Western civilization. In other words, as viewers we essentially look

down on the characters in a comedy. We look up to characters in a tragedy (now called a drama).

Aristotle’s distinction also nicely describes the difference between the kind of character in a

feature film animation and that in an early television cartoon. Television characters tend to be

more flawed and funny, while movie characters tend to be more noble and dramatic.

The initial creative premise of the story world for a cartoon series specifies a certain type

of character. With that in mind, the creator develops the character to match that type. Most all

mass mediated characters probably exist somewhere between a stereotype and an archetype. A

stereotype is a kind of social shorthand that rudely marks a character as a cultural other

according to an unflattering exaggeration. Social commentator Walter Lippmann first coined the

notion of stereotype in 1922, explaining the concept as an ordering process in the form of a

shortcut, one which frames the world in terms of social values and beliefs. A stereotype is a

reduction or essentialization of a specific character to the stereotype of their identity, as people

perceive them according to their subjective judgement. While stereotypes make broad and unfair

514

This discussion is in Aristotle’s Poetics. A contemporary example of a comedic performance is a

stand-up comedy show, while a tragic performance is a serious stage play.

286

ideological generalizations with limited social information, humans both need and want to

employ such a social typing to make sense of the complexity of the world around us. Lippman

openly acknowledges that stereotypes are biased categories shaped according to the norms of a

culture: stereotypes “are the fortress of our tradition, and behind its defenses we can continue to

feel ourselves safe in the position we occupy.”515

An archetype is a complex social portrait, an

idealization which defines an accustomed social human character. If a stereotype is a cultural

distortion or mockery of a particular kind of character, an archetype is an a cultural identification

with or emulation of a particular character type. Psychologist Carl Jung believed that an

archetype is a universal thought-form or mental image that transcends culture, an expression of

human collective unconscious that implicitly influences social life and has done so throughout

the history of humankind.

Robert McKee’s earlier black-and-white distinction, in Chapter 7 on story, between a

stereotype as derivative and an archetype as original, is fairly rigid, although it does inform an

understanding of how content is created for film and for television. The dramatic character of a

feature animation more makes them more archetypal, as Aristotle understands tragedy to feature

noble characters that inspire awe and fear in us. A feature film tends to be both dramatic and

complex, owing to the norms of the medium of the feature film, a kind of journey into the social

self. A feature film encapsulates a whole story within the length of the film, so it can afford to

have a richer and more complex story, and to have original characters closer to archetypes. The

comedic character of the television cartoon is more stereotypical, as Aristotle understands

515

Richard Dyer quotes Lippmann from his book Public Opinion:

A pattern of stereotypes is not neutral. It is not merely a way of substituting order for the great

blooming, buzzing confusion of reality. It is not merely a short cut. It is all these things and

something more. It is the guarantee of our self-respect; it is the projection upon the world of our

own sense of our own value, our own position and our own rights. The stereotypes are, therefore,

highly charged with the feelings that are attached to them. “The Role of Stereotypes.”

287

comedy to feature flawed characters that the audience takes pleasure in looking down on. A

broadcast television show, by contrast, tends to be both funny and simple. Like a commercial, an

episodic television show doesn’t have time to reintroduce the central characters in each episode;

it must inherently rely more on a stereotype model to make clear who a character is through

recognizable social clichés.

My impression is that some academics want to dismiss the concept of the stereotype,

because they have such obvious problems, of essentializing particular types of people. But in the

narration of storytelling, such condensation is often necessary. Animator Caroline Leaf has

commented on this. “There is a limited range of ways of showing women and men in traditional

cartoon animation. But in another sense, … [a]nimation must concentrate a lot of visual material

in very little time … [T]o be clear and legible you need to simplify, to economize … by

exaggeration.”516

Jung identifies a handful of core human archetypes that he believed universally transcend

cultures, influencing social character around the world, not just in stories but also in real life.

These are: the hero; the shadow; the fool; the anima/animus; the mentor; the trickster. These

particular archetypes have been employed to both teach the creative process of creating character

roles for stories and the receptive process of interpreting the characters in stories. Bryan Tillman

believes that characters modeled on these archetypes are the basic building blocks of any

story,517

but these archetypes may be more common in cinematic drama. The hero is brave,

selfless, and willing to help others no matter the cost. They are often the protagonist, the main

character of good that the audience identifies with, although not necessarily so. The shadow

516

Barbara Halpern Martineau, “Women and Cartoon Animation, or Why Women Don’t Make Cartoons,

or Do They?”, interview roundtable with Ellen Besen, Joyce Borenstein, Caroline Leaf, Lynn Smith, and

Veronika Soul, in Peary and Peary, American Animated Cartoon. 517

Tillman, Creative Character Design.

288

character is disagreeable, mysterious, selfish, and cruel. They are typically the antagonist, the

counterpart main character of evil that the audience identifies against, although sometimes the

roles may be flipped and the shadow is the protagonist. Joe Murray makes similar points.518

But

a larger supporting cast of characters is needed “to help push the main characters through the

story.”519

The fool often enters the picture at this point; they are confused and prone to bad luck.

The fool tests the protagonist by creating a need for the antagonist to resolve the adversity the

fool creates, wittingly or unwittingly. The plot often “thickens” when the audience encounters

the anima or animus: the love interest.520

This character embodies sexual and romantic urges

within one character; the anima often tempts the hero, and us as the viewer, with sexual allure.

The emotions of love the hero develops while forming a relationship with the anima/animus

creates meaning, comfort, and vulnerability for the hero; this development draws the viewer

closer into the story. A typical story technique to push the narrative forward is for the shadow to

threaten the anima, which reveals the real stakes of the plot. At this point, the hero will encounter

the mentor, often a kindly older figure with grandparental characteristics, who aids the hero

protagonist to realize his or her full potential. The daunting conflict the hero faces easily

intimidates both them and the viewer. The mentor’s advice, based in their life experience, helps

the hero see a bigger picture and realize their own inner strength. The trickster may be either

good or evil, but they further push for change by raising doubts for the protagonist. The climax

of the story is often a battle between the hero and the shadow, or a kind of proxy test within the

norms of social life.

518

Murray, Creating Animated Cartoons with Character. 519

Tillman, Character Design. 520

The anima is the female counterpart to the male protagonist, while the animus is the male counterpart

to the female protagonist.

289

The hero’s triumph over the shadow resolves the tension of the story, a “happy ending”

which tidily releases the audience back to their normal life in comfort. Especially in U.S. media,

the hope evoked by the happy ending has become so normal as to be unquestioned. This clear

separation of archetypes is conventional in many genres, like the romantic comedy, the

children’s story, the epic fantasy, and the superhero adventure. But in other stories, the hero may

be defeated by the shadow! This is a tragic ending, arousing fear and uncertainty for the

audience, a tradition traceable back to the alternate tradition of the Greek tragedy. A more

complex story can be told by blurring the boundaries of these archetypes, complicating the

audience’s interpretation. The blurring of character archetypes is more common in situation

comedies, young adult dramas, mysteries, suspense thrillers, and horror stories.521

8.5

Cartoon Voices

The story focus of the early television cartoon requires a meaningful narrative, and this

meaning most directly arises from the voice acted dialogue between characters. After the cartoon

writer composes the scripted character dialogue, the voice actors deliver the character’s

personality, voice, intonation, and cadence (rhythm) through their vocal performance. The voice

actor sets the timing of the performance, in this context; later, the animator follows their lead. In

cinema, the animator acts for the character, being the source of character’s body language in

their posing and movement and their facial acting. “But television was a different animal,” as

Jerry Beck says. “Everything shrunk: the budgets, the time allotted, the number of drawings and

even the size of the screen. … [With these] constraints …, the acting had to be carried by …

voice actors.”522

521

Tillman makes some of these points, such as the genre statements. Character Design. 522

Beck, The Hanna-Barbera Treasury.

290

Many of the voice actors in early television cartoons came from radio. There is a whole

art form to the caricatured but subtle craft that voice actors practice, which the viewer

understands intuitively but has little explicit vocabulary for. A well-realized cartoon character

voice is a vibrant thing that freely moves through a culture and touches the cultural sensibilities

of people in very personal ways. The power of the spoken word shines through the largely static

cartoon characters to involve the viewer, in a sense to “touch” them through sound by

reproducing the physical presence of the voice actor. Sam Phillips (1923-2003), one of the

earliest record producers to record rock ‘n’ roll musicians, has remarked about the elemental

power of the sound of the human spoken voice. “There’s nothing even close to being as intimate

as a person’s voice. Even a picture of the person—listen to this, ‘talkin’ about sound—that to me

lets you into the soul world. You get to feel the heartbeat of that person.”523

“[A] fully-

established cartoon voice … will give the audience the essential, … immediate cue to the

character,” says John Halas. “Donald’s [Duck’s] angry introductory squawk immediately

established his cantankerous and interfering nature, and Mickey’s quick squeak his impetuous

efficiency.”524

Voice-acted dialogue is the biggest factor by which the new television cartoon developed

character. It is not often remembered that television had abysmally poor picture quality for much

of the 20th

century. In the early years, static interference with the broadcast signal could flash

across the television screen at any moment, turning an enjoyable evening into a technological

nightmare. Nevertheless, even in its early years, television inherited high-fidelity audio quality

from its foundations in radio. Television’s dynamic audio range and quality allowed talented

523

The Kitchen Sisters, “Sam Phillips and the Early Years of the Memphis Recording Service: We

Record Anything, Anywhere, Anytime,” The Kitchen Sisters Present, Episode 13,

http://www.kitchensisters.org/fugitivewaves/episode-13/. 524

Halas and Manvell, Technique of Film Animation.

291

actors to deeply brand television characters with their vocal signature, giving the characters a

believable authenticity. People who lived through the time have remarked that the skilled

delivery of well-written dialogue by voice actors is what made the rough-hewn visuals of

cartoons in the early years of television watchable.525

Voice acting imbues the visually flat

characters of the early television cartoons with depth by adding the presence of real human

voices to the soundtrack.526

Memorable voice acting is individualized to the cartoon character, to the particular timbre

or identity that the actor gives their voice. This timbre is inflected by the cultural context that

makes this expression meaningful. Inherently, voice acting also reflects the physical embodiment

of the voice actor, who produces sound using their whole body. The resonation of each body’s

physical structure gives voice recordings a distinctive “grain” in the words of French philosopher

Roland Barthes. Timbre and embodiment are the elements that microphones and magnetic tape

capture when the voice actor speaks in the recording studio. Imbuing a character voice with a

cartoony quality is a purer approach to cartoon voice acting, because it resonates with its visual

caricature. Cartoon voice acting is vocal “burlesque,” a kind of vocal caricature and

exaggeration, John Halas gives several well-known examples of cartoon voices as aural

caricature. “Popeye, Magoo, Sylvester and Woody-Woodpecker are all examples of burlesque

525

While I was in Los Angeles in 2017, legendary voice actor June Foray died (July 26, 2017). I believe I

heard this quoted in an appreciation/obituary somewhere. Foray was the voice talent who gave Rocky the

Flying Squirrel and Natasha Fatale their signature voices on Rocky and His Friends and The Bullwinkle

Show. Chuck Jones has been quoted as saying that “June Foray is not the female Mel Blanc. Mel Blanc

was the male June Foray.” Mark Evanier, “The Remarkable June Foray,” Animation World Network, June

1, 2000, https://www.awn.com/animationworld/remarkable-june-foray. 526

Barthes wrote that the “grain of the voice” reflects the embodied nature of the recorded voice.

Recording a voice communicates the body behind the voice. “The Grain of the Voice,” in Image-Music-

Text. There may be more subtlety to this concept I cannot yet determine, because Barthes addresses it

while discussing vocal music singing.

292

voicing … the burlesque voice is normal in cartoon films because it fits best the exaggeration

and distortion of the cartoon figure as it is drawn.527

Much of the production work that animators do to make the planned animation of

television is synchronizing basic animation of the speaking character’s mouth shapes with the

vocal tracks recorded by the voice actors. In these situations, the character is usually standing

still and speaking, with their mouth moving, and sometimes other parts of their face moving,

such as their eyes blinking. The animation is usually fairly mechanical and not terribly

exaggerated. In the 1960s, conventions emerged about which mouth shapes should be used for

characters vocalizing which speech sounds. “The cartoon mouths must mime with suitable

distortions the basic positions of the natural mouth when uttering words made up of vowels and

consonants,” John Halas and Roger Manvell note. “There are seven basic or elementary positions

of the mouth for this miming of speech.”528

The authors present a simple diagram of these

animation decisions in a television cartoon.

527

Halas and Manvell, Technique of Film Animation. 528

The Technique of Film Animation, 1971.

293

Figure 29. Common cartoon mouth shapes for animating character speech, circa 1960s

Source: Halas and Manvell, The Technique of Film Animation

Tom Sito told me that Hanna-Barbera used a standard system of mouth shapes to perform

voice animation for their characters. “We’ve reduced the animation of speech to nine standard

mouth positions,” Joe Barbera said in 1960, “and a character has a full vocabulary with these

nine expressions.”529

By the time Tom Sito worked at the studio in the 1980s, they had further

reduced the number of mouth shapes. “[D]ialogue-wise, [the animation is] easy. At Hanna-

Barbera, the system … was … [that] you have seven mouth shapes, an eye blink, and a head …

You could do cheap television that way.530

Jerry Beck has reproduced an in-house model sheet

for how to animate Fred Flintstone talking. The working and learning of the animators is

reflected in cross-outs and changes shown here.531

529

Stimson, “Cartoon Factory.” 530

Tom Sito interview with author. 531

Jerry Beck, The Flintstones: The Official Guide to the Cartoon Classic, 2011, 24. Unfortunately, this

reproduction, which is also available elsewhere, is one of the few interesting aspects of this book. Beck

294

Figure 30. Hanna-Barbera model sheet showing how to draw Fred Flintstone’s mouth shapes for

each speech sound

Source: Jerry Beck, The Official Guide to the Cartoon Classic

It seems clear that animating spoken speech on a static figure is exceedingly dull work.

One can understand that some animators doing this work nursed life-long resentments about how

conducts interesting character analysis of the main Flintstones characters. But, despite its title, this short

book is more of a kids book, and doesn’t offer much original information.

295

little creative expression they were allowed to pursue in this kind of animation. In the early

1970s, Chuck Jones went so far as to say that young animators who entered the industry don’t

really qualify as animators, because they are not making animation.

[T]here aren’t young animators now [because] all [they] are animating on [is] this very

thin Saturday-morning stuff. ... The sadness is that many of the old-time animators are

working only on these Saturday morning shows. It’s like a violinist playing a triangle and

getting paid three times what he used to make. It’s a pity. I’m talking now not as an

animation director, but as a person; I feel a personal loss in this.532

Admittedly, the animation of the Saturday morning period became quite dull for similar

reasons; it lost its creative inspiration. Nevertheless, cinema animators did still have a job. It

seems that Hanna-Barbera played a similar role for a smaller number of voice actors. With the

many hours of animation the networks needed, the studio still needed voice actors to deliver all

the lines.

Cartoon characters that catch on with the public take on a life of their own. Their inherent

friendliness and charisma takes shape through their signature face and voice. “Character” means

not just characters’ faces, but also their voice, because this is the most expressive element in the

acting of television cartoon characters. While every cartoon character has a trademark face, it is

their personality voice in television through which a character develops and comes alive.

To a degree, television cartoon characters can be understood with concepts predating

television, like Dewey’s stereotypes and Jung’s archetypes. But the differences in medium

between cinema animation and the early television cartoon fundamentally change the nature of

character. In cinema, characters are primarily developed through the idiosyncratic animation

through which the animator expresses their movement. In television, characters are most of all

532

Jones interview by Barrier and Spicer.

296

developed through their personality voice, the particular vocal expression of their voice actor,

which merges in the viewer’s mind with the character’s face.

Walt Disney’s remarkable achievements in character animation in the 1920s and 1930s

raised the bar for character expression. It was competitor Warner Bros.’ Mel Blanc, voice of

most of the Looney Tunes characters, who first foregrounded the very technique of voice acting.

The simplified visuals of the television cartoon, as well as the high fidelity of television’s built-in

FM radio technology, created a need for personality voice to take over from character animation

as the primary means of expression in the newer medium. This history saw its share of twists and

turns, which have delivered cartoon voice acting to where it is today.

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CHAPTER 9

THE PRINCIPLE OF STYLE:

DESIGN AND CARICATURE

Style is present all expression. In cartoon series of all kinds, style is closely intertwined

with design, as a consistent aesthetic unifying the series. The early television cartoon both

simplifies and stylizes itself to create a distinctive experience. Primarily, this occurs visually, in

the design of characters, props, and backgrounds. These cartoons do also shift attention away

from their visuals and to their sounds, where style and design also play roles in crafting

expression. But, to prevent confusion, I mainly describe style as visual in this chapter, and leave

sound as a topic for the next. This discussion overlaps with Chapter 2, on early print cartoons,

and Chapter 5, on early television cartoons. This chapter is broadly about the visual style of

cartoons, about what visually defines them. Style applies to all aspects of the cartoon, and they

are approached fundamentally differently in television than in cinema animation. Cinema

animation’s artistic focus tends to push its expression beyond boundaries of control. In the

television cartoon, style and design ally to keep the text “on model,” or according to plan.

Cartoons are typically “cartoony” in style. Visually, the television cartoon is “stylized,”

that is, removed from naturalism and given a generally idiosyncratic design that both puzzles and

intrigues the viewer. Caricature is the most specific expression of what is cartoony about the

cartoon: the exaggeration of distinctive visual features of characters that often make their very

visual appearance funny and distinctive. Limited/planned animation requires these “strong”

poses to be held on the screen for long moments. Stylization diverts the viewer’s attention away

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from the general lack of action on screen. The design focus of the visual aesthetic of cartoon

series establishes stylistic conventions that make its appearance both believable and quirky.

Cartoon-like images existed for hundreds of years before cinema began. The roots of

cartoon style may lie in Japan, at the earliest. By the 1200s, “Emakimono” scrolls were being

made on continuous paper, on which people are illustrated visually. The figures tell moral

stories, usually fantastic or romantic but sometimes comic, through accompanying text. In

Europe, Leonardo Da Vinci developed caricatural drawings around the end of the 1400s.

Caricature filtered up from Italy into what would become Germany and Great Britain over the

next centuries; print cartoons were inserted into newspapers, magazines, and posters via

woodprints or metal lithographs. That cartoon tradition became a central part of the popular

culture of the day. European artists carried cartoon caricature to the United States in the 1800s,

where cartoons took on a new life of their own.

J. Stuart Blackton’s films of the early 1900s show the plasticity of the then-young

medium of cinema at the time. In the 1910s, newspaper cartoonists created the first animated

cartoon series, which soon became a kind of autonomous alternative reality to photographically-

based live action film. In future decades, the animated cartoon became a new stylistic aesthetic

form that uniquely refashioned currents of social life with surprising power. I agree with British

animation scholar Paul Wells that the animated cartoon as it has become familiar is largely

American, an account Wells develops in his foundational 2002 book Animation and America.

Like the newspaper cartoon before it, “[a]nimation has engaged with the contradictory conditions

of American mores, reflected the anxieties within American culture, and offered insight into the

mytho-political, and indeed, mytho-poetic zeitgeist of a nation.” 533

533

Wells, Animation and America, 1. Wells considers animation to be one of the United States’ “four

major indigenous art forms,” alongside the Western, jazz, and the Broadway musical. Randall P. Harrison

299

The cartoon is similar to art in that both are interpretive forms that should be understood

as linked to technology, culture, and creative expression, and inherently historical, as both have

evolved with and reshaped human society. 534

All media texts actually adopt carefully designed

styles, which are calculated to insinuate their messages into conscious ways of seeing.535

The

historicity of the cartoon means that every new cartoon changes what a cartoon is. The cartoon

stakes a claim for itself by pioneering new formal inventions, while adopting some earlier

conventions. The cartoon is particularly effective as a means of communication in mass media,

from print through television and into digital media. Cartoons are nearly always a timely vehicle

for cutting social commentary on the actions of influential people.

9.1

Kinds of Cartoon Style

What is cartoon style, and where did it come from? There are three broad kinds of

cartoon style: personal/cultural, written, and visual. Visual cartoon style is perhaps the most

straightforward to talk about, and the easiest to understand. After these next two paragraphs on

the first three aspects, visual cartoon style will be the focus for much of the rest of this section.

Sound, the superior to the visual in the early television cartoon, follows in the next chapter.

also writes, “[I]n America, ... the art of cartooning has flourished as perhaps nowhere else in the world”.

Harrison, The Cartoon. 534

This is similar to how art is studied in the academy—it is understood as inherently historical, as the

title of the discipline studying it, art history, makes clear. 535

Design historians Johanna Drucker and Emily McVarish describe media style generally in their critical

history of graphic design. While the design and style of media looks powerfully effortless, it is often

carefully and expensively constructed to appear as such. These ways of seeing become naturalized and

subtly turn into modes of cultural communication across media systems.

The conventions for picturing the world, or forms of address in a text, can appear perfectly

natural, a simple statement of the way things are. ... [But e]very graphic artifact mediates social

relations. Design shapes communication, and communication systems exert an enormous force in

constructing the world we believe in. Graphic Design History: A Critical Guide, xxvi, xxix, and

xxvii.

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Individuals have style, which is clear in everyday life. Style can also reflect the general

worldview, taste, or sense of humor of a group. The same applies to artists, who have individual

and collective styles. The concept of animation style is easily traceable to the individual artistic

style of the artists in influential animation studios. When artists joined together to make animated

films, though, they usually need to adopt the house style of their studio, and sacrifice their own

personal animation style to make a living. Otherwise, every animator’s work would look

different, and the film combining their efforts would be bizarrely metamorphic. The model sheet

began to be adopted as a consensus guide for the whole film crew to draw according to a shared

aesthetic. The implicit style of the artists creating the characters and their model sheets then

became the house style of the studio. At some studios, these aesthetic decisions were more

implicit and at others they were more overt and purposeful.

Written style, at the level of words and their meanings, does define the general style in

which a cartoon is conceived and executed. Depending on its premise, the tone of most television

cartoons falls somewhere between humor and seriousness. Historically, the accustomed written

tone in the cartoon is humorous and given to social commentary; in other words, the cartoon is

often comic, as can be seen in the name of the print cartoon, “comics.” By contrast, the term

“comic book” tends to be a misnomer, because by convention these tend towards adventure, and

more commonly leave humor aside to adopt a “straight” style of narrative that more literally

communicates the action of what is happening.

Comic cartoons are often easily identified visually by a funny approach to design and a

decreased level of visual detail. Animation style is typified by a three-dimensional approach

which Tom Sito described to me as “animation in the round.”536

This is the basic paradigm of the

536

Tom Sito interview with author.

301

majority of golden age cinema animation. Preston Blair explains this approach in his 1949 book

Animation.

The animated cartoon character is based on the circular, rounded form. In a cartoon

studio several people may work on the same drawing and the rounded form is used

because of its simplicity—it makes animation easier. Also, circular forms ‘follow

through" better on the screen.537

Blair teaches that the traditional cinema cartoon character is animated by composing their body

from balls, ovals, eggs, and pear shapes. Blair describes the task of creating a character in his

later book.

Constructing and developing a character is not merely a matter of drawing the figure;

each character also has its own shape, personality, features, and mannerisms. The

animator has to take these qualities into consideration to make the characters seem

lifelike and believable. For example, there are various personality types such as "goofy,"

"cute," and "screwball." … Develop the basic shape of the figure; then add the features

and other details.538

This traditional approach to cinema cartooning is traditionally called “centerline,” because a line

can be in three-dimensional space through the middle of these shapes. Amid Amidi describes the

significance of the dominant centerline school of traditional full cinema animation.

This centerline approach to character design was pervasive throughout the animation

industry in the 1930s and 1940s. One need only look at the creations of the various

studios: Disney’s Donald Duck and Pinocchio, Warner Bros’ Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig,

MGM’s Tom & Jerry and Droopy, Terrytoons’s Mighty Mouse—these characters are all

537

Amidi, Cartoon Modern. 538

Blair, Cartoon Animation.

302

based on the exact same, conventional circular formulas and centerline construction that

Blair teaches in his book.539

The limitation of animation involved flattening characters out into two-dimensional

shapes on paper. In this “graphical style,” characters maintain the same shape however they

move. This means that they can take any shape. U.S. artists were initially introduced to this

modern style by seeing a 1934 Russian film, The Tale of Czar Durandai, in the late 1930s, when

architect Frank Lloyd Wright visited the Disney studio and screened the film. This and other

European films around the same time, such as in France, were not preoccupied with creating

relatable characters, but with communicating ideas. Amidi explains the significance of American

animators seeing these films.

the European shorts illustrate an approach to animation that was completely alien to

American animation artists at the time. Both Black and White and La Joie de Vine feature

strong graphic caricatures of human beings, drawn in a fine art manner, with nary a trace

of ovals and pears.540

The young U.S. artists who would go on to found UPA followed this graphic style in opposition

to the dominant traditional paradigm of character animation; their films began to emphasize not

round but angular shapes. Bill Hurtz was one of the earliest and most decisive UPA artists to

adopt this style, as the layout artist for Gerald McBoing Boing. “The reliance on circles was not

only a graphic dead end, but in the words of UPA director-designer Bill Hurtz, ‘Excessive

539

Amidi, Cartoon Modern. 540

Amidi, Cartoon Modern. Black and White was an early 1933 graphical film directed by Russian artists

Ivan Ivanov-Vano and Leonid Amalrik. La Joie de Vivre was an early 1934 graphical film made in Paris

by Englishman Anthony Gross and American financier Hector Hoppin.

303

curvilinearity could be said to be vulgar, because it's the epitome of the crumpled, the doughy,

the schlumpen, the inelegant.’”541

Each comic cartoon carves out its own slice of its aesthetic domain, in multiple senses,

including cultivating its own linguistic sense of humor. Self-reflexive cartoons with a desire to

comment on cultural norms often adopt parody as a specific approach to tone. Parody invokes

cultural customs; the way it does so often renders them ridiculous. Fewer cartoons for adults

have a sharper edge that pushes their humor further, into satire. While The Flintstones flirted

with satire, it more commonly relied upon parody. Rocky and Bullwinkle was a cartoon that

often equally walked a line between parody and satire; while it was unafraid to make sharp

comedic jabs at even highly-regarded targets like the U.S. government and military and its own

broadcast network, it softened these blows with a self-deprecating humor. The tone of many

comic cartoons, especially those for children, shows less overt comment and a more harmless,

sometimes slapstick, approach to humor. The humor in cartoons with less self-awareness can

easily fall into pastiche, or what Fredric Jameson calls “blank parody,” imitation parody without

comment.542

This was a critique levied at Saturday morning cartoons, and continues to be

implicit in criticisms of commercially-motivated television cartoons.

9.2

Cartoon Caricature

Visual cartoon style is inherent to the cartoon itself, because the cartoon has always been

visual. The definition of a cartoon is debated, but a consensus view holds that cartoons are

caricatured. The caricature of cartoon simplifies its subject by choosing specific facial features to

both emphasize and exaggerate. This simplification and exaggeration creates a recognizable

541

Amidi, Cartoon Modern. 542

Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on

the Postmodern, 1983-1998, 2009.

304

caricature of a person or type of person with a distinctively new appearance. Cartoonist Scott

McCloud describes this as “amplification through simplification.”543

The following three panels

in McCloud’s comic book about comic books, Understanding Comics, pose the question of how

to explain the cartoon. Drawing on semiotician Charles Peirce, McCloud calls the cartoon an

“icon” resembling what it imitates only in its essential defining features. The cartoonist’s skilled

hand boils down a face into certain defining details, and then exaggerates those details to a comic

degree.

543

McCloud, Understanding Comics.

305

Figure 31. Scott McCloud’s understanding of the cartoon image as “amplification through

simplification”

Source: Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics

As a caricature, the cartoon can be understood basically as opposition to strict naturalistic

artistic representation. A cartoonist’s style can be understood to lie in part in how they choose to

render their drawing as departing from naturalism.544

The word “cartoon” first referred to the

simplified drawings that painters would sketch on disposable cartons before attempting their full

painting. In Enlightenment Europe, art became understood to be oil painting that seeks to

represent a person or a landscape naturalistically; the artist’s skill in doing this convincingly

distinguished them as an accomplished artist. The cartoonist’s comic cartoons were contrarily

often printed in the mass media of newspapers, placing such works firmly outside the province of

art. But they need not aesthetically be excluded with the resignation of defeat. Cartoons should

not be considered bad art—they may instead be non-art. Simple, enjoyable entertainment is the

goal of the cartoon, not aesthetic mystery. In the 19th

century, before photographs were common

544

I thank my colleague Emma Rifai for this explanation.

306

in newspapers, cartooning was actually the basis of much visual journalism; drawings were

etched into blocks of wood, stone, or metal, which could be imprinted upon newsprint. In the

20th

century, as photographs entered newspapers via new printing techniques, the realism of the

photograph was sharpened through photojournalism, becoming a mark of realism. This has more

firmly excluded cartoonists from reporting the news of the world, but comics as images only

grew more popular, printed on inner pages of the newspaper. From another perspective,

photography relieved hand drawings of the burden of naturalistic representation, after which

point drawing could become as cartoony as it wanted to be.

Mad magazine cartoonist Tom Richmond proposes a “basic caricature theory” in his

2011 instructional book The Mad Art of Caricature. He holds that effective caricature must have

three elements in place: recognizability, exaggeration, and statement. First, referring to the kind

of caricature that comments on real-life figures, he holds that a caricature must be “instantly

recognizable as the subject regardless of the level of exaggeration the artist applies to the

subject’s features.” Second, exaggeration is the outcome of the cartoonist’s judgement in

caricaturing those features which most distinguish a person. Third, “[statement] is reaching past

the surface features of the subject and capturing some of the intangibles that make the subject a

living, breathing person. It’s the way that a good caricature goes beyond capturing the look and

enters the realm of describing the subject’s personality and essence.”545

Disney animator Art Babbitt explained it this way: “A caricature is a satirical essay, not

just doubling the size of a bulbous nose.”546

Somehow, humans recognize human-created

drawings as representative of real or imagined people—and all the more so when they are

simplified and exaggerated. On a more elemental level of perception, as people, we gravitate to

545

5. 546

Babbitt, “Character Analysis of the Goof; June 1934,” in Peary and Peary, American Animated

Cartoon.

307

the cartoony style of such caricature, but it is still not clear exactly where the power of the

cartoon caricature comes from. In the book The Cartoon—Communication to the Quick,

cartoonist Randall P. Harrison quotes literature scholar David D. Perkins from a 1976 article.

Perkins had just become chair of the Harvard University English Department, yet despite his

credentials, he was bemused when trying to explain the power of how the human organism

processes a visual caricature.

What sort of picture is this? It is deliberately inaccurate, yet the subject is often quite

recognizable—perhaps more recognizable than in an accurate portrait or photograph. It

lies about its subject’s shape, but in doing so, often comments delightfully on that

shape.547

Human faces are complex and the subtle differences between faces are perceived to

recognize people by their distinctive qualities. When a cartoonist renders defining features to a

comically exaggerated degree, this makes the person’s caricature somehow larger than life. Tom

Richmond shows how this is done, first by drawing two faces in the lines of a cartoon but

without any exaggeration.

547

Harrison, The Cartoon.

308

Figure 32. Two cartoon heads without caricature exaggeration

Source: Tom Richmond, The Mad Art of Caricature

Richmond then shows that there are actually only five basic shapes needed to draw the face: the

shape of the head, the left eye, the right eye, the nose, and the mouth.548

Even small changes to

each element create an aesthetic statement, such as gendering a drawing.

