The Censored 11: “Sunday Go to Meetin’ Time” (1936)
The second article of the “Censored Eleven” series is about the Warner Brothers “Merrie Melodies” cartoon Sunday Go to Meetin’ Time (1936) – a film based around a tune by…
The second article of the “Censored Eleven” series is about the Warner Brothers “Merrie Melodies” cartoon Sunday Go to Meetin’ Time (1936) – a film based around a tune by…
On a monthly basis, I will examine each of the notorious Warner Bros. cartoons now collectively known as the “Censored 11”.
This month my focus is on theatrical cartoons that made reference to the competition between the US and the Soviet Union to land on the Moon first.
Steve Bosustow told a newspaper in 1959 that work on a feature-length cartoon about the African American jazz artist Jelly Roll Morton was underway.
Paramount Pictures closed its cartoon studio in December 1967. The studio’s last cartoons were distributed well into 1968, and most of them came and went without any notice in newspapers.
CBS had allowed 20th Century-Fox to distribute Terrytoons’ new cartoons to theaters, but Viacom dealt strictly with television syndication. Then Viacom acquired the studio.
Watching a “Woody Woodpecker” cartoon from the early 1970s is a bittersweet experience. My column for this month is about how the press covered the last years of theatrical cartoon shorts.
To be sure, television was a democratizing force in animation. It allowed African Americans to see cartoons in their homes, in contrast to being restricted to balcony seats at theaters.
Beyond producing cartoons starring humanoid versions of Bosko and Honey at MGM, Harman and Ising also specialized in films starring caricatures of black jazz musicians – as frogs.
“White flight” from desegregated theaters caused the demise of many theatrical cartoon programs in the South. As cartoon shows disappeared, the closings of cartoon studios accelerated in the late 1960s