The scarce history of Disney animated shorts on television

[TMC]

http://boards.radio-info.com/smf/index.php?topic=211283.0

Much evidence exists of Looney Tunes, Tom and Jerry and Popeye
theatrical shorts enjoying wide exposure on television in the '50s and
'60s; Disney shorts, not so much, which is weird, because Walt Disney
was a huge proponent of the medium. There was Disneyland and later The
Mouse Factory, both of which occasionally featured the shorts, but
unless I'm missing something major, the advent of The Disney Channel
in 1983 marked the first time theatrical cartoons starring Mickey,
Donald, Goofy; etc. were in regular rotation on television.

What was the rationale behind this scarcity? By the time Disney was in
the TV business, Mickey Mouse's career on the big screen was over, and
the frequency of the shorts themselves had slowed to a crawl. Did Walt
not want television runs hampering potential theatrical reissues of
the shorts, or did he just feel it wasn't appropriate to air them on
TV too often?

[Madara0806]

Yeah, I always felt a dearth of Disney shorts when I was growing up.
Everything else was playing on TV--Looney Tunes, Terrytoons, Betty
Boop, Popeye, Walter Lantz, etc.--but the Disney cartoons were
parceled out very stingily on Disney's hour-long show (Friday nights
some seasons, Sunday nights in others), but they did occasional hour-
long compilations of shorts with some excerpts from longer films. I
honestly don't remember seeing a lot of them, though. When my daughter
was little, in the second half of the 1980s, the Disney show persisted
on ABC on Sunday nights and I would tape those hours devoted to the
shorts, which were more often than when I was a kid. Many of them
started coming out in VHS compilations also, several of which I bought
back in the 1980s and still own.

Now, of course, so many have come out in those Walt Disney Treasures
box sets that I've gotten tired of them. And my daughter's an adult so
I don't have the excuse of sharing them with her to watch them. The
truth is, the Disney shorts were never as good as the Warner Bros.
stuff or the best of Fleischer. I frankly find them tiresome today.

[Remysun]

One possibility is that Disney was distributed by RKO, which I think
went out of business. So until the profits from Disneyland proved more
lucrative than the content, Disney didn't have the clout to put his
stuff on television the way the other studios could.

[Chet Bosco]

In article <22086d8f-074f-4e7a-bf27-
bf9547...@t23g2000yqd.googlegroups.com>, remys...@yahoo.com
says...

Disney owned his product outright, even though he distributed through
United Artists and later RKO. He could have put anything he owned on
television whenever he chose. And if anyone had the clout to put
something on television it was Disney. The TV networks would crawl
through broken glass to run his stuff.

Disney created his own distribution company, Buena Vista, in 1954,
cutting RKO off from the one source they had for profit producing films.

CB

[Remysun]

On May 6, 1:29 am, Chet Bosco <chesterbo...@hotmail.com> wrote:

> Disney owned his product outright, even though he distributed through
> United Artists and later RKO.  He could have put anything he owned on
> television whenever he chose.  And if anyone had the clout to put
> something on television it was Disney.  The TV networks would crawl
> through broken glass to run his stuff.

> Disney created his own distribution company, Buena Vista, in 1954,
> cutting RKO off from the one source they had for profit producing films.

But in those early days, he'd have been an independent going up
against the major studios in the vertical integration era. I wouldn't
be surprised to learn that they tried to squeeze out everybody else.
Or that Disney decided to concentrate on the parks.

[Madara0806]

That's an interesting question, but I'm not sure it applies here
because 1948 was the year of the consent decree which broke up the
studios' ownership of theaters. I imagine that theater owners would
have climbed all over each other to run Disney shorts. Yet, now that I
think of it, I don't recall ever seeing a Disney short in a theater
when I was growing up. Nor do I remember seeing any Warner Bros.
shorts, which were still being produced for theaters in my childhood.
I do remember seeing Walter Lantz cartoons (Woody Woodpecker,
Inspector Willoughby and that alligator character) and the DePatie-
Freleng Pink Panther shorts. But that's all I recall.