548

Richmond, Caricature.

309

Figure 33. A cartoon face modeled for caricature, with its five elements marked

Source: Richmond, Caricature

“If caricature has a secret key,” Richmond reports, “it’s understanding relationships”

between these five elements. There are three different kinds of relationships between these five

elements: size, distance, and angle. “These relationships are the foundation upon which the rest

of your building is built, where the real power of exaggeration is realized.”

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Figure 34. Three models of caricatured cartoon faces with different kinds of visual relationships

Source: Richmond, Caricature

The relationships between these five shapes is the basis of the exaggeration of the caricature of

the face. If these figures still look empty, indeed they are – they do not yet have enough features

to distinguish them as distinct individuals. Tom Richmond’s 2011 book is filled with

astonishingly evocative caricatures of figures from across pop culture from the 1960s to the early

2000s, largely actors, musicians, and some public figures. The precision and visual power of the

cartoon caricature is evident in Richmond’s perceptive rendering of even similar figures, such as

the six different actors who have played James Bond across that franchise’s history, or the core

cast of the TV series Lost. Here are his caricatures of the two romantic leads of the Twilight film

franchise, Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart, with his explanations of how he caricatured

their real-life features to make these drawings larger than life.

311

Figure 35. Caricature of actor Robert Pattinson, male lead in the Twilight film series

Source: Richmond, Caricature

Figure 36. Caricature of actress Kristen Stewart, female lead in the Twilight film series

Source: Richmond, Caricature

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If the power of the cartoon caricature can be reduced to one feature of the human face, it

is the eyes. Since the faces of television animation characters don’t move as much as in cinema

animation, much of the visual weight of television cartoon performance is carried by the eyes.

“[H]uman characterisation in animation is so predicated on the eyes,” writes all-around creative

Australian scholar Philip Brophy. The proportions of the face of a cute cartoon character

caricatures the appearance of a human baby. An aesthetic of cuteness grew across the 20th

century, and was most evident in large eyes.

‘[C]ute’ signified an idealised social world in which people, animals and things were

infinitely happy and kind to each other. This is an important point, because … most

depictions of cuteness … intend to codify the happy/kind domain of the baby.549

For some reason, humans vividly perceive even gross visual exaggeration not as grotesque but as

cute.

9.3

The Style of Graphic Animated Cartoons

The term “style” of animation is sometimes simply refers to the “kind” of animation,

either full animation or limited animation. If misused, this choice of words can make it appear

that television could have chosen to make better, fuller animation, if only its producers and

executives cared more about it. The choice might seem open-ended: why not spend the time and

money to make a television cartoon more like cinema animation? This common misconception

misses the simple truth that the caricatural aesthetic of television animation directly arises from

its economic constraints. In the past, the very existence of cartoons made for television has felt

549

Philip Brophy, “Ocular excess: A Semiotic Morphology of Cartoon Eyes,” Kaboom! Explosive

Animation from America and Japan.

313

like a concession to many observers, like artists and critics. The very language of “limitations”

unfortunately implies that it fails to live up to its potential,550

when its aesthetic actually reflects

its medium. It is true that television generally simplified animation’s subtle and complex

expression, because its economic realities imposed strict budgets on cartoon production. The

small size of the analog television screen in the 20th century also caused television animation to

need to simplify, for technological reasons: the relatively small size of the television screen. But

this simplicity can be seen as a matter of aesthetic choice, not just necessity. As any designer

would tell you, “simple” does not mean “bad:” it can also mean refined. To understand the early

television cartoon is to need to recognize not just its negative limitations but also its positive

affordances. Its simplicity is one of its greatest assets.

Before the moving image, a “cartoon” was understood to usually mean a political

cartoon, a nursery rhyme in a children’s book, and perhaps other forms, like print advertising.

Cinema changed the cartoon by introducing a vaudeville aesthetic dominated by visual slapstick

humor and a pervasive sense of carnival, a bawdy, physical humor and subversiveness.551

Early

characters were also given strong cartoon poses rendered with thick black lines profiling their

figure, to “pop” out of the hazy early black and white television screen. This required precision

and deftness in drawing; it is in fact easier to hide sloppiness in cinema animation, where

complicated in-between frames glide by in a flash.

The simplification of limited and planned animation has tended towards stylization, and

specifically cuteness. Early cinema cartoon characters first needed to be simplified and stylized,

partly to make the characters more distinctive, but importantly also to make them more feasible

to animate. The early animators evolved the cute cartoon style of animation relatively quickly

550

Thanks to Mihaela Mihailova for correspondence on this. 551

Henry Jenkins talks about the conventions of the vaudeville aesthetic in what could be his first

published book, What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic, 1992.

314

between 1915 and 1920. Paul Terry appears to have first grasped how exaggerating the eyes of

characters can make them appear more cute, as Dick Huemer interpreted the cartoon styles of

early animated cartoonists.552

Brophy writes that “[The] shift from the anatomically plausible

designs of the mid nineteenth-century to the more stylised representations of the twentieth-

century articulated a complex semiotic continuum”. A concrete example of how quickly this

changed is reflected in how cartoonists before and after Terry drew children and dogs. Before

Terry, Earl Hurd was drawing boy Bobby Bumps and his dog Fido in a naturalistic style

resembling a Victorian newspaper comic; after Terry, this gave way to a far looser and cartoonier

animation style in Walter Lantz’ boy Dinky Doodle and dog Weakheart. Both animators worked

at John Bray’s animation studio, yet within a decade, the appearance of characters, and most

specifically their eyes, changed completely, swelling to a massive size.

Figure 37. The change in design aesthetic from Earl Hurd’s Bobby Bumps and Fido (1916) to

Walter Lantz’s Dinky Doodle and Weakheart (1925); the eyes have it

Source: Digital copies, YouTube

552

Huemer interview by Adamson.

315

These characters’ eyes by themselves point to the specifics of this shift: Bobby’s eyes are

appropriately-sized black dots with partial outlines, a more naturalistic presentation, while

Dinky’s eyes are enormous, larger than his hands, with pupils stretching up and down, a wildly

figurative, non-naturalistic look. Animation style is also visible here: Bobby moves stiffly, while

Dinky moves more fluidly. In 1928, Ub Iwerks designed Mickey Mouse to be mostly circles,

namely his signature ears, which are easier to draw than lines. This aided Iwerks’ ability to

animate Mickey’s early films entirely by himself.

In caricaturing representations of the world in cultural terms, cartoon style refashions the

world according to human ways of seeing. Paul Wells proposes a deep understanding of the

significance of the media form of the American animated cartoon, as an aesthetic realm that

reimagines reality through the capacity of caricature to comment.

[T]he cartoon becomes inherently metaphysical because it is playing out creative ideas

which are extrapolated from, and interpretive of, observational and representational

codings. This invariably results in expression which moves beyond the recognisable

limits of the material world in order to comment upon them. If nothing else the American

cartoon tradition alone has redetermined how the parameters of 'law and order' may be

interpreted psychologically, politically and geographically.

This kind of speculation about the reasons why humans see the world naturally through cartoon

caricature is rare. It appears that there may be much analytical work to do to understand the

implications of hand-fashioned cartoon caricature for human perception.

In Joe Grant and Dick Huemer’s 1941 “Baby Weems,” to compensate for each drawing

remaining on the screen for seconds each, what was seen was attractive drawings of a very cute

316

character, a baby. When Alex Anderson created the first television cartoon, his network and

colleagues agreed that the star, a small rabbit, should also be cute. Apart from this, though,

Anderson’s and Ward’s studio embraced the messiness of television cartoon production, airing

its rough-hewn productions for the world to see, while drawing the viewer’s attention away to

their soundtrack.

UPA remains esteemed for its aesthetic ideals, and it is true that UPA chose to simplify

their animation for aesthetic reasons, most memorably in Gerald McBoing Boing (1950). But

they too needed to simplify for economic reasons; even they could not have made Disney-style

animation if they wanted to. John Hubley, one of the aesthetic leaders of the UPA studio has

recalled this. “The simplified nature of the UPA style was due to the fact that we were working

on lower budgets. We had to find ways of economizing and still get good results. So we cut

down on animation and got into stylized ways of handling action.”553

In September 1956, ex-

UPA animator John Hubley made a big impression on the emerging style of the early television

cartoon. Hubley brought his visually flat, attractively spare style to television in several 60-

second commercials for sweetened oatmeal maker Maypo that aired in New England television

markets at this time. Despite their excessively simple style, these cartoons represented

naturalistic slices of everyday life at the time, like a harried father trying to get a skeptical young

boy of around four to try the maple-flavored oatmeal. When the father tries the oatmeal and finds

that he likes it, and begins to finish eating the bowl, the boy cries out, “I want my Maypo!”554

553

John Ford’s 1973 interview with John and Faith Hubley is collected in Peary and Peary, American

Animated Cartoon. 554

“Topher” gives an excellent history of how Hubley made this commercial. “Marky Maypo,” Topher’s

Castle (blog), no date, https://www.lavasurfer.com/bchof/hof-maypo.html. One measure of the influence

of this early cartoon commercial is that a similar phrase popped up on an early cable television 25 years

later. In 1982, in an effort to get cable providers to carry the channel, the just-launched Music Television

aired promos of famous rock ‘n’ roll stars. A faint echo of the original can be heard in their cries of “I

want my MTV!” Fred Seibert, who would go on to lead Hanna-Barbera after its purchase by Turner,

317

Figure 38. “Marky Maypo,” reluctant child spokescharacter created and animated by John

Hubley, for Maypo brand maple-flavored oatmeal

Source: Eric Goldberg, “An Appreciation of Marky Maypo,” Cartoon Brew555

John Hubley’s influential commercials may have helped revolutionize not just animated

television advertising but the forthcoming television animation style of Bill Hanna and Joe

Barbera. Since early television cartoon characters did not move a lot, their designs and poses

needed to be attractive when holding still. Although surprisingly, Hanna-Barbera’s characters

were not generally cute in appearance, which even Hubley’s often were; H-B stylized their

characters in a surprisingly angular way that emphasized design. Hanna and Barbera had

began in cable television as one of the lead creatives in charge of creating Music Television (MTV). In

other words, Seibert was “there,” and has shared his recollections. Fred Seibert, “I WANT MY MTV!

Part 3,” Fred Seibert, no date, https://fredseibert.com/post/502390691/i-want-my-mtv-part-3. 555

October 10, 2008, https://www.cartoonbrew.com/advertising/an-appreciation-of-marky-maypo-

7830.html.

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inherited a number of talented creatives from Tex Avery around 1954, when Avery quit working

at MGM, like Ed Benedict, a character designer and layout artist. Sometime very close to when

the closing of the MGM cartoon studio was closing, apparently around December 1956, Bill

Hanna asked Ed Benedict to create a dog and a cat in a modern “television style” unlike the old

“pudgy round stuff” of studios like Terrytoons.556

Dick Bickenbach created model sheets,

showing the correct way for each artist to draw the character. Bickenbach would fine-tune

Benedict’s character designs to make them easier to animate, and establish the final character

models for the characters, which the animators worked from.557

The angular, flat cartoon style

that followed soon became the vessel for the new voice talent the new Hanna-Barbera studio

imported, namely Daws Butler, who began in radio and had worked for Bob Clampett in

television and Avery in cinema.

Ed Benedict’s character designs were central to the success not just of Hanna-Barbera’s

cartoons, but to the television cartoon in general, as Mike Mallory has written. “Layout artist and

character designer Ed Benedict[‘s] … crisp, attractive, deceptively simple-looking designs were

a major factor in ensuring the success of what came to be called limited animation.”558

But Bob

Jaques has said that “Bill and Joe did not know the modern style, until Ed Benedict and others

showed it to them.”559

Bill Hanna led the way for the new Hanna-Barbera studio’s television

cartoon style. Although he ultimately became proficient in it, I believe Thad Komorowski says

that Joe Barbera was quite resistant to adopting the spare style being pioneered in television by

people like John Hubley. By the time Hanna and Barbera hired Disney character designer Iwao

556

Mallory, Hanna-Barbera Cartoons, 24. 557

“It was Bick who would take a lot of Ed Benedict’s designs and modify them for the animators so that

they were easier to move around,” Iwao Takamoto confirms in his autobiography. Takamoto and Mallory,

Iwao Takamoto. 558

Michael Mallory, “Changing the Face of Animation,” in Beck, Animation Art, 180. 559

Komorowski and Jaques, “Tom & Jerry.”

319

Takamoto in 1961, Takamoto was impressed with the central role design played, in contrast to

the Disney studio. “[T]he H-B style of animation very design-oriented [in its approach to story

layout]. … In the early days of Hanna-Barbera, this technique was used in an absolutely clean,

pure way.”560

Hanna-Barbera artist Tony Benedict (no relation) showed the difference between

drawing a cinema-style naturalistic anthropomorphic bear and the television-native Yogi Bear,

using Ed Benedict’s design.

Figure 39. A realist way of drawing an anthropomorphic bear, a loose resemblance to Harman-

Ising’s Barney Bear. And a simplified, caricatured way to draw an anthropomorphic “funny

animal” bear, a spot-on drawing of Hanna-Barbera’s Yogi Bear

Source: Tony Benedict, The Last Cartoonery561

560

Takamoto and Mallory, Iwao Takamoto. 561

Tony Benedict, “Bear Necessities,” The Last Cartoonery, April 9, 2015

https://lastcartoonery.wordpress.com/2015/04/09/1710/.

320

While Ed Benedict himself did not understand the attention people paid to him, his designs

fundamentally changed the course of animation history. In commenting on Ed Benedict’s design

of Yogi Bear, John K. has written that Benedict’s drawings are worth hundreds of millions of

dollars.562

Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera had high creative standards. For decades, Hanna and Barbera

only really hired animators who had worked in cinema—indeed, mostly they hired from

Disney’s studio, known for its rigorous artistic training. Hanna and Barbera believed that

animators trained for the subtlety of cinema were best prepared to achieve the precision required

for television (this old-fashioned view unfortunately prevented many younger artists from

entering production for television). Layout artist Lance Nolley talked about the studio in a later

interview.

Joe Barbera was a perfectionist. You had to please Joe in your layout. ... [H]e’d work

very closely with us. He was a very fine designer himself, and he had a great story mind.

… [F]rankly, all of the key artists, key animators at Hanna-Barbera, were Disney-trained

men. All of them.563

John Kricfalusi has written a great deal about his affinity for Hanna-Barbera’s design

sensibility, owing to Ed Benedict, revealing where an important part of his own design

sensibility arose from. Kricfalusi goes so far as to claim that the characters of even the most

famous earlier cinema animation studios were not very well designed.

[M]y favorite characters to draw were always Ed’s. I just loved the design of the Hanna

Barbera cartoons and was aware that they actually HAD design. Most other cartoons

562

John Kricfalusi, “Ed Benedict talks with John K.,” included in The Flintstones: The Complete First

Season DVD set, 2004. 563

Lance Nolley, “Lance Nolley,” interview by Don Peri, Working with Disney: Interviews with

Animators, Producers, and Artists, University Press of Mississippi, 2011.

321

were sort of generic—Disney, Warner Bros and MGM—I mean generic in design—they

were all made of balls and pears. Hanna Barbera had a real look about it and it fascinated

me.564

If John K. is right that earlier studios did not pay close attention to design—which is debatable—

it would reflect that much of the appearance of characters was under the control of the specific

animators who animated their movement; often only a single animator was charged with

animating a character in a Disney film, for instance. During the process of simplification while

developing their early television cartoons, Hanna-Barbera foregrounded the angular designs of

Ed Benedict. The angular nature of the drawings can be seen in Benedict’s initial model sheet for

Fred Flintstone.565

Another artist, presumably, sketched a square grid over the upper-left

drawing, evidently trying to figure out how to mechanically imitate Benedict’s drawings.

564

John Kricfalusi, “Design 3 - Ed Benedict and Fred Flintstone,” John K. Stuff (blog), April 13, 2006,

https://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/04/design-3-ed-benedict-and-fred.html. 565

The model sheet is so early that it has the original title of the cartoon on it, The Gladstones, which was

crossed out when the show’s name was changed.

322

Figure 40. Early Fred Flintstone model sheet by Ed Benedict (“EB” written in lower-right

corner). Grid in upper left analyzes the design of Fred’s face

Source: Google Image search

323

Figure 41. Ed Benedict’s notes on his designs of Fred Flintstone, giving drawing instructions to

animators

Source: John Kricfalusi and Amid Amidi. “Analyzing Ed,” Animation Blast566

By the late 1960s, Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera realized that making increasingly vast

quantities of animation for television required making increasing serious artistic sacrifices. Lance

Nolley was there at the time, and recalled the pressure of the studio’s endless production.

“[T]hey try for perfection, as close as they can, but [there] is an insatiable appetite [for]

animation at H and B. You simply can’t fill it up. There is always a demand for more artists”.567

Over time, Hanna-Barbera gave up its distinctive character designs for an increasingly

homogenous style. John K. began his career working for Hanna-Barbera in the 1980s,

supervising the layout process with artists in Taiwan, during production of a new season of The

Jetsons. Later, Kricfalusi described this homogenous aesthetic as “the style of fear,” referring to

566

John Kricfalusi and Amid Amidi. “Analyzing Ed: John Kricfalusi Talks About His Favorite Animation

Designer,” Animation Blast 8, May 2002. 567

Peri, “Lance Nolley.”

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the drive towards least objectionable programming and the risk of upsetting anyone. Explaining

his own evolution as an artist, he has written “No more crap!” There have been consequences in

his own career, but he has stated his own belief: “Fear nothing!”568

Like the new consumer plastics of the time, the early television cartoon did not aspire to

be a detached art form, but to be a functional design form. Early on, Hanna-Barbera’s distinctive

aesthetic supported its measured but smart parody and satire, which commented on social and

cultural phenomena by representing them in their shows. Its limited animation at that time can

still probably be considered modern, a novel, inspired adaptation and refinement of the

classicism of Disney’s cinema animations. But one could easily argue that animation helped play

a role in pushing past modernism on television into postmodernism, in the Saturday morning

cartoon years, because animation so flexibly allowed marketers and networks to fundamentally

recraft media in aesthetically ideological ways. The creative slide into stylistic inertia in the

1970s can legitimately be described as what philosopher Fredric Jameson calls pastiche. For

Jameson, pastiche has been emptied out of its critical capacity for comment; while it still

represents the social world, it is nothing but “blank parody, parody that has lost its sense of

humor.”569

“There was no rule that said limited animation had to be crappy,” admits Darrell Van

Citters. “It’s just that it often was.”570

Television animation emerged historically at a time when artists and the public were

conscious of variations in animation style. While the style of limited animation was effectively a

choice against full animation, it should be understood more as the adaptation of new texts to the

568

John Kricfalusi, “Slab’s First Fist All in One EZ to Read Post,” John K. Stuff (blog), December 08,

2010, https://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2010/12/slabs-first-fist-all-in-one-ez-to-read.html. John K.’s

idiosyncratic perfectionism was likely the reason he was unceremoniously kicked off of his own cartoon,

which his network had assiduously branded as his own creation, The Ren & Stimpy Show. 569

Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” 570

Van Citters, Jay Ward Productions.

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new medium and genre of the television cartoon. Cartoon style is thought of as visual, and it is

simpler to talk about its visual style. While visual caricature inherently defines the cartoon, the

early television cartoon is more aural than it is visual. The new cartoon stylizes itself visually to

direct the viewer’s attention to its sound, in part to its music and sound effects. Here, images are

somewhat like props that support the sound. Television voice acting communicates its written

style, its story, and its personality. These are new ways in which the early television cartoon is

cartoony, the ways in which it is a different kind of cartoon. The television cartoon was a new

kind of “illustrated radio,” in the words of Chuck Jones.

The early television cartoon is more stylized, which means it is also more cultural.

Television cartoon humor is timely and speaks to contemporary cultural social dynamics and

debates. Domesticity is an overriding context, not surprising given the context of its reception in

the home, and on television animation became domesticated into the cartoon. Since the age of

television began, viewers understood what animation is and what it is capable of. They didn’t

need to be wowed with a sophisticated animated feature film. Instead, they partly just turn to

television cartoon characters for one-sided parasocial experiences.

Caricature is an inherent aspect of the stylization of the early television cartoon. Long

before television, caricature has always relied on simplification and exaggeration. Since the

television cartoon is similar, its caricatures are satisfying to viewers, even though they are more

stereotyped and less archetyped than in cinema. Like caricature, the early television cartoon is

generally opposed to the Disney-style naturalistic animation of cinema. While implicitly similar

to UPA’s abstracted style, Hanna-Barbera has more in common with the goofy character comedy

of Alex Anderson’s and Jay Ward’s Crusader Rabbit. Joe Barbera’s personal cartoon style stems

from Paul Terry’s New York story-driven, slapstick humor, while Bill Hanna’s Los Angeles

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personal style arises from Walt Disney’s character-focused charm and sentiment. Hanna-

Barbera’s house style is both Disney-like in its simplicity and Terry-like in its exaggeration. This

unlikely hybrid established the defining style of the early television cartoon.

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CHAPTER 10

THE PRINCIPLE OF SOUND:

PRIORITY AND STRUCTURE

Sound is the force which most animates the early television cartoon. Here, sound is

primary, while image is secondary. Early cartoon series in the new medium are full of largely

static poses, limited but slightly animated, and repeated. This is a specific sense in which the

animation of the early television cartoon is limited: in a sense, it displaces its animation from the

visual to the aural. The new avoidance of visual animation has stigmatized the newer cartoon in

the minds of many observers since its beginnings in the “comic strip-style” cartoon Crusader

Rabbit. But this sound-dependence should not be a source of shame: it is a technical difference

of media, not a fatal flaw that dooms the television cartoon from ever achieving the status of art.

I wish to rebrand the television cartoon as illustrated radio, as a sound form supported by image.

Television itself is an evolution of radio, in its technology, economics, and

programming.571

High-fidelity frequency modulation (FM) radio broadcasting technology,

invented in 1933 by Edwin Armstrong, was built into television from the beginning.572

A

dramatic advance over the earlier AM radio technology, FM had actually been shunned by much

of the radio industry at the time because it was incompatible with existing radio sets. FM audio

was a more robust standard of audio than the comparably crude video technology that defined

571

Shawn VanCour, “From Radio to Television: Sound Style and Audio Technique in Early TV

Anthology Dramas,” 2017. VanCour writes,

Radio haunted television at every turn, clinging ever-present to the new screen medium and

providing both ready-made solutions to common production problems and a convenient foil

against which television could define itself. 572

Launiainen, Everything Wireless.

328

U.S. television until the 21st century. The most dominant domestic color television standard

during the latter half of the 20th

century was called the National Television System Committee

(NTSC) standard; many video technicians apparently did not respect this standard, instead

calling it “Never The Same Color.”573

Despite not realizing the reason why, most viewers were

willing to put up with the visual shortcomings of television, evidently because sound

compensated for poor image fidelity. For these reasons, it is a slight mystification to believe that

the early television cartoon is generally a visual medium. Its sound is actually more important.

Its images then accompany its sound.

While sound dominates the image, the early television cartoon is nevertheless inherently

a hybrid of both. Rick Altman has offered a valuable corrective to those who regard cinema itself

as visual: “Conventional wisdom has it that the sound track in classical narrative films is by and

large redundant. … I … show that the conventions of classical narrative … make the image

redundant.” The spirit of Altman’s critique is helpful, but his argument makes less sense for

cinema. Also, his argument is incomplete in this context. Any cartoon is a coupling of both a

caricatured image and socially relevant text in some form; here, the text is a rich soundtrack

dominated by voice acting. Similar to what Shawn VanCour says of television, the TV cartoon

should be understood “as neither a strictly visual nor aural medium but a combined, audiovisual

one.”574

10.1

The Sound of the Early Television Cartoon

Animation is usually thought of as a visual medium. Classical cinema animation is more

of a visual form than the early television cartoon, which is more of a sound form. But sound, an

573

Media theorist and historian John Durham Peters has mentioned this joke to me in conversation, which

media theorist Friedrich Kittler was apparently also fond of mentioning. 574

Shawn VanCour, “Television Music and the History of Television Sound,” 2011.

329

invisible presence not often acknowledged by viewers, is integral to the communication of all

animation. Before sound, animation was a novelty form that struggled to communicate even

humor. With sound, animation became a vibrant, powerful, subtle art form. Without sound, the

television cartoon is disquietingly dull, because it’s not clear what is happening; its sound is

integral. Jeremy Butler writes that many television genres could not exist without the meaning

that sound conveys. “Sound affects the viewer and conveys television meaning just as much, and

possibly more, than the image does. Indeed, so little is communicated in the visuals of some

genres—talk shows, game shows, soap operas—that they would cease to exist without sound.”575

In all forms of animation, sound is a composite “track” composed of three distinct but

overlapping sub-tracks: voice acting, sound effects, and music. Like an aural caricature, each of

these becomes more simplified and exaggerated in cartoon animation. Sound effects are the

easiest to imagine in isolation, because they are unabashedly wacky.576

Their comic conventions,

which stretch back through radio and vaudeville, have trained viewers to accept bizarrely non-

naturalistic sound substitutions for actions in cartoons. The voice given to the cartoon character

by their voice actors sounds more cartoony than a real life voice; it is also more burlesque. For

their characterization, animation voice actors often explicitly or implicitly mimic stereotypes

associated with certain kinds of characters. Early television cartoon music is often playful and

buoyant; this is in contrast to the more serious classical soundtracks of many cinema cartoons

and animated feature films. Through the 1950s, cinema cartoons often had string orchestral

music, as did the scores of Hollywood films generally. Less frequently, but still commonly, horn-

based jazz music provided the backdrop. Starting in the mid-1960s, pop music and rock ‘n’ roll

575

Jeremy G. Butler, “Style and Sound,” chapter 10 of Television: Critical Methods and Applications (4th

Edition), 2012. 576

My colleague Patrick Sullivan, a sound scholar, describes Hanna-Barbera’s sound effects in this way.

330

has steadily crept more into the television cartoon, with cartoons about musicians in bands, like

The Beatles and Josie and the Pussycats.

The interplay between sound and image may be the essential basis of the animated

cartoon, although the relationship of the elements in the early television cartoon is looser. Sound

direction invisibly changes the focus within a scene through time.577

In different media, texts,

and genres, the relationship between these three elements assumes a different hierarchy. Music is

the most dominant sound in cinema animation.578

Effects are the most distinctive sound in video

games and smartphone apps. Voice acting is the most important in the early television cartoon.

The sound of the television cartoon often assumes a hierarchy of these three forms. Alf Clausen,

longtime (but not current) music composer for The Simpsons, has described his frustration at

being the low man on the totem pole, opposite the well-recognized voice actors for the show.

“Unfortunately, in many series, including this one, the pecking order is dialogue first, sound

effects next, and music third.”579

The four sections of this chapter cover: sound in the early television cartoon generally;

sound effects in the cinema cartoon and early television cartoon; music in the cinema cartoon;

and music in the early television cartoon. I also make my argument for reclaiming the term

“illustrated radio,” and talk about how to understand cartoon sound generally. Voice acting was

part of the initial version of this chapter, but is now covered in Chapter 8, as personality voice.

Here, sound effects, and music are each given a separate focus devoted to understanding the

577

Alex Koch explained these points to me in conversation in November 2019. 578

“Music is virtually always of the greatest importance to the cartoon film—the composer is, in fact,

frequently more essential to the animator than is the writer,” Halas and Manvell say about cinema. While

I argue that sound is more important to television, this statement would admittedly be questionable about

television. Technique of Film Animation. 579

Alf Clausen, “An Interview with Alf Clausen,” interview by Daniel Goldmark, Daniel Goldmark and

Yuval Taylor (eds), The Cartoon Music Book, 2002.

331

specificity of that aspect of the cartoon soundtrack. Throughout, relevant history will continue to

arise.

In all animation, there is interplay between image and sound. But on television, animation

shifts from a basis in image to a basis in sound. Television may be thought of as a visual medium

paradoxically because of the believability of the soundtrack, which imparts authority to visuals.

The vocal track in the television cartoon is finished long before the animation, and is the basis of

the animator’s work. Character voices are generally the focus of the early television cartoon. In

cinema, animation is the primary means of character expression; occasionally, the characters stop

moving to talk. On television, voice acting is the primary means of character expression;

occasionally, the characters stop talking to move.

Sound effects mark and emphasize actions, usually. In the early television cartoon,

effects massage perception of things that happen, persuading the viewer aurally that things are

happening, without always very much visual emphasis. Here, sound designer Robin Beauchamp

explains that sound effects tend to be exaggerated (caricatured) because “the real sound of a

source is often less convincing or entertaining than the exaggerated substitution.”580

Music in the television cartoon plays an all-around, holistic role. It acts as a kind of glue,

holding all the other elements together. During the opening title sequence of a television cartoon,

music is typically overt, bright, and catchy, a fanfare kicking off the proceedings. This trend

began with The Mickey Mouse Club. During a cartoon episode, music is usually “underscored”

and confined to the background. Music supports the narrative and the flow of its continuity. It is

nearly always present, except during dramatic and frequently uncomfortable moments when it

sometimes ceases for heightened effect.

580

Beauchamp, Sound for Animation 21.

332

All animation sound is an evolving dance of voice acting, sound effects, and music. The

actor’s vocal performance defines the character, giving them a human uniqueness. A sound

effect usually indicates that something happens. Music then brings the character together with

the goings on of the story world. The interplay between these three sound elements becomes the

animation’s soundtrack.581

Contrary to common assumptions, the visual cartoon animation is

based around its soundtrack, not the other way around.582

In television animation, voice acting

and the director’s timing become the initial soundtrack, the blueprint of the cartoon, in

essence.583

Thus, these early sounds and silences temporally structure the whole cartoon,

embodying the director’s direction.584

Silences are left in the track at this point to indicate that

sound effects and/or music will be inserted in later.585

In the final edit, sound effects and music

are added to the voice track to create the soundtrack in the final edit. The musical director then

composes the music to follow the animation, often with the aid of an aural “click track,” a kind

of metronome marking. Upon broadcast, the soundtrack helps orient the viewer and fills in the

detail missing from the image. Sound here is actually more authentic than image is; sound

intuitively convinces us that something is happening. “Sound is persuasive,” sound scholar

Sandra Pauletto writes. “[W]hen combined with picture, [sound] can fool us in many ways.”586

The silence of silent cinema was accepted, but imposed intimidating limitations on it. Lee

de Forest, known as “the father of radio,” proposed in 1918 that “voice and music” could

581

Thanks to Alex Koch. 582

There have been rare exceptions. In the early 1930s, the Fleischer studio “post-synced” the music and

voice acting to the animation after it was drawn. The results seem hopelessly crude by comparison with

Disney’s films: this process resulted in stilted voice acting and an unnatural musical flow. 583

Bill Hanna explained that, “After the material had been developed on the storyboards, the dialogue

was then recorded, providing a soundtrack for the cartoon.” Hanna and Ito, Friends. 584

Thanks to Jeff Shuter for these points. 585

I am assuming that this is the process. I am not actually positive of this. 586

Pauletto is quoting Foley sound artist Caoimhe Doyle here.

333

complete “the too-long silent film.”587

In animation, this happened when Walt Disney gambled

that adding music to his previously silent Mickey Mouse cartoons could strengthen their appeal.

Steamboat Willie (1928) was not actually the first animation to sync sound and image (the

Fleischers had been making sing-along films for at least three years,588

using the sound system

by Lee de Forest which Disney’s was based upon).589

But Disney’s use of sound enabled a newly

entertaining kind of cartoon. This was no novelty—the sound facilitated a richly entertaining

synthesis, a kind of cartoon humor that was irresistibly funny, inviting, and human. It is

inherently a performance, communicating emotion as well as meaning. There is an amnesia

about what cartoons were like before sound, because of Western culture’s visual bias; since

sound is invisible, it is often forgotten. To watch any “silent” cartoon from before 1928 is to see

a more helpless kind of cartoon: actions are mushy without accompanying sound effects;

narrative is often implicit but not explicit, because of the general struggle to convey verbal

meaning; and characters are more vague, because they literally have no voice.

