Animation in the United States in the television era

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
History of animation in the United States

Animation in the United States in the television era was a period in the history of American animation that slowly set in with the decline of theatrical animated shorts and the popularization of television animation that started in the late 1950s, reached its peak during the 1970s, and ended around the mid-1980s. This era is characterized by low budgets, limited animation, an emphasis on television over the theater, and the general perception of cartoons being primarily for children.[1] Due to the perceived cheap production values, poor animation, and mixed critical and commercial reception, the era is generally looked back upon negatively by critics and animation historians. The television animation of this period is often referred to as the dark age of American animation,[2][3] while the theatrical animation from the time is sometimes referred as the bronze age.[4][5]

Television animation developed from the success of

DiC Entertainment's Inspector Gadget, and Marvel Productions' and Sunbow Productions' The Transformers. The period came to an end in the late 1980s as many entertainment companies revived their animation franchises and returned to making high-budget, successful works
.

Television animation developed from the success of

DiC Entertainment's Inspector Gadget, and Marvel Productions' and Sunbow Productions' The Transformers. The period came to an end in the late 1980s as many entertainment companies revived their animation franchises and returned to making high-budget, successful works
.

From the big screen to the small screen

Early experiments

There were a number of early experiments in

worst of their kind. On the other hand, a long-running series of animated shorts named Tom Terrific was produced by Terrytoons for the Captain Kangaroo show, and this series was praised by film historian Leonard Maltin as "one of the finest cartoons ever produced for television."[7]

Cartoons in the Golden Age, such as the works of

theme park and began a decades-long series of TV broadcasts of Disney cartoons, which later expanded into the show Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color. While Disney recognized that the economics of the medium could not support his production standards and refused to go into TV animation, he still ordered the creation of one character exclusive to TV, Ludwig Von Drake
. The character's segments would link compilations of the company's archived theatrical shorts as complete episodes.

Saturday morning cartoons and TV specials

As TV became a phenomenon and began to draw audiences away from movie theaters, many children's TV shows included airings of theatrical cartoons in their schedules, and this introduced a new generation of children to the cartoons of the 1920s and 1930s. Cartoon producer Paul Terry sold the rights to the Terrytoons cartoon library to television and retired from the business in the early 1950s. This guaranteed a long life for the characters of Mighty Mouse and Heckle and Jeckle, whose cartoons were syndicated and rerun in children's television programming blocks for the next 30 to 40 years.

By the late 1950s and 1960s, the perception of cartoons as children's entertainment was entrenched in the public consciousness, enough so that

Newton Minow, in his landmark 1961 speech "Television and the Public Interest," denounced the medium of animation as a whole and compared it to feeding children junk food all of the time.[8]
Animation began to disappear from movie theaters; while Disney continued to produce animated features after losing its founder, MGM and Warner Bros. closed their studios, outsourced their animation, and got out of it entirely by the end of the decade.

Animation on television focused almost exclusively on children, and the tradition of getting up early to watch

The Pink Panther
), but Hanna-Barbera had developed a virtual lock on Saturday morning cartoons by the 1970s. Such critics of Hanna-Barbera's style of limited animation as Chuck Jones referred to it disparagingly as "illustrated radio", yet when one show was cancelled, the studio usually had another one ready to replace it because they were so cheap to produce.

From the mid-1960s through the early 1980s, several successful prime-time animated

Garfield to TV starting in 1982, resulting in 11 specials and a long-running animated series
.

Though the dominant

Carl Lindner, Jr., owner of Great American Insurance Company, in 1987. Two years later, Tom Ruegger launched an exodus of H-B employees to form a relaunched Warner Bros. Animation division. In 1991, Turner Broadcasting System
bought the company and its library.

Other studios' offerings chipped away at the H-B Saturday dominance throughout the decade, such as H-B alumni

first-run syndication success of DuckTales
, which premiered in 1987, eventually inspired a whole block of Disney-produced syndicated cartoons which forced competing studios to improve their own production standards to compete.

