Where Were Those MGM Cartoons When I Needed Them? --- Part One


I was always a cartoon Main Titles junkie. Logos and credits were more fulfilling than the short itself in many cases. Programs that excised openers and went straight to the body of the film were hobbled from a start. Walter Lantz introduced his Woody Woodpecker subjects, then went direct to a stark title card, omitting the credits. It wasn’t until these packages showed up in syndication around 1977 that I first saw a Universal logo on a Walter Lantz cartoon. Disney was as bad for depriving us of titles. The only time I saw Mickey, Donald, or Silly Symphonies on television was when a Mouseketeers introduced that afternoon’s cartoon, none of which bore titles. Disney used shorts on the Sunday night NBC show as well, but often as not fading up to the story from Walt's intro. Again, no credits. It was through collecting 16mm that I was able to see RKO logos and United Artists legends on the main card of a Disney subject. Frustration of going without credits was bad enough, but what about cartoons that never showed up at all? For all I knew, Columbia never had its name on an animated product prior to Mister Magoo, and MGM’s only contribution was Tom and Jerry. I saw my first Metro Captain and The Kids as an extra with A Day At The Races on DVD. I understand there were only fifteen of these, most in black-and-white. They never turned up on North Carolina television to my recollection. All we had by way of vintage cartoons were Popeye and Warner Bros. Was it like this elsewhere, or was my state peculiarly deprived? Metro shorts are a  curiosity. They made hundreds of animated shorts. There’s not much information about the broadcast histories of those packages between the fifties and seventies, but apparently they were available from September 1960 onward …




MGM cartoons were supposedly the last of the major studios’ pre-1948 animated films released to television. The deal was struck with United Artists TV Distribution, but did not include the ongoing Tom and Jerry series, which remained a popular theatrical mainstay well into the sixties. From 1960, the Metros were leased to local stations as kiddie programming, filling time between live host segments. Barney Bear was an umbrella title for some of after-school shows, as the package contained the first fifteen entries from that series, as well as thirteen MGM Bosko shorts, fifteen Captain and The Kids, and numerous Happy Harmonies produced by Hugh Harman and Rudolpf Ising. There were 135 cartoons in the group, and 120 were in color. By the time they became available, United Artists already had much larger packages of Popeye and Warner Bros. shorts in play across the country. The MGM subjects were in direct competition with name-brand animated products that had a four-year head start in clearing virtually every syndicated market. How could Barney Bear compete with Bugs Bunny? It must have been hard selling cartoons with no recognizable characters. UA salesmen in the field would find it far easier to move a Popeye group over these Metros. I assume MGM cartoons wound up with stations outbid by broadcast rivals that grabbed off Bugs and Daffy first, but question arises as to what sort of terms UA exacted for the Metros. My guess would be high --- their lease with MGM was probably no bargain. Is this why so few saw these cartoons growing up? I’ve spent a last few days asking among friends around the country, and none of them recall seeing a Happy Harmonies on television (especially prior to the late seventies).





Owning MGM cartoons on 16mm conferred bragging rights unequaled by the more commonplace WB’s. Finding them was near impossible. A company called Pictoreel sold Harman and Ising shorts outright during the fifties, and home viewers could have them in either black-and-white or Kodachrome prints. It would appear the two producers retained some kind of distribution rights in these subjects, as other MGM cartoons were never legitimately available to collectors in 16mm. As for random or scattered prints (that is, ones mislaid or otherwise appropriated from TV stations or rental houses), collectors would grab a Metro almost sight unseen in those days. Often as not, color was pink, or fading. All were pigs in a poke since we seldom, or never, saw them before on TV. Much of the time that was OK, but there were disasters. I scooped up six MGM’s in 1976 for $30 each, not a bad price for such rarities. A first was The Old Plantation, which had all the rich animation and lavish backgrounds one might expect from Metro. Up next was a cartoon so dreadful that I hesitate even to recall it. My request to Warners --- now that you own The Tree Surgeon, please burn the negative. Collecting cartoons got easier when TV stations began dumping them in the late eighties. Suddenly, there were entire runs of Tom and Jerry (they had finally gone off-network and into syndication in 1977), and even the legendary Tex Avery shorts were starting to turn up. Some friends and I used to meet a longtime collector/dealer on the third Saturday of each month at a Shoney’s restaurant near Charlotte. After lunch, he’d pop his car trunk and we’d do a deal for MGM cartoons out in the parking lot. He had a friend at one of the TV stations and they were converting to videotape for all their programming. What we got would have otherwise been earmarked for the dumpster, had not reason prevailed. There were VCR’s by then, but nothing approached the purity of these classics on 16mm, and besides, the prints were in virtually new condition. It was only after all the TV stations/rental houses were emptied that supply began to dwindle. By then, so was film collecting, for now there was video projection and the remarkable clarity of DVD. We never imagined it would end, but now it pretty much has. The old Big Reel newspaper we waited for each month slimmed to wafer size, then disappeared. Whatever is left of 16mm collecting is largely confined to e-bay. It was all great while it lasted, but film could not survive in the face of digital technology (even theatres would abandon it). Some of you veteran collectors out there should write a history of that vanished era. In tomorrow’s Part Two, I promise not to digress so far from MGM cartoons, for there’s more info at hand about costs and rentals, as well as how the studio used their animated subjects as a battering ram against the despised double feature policy.