Sound is a tool people use for orientation. In animation, sound serves as a kind of guide,

aurally highlighting the events that are unfolding.590

The television cartoon embraced sound from

its earliest moments, in Crusader Rabbit. “[Creator Alex] Anderson ... conceived of a practical

approach to animating for television by simplifying the visuals and using the soundtrack to carry

587

Jon Newsom, “‘A Sound Idea’: Music for Animated Films.” 588

The Fleischer studio’s “Song Car-Tunes” series was the first to use a ‘Follow the Bouncing Ball’

format to lead audiences in theater sing-alongs of popular songs. Much later, this became the technique

for guiding people in karaoke singing. 589

There was a bitter battle over control of Lee de Forest’s new Phonofilm cinema sound system. In 1927,

producer Pat Powers attempted to buy out de Forest’s corporation, which had been working with the

Fleischers on their sound cartoons. When this was unsuccessful, Powers hired a former DeForest

technician, William Garrity, to produce a cloned version of the Phonofilm system. Powers dubbed the

resulting system “Powers Cinephone.” De Forest could not afford to legally challenge this patent

infringement. After Powers convinced Disney to use his Cinephone system for Steamboat Willie, de

Forest’s legacy began to fade in popular memory. 590

Thanks to Jeff Shuter for conversation on this.

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the story.”591

Sound tends to disappear into the goings-on of media texts, but actually plays a

crucial rhetorical role of naturalizing what happens in perception. Television being a temporal

medium, in the television cartoon, sound orients the viewer in time, amidst changing

circumstances, even when there are few visual clues.

10.2

Sound Effects in Cinema and Early Television

Sound effects play a large but often unrecognized role in making the early television

cartoon cartoony. A sound effect supports the voice actor because it usually communicates that

some action has occurred; without sound effects, in an important sense, the cartoon character is

not able to do anything. Only with sound effects do cartoon actions “stick” with the viewer.

Contrary to commonsense understanding of human senses of vision and hearing being separate,

in perceptual experience, hearing and vision are bound up together, shaping each other. By

adding aural force, animation sound effects sharpen the impact of the visual image.592

This is

relevant to the early television cartoon because it lacks visual emphasis. Research has actually

found that effective sound effects can cause jerky animated movements to be perceived as

smooth.593

What makes Hanna-Barbera’s sound effects memorable is that the studio grasped the

figurative nature of the animation and matched it with similarly caricatured sounds. The studio

inherited the legacy of important sound effects artists at Warner Bros. and Disney. Between the

1950s and 1990s, Hanna-Barbera’s sound effects essentially became the sounds of television

591

Karl Cohen, “The Origins of TV Animation: Crusader Rabbit and Rocky and Bullwinkle.” 592

Sandra Pauletto, The Voice Delivers the Threats, Foley Delivers the Punch: Embodied Knowledge in

Foley Artistry, 2017. 593

Georgia Mastoropoulou, Kurt Debattista, Alan Chalmers, and Tom Troscianko. “The Influence of

Sound Effects on the Perceived Smoothness of Rendered Animations,” 2005.

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cartoons, as sound designer Dallas Taylor suggests. “The popularity of the Hanna-Barbera sound

library has given cartoons an almost universal sound-language.”594

Any typical cartoon sound effect is usually imagined to be a “hard effect.” This clear,

discrete sound marks the occurrence of some action in the story world on screen, evident for

every character present. The sound effect is tightly synced with the animation on screen to create

a clear audiovisual event in the cartoon. Sound effects have become one of the key signatures of

the figurative animated cartoon; their use in humor has often accompanied “slapstick” comic

violence. The most common use of sound effects was to indicate the occurrence of some action.

But hard sound effects were also regularly inserted into the soundtrack to add sonic impact to a

funny gag. One of the earliest recognizable examples of a sound device had been used in

physical stage comedy for hundreds of years: a “slap stick” was two wide and thin pieces of

wood stacked on top of each other and attached together at one end. When one character would

hit another with this simple wood device, even without much force, a sharp crack would strike

the room, actually softening the violence from a physical blow into a more comic jab. “Soft” or

“background” sound effects are not synced with the image and usually aurally indicate an

ambient aspect of the cartoon environment, like the sound of a city street or the sound of wind

blowing.

Sound effects are often intimately intertwined with music and voice acting on the

soundtrack of any cartoon. Sound effects are usually played in between lines of spoken dialogue

and synchronized with the music. Often, they are scored in time like musical instruments. Some

animation music more resembles sound effects than music, like the soundtrack of Disney’s

Steamboat Willie, which joyfully syncs exaggerated sounds with its caricatured animation. Hard

594

Roman Mars, “Classic Cartoon Sound Effects!” 99% Invisible, Episode 345, March 12, 2019,

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/classic-cartoon-sound-effects/transcript/.

336

sound effects are usually discrete, short sounds, which can serve a percussive role in the

soundtrack. When isolated, such effects often fall on a beat, but during a musical rest of silence,

as a “punctuation point.”595

Other sound effects are repeated and rhythmic.

Sound effects, like voice acting and music, should all match the visual style of the

cartoon in its caricature or realism. “Effects can be made up of natural sounds, specially created

artificial sound effects, and specifically musical effects,” Halas and Manvell write.596

Sound

design in cartoon animation tends to be exaggerated, just like the visual caricature. “The abstract

nature of animation often calls for a metaphoric sound treatment. … In many cases drastic shifts

are made to synthesize entirely new effects. Reversing [for example] creates variation and masks

the original effect while often preserving a logical rhythmic element.”597

By contrast, the Looney

Tunes actually acquired a heightened kind of realism from Treg Brown’s use of sound effects of

real things. This was somewhat unusual. Many cartoons have sound effects created by modifying

the recorded sound to exaggerate it to match animation effects. Often, Thomas and Johnston

comment, “it is necessary to run the recorded track through some of the sound equipment, to

reverberate it, or take out the lows, or speed it up, or combine it with other sounds.”598

Actually,

natural sound effects can threaten the illusion of animation, because of their realism. Stylized

cartoons tend to have equally stylized sound effects.

The use of natural sound effects in cartoon films … make an unnatural contrast to the

drawn image which appears to produce them; for example, the real noise made by a train

when starting sounds odd when set against the simple image of a drawn train pulling

595

“Treg Brown added his comic genius with sound effects, which were recorded as a “punctuation point”

for the music.” Skweres (2007) here describes the finishing touches that sound effects add to the cartoon

soundtrack. 596

Halas and Manvell, Technique of Film Animation. 597

Beauchamp, Sound for Animation, 82. 598

Thomas and Johnston, Illusion of Life.

337

away. … Whatever kind of sound is used, natural or contrived, it establishes the nature of

the acoustic idiom which must be used for the rest of the picture. … In general, [the

animator] is likely to prefer to use wholly artificial sound effects because these are more

congenial to his medium. He is then free to choose not only the nature but the exact

timing of his effects in advance of fitting them to the animation itself.

The sound effect and its visual representation, more than characters speaking or music,

meld cleanly for the viewer into one holistic and satisfying animated gesture. “Good sound

effects will add life and excitement to a film,” Thomas and Johnston write, “whereas drab,

ordinary sounds will quickly drain what life there might be in the action.”599

Comic sound

effects, what Thomas and Johnston call “funny sounds,” are zany: they are goofy, absurd,

carnivalesque flights of fancy. But there is no inherent connection between a visual action and a

sound effect. After 1928, the particular pairings of a specific sound effect with some visual

animated action were perceptually novel, and often incongruous pairings. Over time, these

choices become more conventional and taken-for-granted, an unacknowledged aspect of the

animated cartoon itself.

During the silent period, before “talking pictures,” sound effects, like music, were added

to cartoons during the screening, usually by percussion drummers hired as part of the band, using

musical instruments to interpret the kinds of sounds that could effectively accompany actions on

screen. After the introduction of sound, movie studios hired some of the same musicians to come

into a sound studio to record their talents. “The pit drummers would bring an assortment of items

commonly used in the trade with them: slide whistles, jew’s harps, bulb horns, and brake

drums”.600

Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston recalled their experiences witnessing the sound

599

Thomas and Johnston, Illusion of Life. 600

Finan, “The History of Animation Sound [Effects],” 2015.

338

effects of early moving pictures. “It is almost impossible to think of the early films without the

slide whistle, ratchet, pop-gun, xylophone, and bells.”601

These particular pairings are in a

figurative realm of art, far from science, where the decisions are fundamentally creative. Jim

MacDonald, the lead “sound man” of the Disney studio, said: “The sound man must think about

what the sound is going to do for the picture—not just how it ought to sound.”602

One of the main ways to make a sound effect funny is to choose an unexpected or

incongruous sound to accompany a visual animated gag. Just one person deserves much of the

credit for exploring and refining this counterintuitive process: “Treg” Brown, a Warner Bros.

sound editor who worked with composer Carl Stalling to create the soundtrack to the studio’s

sound-focused Looney “Tunes” from the very beginning, in 1930. Unlike earlier musical

approaches, sound synchronization enabled more creative decision-making during production.

Treg Brown is credited as the first sound effects editor to introduce sound effects from things

that were not musical instruments.603

Sound editor Kate Finan explains that Brown’s “out-of-

context use of real world sounds” represented a kind of “editorial” audio design, “a methodology

that was entirely new to animation.”604

Brown brought to his work amazingly unconventional

thinking. He recorded the sound of any kind of object, and then paired it with a cartoon action,

usually, following a crazy cartoon logic, nothing like the viewer would expect.605

Animation

director Friz Freleng recalled, “Treg would try anything … The more offbeat [his sound effects]

601

Thomas and Johnston, Illusion of Life. 602

Quoted in Thomas and Johnston, Illusion of Life. 603

Animation director and sound designer Ben Burtt says this in Crash! Bang! Boom! The Wild Sounds of

Treg Brown. 604

Finan, “Animation Sound [Effects].” 605

“[Treg Brown] had a … famous cabinet, and inside … was a myriad of what you and I might call junk

… [But] he had such a wild imagination that he could create any kind of sound from what he had.” Wild

Sounds of Treg Brown.

339

were, the funnier they were.”606

Brown’s skill made this incongruous approach to juxtaposing

realistic sound effects with animation “the hallmark sonic characteristic of Warner Bros.

Animation.”

Jim MacDonald was hired at Disney in 1935. With The Three Little Pigs, Disney’s

character animation was becoming more realist and needing richer sound effects. “MacDonald

[was hired] to begin creating custom sound effect machines that he could record inside the

studio,” writes Finan. He built upon Treg Brown’s innovations to expand the sonic universe of

the cartoon beyond musical instruments. MacDonald was a musician with a firm command of

musical notation and performance. But his innovation at the Disney studio was to create all kinds

of non-musical sound machines to accompany cartoon actions.

[Jim] MacDonald largely pioneered the creation of sound effect contraptions such as

wind and rain machines, glass jug motors, and bowed frog ribbits, which replicated the

natural sounds of the world in unexpected ways. In his tenure at Disney, MacDonald is

said to have created over 28,000 sound effects for 139 features films and 335 shorts.607

MacDonald was revered for his ability to perform his sound-producing devices live, in time to

the screening of a finished animation. MacDonald said that the sound effect performer “feel” the

effect as he makes the sound. “[I]n support of this philosophy [he] threw himself violently into

everything he did, from pounding on a door to choking himself with the hic-cups,” Thomas and

Johnston wrote. “Being a musician he saw to it that the sounds always fit properly into the

score”.608

As recording technology advanced, Treg Brown took a recorder out into the world to

record real-life sounds. Like MacDonald, Treg Brown was trained as a musician. But Brown’s

606

Friz Freleng, in Wild Sounds of Treg Brown. 607

Finan, “Animation Sound [Effects].” 608

Thomas and Johnston, Illusion of Life.

340

most innovative idea was going into Warner Bros.’ film library and recording the sounds of the

real objects and machines featured in Warner Bros. feature films. Sound designer Ben Burtt

describes Treg Brown’s unconventional editorial approach to sound-action pairing.

If [an animated character] came quick to a stop, he’d put in a car skid from, you know, a

Jimmy Cagney gangster movie... If somebody was hit on the head and flew out the

window, there’d be a thunderclap, followed by the sound of a biplane in a spin, recorded

for Dawn Patrol [a 1938 aerial war film]. [I]t was this imposition of realistic sounds into

the fantasy world of the cartoons which gave them comic impact.609

While Treg Brown created many of his own sounds, unlike Jim MacDonald, his approach

to designing the sounds to make up a cartoon relied less on performance and more on deploying

recorded sounds. Where Jim MacDonald stored sound devices he created, Brown was the first

sound editor to begin cataloging the recorded sound tape he recorded.610

Over the years Brown’s

library of sound effects became increasingly large. Thus, over time, Brown could rely more on

choosing sound effects from his library and less on the messy work of performing and capturing

the sounds.

Sound effects were more fundamental to Bill Hanna’s and Joe Barbera’s Tom and Jerry

series than to Looney Tunes, because unlike the Warners characters, Tom and Jerry could not

talk. Most of the Tom and Jerry cartoons were richly animated in pantomimed nonverbal acting,

and without voice acting, actions were fundamental plot points. For these reasons, the sound

effects here carried more meaning and expression. Recorded sound effects were tightly woven

together with the music, to create a dynamic counterpoint as a structure for the cartoon. Nearly

609

Ben Burtt, in Wild Sounds of Treg Brown. In the documentary, Burtt describes how he has more

recently used methods inspired by Treg Brown to provide sound effects for films like the original Star

Wars trilogy, such as the speeder bike chase in Return of the Jedi. 610

Jerry Beck, in Wild Sounds of Treg Brown.

341

all of the vocal sound effects were produced by Bill Hanna himself; these needed to be recorded

early in production because they were a kind of proxy vocal track, needed to time the cartoons.

Greg Watson was the leading sound effects artist at MGM, and directed the sound effect

production for Tom and Jerry, overseeing “a very efficient crew” whose “services were sought

out,” even by other film production companies “to make noises many thought impossible to

make.”611

MGM composer Scott Bradley was so closely involved in working with sound effects

that he created many himself in his musical scores. “No composer could escape the influence that

sound effects had on the cartoon score,” Daniel Goldmark has written about MGM music

composer Scott Bradley. “Bradley seems to have incorporated as many sound effects as possible

into his scores and thereby controlled, at least occasionally, the balance between [the] two”.612

When MGM closed its animation studio in 1957, Greg Watson was tasked with carrying

important sound effects on to Hanna-Barbera. He chose “[t]hings … that we couldn’t expect to

make ourselves,” like ricochets, the sounds of jet planes and railroad engines. “We got to Hanna-

Barbera with that nucleus, and then we began to expand.”613

Sound effects proved to be crucial to making the limited animation of the early television

cartoon “pop” on television. UPA first dramatized the potential of sound effects to supplement

limited animation in their famous film short, Gerald McBoing Boing, by featuring a boy who

speaks not words but sound effects. Although mostly in the film this was a kind of aural novelty

without accompanying animated action. UPA tried to extend Gerald’s story into a very early

television cartoon series with The Gerald McBoing Boing Show (1956-57) … they found that

611

These are the recollections of sound artist Lovell Norman, in conversation with journalist K. M. Hall.

“Couple Built Career on Cartoons,” Kingman Daily Miner (Arizona), September 2, 1992, reprinted by

Yowp on Tralfaz blog. “He Helped Make Tom Scream,” November 24, 2012,

https://tralfaz.blogspot.com/2012/11/he-helped-make-tom-scream.html. 612

Daniel Goldmark, Tunes for ‘Toons. 613

Barbera, Hanna, Watson, Foley, “Sound Effects Roundtable.”

342

making a television series about a boy who cannot speak raises serious problems of

entertainment. Crusader Rabbit had more plot points, but it leaned on voice acting more than its

“two-reel comedy sound effects.”614

In other words, its lack of animation and tight sound effects

more suggested actions than depicted them. Joe Barbera recalls his and Bill Hanna’s dilemma

when planning how to design their television animation. How could they make their new

cartoons entertaining when they had so many fewer animation drawings? Sound effects were a

key answer, they realized, because the effects could “carry” their characters, even without many

drawings.

We realized early on that sound effects were ... more important in limited animation

[than] they were in full animation. So we never cut back on sound effects. ... In cutting

back, we had to use every trick to put over the feeling of motion and animation ...

miraculously, it worked. ... [Our cartoons] had good sound effects. ... The one thing

[they] had less of was drawings.

To meet the needs of Hanna-Barbera’s greatly expanded cartoon universe, Greg Watson

implicitly or explicitly seemed to want to create and capture every kind of sound that could

conceivably enter into a cartoon. “Throughout the 1960’s, Hanna-Barbera’s Greg Watson created

a cartoon sound library that paralleled Tregoweth Brown’s Warner Bros. library,” Kate Finan

writes. “Watson created iconic sound after sound on The Jetsons, The Yogi Bear Show, and The

Flintstones.”615

The Flintstones, in particular, ran for six years, continually needing sound effect

production; over the course of its run, up to 70 hours of audio were recorded and used for the

show.

614

Erickson, “Crusader Rabbit,” 225. 615

Finan, “Animation Sound [Effects].”

343

Curiously and often annoyingly, Hanna and Barbera installed a laugh track into The

Flintstones. H-B writer Tony Benedict has said that the laughter was meant to balance the

serious adult themes of the early seasons: “When we were developing the show, we weren’t

actually sure if it was funny. So we put in the laughs.”616

Some people consider the laugh track to

be a fourth kind of audio track, in addition to the voices, effects, and music. Of course, the laugh

track in The Flintstones is strange because it is sound recorded live. Since cartoons are not live

and cannot be watched live by a studio audience, this always struck me as frustratingly

incongruous.617

Notably, when The Simpsons was created to follow in its footsteps, there was no

laugh track. Some have said this made it hard to know when to laugh. But it foregrounds the

writing and voice acting, which must deliver comedy without such a crutch.

When Hoyt Curtin became Hanna-Barbera’s music composer, he followed the earlier

example set by Scott Bradley, recording many sound effects using the capacities of his orchestra.

Describing his ideal choice, he sought “a percussion guy from hell … because they help you out

with the sound effects part.”618

Sound artist Pat Foley took up Greg Watson’s banner around

1977 and continued at H-B until 1990,619

when he apparently left to work on The Ren & Stimpy

Show.620

“Pat Foley continued [Greg Watson’s] this work for Hanna-Barbera through the 1980’s.

Because of their shared legacy,” Kate Finan has written, “the Hanna-Barbera library remains the

616

I recall Tony Benedict making these remarks at the event “Celebrating the Glory Days of Hanna-

Barbera Cartoon Studios,” held at the Hollywood Heritage Museum in Hollywood, California, on June 8,

2016. I checked this with him in my interview with him and Jerry Eisenberg. “Actually, I just stole that

from Alan Dinehart,” Benedict then said, referring to Alan Dinehart, Jr., a voice director for the studio. 617

Many of the “canned laughter” recordings used across Hollywood were provided by one man, Charley

Douglas. TV Guide wrote about his influence in a two-part series in 1966. “The Hollywood Sphinx and

His Laff Box,” July 2-8, 1966, 3-6; “Help! I’m a Prisoner in a Laff Box!” July 9-15, 1966, 20-23. Thanks

to Alex Koch for this reference. 618

“Usually Chet Ricord,” Curtin said. Hoyt Curtin, “An Interview with Hoyt Curtin,” interview by Barry

Hansen and Earl Kress, in Goldmark and Taylor, Cartoon Music Book. This interview originally appeared

in the Pic-A-Nic Basket booklet. 619

Pat Foley seems to be related to Jack Foley, creator of the Foley sound method, although I have not yet

been able to confirm this presumption. 620

I can only imagine what making sound effects for Ren & Stimpy was like.

344

epitome of classic cartoon sound effects to this day.”621

Sound designer Mark Mangini, now a

major Hollywood sound designer, began his career in sound at Hanna-Barbera in the late 1970s,

and surprisingly speaks about his experience there as more meaningful than many live-action

films he has worked on.

I’ve worked on 142 live action films. Most recently … Mad Max: Fury Road, which I

won an Oscar for and I’m very proud of … [But] I would argue that everything that we

were doing at Hanna-Barbera was every bit as designed [and] maybe … more profound

tha[n] was being heard in a motion picture.622

To maximize the cartoon’s rhetorical effect, the wackiness of the sound effects should match the

wackiness of the cartoon. “[I]f the effects [are] too real the [cartoon] would be dull, while if they

were too exotic it would become silly and lose its strength,” Thomas and Johnston write. “But

the right sounds, carefully chosen, … give a sprightly character to the whole thing.”623

Sound effects are especially important in early television cartoons, because their sonic

force helps to compensate for the underwhelming lack of dramatic visual animation. The early

television cartoon inherited many of these conventions from cinema cartoons. As bizarre as the

pairings first were, these decisions have become conventional, passed from cartoon to cartoon,

just like other cartoon conventions. In live action film and television, sound usually naturalizes

the reality of the visual image: sound provides the crucial authenticity that makes the image

believable. “Foley” is a sophisticated method of recording and inserting sound effects to match

ongoing action on screen. More common in live-action filmmaking, Foley sound effects are

meant to be transparent and not actually noticed as imposed sound effects. Usually, they are

intended to sound like they were actually the sound that was recorded in the scene. “The best

621

Finan, “Animation Sound [Effects].” 622

Mars, “Classic Cartoon Sound Effects!” 623

Thomas and Johnston, Illusion of Life.

345

Foley art is so well integrated into a film that it goes unnoticed by the audience. It helps to create

a sense of reality within a scene. Without these crucial background noises, movies feel

unnaturally quiet and uncomfortable.”624

In cartoons, the metaphorical relation between sound and image becomes clear: sound

effects emphasize their unnatural cartooniness. Much of this art goes back to Treg Brown, but a

possibly tragic narrative emerges. While Treg Brown was revered for his ability to fill a Looney

Tunes cartoon with what were then bizarrely comic sound substitutions, his cataloguing

approach also led to the increasing conventionalization of cartoon sound effects. When sound

effects were divorced from the objects that produced them, they were no longer performances,

but simply recorded sounds to be deployed. Unmoored from reality, Treg Brown pursued the

most outrageous combinations he could think of. But his innovations created an example few

could live up to; even many talented sound designers at least implicitly followed his lead.

Conventions that Treg Brown established became gags repeated in other cartoons, such that

many of his exact sound effects are still used today. “They are still used so often on television

and in cartoons,” says feature film director Joe Dante, citing Animaniacs as a one among many

“subsequent kind of Looney Tunes incarnations.” “There are certain sounds that just make kids

laugh.”625

Yet the zany essence of the cartoon may most directly lie in the sound effect, in which

anything seems possible.

10.3

Music in the Cinema Cartoon

Is there a special connection between animation and music? “In cartoons, music makes

the laughs grow louder,” Bill Hanna has written. “[It] nudge[s] the laughter out of an

624

Beauchamp, Sound for Animation, 66. 625

Joe Dante, Wild Sounds of Treg Brown. Director of the 1984 comedy horror film Gremlins, Dante also

directed the 2003 animated feature film Looney Tunes: Back in Action.

346

audience.”626

Many believe that, if animation is the process of bringing a cartoon character to

life, then accompanying music brings emotion to that living character. Robin Beauchamp

contrasts sound effects with music scored “underneath” voice acting and sound effects, which

communicates inner character emotions: “Sound effects often represent a character’s outer

world, whereas [musical] underscore often signifies that character’s inner world.”627

However, in

the television cartoon, music is actually the least noticeable of the three sound elements. It may

also be the sloppiest element on the soundtrack, because in the television cartoon, achieving

close synchronization of image and music is challenging, enough so that synchronization seems

usually not to be a priority. Within a television cartoon episode, and especially during dialogue,

music is usually “underscored,” that is, played quietly so as to support the louder spoken

dialogue and sound effects.

Nevertheless, television cartoon music is complex: it performs its support function in

many different ways. The background music, including silences, frames the focus of a scene by

emphasizing some moments and de-emphasizing others, literally setting the tone for the

narrative. On a more fundamental level, music provides continuity: announces and carries out

transitions, and thereby structures the narrative by keeping time. There is one time when music is

explicitly foregrounded: during the opening theme song, when it plays a starring role. For many

television shows, but especially for cartoons, the theme song acts as a kind of psychological

advertisement for the show, seeking to worm its way into the viewer’s ears and get stuck in their

head. The repetition of the cartoon’s signature tune cements the show in the viewer’s life by

making it a familiar and enjoyable ritual.

626

Bill Hanna, “In Cartoons, Music Makes the Laughs Grow Louder,” Pic-A-Nic Basket booklet, 1996.

Posted online by Fred Seibert, “The Hanna-Barbera Pic-A-Nic Basket of Cartoon Classics,” Fred Seibert,

https://fredseibert.com/post/3073840374/the-hanna-barbera-pic-a-nic-basket-of-cartoon. 627

Beauchamp, Sound for Animation.

347

Some say that cinema animation music is a poor relation to film music.628

By implication,

early television cartoon music would then be a poor relation to cinema animation music.

Television cartoon music is indeed often not recognized. Because it plays a supporting role, it is

often naturalized as part of the cartoon. But it nevertheless performs a number of important roles.

To the degree it is present in a television cartoon, most often, music serves a narrative role. It

sets the emotional tone of character voice acting and accompanies the ushers the narrative

through the run time of the cartoon. But early television cartoon music also serves a more

fundamental and logistical role of continuity, maintaining the flow not just within character

interactions but across the course of the episode. “Underscore” background music does this

subtly, usually without being noticed. Referring to contemporary television music, composer

David Ricard describes a number of different roles television cartoon music can play.

Composing for a cartoon series has its own unique set of challenges … [T]he music has

different roles that are constantly converting … [Often] you’re playing to or against the

action, while at other times the music is simply keeping the show moving along.

Sometimes the music parodies familiar pop culture themes, and sometimes the music

leaves space for comedy to happen. And then, of course, there are instances when the

music is used like sound design, as an effect.629

Early television cartoon music often changes the focus and emphasis in the cartoon’s

timing, usually in the background. “The need for continuity in the score is … critical …

Nondiegetic sounds, such as underscore, narration, and ambience, are primarily linear. … As

such, they effectively serve as a smoothing element for visual edits while also promoting

628

Paul Wells invokes this argument in a book chapter, “Halas & Batchelor’s Sound Decisions: Musical

Approaches in the British Context,” in Rebecca Coyle (ed) Drawn to Sound: Animation Film Music and

Sonicity, 2010. 629

Ricard, “Cartoon Composing: Scoring An Animated Series,” Sound on Sound, January 2009,

https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/cartoon-composing.

348

continuity,” Beauchamp writes. More rarely, the music breaks through to the foreground, which

can become a kind of special occasion in the narrative. Generally, melodies are passive, not

active. “A melody is a linear narrative element with the power to draw attention away from the

dialog … Therefore, … composers often avoid writing active melodies when important dialog is

being delivered.”630

The challenge in television is to determine how closely the cartoon image

should match the music soundtrack; frequent synchronization, as in cinema animation, is not

often possible. Stock music might seem like a poor solution which simply makes this problem

worse, yet its creative application might actually open up more possibilities for production,

because engaging with latent meanings there can add rich texture to the more drab television

cartoon.

Animation music has a long and storied history. Music in cinema animation, like cinema

animation itself, started out as a simple novelty. Film in the early 1900s is now thought of as

“silent,” but the moving picture in most movie screenings was actually accompanied by live

musicians playing loose renditions of popular songs at the front of the theater. Pianists and small

bands would toss off popular songs in styles of the time like ragtime and jazz to accompany all

kinds of movies being shown at the theater. Critic Barry Keith Grant believes the cartoon, like

jazz, to define popular American culture in the 1920s (he references a common theater name

from the time).

[J]azz and the movies ... met ... in the darkened, smoke-filled chambers of Bijou Dreams

during the first decade of this century. Sitting beneath cataracts of flickering images,

pianists ragged and riffed through the pop and standard tunes of the day. ... [T]here is no

630

Beauchamp, Sound for Animation. Merriam-Webster defines melody as “a rhythmic succession of

single tones organized as an aesthetic whole”. “Melody,” https://www.merriam-

webster.com/dictionary/melody.

349

denying that together the two forms came to define the vibrant essence of US popular

culture in the 1920s – the so-called Jazz Age[.]

Nickelodeon theaters in the early 1900s were working class places that apparently many

women did not even venture into. This began to change in the mid-1910s, as the feature film

began to take shape.631

One does not envy the musicians who were hired to grind out the same

popular songs for hours a day. A 1920 instruction manual give pointers to musicians on how to

accompany “Animated Cartoons and Slap-Stick Comedy.”

“Pep” is the key-note to the situation … [of the] player giv[ing] a musical interpretation

of moving pictures … with the current “jazz” tunes as a medium. … Above all, keep

things “going,” like a juggler who may be handling two or twenty balls, and occasionally

drops one, but must never cease in throwing and catching something.632

While the simple pleasures of these performances have been fondly remembered by

some, by later standards these musical performances were often not more than “pastiches of

popular and folk tunes easily recognisable by the viewer/auditor”.633

Walt Disney closed the door on that time, at once quaint and crude, when he introduced

inherently synced sound to accompany the animation image in 1928. But figuring out how to do

that was not an easy process. With his animator Ub Iwerks, Walt Disney had already made two

earlier Mickey Mouse cartoons; while modestly well-received, public interest was not high

enough for Disney to secure a distributor for the films. Even though he was deeply in debt, Walt

gambled that sound could reverse his and his character’s fortunes. Unlike the random, bizarre

sounds of Paul Terry’s 1928 Aesop’s Fables film Dinner Time, Disney imagined his character’s

631

Sklar, Movie-Made America. 632

In a 1920 instruction manual, Edith Lang and George West promote musical accompaniment for

“Animated Cartoons and Slap-Stick Comedy” in these terms. Reprinted in Goldmark and Taylor, The

Cartoon Music Book. 633

Barry Keith Grant, “Jazz, Ideology and the Animated Cartoon,” 2006.

350

sounds to be closely synchronized, the gestures gaining punch from sprightly voice, effects, and

song. The elusive means of synchronization arrived when assistant animator Wilfred Jackson

brought in a musical metronome. Walt knew that the new standard of cinema sound film would

be projected at 24 frames per second. From this, he and Jackson rhythmically timed the film in

intervals of 24 to mark a tempo. With this system, Disney eventually achieved a tight

synchronization of image and sound, setting a new industry standard for all future animation

producers.634

For example, “[t]he basic, most practical time unit in cartooning is half a second,

that is, twelve frames,” Halas and Manvell wrote. “A number of these half-second units make up

the basic rhythm of movement—a man walking.”635

What is now thought of as the animated cartoon most specifically began here, in Disney’s

Mickey Mouse shorts, which popularized a bouncy style of animation intimately shaped by

sound. A French journalist recalled witnessing the sound effects in a 1929 Mickey short in these

glowing terms.

