Animation in the United States in the television era


The television era of American animation was a period in the history of American animation that gradually started in the late 1950s with the decline of theatrical animated shorts and popularization of television animation, reached its peak during the 1970s, and ended around the mid-1980s. This era was characterized by low budgets, limited animation, an emphasis on television over the theater, and the general perception of cartoons being primarily for children.
The early-to-mid 20th century saw the success of Disney’s theatrical animated movies, along with Warner Bros.’ Looney Tunes and MGM’s Tom and Jerry cartoons. However, the state of animation began changing with the mid-century proliferation of television. By the 1970s and 1980s, studios had generally stopped producing the big-budget theatrical short animated cartoons that thrived in the golden age, but new television animation studios would thrive based on the economy and volume of their output. Many popular and famous animated cartoon characters emerged from this period, including:
Due to the perceived cheap production values, poor animation, and mixed critical and commercial reception, this period is sometimes referred to as the Bronze Age or The Dark Age of American animation by critics and animation historians. Despite this, the era is fondly remembered by members of Generation X who grew up with Saturday-morning cartoons in the 1970s and 1980s.

From theaters to television

Early experiments

There were a number of early experiments in limited animation television cartoons. These cartoons usually were about five minutes in length and were episodic in nature, allowing stations to flexibly program them. One of the first images to be broadcast over television was that of Felix the Cat in 1928. Historian Harvey Deneroff of the Savannah College of Art and Design suggests that animator Don Figlozzi drew some of the first animations to be used on television, working for Popeye films in 1931. In 1938, cartoonist Chad Grothkopf's eight-minute experimental Willie the Worm, cited as the first animated film created for TV, was shown on NBC. Another one of the first cartoons produced expressly for television was Crusader Rabbit, a creation of Alexander Anderson and Jay Ward. Soundac, a small studio in Florida, was responsible for another early adventure serial, Colonel Bleep. Often, existing programs would be a launching ground for new cartoon characters. In 1956, the Howdy Doody show aired the first Gumby clay animated cartoon from creator Art Clokey. Sam Singer earned a certain degree of infamy for his efforts at television animation, which included an animated adaptation of The Adventures of Paddy the Pelican and the original series Bucky and Pepito, both of which have been cited as among the worst of their kind. On the other hand, a long-running series of animated shorts named Tom Terrific was produced by Terrytoons for the Captain Kangaroo show, and this series was praised by film historian Leonard Maltin as "one of the finest cartoons ever produced for television."
Cartoons in the Golden Age, such as the works of The Fleischer Brothers and Tex Avery, contained topical and often suggestive humor, though they were seen primarily as "children's entertainment" by movie exhibitors. Beginning in 1954, Walt Disney capitalized on the medium of television with his own weekly TV series, Disneyland. This ABC show popularized his new Disneyland theme park and began a decades-long series of TV broadcasts of Disney cartoons, which later expanded into the show Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color. While Disney recognized that the economics of the medium could not support his production standards and refused to go into TV animation, he still ordered the creation of one character exclusive to TV, Ludwig Von Drake. The character's segments would link compilations of the company's archived theatrical shorts as complete episodes.

Saturday morning cartoons and TV specials

As TV became a phenomenon and began to draw audiences away from movie theaters, many children's TV shows included airings of theatrical cartoons in their schedules, and this introduced a new generation of children to the cartoons of the 1920s and 1930s. Cartoon producer Paul Terry sold the rights to the Terrytoons cartoon library to television and retired from the business in the early 1950s. This guaranteed a long life for the characters of Mighty Mouse and Heckle and Jeckle, whose cartoons were syndicated and rerun in children's television programming blocks for the next 30 to 40 years.
By the early 1960s, the perception of cartoons as children's entertainment was entrenched in the public consciousness, enough so that Federal Communications Commission chairman Newton Minow, in his landmark 1961 speech "Television and the Public Interest," denounced the medium of animation as a whole and compared it to feeding children junk food all of the time. Animation began to disappear from movie theaters; while Disney continued to produce animated features after losing its founder, MGM and Warner Bros. closed their studios, outsourced their animation, and got out of it entirely by the end of the decade.
Throughout the 1960s, it was not uncommon to have animated shorts produced with both film and television in mind. By selling the shorts to theaters, the studios could afford a higher budget than would otherwise be available from television alone, which at the time was still a free medium for the end-user rather than strictly a medium for delivering signals from distant TV stations.
Animation on television focused almost exclusively on children, and the tradition of getting up early to watch Saturday morning cartoons became a weekly ritual for millions of American kids. The networks were glad to oblige their demands by providing hours-long blocks of cartoon shows. Hanna-Barbera Productions became the leader in the production of TV cartoons for children. A number of other studios produced TV cartoons, such as Filmation and DePatie-Freleng Enterprises, but Hanna-Barbera had developed a virtual lock on Saturday morning cartoons by the 1970s. Such critics of Hanna-Barbera's style of limited animation as Chuck Jones referred to it disparagingly as "illustrated radio", yet when one show was cancelled, the studio usually had another one ready to replace it because they were so cheap to produce.
From the mid-1960s through the early 1980s, several successful prime-time animated TV specials aired. Because these one-shot cartoons were aired during prime-time hours, they had to obtain higher ratings than their Saturday and weekday counterparts. CBS in particular allowed a large number of animated TV specials to air on its network, and several of these continue to be repeated annually and sold on video and DVD. The Rankin-Bass studio produced a number of stop-motion specials geared towards popular holidays ; while Bill Melendez's long-running series of Peanuts specials won numerous awards, spawned four feature films, and even launched a Saturday morning series. Other attempts to bring comic strip characters to TV did not have anywhere near as much success until one of the Peanuts directors, Phil Roman, brought the Jim Davis comic strip Garfield to TV starting in 1982, resulting in twelve specials and a long-running animated series.
Though the dominant Hanna-Barbera Productions launched a phenomenon with the 1981 premiere of The Smurfs on NBC, very little else which they produced in the 1980s caught on. Adding to this was the financial problems of their owner Taft Broadcasting, which was taken over by Carl Lindner, Jr., owner of Great American Insurance Company, in 1987. Two years later, Tom Ruegger launched an exodus of H-B employees to form a relaunched Warner Bros. Animation division. In 1991, Turner Broadcasting System bought the company and its library.
Other studios' shows throughout the decade included H-B alumni Ruby-Spears Productions' Alvin and the Chipmunks, Marvel and Jim Henson's Muppet Babies, DiC and Columbia's The Real Ghostbusters, and Film Roman's Garfield and Friends. Additionally, the Saturday morning continued to see attempts to adapt prime time series for animation, some successfully, others less so. After three decades, Disney premiered their first Saturday morning cartoons in 1985 with Adventures of the Gummi Bears and The Wuzzles. The shows debuted with significantly more substantial budgets. The first-run syndication success of DuckTales, which premiered in 1987, eventually inspired a whole block of Disney-produced syndicated cartoons which forced competing studios to improve their own production standards to compete.
The 1980s also saw a number of cartoons based on children's toys, such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero, The Transformers, My Little Pony 'n Friends, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, She-Ra: Princess of Power, Jem and the Holograms, ThunderCats, Pound Puppies, and Care Bears. There were even cartoons based on Pac-Man video games and the Rubik's Cube. Some of them even inspired feature films. While many of them were successful with children, shows like these were accused of being glorified toy commercials by parents' groups such as Action for Children's Television. These groups also objected to the level of violence in many of these shows. ACT's efforts to curb these trends resulted in the Children's Television Act, enacted in 1990 and strictly enforced by the FCC starting in 1996.