United Productions of America

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United Productions of America
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United Productions of America, better known as UPA, was an American

Gerald McBoing Boing. In the 1960s, UPA produced syndicated Mr. Magoo and Dick Tracy television series and other series and specials, including Mister Magoo's Christmas Carol. UPA also produced two animated features, 1001 Arabian Nights and Gay Purr-ee,[1] and distributed Japanese films from Toho Studios
in the 1970s and 1980s.

Universal Pictures currently owns majority of the UPA library after their acquisition of DreamWorks Animation in 2016.

History

Origins

UPA was founded in the wake of the

The Dover Boys
had demonstrated that animation could freely experiment with character design, depth, and perspective to create a stylized artistic vision appropriate to the subject matter. Hubley, Bobe Cannon, and others at UPA, sought to produce animated films with sufficient freedom to express design ideas considered radical by other established studios.

UPA-produced Private Snafu short film A Few Quick Facts About Fear from 1945

In 1941, Zack Schwartz,

FDR
. The film was a success, and it led to another assignment from the UAW, Brotherhood of Man (1945). The film, directed by Bobe Cannon, advocated tolerance of all people. The short was innovative not only in its message but in its very flat, stylized design, in complete defiance of the Disney approach. With its new-found status, the studio renamed itself United Productions of America (UPA).

Initially, UPA contracted with the

Hollywood in the late 1940s. No formal charges were filed against anyone at UPA in the beginnings of McCarthyism, but the government contracts were lost as Washington severed its ties with Hollywood.[2]

Columbia Pictures and success

UPA entered the crowded field of theatrical cartoons to sustain itself and gained a contract with

Academy Awards, and Columbia granted the studio permission to create its own new characters. UPA responded, not with another "funny animal", but a star that was a human character, a crotchety, nearsighted old man. The Ragtime Bear (1949), the first appearance of Mr. Magoo
, was a box-office hit, and UPA's star quickly rose as the 1950s dawned.

With a unique, sparse drawing style that contrasted greatly with other cartoons of the day, not to mention the novelty of a human character in a field crowded with talking cats, mice, and rabbits, the Mr. Magoo series won accolades for UPA. Two Magoo cartoons won the

(1956).

UPA scored another hit with

, and even Disney, ushering in a new era of experimentation in animation.

Turning to television

In 1955, Steve Bosustow secured a CBS contract for UPA to produce a television series (The Boing-Boing Show aka The Gerald McBoing Boing Show),

Jimmy Murakami, Richard Williams, George Dunning, Mel Leven, Aurelius Battaglia, and John Whitney, among others. However, audiences did not embrace UPA's experiment in television entertainment; as a result, the show vanished from the airwaves in 1958. Further, as the major Hollywood studios began cutting back and shutting down their short film divisions in the late-1950s and early-1960s, UPA was in financial straits, and Steve Bosustow sold the studio to a producer named Henry G. Saperstein. Saperstein turned UPA's focus to television to sustain the studio. UPA adapted Mr. Magoo for television and produced another series based on the comic strip Dick Tracy
. UPA was forced to churn out cartoons at a far greater quantity than the studio had done for theatrical releases or even the CBS television series. Despite this however, quality was languishing, and UPA's reputation as an artistic innovator faded.

UPA's style of

Hanna-Barbera Productions. However, this procedure was generally implemented as a cost-cutting measure rather than an artistic choice that UPA originally intended. A plethora of low-budget, cheaply-made cartoons over the next twenty years effectively reduced television animation to a commodity, partly popularizing the notion of animation as being made only for children rather than a medium for any age group to enjoy (with the exception of shows like The Flintstones
), and notoriously going against UPA's original goal to expand the boundaries of animation and create a new style for the medium.

One bright moment in the UPA television era came with Mister Magoo's Christmas Carol (1962), which inspired the format of Magoo's next television endeavor, the 1964 series The Famous Adventures of Mr. Magoo. Christmas Carol captures the spirit of Charles Dickens's 1843 book and is considered a holiday classic, ranking alongside A Charlie Brown Christmas and How the Grinch Stole Christmas!.[7][8]

UPA produced only two full-length feature films in their tenure: a 1959 feature starring Mr. Magoo entitled 1001 Arabian Nights, directed by ex-Disney animator Jack Kinney; and Gay Purr-ee in 1962, written by Chuck Jones and his wife Dorothy and directed by a friend of Jones, Abe Levitow.

Abandoning animation and Toho Studios

Saperstein kept UPA afloat in the 1960s and beyond by abandoning animation production completely after the animation studio closed permanently in 1970 and sold off UPA's library of cartoons, although the studio retained the licenses and copyrights on Mr. Magoo, Gerald McBoing-Boing and the other UPA characters. This led to UPA contracting with

What's New Mr. Magoo?
in September 1977.

