Filmation
Filmation Associates was an American production company founded by Lou Scheimer, Hal Sutherland and Norm Prescott in 1962. Filmation produced animated and live-action productions and was last located in Woodland Hills, California.
In 1989, Filmation was closed by parent company Group W Productions and its intellectual properties were acquired by French cosmetic firm L'Oréal. Since then, the rights to Filmation's productions have changed hands several times and are today owned primarily by DreamWorks Animation Television.
Notable series that Filmation produced include the DC Comics and Archie Comics animated adaptations, Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, the animated version of Star Trek, its version of Ghostbusters and the two adaptations of the Mattel toyline Masters of the Universe.
History
Background
Lou Scheimer and Filmation's main director Hal Sutherland met in 1957 while working at Larry Harmon Pictures on the made-for-TV Bozo and Popeye cartoons. Eventually Larry Harmon closed the studio by 1961. Scheimer and Sutherland went to work at a small company called True Line, one of whose owners was Marcus Lipsky, who then owned Reddi-wip whipped cream. SIB Productions, a Japanese firm with U.S. offices in Chicago, approached them about producing a cartoon called Rod Rocket. The two agreed to take on the work and also took on a project for Family Films, owned by the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, for ten short animated films based on the life of Christ. Paramount Pictures soon purchased SIB Productions, and True Line's staff increased, including the arrival of former radio disc jockey Norm Prescott, who became a partner in the firm. He had already been working on the animated feature Pinocchio in Outer Space which was primarily produced by Belvision Studios.Peak era
They eventually left True Line, and Scheimer began working on commercials, including for Gillette and others, which began what became Filmation. He met lawyer Ira Epstein, who had worked for Harmon but had left the firm, and now put together the new corporation with Scheimer and Sutherland. It officially became Filmation Associates as of September 1962, so named because "We were working on film, but doing animation"; so putting them together yielded the portmanteau "Filmation".Both Rod Rocket and the Life of Christ series credited "Filmation Associates" with "Production Design" in addition to Scheimer and Sutherland as directors..
Norm Prescott brought in Filmation's first major project, Journey Back to Oz, an animated sequel to the MGM film The Wizard of Oz. Begun in 1962, storyboarding, voice recording, and most of the music scoring and animation had been completed when financial challenges caused the project to be put on hold for nearly eight years.
In the meantime, the new Filmation studio turned their attention to a more successful medium, network television. For the next few years they made television commercials and some other projects for other companies and made an unsuccessful pilot film for a Marx Brothers cartoon series. They also tried to develop an original series named The Adventures of Stanley Stoutheart about a boy and a dog, but they were never able to sell it and almost closed down; until approached by DC Comics editor Mort Weisinger to do a Superman cartoon that premiered on CBS on September 10, 1966. This was followed by several of the other DC superheroes, and then, in 1968, the first Archie Show. Both series greatly helped Filmation's popularity to increase into the 1970s, when it scored big with several of its series.
The Filmation studio was purchased by the TelePrompTer Corporation in 1969. Two years later, in 1971, Filmation and Warner Bros. signed an agreement to distribute cartoons for film and television. In 1981, while Prescott left the company, Westinghouse Electric Corporation, through its Group W Productions division, acquired Filmation along with its purchase of TelePrompTer's cable and entertainment properties.
In 1986, Filmation moved from Reseda, California, where it had been based for the past 19 years, to a larger studio in Woodland Hills.
Closing
In 1989, Group W sold Filmation to Paravision International, an investment consortium led by the French cosmetics company L'Oréal. Before that sale was complete, Group W shuttered the film studio on February 3, 1989, which left L'Oréal with only the Filmation library. This happened a day before the WARN Act went into effect requiring companies to give employees 60 days' notice before a mass layoff.For the past three years Filmation had been in decline due to the saturation of syndicated cartoons which made it increasingly difficult to sell its shows to television stations and its 1987 Christmas movie Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night was a box-office bomb. Additionally, Filmation had higher operating costs than the industry's average due to the insistence from Lou Scheimer himself on keeping all animation work in the United States instead of outsourcing to lower price studios in Asia as most of its competitors did. Also, the new European owners were only interested in Filmation's back catalogue and had no intention of keeping the studio opened.
The last shows produced by Filmation were Ghostbusters and BraveStarr, and the company's last production was the feature film Happily Ever After ; this film was produced from 1986 to 1988, and was theatrically released in the United States five years later, in 1993. Also, at the time of the closing, two new animated series, Bugzburg and Bravo, were beginning production.
