The Musical Innertube - Volume 2, Episode 140 - Jerry Beck Introduces MeTV Toons

DON

On the show today, we have cartoon historian and wonderful guy Jerry Beck. He's been on the podcast a couple of times, talking cartoons, and he has a very special project that he's working on now. He is working with ME TV to build an entire channel devoted specifically to cartoons, and we're going to hear a little bit about that. But, more than that, we're going to hear a little more from Jerry about why cartoons still appeal to people after all these years -  and people like me and John, who are cartoon nuts. Jerry, welcome to the show.

JERRY

Thank you for having me.

JOHN

Good to have you back!

DON

Jerry, let's talk briefly about what ME TV wants to do. It's just going to be an entire channel with nothing but cartoons. And I saw from the announcement that they were going to put this channel together that mostly they're going to use some of the older cartoons. I know ME TV already has morning cartoons for kids, and most of those are old Popeye and old Betty Boop, and some of the really older cartoons. Are those cartoons going to be featured on that channel?

JERRY

Oh yeah, those cartoons that are there, are going to be featured, and it's going to be supplemented with maybe 100% more of all the other studios that, where ever. You know, ME TV, an important note, is that ME TV and this new channel Me TV Toons, is not aimed at kids. You said that they have their showings at 7:00 for the kids, right? It's that's not the intention. In fact, if you look at the commercials that they run on that show, for insurance or, you know, you know, all kinds of, you know, prescription drugs and things like that, the -  It's, I guess, I don't know if there's a name for it.  I call it a nostalgia channel. And uh, you know, obviously ME TV is extremely successful. In fact it's the- I say this as somebody who's just barely involved, but clearly everybody's heard of it now.  I actually go around when I talk to people and ask them if they even ever heard of the channel at all and and people go. “Yeah, yeah, that's the one with the cartoons.” Or, “That's the one with Svengoolie,” or something like that. And they all know about it. Right, right. And I'm really, really, really happy about that.  They the guy who runs the network, Neil Sabin, he's the head man. He's the guy behind that channel and several others that the company he works for, the company is Weigel Broadcasting out of Chicago. They have several channels on the air. They have a movies, they call it MOVIES, it’s a movies channel. They have  one called CATCHY COMEDY, that's all just comedy shows, that kind of thing. Sitcoms. And they have several others I'm forgetting. HEROES AND ICONS is one of them. And, but ME TV, it's mix of things is the most successful. And, Neil, Neil's a great guy, and he's a collector. He's a film collector.  I was the same way. I'm the same way afflicted with that problem way back when in the, you know, let's say the 70s, 80s, you know, where we didn't have yet the DVD, we didn't have cable channels, we didn't have 24 hour streaming, and all the things we have today. So you know, people like Neil and I, we would collect film, 16mm film and it was the one way that you could watch some of these old shows, and he got involved with the TV, and the TV networks, and Weigel Broadcasting, and local channels. And now we live in an era where a local channel can be picked up, you know, on your cable systems. And what they call digital sub channels. And so, they're really broadcast channels is what they are. They're not cable, they're not streaming. They're literally over the air antenna broadcast. But yes, some cable systems do pick up ME TV and those sort of channels. He really wanted the cartoons. And he spent a long time getting them. And he got, and he finally got them. I mean, it took years and they put them on a show where they put up a host like the kind of thing the audience for this channel might remember when they were kids. A hosted show with a puppet. And, long story short (that's my way of skipping over things I shouldn't talk about yet), the cartoon shows were doing very, very well for the channel. They turned out to be, you know, pretty highly rated. And wherever they put the cartoons - they started running them on Saturday mornings without the hosts, you know, a block of Bugs Bunny, a block of Woody Woodpecker and things like that, block of Popeye -and those did really, really, really, well, too. And, what Neil realized, was that the people that he's talking to, to get Perry Mason? Well, that comes from Viacom, you know, Paramount. CBS.  