Cartoons started their emigration to television in the late 1940s when one of the smaller studios (Van Beuren) began marketing their catalogue to early children's programs such as Movies for Small Fry. Other, larger studios were slower to take advantage of the electronic medium. In 1948 the major studios were forced by the U.S. Supreme Court to divest themselves of their theaters--which greatly weakened their ability to distribute their product. In this weakened state, they also had to compete with television for viewers. Disney, however, was among the first of the major cartoon studios to develop a liaison with television networks. Its long-running programs, Disneyland (later known as, among other things, The Wonderful World of Disney) and The Mickey Mouse Club, included cartoons among live action shorts and other materials when they premiered in the mid-1950s. The other studios soon followed suit and, by 1960, most theatrical films and cartoons were also available to be shown on television.
Batman: The Animated Series
Concurrent with these critical and, for the film studios, disastrous changes in the entertainment industry were significant transformations in the aesthetics of animation. Up until the 1950s cartoonists, especially those with Disney, had labored under a naturalistic aesthetic--striving to make their drawings look as much like real world objects as was possible in this medium. The apotheosis of this was Disney's Snow White which traced the movements of dancer Marge Champion and transformed her into Snow White. But post-World War II art movements such as abstract expressionism rejected this naturalistic approach and these avant-garde principles eventually filtered down to the popular cartoon. In particular, United Productions of America (UPA), a studio which contained renegade animators who had left Disney during the 1941 strike, nurtured an aesthetic that emphasized abstract line, shape, and pattern over naturalistic figures. UPA's initial success came in 1949 with the Mr. Magoo series, but its later, Academy Award-winning Gerald McBoing Boing (1951) is what truly established this new style.
