Animation in The United States in The Television Era - Commercialization and Counterculture

Commercialization and Counterculture

Animation on television focused almost exclusively on children, and the tradition of getting up early to watch Saturday morning cartoons became a weekly ritual for millions of American kids. The networks were glad to oblige their demands by providing hours-long blocks of cartoon shows. Hanna-Barbera Productions became the leader in the production of TV cartoons for children. A number of other studios produced TV cartoons, such as Filmation (Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, The Archies) and DePatie-Freleng Enterprises (The Pink Panther), but Hanna-Barbera had developed a virtual lock on Saturday morning cartoons by the 1970s. Such critics of Hanna-Barbera's style of limited animation as Chuck Jones referred to it disparagingly as "illustrated radio," yet when one show was cancelled, the studio usually had another one ready to replace it because they were so cheap to produce.

From the 1960s through the 1980s, several successful prime-time animated TV specials aired. Because these one-shot cartoons were aired during prime-time hours (and thus had to appeal to adults as well as children), they had to obtain higher ratings than their Saturday and weekday counterparts. CBS in particular allowed a large number of animated TV specials to air on its network, and several of these continue to be repeated annually and sold on video and DVD. The Rankin-Bass studio produced a number of stop-motion specials geared towards popular holidays (including Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Frosty the Snowman, and Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town); while Bill Melendez's long-running series of Peanuts specials won numerous awards, spawned four feature films, and even launched a Saturday morning series. Other attempts to bring comic strip characters to TV did not have anywhere near as much success until one of the Peanuts directors, Phil Roman, brought the Jim Davis comic strip Garfield to TV starting in 1982, resulting in 11 specials and a long-running animated series.

This era also saw a number of independent animated short films that were rarely seen outside of "art house" movie theaters. As the Hollywood animation studios faded, a number of independent producers of animation continued to make experimental, artistic animated films that explored new artistic territory in the medium of animation. Short films such as The Critic, Bambi Meets Godzilla, Lupo the Butcher, and many others were almost unknown to mainstream audiences; however, these independent animated films continued to keep the yearly category of the Academy Award for Animated Short Film alive, as well as introducing a number of new names into the field of animation—names that would begin to bring change to the industry in the 1980s.