You know, to get Star Trek, he runs Star Trek, comes from the same place. Leave it to Beaver comes from Universal Pictures. I don't know, I think he runs Bewitched. He runs a lot of the Sony shows that are owned by Columbia Pictures, Sony Screen Gems and other, all the studios that happen to have old libraries of old TV shows. And he realized that well, wait a minute. They also have these cartoons that nobody's running. And then when he started running them, they were doing very well, and he's like, you know, I'm going to call up Universal and see if they have the old Woody Woodpeckers I remember from when I was a kid, and that's exactly what happened. He called them up, and he was able to make a deal to put the Woody Woodpecker cartoons on ME TV. And, the next thing you know, kind of like a snowball rolling down the hill, it's like, well, what does this studio got? What have these guys got? And how come nobody's seen these cartoons in years and years, and that's kind of the beginning of the idea of ME TV Toons. And, I mean, I was talking to him and, we're, you know, we're on the same page about this sort of thing. And I, you know, piped in with, well, you know, Universal also has the Casper cartoons. And, you know,  I remembered where a lot of those cartoons are kind of buried, literally. And the idea of the of a network started to take off. And right now, we've been spending a lot of time, we've been involved with it for a long time. I'm gonna see  over a year in the in the forming of it and the making of it. And right now we're racing to hit the, you know, the launch date of June 25th as the start of it. And to me it's going to be a work in progress for a while, because there's a lot of shows, and a lot of cartoons, and a lot of the ones you remember and - don't ask because I'm not going to reveal some of the secrets - because we're going to bring on newer and older, and I might say newer,  I mean new old, meaning older shows that haven't been on TV in 60 years, or 50 years, or 40 years, a lot of stuff that you. when I mention them in the future, you'll be like, “Oh, I forgot about that! Oh my God! I want to see that again!” You're going to have that feeling when you hear about it. The channel has also partnered with Warner Brothers to make it happen. So, we not only have the Warner cartoons that we've had, which also include the Tom and Jerry, MGM Tex Avery, and Popeye cartoons, but we're now getting everything that Warner Brothers has. What that means is all the Hanna-Barbera TV cartoons. Now, by the way, when I say all of these things, we do have some things that are post 1990, but most of the material I'm talking about is 1990 back and I mean - 1970 back really and or 80 ,you know, the good stuff, and it's insane. And I'll tell you another thing, I'll throw out another thing, things I think I can say - for example, Warner Brothers, in partnering, is all in on this. So much so, that they've gone back to their original camera negatives of all the Hanna-Barbera shows, and at the moment a giant restoration is happening. And, those shows will look like you've never seen them before. And I'm talking about all the nooks and crannies programs that they own the rights to. So, it's for me, it's unbelievable. It's exciting. This is a dream come true, that this channel can exist, and in the way it is going to be. People involved, like Neil and me, who know what the cartoons are. You know, it's not like they're just anonymously handed to programmers. That's the way it is at Boomerang, you know, I mean, I think Boomerang is an all automated thing, anyway, you know? It's it doesn't feel like you have human beings behind it. This one you will.

