{"id":1347,"date":"2013-03-12T00:01:51","date_gmt":"2013-03-12T07:01:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/?p=1347"},"modified":"2013-03-12T00:36:20","modified_gmt":"2013-03-12T07:36:20","slug":"the-lions-roar-for-mgm-cartoons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/index.php\/the-lions-roar-for-mgm-cartoons\/","title":{"rendered":"The Lion’s Roar for MGM Cartoons"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"shorts_story\"\"lions_roar\"From October 1937 until August 1941 MGM published a magazine (MGM Short Story<\/em>, at left) – exclusively distributed to its exhibitors – devoted to its live action and animated short subjects. From Sept. 1941 until the Spring of 1947, MGM continued to promote its shorts inside their more lavish Lion’s Roar<\/em> magazine (at right). <\/p>\n

Back issues of MGM Short Story<\/em> and Lion’s Roar<\/em> are highly sought after collectibles. They not only describe each and every cartoon, but occasionally printed a story about producing the cartoons. I have several random pages from various Lion’s Roar magazines spanning 1940 and 1945. Here are two of those behind-the scenes pieces. <\/p>\n

The first (below left, click to enlarge<\/em>) was written when Tex Avery had just joined the staff – replacing Hugh Harman’s unit. MGM is boasting in this article, of being “the first major motion picture studio to establish its own cartoon studio” – and I suppose that could be true (however, my spider-sense thinks Columbia’s Screen Gems beat them to it by a year, and didn’t Universal initially run its studio before selling it to Walter Lantz?).<\/p>\n

The second page (below right, click to enlarge) is the first of a double page spread (alas I don’t have the other half). It starts off with a great posed photograph of a “story conference” that never was – with Quimby in the middle, surrounded by a laughing Hanna and Barbera, Tex Avery, Scott Bradley, Carmen Maxwell, Harvey Eisenberg and others. Great stuff… (I apologize for the moray pattern on the images due to my scanner). <\/p>\n

\"lions-roar1\"<\/a> \"lions-roar3\"<\/a><\/center><\/p>\n
\n

Here’s one of the pages that describe individual cartoons from a given month. Note Barney Bear is still referred to as “Mr. Bear” and Hanna Barbera’s latest creation Officer Pooch<\/em> is touted as their next big hit. <\/p>\n\"lions-roar5_500\"<\/a>\n

If you’d like to see more pages from The Lion’s Roar<\/em>, like the one directly above, let me know – I have about a dozen others. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From October 1937 until August 1941 MGM published a magazine (MGM Short Story, at left) – exclusively distributed to its exhibitors – devoted to its live action and animated short…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1348,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[86,81,85,57,84],"class_list":["post-1347","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-animation-history","tag-bill-hanna","tag-fred-quimby","tag-joe-barbera","tag-mgm-cartoons","tag-tex-avery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1347","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1347"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1347\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1348"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}