The Screwy Squirrel modelsheet on display here has had me thinking about the backlogging of cartoon shorts again. For those unfamiliar with the term, it refers to how the cartoons were sitting on the shelf for months to years before being released to theaters. It’s why Rod Scribner’s animation shows up in cartoons released in 1955 even though he was part of the 1953 Warners layoff, or why Dick Lundy’s Barney Bear cartoons were released three years after he left MGM.
My question is: how were series and characters established if the backlog was an average of 18 to 24 months at most of these studios? As the modelsheet shows, Tex Avery had Screwy Squirrel redesigned almost a whole year before the first cartoon was even released. Similarly, I have a Baby Huey modelsheet (somewhere) dated 1949 for the third cartoon in that series, months before the first one hit theaters.
Unless I’m mistaken, it doesn’t seem like average movie-goers were used as a basis of what constituted an entertaining character (not before a few thousand was spent on dud series, learning the hard way). It sounds like the suits told the animators to be the judge themselves what would catch on. In a way, the old Chuck Jonesism, “We made them for ourselves,” has some truth to it.
It’s also probably why good animation making a comeback won’t happen any time soon, because that art was part of a society that is now antiquated. Back then, unless the studio was in some state of near bankruptcy, they didn’t need to see immediate revenue. It’s why Walt Disney could afford a bomb or two now and then without folding up.
Today’s society can’t handle that. Everything needs to be instantaneous, and done faster and cheaper. We need to see whether the film bombed or not 36 hours after it premieres. Every retard with a keyboard is allowed to voice an opinion, often destroying others’ work simply because they are able to so quickly and for free. There is no room for error.
Another problem is, unlike with movies in the 1960s, animation didn’t have enough people wanting to figure out how to get around the new system and still produce great work. Just about all of them embraced the shit. I can count the big names of people who tried to preserve quality animation on one hand. And about half of even those people wanted to stick to ‘tried and true’ principles that didn’t deserve to be preserved (i.e. the Disney studio, Jones, Bluth). This is why there have been only a few bright patches in the otherwise soiled mattress that is the last 45+ years of animation.
We all encourage it though, whether we want to admit it or not. We’re all reading and bitching about this with a high-speed Internet connection, are we not?