JOHN

That's such an interesting distinction, isn't it? I don't like watching television where no hand has set foot before, you know. I kind of like watching TV that has some kind of human presence there. And part of the fun, when I was a kid, of watching cartoons was sort of having fun with an adult vicariously watching the same thing, whether it was Sheriff John or whoever was, you know. But at any rate, Don knows what I'm talking about, too. That it's, you could tell the difference, as you were just saying, between a completely automated outfit, and an outfit where somebody could give you fresh reactions or real reactions.

JERRY

One of the things I'm doing that people will see is there's going to be interstitial material between cartoons at the end of the half hour and things like that. I'm working on a whole series called Cartoon College. And my good friend Bob Bergen, who is the voice of Porky Pig, he's a well known Hollywood voice actor, he's been engaged to be the voice of the network, to do the “coming up next,” that kind of thing, and he's also the narrator of these Cartoon College spots that we're doing, that'll go in deep dive and also have fun with the cartoons. You know what? I'm so in the midst of it, and I've done so many of them way, way over 100, that I'm still working on them. That it's hard for me to remember, you know, what I even did last week on writing them, but we're - like right now at this exact minute, I'm writing one about explaining some of the pun titles of the cartoons, you know, because a lot of people don't understand, you know. For example, there's - I'm trying to hit some very quickly here - but they don't even understand, like I'm looking at my little list here and there was a Tweety and Sylvester, it's actually Sylvester and a dog, called “Da Fighting Ones,” which was a parody of the movie “The Defiant Ones.” And there was similarly a Tweety and Sylvester called “Rebel Without Claws,” which of course - “Rebel Without A Cause.” And on and on, so we're going to explain that if that needs. It's one of hundreds of ideas for these things that we've done. We're going to go deep, dive into the directors and animators, we're going to - it's great, but it's going to be a lot of fun. It'll be a lot of clips. These are just the interstitials. The cartoons, like I say, especially the things we're digging up, I'm just so - I just can't believe it. That's, that's really my own personal - I can't believe I'm involved. I mean, you know, I've been, we've been talking about it, was pie in the sky and speculation for a while, and slowly and slowly and slowly it's become real. So, I'm kind of on pins and needles myself to see what happens once we launch, and how the reaction is in the real world. I feel this is the time has come for this sort of channel. I mean, yes, it existed. There was Cartoon Network, there was Boomerang. It's been there before. But I've always had a  dream of this, what we're doing here, which is to get the cartoons from all the different studios. Yeah, that isn't just one studios preference that the whole history of animation is reflected. In fact, we're gonna have silent animation, black and white cartoons, going to have everything. I mean, I'm forgetting all the things that are planned. And no one should watch it on day one, and the first week, or month and think, “OK, I've seen it, I don't feel like I need to see this anymore.” No one should think that, because we're going to be introducing new things, new ideas, new “older” shows that haven't been on, older cartoon libraries that we that that are taking us right now a while to get in. So,things are going to be debuting in that first six months and it's going to be, you know, just fantastic, that’s all I can say. Again, it's one of my bucket list dreams that I never thought could ever come true, would be to somehow be involved with a Cartoon Network the way I'd like to see it. And that's what this is. So it's really a culmination of a lot of things I've done, you know, in my life.

DON

Jerry, it reminds me a lot of two things in in the nostalgic slash curating thing. It reminds me of TCM a lot and what they're doing with old films.  And second of all, some of the interstitial things that you're talking about remind me of the things that you did with - for example,  my introduction to you was to buy the CD's for the Warner Brothers cartoons. When that big collection was released. And you were one of the people that were doing the commentaries.  And it sounds a lot like the commentaries that are with those CD's and also the small little vignettes that were packaged as part of the extras.

JERRY

Again, lots in progress, lots of stuff I can't talk about yet, but  I love that you made the reference to TCM. I was thinking of saying that, but I didn't wanna, I didn't want to say it, but the fact that you said it makes me very, very happy. Because, Neil said to me at one point, he wants this to be the TCM of animation. I'm, like, whatever you want, I'm here.  I will obey. I want to do, I want to see this. You know, I started my career in the 70s, literally started my career. I worked somewhere for a living that wasn't in the movie business in the very beginning of my career. But I worked with, I met Leonard Maltin back then, way back in the 70s, before he was famous or anything, and he was just writing books, The Great Movie Shorts and things like that.

DON

Before he had a beard?

JERRY

No, he had a beard.

Speaker 1

Oh, OK. He probably always had a beard.

JOHN

And we should mention that Leonard Maltin is well known, I think partly for his review books, I think largely for his review books, that are used by a lot of people to figure out whether they want to see the next movie on TCM.

JERRY

No, I worked on some of those books. He was actually teaching  a very modest animation history class. This was in the 70s, before that idea was the real thing that it is today. But back then it was nonexistent. And I went to that class. And right away, from the beginning, I'm like, well, you did a book on the movie shorts, you know, and you ever think of doing one on cartoons? And he really hadn't, even though he was teaching a class about it. And it took a few years, and I stuck with him. We became friends, became, like, instant friends and colleagues. And I started doing - there were no books, there's no Internet, there was no, you know, no Wikipedia, no web pages, no, there weren't even fanzines. There was one or two fanzines. But I wanted, I wanted what we did in a book. And I worked with Leonard as his research associate, a book called Of Mice And Magic, which came out in 1980. You know that that was that was like, considered now one of the first books on the history of American animation studios. There  were books on Disney. But there were no books about Fleisher, there were no books about, you know, UPA, or hardly anything written about Warner cartoons, MGM, all those, there were hardly any of that stuff. And one of the things I did as his research associate on the book was to compile the filmographies of all the studios. There was nowhere to see that. Today, you can go on Wikipedia and say, let me see the list of all the Looney Tunes. But back then, there was literally nowhere to go. And one thing, we I went to Warner Brothers, and, you know, we had good relationships with people back then, at the different studios and the studios didn’t even know, some of them didn't even know they owned any old cartoons. But you know, they, even Warners, you know, really didn't have a master list. I said OK, we got to make a list. We got to put the plots, synopses and who gets the director credit. And we just had to do it, me and Leonard, and then later with my friend Will Friedwald, we got together and we went more deep, deep dive on to that. That was the beginning of my crazy career, and my dream with this channel. I mean, I never really could have had this dream before, which is that I'd like all the films that we have listed in Of Mice And Magic, in the filmography, to somehow be on this channel. I don't know if we can - and when I say that, by the way, I'm not counting Disney. We haven't even approached Disney. We're not gonna approach Disney. We wouldn't approach, you know,  Disney will not, I'm sure, be involved with it. They have their own outlets.

