December 17, 2000|By Crispin Sartwell
WE ARE privileged to live in the second golden age of the cartoon. Such contemporary classics as "The Powerpuff Girls," "CatDog," "The Angry Beavers," and "SpongeBob SquarePants" tower over our society artistically and intellectually.
The first golden age was during the 1940s and 1950s, when the basic form of the animated short feature was defined. These cartoons were screened before movies and, later, cobbled together to make television shows. And though the Disney studios created the visually richest animation, Disney cuteness slid easily and often into insipidity.
The real soul of the cartoon was created at Warner Bros., where such free spirits as Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett and Friz Freleng gave birth to even freer spirits such as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Tweety, Yosemite Sam, Foghorn Leghorn, and Pepe Le Pew.
Bugs and Daffy were truly subversive icons: their talk was free-association, rapid-fire standup; they were animated in a style somewhere between Salvador Dali and Jackson Pollock; they devoted their lives to torturing authority figures such as Elmer Fudd and Porky Pig; they liked to dress in drag and imitate Mae West; they reveled in revolutionary violence. In short, they combined the approaches of Oscar Wilde, Sigmund Freud, Groucho Marx and Che Guevara.
Other studios, such as MGM, which hired the great Tex Avery away from Warner's, were on the same wavelength. Tom and Jerry speechlessly pursued their path of glorious destruction in a continual enactment of the victory of the undermouse over the uberkitty.
It is hard almost to see how they got away with it. Perhaps the 1950s was not quite the era of buttoned-down conventionality that it appeared to be in the television shows aimed at the unfortunate adults. But there's no doubt that Bugs had a profound social influence.
Many explanations have been offered for the various 1960s social movements that attacked the constituted authorities. But surely Looney Tunes should be in there somewhere. The entire sensibility of the Yippies, for example, is incomprehensible without Daffy Duck's anarchic activism. When Abbie Hoffman and friends nominated a hog named Pigasus for president, they were taking up the mantle of Chuck Jones.
Unfortunately, though, the 1960s was a period of decline for the cartoon itself, partly because the elaborate handmade animations of Disney and Warner had become prohibitively expensive. But there were still great shows, not least theWarner Bros.'s Road Runner/Wile E. Coyote chase marathons, featuring malfunctioning Acme products that delightedly ridiculed consumer capitalism with its complicated gadgets and planned obsolescence.
"Rocky and Bullwinkle" was drawn in an extremely primitive way, but Jay Ward's beat-poetic cartoon, with its Fractured Fairy Tales and Wayback Machine, was an intellectual feast for adults and a wonderfully questionable influence on impressionable young minds. Shows of a similar sensibility sprouted and receded: Clampett's "Beany and Cecil," "Underdog" and "Dudley Do-Right, " who battled the greatest of cartoon bad guys, Snidely Whiplash. (Many 1960s cartoons have been revived on Boom, a cable network devoted entirely to baby-boom cartoons.)
But there were bad signs too: "The Flintstones" and "The Jetsons" were simply bad sitcoms translated into the world of animation. Their use of the form was anything but creative.
Dark age - 1970 to 1985
The truly dark age of the cartoon, however, extended from around 1970 to 1985. The chaotic anti-authoritarianism of Daffy and the Yippies atrophied into a grim political correctness. "Sesame Street," though not a cartoon, was the model of the new children's programming: devoted above all to affirmative action and sledge-hammer didacticism.
Soon every children's program was conceived as a piece of moral or educational training rather than as an entertainment. Childhood became a pure training ground for adulthood, and there was to be not a moment's surcease from the improving messages.
Well, perhaps a moment's. "Scooby-Doo" was nominally devoted to the continual scientific refutation of the possibility of the supernatural, but it was really about a dog who talked funny and wolfed Scooby Snacks. Despite its current revival as camp, however, "Scooby-Doo" was idiotically written, indifferently drawn, and insufferably repetitive. In every show, a ghost was unmasked as a fake, and always in the same way. Meanwhile, "Josie and the Pussycats" followed the insipid hijinks of an all-girl rock band. He-Man and She-Ra battled evil with big arms and not a thought in their pretty heads.
A true ecstasy of emptiness assaulted the unsuspecting young'uns with shows such as "The Care Bears" and "The Smurfs," vehicles for the constant pounding-home of messages that no one could possibly disagree with, featuring characters that lived in tiny embattled utopias and who each represented a microscopic piece of empty moralizing (Good-Heart Bear, for instance, or Smurfette).