Columbia Pictures retained ownership of UPA's theatrical cartoons. The studio's TV cartoon library was licensed by Classic Media in New York, and then in 2007 merged into Entertainment Rights in London.

In 1970, Saperstein led UPA into a contract with

cult movie market for Japanese monster movies, and long-running television movie syndication packages such as Creature Double Feature
exposed the Toho movie monsters to young American audiences, who embraced them and helped them maintain their popularity throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

When Toho began producing a new generation of monster movies in the late 1980s, beginning with Godzilla 1985, UPA capitalized on its Toho contract and helped introduce the new kaiju features to the Western world.

Because of its long association with Toho, UPA is better known to cult-movie fans today as Toho's American distributor rather than a pioneer of animated cartoons, but the legacy of UPA is an important chapter in the history of American animation. UPA continues to license the American library of

What's Up, Tiger Lily
?.

Henry Saperstein died in 1998. On January 1, 2000, UPA shuttered its operations, with the assets sold by the Saperstein family, which would later result in the founding of

Universal Studios) now owns the ancillary rights to most of the UPA library, UPA itself (with DreamWorks Animation/Universal) continues to hold the licensing rights to Mr. Magoo, and Saperstein was executive producer to Disney's unsuccessful live-action feature Mr. Magoo
in 1997.

DVD releases

Sony Wonder began issuing the Mr. Magoo TV cartoon series on DVD
in 2001, beginning with Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol (which received a Collector's Edition Blu-ray/DVD combo pack in 2010). In 2011, Shout! Factory (with Classic Media) released the Mr. Magoo: The Television Collection set which contained all Mr. Magoo television productions (except for Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol, for which the DVD copy from the 2010 Blu-ray release was issued by itself). In 2013, Shout! (with Sony) released the Mr. Magoo Theatrical Collection containing all the Mr. Magoo theatrical shorts and the full-length feature 1001 Arabian Nights (which was also released through Sony's MOD program in December 2011). The set was originally set for release on February 14, 2012 but then delayed to June 19, then December 4, then delayed to sometime in 2013. It was delayed so that the shorts could be restored from high quality sources (plus newly discovered elements added).

The Jolly Frolics Collection was released on March 15, 2012 through Turner Classic Movies' website. Extras included audio commentaries and an introduction by film critic Leonard Maltin.

Legacy

UPA Pictures' legacy in the history of animation has largely been overshadowed by the commercial success and availability of the cartoon libraries of

live-action film with animation directed by John Hubley,[12] in his final project at UPA.[13]

Both Gerald McBoing-Boing and The Tell-Tale Heart were inducted into the National Film Registry.[14]

Filmography

See also

References

  1. .
  2. ^ "MichaelBarrier.com -- Essays: UPA 1944-1952". www.michaelbarrier.com.
  3. ^ Archer Winsten, "UPA, Media and James Thurber," New York Post, 6 December 1950.
  4. ^ "Priceless Gift of Laughter". Time Archive: 1923 to the Present. Time Inc. 1951-07-09. Archived from the original on October 16, 2007. Retrieved 2007-01-31.
  5. ^ "The Unicorn In The Garden". The Big Cartoon Database. Archived from the original on July 19, 2012. Retrieved 2007-01-31.
  6. ^ Adam Abraham, When Magoo Flew: The Rise and Fall of Animation Studio UPA (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2012), 178.
  7. ^ Hill, Jim (November 28, 2006). "Scrooge U: Part VI -- Magoo's a musical miser". JimHillMedia.com. Retrieved 2006-12-25.
  8. National Public Radio
    . Retrieved 2007-01-03.
  9. ^ "Classic Media Acquires Harvey Entertainment". Animation World Network. August 25, 2000. Retrieved August 4, 2014.
  10. ^ Oddball Films: Mid-Century Modern Animation - Thur. Jun 26 - 8PM
  11. ^ UPA Cartoons - TCM.com
  12. .
  13. Sight & Sound
    . 31 (1): 17.
  14. ^ 13 Amazing Cartoons from the National Film Registry|Mental Floss

Bibliography

  • Abraham, Adam (2012): When Magoo Flew: The Rise and Fall of Animation Studio UPA. Wesleyan University Press.
  • Amidi, Amid (2006): Cartoon Modern: Style and Design in Fifties Animation. Chronicle Books.
  • Barrier, Michael (1999): Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age. Oxford University Press.
  • Maltin, Leonard (1980): Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons. McGraw Hill.
  • Solomon, Charles (1989): Enchanted Drawings: The History of Animation. Alfred A. Knopf.
  • Shapiro, Susan P (1980): Detecting Illegalities: A Perspective on the Control of Securities Violations. Yale University

External links