DON

Yeah, they have their own plus.

JERRY

Yeah, you know what's sad, though, is they don't they don't have everything on there. They don't have, you know, I'm not even talking about features they don't have. On the shorts they have like a third, maybe, maybe a fourth of their library. It's kind of criminal in my opinion.

JOHN

We’ll return to the Musical Innertube in just a moment, but first, here’s a soothing musical interlude.

DON

Jerry Beck is the editor of two cartoon-based websites, Cartoon Research.com, and Animation Scoop.com.

JOHN

Among the many books Jerry has written are: The Animated Movie Guide; Looney Tunes And Merrie Melodies; and Not Just Cartoons, Nicktoons! - an overview of 31 cartoons that appeared on Nickelodeon.

DON

And he co-authored a book with film critic Leonard Maltin titled Of Mice And Magic - A History Of American Animated Cartoons

JOHN

You can email Jerry at jerrybeck18@gmail.com.

DON

And now, back to the Musical Innertube, already in progress!

JOHN

I have a question, Jerry, and it's a naive question, but I I'd love you to talk more about this. One thinks of cartoons - they lie around, you know, copies of them in this warehouse and that private collection and - how do you get your hands on some of these collections? I'm wondering how does one, how does one put one's hands on these cartoons?

JERRY

Well, you mean when you say, “how does one,” are you talking about this channel, or...?

JOHN

Yes, I mean, how do you, how do you go around fighting out where things are when all the people who have those things don't know where they are?

Speaker 2

Well, I've been doing this since the 1970s, and I had to find out. I wanted to know, I wanted to - I remember when I was in high school, and everybody else was a normal person, but I went home and watched cartoons. I'd come home and there'd be Casper, for 1/2 hour followed by Bugs Bunny. This is what got me into it. I'm going to answer your question, I promise. (JOHN: No problem.) And you'd start off with the Harveytoons logo and the Casper would come on. And then Bugs Bunny would come on and, kind of while I'm working on my homework, and I had this stuff on in the background, that's when I began to notice as a teenager that, hey, wait a minute, these Bugs Bunny cartoons are funny. These Warner cartoons are really, I feel like they're talking to me. I really felt like they were aimed not at the kids. So, initially, I immediately got some taste. Because I could tell the difference between, the, you know, the Casper type cartoon and the and the Warner Brothers cartoon, and clearly the Warners ones were a little better. Then I started to notice the director credits, the ones by Chuck Jones or Bob Clampett were, you know, a favorite to me, that I liked a lot more. Not to put anybody down, I've learned to appreciate them all now. And I wanted to know more. There was nowhere to go, so I made it my life, in my life, to know where these things are. Now you're saying, you know, how would you know? How would you? That's one reason we did the book. People didn’t know, I didn't know until we started really researching this, that the Paramount Cartoons, meaning the Casper cartoons, were actually released in theaters by Paramount Pictures. Now, who knew that? There's no Paramount logo on them, and it says Harveytoons. Well, you know, I did all the research. I figured out who. Where did these come from? How were they shown? Where were they shown and today, do they, these companies still own them or not? In the case of just to pick the Harveytoons, which I'm a fan of now, that was – Paramount kind of didn't care about their cartoons that much, and in the 1950s and 60s, when TV really emerged on the market, a lot of studios, you know, wanted to sell their cartoons directly to TV. But Paramount had some problems in that regard. They had been sued already, and they didn't want to get in trouble with their theater owners, and they didn't want the Paramount logo to show up on Saturday mornings. It was a big issue back then. Theater exhibition played a bigger part than TV sales back in those days. But they still wanted to make a couple of million dollars selling their old cartoons to TV, and they ended up - again, long story short - they ended up selling the cartoon, the actual film rights to the company that was doing the licensed comic books, and that was Harvey Comics. They were doing licensed comic books, and they talked them into a deal where Harvey bought the rights to these cartoons of the 1950s. And they made a deal with ABC immediately to put them on TV. And that's the story there. And so from that point on, they took the Paramount logos off and they, Harveytoons, begat. Now being the nut that I am, and throughout the years - and this is, like, take this story and magnify it at least tenfold – I’ve followed where these cartoons are, just because, for a variety of reasons, because part of what I've done in my life, just part, is I've done the DVD's, I've done programs in museums and festivals and repertory theaters, where I show old cartoons - so I kind of want to know where everything is so I can maybe get them and show them. I've also worked unbelievably, like fate, for companies -  I've worked for Nickelodeon, and when I worked for Nickelodeon, I had access to whatever they own the rights to at that time, which were Terry Toon cartoons and old Max Fleischer cartoons - I've worked for Disney, I've worked for Warner Brothers. So, wherever I've worked, I've been able to do a little more research while I was there. So, to cap this story, today - again, leaving out all the intricate trail - but today the Harveytoons are owned by Universal Pictures. They acquired them because at one point - again leaving out tons of detail - at one point, DreamWorks bought the rights to those cartoons, didn't do anything with them. But when Universal bought DreamWorks, that went along with them. And thus, you have a perfect example of when you talk to people at Universal, they don't know they own them. But they do. And we broke through that. We convinced them that we know that they own them, we showed them the chain of where things went, and they dug them out, and we're going to run them on ME TV Tunes. They're part of what we're going to be running.

