Yeah... I knew that DC's original name was National Comics, but I wasn't sure when the name change happened. Sorry, I'll fix that error now.
Mixed Nutz: The Timeline Where MGM and Warner Bros. Are the Main Rivals of the American Animation Industry
- Thread starter ArcticAurora2002
- Start date
I've already planned for Warner Bros. to acquire DC in the late 60s/early 70s just like OTL, albeit under slightly different circumstances.
It'd be a pretty major success during its premiere in 1945, though critically it'd retroactively be regarded more as a relic of its time (the World War II plotline does admittedly end up causing the film to become somewhat dated in the decades following the war's end).
Yeah, Disney's renewed success in the 50s isn't going to last. Come the mid-to-late 60s, the studio will quite literally split itself apart (though at least it won't get bought out like in King Krazy's timeline).
Well, they'll get Harvey Comics at least. King Features, I don't know, but given how associated Paramount/Famous Studios and Popeye are (and will continue to be ITTL), I won't rule out the possibility.
The Bongo segment from OTL's Fun and Fancy Free, followed by the Wind in the Willows segment from OTL's The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad.
Nice. Would John Carter of Mars be a hit?
Nice to see the 2 studios get along well.
That's great that Disney makes a comeback, but I think Disney needs to get into the superhero game pretty quickly.
Could we have Disney and RKO merge?
Cool.
Right.
Which circumstances?
Ah.
Oh Lord.........
Cool.
1950s (Warner Bros.): Now, Let's Get This Picture Started, Shall We?
Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies has gone through a variety of mascots throughout the 1930s before finally settling on Bugs Bunny. First there was Bosko (his creators, Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising, took the copyright to the character with them when they left Warner Bros. for MGM), then Foxy (so much of a blatant copy of Mickey Mouse that Walt Disney himself threatened to sue), then Buddy (just plain bland), then Beans (meant as part of a pair with Porky Pig - the latter proved to be more popular), then Porky (worked better as a sidekick/straight man to characters more outrageous than himself). Yet while the rest were gracious enough to back out of the limelight when their time was up, one in particular was stubborn enough to keep trying to take back the mascot position - perhaps in part because Bugs seized his spotlight before he had a proper chance to bask in it.
That character, of course, was Daffy Duck.
Introduced in the 1937 short Porky's Duck Hunt (directed by Tex Avery), Daffy in his introduction was exactly as his name suggested - a screwball trickster of a duck who tormented his adversaries at every turn. However, his greedy, spotlight-hungry side would come to the forefront in the 1940 live-action/animation hybrid short You Ought to Be in Pictures (directed by Friz Freleng, and somewhat based on a real-life experience where he briefly left Warner Bros. to work for MGM), where Daffy manipulates then-mascot Porky Pig into quitting Warner Bros. so that he can take his place as the head honcho of the Looney Tunes. Of course, the short ends with Porky realizing he's been had, returning to reclaim his position, and giving Daffy his comeuppance in the form of a beatdown, but even if Daffy had succeeded, it would've been for naught - later that year, A Wild Hare would premiere, and not long afterward Bugs would displace both Porky and Daffy as the face of the Looney Tunes brand.
Needless to say, it didn't take long for Daffy to switch his sights from Porky to Bugs... except that isn't quite the case. In fact, for the entirety of the 1940s, Bugs and Daffy appeared in the same cartoon a grand total of two times, both in 1943: Porky Pig's Feat (in which Porky and Daffy are prevented from leaving a hotel after the latter gambles away the money meant for their hotel bill; they try calling Bugs for assistance as a last-ditch effort, only to find that he's trapped there with them) and A Corny Concerto (a Fantasia parody with two segments, the first featuring Bugs and the second featuring Daffy; neither of them interact with each other or are even on screen at the same time). Of course, Daffy would have plenty of appearances opposite Porky Pig and Elmer Fudd during this time; his more established maliciousness in comparison to Bugs made it easier for him to serve as an antagonist to either of them while Bugs was edged closer to the heroic side throughout the 1940s. Not to mention he had a good deal of solo appearances without any previously established Looney Tunes characters.