Technically perfect sound films are now being shown in the cinema. ... What pictures are

we talking about ... ? ... [T]he phenomenal series of “Mickeys.” ... [T]he synchronization

of action and sound [is] the miracle. ... The superposition of a real noise and a virtual

image produces … [a] magical spell [that] enthralls and gladdens us. We are seized with

a kind of nervous admiration, like children admiring their first mechanical toy. ... Where

are we, if not somewhere in the uninhibited world of dreams ... ?636

634

Disney’s initial composer was Wilfred Jackson, a less experienced musical arranger. Nevertheless,

Jackson was the one to “devise … a way to synchronize music to film by using a metronome,” writes

biographer Bob Thomas. “Walt whistled ‘Steamboat Bill’ while Jackson played his harmonica. The

metronome ticked out their rhythm. The system worked.” Thomas, Disney’s Art of Animation. 635

Halas and Manvell, Technique of Film Animation. 636

Michel-Joseph Piot, “Jazz: l’actualité intellectuelle,” in The Cinema, December 15, 1929. His

comments are on The Opry House. Reprinted in Garry Apgar (ed) A Mickey Mouse Reader (2014).

351

In the early sound cinema cartoons, music was the biggest attraction of all, at a time when

recorded music was still relatively new. When Carl Stalling came to work for the Disney studio

in 1929, Walt made a concession to the talented composer that the studio would start a new

series of cartoons whose timing was based upon music, the “Silly Symphonies,” instead of music

being added at the end, like in the Mickey Mouse cartoons.637

This started a trend that dominated

animation for the next decade. The majority of cartoon series in the 1930s and 1940s named

themselves not by their characters but by their music: Looney Tunes (Warners), Merrie Melodies

(Warners), Happy Harmonies (MGM), Musical Miniatures (Walter Lantz). Disney’s early

cartoons of the time relished in coordinating their music with the actions on screen, a simple and

satisfying style that many audiences loved. Some animation producers adopted a very similar

cute, neat style, but there were limits to this approach to animation. Gone With the Wind (1939)

producer David O. Selznick apparently derided a cinema score by Max Steiner as sounding like

the music of a Mickey Mouse cartoon,638

as Daniel Goldmark explains the genesis of the term

“mickey-mousing.”

During this era the music in Disney’s cartoons … gave rise to [a] term: “mickey-

mousing,” the exact synchronization of music and action. … The phrase implies not only

that the music in question is simplistic, or “mickey mouse,” but also that it is telegraphing

637

Walt … said [to Carl], Wilfred Jackson recalled, “‘Look, let’s … make two series. On the Mickey

Mouse pictures you make your music fit my action the very best you can. But we’ll make another

series, and they’ll be musical shorts. And in them music will take precedence and we’ll adjust our

action the best we can to what you think is the right music.’ Those were the Sillys, and that was a way

of getting something done and not getting in a dog fight all of the time. Quoted in Newsom, “A Sound

Idea.” 638

Presumably this wasn’t the musical score for Selznick’s own film, Gone With the Wind, which Steiner

composed.

352

to the audience too much information: that is, the music is calling attention to itself as it

describes what is happening on screen.639

To my eyes and ears, Harman-Ising’s early Bosko cartoons of the early 1930s try to out-

Disney Disney in this “mickey mouse” kind of way.640

Harman and Ising were Bill and Joe’s

bosses when the two began working together at MGM; Rudy Ising is credited as producer on the

first Tom and Jerry cartoon.641

In developing their craft, Jerry Beck thinks that “Hanna and

Barbera set about analyzing the Harman-Ising cartoons, and decided that they could be faster,

funnier, and far more entertaining.”642

Cartoon composer Carl Stalling, who briefly worked with Disney, left to join Warner

Bros. There in the 1930s, Stalling and Treg Brown used Disney’s universal metronomic method

as a point of departure for exploring the rich comic possibilities of animation music and sound

effects. Carl Stalling apparently built upon Wilfred Jackson’s metronome approach to animation

timing to create a tick system, a forerunner to the “click track,” now widely used across

Hollywood filmmaking, based upon a constant mark at a specific tempo or speed.643

The image

in the Warner Bros. shorts was tightly synced with the sound. Both are sharp, evocative, and

often funny.644

Warner Bros. owned controlled a handful of large music publishing companies. It

639

Goldmark, Tunes for ‘Toons. Lea Jacobs helpfully overviews this debate in “Mickey Mousing

Reconsidered,” a chapter in her 2015 book, Film Rhythm after Sound: Technology, Music, and

Performance. 640

Harman and Ising had worked with Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks in Kansas City before they all moved

to Los Angeles. I think that Harman and Ising’s rounded, roly-poly animation style, so evident in Bosko

cartoons like Sinkin’ in the Bathtub (1930), might have influenced Ub Iwerks’ design for Mickey Mouse

in 1928. But I have not pursued any evidence of this. 641

When the first Tom & Jerry cartoon was released in 1940, neither of the two characters even had a

name. Mark Kausler reports that Jerry Mouse was patterned after Rudy Ising’s mouse Little Cheeser.

“Tom & Jerry,” Film Comment 11, Iss. 1, Jan/Feb 1975, 74. 642

The Hanna-Barbera Treasury, 2007. 643

Neil Strauss, “Tunes for ‘Toons: A Cartoon Music Primer” in Goldmark and Taylor, Cartoon Music

Book. 644

In “Drawing a New Narrative for Cartoon Music,” (2013) Daniel Goldmark cites Thomas F. Cohen on

this history. Cohen’s essay is “The Click Track: The Business of Time: Metronomes, Movie Scores and

353

was not coincidental that this was the studio that first broke into sound in feature films (with The

Jazz Singer, 1927). In its contract with cartoon producer Leon Schlesinger, Warners stipulated

that every cartoon would feature music owned by the studio would feature in every cartoon. The

Merrie Melodies were required to include both a verse and chorus of the title song in each

cartoon, “a proviso that turned the Merrie Melodies into primordial music videos”.645

By the late

1930s, however, the focus began to turn away from this enthusiasm for music.

Cartoons…—like feature films—began moving away from the “All Singing! All

Dancing!” format prevalent earlier in the decade, featuring stories less dominated by

performance … not that it disappeared by any means … [but] the studios and audiences

both seemed less interested in highlighting performance as time went on.646

Then, Walt Disney pushed past the sentimental audiovisual novelty that he himself had

celebrated in his own cartoons of the 1930s. Disney’s second animated feature film, Fantasia

(1940), reframed animation music by venturing out in ambitious explorations of the aesthetic

possibilities of audio synchronization with visual image latent in the full cinema animation. Bill

Hanna and Joe Barbera’s musical composer, Scott Bradley, was evidently deeply influenced by

Fantasia; in 1941, he published a manifesto of sorts on “The Cartoon Music of the Future.” The

Tom and Jerry cartoons accepted Disney’s approach to sound-image synchronization, although

Bradley actually departed from the regular, metronome-guided pace of cartoons followed by Carl

Stalling at Warner Bros., ambitiously pushing into avant-garde musical directions. By the mid-

1940s, spirited jazzy freestyle and accomplished orchestral flourishes were setting a new, high

Mickey Mousing,” in Graeme Harper, Ruth Doughty, and Jochen Eisentraut (eds.) Sound and Music in

Film and Visual Media: An Overview, 2009, 100–113. 645

Goldmark, Tunes for ‘Toons. The author gives these names of Warner’s music publishing companies:

DeSylva, Brown & Henderson; Remick; Advanced; Harms; T. B. Harms; and “the original Tin Pan Alley

music house, formed in 1885,” M. Witmark & Sons. 646

Goldmark, “Cartoon Music.”

354

bar for what cartoon music could be, during what is now recognized as the (first) Golden Age of

Animation.

[By then] Carl Stalling and Scott Bradley had established “cartoon music” through their

respective work with Warner Brothers and MGM animated shorts. Cartoon music of that

Golden Age features harsh dissonance, exaggerated performance techniques, frantic

rhythmic lines, and quotations from popular tunes. … The music created to meet these

demands pushed the technical limits of the composer and musician alike.647

The Tom and Jerry series had nearly no dialogue whatsoever. Here, music and sound

effects combine into a fluid, interdependent continuum. Music, though, probably plays the

biggest role of any sound element in this series; Scott Bradley’s wildly inventive and dramatic

musical explorations made these cartoons regular tours de force. But perhaps Bradley was a bit

spoiled. He began to rhapsodize in print about what classical music might be like in the future.

[I]n cartoons of the future … the present rigid methods of recording, wherein we must

follow a “click track” in order to co-ordinate the music with the animation, will be

abandoned in favor of free and flexible tempi governed by the emotional quality of the

music. There will be unlimited variation in composition … [T]here … should be … no

dialogue at all, for fantasy is best portrayed without the irritating presence of speaking

voices.648

UPA, the studio that established the viability of limited animation, despite its emphasis of sound,

surprisingly did not have a clearly unifying musical signature.649

But a rare UPA-like film made

647

Beauchamp, Sound for Animation. 648

Scott Bradley, “Cartoon Music of the Future,” Pacific Coast Musician 30, 12, June 21, 1941, reprinted

in Goldmark, Tunes for ‘Toons. 649

Lisa Scoggin, “The Brilliant Disparity of UPA Soundtracks,” Animation Studies 2.0, September 9,

2019, https://blog.animationstudies.org/?p=3207.

355

at the Disney studio, “Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom,” was a notable showcase of the

importance of music in limited animation.650

As happened with many animation studios of the time, Hanna and Barbera’s craft of

making a cartoon became built upon musical methods of timing animation at the fundamental

technical level of tempo (speed). “Timing is the part of animation which gives meaning to

movement”:651

what makes a cartoon lively is brisk timing, while what makes one dreary is

sloppy, uninspired timing.

Music was our inspiration, our jumping-off point, you might say. I used to time out

cartoon gags using musical bars and staves, because the timing in cartoons is so crucial to

getting the laugh. “Timing” is a musical concept, really. A seven-minute cartoon can be

seen as a short piece of music, with pacing and dynamics that can almost be charted, like

a musical score.652

Bill Hanna has affirmed that he and Joe Barbera maintained this musical model of

cartoon timing even in their early television cartoons, which were much longer and less

synchronized. Perhaps surprisingly, Hanna describes the studio’s planned animation process as

ultimately similar to their widely-recognized full animation production process. In an

unpublished 1998 interview near the end of his life, with animation historian Michael Mallory,

Bill Hanna recounted the basic structure of the studio’s production system, getting into the weeds

a bit by describing their use of bar sheets and exposure sheets.

650

Animator Ward Kimball and director Charles A. Nichols actually made that film while Walt Disney

was overseas in Europe. When he returned, Walt was not happy to witness the kind of shenanigans that

had been afoot in his absence. The film actually won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film

in 1954. This possibly chagrined Walt, who flubbed his acceptance speech. Amid Amidi, “Watch Walt

Disney Botch The Oscar Acceptance Speech for ‘Toot Whistle Plunk and Boom,’” May 3, 2014,

https://www.cartoonbrew.com/disney/watch-walt-disney-botch-the-oscar-acceptance-speech-for-toot-

whistle-plunk-and-boom-98954.html. 651

Whitaker, Halas, Sito, Timing. 652

Hanna, “Music Makes the Laughs Grow Louder.”

356

[W]hether it’s for network or the [movie] theatre, the process is the same. ... There is a

director who had what we called a bar sheet—they were like music sheets ... a tempo

would be established ... that fits the general mood of the action. ... [Then], I would put

[the timing] on what we called exposure sheets. ... I would time and tell [the animators]

how many drawings to take to do this action or to anticipate this, or how slow to do it …

[so the] assistant work [can be] done and everything, and [then it can be]

photographed.653

“The music or bar sheets plan the production timing on all the scenes in a film,” writes Preston

Blair. “The exposure sheets plan the animation production timing of an individual scene.”654

It is surprising to realize that the musical system of timing that Hanna and Barbera used

at MGM was the same approach they upheld into their decades of television cartoon production,

where music was less important and voices, previously nearly nonexistent, were the starring

653

Bill Hanna, unpublished interview by Michael Mallory, March 17, 1998. Actually, historically,

exposure sheets developed before bar sheets did, which arrived with sound. In this long note, I share this

technical history that puzzled me for hours, until I pieced together the following historical explanation.

Technical cel animation production methods developed in the 1910s to manage the workflow between

animators as cel animation production expanded beyond the work of single men. The animation director

evolved the exposure sheet (in the U.K., a “dope sheet”) as a print form to “commit … their ideas to

paper” about how their animators were to “tell … the story in terms of film, i.e. cutting, timing and pace

(movement)”. Whitaker, Halas, Sito, Timing. There, the director would indicate to the animator

specifically, frame by frame, which parts of which drawings they should draw, according to how these

would be sent along to be inked on celluloid and then combined in a stack by the cameraman to

photograph the cartoon. The term exposure sheet relates to the process of stacking the cels for the

photographer. When Walt Disney advanced animation craft by adding music, he and his audio artists

developed a further new kind of form, a “bar sheet,” “a notated blueprint of the music, dialogue, and

animation timing,” called this for its musical bars. Goldmark, Tunes for ‘Toons. The bar sheet was a

means of detailing the specific musical notes that would accompany which specific animation elements.

Originally, this was simply musical staff notation paper, with its bars or lines indicating specific musical

notes. It “made possible [Disney’s] very precise synchronization of the soundtrack and the action”.

Goldmark, Tunes for ‘Toons. The director and composer would closely collaborate to choose the tempos

for each section of the cartoon, imposing this new discipline on animators, who “had to stick to the beat in

order to maintain synchronization.” “Disney was well aware [that] he was now far ahead of any other

cartoon producer in his mastery of sound,” although the bar sheet soon became standard around the

industry, as other studios ventured into sound animation”. Mayerson, “Cartoons at MGM.” 654

Blair, Cartoon Animation.

357

element. “In effect, this approach to synchronizing animation and sound turned all cartoons into

the equivalent of musicals,” animator Mark Mayerson has written. “There might be no singing or

dancing within a cartoon, but the pacing of the action is still dictated by the musical tempo.”655

But mostly the director Hanna was the one who worked with bar sheets. The animators worked

from exposure sheets prepared from the bar sheets, which contained detailed instructions. Hanna-

Barbera’s production system in fact became so defined by exposure sheets that its in-house

employee newsletter publication, begun in July 1967, was called The Hanna-Barbera Exposure

Sheet.656

The music of the early television cartoon series owes not just to the cinema cartoon series

but also to the earlier music of the radio, both freely played songs and the music played as part of

narrative radio series. In many ways, radio’s connection with music is more powerful than

cinema’s. As early as 1920, before the synchronized sound of the movies, one of the primary

reasons people listened to radio was to hear music. Only several years prior to this, to hear

music, one needed to go to hear a musician play in person. After radio, people could hear any of

many different kinds of sounds that invisible radio waves carried into their homes. Listening to

music on a home radio receiver is a fundamentally perceptual and emotional activity. While

much music is vocal, as listeners we receive music on a deeper personal level. Susan Douglas

relates that access to music on the radio, including how this mixed with narrative on variety

shows and comedy shows, nurtures a general desire for musical repetition and variety.

655

Mayerson, “Cartoons at MGM.” 656

Artist Patrick Owsley’s blog is one of the few sites I have found confirming this, apart from images on

photo sharing site Flickr. The headlines on the first page read: “Hanna-Barbera Productions Celebrates

10th Anniversary - Staff Grows from 6 to 500; More Expected.” Then, “Hanna-Barbera Joins Taft”.

“Hanna-Barbera Studio Newsletter – July 1967,” Patrick Owsley, June 13, 2008,

http://powsley.blogspot.com/2008/06/hanna-barbera-studio-newsletter-july.html.

358

Radio … transformed Americans’ relationship to music. Indeed, after radio Americans

didn’t just have access to music, we needed it, often on a daily basis. It is easy to forget

that, ever since the 1920s, it has been music that has predominated the broadcast day,

even during the height of radio comedy and drama. And this, too, may help explain the

powerful nostalgia that radio evokes. Music so effectively taps our emotions—brain

mapping by cognitive scientists shows that the brain’s musical networks extend into its

emotional circuits[.]

In the early and mid-1930s, music began to be blended with vocal and narrative comedy

in new forms of variety shows. The advertising sponsor behind influential comedian Jack

Benny’s radio show initially pitched the program in 1932 as “30 minutes of music and quips”; at

that time, the musicians were the stars. By the next year, the show was billed as a comedy

program that contained music.657

Radio comedy was proving less expensive to produce than

musical concerts, which had previously been more the norm. The Great Depression was

becoming keenly felt across the country, and musical radio comedy was a buoyant bright spot

both in listeners’ lives as well as for the national economy.

10.4

Music in the Early Television Cartoon

Like the history of the television cartoon, the history of television cartoon music is spread

much more thinly, across a much bigger area, than with cinema animation. It is challenging to

simply grasp the sheer amount of music that has been made for television cartoons, across this

history of now over 70 years. When cartoons began airing regularly on television, this demand

for music began to grow slowly. Crusader Rabbit, the first television cartoon, had music, but

was more driven by voice acting and narration; its theme song was a recording of a song in the

657

Kathryn H. Fuller-Seeley, Jack Benny and the Golden Age of American Radio Comedy, 21.

359

public domain from a stock music library.658

It appears that Alex Anderson and Jay Ward relied

upon stock music for much of the score in the show; given the show’s paltry budget and DIY

production values, it seems unlikely that the producers could have afforded to have music written

and recorded for the show. Evidence actually suggests that very few musicians were available for

television production work as it was, in part because of bias against television within the

entertainment industry.659

In 1955, Disney’s Mickey Mouse Club kicked off a youth consumer boom in part by

reimagining what broadcast music sounded and looked like. Unlike on Howdy Doody, real kids

were now center stage, performing in Broadway-style musical numbers. “[T]he kids, instead of

being relegated to a peanut gallery, were very actively involved: presenting cartoons, starring in

live-action serials, and singing and dancing as part of their regular duties as Mouseketeers.”660

One of the things The Mickey Mouse Club did very successfully but has not apparently been

recognized for in print is the elaborate animated fanfare that is its musical opening sequence.

“Every TV show — animated or not — needs a theme song,” says musician David Ricard. “[A]n

opening tune becomes the fabric for each episode — not only musically, but also

thematically.”661

MMC’s opening sequence is at once a march and a celebration, and one of the

few times in this mostly live-action program that viewers actually saw Mickey Mouse and his

658

Karl Cohen, “Alex Anderson: Father of Crusader Rabbit and Limited Animation,” Animania, 1981 16-

23. 659

Fred Patten has written that U.S. musician unions disallowed members from working for television.

When the television industry began just after World War II, it was viewed as a deadly rival by the

motion picture industry, which tried to stifle it by heavy-handed methods. … [T]he American

Federation of Musicians, the musicians’ guild which had the monopoly on providing orchestras

for movie music, would not work for television, and threatened to fine or expel any individual

musician who accepted TV background-music employment.” “Some Notes on Crusader Rabbit,”

Animatrix 6, 29-36. 660

David Bianculli, The Platinum Age of Television: From I Love Lucy to The Walking Dead, How TV

Became Terrific, 2016. This italic emphasis is mine. 661

Ricard, “Cartoon Composing.”

360

cartoon friends, like Donald Duck. The opening fanfare was warranted, because Mickey was and

remains today probably the most important and recognized single cartoon character ever.

With repetition, music comes to sound familiar. This is built into early television cartoon

music, especially with the opening sequence theme song, music which defines the whole series.

Many early television cartoons echo the theme song in the closing credit sequence, as The

Mickey Mouse Club does. To come to know the theme song to a cartoon is to become more

connected to the cartoon. While The Mickey Mouse Club was a television show starring a cartoon

character, it is only lightly animated: brief fully animated sequences with Mickey begin and end

the program. Disney’s full model of animation was slow and expensive; it was inherently

opposed to the fast and cheap approach real television cartoons required. To return to theme

songs, when Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera began making television cartoons, like with their

breakout success, The Huckleberry Hound Show (1958), I believe that they learned this lesson

about the starring role of the opening sequence from Disney’s Mickey Mouse Club. Bill Hanna

wrote later: “One of the vital elements necessary to rouse an audience’s enthusiasm for a TV

cartoon show is fanfare.”662

As usual, while they did not originate the practice, Hanna-Barbera

was the studio that repeated it, making the opening theme song of a show a shared reference

point, or in the parlance of our times, “a thing.”663

The opening title sequence functions like an

advertisement for the show and its characters. As the theme song becomes familiar to the viewer,

in essence, it is trying to wedge its foot in the door of our attention, to make room for the

characters. Music would not be recorded specifically and regularly for television cartoons until

662

Hanna and Ito, Friends. 663

Willie Ito has said “Hanna-Barbera has done a lot of ‘new spins’ on old ideas.” He made these remarks

at the event “Celebrating the Glory Days of Hanna-Barbera Cartoon Studios,” held at the Hollywood

Heritage Museum in Hollywood, California, on June 8, 2016.

361

1959 and 1960, when it was recorded both for Bill Scott and Jay Ward’s Rocky and His Friends

and Hanna-Barbera’s Flintstones.

The television cartoon presented a quandary for music producers. It is clearly in need of

music, at least for scene transitions. But television production budgets were low and the amount

of time to fill was high. It appears to me that these conditions have generally separated the once-

tight coordination of the animation image with its music. The opposite of mickey mousing is a

phenomenon that could be called unsynched drift, the vague lack of coordination between the

image and soundtrack. In the 1950s, this slipping away from synchronization occurred because

there was no original music composed for the cartoons—all musical cues relied upon short

recordings drawn from large musical stock libraries. For The Huckleberry Hound Show, Bill

Hanna and Joe Barbera chose prerecorded incidental background music from a reputable stock

music library, especially the Capitol Hi-Q library, a musical production choice popular in the

1950s. Such stock music is often incidental background music. These short musical cues or

pieces are generally somewhat generic and unobtrusive, but sophisticated enough to sound

professional. It is not actually meant to be enjoyed as music; instead, incidental music is

functional, intended to add texture, authority, and relatability to institutional messages.664

664

Nerdy deep dive: the music was designed to be used by any range of institutions looking for a flexible

and affordable way to use neutral incidental music in in-house videos as if it were their own, from

television studios to government agencies to corporations. Rodney Sauer, “Photoplay Music: A Reusable

Repertory for Silent Film Scoring, 1914-1929,” The American Music Research Center Journal 8, 1998.

Paul Mandell, an authority on such television background music, has written a rich treatment presenting

the personal history, institutional politics, and design decisions that went into creating these usually

anonymous pieces, worth quoting at length.

In 1955, Capitol decided to create its own music library … [The label] hired Bill Loose, a pop

composer-arranger with a good melodic sense. In January 1956, Loose turned in an astounding

5,500 pages of sheet music. The sessions were recorded by Phil Green’s orchestra in London and

brought back to Hollywood. [It was] cataloged … by mood and packaged … on 110 reels of

quarter-inch tape and fifty-five corresponding [vinyl] audition discs. The twenty-two-hour

package was christened Capitol Hi-Q, a reference to the new buzz on high fidelity. The entire

library was made licensable to film and television producers for as little as 350 dollars. …

362

While using stock music might seem like a creative failure, others have recognized that

Hanna and Barbera’s penny-pinching reliance upon stock music made it the basis for a new kind

of cartoon aesthetic. “While stock cues made the final years for theatrical cartoons sound blah,”

Daniel Goldmark recently wrote, “they also helped to define the sound of television cartoons,

particularly those by pioneer TV animation studio Hanna-Barbera.”665

Because of the memorable

impersonal/personal role Capital Hi-Q’s specific stock music library played in shaping Hanna-

Barbera’s early television cartoons, Hanna-Barbera historian Yowp has lots of love for the

musicians who composed and recorded the immense variety of music that went into this

particular collection, writing emotionally about his own experience in a way he rarely does.

Music evokes memories. Music in cartoons included. … [D]espite being originally

designed to linger in the background while setting moods for TV westerns and sitcoms,

industrial films and low-budget movies … because the composers were so adept, the

music not only does its utilitarian job, it sticks in people’s minds. … The earliest Hanna-

Barbera cartoons have a different feel to them than what came later … Stock music was

as much a part of the Hanna-Barbera cartoons in the studio’s first couple of years as the

animation or the sound effects.666

A major part of Hi-Q was Theme Craft, a name invented by Seely to house powerful

mood music by David Rose. … Theme Craft cues by Bill Loose … caught on as signature

themes. ... A light comedy piece with a xylophone “nose twitch” became the theme for Dennis the

Menace. TC 430 (“Happy Day”) became the theme for The Donna Reed Show. Loose’s cowriter

… recalled, “We wrote a bunch of cues we jokingly called ‘Music to Wash Windows By.’ We

called them ‘domestics’ and the industry really ate them up!”

Mandell’s piece is quoted by Yowp from the author’s generically titled book Performing Arts:

Broadcasting. The book was published by none other than the U.S. Library of Congress in 2002. Yowp,

“Capitol Hi-Q — Cartoon Music For Huck and Yogi,” December 25, 2009,

https://yowpyowp.blogspot.com/2009/12/capitol-hi-q-cartoon-music-for-huck-and.html. 665

Goldmark, “Cartoon Music.” 666

I stretched academic protocol here a bit to compile this representative quotation from parts of four of

Yowp’s blog posts about music. The particular musicians Yowp recognizes here as the creative minds

behind this surprisingly affecting institutional music of the Capitol Hi-Q stock library are Bill Loose, Phil

Green, and David Rose. He links music cues are on each page. In the case of the second page, It seems

363

Hanna-Barbera’s secret weapon in the war for audiovisual supremacy in television

animation was Hoyt Curtin, a Hollywood television advertising jingle writer, “who in the late

1950s was one of television’s busiest commercial composers.”667

Curtin made three kinds of

music for Hanna-Barbera, each playing an important role making their cartoons work: the main

title song, incidental music of stock cues, and underscore background music. First, Curtin wrote

most of Hanna-Barbera’s opening theme songs. Here are two perspectives on his theme songs.

Hoyt Curtin “became known … for his economy of expression”.668

And “[a]s a jingle writer,

Curtain [sic] had a talent for writing melodic themes with a strong hook.”669

The television

animation studio of Jay Ward and Bill Scott was Hanna-Barbera’s main competitor at this time.

With Rocky and His Friends (1959-1962), Ward and Scott also realized the importance of the

opening sequence, which is by turns peppy and strange. Composer Frank Comstock wrote the

catchy theme song. In these cartoons, there is almost no underscore music, so the music of the

opening sequence carries a lot of weight. Mostly, that series relied upon its sophisticated voice

acting.

Curtin helped wean Hanna-Barbera off external stock music libraries, second, composing

his own incidental music that the studio could use as needed. An interviewer asked Curtin about

the differences between how he worked and how other studios worked. “In other [studios’]

cartoons, the music is scored very closely to the picture. Most of the Hanna-Barbera music was

that Yowp so loves this music that he saved posting about it as a Christmas present for himself—in two

consecutive years. Capitol Hi-Q — Cartoon Music For Huck and Yogi,” December 25, 2009,

https://yowpyowp.blogspot.com/2009/12/capitol-hi-q-cartoon-music-for-huck-and.html; "The In-

Compleat Cartoon Shaindlin," April 20, 2010,

https://yowpyowp.blogspot.com/2010/04/in-compleat-cartoon-shaindlin.html; "A Few More Background

Tunes," December 25, 2010, https://yowpyowp.blogspot.com/2010/12/few-more-background-tunes.html;

"Music for Cartoons and Aliens," September 6, 2011, https://yowpyowp.blogspot.com/2011/09/music-

for-cartoons-and-aliens.html. 667

Mallory, Hanna-Barbera Cartoons, 37. 668

Goldmark and Taylor, editorial note, The Cartoon Music Book. 669

Beauchamp, Sound for Animation.

364

used over and over again, yet some of the cues sound scored, like something that you wouldn’t

make up out of thin air.” This would be a prime example of Hanna-Barbera’s unsynched drift.

Curtin responded that there were plenty of cues he wrote to be used multiple times, in similar

kinds of situations in the studio’s cartoon episodes. “[E]ach [Hanna-Barbera] picture has a

rhythm of cutting … many had the same kind of gags in them so they could reuse [the cues].”670

In fact, Hoyt Curtin developed an in-house music library for most every one of Hanna-Barbera’s

television cartoons, as Robin Beauchamp explains. “Production libraries feature precut versions,

mix options, and underscore versions. Musical elements (such as solo percussion) can be added

to an existing cue to customize the score with hits.”671

Perhaps surprisingly, Yowp more fondly

recalled the Capitol stock music of Huck Hound over Curtin’s new stock music cues for Quick

Draw McGraw. “Some of Hoyt Curtin’s work is really great, but Snooper, Quick Draw and the

others seem to be missing something when you hear the generic Curtin cues instead of the

[Capitol] Hi-Q work”.672

Nevertheless, Curtin’s stock cues became signatures of the studio.

Daniel Goldmark holds that this approach of composing an in-house stock library system would

become the model for the rest of the television cartoon industry. “Curtin … composed new

melody sets that became the musical foundations of the many new Hanna-Barbera shows to

follow. This approach to scoring cartoons would dominate the industry through almost a quarter

of a century”.673

In addition to writing Hanna-Barbera’s punchy theme songs and its in-house library of

music clips from The Flintstones forward, third, the studio also hired Hoyt Curtin to be their

general musical director, to provide the vast amount of underscore music needed to accompany

670

Curtin interview with Hansen and Kress. 671

Beauchamp, Sound for Animation. 672

“Capitol Hi-Q.” 673

Goldmark, “Cartoon Music.”

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their television cartoons. Thus, for its highest-profile early television cartoon, The Flintstones,

Hanna and Barbera decided to abandon their reliance upon stock music entirely. They hired

house-affiliated composer Hoyt Curtin to write and record original music for every episode.

“Everybody hears the main title, but there’s also always music playing in the background,”

Curtin has explained. “It might be turned way down, but there’s 22 minutes of music that goes

with each show.”674

Initially, Curtin has said, he had the time and money to write short cues

timed to the physical movement of characters at important moments. He described this music as

being so synchronized it was “scored to a gnat’s banana”.675

But to my eyes, the volume of

music Curtin needed to compose when production of The Flintstones was in full swing would

have meant that he could not get caught up in trying to perfect a close relationship between

image and music. In fact, Curtin says he and Bill Hanna came to like the lack of synchronization,

instead composing longer melodic themes.

I just let the music play. Hanna liked that. He didn’t want the music to stop and start all

the time. I think he was right. The sound effects guy is there to put the sound on every

blink—just let the music be happy underneath.676

The relationship between the image and the music in The Flintstones is often so leisurely

that it does not seem accurate to say that the two are in sync: they usually drift out of sync to

varying amounts. It is more like the image influences the music, and the music influences the

image, in a kind of dialogue. Rocky and His Friends and The Bullwinkle Show, peers to The

Flintstones, had very little underscore music whatsoever, so for Bill Scott and Jay Ward, the

issue of syncing image with music did not even come up much. Underscore is only present in the

674

Pancho Doll, “Music Helped ‘Flintstones’ on Way to Fame” Los Angeles Times, Jun 2, 1994. 675

Quoted by Barry Hansen, “Yabba-Dabba Duets and Musical Meeces,” Pic-A-Nic Basket booklet,

1996. I wish to recognize Barry Hansen as Dr. Demento, a fellow alumnus of my alma mater, Reed

College. 676

Hansen, “Yabba-Dabba Duets.”

366

“Dudley Do-Right of the Mounties” cartoon series, written by composer Fred Steiner and his

father George, which were added in the second season (1960-61). The connection between action

and music here is even looser and rougher than in The Flintstones. The production method used

to produce this music must have presented great challenges to syncing: the tinny piano music on

the soundtrack is actually sped up, “authentically recreat[ing] the sound of rinky-dink silent-film

accompaniment.”677

This means that the one underscore soundtrack in the Rocky and Bullwinkle

series is operating on entirely different timing intervals.