JOHN

Can I just say that this is an amazing research story. As a career researcher myself, I just love stuff like this. I love the people who pioneer the trails, and it's so funny to think of you folks going in and telling this big corporation, “Yes, you do own these. We could prove it to you,” and they're on the other side of the desk going, “We don't own these.” “Yes, you do. No, you do own these. Look, you own this guy who was part of that guy” - like, you did the pioneering work, which is to me so interesting. I imagine there are a few other people who do this. but it just....

JERRY

I've been very out front about - on my  blog, on my website called Cartoon Research, I have a page somewhere, one can find Frequently Asked Questions. And so when I started it 20 years ago, 23 years ago, and I started my blog, I put on this FAQ page. And I made-up the question of, like, which studios own, you know, which cartoons? Then I did a list, which I update all the time, and it's just mainly the cartoons that are listed in Of Mice And Magic, the old studio, Hollywood studio cartoons. And I'm pretty good at it. I have to say, I'm pretty good at knowing, and if I don't know, what's great is, in this job I've had to, I've had to track down- I won't get into the intricacies of it - but when another library that we have on, on ME TV Toons is, of course, the Jay Ward Rocky and Bullwinkle Library. And guess what? No one that I know would know where they were, because they weren't where you might think they were. They travel around, I won't give it away actually right now, but they were at one time being controlled by Disney, there was another time where Universal had the rights - that was around the period when they did that Rocky and Bullwinkle movie, and then there was another period where DreamWorks owned the rights, around that time when they did a Peabody and Sherman movie. But that today it's owned by another company. That took me a while to track down. And what we did, and it's company nobody's ever heard of, I guarantee you, it's a small company. It's  weird, it's just the weirdest thing!  I'm fascinated now by the fact that there's actually a bunch of cartoons - going to leave names out because I have to - but there's a bunch of a series that are classic things we all grew up with - we this group here -  that that haven't been seen in 40 to 50 years and they're mainly owned by families. Jay Ward stuff is actually owned by the Ward estate. They just go to different studios to let them handle the business work, you know, of distributing it. But a lot of stuff is handled by families that seemingly, again based on some of my conversations with them, I mean I said is there a business in this? I don't see these cartoons on any TV in America. He goes well, yeah, this series is big in in England, and this one's big in South America.  And they make money licensing it to foreign countries, really. So ,it's about time they came home, I think.

DON

One of the things that struck me when we first started talking, was that you brought up the world nostalgia, and that's one of the reasons why a whole channel full of older cartoons would appeal to somebody. And it does. I mean, I bought all those DVD's with Warner Brothers cartoons on them and just ate them up. I just thought they were great. Whereas my granddaughter looked at him and goes, “Oh, yeah, what the heck?” But ,she's meanwhile watching Steven Universe and all the other stuff that came later. And those are gold to her. So, I guess it's whoever you grew up with that you're going to watch, and because you have such a wide range of cartoons to present, you are going to get adults to teenagers, to kids watching this channel.

