The First “Peanuts” Movie Soundtrack Album
Good grief, Charlie Brown! A soundtrack album almost an hour long? FIVE different musical styles? You’re out of your mind, Charlie Brown! A BOY NAMED CHARLIE BROWN Selections from the…
The Shape of Things To Come: Max Fleischer Promo Art #23
Fleischer Studios was entering an important transitional phase and the Paramount Sales News cartoons actually advertised it. Most noteworthy is the April 6th panel (above) showing a model of “the…
French Animation. Part 2: Early Features
Continuing my survey of French animation, I’ll first note that through 1950 isolated French-language animated short films, mostly theatrical animated commercials, began to appear immediately before and during World War…
Cheezy Day-After-Halloween Commercial Spook-tacular!
Halloween is at an end. Have you had enough monsters yet? No? Good thing, for indeed that is the theme for today’s post. We present here a creepy compendium of…
Animation Anecdotes: Halloween Special Edition
“Monsters lead such interesting lives,” according to Bugs Bunny in the Warner short cartoon Hair Raising Hare (1946). In 1973, The Monster Times, a newspaper devoted to fantasy films, conducted…
A Thunderbean Halloween
So, Halloween has gotta be the cartoon lover’s favorite holiday, at least for all the weird animated films that either have Halloween themes. We seriously could put a link to…
Halloween Horror: “The Mad Doctor” (1933)
It seems this year has really flown by for us Cartoon Researchers. So much work had been put into the big Turner Classic Movies broadcast show of early animation in…
Halloween Magic! Hanna-Barbera’s “Winsome Witch”
Check out Jean Vander Pyl’s well-earned lead role as a helpful, huggable harpy in this HBR album based on The Atom Ant Secret Squirrel Show segment. Hanna-Barbara Presents WINSOME WITCH…
Max Fleischer Promo Art #22
Bigger than MacMurray, Lombard, and Bing? The ads seem to think so. I love that the marketing people promoted the idea that Popeye and Betty had the same star power…
Jerry Beck is a writer, animation producer, college professor and author of more than 15 books on animation history. He is a former studio exec with Nickelodeon Movies and Disney, and has written for The Hollywood Reporter and Variety. He has curated cartoons for DVD and Blu-ray compilations and has lent his expertise to dozens of bonus documentaries and audio commentaries on such. Beck is currently on the faculty of CalArts in Valencia, UCLA in Westwood and Woodbury University in Burbank – teaching animation history. More about Jerry Beck [Click Here]
