“Mr. Bug” and “Hoppity” Go To Town
While Steve Stanchfield takes a well-deserved break after a whirl-wind trip to LA this past week (he’ll be back next week with BIG news), I’ll fill in today by posting…
Category Archives: Animation History
Columbia’s “Color Rhapsody” Stock Posters
I’m a big fan of theatrical cartoon posters from the golden age of cartoons. While doing some research last week I stumbled onto the online archive of the Academy of…
A Paul J. Smith Scrapbook
Who was “Paul J. Smith” (1906-1980)? He was a pioneering animator who started with Walt Disney on the Alice Comedies, then joined Harman-Ising on the Bosko Looney Tunes and Merrie…
Which Is The Ugliest MGM Cartoon Poster? (NSFW)
Man, these posters are ugly! MGM made some of the best short cartoons ever, with brilliant directors like Tex Avery, Bill Hanna and Joseph Barbera – and perhaps the…
Disney’s O-Zell Soda
Over the past weekend I had the pleasure to meet Dina Benadon and Brent Young, owners of the 1893 house that Walt and Roy Disney were born in. They bought…
Paul Fennell’s “This Changing World” (1941)
Today we take a look at two obscure but important shorts released by Columbia in 1941 – a two-part set labeled This Changing World. These are two subjects were designed…
“Johnny The Giant Killer” (1950)
Steve Stanchfield’s recent post about obscure animated features had me thinking about one of my favorite guilty pleasures – Johnny The Giant Killer. However, there is little to like about…
The Launch of “Toon Disney”
To a lot of us back in the 1990s, the very idea of a 24-hour television channel devoted to cartoons seemed like a fantasy – and when Ted Turner launched…
“Animation: The Naked Art” by Chuck Jones
Introduction by Mark Mayerson In the summer of 1974, I was visiting Washington D.C. While there, I found the latest issue of the AFI Report, the quarterly publication of the…
The Bosko Comic Strip – Part 4
Alas, poor Bosko! I knew him well. The stretch-and-squash star of Warner Bros. Looney Tunes for three years, his rubber-hose antics became a victim of the “realism movement” in Hollywood…
