Old Cartoons

As a grade schooler, 1957-1963 or thereabouts, my early mornings started with cartoons on days without pressure to dress for school.  Looney Tunes stood out.  Everyone knew Bugs Bunny and his associates, who eventually found their way to a US Postal Service series of stamps and swag.  My home TV for that entire era only delivered black and white, so the color Looney Tunes had to wait for matinée shorts at the movies or occasional reels run in school.  They weren't my favorites.  I took more of a liking to Flip the Frog and Farmer Gray aka Farmer Alfalfa.  To the best of my knowledge, those were never colorized.  Later, I would turn on Crusader Rabbit at 7AM every Saturday morning.  Farmer Gray had no audio dialogue, though occasional subtitles.  Flip the Frog spanned the entry to talkies but the skits remained mostly silent.  Music accompanied each, often the finest classics ever composed, though unknown to me as a grade schooler.

Democratization of cyberspace and YouTube enterprises have reconnected me to my old favorites.  When I watched them as a child I did not know when they had first been produced.  It turns out that Farmer Gray and Flip came to the cinemas in the pre TV era, early 1930s.  They each ran about seven minutes, making them suitable for a movie theater prelude to a main matinée.  On TV, they stood alone.  At the time I watched them, they were already about 30 years old, though my parents may have seen some in the original.  They seemed remote, already part of an obsolete screen history at the time I sought them out on television.  For perspective, my daughter watched She-Ra Princess of Power and my son the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.  Each series is older now than Flip and Farmer Gray were when I watched them, but neither registers as obsolete.  Neither do Looney Tunes of a slightly later time than Flip or Farmer Alfalfa.

Absence of dialogue posed a challenge for the cartoonists.  They had to make the pictures memorable.  Looking now, I find the plots and diversions witty.  Heads lopped off but easily replaced.  Emotions between a loving feline couple conveyed without words.  Modern cartoonists have become too dependent on accompanying audio to tell the story.

By the time of Crusader Rabbit, also initially in black and white, the stories became serialized.  Each episode lasted about five minutes, just right for selling sugared cereal to youngsters of my age, followed by another five-minute clip that resumed the story.  The cartoons stopped being stand-alone.  Their creators eventually moved on to Rocky and His Friends.  The Rocky/Bullwinkle tales also had brief cartoon installments of a longer story.  The Fractured Fairy Tales, Aesop, and Mr. Peabody took a standalone format.

As I reconnect to Flip and Farmer Gray, there seems to be something timeless, though both series lasted only a few years each.  They remain entertaining today.  They also leave me with admiration for the wit needed to produce them in the absence of words.