Lo-Tech Cartoons

I was a lucky kid. On Saturday mornings and after school I got to watch cartoons on television featuring comical and cute characters who were most often animals. Even the villains in these cartoons were cute in a kind of non-threatening way. But the most interesting thing about all the cartoons I watched on the tube as a kid was the wonderful absence of high technology. The big four cartoon makers in the 1950s and 1960s were Warner Brothers, Disney, Walter Lantz and Hanna-Barbera. A lot of their cartoons were made in the 1940s and were also aired prior to theatrical movies.

Warner Brothers cartoons were my favorite, with Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck sharing the highest honors, followed by Foghorn Leghorn, Sylvester the Cat and Yosemite Sam. The interesting thing about all these characters is that they were not really good guys. Bugs Bunny was a rabbit who loved to rattle anybody’s chain. He was a pest and a menace but you just had to like him. Daffy Duck was temperamental and vengeful but who cared? He was a laughable goof with a pronounced lisp and ideas that always backfired on him. Foghorn Leghorn was a lazy southern rooster who liked to devil a stupid, lazy dog. Sylvester was a stupid cat (with a very pronounced sloppy lisp) who could not outsmart a little, sissy, yellow bird. And Yosemite Sam was a southern outlaw who hated Bugs Bunny more than anything in the world. And none of them carried ray guns or cell phones or had pals with cyborg heads and cloned anime bodies. Hip-Hip Hooray for non-computer-generated cartoons.

I seemed to outgrow Disney’s cartoon characters when I reached puberty. Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Goofy were fun when my feet still didn’t touch the floor at the table but they became boring as I got older. Walter Lantz’s Woody Woodpecker, Chilly Willy and Droopy weren’t very funny anyway and I actually disliked Woody Woodpecker because he was an impish little brat more than anything else. Still, they were wonderfully low-key and low-tech.

Hanna-Barbera cartoon characters took over where Disney and Walter Lantz left off. Yogi Bear and Quickdraw McGraw were hard to beat. But Huckleberry Hound and Auggie Doggie were my favorite. They were dogs. One was blue and grown up and stupid and the other was a brown beagle kid who always managed to get into trouble with his father, Doggie Daddy. Liking cute cartoon characters today would not be cool or masculine but I have no regrets about my past fondness for these kind of cartoon characters. I still like them but I can’t find them on the tube anymore.

The human exception to the cute animal character rule, as far as Hanna-Barbera was concerned, were The Flintstones and The Jetsons. I really like Fred and Barney and thought Wilma and Betty were "neat" (i.e. "cool") cartoon wives but nothing beat the space-age Jetson family for me. I liked them all and never missed an episode.

Still, with all the color and imagined three-dimensionality of my favorite cartoons, the first one I ever viewed on TV remains my favorite to this day. When I watched Captain Kangaroo in the late 1950s and they finally got around to airing another episode of Tom Terrific, I was in cartoon heaven. Tom and his dog Manfred and the arch villain Crabby Appleton were merely black stick figures on a white background but they immediately stole my kid heart and captured my boundless imagination.

At the Drive-In

When you think of a drive-in today you think of food-on-the-run. But back in the 1950s and Sixties a drive-in meant an outdoor movie theater. It was the biggest limestone parking lot in the world and the strangest and most exciting movie experience you’d probably ever have. The Drive-In Theater was a cinematic carnival that lasted all summer long.

The main features in the 1960s, when I was finally old enough to see the movie over the back of the front seat, were quite often Disney movies, and about half of them were animated. Dad got the speaker off a hook and pulled it toward us. He clipped it on his window and turned up the volume. Just for the heck of it he’d turn the volume clear off in the middle of a movie and we could still hear it. The sounds of swords clashing or six-shooters booming were carried on a wave of a hundred speakers into the atmosphere and, there we were, right in the middle of it. But the movie was just the tip of the iceberg.

There were cartoons and commercials for the concession stand. And there was the concession stand, a long flat concrete-block oasis in the middle of a limestone desert, full of smells that made your mouth water. Popcorn, pizza, hotdogs, french fries, soda in paper cups. Who needed the movie?

And then the Seventies came along and drive-in theaters all across America became vacant lots and weekend flea markets and porn theaters and no one seemed to notice or care.

I think few people would believe me if I told them that the first time I saw “Dr. Zhivago” I was sitting on the hood of a car and totally surrounded by trees.

The Wonder of Disney

More impressive to me than the automotive empire that Henry Ford built with his “assembly line” or the steel dynasty of Andrew Carnegie was the magical kingdom without a king created by Walt Disney in the mid-20th century.

The “house that Uncle Walt built” had television shows like “Disneyland” on ABC, which premiered on October 27, 1954, and which had prime time offerings that included wonderful family shows like “Davy Crockett”, starring Fess Parker.

When “Disneyland”, the TV Show, moved to NBC in 1961 it was broadcast in color and renamed “Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color” and it later became “The Wonderful World of Disney”. It was family entertainment at its best and it offered American children a wholesome opportunity to wish upon a star and see what happened next.

Disney meant Disneyland, the theme park in California, and later “Walt Disney World” in Florida. Walt Disney brought us the “Mickey Mouse Club” each weekday on TV in the late 1950s and dozens of animated films and “G-Rated” feature films, including quality westerns and action/adventure movies with big-name stars.

When Walt Disney died in 1966 his dynasty continued to flourish but the entertainment empire that Disney built was not the thing that really impressed me about Walt Disney. It was the man, himself. Here was a man who loved entertaining children and who dared to dream of mystical realms and magical kingdoms and of wonderful things that were bigger than himself.

And that kind of humble, hands-on, American entrepreneurial spirit hasn’t been seen or heard from since.