In the 1960s, it seems that there was simply not enough money or time to hire out

different people for different shows, as would happen in the 1990s. For approximately 20 years,

between 1959-1963 and 1973-1986, Hoyt Curtin apparently nearly singlehandedly wrote most of

the music for Hanna-Barbera’s many television cartoons, week after week.678

“Curtin ably

devised a completely new means of creating meaningful music for cartoons,” Goldmark and

Taylor write.679

How is it possible for one man to write that much music? To my mind, the only

way one could create this much music is with a prodigious talent for improvising, or making up

the music as one goes along. He implied that not only did he improvise, but that he relied upon

his talented musicians to improvise. “Did you actually compose all the underscores yourself?” an

interviewer asked him.

I would sketch out. … The sketch tells them what instruments you’re going to use, what

the tempos are going to be, and a description of what the music should sound like. Then

677

Keith Scott, The Moose Who Roared (2000). 678

“The man … almost single-handedly wr[ote] more cartoon melodies than anyone [else].” Goldmark

and Taylor, Cartoon Music Book. Kevin Sandler (“Limited Animation”) and Mike Mallory (Hanna-

Barbera Cartoons) confirm that between 1963-1973, Ted Nichols was H-B’s primary musical director. 679

Goldmark and Taylor don’t specify exactly what they mean by this.

367

maybe I might write a cue or two, a few bars, so that they could see what I was talking

about. That’s all they needed. 680

To keep up with the volume of composition, Curtin did not arrange his music on musical

staff sheets for his musicians; an arranger did that. “I always had a great arranger ... I just

couldn’t keep up. ... I would sketch everything, and he would arrange it. … [Then I] conducted it

and the whole bit.”681

Curtin’s style was, indeed, jazzy, with its penchant for improvisation, far

from the strict pretentions of legitimate classical music. “If it doesn’t swing, it isn’t important to

me. I love the legit side, too, but when you hear a big booming jazz band come on, it’s joyous to

me,” he has said.682

Despite his labor-saving methods, it seems fair to say that Hanna-Barbera

kept Hoyt Curtin quite busy. Hoyt Curtin acknowledged how inherently different this is from

how Walt Disney’s studio made animation. Curtin’s jazzy style of composition emphasized

musical liveliness, arranging music to shift emphasis away from the lack of animation and make

the character’s abbreviated animation acting more natural. The great amount of improvisation

involved in writing the Flintstones’ swing music, Curtin said, made Hanna-Barbera’s approach

“kind of anti-Disney”.683

Bill Burnett, a marketer and musician, became the new creative director

at Hanna-Barbera when Ted Turner bought the studio in the early 1990s. He and Bill Hanna

described the significance of Curtin’s music.

Hoyt Curtin’s music jumps out at you and wraps itself around that part of your brain

where the giddy, childlike pleasures live. It nudges and jolts and eggs the action on. It’s

680

Curtin explained that, in addition to being good musicians, his players needed to be able to read music

easily by sight the first time. He implies but does not state that his musicians improvised.

I developed a group of very fine players. You can’t bring a guy into something like this just

because he plays well—the [difficulty of the] sight-reading is fantastic. But our musicians always

said they enjoyed doing animation music more than love themes and so on. No sleeping on this

job! We went right from one cue to the next”. Hansen and Kress, “Interview with Hoyt Curtin.” 681

Curtin interview by Hansen and Kress. 682

Hansen “Yabba-Dabba Duets.” 683

Hansen, “Yabba-Dabba Duets.”

368

as bright and instantly recognizable as the Hanna-Barbera color palliate [sic]. That’s

called style.684

684

Bill Burnett, “Hanna-Barbera Essays,” Bill Burnett, https://billburnett.wordpress.com/hanna-barbera-

essays/.

369

CHAPTER 11

THE PRINCIPLE OF PERFORMANCE:

STAGING AND TIMING

To watch a cartoon is to expect to be entertained. Cinema animation is inherently visually

entertaining because of its constant novel variety. But, how can a television cartoon be made fun,

without as much animation? To watch a TV cartoon is to encounter much more repetition, which

can quickly become boring. The television cartoon’s solution is to create more variety within this

repetition, making it less repetitive.

When we as the viewer encounter a well-executed cartoon performance, its intention is to

just “click” with us, to compel us to instinctually suspend our disbelief as we are drawn into the

story. A television cartoon is only as fun as its whole execution is entertaining. The cartoon is

part drawing and part timing, but the performance is the holistic, familiar entertainment that

results.685

The entertainment value of the television cartoon arises from the skill with which

characters are posed in attractive drawings and the satisfying animation of the character’s

movement in the transition to the next pose. “Solid,” three-dimensional drawing is one of Walt

Disney’s principles of cinema animation; drawing in the early television cartoon is flatly two-

dimensional.

In the early television cartoon, posing is primary and animated movement secondary. In

cinema animation, animation is primary and posing is secondary. The cartoon character’s

performance is a combination of their drawn poses and their subsequent transitions. They stand

still in strong, natural poses, for relatively long periods of time. The technological moving image

685

My thanks to Lev Cantoral, who explained this to me.

370

apparatus of television, like cinema, unfurls through time. Film begins, advances for a finite

amount of time, and then ends. Television, by contrast, goes on and on. To insert a drawn

cartoon character into a moving image is to need to time how long they hold that pose. To

advance the plot, the character must be moved to a new pose in the next story situation’s similar

but different context. If the character takes longer to move across more frames, they appear tired;

if they move quickly across fewer frames, they seem wired. To minimize animation, transitions

in television cartoons usually occur quickly. The contrast between this quick movement and the

previous static pose is a clear variety, a performance that is surprising.

I am considering both drawing and timing to be part of the composite notion of the

performance of cartoon acting. Hanna-Barbera’s early television cartoons are each a mixture of

Joe Barbera’s drawings and Bill Hanna’s timing direction. Drawings are a starting point in

animation production; the early television cartoon results from stretching out these drawings in

time. There are many fewer drawings in an early television cartoon than in a cinema animation,

so the timing of those drawings that are present must be natural and compelling. Hanna-Barbera

historian Mike Mallory explains. From the beginning of the television cartoon, the held poses

needed to be milked for their dramatic potential. “[K]ey poses were [held as] long as possible …

[And] the animators’ ex[ecution] of the key poses … had to be as pleasing and funny as

possible.”686

Drawings can be funny in and of themselves, but humor in performance crucially

arises from the pace at which those drawings are shown, and changed.

The timing of the pose is what gives meaning to it. Most simply, for animation to be

“readable,” it needs to be well-timed, “so that enough time is spent preparing the audience for

something to happen, then on the action itself, and then on the reaction to the action,” as

686

Mallory, “Changing the Face of Animation.”

371

Whitaker, Halas, and Sito explain in the industry-standard book on animation timing.687

Describing Bill Hanna’s uncanny ease with timing, Mallory writes: “Timing a cartoon—not only

knowing the mechanics of movement, but knowing how long to hold a reaction, how to play out

a gag and make it ‘read,’ and how to use either audience anticipation or surprise to get the

biggest laugh—is based on both instinct and skill.”688

11.1

Staging and Timing as Cartoon Performance

The viewer first encounters cartoon characters in the present moment while watching a

cartoon presenting their performance in animation. The characters appear to magically perform

autonomously on their own, as if they are the masters of their own destiny. As children, we

believe that cartoon characters are real, and don’t understand when adults say that they are made

by human artists. As adults, for better or worse, we age out of this magical thinking, and

understand that the animated character’s performance points backwards to the earlier aesthetic

work performed by animators during the production phase of animation. In cinema animation,

especially, the animator is considered the real actor, because the character’s acting performance

arises from the animator’s performance, as an “actor with a pencil.” Donald Crafton

distinguishes the cartoon character’s acting that we experience from the animator’s performance

that creates character acting. “The [character’s] performance in the [animated] film ... is both a

result and a springboard,” he writes. “It is dependent on, but separate from, the performance of

animation, which comprises these conditional performances by the animators”.689

In other words,

when the viewer sees the animated characters they know and love perform in an animated film,

687

Whitaker, Halas, and Sito, Timing. 688

Mallory, Hanna-Barbera Cartoons. 689

17.

372

in a more fundamental sense they are seeing the animator’s performance of animation

production.

Like style, cartoon performance and timing can each be understood as either figurative or

embodied. Graphic, figurative cartoons are usually two-dimensional and hand-animated, drawing

attention to their being constructed, artefactual entities. By contrast, the dramatic cartoon more

typical of cinema is embodied, that is, more naturalist.690

The cinema animation suggests three-

dimensional depth. In the 21st century, the computer-generated imagery (CGI) of most feature

films is actually rendered in three digital dimensions by computer software. Crafton’s concepts

of figurative and embodied performance can be expanded to timing to better talk about the

television cartoon. Timing and drawing are both either exaggerated or naturalistic, as authors

Derek Hayes and Chris Webster helpfully suggest.

Spacing is a concept more dominant in cinema animation than television animation. It

refers to how characters and objects move around on the space of the screen, specifically how

much screen space the character or object crosses in the sequential frames of their animation.

The early television cartoon’ acting performance is less spaced apart because the acting of

television characters is dominated by static body poses, rather than animated movement; also,

there was less space on the early television screen to use. Television characters assume “strong,”

comfortable poses in which they can naturally hold their body still. In cinema, the animator

assumes more responsibility for rendering the character’s acting performance through time. For

its lively performances, cinema animation both moves characters around in space as well as

timing their movements. If a character crosses larger spaces in fewer frames, the action will seem

quick, even magical; if the character takes many frames to cross the same space, the action will

seem slow and deliberate, labored.

690

Crafton, Shadow of a Mouse.

373

On television, the cartoon is no longer the brisk jaunt of the six or seven minutes of a

cinema short: this new kind of cartoon extends its length by a factor of two, three, or even four

(to 12 minutes or so or to 23 minutes or so). Television cartoon characters in early years don’t

cavort around the screen in elaborately choreographed dances; they comfortably hold their

bodies still, usually talking and listening, until it is time to move. Thus, on television, the cartoon

character stands or sits still much more frequently, so the animator does less work to bring the

character to life. The more measured early television cartoon largely relies more upon time

elapsing and less on movement across the screen. The timing of poses the director oversees then

becomes much more important. Much of the cartoon acting responsibility falls to the voice

actors, how they are directed during the recording sessions.

Richard Williams, director of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988), illustrates these

concepts well in the Animators’ Survival Kit he published in the 2000s for animators, a large

book visually explaining all aspects of animation production. Before that film, he was known as

the director of the legendary but troubled animation feature film The Thief and the Cobbler,

which was never truly finished as he had conceived it.691

Williams describes meeting the great

animator Grim Natwick in the 1970s, perhaps while searching for ways to finish his feature film.

I met Grim Natwick ... in a Hollywood basement when he was in his eighties. Grim was

the oldest of the great animators … Previously, he’d designed Betty Boop for Max

691

Williams began production of this animated feature in 1964. Near but not at the end of production, the

film’s production was taken over from the director. Its animation unfinished almost 30 years after it was

begun, in 1993 the film was re-edited without Williams’ involvement and released in bastardized form by

British studio Allied Filmmakers, performing poorly. Nevertheless, the film has become legendary for

artists and animation historians. A fan edit was created called The Recobbled Cut, and a documentary was

made in 2012 about its production history, called Persistence of Vision. Williams died in 2019, though,

and the film still remains officially unfinished. Although they are both artists, animation director Richard

Edmund Williams is not related to my father, Richard Solon Williams, a photographer.

374

Fleischer, for which he received nothing and was furious about it ‘til the day he died,

aged 100.692

It seems that Richard Williams came to the animator elder statesman and asked a fundamental

question like, what is the essence of animation? Williams then literally illustrates the great

animator’s response in the following image.

Figure 42. Richard Williams’ caricature of his encounter with great animator Grim Natwick, who

explains the importance of timing and spacing in animation

Source: Williams, Animator’s Survival Kit

In fact, it is not an exaggeration to say that animation is timing and spacing: these factors

govern how characters and objects move around. Spacing is the sequential drawings of a

character moving around on the screen; timing is the pace of their movement. While these

692

Animator’s Survival Kit, 35.

375

concepts are abstract, when both are intertwined skillfully, the resulting performance is

irresistible entertainment.

Most animators are trained in the traditional techniques of cinema animation; to work in

television later, they must adapt to the different medium. In learning animation, students are

asked, how does a ball bounce in animation? Demonstrating this in animation drawings is much

harder than it seems. Richard Williams illustrates the distinctions between staging and timing in

the following three images showing how a ball can be drawn to bounce across the screen.693

The

ball’s timing is when it bounces on the ground, distinct non-regular events in a temporal

sequence, occurring on screen either quickly, slowly, or somewhere in between. The ball’s

spacing is its positions on the screen as it proceeds through the motions.

Figure 43. Illustration by Richard Williams demonstrating animation timing

Source: Williams, Animator’s Survival Kit

693

Animator’s Survival Kit, 36-37.

376

Figure 44. Illustration by Richard Williams showing animation spacing

Source: Williams, Animator’s Survival Kit

377

Figure 45. Illustration by Richard Williams showing relationship of animation spacing and

timing

Source: Williams, Animator’s Survival Kit

Don’t worry if you don’t understand these distinctions. I also have trouble grasping the

difference between timing and spacing, because the two are intimately connected. It is actually

not necessary to split hairs between the two. Timing is most relevant to the performance of

television animation, so that is the main focus here. Spacing can be left for writing about cinema

animation. Cinema animation visually whisks the viewer away into the story through both

spacing and timing. But when watching a television cartoon at home, we don’t expect to be

dazzled by the motion spectacle of cinema animation. Generally, we just want to spend time with

familiar and beloved characters, as they talk with each other. Animated performance on

television is not snappy like in the cinema; it is longer stories richly told through dialogue.

378

11.2

Performance History

The performance of the early television cartoon has been shaped by the history and

reception of cinema, animation, and broadcasting. In the late 19th

century, cinema standardized

time, previously a subjective phenomenon, uniting it with photography, a means of witnessing

people. Cinema captured and reimagined human experience. It was a visual spectacle: the simple

movement of people through time astonished spectators.694

When J. Stuart Blackton discovered

animation between 1900 and 1910, it was one of a number of special effects “tricks.” The

movement of cartoon characters after stasis—animation—was also an entertaining spectacle.695

In the silent cinema of the mid-1910s, the basic means for achieving humor in live action film

shorts was just being worked out, as in the early films of Charlie Chaplin. Cartoon animation was

a completely new form. Spacing and timing, fundamental means of humor in cartoons, were not

yet well-understood. Vaudevillians could have told the animation artists that humor involves

anticipation: a gag is often set up slowly, and then, in a quick flourish, something completely

different happens instead.

The visual aesthetic of early cinema cartoons was figurative. Figurative animation is

visually cartoony and comic in tone, as Donald Crafton writes.

Figurative performance [in animation] is extroverted. Characters behave as recognizable

“types,” marshaling a small range of instantly identifiable facial and body expressions. …

They elicit surprise and shock but mostly laughs as they move the gag-laden story along.

We appreciate them as we understand clowns or slapstick comedians with distinctive yet

694

Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator,” 1989. 695

Huemer interview by Adamson.

379

familiar styles. … Emotion and empathy, in this other concept of performativity, were

less important than immediacy, surprise, visual gags, and witty repartee.696

Most early animations were crude in execution and couched in the model of cinema as attraction.

Spacing and timing were considered desirable as ends in themselves. In other words, the goal of

early cinema cartoons was show the characters and simply make them move.

Disney was the one to evolve the cartoon into animation, by making spacing and timing

serve character and story. Beginning in 1928, Disney and his artists began to realize that

exaggerating spacing and timing tapped into the unique expressive capabilities of figurative

(cartoony) animation. “Disney was the first person who really analyzed cartoon action,” said

Dick Huemer. “[He] always very carefully planned things, so that everything was

understandable, and one thing happened after another, logically.”697

Disney had his artists adopt

standardized character model sheets, to maintain consistency in characters across different films.

Model sheets portrayed common poses for the character’s common facial expressions, implicitly

“perpetuat[ing] ways of signifying character through pantomimed gestures that had been current

for a century in theater and painting.”698

Disney and his artists went to vaudeville stage theater

performances and studied how the performers expressed themselves. At the time, stage comics

learned performance from people like acting and singing coach Francois Delsarte, who coached

performers to adopt conventional body poses, facial expressions, and physical gestures, to ensure

the audience understood what they were expressing. “Artists of every stripe as well as silent

filmmakers such as Griffith were steeped in these poses,” Crafton writes, “which were a staple of

theater acting.” This approach to theater and cinema performance was figurative and

exaggerated. Disney had his artists render similar techniques in cartoons, and they began to

696

Crafton, Shadow of a Mouse. 697

Huemer interview by Adamson. 698

Crafton, Shadow of a Mouse.

380

string gestures and poses together in sequences. They found that they could bring emotion to the

screen by simply showing a character’s expression change through their acting, thus “giv[ing]

meaning to the expression.”699

After Disney’s early cartoons became wildly popular with audiences, other studios

attempted to copy Disney’s sophisticated approach to making animated films and outdo him.

Artists asked, what makes for an entertaining cartoon? The Fleischer animation studio in the

1930s established a timing department to make their animation “flow more smoothly,” but this

was not necessarily a good decision, because the ensuing regular pacing became monotonous.700

Disney and his artists had been going in the opposite direction, exaggerating cartoon

performance even more. They found that actions could be rendered “very spirited” by more

creatively timing and spacing the frames of character animation. In 1933, the studio achieved a

landmark in character animation with The Three Little Pigs, communicating differences in

personality not through the appearance of characters, but through differences in their gesture and

acting. New characters were being introduced in the figurative style, and finding huge success,

notably Fleischers’ Betty Boop and Popeye.

As the Disney studio began production on their first feature film in the mid-1930s, Walt

came to feel that an hour-long film of wacky gags simply would not hold the audience’s

attention. Contrarily, he decided that the animated feature film should have more naturalistic

animation, a concept contrary to figurative animation, and not a terribly familiar notion. The

studio began to focus on figuring out ways to turn their cartoon characters into naturalistic actors,

believable characters who seemed to inhabit three-dimensional space. Disney’s studio copied the

Fleischers’ rotoscope technique, as a way to literally achieve naturalistic movement. The

699

Thomas and Johnston, Illusion of Life. 700

Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons.

381

character of Snow White was animated this way, by simply tracing over of the frames of her

live-action actress.

Hollywood acting in the 1930s was evolving in sophistication quickly. One of the people

most responsible for this was Konstantin Stanislavski, a Russian actor who began writing about

expressive but naturalistic stage acting decades earlier. Much silent live action cinema acting was

overly exaggerated. In the late 1920s, cinema was transformed by the introduction of sound,

which simultaneously established its standard frame rate of 24 frames per second. Cinema’s

becoming technically sophisticated at this time changed the paradigm of performance for actors.

Stanislavski advocated for a holistic approach to acting uniting experience and performance; in

the US, it would come to be called simply “the Method.” Stanislavski’s approach taught the actor

not to only express a character behaviorally; the actor’s performance should arise from

experiencing the role, enabling the actor to become the character, and “live” out their experience

through their performance. “An actor is under the obligation to live his part inwardly, and then to

give to his experience an external embodiment,” he writes.701

The gradual establishment of radio

broadcasting in the 1920s and 1930s, before the visual signal of television, brought the personal

sound of interpersonal conversation and music into the home. As stations and listeners slowly

began to find each other, personalities of the world spoke to us, and this instant, electric medium

introduced a new intimacy into private life.

At this time, Disney and his actors studied the acting in new Hollywood films, seeking to

achieve a heightened realism in their animation. Late in 1936, Walt Disney began offering

evening art classes to his top animators after hours to develop their craft. These new artists

became known as “character animators”: their role became not just to draw a character but to act

for them through their drawing. The studio was fundamentally changing its approach, distancing

701

Quoted in Crafton, Shadow of a Mouse.

382

itself from figurative animation, and embracing a naturalistic “embodied animation.” Through

rendering characters in “solid,” three-dimensional drawing, the studio achieved an entirely new

naturalist verisimilitude in animation. “This sense of reality in the action was pure illusion—but

satisfying. It opened up a world of fantasy in which anything could happen—and still be real.”702

When Snow White finally premiered, it single-handedly changed the craft of animation by

mesmerizing the audience with its breathtaking illusion of life. At the time, this was an aesthetic

breakthrough, with far-reaching implications.

Making an animated feature film is an endeavor of great risk, and the majority of golden

age animation studios never attempted it. Nearly all other studios only made cartoon shorts.703

In

shorts, the figurative, comic style was still the overriding approach, because there was not time to

develop nuanced characters. But, animation shorts studios somehow needed to split the

difference with Disney’s features, making aesthetically sophisticated embodied character

cartoons which were still driven by figurative slapstick humor. Between 1935 and 1940, Tex

Avery and his animators at Warner Bros. exaggerated timing and spacing even more

dramatically than Disney had done, eschewing believability to contrarily emphasize the

transformative performative power of the animation form. In 1941, Tex Avery began working at

MGM, deeply influencing the animation of Hanna and Barbera, who released the first Tom and

Jerry cartoon in 1940. Imitating Tex Avery, Hanna and Barbera used their lavish budgets to push

animation spacing and timing to breathtaking limits, often just by dramatizing the chase of cat

after mouse.

702

Crafton, Shadow of a Mouse. 703

The exception is the Fleischer brothers. Their studio ambitiously completed two animated feature

films: Gulliver’s Travels in 1939 and Mr. Bug Goes to Town in 1941. The first film was modestly

successful, but producing both ultimately bankrupted the studio and contributed to its closure.

383

“[T]iming, of course, is the essence of comedy. … Everybody learned from Tex Avery,”

Chuck Jones said. “He had an exquisite sense of what you might call ‘ridiculous timing.’”704

But

even the Looney Tunes directors adhered to the basic illusion of life Disney had achieved.

“Believability. That is what we were striving for,” Jones concluded.705

By the mid-1950s,

animation had become a medium of profound power, ranging from the earnest, sentimental

beauty of Disney’s features to the gonzo anarchy of the Looney Tunes. Duck Amuck, a 1953

pinnacle of cartoon achievement directed by Chuck Jones, showcased many of the fundamentals

of animation by dramatizing their opposites. At the same time, of course, television was

overtaking entertainment, taming many of the outlandish tendencies of cinema into more

palatable family fare. Within a few years, many of the animation shorts studios closed.

The arrival of cartoons on television reversed the course of the history of animation,

essentially pushing it from Disney’s embodied animation backwards in time, into more purely

figurative animation. In Crusader Rabbit, “animation was … conspicuous by its absence.” Here,

“animation becomes paralysis,” in Donald Heraldson’s words. 706

The Hanna-Barbera studio

faithfully followed this production model, although they initially sought to mimic cinema shorts.

Chases were a common feature, although these were accomplished with technical rather than

aesthetic methods. Hanna and Barbera needed to abandon Disney-style naturalism, which they

had followed in Tom and Jerry for almost 20 years, instead following the figurative lead of UPA

and Terrytoons. In this sense, Hanna-Barbera’s early television cartoons were cinema-style

animation by other means, superficially emulating a naturalist aesthetic with limited techniques.

704

Jones interview with Adamson. 705

Jones, Chuck Amuck. 706

Donald Heraldson, 1975, Creators of Life: A History of Animation, 81.

384

11.3

Staging and Timing the Early Television Cartoon

In the planned animation of television, performance must be boiled down into a reduced

form. Critics imply that the ultimate cartoon feels lazy and uninspired. While not wrong,

ironically it is the product of great discipline and scale. Instead of planning for the six-to-seven-

minute runtime of a cinema cartoon short, timing for the half-hour early television cartoon

needed to be extended by a factor of two, three, or four. Given these dramatically “restricted

tools,” it is challenging to practice the craft of television animation skillfully, to achieve a

satisfying cartoon for television.707

Doing so requires planning out the animation to maximize the

redundancy of different elements, and limiting the animation elements to build them as

compound images using cel layers. These were tasks of aesthetic engineering in which Alex

Anderson and Bill Hanna excelled.

Walt Disney believed that the skilled animator’s ability to capture the sensation of a

amazing but also familiar experience in animation is what makes a cartoon “readable” to its

audience. In this way, Chuck Jones described “the animator [as] an actor with a pencil:”708

the

animator translates their own acting of the character into their drawings. In practice, often this

meant that animators would have a mirror on their desk, would make faces into the mirror

corresponding to the expression they wanted to draw, and then transpose their face onto the

character.

707

This is a term Chuck Jones used. Greg Ford and Richard Thompson, “Chuck Jones.” Furniss, Chuck

Jones, 113. 708

“Drawings for animators are simply the instrument through which they act, emote, mime, dance, and

create characters as real as any devised by nature,” animator Mark Mayerson explains in a 2008 blog post.

“Their successive drawings are their instrument in no less a way than a ‘live’ actor’s body.” “The

Animator as Actor,” January 16, 2008, http://mayersononanimation.blogspot.com/2008/01/animator-as-

actor.html.

385

In their important book on animation timing, one of the few that exists, Whitaker, Halas,

and Sito write: “Limited animation requires almost as much skill on the part of the animator as

full animation, since he or she must create an illusion of action with the greatest sense of

economy.” It is easy to understand why people in the 1950s believed that it was economically

unfeasible to make animation for television. Yet where there was a will, a way was found. A

sequence of practitioners accepted the risks of leaving Disney’s naturalism, forging a new path

forward for limited animation: Ivan Ivanov-Vano, Dick Huemer and Joe Grant, Chuck Jones,

John Hubley, Bobe Cannon, Alex Anderson, Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.

In Hanna-Barbera’s television cartoon studio, the character’s performance does not

depend largely on the kind of cinema animator who worked at Disney. Instead, the creative work

of people in several different roles approximates character performance in television. The

director carefully plans out the whole cartoon. They assign each shot and its modest amount of

accompanying animation to an artist. The storyboard artist draws and the layout artist designs

character poses carefully, because they must be held naturally for long periods of time. The

director carefully times these poses, so that the timing is natural. Here, the director, the voice

actor, and the animator work with the layout artist’s poses. Largely, what had to suffice is just

two primary elements: the character pose, staged on screen in the drawings of the layout artist,

and the transitional animations that connect them. Each single pose becomes the basis of the

character’s performance in one shot, and the equivalent in television of the subtle motion that

Disney characters perform in one shot.

Much of the entertainment value of the early television cartoon lay in its timing. Hanna-

Barbera’s beginnings in animation production go back years into the cinema era, with their Tom

and Jerry series. In television, too, Joe and his story artists established the basic shots of the

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story, first in the script or storyboard, and second in the layout, the basis for the final shots.

Around that point, approximately, Joe also recorded the voice track with the actors, and directed

the actors’ performances. This was a creative process. After that point, the layouts were turned

over to Hanna to time them and direct the animation staff about how to actually make these

elements into (semi-)moving cartoons. Much of the early television cartoon’s timing is

determined by those voices as the basic soundtrack, but Hanna needed to work out all the nitty-

gritty details, including . Hanna and other animation directors including Charles Nichols were

the ones who had to figure out how to make the leisurely and somewhat awkward timing of this

new kind of cartoon natural. This was more of a technical process. Importantly, one shouldn’t

generalize about what is good timing and what is not, because it depends on many different

factors, like the genre of the show, the rhythm of the speech of each voice actor, and the

personality of the character.709

Summarizing this, Chris Webster writes:

[T]here are many approaches to animation and the notion of ‘good timing’ is entirely

wrapped up in and linked to what the animator is trying to achieve. ... A good dramatic

performance demands different acting skills to that of a comic actor, not greater or

lesser—just different.710

How did Bill Hanna time his cartoons? He has explained that he combined strict

mathematical time with his intuition, developed from experience and early musical training. The

fundamental unit of animation time is the frame rate of the motion picture technology, that is, the

technological time standard according to which each new frame is displayed. In film, there are

24 frames per second. The U.S. NTSC video standard is approximately 30 frames per second, a

709

Timing … which works in one situation or in one mood, may not work at all in another situation or

mood. The only real criterion for timing is: if it works effectively on the screen [in its context] it is

good, if it doesn’t, it isn’t. Whitaker, Halas, and Sito, Timing. 710

Chris Webster, Animation: The Mechanics of Motion, 2005.

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small but relevant difference. Hanna used a simple metronome, a mechanical device used to

mark exact timing with a clicking sound, and broke each second of animation up into a fraction

of the total frame rate per second: e.g. a half second is 15 frames, a quarter second is about 8

frames, and so on. With his metronome, Hanna “could figure out how many frames … were

required for the precise coordination of action with sound.” Hanna’s musical training gave him a

learned knack for knowing when the timing should frequently depart from regularity to introduce

entertaining variety. “[T]iming the facial reaction of a character, a double take, or some other

comedic or dramatic bit of action … you just had to rely on your intuitive sense of timing … it

becomes something that is felt more than precisely measured.”711

In Hanna-Barbera’s shows, there were nowhere near as many “in-betweener” animators

as there was at Disney. Because of this, Hanna-Barbera had far fewer animators, and they played

a supporting secondary role, not a primary role. Even on higher-budget shows like The

Flintstones, there were not many transitional animation drawings. At the point when the

character needs to somehow move, as I understand it, the director, animator, and sound effects

person would step in, in that order. From the best I can tell, what happened is that the director

timed the motion transition, and an animator would step in to accomplish that motion with a

minimum of additional drawings, like a twirling of a character’s feet. That is, if there was not

previously completed animation completed and banked that could be substituted. If there was not

a suitable sound effect available, there was a sound effects person to record a sound of some kind

to accompany it, like perhaps a breezy whooshing sound. Characters often entered and left the

frame with an effect of some kind, like a motion blur, camera shake, or simply by a walk cycle

bringing them into frame.

711

Hanna and Ito, Friends.

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The animator is not the character, as Donald Crafton shows. In animation, the animator

must draw the character poses relatively slowly, frame by frame, but anticipate their speed when

projected at many frames per second. In cinema, animated motion is usually drawn “on ones,”

which means a new drawing for each cinema frame. On television, animated motion is generally

drawn every few frames to save on production costs, such as “on twos,” “on threes,” or even “on

fours,” meaning that a new drawing only appears every two, three, or four frames.712

On a

subjective human level, timing is segmented in terms of “beats,” a beat being a moment of some

seconds in which an action happens or a line of dialogue is delivered, and the pause that follows

it.713

Preston Blair explains how an animator can set the timing of a shot. “The swings and ticks

of a metronome can determine the exact speed of the frames of a walk, a run, or any action you

visualize. [The animator can start by setting the metronome] arm at 8 frames and act out a fast

walk or run with your fingers.” The effect of movement, according to Blair, arises “according to

spaced-move patterns in the actions.”714

A crucial difference here is that, as a text, a classical cinema animation unfolded

relatively quickly, over a shorter runtime. The early television cartoon text unfolded

comparatively slowly, over a longer runtime. This suggests that making cinema animation is

more intuitive and that making a television cartoon is more rational. Richard Williams confirms

the impression, which Chuck Jones mentioned: “It is easier for an animator to deal with an action

that ‘seems a little rushed’ … than with one that is a little slow. Clarity alone can save a rushed

scene, but a distended scene requires an inventiveness that not every animator can muster.”715

712

I’ll need to confirm these specific numbers. I’ve seen them referenced. 713

Thanks to Lev Cantoral. 714

Cartoon Animation. 715

Williams, Animator’s Survival Kit.