The 1980s also saw a number of cartoons based on children's toys, such as

Children's Television Act, enacted in 1990 and strictly enforced by the FCC
starting in 1996.

Major animation studios

Hanna-Barbera

The first major animation studio to produce cartoons exclusively for television was

first run syndication in the 1970s, aimed at adults instead of children, such as Where's Huddles? and Wait Till Your Father Gets Home
.

Hanna-Barbera was notorious for using common

The Snorks and Paw Paws). The late 1980s and early 1990s saw Hanna-Barbera join the numerous studios producing younger and junior versions of cartoon characters for the Saturday morning cartoon market, such as The Flintstone Kids and A Pup Named Scooby-Doo
.

One of the problems with producing animation for television was the extremely labor-intensive animation process. While theatrical short subjects were previously produced in six-month cycles or longer, networks needed a season of 10-20 half hour episodes every year. This led to a number of shortcut techniques to speed up the production process, and the techniques of limited animation were applied to produce a great number of quickly-produced, low-budget TV cartoons. Hanna-Barbera also used limited animation for artistic reasons: with smaller, low-resolution screens, the company's namesakes reasoned that a limited style that focused on dialogue, exaggerated sound effects and close-up shots with bold outlines worked better than the fully detailed animation used in film shorts, which were designed for large theater screens.[1]

UPA

The

Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol
, UPA was shut down in 1964.

Jay Ward Productions

The

Quisp and Quake. Another company that used the same animation studios as Jay Ward did was Total Television, most famous for The Underdog Show
. Total Television and Jay Ward animated productions were often mixed and aired together in syndication, leading to the two companies' shows to sometimes be confused with each other.

Filmation

Filmation, headed by Lou Scheimer, Hal Sutherland, and Norm Prescott, was another television animation studio that arose in the 1960s. Filmation was most famous for its acquisition of licenses to produce animated series based on other media; it was one of the few companies to keep all of its animation within the United States and did not use the aesthetics of limited animation preferred by Hanna-Barbera and UPA; instead, Filmation productions relied on heavy usage of stock footage, rotoscoping, limited voice casts (Scheimer himself provided many voices) and a balance of licensed animated series with lower-budget, live-action ones (such as The Ghost Busters and Uncle Croc's Block) to stay financially solvent. After a string of Saturday-morning successes lasting well into the 1980s (chiefly Fat Albert), Filmation had several costly syndicated failures, namely Ghostbusters and BraveStarr, and a lawsuit from Disney over Happily Ever After, forcing its parent company Westinghouse to shut down the studio and sell off its library in 1989.

Cambria Studios

One of the most infamous users of limited animation was

The New Three Stooges
in 1965, but went out of business shortly afterward.

Disney

In the 1960s,

A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh characters to the screen for the first time in two of four animated featurettes (the second of which, Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day
, won an Oscar, the last Walt Disney received).

The Disney empire was rocked to its core when Walt died from lung cancer on December 15, 1966. While the studio tried to remain true to his vision (a common catchphrase of the time was "What would Walt do?"), the level of popularity and acclaim the studio received in earlier years eluded it in the 1970s. The theme parks Disneyland and Walt Disney World (the latter having opened in 1971) ended up contributing more to the bottom line than the film division. Additionally, many veteran animators either retired or died, so the studio had to find ways to replace them. In 1973, Eric Larson started a training program for new animators.

The studio's post-Walt animation fare consisted of the features

Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too!, The Small One, Winnie the Pooh and a Day for Eeyore, and Mickey's Christmas Carol, and the live-action/animation hybrids Bedknobs and Broomsticks and Pete's Dragon. Some of the films got mixed reactions from critics; Robin Hood, in particular, was widely criticized for re-use of animation from earlier films (especially in the production number "The Phony King of England"), but this was done because the film had fallen way behind schedule.[9] Still, all of these films were successful and many of them received Academy Award nominations (with two wins, one for the short Bird and another for the special effects in Bedknobs). Additionally, in keeping with Walt's original intentions, the first three Pooh featurettes were compiled into the 1977 feature The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh
.

