Jerry Beck became a cartoon expert the hard way – before the Internet existed, before there was such a thing as home video, and before studios really even cared about their large archives of ‘toons. In 1981, Beck co-wrote the very first reference book on Warner Brothers’ cartoons – a list of titles had never even been compiled before – which meant he had get his information mostly from trade publications from the 1930s and ‘40s. Nowadays, cartoon history is well recorded, thanks in no small part to Beck’s efforts. His latest book is Animation Art, covering the history of cartooning from its earliest days to the current digital triumphs of Pixar. We asked Jerry about the past, present, and future of the animation business.
How did you get interested in researching cartoon history?
I always kept my eyes on cartoons, but I didn’t take them seriously at all until I was in high school. I’d come home from school and Bugs Bunny would be on the moment I got in the door. I’d have them on in the background while I got something to eat – and these were funny! I noticed they were funny when I was 15 or 16, and I suddenly began to enjoy these cartoons more than I ever had. This was before the Internet and there were not even books about these things. I started to be more aware that I wanted more information on these cartoons: “Gee what was the name of that cartoon I saw yesterday?” But there was no information, so that’s what started me on being curious about them and researching them myself.
How did you go about it if there were no reference materials?
At one point I just started writing down the titles off the TV screen. There was one cartoon in particular that I just missed the title and I go, “I’m gonna find the name of that cartoon if it kills me, one way or another.” I had been inspired by Leonard Maltin, who had a book at that time called The Great Movie Shorts, which was all about The Three Stooges, The Little Rascals, and Laurel and Hardy – all those kinds of short subjects that were shown on television. In this book, he told you about the shorts and he also had a listing of all the different episodes – this had never been done before. He had the title, a plot synopsis, and who was in it, and I thought, “We need this for cartoons.” I ended up meeting him; he taught at a night school back then before he was on television, and he was teaching a class about the history of animation. It was an expensive, college-level course, and I enrolled in it just to meet the guy and to talk to him. We ended up becoming very good friends, and we started talking about the idea of doing a book like The Great Movie Shorts on cartoons. That book ultimately happened; I was his research associate on it, and it was called Of Mice and Magic – it came out in 1980.
But how did we do the research? Luckily, in L.A. and New York there are great entertainment libraries. In New York there’s the Donnell Library Center at Lincoln Center and in L.A. it’s the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Library. I asked Leonard how he researched the Three Stooges shorts, and he said one way is to go through these old Box Office and Motion Picture Exhibitor magazines from the 1930s that would list release charts in the back, and they’d have reviews of things. So I started a campaign of going every day to this library and I’d write down every studio: Terry Toons, Warner Brothers Cartoons, Fleischer Cartoons. From 1929, the beginning of sound, I started to document just by title what each cartoon was – and this is before video. In the late ‘70s, my friends and I started to collect 16mm film because at that time that was the only way [t
– and that was underground. It was like today with illegal downloading; technically, you couldn’t buy films. You could rent them if you were a college or a theater, but a person couldn’t buy them…but there were ways. I still have my film collection, which has tons of cartoons. I literally know where evernbsp;from the old days is because of film collectors.
Didn’t studios keep track of this kind of information themselves?
The only studio that really had any kind of sense of its history is Disney, and they still do. Disney was always reliant on its catalog. Warner Brothers was ultimately delighted for me to do a book like this because the publisher was going to pay me, so this was a way to get this wonderful work done without them having to spend a cent on it. They gave me complete access to everything they had, but they didn’t have anything. They had their films, but I had the map – the road map is the titles. They knew they had these films in their library but there was no real documentation. Forget about the other studios. MGM may have had some lists. Columbia was a complete mess, and Universal. None of these places really had any public documentation, and their inside documentation wasn’t even helpful.
Did you come across any "lost 'toons" that surprised you?
My favorite thing at Warner Brothers was The Bugs Bunny Show, which we’ve just in the last two years have made progress on. The Bugs Bunny Show, which was made in 1960 on ABC, featured three or four minutes of brand-new animation by Chuck Jones, Friz Freling, and Robert McKimson with Mel Blanc doing the voices, where the characters would host old cartoons. That show was never syndicated, never telecast in color even though it was shot in color. A lot of people think they have seen it because they’ve seen cut-down versions of it on Saturday mornings years later. And the thing is, they cut up the original negatives to the original show to make those Saturday morning versions. To me, that was the most endangered piece of Warner Brothers history. They had actually chopped up this Bugs Bunny Show; it was never syndicated so there aren’t all these 16mm TV prints around – there never were any because it went right from ABC prime time to ABC Saturday morning, then it went to NBC and CBS. So it never left network.
I have been trying for years to convince them to see if there’s a way to find the negatives, put them back together, colorize the black and white parts, whatever – let’s reconstruct the show the way it was. That’s gone nowhere. But luckily I’ve been involved with the Looney Tunes Golden Collection DVDs that have come out in the last two years and I insisted on the first one, as bonus material, to reconstruct one of the Bugs Bunny shows. It happened at the last second. They pulled the materials out, but they had black and white on certain parts of it, and color on other parts. So we put it together – it’s a Frankenstein, but boy did we get a lot of feedback on the Internet: “Thank you for doing that.” “Oh my god, where have these been?” So we did another one on the second volume, and we’ll probably do one on each one of these things. At least we’re doing it, even in its Frankenstein state. I hope to someday make sure they’re colorized, reconstitute it. I’ve always wondered why the Cartoon Network hasn’t run them as The Bugs Bunny Show; they’re so wonderfully put together.
