Animating the Space Race
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.
Category Archives: Christopher P. Lehman
The Jazz Biopic That Wasn’t
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.
The Paramount Cartoon Studio and the Press, 1968
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.
Terrytoons – The Viacom Years
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.
The Final Days of The Theatrical Cartoon Short
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.
Huck and Jim (Crow)
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.
Those MGM Jazz Frog Cartoons
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.
Desegregation and the Cartoon Short’s Demise
“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
“Klanimation”
Commercial animation during the silent era rarely addressed political movements – and staffers of the cartoon studios comprised part of the demographics that the Ku Klux Klan abhorred.
Quincy Magoo Meets Jim Crow
Steve Bosustow traveled to New Orleans to promote the premiere of UPA’s 1001 Arabian Knights. He spoke at Tulane University, which in 1959 had no African American students – ironic, considering UPA’s earlier work like Brotherhood of Man.