The most devastating development since Walt's death occurred in September 1979, when studio animator

The Fox and the Hound.[11]and the animation department had faced more jeopardy in 1985 with its first PG-rated animated film The Black Cauldron

The end of Termite Terrace

Warner Bros. shut down its animation studio completely in 1963, and the directors of

Bunny and Claude, Quick Brown Fox and Rapid Rabbit, and Merlin the Magic Mouse
, never caught on, while the Termite Terrace cartoons remained perennial television favorites through syndication and Saturday morning airings throughout the remainder of the 20th century.

Chuck Jones and MGM

In 1961, Chuck Jones moonlighted as a writer on the UPA feature Gay Purr-ee. When Warner Bros. distributed the film the following year, they discovered that he had contributed to the film in violation of his exclusive contract and fired him. Jones teamed with Les Goldman to form Sib Tower 12 Productions, later renamed MGM Animation/Visual Arts, to work with MGM on the Tom and Jerry series in the mid-1960s; his shorts were not as popular as the Hanna-Barbera originals but more so than the Gene Deitch shorts produced overseas in the early 1960s. Jones then began producing a number of successful animated TV specials. His most famous special was How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, a 1966 CBS adaptation of the Dr. Seuss story that still remains popular and has been released on video and DVD several times. Jones also produced three animated adaptations of short stories from Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book, a full-length MGM feature film entitled The Phantom Tollbooth, and the 1970 TV version of Horton Hears a Who!

DePatie-Freleng

Main article:
DePatie-Freleng Enterprises

After leaving the remnants of Termite Terrace behind for good, Friz Freleng and his new partner David H. DePatie went on to produce the Pink Panther cartoons during the 1960s and 1970s, with the cartoons appearing almost simultaneously on television and in theaters through a distribution deal with United Artists. Freleng also produced several TV specials based on Dr. Seuss books throughout the 1970s, including The Cat in the Hat and The Lorax.

In 1981, Friz Freleng retired, and shortly thereafter Marvel Comics bought out the DFE studio, due largely to its pre-existing relationship from the commissioned shows The New Fantastic Four (1978) and Spider-Woman (1979). The studio continued under DePatie's lead as Marvel Productions. This new studio continued saturday-morning fare but focused almost exclusively on licensed properties, first with Marvel shows like Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends and The Incredible Hulk, then shifting to Dungeons & Dragons and the long-lasting Muppet Babies. Sunbow Productions, commissioned by Hasbro, began farming out animation to Marvel Productions for toy merchandising, first as commercials, then as syndicated series, like action-oriented cartoons such as G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero and The Transformers, and later with My Little Pony 'n Friends and Jem and the Holograms. Marvel Productions found a new audience among young viewers, but was hampered by the collapse of the syndication market and multiple changes in ownership.

Counterculture

The majority of American animation came to be dominated by limited animation made for TV and aimed primarily at children. However, there were a number of attempts to challenge this perception during the late 1960s and 1970s with ambitious (and often controversial) animated projects that were often not for children.

Yellow Submarine

In 1968, the music of

Yellow Submarine. Displeased with the previous animated television series depicting themselves
, the Beatles themselves had reservations about the project at first and declined to participate beyond providing a mix of older and original musical recordings. However, they were impressed enough with the finished film to appear in a live action epilogue.

Ralph Bakshi

Ralph Bakshi tried to establish an alternative to mainstream animation through independent and adult-oriented productions in the 1970s.

