BSA 206 S2W2 : Saturday Morning Cartoons

First was Crusader Rabbit, which had very limited animation and ran from 1950-52 ish in America:



Yo this works surprisingly well to communicate the story and gags even if the animation is very limited, you fill the actions in with your mind a bit more than actually seeing them - since its similar to Looney Tunes and later TV cartoons its easy to fill in the blanks. If an animator is making a project that might be somewhat ambitious this could be a good way to represent that. For storytelling first this is great to present an idea as a student that is more polished and easily accessible than a simple animatic.

Jay Ward productions went on to do:



It was very cheap, repeating backgrounds, simple images like clouds, use of elementary explosions to cover actions and panning. Lots of ways to cut costs used.



Peabody and Sherman has a really cool sci-fi set-up, a show with time travel for kids is already an amazing idea, and then having the whole thing about a very smart dog adopting a human boy adds another layer of classic sci-fi "What if", with political consequences and everything - even if it is very simple. Here I didn't even think about the budget much, it's obviously cheaply made with much corner cutting, but I was invested enough in the clip we watched from the show that I forgot about it.



Next we watched an episode of Fractured Fairy Tales, which really puts into focus Jay Ward's narration style storytelling, which reminds me a lot of a bedtime story.



This is kinda interesting as an early example of mixing up classic tales into something new, a more recent example of this type of thing would be Hoodwinked! Yo this thing was great though, really funny - it even has a fourth wall break where the narrator and main character interact. This was used later to great effect in Spongebob Squarepants. I'm thinking now these guys had some really awesome ideas and storytelling definitely trumps the fact that they had very cheap animation.

In 1955 film studios weren't screening animations anymore and TV channels started buying them up, like Mighty Mouse:



This is where Hanna-Barbera was introduced to the world:




We watched a clip of Gene Kelly dancing with Jerry Mouse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2msq6H2HI-Y This is really well animated and came out way before Mary Poppins, so really quite impressive. Hanna-Barbera's budget was slashed after this though and they started producing cheaper films, taking cost-cutting measures such as individually animating different part of a characters body - hence the reason they all have collars (heads are animated apart from body and this makes that fact way less obvious).



We watched an episode of the Ruff and Reddy show produced by Hanna-Barbera, the narration was painful as we can see what's happening, even Crusader Rabbit did a better job, here this cost-cutting method removes from the experience as it's kinda lost its bedtime story routes in my opinion. This thing had an interesting story though, of aliens kidnapping a cat and dog so that they can make them mate and repopulate their planet, relevant now with the Storm of Area 51 on the horizon. It ends on a cliffhanger though which was kinda bizarre.

We watched Huckleberry Hound next, where the titular Hound served as his own host for a 30 minute show which was made up of segments for different characters like Yogi Bear and others.



An episode of the Jetsons, these cartoon intros reminded me a lot of the intros for Saturday Cartoons I grew up with, like Courage the Cowardly dog, where each episode shares an into animation and music, but there is a unique episode title and single frame illustration at the end before the episode begins proper. I always liked these.



They also produced The Flinstones, which was the biggest sitcom thing before Simpsons showed up on the scene. I never really watched the Jetsons but Flinstones' intro is seered into my brain.



I wasn't the biggest fan of Flintstones, but Scooby Doo was awesome:




I love the intro here, the theme song is great and I am a huge fan of the series' atmosphere. I think I saw a documentary of the birth of this series once and it was very interesting, was a hard sell at first (it's a really strange concept if you think about it) and was supposed to show kids that real monsters don't exist or something like that.

Now these are a bit too formulaic for me, literally always following the same structure, the comedy is also very strange because unlike Looney Tunes its not surreal and creative enough to be funny anymore. This is a bit of a big issue with this show because it relies a lot on the comedy...a lot.

Hanna-Barbera had a lot of hard-hitting properties, I think they were all purchased by Cartoon Network later.

Peggy Charren thought all the animation was bad and lobbied for more diverse broadcasting for children - she wanted the cartoons to teach kids something as well, not just use them for profit.

This resulted in things like Captain Planet - which I think no one likes. Personally I think when things are made to profit its usually a good way to filter down to exactly what the market wants, making it the best it can be so that people want to consume it. Once you introduce learning into an entertainment industry, the quality isn't that important anymore, the amount kids enjoy it is less important and there is a greater focus placed on educational elements. Which is why these shows aren't fondly remembered imo.

Sealab 2020 is notable as it was a pretty much forgotten show from Hanna-Barbera, being revived for Adult Swim, Cartoon Network's mature channel. Sealab 2021:



These shows are real weird, it's like professionally produced Youtube parody, like Dragonball or Yu-Gi-Oh abridged, but you know legal.

Filmation was another big player in the Saturday Morning Cartoon arena, with properties like He-Man, She-Ra, Superman, Archie and Sabrina the Teenage Witch.

Recently Netflix have remade Archie and Sabrina into adult orientated shows. A lot of these old cartoons are properties that seem to be easy to reinterpret and remake. A lot are classics and still have shows or reboots going today. Peabody and Bullwinkle have recently seen reboots as well, but for some reason a lot of Jay Ward's stuff has dissipated into obscurity. This is why I think remaking properties are important, that way they stay in the public consciousness and continue to be marketable. By the time the Peabody movie came out everyone had forgotten about it, a property like He-Man is close to a similar fate but its more ridiculous elements lent itself well to memes and stuff and have stayed relevant in that sense, so I suspect a fittingly campy He-Man movie will do quite well.



We watched the documentary above.