389

This appears to essentially be the distinction that Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston make

between a “straight-ahead” approach to animation, contrasted with a “pose-to-pose” approach. A

cinema animator could often just start at the beginning of their shot and work straight through to

the end, without even knowing what exactly would happen in advance. The early television

cartoon mainly just has its poses; it doesn’t lavish attention on its linking animation. The

animator plans around those poses, and completes any animation needed besides them, like a

tilting of the head and a moving of the mouth. It appears that some accomplished cinema

animators, accustomed to a straight-ahead approach, might have struggled to work in the pose-

to-pose approach required in television.716

It appears that cinema animation became an intuitive

artistic practice for animators like Milt Kahl and Ken Harris. When asked to animate a cinema

scene from scratch, they had no problem. But if they were restricted to the simple poses of

television, they might not have been able to draw the character in poses that could be naturally

held.

Bill Hanna should not be remembered as incidental to the operation, because his effective

timing as animation director was necessary to make the cartoon believable and funny. Although

neither played the all-powerful role that their executive producer credits on seemingly every

single television cartoon episode they ever produced. By the time of Jonny Quest (1964-1965),

716

In Richard Williams’ words, it appears that Disney legend Milt Kahl, who was celebrated in 2009 as

“The Animation Michelangelo,” couldn’t explain how he approached his cinema animation performance

and timing in a rational way.

Milt Kahl always said, ‘[Ultimately] I think you just do it. [Once] you know what you’re after—

you just keep after it till you get it.” Williams, Animator’s Survival Kit. Chuck Jones gives a

specific example of a talented cinema animator who it appears never worked in television,

apparently because he lacked the skill set to do so. “Dick Williams adores Ken Harris. He worked

with him on A Christmas Carol. … [63] Ken animated most of Scrooge, but he couldn’t draw

him. … Ken is an animator in the truest sense. There are animators who could not draw, in the

sense that they couldn’t make a single drawing; they made a flurry of drawings. Jones interview

with Adamson.

390

Joe yielded more control to other artists in the studio to create new shows and segments, and Bill

shared direction duties with Charles Nichols.

The majority of the artists that Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera hired were actually trained at

Walt Disney’s studio, which was then apparently one of the few and best places to receive

animation training.717

Iwao Takamoto distinguished that Hanna-Barbera’s approach to cartoon-

making was design-oriented, compared with Disney’s, which had an art-based approach. “At

Disney’s, so much of the process was left in the hands of the animators, who were in essence

their own directors,” Takamoto said later. At H-B, the house style of story writing was quite

grounded in design, meaning that cartoons were simply based around the layout poses of the

writer’s story. “I was very comfortable with this style of working [at H-B] ... doing key poses on

a scene.”718

In the end, Hanna-Barbera’s cartoon empire can be understood to be based in the

poses which Joe Barbera and his story artists drew and the timings which Bill Hanna and his

animators realized.

11.4

Variety amidst Repetition

“[A] good cartoon is about surprise,” contemporary animation producer Linda Simensky

has said. “[I]t is about the unexpected.”719

Comedy on television often works through what is

called the incongruity theory of humor. Funny jokes are set up to prepare the viewer to expect

one thing, and then to instead deliver something completely different to us. The most impactful

jokes use this process of incongruity to frame cultural norms in a new light, showing society’s

717

CalArts was not established until 1961, after the beginning of television cartoon production. 718

Takamoto and Mallory, Iwao Takamoto. 719

Sarah Banet-Weiser, Kids Rule!: Nickelodeon and Consumer Citizenship, 2007.

391

status quo to be arbitrary, even ridiculous.720

Incongruity was a core technique in television

animation from the beginning. In its characterization, Crusader Rabbit is about a smallish rabbit

who is wimpy, but brave. The Mickey Mouse Club began each episode with an elaborate

animated parade with musical fanfare. The opening sequence ends with Donald Duck preparing

to hit a gong; when he does so, something different happens each time, in each daily episode.

The cartoony characters of the figurative cartoon are meant to be broadly caricatured

stereotypes, which means that they are inherently repetitions of widely-understood cultural

tropes. On the formal level of the standard visual character model, so central to the television

cartoon, rather than performing the original and naturalistic animated movement of the cinema,

the early television cartoon character has a consistent, repeated appearance. Their humor comes

from their dialogue and from performing simple comic gags. Unlike in cinema animation,

figurative cartoon characters perform the ridiculous for comic effect.

[In figurative animation, t]he characters are comedians without any depth or subtlety of

personality. The interest is in putting over the gag, showing their funny actions, and

engaging in self-parody, not in setting forth the toons’ motivated behaviors. … Rather

than providing insight into a character’s psyche or suggesting a moral, the narratives of

films adhering to the figurative approach make their points through repetition and

symbolic visuals.721

Comedy texts often invoke cultural clichés because of their accessibility and because of

their need to socially generalize across many groups to find a broad audience, like a half-hour

cartoon or sitcom. Television generally privileges consensus and an overriding normalcy. But

720

Television scholar Brett Mills discusses this theory of humor in his 2009 book The Sitcom. The humor

of the incongruity theory is inherently surprising. Jokes like this are typically built up. But, rather than

being the result of a gradual exposition, then the gag is put over suddenly. At that point, the viewer will

hopefully intuitively just “get the joke.” 721

Crafton, Shadow of a Mouse.

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perhaps acceptance of ritual of repetition on television eases the acceptance of the variety of

changes that depart from our expectations. Implicitly, we gravitate towards characters similar to

us. In this way, the identity of the main characters reflects the show’s anticipated audience. Since

stereotypes affirm existing beliefs, they easily cause laughter. But when comedy is used to push

the audience in unfamiliar directions, it holds a unique power. Laughter is a way we accept new

social information. Laughing at an uncomfortable joke is a way to engage comfortably with it.

The very fact of laughter also softens our resistance to its unfamiliarity when it is experienced in

a group. Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai address this by stating that “comedy has issues.”

Comedy often starts from points of consensus and stasis, but they emphasize its unique power for

social transformation through invoking shared laughter.

Comedy helps us test or figure out what it means to say “us.” Always crossing lines, it

helps us figure out what lines we desire or can bear. Precisely through the potential

disagreement they inevitably provoke, both aesthetic judgments and comedy “recall us to

what is shared [and not shared] in our everyday practices.” … [I]t is worth stressing the

originality of putting comedy—as opposed to mass-mediated entertainment, capitalist

commercialism, or the performance principle—at the heart and origin of the public

sphere.722

How does television animation entertain and hold the attention of the viewer when it is

generally defined by redundancy, static poses and repeated motions? If cinema animation

characters move in time, television cartoon characters simply persist through time. Since these

characters move less, they are able to just hang out. This is a way in which stasis is more

characteristic to this cartoon than motion, which so defines cinema animation. Visually, the early

722

Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai, “Comedy Has Issues,” 2017.

393

television cartoon is often largely static. This is the simplest form of repetition—the lack of

change.

The viewer spends much time with popular characters. This reinforces the parasocial,

one-sided relationship that is the basis of the popularity of all performers. Watching the cartoon,

the viewer accustoms themselves to the conventions of the norms of the show and genre.

Viewers of The Flintstones as the original cartoon sitcom expect a lot of talking and quick

slapstick gags. The television cartoon cannot go crazy like a Looney Tunes short. For this reason,

the early television cartoon must combat boredom by maintaining variety and novelty on an

ongoing basis. Some long-running cartoons develop an extensive cast of characters, who

alleviate viewer boredom with the primary characters. Topical cultural references are a source of

relevance. In a sense, the early television cartoon needs to continually wield the capacity to

surprise and delight, to continually keep the viewer’s attention.

Generally, like any cartoon, the early television cartoon relies on the element of surprise,

of the unexpected. Every television cartoon repeats many visual elements, such as character

poses and walk cycles within an episode. The Flintstones, for instance, established set

proportions for the specific size and orientation of the characters on screen. This enabled Hanna-

Barbera to reuse character poses not just within but also across many episodes, possibly even

much of the series. But, the studio varies these repeated elements in many ways. Because the

repetitions occupy discontinuous positions within the episode narratives, separated in time, their

performance feels natural, not redundant.723

Commercials often obscure the fact that often the

very same climactic moment that often precedes the break and is repeated just after the break, to

723

[When an animation cycle] repeats, it also pushes forward. ... Every cycle can therefore be considered

to be both repetitive and appetitive. They simultaneously convey both cyclical and progressive

properties. One reason for this is that time is always experienced in a linear manner — actions may be

repeated (or more precisely re-enacted), but not time. Torre, Animation.

394

restore continuity. But when watching a cartoon without commercials, that repetition suddenly

seems surprising.

Especially in television, it is never exactly known when something will happen, even if it

is understood that it will probably happen. Timing is the very basis of animation, the factor that

can distinguish between a character who acts lethargically and one who acts quickly. Television

cartoons fill a half hour broadcast time slot by stretching out slow moments and speeding up the

fast moments that follow them. Even the earliest television cartoon, Crusader Rabbit, which had

very little actual animation, had sharp timing. What may be unexpected is that the viewer will

often stay glued to the screen less by what has happened as by what has not happened yet. The

television cartoon arguably emphasizes the potential for surprise, which is still entertaining to the

viewer, even when not much is happening on screen.

In everyday life, we assume body poses and face expressions for specific periods of time

without realizing it. An actor must learn to understand their character from the inside to know

how their character should behave. Composing each frame of a cinema animation is

comparatively slow, but closer to reality in its detail, and thus more intuitive. By comparison,

planning out a television cartoon is exceedingly slow and counterintuitive, requiring rational

planning; on screen, each pose or expression is held for second after second. Frank Thomas and

Ollie Johnston summarize the animator’s situation this way.

The assignment sounds deceptively simple. Find the entertainment values in the story

situations, then present them visually through the feelings of the personalities involved.

Until the spectator can see an incident through a character’s eyes, there is no life and very

little warmth. So [at the Disney studio] the discussions were not so much about “What

happens next?” as about character relationships and the funny things that people do.

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Variety is built into cinema animation, in the sense that it involves a great amount of

movement, and little repetition. Cinema animators have great flexibility in how to realize the

particular beats of the story, and they have a long production period of years to revise those

executions. A cinema animation is often a grand narrative involving many different characters

doing a lot of moving around; there is a short amount of time to tell the story, so each moment

must count. The posing, timing, and spacing of animation in cinema often occurs quickly, and

must be tightly synced together.

Variety must be pursued differently in the television cartoon, because repetition is the

default. Television animators, by contrast, must communicate story beats with only the most

“golden” of visual poses, the ones that most naturally express what is happening, poses that will

stay on screen for seconds at a time. Early television cartoons often use the gimmick of having a

character stay stationary, but having their feet, head, and the background move, to make it look

like they are running. There is a lot of time to fill, and the posing and timing of television

cartoons is looser, but the key moments of the narrative must still be seamlessly believable.

In both television and cinema, the creative work of the many different people involved in

the multiple beats of every scene must come together seamlessly and holistically to communicate

the writer’s intention. “Comedy, possibly more than anything else, depends on us knowing our

characters and our audience and getting the timing right … the pauses we put into our visuals …

create the comedy. … The pregnant pause is a staple element of any comedy film but the cartoon

takes it almost as far as it can go.”724

Describing posing and timing is abstract, but when to see it

on screen is to understand it instinctually. “[I]t is animation timing that makes an animation

believable, funny, frightening, moving, poetically beautiful or just downright silly.”725

724

Hayes and Webster, Performance for Animation. 725

Webster, Animation.

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PART 2 CONCLUSION

Twentieth-century childhood changed as television evolved away from strict live

broadcast into the greater mediation of cartoon and film production. The meeting of television

and animation forever changed both media, forging a new hybrid that continues to evolve today.

Since the 1960s, television can no longer be understood as a purely live medium. There was no

going back after it gained animation’s capacity for non-photographic or counterfactual

mediation. And, since the 1960s, animation can no longer be understood as a purely cinematic

form of media. While it seemed impossible at first, animation gained the ability to adapt to the

fast pace of television, as its two early studios simplified and stylized it into a new kind of

cartoon.

The hybridity of the television cartoon permanently marked both media. Television could

no longer be considered strictly a technical medium without aesthetic aspect. “[T]elevision by

1990 … retheorized its aesthetic and presentational task,” John Caldwell has written. “With

increasing frequency, style itself became the subject, the signified, if you will, of television.”726

And animation was no longer solely created by only the most experienced studios, in service of

purely aesthetic aims. The cartoon of television became an electronic audiovisual language,

much more than a quaint genre that children grow out of to become adults. Animation became

telematic, the “suitable form” many different kinds of institutions turned to to engage with

contemporary ideas on television. “[L]ine, shape, color, and symbols in movement can represent

the essence of [any] idea, … humorously, with force, with clarity,” John Hubley and Zachary

726

Caldwell, Televisuality, 5.

397

Schwartz wrote in 1946.727

Television provides access to a broad audience at every time of day,

and animation is the human-friendly design aesthetic that people cannot help paying attention to.

To understand how the early television cartoon became a hybrid form of media without

historical precedent, it can be analyzed using its formal attributes as lenses, through the

principles I proposed here. The principle of Cartoon, in Chapter 5, at the end of Part 1, represents

this format broadly, as generally distinct from animation. The television cartoon image is here

the visual caricature, while the soundtrack is the aural text.

The six principles of Part 2 are the specifics of this model of the early television cartoon.

Chapter 7 proposes the principle of story. Television cartoons tell ongoing, open-ended, stories.

Cartoon story is about the characters in the story world and the nature of their relationships.

Cinema animation does tell stories, too, but its art form has historically been about dramatizing

single, closed stories with a predictable structure, performed by the expressive power of an

artist’s renderings of animated movement. My argument is that cinema’s visuality ultimately

dominates its story. Inherently, the largely visual focus of cinema animation makes it less

narrative and more expressive. In television cartoon, story drives the plot along in a forward-

looking sequence, even if there is not much happening on screen at any given moment. The story

and plot tends to take the viewer’s mind off the fact that they are watching what would be,

without its sound, a pretty dull, largely static image. Another way to express the significance of

story here is to say that television cartoon is meaningful and that its episodes act out those

meanings.

Chapter 8 shows how the characters of the early television cartoon are the focus of the

story. Characters do things, interact with each other, and express their personality. But, unlike in

cinema animation, they express their personality with their voice. Voice here can mean either

727

Quoted in Sandler, “Limited Animation.”

398

their literal speaking voice, or their agency or freedom of expression. These spoken voices are

the most important sound element of the cartoon character. The vocal tracks, recorded early in

the process, serve to structure the rest of the episode. Of course, there are characters in animated

films, too. But their animation is at odds with the depth of their character’s personality, in being

so focused on developing the character visually. The television cartoon is fundamentally oriented

around the personality voice of characters, because for a cartoon character to express themselves

on television as a person, they need to speak.

Chapter 9 focuses on how, in its visual style, the early television cartoon inherently

distances itself from naturalism. The style of the television cartoon is called “figurative.” In

contrast to the “embodied,” three-dimensional cinema animation, the television cartoon is

simplified and exaggerated in just two dimensions. Economics is one of the main reasons for

this. But in another sense, the visually abstracted design increases visual interest in the

characters, even if they don’t move very much, because it makes their appearance curious or

funny. This visual stylization more clearly expresses how the early television cartoon is

designed: it is inherently de-naturalized and prone to invite attention. When it loses the

sophistication of Disney-esque naturalism, visual style becomes newly important.

Sound most deeply defines the early television cartoon, a principle explored in more

depth in the tenth chapter. As Chuck Jones alleged, it can be understood as a new kind of visual

radio. High-fidelity FM radio technology was built into television from the beginning, and this

sound quality made up for the fairly crude image quality it had for the remainder of the 20th

century. The production process of the television cartoon really commences when the writer has

finished their storyboard or script and the director directs the voice actors to deliver and record

their lines. In the final sound mix, sound effects are added, which punctuate actions in the

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cartoon story and add atmosphere. Music is arranged to roughly match the timing of the cartoon

towards the end of the production process.

The performance of the early television cartoon, covered in Chapter 11, consists in the

timing of character poses and in execution of quick animated character movements that transition

from one pose to another. These more static character poses can’t reflect the more subtle facial

acting that animated cinema characters accomplish; the voice actor does much of the acting, and

much is communicated by the director’s pacing of “strong” character poses that are natural and

easy to hold.

Before concluding this conclusion to Part 2, I will address what I imagine to be several

criticisms my account might be vulnerable to, because of its emphasis on these principles. First,

scholars with knowledge of the history of cinema animation would understandably be liable to

say: all of these principles were pioneered in cinema years before television! So, how can I claim

that they came to define the early television cartoon more than cinema animation? I admit this: as

the earlier form of both cartoon and animation, cinema did establish each of these principles as a

precedent. My response is, though, that I believe that cinema animation left many behind or

subordinated them to roles simply supporting animation’s illusion of life. When television

needed means for economical but entertaining cartoon production, these principles became

relevant again, and soon became essential to the early television cartoon.

A likely rejoinder is that, Ok, that may be true for some of these principles, but not for all

of them. How can I say that story, character, and performance are not prominent in cinema

animation, when they so clearly are? I acknowledge this. It is possible to question whether some

of these principles in this way. Ultimately, there is not a clearly true or false answer: making a

decision is a matter of persuasively making a case, which I have tried to do here. There are valid

400

counterarguments for each of these principles. I respond that I conceive each of these three

principles in particular to have a different function in television. Partly, my decision to title each

of my principles chapters with one word means I must clarify or qualify the term to make it more

specific in the subtitle. In cinema, story frames the events depicted, ultimately establishing

discursive closure of the text; in television, story is an engine that keeps the plot in motion.

Character in cinema is developed through the animator’s penciled acting; character in television

is developed aurally by the actor’s giving the character their distinctive voice. In cinema,

performance is an animistic visual spectacle; in television, performance might be more akin to

puppetry, gesturing unchanging characters around manually. “In a sense [our cartoons are] a

return to the old Punch & Judy shows,” Barbera said in a 1960 interview.728

When I began my interview study with animation industry professionals and scholars in

Los Angeles in 2017, I asked most people, why do you think that television animation is

understudied in print? I received perhaps the most memorable response from Kevin Sandler.

“Because most of it’s crap!” Well … it is hard to deny this. Partly, this is the reason I chose to

limit my discussion to the early television cartoon, between 1950 and 1965, not after 1965.

Quality was a big issue for watchdog and advocacy groups during the Saturday morning

cartoon years, in the 1960s and 1970s, especially: why couldn’t these cartoons be better? Many

advocates thought of violence as antisocial and civically-informed themes as prosocial. And

many conflated antisocial cartoons as bad cartoons and prosocial cartoons as good cartoons.

When Joe Barbera was asked why their cartoons could not be better, he responded that they felt

handcuffed without the ability to use simple, slapstick antics. Here’s a memorable story about a

meeting he attended with broadcasting standards and practices professionals, whose job became

728

Stimson, “Cartoon Factory.”

401

to enforce such morality-focused standards of taste. “I … was asked to state my position on what

they called ‘responsible programming.’”

“I’m aware of the importance of vigilant standards and practices,” I said, “but I hope we

don’t get to the point where we have to have the cat stop chasing the mouse to teach him

glassblowing and basket weaving.” It was my way of saying that I hoped we wouldn’t

kill cartoons by burdening them all with phony “educational content.” I guess at least one

of the standards and practices people present got the message. My comment prompted her

to up and walk out of the conference.729

Admittedly, on television, animation became a matter of filling time. Spreading

animation thin meant that practitioners lost much of the remarkable artistry of the cinema era. It

will always remain necessary to limit movement to make such cartoons possible. On the other

hand, it is possible to see these new techniques as making animation more sophisticated, because

it learned to do new things. In a sense, early television cartoons found the ability to focus on

things besides dazzling the spectator with their visual artistry. This was actually also necessary

for the technical reason that the black and white television screen of the time was hard to watch.

Once television acquired animation techniques, it could divide up its broadcast into a sequence

of well-produced segments made with video and audio controls. Both crafting video and

manipulating audio are techniques made common by animation.

Perhaps the most serious critique is: Focusing on specific, unchanging “principles” is by

definition essentialist. If this account is to live up to academic standards of impartiality, how can

I pass essentializing judgements like the seven principles I propose? This is, truly, a difficult

critique to answer well. Maybe this project is inherently essentialist, because it commits to

specific attributes. I am making blanket statements, it is true, which do not leave much room for

729

Barbera, My Life.

402

the kind of natural variation that occurs in any empirical phenomenon of the world. This critique

could be sharpened by saying that this account also seems to be historically essentializing, in that

it proposes these principles as somehow fixed and unchanging through time, which is generally a

methodological weakness of this kind of absolutist account.

I don’t mean to propose that these principles of the early television cartoon never change

over the years. My best response is that, because of the pressures of economics and time in

television animation production, nearly all cartoons that were made after the early years needed

for the sake of efficiency to follow these same standard practices. For whatever reasons, making

limited animation for television became a stable production standard, one that persists to this

day. But what about a cartoon like The Ren & Stimpy Show? I see that important show as

pushing limited animation into the territory of cinema, closer to cinema animation like Bob

Clampett’s Looney Tunes than television cartoons like The Flintstones.

Doesn’t this prove that these principles are not absolute? I don’t actually claim that these

principles are absolute; limited animation and full animation exist on a shared spectrum, and

each borrows from the others. Principles are not hard and fast rules, but lessons that apply most

of the time. If anything, Ren & Stimpy is the exception that proves the rule that these principles

are the norm. No other television cartoon has ever been made with cinema animation techniques

to the degree that it was. Lev Cantoral and I reckon with this in our paper on Mighty Mouse: The

New Adventures.730

John Kricfalusi, the creator of Ren & Stimpy, first worked on the Mighty

Mouse series, and he worked out many of his approaches there. John K. was both famous and

infamous for his idiosyncratic and high artistic expectations of his artists during production. One

basically insane standard he imposed was to completely reject the use of model sheets. He

actually required the same characters to be drawn differently by different artists, so that their

730

Cantoral and Williams, “Saturday Morning Trojan Mouse.”

403

appearance was never the same. Unfortunately, John K. was fired from Ren & Stimpy—in large

part because he could not economically rationalize his production team. His approach to

television animation is really more like the more elaborate standards of cinema animation

authorship, and is thus atypical for television cartoons.

Despite the central position of television cartoons in the media ecosystem, many scholars

appear to favor accepted and esteemed forms like the feature film and the novel, while

simultaneously appearing to deny that cartoons exist, or accept a need to attend to them as

scholars. In my view, this is a kind of chauvinism, implicitly privileging one object as inherently

superior to another for arbitrary reasons of taste. Admittedly, trying to understand how cartoons

are made for television is a different research project than focusing on what animation is in

cinema. But I believe that accounts of television without cartoons are incomplete, as are accounts

of cartoons without television.

Ultimately, I suggest that television’s economization of the expensive visual change of

animation in its new cartoon format began a trend that eventually led into animation becoming

possible in digital media. Being welcomed to television allowed animation to colonize an

entirely new medium and to evolve as part of its growing production and distribution system. For

generations, television has been establishing and spreading this simple but entertaining cartoon

format. Hanna-Barbera, especially, kept animation alive long enough for it to spread into the new

forms of digital media in the 1980s and 1990s, even if it suffered in the process. The television

cartoon remains a hybrid of television and animation, of course. Certainly by the 1990s,

television was no longer just a technical medium—hardware—and animation was no longer just

a genre—software. By incorporating animation techniques, television became more like software

404

than hardware. Departing from the classicism of cinema, when animation was adapted for

television, it became modernized, a lean and flexible technique necessary for digital media.

405

CONCLUSION

THE MEDIA LEGACY OF THE EARLY TELEVISION CARTOON

[I]t is because culture has become material that we are now in a position to understand

that it always was material, or materialistic, in its structures and functions. We

postcontemporary people have a word for that discovery—a word that has tended to

displace the older language of genres and forms—and this is, of course, the word

medium, and in particular its plural, media, a word which now conjoins three relatively

distinct signals: that of an artistic mode or specific form of aesthetic production, that of a

specific technology, generally organized around a central apparatus or machine; and that,

finally, of a social institution.

— Fredric Jameson, “Video: Surrealism Without the Unconscious”731

“Television production saved the American animation industry during the late 1950s and

early 1960s,” animation historian Charles Solomon has written. “But the cost was enormous. …

The salvation of animation by television recalls the Vietnam era phrase: ‘It became necessary to

destroy the village in order to save it.’”732

Animator Mike Kazaleh is one of the few people I’ve

found who has little patience for such old-fashioned protestations. He seeks to bring the

temperature of this debate down by emphasizing that this perspective represents a romantic

idealization of animation as art. Kazaleh responds: Animation is entertainment!

731

In Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 1991. 732

Enchanted Drawings: The History of Animation (2nd

Edition), 1994.

406

[T]here were (and still are) a lot of people in the cartoon business who think that what we

are producing is animation. This has [led] to a lot of bad films that had trite stories that

only existed so that the animators had something to animate … In reality, the by-product

of our labor is not animation, but filmed entertainment that combines moving drawings

with sound. The way we draw the figures and make them move must occur naturally

from the story material.733

The media cartoon is inescapably a hybrid: it is aesthetic, and technical, as well as

economic. Since media became visual, temporal, and aural in the early 1900s, the cartoon has

become an irresistible format for entertainment. Animation has always required economies of

scale to produce: a large audience is needed to finance such expensive productions. The means

for producing cartoons inherently needs to be rationalization of technique. Cartoons are an

ultimate fetishized commodity: the creative labor of artists transforms them into something

magical. Mike Kazaleh is right that, from one perspective, cartoons are simple entertainment.

Charles Solomon may make a point he did not intend: by lamenting animation’s rationalization,

in a way he implicitly mournfully admits to its necessity. And, as Fredric Jameson reminds us,

culture always takes material form in media. Jameson helps rescue 20th

century media from its

equation with content, showing its essential technicity. As long as there are media, there will be a

need for cultural content like cartoons.

This conclusion is fairly open-ended. The material is newer… and not always as well-

organized. Instead of looking at the television cartoon’s early past, I focus on recent history—the

early years of digital graphical user interfaces in the 1980s and 1990s. My main theme in this last

piece of linear writing is that this new kind of cartoon is inescapably a mediated entity. This

733

Mike Kazaleh, untitled comment on a blog post by Yowp, “A Reply To Chuck Jones,” April 18, 2015,

Tralfaz (blog), https://tralfaz.blogspot.com/2015/04/a-reply-to-chuck-jones.html.

407

relates to my earlier point that this cartoon is specific to television. The animation of cinema is

directly linked to the specificity of the medium of cinema. But, the television cartoon’s purpose

of everyday entertainment shows more clearly that it must be a hybrid of technics, design, and

economics, as Jameson would claim. Early in my doctoral career, when people asked me what I

study, I used to say that I study the intersection of technology and culture in historical contexts.

After studying with Tim Havens and Rita Zajacz, both of whom are steeped in media economics,

I realized that I should add political economy.

I’m taking the modest methodological risk of zooming out in my conclusion to this

dissertation to search for more general implications that may follow from this understanding of

the early television cartoon as a media format. The introduction and conclusion of Part 1

summarized the important context themes of the early television cartoon, and those of Part 2

brought together its important properties. In this final conclusion, it would have made the most

sense to look at later television cartoons—namely those of the animation renaissance of the

1990s. Yet, in the ambitious spirit of this dissertation, I here push past the primary implications

to explore secondary and tertiary ones. These concluding speculations are similar in some ways

to Marshall McLuhan’s wide-ranging thought probes. My collegial hope is that this concluding

discussion provokes you to some broader reflection, but that it does not feel self-indulgent or

methodologically irresponsible. I am reminded of asking my first doctoral advisor, John Durham

Peters, about Marshall McLuhan. Did John think what McLuhan was doing was scholarship?

“No,” he responded. An offhand comment in his book on environments as media clarifies the

matter: “One reads McLuhan for sparks, not scholarship.”734

Facing down the one-eyed monster in the 1950s, animation decided “TV”: to be a new

kind of thing beamed out on television. In the brave new postwar era, animation needed

734

Peters, Marvelous Clouds. I take John to mean sparks of insight.

408

television as much as television needed animation. But animation’s career as a show-stopper

spectacle ended with World War II. Postwar, animation became a workaday craft, in the hands of

Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera. Avoiding the visual provocation and exertion of action, the early

television cartoon became a loquacious charmer that routinely talked up a storm. Animation did

get a new lease on life in its simplification in UPA’s short films. But, there was not much

comedy to be found in UPA’s world—the new limited animation cartoon was still in search of an

aesthetic.

The early television animators pragmatically returned to the time-tested vaudeville model

of early cinema cartoons, especially the utilitarian slapstick cartoons of Paul Terry. “Television

discover[ed] 1915,” Conrad Smith has written, writing with poetic eloquence about the banal

proceedings of the middle-period television cartoons shown in the United States on Saturday

mornings in the 1970s.

By tuning in on the American commercial television networks any Saturday morning, we

can see crude, characterless animation reminiscent of the early studio efforts around

1915. … Whole scenes are shot with only the character’s mouth moving through three

basic positions used to express the whole English vocabulary; unimaginative panoramic

backdrops repeat themselves so quickly that even children notice when their attention is

drawn to it. The plots are often sophomoric and crude, with banal dialogue added to the

mediocre artwork as an expression of modern technology.735

Recognizing this parallel between the early television cartoon and early cinema cartoons speaks

to how, before Walt Disney, most all cartoons were limited. Winsor McCay awoke a desire for

vivacious visual life in 1914, but it was not until Disney’s animation in 1928 that this became a

reality. In the subsequent postwar domestication, watching cartoons on television at home

735

Smith, “Early History of Animation.”

409

became a childhood pastime. Cartoons on television were no longer novel—they became normal.

“[A]nimation as an industry only survived in the United States because of its albeit ‘reduced’

presence on television.”736

On the whole, I think it is a good thing that the limited animation of

television made simple animation a viable production mode, because it allowed this format to

expand to meet new needs, instead of contracting and dying. In the 1970s, newer video

technologies like the video game and VHS home video recorders rendered the television cartoon

an old media. But this evolution also shows how the cartoon continues to be a technical

precedent, an inherent part, of later video technologies.737

In a 1994 book called The Texture of Industry, two archaeologists of industry go way

back to the beginning of industrialization to give us a reminder that the earliest raw materials of

industry were hard substances like wood and steel. They lament that children, especially, are

losing touch with the essential materiality of the world, which once defined workaday life in

earlier times, when working at a factory was the norm.

Already young Americans have lost most of their opportunities to see or experience the

transformation of materials into finished products or to learn about the properties of wood

and steel or about the handling of tools through personal experience. … Today … [t]he

tactile experiences of making and shaping materials are being replaced by manipulation

of images on video screens[.]738

For better and worse, it’s true that the stuff of life today is becoming increasingly

immaterial. But, because it is so thoroughly culturally naturalized, even immaterial media, like

the images and videos of social media, feel immediate. Presumably, some people told Joe

736

Paul Wells, quoted in Sandler, “Limited Animation.” 737

“Old media rarely die; they just recede into the background and become more ontological,” John

Durham Peters has written. The Marvelous Clouds. 738

Robert B. Gordon and Patrick M. Malone, The Texture of Industry: An Archaeological View of the

Industrialization of North America, Oxford University Press, 1997.

410

Barbera that he must have had it easy, bringing his airy-fairy fantasies into the world. He

responded that “making cartoons is as real a business as stamping steel into automobiles, or

cobbling shoes together, or selling groceries.”739

He’s right that just because television cartoons

are not material in a hard way, something one can pick up, they are instead material in a soft

way, mediated symbols consumed by the perception of sight and hearing. They have a material

basis in limited animation production, electromagnetic broadcast, and electronic display by the

television’s cathode ray tube, although their impact is largely personal and psychological.