JERRY

Well, one thing I have learned throughout the years, and especially more so recently, uh, I mean, I've always heard my whole life, they say animation is evergreen. That's why Disney was able to re-release his features every seven years back when we were kids, and we didn't think of them as old movies. You know, Bambi is from 1942. What 1942 movie is being reissued, you know, later and. you know, that kind of thing. When we go back to the camera negs, which the new, the most recent DVD's and Blu Rays, and the prints or the versions that we show on regular ME TV, are from a restored from the original negatives, they look brand new. You wouldn't know that they're old except by the references that might be in the film. In the TV cartoons, this is another weird shocker, they really looked like they were made yesterday by Nickelodeon, I mean they really look new. When you go back to the original master material, which is what's going on, and what people will see on this channel. In fact, ME TV runs, I think the Flintstones right now, and that's all from the master material. In our lifetime, maybe if we were watching it as I did in the 60s on prime time, you know it hasn't looked that good since those days. You know, we grew up in a period where the history of animation was presented to us on television, free, it was beamed into our brains, and we had everything, and we even had, like, watch the Mickey Mouse club, you had the Disney cartoons. And you had, you know, Woody Woodpecker, with Walter Lantz explaining how he makes cartoons. And all that stuff from the 40s, 30s, you know, and 50s were  available to us to be seen. My point is, is that, you know, it doesn't matter. Those films are beyond kids’ films. I don't personally believe they were ever made for kids, even Casper. They were shown in movie theaters. They were, all audiences, saw them. They were directed and written on high for the whole audience. And yes, kids love them. In particular, there was Saturday matinees, but grownups did too. Especially the Warner cartoons, the Avery cartoons, the Fleischer cartoons, a lot of the Disney cartoons, believe it or not. They, you know, all audiences really, really love them.  They were the equivalent of a comic strip in the daily newspaper. If you read it, you throw the paper away and you really never see it again. That's the way the cartoons were. They were considered like comic strips in the movies. And they were just there for that month or two or three at the time they came out. Up until about ‘46-7-8, they didn't even reissue the cartoons. They just made them new, all the time. And then then they got the idea to save some money and do re-releases. But, there was still no thinking of selling them to television. TV was the enemy back in the 40s and 50s. It was taking people away from coming to the movies, so there's no thought of selling these things to TV. And no thought of even showing them again. And that's why they have topical references. That's why it's the depression in the 1930s. That's why Bugs Bunny is in the army. That's why, you know, it was what was going on at that time, you know. And we got to see all that stuff on TV and grow up with it. and have it in our brains.

DON

And correct me if I'm wrong, but Warner Brothers was using those cartoons to sell some of their sheet music. Because, yeah, when I watched cartoons, when I was a kid, I knew the tune to “Shuffle off to Buffalo.” I knew, you know, all sorts of different songs that I would later encounter in a different context and go, “Wait a minute! I know that music! Where do I know that music from?”  It wound up being cartoons.

JERRY

Yeah, I know. I love that, actually. I so know them from the cartoons that when I see any of the old movies and they're playing some song I know from a cartoon I kind of get ohh, I just go nuts. I love that. Yeah, that was the original thing behind the Looney Tunes and Merry Melodies. Warners and most studios, even MGM, most of these studios reluctantly were dragged into the world of doing cartoons. Disney's cartoons were so popular in the early 30s that theaters demanded them. When you went to, you know, this, when they went to the movies, when went to movies back in the 30s and 40s and into the 50s, people saw the movie, they might see a double bill they might have a program of shorts that would include things like comedy shorts, like the Three Stooges or Laurel and Hardy. It might include travelogues, newsreels, serial chapters, on and on and on. It was a big, crazy program. There are reasons for why that was, but I won't go into that now. And the thing is, the cartoon was the staple. It was the absolute thing that audiences demanded. They got upset if a cartoon wasn't on the program. And you gotta remember that, except for some of the big downtown theaters that might play a movie for a week, and maybe hold it over second week - that was a big deal, if a movie was so popular that it was held over. Most theaters, neighborhood theaters, changed their bill two or three times a week. So, they had this giant collection of films and shorts and stuff twice or three times a week. So, people went to the movies all the time to see the news, the newsreels and all that. So, to keep up with the demand of theatres in the 30s and 40s that might need three cartoons in a week, every studio had to get involved. Every studio had to have a program of animation one way or another, and that's why we have so many of them, why all the studios did - that's why some of them don't care later on, cause it's that's old news. We did that. That's over!