In 1968,

St. Mark's Place, Bakshi came across a copy of R. Crumb's Fritz the Cat. Impressed by Crumb's sharp satire, Bakshi purchased the book and suggested to Krantz that it would work as a film.[15]

X rating from the MPAA, and is the highest grossing independent animated film of all time.[15] With the success of his second film, Heavy Traffic, Bakshi became the first person in the animation industry since Walt Disney to have two financially successful films released back-to-back.[17]

Music videos

The 1980s also saw the rise of the

Saturday morning cartoons. A number of memorable animated videos were produced during the heyday of MTV, including a-ha's "Take On Me" by British director Steve Barron; Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer" with animation by Aardman Animations and Brothers Quay; the groundbreaking computer-animated Dire Straits' "Money for Nothing" directed by Steve Barron; and The Rolling Stones' "Harlem Shuffle" with animated sequences directed by Ralph Bakshi and John Kricfalusi. MTV also had a plethora of wild and experimental animated idents, made by uncredited animators.[18]

Anime comes to North America

Throughout this period, Japanese

Saban would go on to play a key role in the anime boom of the mid-90s. Although their impact on visual style and storytelling in North America was minimal for decades, the success of some of these series helped create the groundswell that would lead to mail-order VHS releases of adult-oriented movies and OVAs
in the late 1980s.

Other animation

A few attempts were made to produce independent feature-length animated films in the 1970s. Several of these were decidedly adult-oriented productions from outside the United States, including the Canadian Heavy Metal, the English Watership Down and a live-action/animated version of the Pink Floyd concept album The Wall, all of which received wide release in the United States. Other films like Richard Williams' Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure were less successful. The industry largely continued to ignore or dismiss animation as something only kids watched on Saturday morning television. A notable exception was a series of films based on the Peanuts franchise, beginning with the 1969 film A Boy Named Charlie Brown, which was both a commercial and critical success; the films were made with the same production team behind the acclaimed Peanuts television specials that were airing throughout the time period, led by Bill Melendez.

Fine Arts Films, a studio founded by John David Wilson with offices in Hollywood and in England, became best known for its music videos (eg: Bob Dylan's "You Gotta Serve Somebody").[19] Several of the videos appeared on the American variety show The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour (these shorts were compiled into The Fantastic All-Electric Music Movie), and one appeared as the opening sequence and title track to the hit film Grease.[20][21]

This era also saw a number of

Academy Award for Animated Short Film
alive, as well as introducing a number of new names into the field of animation—names that would begin to bring change to the industry in the 1980s.

End of the era

By the end of the 1980s, most of the Golden Age of animators had retired or died, and their younger successors were ready to change the industry and the way that animation was perceived. This led to the

Tiny Toons, The Ren & Stimpy Show, Rugrats, Animaniacs, Batman: The Animated Series, and the Disney Renaissance films.[22][23][24]

Legacy

This era has been continued to be satirized and/or spoofed even by the likes of the cult sci-fi series Futurama in the episode "Saturday Morning Fun Pit".[25]

The soundtrack to the Emmy-winning special A Charlie Brown Christmas was inducted to the National Recording Registry in 2012.[26][27]

Paul Driessen's The Killing of an Egg (1977) influenced SpongeBob SquarePants creator Stephen Hillenburg to consider the field of animation after he saw it at the International Tournée of Animation.[28][29][30]

Quasi at the Quackadero (1975) (which was part of the 1994 book survey of The 50 Greatest Cartoons) and the Oscar-winning shorts The Hole (1962) and Frank Film (1973) were each inducted into the National Film Registry.[31]

Disney animator and director Byron Howard admitted that Robin Hood was his favorite film while growing up and cited it as a major influence on his 2016's Academy Award-winning Zootopia.[32] The song "Whistle-Stop" was sped up and used in the Hampster Dance, one of the earliest internet memes,[33] and later used at normal speed in the Super Bowl XLVIII commercial for T-Mobile.[34] The song "Oo De Lally" was featured in a 2015 commercial for Android which shows animals of different species playing together.[35]

The Yuletide specials of Rankin/Bass have been parodied by the likes of TV series from Saturday Night Live[36] to South Park,[37] while non-holiday works like The Last Unicorn maintained a cult following.[38]

The

Thundercats, Care Bears, and Denver, the Last Dinosaur.[39]