For better and worse, I think that Barbera’s comments are disingenuous: his products

were partial factors changing the world away from material professions like auto manufacturing,

shoe repair, and even grocery selling. Hollywood is no longer the dusty trolley stop it was when

Bill Hanna moved to Los Angeles, and it is partly because he and Joe Barbera helped transform

it into an electronic media empire. LA is actually getting too expensive for people who don’t

work in Hollywood to live there. Today, digital technologies mean that you don’t need to get

your hands dirty at all to buy a car or buy groceries. And we just throw our old shoes away.

Friedrich Kittler believed that there is no software, that all electronic media is ultimately

electrical impulses.740

Because of the pervasiveness of digital formats, I side with Lev Manovich,

who believes that now “software takes command.”741

Although there are others who believe that

“there is no software, there are just services.”742

Commercial service company SalesForce may

be able to see the future that others cannot, that what now matters are online platforms,

independent of hardware, which do not even need to be installed locally as software. Commerce

was once about hard materials like lumber and oil; today, commerce pursues ever more

739

Barbera, My Life. 740

“There is no software,” Ctheory (1995),

https://web.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Kittler/There_is_No_Software.html. 741

Software Takes Command, Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. 742

Irina Kaldrack and Martina Leeker, There Is No Software, There Are Just Services. Meson, 2015

411

evanescent frontiers, leaving “impressions” with consumers via technologies like 5G cellular

smartphones. The visual is no longer even necessary: to engage with a computer, we can now

just speak to them.

In any case, I see the television cartoon as emblematic of a central aspect of

contemporary media production. Electronic media is not a simple window on the world... of

course, it never truly was. Now, media are digitally manipulated; some of the most important

elements, like commercials, are often crafted frame by frame. Yet, every non-photographic video

sequence must inherently be constructed frame by frame, crafted by someone, because it cannot

simply be captured like photographs are. And most media is composed of multiple different

components. In the age of Instagram, photographic visuals can now so easily be modified that a

sensible decision is becoming to just opt out of beauty culture altogether, and be “natural.”

Audio is also now very malleable, crafted through Foley sound replacements of sound effects;

even in what seem like strict live action recordings in television, sound is introduced, deleted,

and modified.

These trends mean that the cartoons of television, which led the way in electronic

modification, are quite relevant to the general study of media. Even hundreds of years ago, the

promise of the American dream introduced to the world the possibility of becoming.743

Members

of the Silent Generation, many of whom became parents in the 1950s, appear to have been

falsely comforted by television during the paranoia of the Cold War, acceding to a creeping

social complacency that everything would be OK if the family just assimilated and went with the

flow of the new form of society. A mobile privatization emerged in which the family could feel

comfortably at home in a locale distant from the city because the car and the TV allowed them to

743

Stephen Fender, “The American Difference,” in Mick Gidley (ed.) Modern American Culture: An

Introduction, 1993.

412

stay connected. Before World War II, such frontier areas were small rural towns. As a national

culture, the United States has always been defined by a tendency to fictionalize media

representations, even of photographically based content. The U.S.’ widening political divide has

revolutionary origins which reveal the basic idealism of Americans. To use the language of

advertising, a common U.S. desire is to remake oneself psychographically, at the level of

personality, to escape one’s fixed demographic characteristics, like race, sex, or age. In the 20th

century, the cartoon of television reflected how electronically networked communication content

was becoming depoliticized, because mass media of the time had no technical means for

registering feedback to its messages.744

In 21st century electronic media, animation is an

individualized personal media interface for experiences that promote engagement and therefore

enable circulation on electronic networks.

Led by the central role of advertisers using animation, television quickly became

dominated by the impulse to embrace new wants and needs of ambiguous importance; it became

a medium of wish fulfillment, a means of feeling if not actually living a better life.745

In that

moment, myself, I see a disruption to the onetime U.S. faith in progress. Simply by altering the

flow of time, television creates an endless present moment, implicitly threatening the previously

assumed progressive march of history. This, coupled with a series of domestic and international

crises in the 1960s and 1970s, put the United States into a perilously rudderless state of affairs.746

744

This is similar to a claim that political theorist Jodi Dean makes, “Communicative Capitalism:

Circulation and the Foreclosure of Politics,” Cultural Politics, Volume 1, Issue 1, March 2005, 51-73. 745

This is similar to the argument John Berger makes about advertising in Ways of Seeing 1972. 746

It’s easy to cite events during the 1960s and 1970s that shook Americans’ faith that the country would

always be on the up and up. The assinations of prominet politicians, activists, and public figures; the

deaths of famous musicians by drug overdoses; the deindustrialization of Midwestern cities; the election

of divisive conservative president Richard Nixon; the long process of losing the Vietnam War, and

watching the carnage nightly on television; the breakup of the Beatles in 1970; abandoning the gold

standard in 1971; Nixon’s Watergate scandal; the Arab oil embargo of 1973; the economic crisis of

stagflation throughout the whole decade of the 1970s; the Iran hostage crisis of 1979.

413

These are reasons it was so appealing for many here to welcome Ronald Reagan, a former actor,

to become president in 1980, the year I was born. In a series of long, nostalgic, conservative

television commercials, Reagan promised that it would be “morning in America” again soon.

Entertainment technologies like television, by changing the way people lived, changed who

people were. Some believe that in the 1970s, such new media were profoundly changing the way

the world works. “Telecommunications is the new arterial network, analogous in part to what

railroads were for capitalism in the nineteenth century,” wrote art and media theorist Jonathan

Crary in a 1984 book chapter, a prescient statement if there ever was one.747

Tim Wu has

recently suggested that we are now living in a new gilded age, in which just a few massive media

companies control much of our everyday life, and that these are reasons to break up such

institutions.748

To return to the 20th

century, Fredric Jameson, notwithstanding his leading position

within the Duke Literature program, as of 1991, points out that film and literature are no longer

the hegemonic center of social life. “[E]very age is dominated by a privileged form, or genre,

which seems by its structure the fittest to express its secret truths,” he writes.

[Media] serve as some [such] supreme and privileged, symptomatic, index of the

zeitgeist; to stand, using a more contemporary language, as the cultural dominant of a

new social and economic conjuncture; to stand … as the richest allegorical and

hermeneutic vehicles for some new description of the system itself. … Film and literature

no longer do that … The identity of that candidate is certainly no secret: it is clearly

video… [V]ideo is unique—and in that sense historically privileged or symptomatic—

747

“Eclipse of the Spectacle.” 748

The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age, Columbia Global Reports, 2018.

414

because it is the only art or medium in which this ultimate seam between space and time

is the very locus of the form[.]

In a surprisingly specific insight, Jameson proposes that the animated cartoon may be the first

antecedent of video to inherently privilege presentational coding and meaning in its texts, over

simple representation of objects, characters, and events.

[S]ome greater materiality of video as a medium suggests that … [w]e need to explore

the possibility that the most suggestive precursor of the new form may be found in

animation or the animated cartoon, whose materialistic … specificity is at least twofold:

involving, on the one hand, a constitutive match or fit between a musical language and a

visual one … , and, on the other, the palpably produced character of animation’s images,

which in their ceaseless metamorphosis now obey the ‘textual’ laws of writing and

drawing rather than the ‘realistic’ ones of verisimilitude, the force of gravity, etc.

Animation constituted the first great school to teach the reading of material signifiers

(rather than the narrative apprenticeship of objects of representation—characters, actions,

and the like).749

It is constitutive of postmodernism, Jameson believes, that “the work of art … has everywhere

largely been displaced by the rather different language of … texts and textuality”.750

Television

cartoons are just such a text; they seem to even forget the grandeur of the great works of cinema

animation in their endless pursuit of novelty.

Martha Sigall, who spent her whole professional life inking layout drawings into the final

refined contours of the Hollywood cartoon, reminds scholars that “cartoons were made to

entertain.” University teachers who “dissect and psychoanalyze the motives of the creators as if

749

Jameson, Video. 750

Fredric Jameson, “Video: Surrealism Without the Unconscious.” In Postmodernism, or, The Cultural

Logic of Late Capitalism, 1991.

415

they had a hidden agenda … never mention the humor,” she says, “which is what these cartoons

are all about—making people laugh.” Is she right, that cartoons are simply entertainment?

In an important sense, I think Sigall is right: as academics, we sometimes overthink

particular films that few people know or care about. Television’s mundane, everyday function is

entertainment, most simply holding the viewer’s attention. As an inker and painter, Sigall was

uniquely aware of the material basis of animation production, but a risk in her view is that the

focus on entertainment can obscure the political-economic incentives it is built upon. Even cheap

animation is very expensive, generally out of reach for individual creatives. The problem is that,

the creative process of animation production can be corrupted by economic interests, like a

conservative aversion to taking risks, and instead fall back on proven models. In earlier

centuries, the equivalents of cartoons were probably literary fairy tales and puppet shows. These

were generally organic forms of folk culture. In the 20th

century, media corporations co-opted

public expression, organic community, and symbolic traditions, instead regurgitating amalgams

created by industry habits of thinking, as Herbert Schiller describes.

[B]y the close of the twentieth century, in highly developed market economies …, most

symbolic production and human creativity have been captured by and subjected to market

relations. … [C]ultural creation has been transformed into discrete, specialized forms,

commercially produced and marketed[, meaning that] … the availability of goods is

greater. But there is a cost, … a very high cost! ‘The price paid by working people for the

‘successes’ of capitalism has been in terms of the breakdown of human associations, the

loss of solidarity, indifference between people, violence, loneliness, and a sense of loss of

function and purpose.’751

751

Herbert Schiller, “The Corporation and Culture.” In Culture, Inc: The Corporate Takeover of Public

Expression, 1989. This quotation is by Jeremy Seabrook.

416

So, cartoons are entertainment, but they were propped up by exploitative economic power

dynamics inherent to 20th

century mass media production.

The development of what we might call animated video media during the 1960s, 1970s,

and 1980s appears to be a fascinating subject which has not been directly written about in these

terms: I’m not aware of anyone who has studied how television cartoons evolved into video

games. Generally, this time witnessed an increasing digitization of cartoons into video games,

and then into computers. While video games are not commonly thought to be animation, as non-

photographic moving media, they inherently are. In 1972, U.S. electronics company Atari

created the first kind of electronic game that allowed the player to control designed interfaces on

a television at home, with the game Pong. Such new video games “were not initially regarded as

their own independent medium with a clear and distinct identity,” Michael Newman has written

in his memorable 2017 book, Atari Age: The Emergence of Video Games in America. “They

were likely seen as another public or home amusement or another use for a television set or

computer. In some instances, they were familiarized as a marriage of television and

computer.”752

While earlier video game systems were revolutionary in the 1970s, by today’s

standards their stick-figure primitive graphics are difficult even to understand.

752

Michael Z. Newman, Atari Age: The Emergence of Video Games in America, The MIT Press, 2017.

417

Figure 46. Atari Space Invaders game freeze frame and box art. The fantastic box art interprets

the cryptic images on screen for the player

Source: Google Image search

The early days of computing in the 1970s were initially only based in text interfaces,

limiting their broader exposure because of the lack of visual control. Entrepreneur Steve Jobs

was among the first to realize the long-held dream of creating a computer with a graphical user

interface (GUI), with the Apple Macintosh (1984-present). The Macintosh revolutionized the

personal computer industry by making computers easy enough that anyone could control one.

Limited animation is a technical precedent that made the Mac interface possible. Software rival

Microsoft copied Apple’s Mac operating system (OS) to create the Windows operating system

for IBM-compatible personal computers (PCs), which realized a new user-friendly accessibility

in its version 3.1 in 1992.

The “personal computer revolution” was taking off at the time, as adults were using home

computers for work. Japanese electronics company Nintendo released its Nintendo

418

Entertainment System in the US in 1985, after releasing it two years earlier in Japan as the

Family Computer, or “Famicom.” Nintendo’s games featured cartoon-like characters inspired by

Japanese animation. Newly graphical video games transformed the family television into a

computer. The video game systems of the 1980s represented the beginning of an entirely

different kind of personal computer revolution: kids were turning the family television set into a

monitor for playing new kinds of interactive digital games. Technically, the relatively

sophisticated graphics were possible because the NES had not only a central processing unit but

also a graphics processing unit, which helped to crunch the numbers needed to show characters

in animated movement on screen. In other words, this was a personal computer revolution for

kids. The characters Nintendo introduced, Mario the plumber, and elfin Link the adventurer in

the Legend of Zelda franchise, are still going strong today on the Nintendo Switch console. The

game was on.

419

Figure 47. Nintendo Super Mario Bros. game freeze frame and box art, among the earliest video

games consistently resembling an animated cartoon

Source: Google Image search

Graphical user interfaces are “user-friendly” because they are intuitively designed and

animated. This seems obvious to me, but I’m not aware that scholars have stated this in these

terms yet. With the iPhone, touch-based interface animation was now a reality.753

As with video

games, we’re not accustomed to thinking of computer interfaces as animated—but as non-

photographic media, they inherently are. The proof is that only advanced users can work with

text-based interfaces, like Linux. I’m convinced that Steve Jobs thought of iOS as animated. Its

development followed the success of Steve Jobs’ other major venture, Pixar Animation

753

Val Head, Designing Interface Animation: Meaningful Motion for User Experience, Rosenfeld Media,

2016.

420

Studios.754

Jobs also seemed to consider iOS to be in competition on the iPhone with software

maker Adobe’s Flash video standard, which began as a platform for animation.

While it became a fully-functional video player in the 2000s, Adobe Flash was initially

known for its features allowing individuals to create simple animation. Here, the computer

performed the labor of drawing the frames in between the keyframes. Limited animation became

the dominant use, a process that, most simply, required giving simple instructions to the

software, like moving vector graphics shapes between different points at certain speeds. In the

late 1990s, Flash became the main standard for creating animation for the web, launching a

whole new form of online cartoons. After it was officially declared defunct by developer Adobe,

Anastasia Salter commented on how it transformed the internet to NPR.

Adobe Flash was the tool that reimagined the Web. It took us out of a fairly static, text-

based Web to an animated, interactive space … [It] really shaped a whole generation of

artists and animators. ... No one had really imagined having a tool like that for an

individual to make something interactive. And it’s where we get kind of all of the cool

early experiments like Homestar Runner. 755

The visual simplification of the early television cartoon, like its reliance upon flat poses,

was opposed to fluid, three-dimensional animated movement. At least implicitly, this set a

754

Tom Sito has presented a first-hand, deeply informed history of this new animation format.

Moving Innovation: A History of Computer Animation, 2015. 755

“RIP Flash Player: Adobe Ends Support Of Pioneering Web Animation Technology,” NPR, January 4,

2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/01/04/953314603/rip-flash-player-adobe-ends-support-of-pioneering-

web-animation-technology. I agree with Salter that the most famous Flash web cartoon may be Homestar

Runner (2000-present), known for its “Strong Bad Email” skits. Luke Winkle, “An Oral History of

Homestar Runner, the Internet’s Favorite Cartoon,” io9, January 24, 2017, https://io9.gizmodo.com/an-

oral-history-of-homestar-runner-the-internets-favor-1791519879. While attending Reed College (1998-

2002), when I would return to my hometown of Bellingham, Washington, I recall that a good friend

would show me episodes of this cheeky series. It felt underground in a DIY way, yet it was appealingly

rendered in bright colors and simple shapes, and given rudimentary life through limited animation

through Flash.

421

precedent as a media format that in the 1980s enabled early computers and video game consoles,

lacking in computing power, to display similar kinds of flat graphics. Early computers had small

cathode ray tube screens of the same type as television, and as such required simplified non-

photographic interfaces. “Instead of manipulating matter, the computer allows us to manipulate

symbols,” literature and new media scholar Matthew Kirschenbaum writes about a basic concept

in computer science.756

The dream of giving a user the ability to interact with data visually, as

opposed to via old-fashioned text-based interfaces became more of a reality when Apple released

the Macintosh personal computer and its well-functioning graphical user interface in 1984. “We

employ limited animation in the Macintosh interface today,” wrote the manager of the Human

Interface Group at Apple Computer in 1990 in a book published by the company on The Art of

Human-Computer Interface Design. “[T]he zooming effect for opening and closing of files, for

instance.”757

However, University of Toronto computer scientists wrote elsewhere in the volume

that “[c]urrent uses of animation at the interface have barely scratched the surface of what is

possible and interesting.”758

Forced out of Apple in the mid-1980s after a power struggle, in 1989, Steve Jobs

introduced a new and more advanced graphical personal computer system called NeXT. Jobs’

influence was far from over—his new system led to four huge leaps forward in GUIs in

subsequent years. NeXT directly influenced the creation of the World Wide Web in 1990.759

It

directly influenced the creation of the PC games Doom and Quake in 1993 and 1996,

756

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. The MIT Press,

2012. 757

S. Joy Mountford, “Tools and Techniques for Creative Design,” in Brenda Laurel, The Art of Human-

Computer Interface Design, 1990, 17-30. 758

Ronald Baecker and Ian Small, "Animation at the Interface," in Brenda Laurel, The Art of Human-

Computer Interface Design, 1990, 251-268. 759

“Inventing the Web,” Computer History Museum, https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/the-

web/20/385.

422

respectively.760

NeXT indirectly influenced Microsoft’s Windows 95 operating system in

1995.761

And, it directly influenced Apple’s Mac OS X operating system in 2001.762

I’ve just

learned about these big implications of Jobs’ NeXT system, and will plan to study this more in

the future.

The point I want to make is that, in the 1990s, as the sophistication of GUIs increased,

digital devices began to be able to interface with users through simplified but naturalistic

animation. The NeXTSTEP operating system made sophisticated use of animation, among other

capabilities. A 1993 technical paper captures the possibility people felt in that moment, when a

wider range of possibilities for interface design and human-computer interaction were opening

up. The authors specifically describe modeling the user interface of a new operating system on

Walt Disney’s cinema animation, titling the paper “Animation: From Cartoons to the User

Interface.” They make the case that cartoony animation helps users both understand how to use

the computer and even therefore to enjoy the experience (!).

User interfaces are often based on static presentations, a model ill-suited for conveying

change. Consequently, events on the screen frequently startle and confuse users. ...

Cartoon animation, in contrast, is exceedingly successful at engaging its audience; even

the most bizarre events are easily comprehended. … Despite the differences between user

interfaces and cartoons—cartoons are frivolous, passive entertainment and user interfaces

760

John Romero, “Apple-NeXT Merger Birthday!”, Rome.ro (blog), December 20, 2006,

https://rome.ro/news/2016/2/14/apple-next-merger-birthday. 761

Daniel Eran Dilger, “1990-1995: Microsoft’s Yellow Road to Cairo,” Roughly Drafted, December 14,

2006, http://roughlydrafted.com/RD/Q4.06/4E2A8848-5738-45B1-A659-AD7473899D7D.html. This

article is part of what appears to be an excellent series of articles about the politics of personal computers

between 1980 and 1995. I will definitely be returning to read more of it. Daniel Eran Dilger, “Tech: The

Rise and Fall of Platforms,” Roughly Drafted. It begins here:

http://roughlydrafted.com/RD/Home/158E7FA2-7B50-45E0-BD80-BEBC7C5E8CA6.html. 762

John Markoff, "Why Apple Sees Next as a Match Made in Heaven," The New York Times, D1,

December 23, 1996.

423

are serious, interactive tools—cartoon animation has much to lend to user interfaces to

realize both affective and cognitive benefits.763

This historical moment is telling because animation here ceases to be a form of

entertainment and instead becomes a new form of digital functionality. The GUIs of the 1990s

became environments that adults used for work and children used for play. Over time, such GUIs

became naturalized and taken for granted. The ideal of interface design is to seemingly connect

the user directly with the data they are manipulating, making the interface transparent or even

invisible. The arrival of the Macintosh in the mid-1980s and of Windows PCs in the mid-1990s

had enabled everyday people to use computers, for the first time. Even productivity personal

computers, Windows PCs, increasingly became gaming systems, too. So much so that, in 2001,

Microsoft created their own gaming console to compete with Sony’s PlayStation—the Xbox.764

An unspoken undercurrent in video games and computer software in the 1990s and 2000s was

that the more intuitive a software could be made for users, the broader its appeal could be.

As early as 1993, Apple sought to transcend the increasingly old-fashioned, instrumental

paradigm of “human-computer interaction” in favor of the new holistic one of “user experience”

(UX), a concept designer Donald Norman coined in 1993, “to cover all aspects of the person’s

experience with the system”765

. I believe the parallel to UX in video games is the concept of

game feel. “Game feel is the tactile, kinesthetic sense of manipulating a virtual object,” writes

763

Bay-Wei Chang and David Ungar, “Animation: From Cartoons to the User Interface,” Proceedings of

the 6th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, 1993, 45-55. The authors

base their understanding of Disney animation on the principles expounded in Thomas and Johnston’s

1981 Illusion of Life book about the Disney model of animation. 764

Has anyone else ever thought that the name of the Xbox might have been inspired by the ‘X’ box in

the upper-right corner of Microsoft Windows windows? That would make the name something like either

an inside joke, or a branding statement. 765

Peter Merholz, “Peter in Conversation with Don Norman About UX & Innovation,” Adaptive Path,

2007.

424

game designer Steve Swink. “It’s the sensation of control in a game.”766

I see this as analogous

to the illusion of life effect Walt Disney sought in his animations: the perceptual feel of a

dynamic, well-crafted digital environment. BlackBerry (like Apple, named after a fruit) released

an early smartphone in 1999. Before touch screens were a technical reality, this phone had small

physical buttons for each key. It became widely popular, but paradigms in the new millennium

were palpably shifting.

A technology trend towards miniaturization culminated in Steve Jobs’ and Apple’s

introduction of an appealing handheld computer/phone in 2007, the iPhone, the ultimate personal

digital device. The first analog computers had occupied an entire room, but in this new media

era, you could easily slip this phone into your pocket. Of course, as an Apple Store employee

once explained to me, it is not just a phone. It is a computer, a paradigm of emerging possibility,

with the potential to do any number of things its creators did not anticipate.767

Importantly, it

offered to any developer a newly intuitive array of built-in capabilities, all highly visual and

accessible by touch. At first, the new iPhone felt curious; soon it became indispensable. After its

launch, Blackberry’s market share increasingly vanished. The company ordered an ad campaign

likening the iPhone to a toy. It was not effective. I think the intimate physical touch and

emotional pull of Apple’s next-generation haptic interface, which intuitively clicked with users,

rendered BlackBerry phones suddenly klunky by comparison.

Such new mobile, logistical media no longer simply placate us with entertaining stories.

A smartphone is a device which relies upon its connectedness to an invisible, global

telecommunications infrastructure to offer orientation and access to information. John Durham

Peters explains.

766

Steve Swink, Game Feel: A Game Designer’s Guide to Virtual Sensation, CRC Press, 2008. 767

I think my uncle, J. Scott Williams, a retired network systems administrator at Western Washington

University, for making this point to me.

425

Unlike the mass media of the twentieth century, digital media traffic less in content,

programs, and opinions than in organization, power, and calculation. Digital media serve

more as logistical devices of tracking and orientation than in providing unifying stories to

the society at large.

At this point, Peters writes, digital technology evolves human communication from a

sender/receiver model into a newly personal way to exist in relation to the world.

Once communication is understood not only as sending messages … but also as

providing conditions for existence, media cease to be only studios and stations, messages

and channels, and become infrastructures and forms of life. ... Though large in structure,

infrastructures can be small in interface … gates to bigger and submerged systems.768

The smartphone reveals how new media are increasingly the opposite of heavy or big;

instead, they are light and small. iOS, operated directly with one’s fingers, with a subtle level of

sensitivity, realizes long-held dreams of human-computer interface designers: it married its

elegantly simple interface design with fundamental human needs, like making phone calls and

writing notes. In iOS, animation creates an impression of eliminating friction in the interface, to

further narrow the perceived distance between the human user and the device. This was a

complete paradigm shift from earlier desktop-based computing interfaces, and appears to be the

kind of breakthrough human-computer interface specialist. The iPhone’s interface was a

seductive perceptual realism for a new age, it seemed, a personal, post-desktop world. In a

design harkening back to age-old dreams of human-machine harmony, iOS literally realized a

new digital world in which people could be seamlessly connected with clouds of computer

servers around the world, sending and receiving data in something like a human-machine

768

Peters, Marvelous Clouds.

426

symbiosis.769

Like television cartoons, the iPhone invites the user into a seemingly immaterial

experience, something transitory and fleeting. More broadly, I believe the smartphone’s

frictionless interface accompanied the transition to cloud computing, its metaphor creating the

impression that computing was now seemingly taking place invisibly in the air and sky.

In 2010, the last year before he died from cancer, Steve Jobs decided to discontinue

support for the Adobe Flash media player on the then-new iPhone. In spectacular fashion, Jobs

wrote a rare public statement, a 1,700-word essay called “Thoughts on Flash,” something of a

manifesto. “Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of web content,”

Jobs concluded, citing “[t]he avalanche of media outlets offering their content for Apple’s

mobile devices”. Although Jobs does not mention it in his essay, I think he basically saw Apple’s

iOS operating system as performing similar functions to Flash in a technically superior way. At

the least, it seems clear that he realized the built-in capabilities of iOS rendered Flash

unnecessary. Use of Flash declined after the clash with Apple. The HTML5 web coding standard

also incorporated many animation capabilities previously common in Flash. Software publisher

Adobe declared Flash defunct in early 2021. As I see it, Flash was a victim of its own success:

like the limited animation of television, Flash’s limited animation became so influential and

normal, influencing other kinds of systems, that the tool itself became redundant. But, the tools

that replaced Flash were not as easy to learn, which implicitly erected a barrier to individuals

seeking to create web cartoons. “[That] was really frustrating because Flash was so good at

bringing new people into making things,” Salter concludes.770

A central conclusion of this dissertation is that animation provides a palatable and

appealing mode of the mediation required by mass media. At the end of the day, humans will

769

J. C. R. Licklider, „Man-Computer Symbiosis,” 1960. In Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort

(eds), The New Media Reader, The MIT Press, 2003. 770

Quoted in “RIP Flash Player.”

427

continue to need to rely on media technologies to communicate. Humans are inherently

instrumental creatures, and the scale and nature of human civilization has fundamentally changed

in the last several centuries, necessitating that technology keep us connected. In recent years,

there has been institutional consolidation of both the means of production and distribution within

the same few media companies, which shows how content and technics have become deeply

intertwined. Hanna-Barbera became absorbed into Time Warner in the mid-1990s, although

Warner still markets Hanna-Barbera properties with the former company’s name.

But Time-Warner itself is no longer an autonomous company. Who owns Warner now?

AT&T does. In 2016, the CEOs of Time Warner and AT&T met to discuss the possibility of

merging. News coverage of the event is revealing. Both men could not resist the “‘unique’

potential of marrying their assets.” Time Warner CEO Jeffrey Bewkes referred to the

dramatically increased scale of distribution AT&T could to Time Warner. AT&T gained an

instant, vast library of content, ready-made to send out over its multifarious network. AT&T was

competition from companies like internet service provider Comcast, which bought NBC

Universal in 2009. Comcast in fact failed in a bid to buy Time-Warner in 2014,771

so it appears

that AT&T sought out the deal for itself. “The merger will ‘super-charge our capabilities’ and

give the company more “financial heft, Bewkes said. As for AT&T, the new nature of the then-

140-year old company as an owner, producer, and distributor of popular content would likely

have been unimaginable to leaders of past eras. It had found religion about the power of content

771

Variety saw Comcast’s strategy as an attempt to capture viewers who had “cut the cord” on their cable

subscription. Todd Spangler, “Comcast Launches Watchable: Can Web Video Help Save Cable TV?”

Variety, Sep 29, 2015, https://variety.com/2015/digital/news/comcast-watchable-launch-1201604855/.

This deal collapsed after Congress raised antitrust concerns and threatened a hearing before an

administrative law judge. Emily Steel, David Gelles, Rebecca Ruiz, and Eric Lipton, “Comcast Is Said to

End $45 Billion Bid for Time Warner Cable,” New York Times, April 23, 2015.

428

when paired with distribution through smartphone mobile services. ‘The future of video is

mobile and the future of mobile is video,’ AT&T declared in announcing the deal.’”772

People will always need entertainment. Should the increasing complexity and

rationalization of communication be a cause for despair? It may be true that mankind’s

community-oriented technics are democratic, while the media’s system-centered technics are

authoritarian, as philosopher of technology Lewis Mumford wrote in 1964.773

But, despite their

problems, cartoons are simply enjoyable. As for smartphones, many of us love our phone.774

Their human-oriented communication inherently gets and keeps attention. Today, just holding

people’s attention is powerful. What is another word for this? To entertain.775

As Joe Barbera said in explaining Hanna-Barbera’s cartoon craft for television, “[W]e

have returned to the basic idea of a cartoon.”776

Ultimately, Barbera and Bill Hanna simply put

relatable characters into funny stories, and set them off onto television to appear in weekly

engagements. Hanna and Barbera didn’t pretend to make visual art, like UPA did; they simply

wanted to entertain (and to be paid for doing so). Hanna-Barbera made the personality voice of

the television cartoon character the center of their star appeal, shifting the creative work from the

artist to the writer and actor.

772

Cynthia Littleton, “AT&T Sets $85.4 Billion Time Warner Deal, CEOs Talk ‘Unique’ Potential of

Combination,” Variety, Oct 22, 2016, https://variety.com/2016/biz/news/att-time-warner-deal-

1201897938/. 773

I added the word “media” to Mumford’s description. He writes, “[F]rom late neolithic times in the

Near East, right down to our own day, two technologies have recurrently existed side by side: one

authoritarian, the other democratic, the first system-centered, immensely powerful, but inherently

unstable, the other man-centered, relatively weak, but resourceful and durable.” Lewis Mumford,

“Authoritarian and Democratic Technics,” Technology and Culture 5, No. 1, Winter 1964, 1-8. 774

Aviv Shoham and Ossi Pesämaa, “Gadget Loving: A Test of an Integrative Model.” Psychology and

Marketing 30, 3, March 2013, 247–262. 775

The dictionary’s second of four definitions for this word: “to keep, hold, or maintain in the mind.”

Merriam-Webster, “Entertain,” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/entertain. 776

Stimson, “Cartoon Factory.”

429

In the new golden age of television in the streaming era, television is recognized for its

complexity, sophistication, and long-form storytelling.777

This further distances the present from

past forms of media. Yet, there was a surprising amount of subtlety and complexity in early

television cartoons, which began during the first golden age of television. While it would become

pigeonholed as mindless, when it was a novel form in a new medium, it was written for both

children and adults, and wielded a playful literacy of popular culture. A great degree of

rationalization produced the cartoons; aesthetically, they were fairly stylish; their sound was rich.

Relying on familiar premises, the cartoons changed every week, although over time these

variations revealed that they also stayed the same. To make up for a visual sparseness, while they

moved less, they talked more, in a familiar linguistic slapstick. In doing so, the cartoons

extended the aural narrative imagination so emblematic of the radio era.

Cartoons today are a stuff of everyday American life. To be able to turn on the television

set and watch these imaginary escapades at any time shows that the United States became a

mediated culture. Until the 1980s, you couldn’t buy or record these cartoons on video; they

dissipated in the air after their moment of consumption. Say what you want about television

cartoons, or ignore them—they still exist. They were and are just “out there.” And they will

persist. Broadcast networks saw cartoons as “insurance policies”: successful cartoons last for

generations.778

The fact that they were “free” but cost attention makes them ahead of their time.

Suburban cultural ideology pretends that that we humans still live in villages, amidst groves of

native trees. Yet, of course, suburban households could not imagine life without a car, or a

television. The realities of contemporary media and technology make it difficult to believe that

humans are still creatures of nature living simple lives. Could we live without non-photographic

777

Jason Mittell, Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling, 2013. 778

Gary Grossman, Saturday Morning TV.