DON

Again, like the like, the newspapers just throw them away.

Speaker 2

Right. Yeah. And I'm amazed they kept them. But I I've researched it, because, like, the more I think about it, it's like, why did they even hold on to them? They held on to them because they were assets of the company. And if something were to happen, which eventually did on many occasions, they could sell them. They knew they could sell them if it came to it. Like, you know, it's one thing to own the copyright to this, but if you don't have the physical asset, you know, of the of the thing your company is worth less. So they have to keep the negative, you know, that that kind of thing. The other thing I say about the ephemeral part of it and a question that I ponder is, we get a lot of our armchair animation critics these days, they're like, “I don't like the Pepe Le Pews. They're all the same.” Or, you know, “I can't watch those Caspers. It's the same story over and over.” You know what, it was? Why did they do that? They did it because these were ephemeral. Because once you saw one of them, the first time they did it and it got a great reaction. Two years went by, and, “Hey, let's make another one of those!” They didn't think to reissue it. They go, “Let's just make another one!”  What gets me is, that's how you can really tell the geniuses. The Tex Averys, the Chuck Jones, because - Hanna and Barbera with Tom and Jerry. Someone could say to you, hey, I've seen a Tom and Jerry, I've seen them all. And you know, kind of, you have, but they actually are different, in each cartoon, and similarly with the Road Runner from Chuck Jones....

JOHN

I was just going to say the Road Runner is the same thing every single time.

JERRY

Right! It is, except it isn't.

JOHN

But the brilliance is the variations on the theme, and that that's where you see someone like Chuck Jones is able to, yeah, really think up stuff that you hadn't seen anywhere else.

JERRY

Part of that was, that's come out in interviews with them in later years, part of it was that was their choice. There was some studios - I won't name them, we'll probably have them on our channel - but there's some studios that were a little bit, you know, the budgets were lower, and, you know, let's just do that again, you know and they would remake a cartoon or this or that. The people at Warners, and Tex Avery, and Hanna-Barbera in particular, and Disney in general, and others, they didn't want to do the same thing again. If they're gonna use the same character or same premise, they did it in a different way, they did it for themselves, they did it for, they imagined they were the audience, and somehow imagine that the audience would remember the last one. So they would redo it. You know,  in a different way and that only makes those cartoons better, and, and those guys really were geniuses, really.

DON

Yeah, definitely. Well, Jerry, thanks for being with us today. Could you give a plug, a couple of times, not just to this new cartoon channel, but also to the stuff you're working on? You mentioned Cartoon Research, your blog, what other things could people check in with online to follow cartoons and follow what you guys who are chasing cartoons are doing.

JERRY

Well, I mean, you know, one of the other things I do, I can't invite people to is the, I teach at Cal Arts and several schools in the Southern California area. But, the main thing is my Cartoon Research blog. Every day we try to post something new about the history of animation. And of course, if there's something, big news like, there's a new channel, you know, we'll break in and talk about that. But, mainly I've got the Cartoon Research Facebook group, you know, being the old man that I am, Facebook's good enough for me. I don't need to Tik Tok this sort of thing. But, those are the main places where people can check in. I would highly recommend that, you know. I'm always available. Just look me up online and you'll find me.

DON

All right. And the ME TV Toons channel premieres when?

JERRY

June 25th. And I don't know where you can all find it, except that most of the big cities and most places in general, if you've got  ME TV, you're most likely - it's going to be playing in your area, it's going to be on one of the channels in your area. Oh, and let me say this - very important! - if for some unknown reason you look into where is this ME TV Toons Channel playing, and you find out it's not playing in your area, right now, immediately contact any of the local broadcast channels that do the subchannel thing, that they that play ME TV or even if they don't play ME TV, it's available to them if they seek it out. So, we need people to do that because we want to be everywhere. And so, and we can't be everywhere. So, we need you to like, be our local agent to see if it's if it's going to be on or not and help us out there.

DON

OK, so that's homework for all you guys! And you can do your homework while you're watching cartoons, the way Jerry used to back in the day. Jerry Beck, thanks very much for being on with us today.

JOHN

Terrific. Yeah.

JERRY

You're welcome. Thanks, both you guys.