Ads That Sold Cartoons --- Part Two



I submit that we all grew up spoiled rotten on cartoons. For theatre-goers, they were a treat, and usually came one at a time as treats should. Multiple helpings were for special occasions, like a School's Out party or Saturday morning feed while Mom was down blocks shopping. I remember specific cartoons in theatres, but am far less able to call back ones ladled out daily, and to excess, on TV. Asheville's Channel 13 ran two hours of the things every morning, overkill I never could process beyond recognizing logos and music seen/heard ad nauseum. Parental concern was not misplaced for offspring parked before such bottomless pit of molasses. Our generation bitches over video games played incessantly. What were cartoons on a loop other than same hypnosis minus hand controls? It usually took me thirty or so minutes to go numb on them, an hour short of (Winston-Salem) Channel 12's ninety-minute Saturday dollop (the ad here came after they'd reduced that by half). Had I seen those cartoons at the Liberty, and in proper moderation, there'd be specific memories still, like most features experienced there. Imagine if you will a reasoned diet of Donald, Daffy, and Popeye in 35mm, each on and off big screens well short of viewer fatigue. Even now, I won't watch beyond four at a single sitting. To indulge more does neither me nor them proper service.

This time, I wanted to sample ads where theatres laid cartoons on thickest. Were so many animated shorts able to keep a young crowd's undivided attention? I'll bet shows like this one at Bluefield's State Theatre were thoroughgoing madhouses, what with a Tom and Jerry Carnival, Bugs Bunny's Revue, the Three Stooges, and a Bowery Boys leading into Tension at Table Rock. Tension indeed for house staff trying to keep order among patronage so over-stimulated. Are there places today the equivalent of these weekend matinees for letting off steam (other than public school systems)? Vegetating in front of DVD Bugs Bunny revues could not approach this. It just dawns on me that I've never seen Bugs or Tom and Jerry with a large audience, nor more than a handful of cartoons which appeal I presume to understand. What would that have been like? Laughter is contagious enough in a majority of adults. Theatre kids already hopped up on sugar bars and sodie pop must have all but wrenched chair bolts out of floors. More than one exhibitor has told me how vital it was to maintain order during these hyper-thons. Usher help needed, at the least, whips and chairs. Knowing what sweets do to one child, imagine hundreds chasing the same high of concessions plus cartoons. Could an emerging drug culture have been thwarted by simply giving youth continued access to shared euphoria like this? Too much joy of animation was lost when TV swallowed it whole. DVD providers can restore picture and sound, but not tribal rites of discovering cartoons in the company of excited peers.

Something else showmen told me ... it didn't matter if cartoons they booked were old or new. One veteran reported he never had a customer cry foul over animated repeats. You couldn't spot age of a cartoon short of eagle eyes for fleeting copyright notices, and Warners' slapping a Blue Ribbon on their oldies might convey many things other than fact you were watching a reissue. Color had stopped being a novelty by the mid-thirties, so inventories swelled quickly and enabled done shorts to cycle through the marketplace time and again. It was hard enough recalling two hour features you'd seen ten years before, but seven minute drawings? --- unless it was a Three Little Pigs or some such, you could go back in before leaves changed and swear cartoons you saw were brand new. What singled out animateds was also what revitalized features ... namely things new and novel. Audiences woke up when Popeye went 3-D and became an Ace Of Space. Then there was Cinemascope and Tom and Jerry chasing each other to accompaniment of Perspecta sound. Ads like one shown here celebrated new frontiers of Kartoonascope --- Cartoons Seen Thru The Eyes of Cinemascope. These spikes were short-lived but effective for letting customers know their favorites were keeping up with times, but what was difference otherwise between T&J or Bugs in their youth and adventures they'd relive years down the line?

Exhibitors didn't mind new cartoons, so long as they paid old prices. The biggest problem distribution had after the war was theatres reluctant to kick in higher rentals for supporting product. It was bad enough being gouged for features. Why give more for shorts their public took for granted? I gandered as before at Liberty account books from the late 30's. They paid $5.00 for Don Donald in August, 1937 and again that amount for Disney's Woodland Cafe during the same month. Betty Boop in The Foxy Hunter cost $4.80 for a single day's run in February, 1938. Next I moved into war years and a Murphy, NC venue similar in size and seating to our Liberty. This was March 1945 and they paid $3.00 for MGM's Bear Raid Warden. An October 1945 booking of Der Fuhrer's Face enriched RKO/Disney by $3.00. Well after the war, in May 1948, the Murphy house was using a 1940 MGM, Fishing Bear, again at $3.00. In fact, every Metro cartoon they booked that year, new and old, cost the same --- $3.00. The Liberty was meanwhile paying more to MGM, $8.00 in fact for Red Hot Rangers in June, 1947, but only $2.00 to Paramount for Jasper In A Jam, booked the same month. Tom and Jerry's 1945 Academy Award winner, Quiet Please, came to the Liberty in July 1947 at a bargain --- $2.00. Costs to produce cartoons were up across studio boards after WWII, but for at least these two theatres, rates remained stable, if not below prices paid during the late 30's. I realize companies got most of their return out of metropolitan and first-run houses, but modest yields like these from small situations provide insight as to why studios struggled with continued cartoon production, higher costs attendant to that, and diminishing profit new animation realized.