430

digital interfaces like smartphones? I am increasingly uncertain about that. People who go on a

media diet and don’t touch their phone describe the experience as jarring. Humans’ existence is

now thoroughly intertwined with both the hardware and software of media.

“We’d best reconcile ourselves to a scheme in which television (or something like it) will

outlast us,” David Thomson writes, “and become not just a window on the world but the entire

house where we live.”779

Today, in the media ecosystem made possible by the hybridization of

television/animation 60 years ago, it is increasingly anachronistic to hear people bemoan the

television cartoon as an impoverished stepchild of cinema animation, when it has actually been

thriving for generations as a vibrant media format with its own unique aesthetics. As a form of

recombinant culture, cartoons seek both novelty and constancy. “Popular culture above all is

transitory; this guarantees not only turnover for the cultural marketers but currency for the

customers,” Todd Gitlin writes. But curiously, the inseparable economic and cultural pressures

for novelty must coexist with a pressure toward constancy.”780

Cartoons are heavy with cultural

meanings. Spreading everywhere, starting in the later 1960s, popular cartoons often ran for

years, creating a palpable cultural memory of the escapades of these colorful characters. The

cartoon as both program and advertisement serves to bind television together, and is thus an

indicator of the interconnectedness of many different kinds of media into the hybrid that is

television. But Steven Johnson is not depressed. He believes that “today’s popular culture is

actually making us smarter.” Even that “everything bad is good for you.” He explains.

[P]opular culture has, on average, grown more complex and intellectually challenging

over the past thirty years. Where most commentators assume a race to the bottom and a

779

Thomson, Television. 780

Gitlin, Inside Prime Time.

431

dumbing down … I see a progressive story: mass culture growing more sophisticated,

demanding more cognitive engagement with each passing year.

But, historical teleologies no longer clearly extend into the future, because electronic media keep

eyes glued to the screen in the present moment.

Our favorite cartoon characters stay with us for our whole lives. “You just always find

when you talk to people that their fondest, deepest associations are with animated series,” Ellen

Seiter told me.781

If photographic live action representations are normal to adults, cartoons are

arguably normal to children. The magic of cartoons is always alive for children; moments of

stasis don’t turn them away from the television, but may cause them to pause and reflect. Thus,

while adults can dismiss cartoons, kids cannot. Like candy, for kids cartoons are the good stuff,

the first thing many want to watch when they wake up on the weekend. In this sense, for each of

us as kids, cartoons are equipment for living.782

Children grow up learning about the social world

through cartoons. Adults manipulate similar kinds of animation on touch screen devices. The

simple but stylized audiovisual interfaces of smartphones now keep us living in an eternal

present.

781

Ellen Seiter (animation scholar) interview with the author, Los Angeles, July 2017. 782

Rhetorician Kenneth Burke wrote in the 1950s that literature is equipment for living. Kenneth Burke,

“Literature as Equipment for Living,” in The Philosophy of Literary Form, 1957. If that was true then,

and media have since evolved, the argument can be made that newer forms of taken the place of print

literature. The socialization function of television cartoons for children, I believe, cannot be ignored. Each

of us is shaped into a person as a child in part through cartoons.

432

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446

CHRONOLOGY

TOWARDS A CARTOON HISTORY OF ANIMATION

17,000 BCE Cave paintings, early humans, Lascaux, France

1000s BCE Camera obscura, Zhoubi Suanjing mathematical text, China

1200s Drawn scrolls, anticipating manga comics, Japan

1490s Caricatured “grotesque” portraits, Leonardo da Vinci, Italy

1731 A Harlot’s Progress engraving series, William Hogarth, United Kingdom

1754 “Join, or Die” political cartoon, Benjamin Franklin, American colonies

1827 Thaumatrope, first perceptual optical device, John Ayrton Paris, Great Britain

Early 1830s Early comic strip sequential drawings, Rodolphe Töpffer, Switzerland

Late 1830s Daguerreotype, earliest form of photography, Louis Daguerre, France

1860s Political newspaper cartoons, Thomas Nast (German), United States

1871 Puck, magazine of graphical drawings, Joseph Keppler (Austrian), United States

1883 New York World, earliest “yellow journal,” purchased by Joseph Pulitzer

(Hungarian), United States

1892 Théâtre Optique system and proto-cartoons, earliest extended animated cartoons,

Charles-Émile Reynaud, France

Early 1895 The Yellow Kid, first newspaper comic, published in New York World, Richard F.

Outcault, United States

1895 New York Journal, competitor yellow journal, purchased by William Randolph

Hearst, United States

Late 1895 Short films screened, earliest photographic cinema, Lumière brothers, France

1897 The Katzenjammer Kids, first newspaper comic strip, published in New York

Journal, Rudolph Dirks (German), United States

447

1900 The Enchanted Drawing, rough cinema animation mixed with live action, J. Stuart

Blackton (British), United States

1908 Fantasmagorie, early drawn animation in self-contained cartoon, Émile Cohl,

France

1911 Little Nemo, early mixed animation and live action film, Winsor McCay, United

States

1913 Colonel Heeza Liar, first cartoon series with a repeating character, John R. Bray,

United States

Early 1914 Gertie the Trained Dinosaur, earliest cartoony character animation, Winsor McCay

1914 Bray Productions, first industrial-style animated cartoon studio, John R. Bray

1914-6 Cel animation process, patented by Bray and Earl Hurd

1916 Farmer Al Falfa cartoon series, earliest cartoon series with cartoony animation, Paul

Terry

1918-20 Rotoscope animation process, rote process for creating smooth animation, Max and

Dave Fleischer

1919 Feline Follies, first cartoon with Felix the Cat, first funny animal cartoon superstar,

Otto Messmer and Pat Sullivan

1920 KDKA founded, earliest commercial radio broadcasting station, Pittsburgh, PA

1921 Aesop’s Fables, early long-running cartoon series, Paul Terry

1920s Radio broadcasting begins nationwide, initially largely by amateur broadcasters

1928 Steamboat Willie, first Mickey Mouse cartoon, Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks

1930 Looney Tunes, influential film cartoon short series, Hugh Harman, Rudolf Ising,

and Leon Schlesinger Productions for Warner Bros. film studio

1932 Jack Benny, talented radio comedy star, begins performing radio comedy

1932 Flowers and Trees, first three-strip Technicolor animated cartoon, Disney studio

1933 The Three Little Pigs, technically advanced and influential animated cartoon,

among earliest made with animation principles, Disney studio

Mid-1930s Commercial radio modern program formats develop

448

Mid-1937 Subversion of Looney Tunes, with animation director Tex Avery and voice actor

Mel Blanc joining the Warner Bros. studio

1937 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, first commercial animated feature film, Disney

studio

1939 Tale of Czar Durandai, 1934 Soviet cartoon by Ivan Ivanov-Vano, screened at

Disney studio, planted seeds of the limitation of animation, screened by Frank

Lloyd Wright

Mid-1941 Labor strike at Disney studio, event that precipitated the limitation of animation

1941 The Reluctant Dragon, Disney documentary film demonstrating limited animation

technique, “Baby Weems” segment by Joe Grant and Richard Huemer

1942 The Dover Boys, first commercial animated short made with limited animation,

Chuck Jones

1944 Hell-Bent for Election, among earliest films made by future UPA artists, Chuck

Jones, and others

1947 Kukla, Fran, and Ollie, influential early television puppet show, Burr Tillstrom

1949 Time for Beany, television puppet show with future television cartoon voice actors,

Bob Clampett

1950 Crusader Rabbit, first television cartoon, Alex Anderson and Jay Ward

1950 Gerald McBoing Boing, most influential limited animation cartoon, Bobe Cannon,

John Hubley, and United Productions of America (UPA)

1951 The Great Meeting, early European limited animation cartoon, Walter Neugebauer,

Fadil Hadzic, and Zagreb Film, Croatia

1955 The Mickey Mouse Club, early Disney television series with brief full animation,

Hal Adelquist, Bill Walsh, and Walt Disney

1958 The Huckleberry Hound Show, first widely-popular television cartoon, Bill Hanna,

Joe Barbera, and Hanna-Barbera studio

1959 Rocky and His Friends, influential television cartoon, Bill Scott and Jay Ward

1960 The Flintstones, first television cartoon sitcom, Bill Hanna, Joe Barbera, and

Hanna-Barbera studio

449

1963 Astro Boy, first adventure cartoon made for television, Osamu Tezuka and Mushi

Productions, Japan

1964 Jonny Quest, first straight-styled adventure cartoon made for television, Doug

Wildey and Hanna-Barbera

1966 The New Adventures of Superman, first superhero cartoon made for Saturday

morning television, Lou Scheimer, Hal Sutherland, Fred Silverman, and Filmation

Associates

1969 Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!, influential evolution of Saturday morning cartoons,

Joe Ruby, Ken Spears, Iwao Takamoto, Fred Silverman, and Hanna-Barbera

1969 Sesame Street, first educational public television children’s program, Joan Ganz

Cooney, Lloyd Morrisett, many others, and Children’s Television Workshop

1977 Video Computer System, earliest home video game console with multiple games,

Atari, Inc.

1981 The Smurfs, among earliest television cartoons for very young children, Peyo, Fred

Silverman, Gerard Baldwin, others, and Hanna-Barbera

1983 He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, ambitious afternoon syndicated television

cartoon, Michael Halperin, Lou Scheimer, Gwen Wetzler, many others, and

Filmation Associates

1984 Macintosh, first home computer with graphical user interface, Apple Computer

1985 Adventures of the Gummi Bears, the Disney studio’s first strict television cartoon,

Michael Eisner, Art Vitello, Jymn Magon, others, and Walt Disney Television

Animation

1985 Nintendo Entertainment System, first home video game console in North America

with consistently cartoon-like characters (introduced in Japan in 1983), Nintendo

1987 Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures, first contemporary creative-driven television

cartoon, Ralph Bakshi, John W. Hyde, and others

1988 Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, first subversive contemporary animated feature film,

Gary K. Wolf, Richard Williams, others

1989 The Simpsons, subversive contemporary cartoon sitcom for adults, Matt Groening,

Sam Simon, James L. Brooks, others

450

1991 NickToons, influential group of three cable television cartoons, each led by a

creator-author, including Doug, Rugrats, and The Ren & Stimpy Show,

Nickelodeon, and others

1992 Cartoon Network, cable channel airing only television cartoons, Turner

Broadcasting System

1997 South Park, very adult-oriented cable television cartoon series, Trey Parker, Matt

Stone

2001 Adult Swim, programming block expressly for adults, with “minimal animation”

production aesthetic, Cartoon Network

2005 YouTube, vanguard of new era of digital video streaming, quickly bought by

Google

2007 iPhone, first widely-adopted smartphone with haptic touchscreen, Apple, Inc.

2009 Digital terrestrial broadcasting standard passed into law, causing necessary adoption

of digital televisions and abandonment of earlier analog standard, United States

451

GLOSSARY

OF LIMITED ANIMATION TERMS

Note: These are rough descriptions of basic concepts important for understanding this

dissertation’s discussion of limited animation. Some of these terms are hotly debated; some are

technical and not widely used outside of the production context; others are concepts I propose,

making analytical distinctions based upon commonly-recognized ideas. The intention of these

descriptions is simply to orient you as the reader. I will need to return at a later stage to revise

these descriptions to more fully capture the meaning of these terms, and to better address

common criticisms.

Animation

Here in this dissertation, animation is considered to be full cinema animation, typified by

Walt Disney’s animated feature films. Animation refers both to aesthetic techniques for creating

character movement and to the entertainment form of the resulting text. Here, animation is

considered to be a media form specific to cinema. It is a primarily visual and secondarily aural

form, in comparison with the television cartoon, a primarily aural and secondarily visual form.

Disney’s animation pursues “the illusion of life,” a convincing illusion of reality, by greatly

exaggerating the movement of character animation, while maintaining high production standards.

Walt Disney and his head animators codified their understanding of how to make animation into

“the 12 principles of animation.” Hand-drawn animation is now called “traditional animation,” to

distinguish it from computer-generated imagery (CGI) animation. See: Animation, Character;

Principles, Cinema Animation

452

Animation, Character

Character animation is the animated movement of cartoon characters. Each character in

an animation visually expresses their individual personality through the idiosyncrasies of their

physical movement. The traditional cinema animator needs to be “an actor with a pencil,”

imaginatively rendering the movement of their character through drawing. Here, I consider this

form to be specific to cinema. Digital CGI animation is achieved today through manipulating

digital character models. See: Animation

Animation, Limited

A term now referring to the television cartoon’s rationalized mode of production, in a

mildly derisive way that is now conventional. Television inherited the production model of

limited animation from several cinema animation short studios and combined it with the new

planned animation process into a hyper-efficient production standard. While it superficially

resembles animation, I somewhat provocatively suggest in this dissertation that what is seen on

television is not really animation at all, but a newer, simpler kind of cartoon. Technically, limited

animation refers to the process of stacking cel layers. This allows for the animation of specific

parts of the character’s body to move, while the other parts remain still. Early digital computer

devices were designed with a similar approach, to minimize the amount of computation required

to animate the human-computer interface. See: Animation, Planned; Cartoon, Early Television

453

Animation, Planned

An infrequently-invoked but technically specific term for the early television cartoon. As

a production standard, planned animation refers to the necessary process of planning out each

cartoon, to rationally dedicate the labor-intensive time, money, and talent required to create

animation only to the moments where it is most necessary. Rationalization and creativity are

both inherently required to make this kind of cartoon entertaining. See: Animation, Limited;

Cartoon, Early Television

Caricature

The visual exaggeration that defines the cartoon. The specific means is to emphasize

eccentric aspects of a person’s or character’s face in drawing it. The caricature of the cartoon is

opposed to strictly realist artistic representation. The cartoonist defines their subjects through the

ways that their drawings depart from conventional naturalism to comment on the figure. See:

Cartoon; Figurative; Funny (Depiction); Style, Cartoon

Cartoon

Historically, a cartoon is a simplified, caricatured drawing, often accompanied by a text

caption or dialogue balloons. Most purely, a cartoon is a single drawing in a single frame. The

political cartoon is the longest-standing form, which comments on socially influential people

through visually lampooning their appearance and actions. Comic strips imply the passing of

time for their fictional characters by presenting sequential panels. The moving image media of

cinema and television made possible a new kind of animated cartoon, cinema emphasizing

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movement and television stasis. Cartoons are inherently funny and must be fun to be

entertaining. See: Caricature; Cartoon, Early Television; Non-Photographic; Style, Cartoon

Cartoon, Early Television

The specific term at the heart of this dissertation. The kind of cartoon made for early

television is considered to be a media form specific to television. It is a primarily aural and

secondarily visual form, in comparison with cinema animation, a primarily visual and

secondarily aural form. Many artists and critics have historically stigmatized this as limited

animation, claiming it is aesthetically incomplete. This dissertation instead proposes the term

“the early television cartoon” as a more neutral descriptive term for this entertainment form.

Although, to fundamentally distinguish it from cinema animation, I also somewhat provocatively

describe the early television cartoon as illustrated radio. Regardless, viewers from the beginning

have enjoyed the television cartoon on its own terms. Comparing it to cinema animation 70 years

after its beginning now feels anachronistic. See: Cartoon; Telematic

Character, Cartoon

Cartoon character is typically understood to mean the kind of individual depicted in a

cartoon. This sense is frequently invoked here as a simple description. The principle of character,

though, understands the character of the early television cartoon to be defined by their

personality voice. Historically, the early television cartoon has roots in radio comedy. Vocal

acting sonically animates the character, making up for their modest amount of visual animation.

Note that these meanings are different from character animation, the development of a cinema

character visually through animated movement. See: Animation, Character; Personality Voice

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Cel

One “cel” is a single sheet of celluloid. This material made possible animation production

since its earliest years. Celluloid replaced paper, the original material on which Winsor McCay

drew. The cel technique divides the labor of animating a character by isolating their limbs and

mouth onto separate cels. Those elements can move, while the rest of the character remains still.

The downside of this production method is that its very ease can lead to overproduction of

animation, threatening the quality of the product. This dynamic began early. Earl Hurd patented

the cel process around 1915, enabling John R. Bray’s cartoon studio to create a market by

producing animated shorts regularly, regardless of their artistic merit. See: Animation, limited;

Pipeline; Rationalization, Cartoon

Figurative

The form of simple, graphical drawing that most defines the style of the cartoon, limited

animation, and the early television cartoon. The concept of figuration means a form or outline.

This kind of cartooning embraces two-dimensional flatness, as opposed to the three-dimensional

aesthetic ambition of Disney’s animation, which Donald Crafton calls “embodied.” This

aesthetically simple approach was also used with digital devices to create interfaces enabling the

interaction of computer and human. See: Animation, Character; Cartoon; Style, Cartoon

Format

The kind of content within a medium. I use the term “media form” similarly, although

both terms are challenging to define. Format is sometimes analogous to genre, referring to

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meaning. Other times, it refers to technique. I talk about animation and cartoon as formats not

because they are different from live action in meaning, but because they are different in their

technique. Photographing people is a different technique than creating drawings. See: Medium

Funny (Depiction)

Comedic depiction intending to cause laughter, as opposed to straight or dramatic

depiction. The funny/straight distinction refers to the two different personality types or

stereotypes each member of a comedy duo performs, extending back to the tradition of American

vaudeville stage comedy of the 19th

century, and earlier to British music hall. In a comedy duo,

one performer is the funny man or the comic, and the second is the straight man, the stooge, or

the feed, so called because he sets up jokes that the funny man completes. Humor’s purpose as

entertainment has meant it has long been understudied. Recent theories, though, propose that

humor provides to its audiences relief, superiority, or comic incongruity. See: Funny Animal;

Straight (Depiction)

Funny Animal

An anthropomorphic caricatured cartoon animal. Beginning with Otto Messmer’s Felix

the Cat, around 1920, funny animals became the typical characters of animated cartoons. Such

funny animals are eminently believable for viewers, even very young children. Funny animals

are essential points of audience identification, involving the viewer with the story situations,

apparently more naturally than human characters. The reasons are not well understood. This

researcher thinks this human comfort not with humans but with animals points far back in human

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evolution, to animist worldviews in which everything was thought to be alive. See: Cartoon;

Funny (Depiction)

Graphic User Interface

A dynamic audiovisual surface displayed on an electronic screen that enables human

interaction with personal computers. GUIs are often central to computer operating systems, like

Mac OS and Windows, and are opposed to text-based interfaces, like those of Unix and

Microsoft DOS. The introduction of graphic interfaces to personal computers in the 1980s and

1990s, first in 1984 with Apple’s Macintosh, enabled everyday people to begin using computers.

Limited animation techniques from television cartoons here became adopted into elements of

GUIs, limiting the amount of computation, necessary on early digital devices. These graphical

interfaces are “friendly” to users, arguably, because of their simplified, non-photographic design

and use of intuitive, dynamic animation. Smartphones transformed the GUI by making it

touchable, or haptic, making it even more intuitive. See: Animation, Limited; Figurative; Non-

Photographic

Illustrated Radio

A metaphor for understanding the television cartoon as a sound-oriented media format

distinct from visual cinema animation. Chuck Jones leveled this term as an epithet against

television cartoons, even though he himself innovated limited animation. I reclaim the term

because it shows the early television cartoon to be inherently different from cinema animation. In

its early years, cinema was a form of visual motion photography lacking a soundtrack. Early on,

television was an outgrowth of radio, the pictures of its small screen supporting its rich built-in

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FM soundtrack. Illustrated radio describes the uncanny push and pull between movement and

stasis in the planned animation of the early television cartoon, here also described as

discontinuous flow. Because of these technical difference of media and format, this dissertation

takes the position that the television cartoon should not be faulted for not imitating cinema

animation. See: Animation, Limited; Cartoon, Early Television; Non-Photographic; Sound,

Cartoon

In-Between

Sometimes, the intermediate frames of a cartoon. These frames are shown in between

keyframes, and are often the ones in which movement is animated. Other times, the animators

who draw these frames, historically called “in-betweeners.” Since the 1980s, much of this labor-

intensive work was outsourced to overseas contract animation studios, like Hanna-Barbera

Australia. See: Keyframe

Keyframe

“Extreme” character poses that bookend animated movement. The work of animation is

to connect these key reference poses in time by drawing the frames in between them. Key poses

must be performatively “strong” but also intuitively believable. These are first sketched in the

storyboard, and then designed in the layout phase. Each drawing in the storyboard and layout is

such a key frame. A 2000 documentary film about Chuck Jones was called Extremes and

Inbetweens: A Life in Animation. Interestingly, digital video codec standards are also built

around keyframes: a digital video sets up its fixed keyframes, and essentially animates the pixels

to connect each one into a fluid video. See: In-Between; Storyboard

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Layout

The production phase following storyboarding, in which a layout artist renders the rough

sketches of the storyboard into the near-finished drawings that will actually appear on screen.

This is a process of design, following the studio’s standard in-house models for how characters

must be consistently drawn to be themselves. The director oversees this whole process, giving

assignments to artists based on the timings that best communicate the message of each scene to

the audience. Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera adapted to television in part by cutting out much of the

process in which actual animation was produced, effectively nearly ending it here in layout,

“keeping the finished product more like pose reels”.783

See: Keyframe; Storyboard

Medium

A communication technology with specific technical and aesthetic properties that make it

generally distinct from others. Each user of an electronic medium typically has a device in their

home. This device is often one end-point of a much larger electronic network. A medium

metaphorically becomes a unique sensory environment, and interaction with it is a specific kind

of experience. Radio and music, for instance, are purely aural media of sound, while television

and cinema are both aural and visual media. Marshall McLuhan popularized this concept in his

1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, a time when television was new. See:

Format

Non-Photographic

A concept this dissertation proposes to distinguish cartoon and animation from

photography and live-action video. Cartoons are audiovisual fictions created by humans, not

783

Joe Barbera, quoted in Sandler, “Limited Animation.”

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captured from reality like a photograph. In this sense, cartoon and animation are non-

photographic, or counterfactual, in that they depict imaginary situations. Unlike the visual

spectacle of cinema’s big screen, television’s small screen made simplified, non-photographic

messages effective. This was especially important to advertisers, who needed this to effectively

communicate their sales pitches as ideas. Later media with electronic screens similarly simplified

their interfaces to achieve an intuitive connection with the user, showing the early television

cartoon to represent a new production philosophy distinct from traditional live filming. See:

Cartoon; Cartoon, Early Television; Illustrated Radio

Performance, Cartoon

The television cartoon character’s performance is accomplished by extending figurative

cartoon drawings through time. This is a “performance of animation,” a performance of

animation production, in Donald Crafton’s terms, more than cartoon characters’ “performance in

animation.” While this more static performance would seem boring in comparison to cinema, the

early television cartoon is entertaining because its visually stylized poses support its primary

aural dialogue, the personality voice of its characters. The situation comedy genre works

especially well in the television cartoon because, while characters talk and listen, visually they

are often simply sitting or standing still. (Family Guy has made this into a running joke). See:

Personality Voice; Spacing; Timing

Personality Voice

Character is expressed in the early television cartoon through personality voice, in which

spoken dialogue serves as the means of character development, instead of cinema’s focus on the

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movement of character animation. The character’s ineffable aural signature is created by the

embodied “grain” of the vocal actor’s body giving rise to the voice. Through this, the character

gains their voice, their capacity for expression. This factor is the reason why, when a voice actor

identified with a familiar character dies, it is difficult to accept a new voice actor who takes over

the character’s personality voice. In this sense, the voice actor is integral to the character’s

sound; by comparison, it is simpler for another skilled animator to visually draw the character.

See: Character, Cartoon

Pipeline

The animation production workflow process. The mode of production of the early

television cartoon is historically important because it became the production standard that

essentially all later television cartoons needed to follow. The term pipeline is more commonly

used to refer to the digital animation production process, but it can also be helpful for

understanding the earlier traditional animation production process. The seven principles of the

early television this dissertation proposes are roughly ordered in a sequence approximating this

production pipeline. See: Animation, Planned; Rationalization, Cartoon

Premise

Cartoon story typically refers to just one animation text. A premise is the story concept

for a whole series of cartoons. Cartoon premises are often variations on common genre

conventions. The Flintstones, for instance, is a working class family sitcom transported back to

the stone age. While usually not directly articulated in the story of any particular episode,

premise nevertheless guides the story sequence of an entire series. See: Story, Cartoon

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Principle, Cinema Animation

Walt Disney and his head animators codified their practice of animation production into

their 12 principles of animation. The success of this general model of animation production

established the aesthetic standard that all other cinema animation shorts studios needed to

measure their work against. There is risk of essentialism here, of attempting to rigidly define

what animation is. But a principle is not a hard and fast rule, so much as a rule of thumb, a

heuristic approach that works and has stood the test of time. While kept in-house as a kind of

trade secret for over four decades, Disney’s principles were finally published by Frank Thomas

and Ollie Johnston, the last of Disney’s key animators, in 1981. Taught first at the California

College of the Arts, the animation school Walt Disney founded, these principles have since

become essential curriculum for all animation students. See: Animation; Principle, Television

Cartoon

Principle, Early Television Cartoon

A concept that explains the early television cartoon better than cinema animation.

Disney’s principles do not explain the early television cartoon well, as the Figure 7 graphic in

Chapter 3 shows, so this dissertation proposes seven new principles specific to the newer media

form. The principles of the early television cartoon in this dissertation do not replace Disney’s

canonical principles of cinema animation. In fact, I suggest that Disney’s principles be

understood as specifically defining cinema animation. Together, the seven principles add up to a

model of the early television cartoon. These newer principles are concepts, not techniques like

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many of Disney’s principles, so they cannot taught as ways to make television cartoons. I

propose them as like lenses, making legible what is unique about the early television cartoon.

See: Principle, Cinema Animation; Telematic

Rationalization, Cartoon

To adapt to television, animation needed to be rationalized, to realize much greater

efficiency in production. The principle of rationalization largely proposes specific techniques or

strategies that appear to have helped make cartoon production possible on television.

Rationalization represents a division of labor, and invokes Frederick Taylor’s concepts of labor

management for factory production. This is fitting in part because, like the factory-style

production of the early cinema cartoon, television cartoon production has affinities with

industrial production. Limitation strategies were needed to reduce the actual amount of visual

animation in the cartoons. And, extension strategies were needed to fill time and lengthen these

cartoons to the long, standard lengths of the program times of the new medium. See: Animation,

Limited; Cel; Pipeline

Sound, Cartoon

Sound animates the early television cartoon far more than its rudimentary visuals do.

Voice acting works in concert with sound effects and music to create the dynamic aural

soundtrack to accompany the generally rough visuals. The principle of sound points to the status

of sound as “prior” to the image in television. A cartoon episode’s story is given aural expression

through the recording of the dialogue track. At this point, the timing of sound structures the

visuals through time—these are added later. This technical difference means that the early

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television cartoon is fundamentally different as a media format from cinema animation. See:

Illustrated Radio; Personality Voice

Spacing, Animation

Spacing defines cinema animation more than the television cartoon, which is more

dependent on timing. Spacing is visual, while timing is aural. Spacing is how animated

characters move around on the space of the cinema screen, specifically how much screen space

the character crosses. Cinema animation achieves lively performance by creating visual variety

in spacing, and by closely linking this with the aurality of timing. See: Timing, Animation

Story, Cartoon

Cartoon story is a holistic sense of the nature of characters, their relationships, and typical

events, within the context of the overarching story world. A single cartoon has a story, while a

cartoon series has a premise. The principle of story here encompasses both. Creating the premise

for a series is a creative process requiring great subtlety. Cinema animation focuses on creating

visual spectacle rather than meaning. In television, cartoon story must be driven along through

dialogue, which makes television story full of meaning. Some may question this, but these are

reasons why the principle of story proposes that story matters more to the early television

cartoon than to cinema animation. See: Premise; Storyboard

Storyboard

An animation storyboard is a visual expression of the key poses of the cartoon, with text

accompanying the images. Visually, it resembles a newspaper Sunday comic strip. In purpose,

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though, the storyboard is more like to an architectural blueprint. The storyboard sets the basic

visual and aural structure of the cartoon. These “extreme” poses and the story they develop are

the points of reference around which all subsequent creative work on the cartoon orients itself.

Sometimes it is created based on a traditional script, although storyboards have the edge here,

because they are already visual. In essence, storyboarding is writing through drawing pictures.

See: Keyframes; Layout; Story, Cartoon

Style, Cartoon

The principle of style suggests that style defines the early television cartoon more than

cinema animation. Since the early television cartoon could not rely on animation, it compensated

by dramatically stylizing its character designs. While cinema animation is often based visually

around circles (clear in Mickey Mouse’s design), the television cartoon is much more angular.

Visual style is inherent to the cartoon, because it is always at least partly visual. The general

style of cartoons is graphical, figurative, caricatured, and funny. See: Cartoon; Caricature;

Figurative; Funny (Depiction)

Straight (Depiction)

Non-comedic. In everyday life, a straight performance would be equivalent to normal

behavior. But, since cartoons are inherently funny and comedic in orientation, lack of comedy is

noticeable and risks becoming serious and unfunny. The notion of straightness relates to the

straight man in a comedy duo. The funny/straight dynamic of a comedy duo is inherently

dialectical: the funny man is funny because the straight man is straight, and the contrast between

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the two is clear. Action cartoons are generally straight in their realism and emphasis on dramatic

adventure. See: Funny (Depiction)

Telematic

The early television cartoon is telematic because it is specific to television. How the early

television cartoon is telematic is explained by the seven principles here. Telematic is a novel

concept, opposed to how films are cinematic. (This concept is different from telematics, an

interdisciplinary field about how cars move in space and time.) When a film is cinematic, it is

clearly a film. Blockbuster action films are cinematic because they are grand visual spectacles

best experienced on the big screen of cinema. Early on, cinema cartoons did not “read well” on

small black and white television screens. Ward-Anderson and Hanna-Barbera provided these

newly telematic cartoons. When digital televisions became the norm in the early 21st century,

their larger size made them less telematic and more cinematic, blurring these distinctions into a

newly hybrid kind of media. See: Cartoon, Early Television; Principle, Television Cartoon

Timing, Animation

Timing is based in sound, while spacing is visual. The television cartoon character’s

performance arises from the timing of the personality voices. Visually, the early television

cartoon is mostly composed of the static key poses of the keyframes. The timing of a pose

visually and the movement that follows it is what gives an action its meaning. Even if there is not

very much movement visually, skillful timing keeps the performance lively. If a character’s

timing is quick, their performance may seem excited; if it is slow, it may seem tired. Timing

makes animation “readable,” and thus may be the ultimate secret of convincing animation. The

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director shapes cartoon performance by controlling timing. To compensate for lack of animation,

the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons made their timing sharp, and frequently cut between different

characters speaking and listening. See: Performance, Cartoon; Spacing, Animation

Unsynched Drift

Disney’s introduction of sound to the early cinema cartoon is well-understood. The

cartoons of the 1930s, like the Looney Tunes and Silly Symphonies, were highly musical. The

tight synchronization of visual cartoon animation with the soundtrack was derisively called

“mickey mousing.” (This was achieved through bar sheets.) On television, “hard” sound effects

could be clearly synched with simple animation. The ever-present music, however, drifted

around in the background, unsynched incidental music largely for mood. The Grateful Dead

evidently grew up watching Crusader Rabbit, because they seemed to joke about that show’s

unsynched drift: in 2001, band members performed several times in the San Francisco Bay Area

as “Crusader Rabbit Stealth Band.”784

See: Cartoon, Early Television; Sound, Cartoon

784

“Crusader Rabbit Stealth Band,” The Grateful Dead Family Discography,

http://www.deaddisc.com/GDFD_Crusader_Rabbit.htm.