See also

References

  1. ^
    ISBN 978-1250040497
    .
  2. ^ Dark Age (Thesis). Holderness Senior Thesis.
  3. ^ Meyer, Andrew (2016). Animation or Cartoons: An American Dilemma (Thesis). Honors Projects.
  4. ^ "The Final Days of The Theatrical Cartoon Short". Cartoon Research. 11 March 2017.
  5. ^ "The Bronze Age 2". Cartoon Research. 1 April 2019.
  6. ISBN 9781581153019
    .
  7. ^ Maltin, L. (1987). Of mice and magic: A history of American animated cartoons (Rev. ed.). New York: New American Library.
  8. ^ Newton N. Minow, "Television and the Public Interest", address to the National Association of Broadcasters, Washington, D.C., May 9, 1961.
  9. ^ Hill, Jim (2005-03-17). "Why For?". Jim Hill Media.
  10. ^ Beck, Jerry (1996-06-01). "Don Bluth Goes Independent". Animation World Magazine.
  11. ^ "The Fox and the Hound (1981)". Box Office Mojo.
  12. ISBN 978-0-7893-1684-4
    .
  13. ISBN 0-8131-2407-7
    .
  14. ^ Television/radio Age. Television Editorial Corp. 1969. p. 13.
  15. ^
    ISBN 978-0-7893-1684-4
    .
  16. Barrier, Michael (Spring 1972). "The Filming of Fritz the Cat: Bucking the Tide". Funnyworld, No. 14. Archived
    from the original on 15 April 2007. Retrieved 2007-03-02.
  17. ISBN 0-394-54684-9
    .
  18. ^ Ultimate collection of 230 MTV ID Idents Adverts Bumpers, archived from the original on 2021-12-11, retrieved 2020-01-16
  19. ^ "Cartoons Considered For An Academy Award – 1983 -". cartoonresearch.com.
  20. ^ John David Wilson, animator on 'Lady and the Tramp,' 'Grease,' dies at 93 – TODAY
  21. ^ "Famed Animator John David Wilson Dies at 93". The Hollywood Reporter. July 2013. Retrieved 3 July 2013.
  22. ^ "Vuelven los Tiny Toons (aparte de los Looney Tunes y los Animaniacs)". Gizmodo (in Spanish). 28 October 2020.
  23. ^ Batman-On-Film Archived 2010-07-22 at the Wayback Machine, Batman: The Animated Series.
  24. ISBN 978-1538103739
    .
  25. ^ Nicholson, Max (July 18, 2013). "Futurama: "Saturday Morning Fun Pit" Review". IGN. San Francisco, California: j2 Global. Retrieved December 22, 2016.
  26. ^ "2011". The Library of Congress. Retrieved November 16, 2018.
  27. ^ Bang, Derrick (2012). A Charlie Brown Christmas (booklet). Vince Guaraldi. Beverly Hills: Concord Music Group. p. 16.
  28. ^ The Benevolent Spirit Behind Spongebob Squarepants - The Objective Standard
  29. ^ Cowspotting: 'The Dutch Films of Paul Driessen'|Animation World Network
  30. ^ Stephen Hillenburg: marine biologist whi created Spongebob Squarepants|The Independent|The Independent
  31. ^ Brief Descriptions and Expanded Essays|Film Registry|Library of Congress
  32. ^ "How Zootopia Fits Into the Legacy of Disney Animal Movies". Oh My Disney. March 6, 2014.
  33. ISBN 978-0-89820-177-2
    .
  34. YouTube
  35. YouTube
  36. ^ Saturday Night Live (SNL): “The Narrator That Ruined Christmas” on Vimeo
  37. ^ "South Park" A Very Crappy Christmas (TV Episode 2000) - Connections - IMDB
  38. ^ 18 Popular Cult Classic Movies That Are Perfect For Movie Night - CINEMABLEND
  39. ^ Saturday Morning All Star Hits! review: Kyle Mooney brings his weird to Netflix - Polygon
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Animation_in_the_United_States_in_the_television_era&oldid=1219660705"