Production
Animation style
Like other producers of Saturday-morning cartoons, Filmation was more concerned with quantity rather than quality; however, it did make a number of attempts to rise above the standard animated fare and produce reasonably well-written cartoons. The best-known example of this is its animated adaptation Star Trek: The Animated Series, which included scripts contributed by well-known science fiction writers and starred most of the original cast. Other favorably remembered Filmation series included a 16-part animated serial of Flash Gordon, originally intended as a movie for theatrical release, Flash Gordon: The Greatest Adventure of All. The original film edit was only aired three times on NBC, years after the series was cancelled. Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids was another hailed series created by and starring Bill Cosby with an explicit educational focus. He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, based on the popular line of Mattel toys, opened up a new North American market for first-run television syndication for animation in the 1980s. The animated adaptations of the Archie Comics characters were also noteworthy for the original pop music produced for it, particularly the song "Sugar, Sugar", which was a No. 1 hit single.In addition, certain episodes of He-Man and BraveStarr, in substance, and often animation, were pioneers in children's animated series of their time and paved the way for broader storytelling. Examples include He-Man's "The Problem with Power" which dealt with He-Man believing he had killed an innocent bystander. Another is "Teela's Quest" which introduced a now-famous mythology on the Sorceress being Teela's mother, who is thus the heir to the mantle of safeguarding Grayskull, the versed continuity shared between He-Man and She-Ra, among others. Other notable examples include the BraveStarr episode "The Price", which includes the death of a character due to drug addiction. The 1985 Fat Albert episode "Busted" was a direct homage to the primetime Scared Straight! specials. A first for American children's cartoons, the original airing of this episode included mild profanity that has, however, been edited out of re-airings and home video versions. Likewise, the scripts for Star Trek, which were often written by the same people who had written for the live-action version of the series, tended to be quite sophisticated, and garnered the first Emmy Award for the franchise.
Quality
Filmation had a reputation for exploiting the technique of limited animation to produce a number of animated series with a distinct look. This technique involved limiting of the number of frames per second to fewer than the standard 24 fps seen on film or 25/30 fps seen on video. Frames would be repeated to compensate for the deficiency, resulting in a "jerky" motion. Filmation also made heavy use of rotoscoping in later years. It also re-used the same animated sequences over and over, many times, to the point where the Filmation style was instantly recognizable. One example of this can be seen in She-Ra's and He-Man's transformation sequences.This frequent use of stock footage saved production money, but often resulted in sacrifice of continuity. This was countered by cutting from one stock shot to another after only a second or two, long enough to set the scene but before the eye could notice all of the unexplained errors. This became part of the Filmation style during a period when most television and motion picture productions tended to run minimum shots of 4–5 seconds.
In contrast to the rapid jump cuts during action sequences, another Filmation trademark was the recurring use of long establishing shots in which the camera would pan slowly across a very wide background painting, thus filling up screen time with sequences requiring little or no animation. Filmation also pioneered other animation technologies, particularly in Flash Gordon, which included backlighting effects for the first time in American animation, including moire effects to represent energy fields. It also pioneered a unique method of generating 3-D vehicle animation by filming white-outlined black miniatures against black backgrounds using a computerized motion-control camera and high-contrast film, then printing the negatives onto acetate frame-by-frame, to create animation cels which were then hand-painted. This produced a three-dimensional effect that had been used by Disney in films such as One Hundred and One Dalmatians previously. It predated the modern use of 3-D computer animation for vehicles in 2-D animated productions. However, it had a distinctive "flicker" to it, because some of the painted lines went out and in of visibility as the miniatures moved.
Unlike many American studios, Filmation never relied on animation studios outside the United States for the bulk of its production; Ghostbusters and BraveStarr both state in the ending credits that they were "made entirely in the U.S.A." This occurred during a time when rival studio Hanna-Barbera shifted from saying in the final production credits "A Hanna-Barbera Production" to "Produced in Association with: Wang Film Productions / Cuckoo's Nest Studios" which is located in Taiwan. The quality of Filmation's "Made Entirely in the U.S.A." strategy was comparable to the outsourced animation. Filmation did, however, rely on outsourcing once, when the company created its animated Zorro series. It was animated by Tokyo Movie Shinsha of Japan; however, the storyboards and graphics were made by Filmation itself.
Filmation is also noteworthy for its background paintings under the direction of long-time department head Erv Kaplan, such as the purple-colored "night sky" backgrounds used in He-Man and She-Ra.
Characters, as well as plots, were typically run-of-the-mill for the time. For example, most episodes of Ghostbusters had the same scheme ; although as previously mentioned, Filmation made various attempts to rise above the norm. Many of the sound effects used in its cartoons are also very familiar, the majority of them being recycled from Hanna-Barbera, though the company's DC Comics cartoons of 1966–67 used more realistic sound effects.
Filmation received particular criticism for Lassie's Rescue Rangers, an animated continuation of the long-running live-action series Lassie. Lassie's co-creator and trainer, Rudd Weatherwax, said of the show, "That's not Lassie. That's trash." It drew a rare denunciation from the National Association of Broadcasters, which accused Filmation of corrupting the Lassie franchise with "violence, crime and stupidity." According to Scheimer, when he appeared at a fan convention to promote Star Trek: The Animated Series, he heard a fan express hope that the series would not "turn out like all the rest of Filmation's sh*t". Some people who worked at Filmation, including Mark Kausler, Don Bluth, John Kricfalusi, Eddie Fitzgerald, Sam Simon, Tom Ruegger, Paul Dini, and Will Finn, expressed their dislike for the company and the shows that they worked on.