[Professor Bubba]

In article
<8fc4d615-bc55-4ef8...@o6g2000vbz.googlegroups.com>,

The 1950s Mickey Mouse Club always ended with a Mouse-kar-toon, a
Disney short.

I grew up in the 1950s and cartoons were already becoming rare in
theaters. Where there once had been a show (a short, a cartoon or two,
a featurette (maybe a newsreel) and then a main feature), now there
were two features in a double bill, with trailers and the like inserted
after each film so they wouldn't bump into each other. Soon enough,
double features were gone, too.

I recall seeing a Mr. Magoo and a Tom & Jerry in theaters no later than
about 1961 or 1962. The last newsreel I saw had a story about 1960's
Hurricane Donna, and it was months afterward.

[Remysun]

On May 7, 12:41 pm, Professor Bubba <bu...@nowhere.edu.invalid> wrote:

> The 1950s Mickey Mouse Club always ended with a Mouse-kar-toon, a
> Disney short.
>
> I grew up in the 1950s and cartoons were already becoming rare in
> theaters.  Where there once had been a show (a short, a cartoon or two,
> a featurette (maybe a newsreel) and then a main feature), now there
> were two features in a double bill, with trailers and the like inserted
> after each film so they wouldn't bump into each other.  Soon enough,
> double features were gone, too.
>
> I recall seeing a Mr. Magoo and a Tom & Jerry in theaters no later than
> about 1961 or 1962.  The last newsreel I saw had a story about 1960's
> Hurricane Donna, and it was months afterward.

By that time Disney was combining what would have been shorts to form
features like Melody Time. The profits were in features.

[Remysun]

On May 7, 12:13 pm, Madara0806 <madara0...@gmail.com> wrote:

> That's an interesting question, but I'm not sure it applies here
> because 1948 was the year of the consent decree which broke up the
> studios' ownership of theaters. I imagine that theater owners would
> have climbed all over each other to run Disney shorts. Yet, now that I
> think of it, I don't recall ever seeing a Disney short in a theater
> when I was growing up. Nor do I remember seeing any Warner Bros.
> shorts, which were still being produced for theaters in my childhood.
> I do remember seeing Walter Lantz cartoons (Woody Woodpecker,
> Inspector Willoughby and that alligator character) and the DePatie-
> Freleng Pink Panther shorts. But that's all I recall.

The shorts were packaged with the films by the studios, inserted with
the trailers and newsreels. It probably accelerated Disney's move into
features to guarantee himself an audience.

[Chet Bosco]

In article <144fa9da-f5fe-4d9c-b603-2a3de760e563
@r2g2000pbs.googlegroups.com>, remys...@yahoo.com says...

Your understanding of how shorts were sold is a bit off. They were not
always packaged, in fact they seldom were. The studios certainly
provided inducements to combine their shorts with their features, it was
not a hard and fast practice.

Walt Disney's cartoons were wildly popular. In fact, they were so
popular that they often were responsible for ticket sales for features
that would not have otherwise been as popular as the ticket count
indicated. Disney's product ran with feature films from every studio in
Hollywood, and the studios were happy to have the aid of the Mickey
Mouse draw. Many of the studios ultimately developed their own cartoon
departments to compete with Disney. Only Warner Bros. developed
characters that were competitive with Mickey, Donald, and Goofey, and
initially the Warner cartoons were actually made by a separate company
that ultimately melded with the big studio.

[Ted Nolan <tednolan>]

In article <MPG.2a1271f81...@news.eternal-september.org>,

Not entirely right, IMHO. I would say that Popeye was competitive as,
arguably, were Tom & Jerry.
--
------
columbiaclosings.com
What's not in Columbia anymore..

[Remysun]

On May 8, 2:32 am, t...@loft.tnolan.com (Ted Nolan <tednolan>) wrote:

> Not entirely right, IMHO.  I would say that Popeye was competitive as,
> arguably, were Tom & Jerry.

Tom and Jerry being MGM, of course, and maybe being the influence on
the name of two cats that Anne Frank could see from her secret hideout.

[Bill Steele]

My recollection is that as long as theaters continued showing cartoons
they drew from all possible sources. Going in would be a crapshoot: if
the cartoon was Disney, Warners or MGM I would sit back and enjoy. If it
was Paramount or Universal I'd grin and bear it. There were just a few
UPAs.

[Ralph]

Here's the way I remember it from 1940 through about 1955:
If it was a Disney cartoon, everyone cheered.
If it was Warner Brothers, almost everyone cheered.
If it was MGM, some people cheered.
If it was any other studio, there was either silence or groans.

The theatres had free rein on what they showed. For Saturday morning
all-cartoon kiddie shows (my favorite), they would run two hours of
cartoons from any and all studios, sometimes together with serials,
live-action shorts, and maybe a movie. Most of them were probably
released months or years before, but if you didn't happen to see them
when they were linked to a feature, you didn't know the difference.
Oh, and don't forget the sing-alongs with the pipe organ (if you were
lucky enough to live in a town with one still in the theatre).

And has often been said, cartoons weren't just for children. My
parents and I went to the last showing of a movie one night, and they
liked the preceding cartoon so much, we waited for it to be shown
again after the movie. When the curtains closed and the house lights
came up, we asked an usher if the cartoon (and newsreel, etc.) would
be shown again, and we found out that those extras preceded the
feature, not followed it.

Does any kid today know what the following are:
curtains
ushers
theatre organs
newsreels
movie palaces

[Michael Black]

How young are the kids?

There was an infamous theater fire here in Montreal in 1927, where quite a
few children died, mostly because they couldn't get out. The next year,
after the Catholic church campaigned (they didn't like movies to begin
with apparently), a law was passed that meant nobody under 16 could see
a movie here.

That doesn't really affect me since I was born in 1959. But the first
movie I remember seeing was "Mary Poppins", in Denmark, in 1964 or 65. I
assume it was an English version, I can't remember. Once back in
Montreal, the movies I remember going to see were because someone at
school had a birthday and we went to a movie. I don't remember seeing a
movie with the family until 1968, "2001", though I may be misremembering.
The only movies I can remember seeing in a theatre date after that.

So I remember ushers, and curtains. But no newsreels or organ. They were
all movie palaces, indeed so many of them were neighborhood movie
theaters. I remember one movie, about 1970 so it might have been The
Aristocats, walking a few blocks to the neighborhood theatre and seeing a
bunch of different kids from school, just coincidence that we went to the
same showing that day during Christmas Holidays or whatever. The
neighbordhood theaters slowly disappeared, starting not much later than
1970, until most theaters were in central locations. In the late
seventies, those started to be subdivided, though they were so immense to
begin with that most theatres were still decnet sized. The downtown
"movie palaces" lasted past the introduction of "cineplexes", new theatres
coming in with multiple screens but often pretty small spaces. But then
about a decade ago, places like AMC came along and set up new multiplexes
and that's when the old movie theatres finally disappeared. Some were
supposed to be kept for historical reasons, but they just sat waiting for
something until they were in such bad shape that permission was given to
pull them down. Others were gutted for other reasons, the buildings still
there but no sign of movie palaces left.

Michael

[SJC]

Besides Warner Bros. and Walt Disney, these, UPA, Lantz, MGM, Famous and Terrytoons all also existed and were major competitors as well!

Let's also not forget as Leonard Maltin said in his often-updated breakthorugh book, "The Disney Films", first published by Crown in 1973, that Disney RETAINED [EXCLUSIVE-me] RIGHTS [caps are all mine] to his material.

[SJC]

That was certainly, especially for the theatrical features, a provable reason.

"As long as they're good enough for theatres---I'll still keep runnin' them in the theatres-they're timeless enough"-Walt Disney, as quoted by Leonard Maltin in all editions of his frequently updated and famous history "The Disney Films",first published in 1973 (Crown).