Then, in the 1951 short Rabbit Fire (directed by Chuck Jones), Daffy would finally make his move to directly upstage Bugs, in a scenario very familiar to both characters: getting hunted by (and subsequently outwitting) Elmer Fudd. But while outwitting the likes of Porky and Elmer (more so the latter - Porky tended to have the last laugh in cartoons where he's the victim of Daffy's antics) is easy enough for Daffy, Bugs is a whole other beast entirely - any attempt Daffy makes to get Bugs shot by Elmer, Bugs is able to turn right around so that Daffy is the one blasted instead. This would end up coloring both of the characters' personalities and the interactions between the two of them in Jones' later work - Bugs as the suave, carefree one who always gets the better of his foes (after they sufficiently provoke him into actually getting involved, of course), and Daffy as the selfish, egotistical one who can't seem to have anything go his way no matter how hard he tries (as Jones himself would later summarize, "Bugs Bunny is who we want to be, Daffy Duck is who we are.").
Unsurprisingly, Daffy's luck wasn't much (if any) better in the shorts directed by Jones that didn't have him paired with Bugs, even the ones that had him in a "protagonist" role. Often, these would have Daffy in some sort of "heroic" role only for him to be hilariously incompetent at it - sometimes, Porky Pig would also appear in these as his more competent sidekick. A perfect example of this is the 1953 short Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2th Century, (a spoof of the Buck Rogers comic strip and similar sci-fi stories) which featured Daffy as the titular space hero (and Porky as his "eager, young space cadet") battling it out with a diminutive Martian commander (who'd previously appeared as one of Bugs Bunny's antagonists - later works featuring the character would give him the name Marvin the Martian) over the right to claim Planet X - home of "Illudium Phosdex", the shaving cream atom. Their conflict escalates (with Daffy almost always on the losing end) until Planet X itself is destroyed in the crossfire - after which Daffy claims what's left of it "in the name of the Earth!" (Porky: "Eh, bi-bi-bi-bi-big deal."). Another 1953 short starring Daffy, Duck Amuck, took a more experimental approach - in it, Daffy is toyed with by an unseen (until the end) animator, who messes with the backgrounds, the sound effects, Daffy's appearance, Daffy's voice... basically any and every aspect of the cartoon itself (according to Jones, it was an experiment to see if Daffy would remain Daffy if every single aspect of him was changed beyond recognition). Both of these cartoons received much critical acclaim and are generally regarded as among the absolute best of the hundreds of Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies produced in the heyday of Termite Terrace, with the latter even managing to claim the 26th Academy Award for Best Animated Short Subject, ending another winning streak by MGM's Tom and Jerry (who'd won the 24th and 25th awards for the cartoons The Two Mouseketeers and Johann Mouse, respectively).
Emboldened by the win, it was decided that Daffy would be the star of Warner Bros. first ever animated feature film - an adaptation of Don Quixote, with Daffy in the role of the Don himself and Porky in the role of Sancho Panza (and unsurprisingly, with Chuck Jones in the director position). The resulting movie, Daffy Quixote, would release on New Year's Eve in 1955 to much commercial success - Jones would later remark how ironic it was that, despite having written Daffy as the loser to Bugs' winner, Daffy would be the first of the two to receive both an Academy Award and a feature film (Bugs would finally get his Academy Award winning short in 1958, the short being Friz Freleng's Knighty Knight Bugs - and by that point, Termite Terrace had far more to worry about than Academy Award wins). That said, even Daffy's feature film debut would be upstaged to a degree, as the short that preceded it (also directed by Jones) would end up beating it in both popularity and critical reception - a tale about a singing frog and a man's fruitless efforts to profit off of him, titled One Froggy Evening.
Not everyone was fond of Chuck Jones' re-interpretation of Daffy Duck, however. Among those was fellow Warner Bros. animation director Robert "Bob" McKimson, best known for his creation of Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies series regular Foghorn Leghorn, a loudmouthed prankster of a rooster with a Southern accent (first introduced in the Academy Award-nominated short Walky Talky Hawky in 1946). By his own admission, McKimson preferred the earlier screwball trickster interpretations of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, and thus he did his best to maintain elements of those earlier personalities in the shorts he directed featuring those characters.
Incidentally, another Looney Tunes character that McKimson himself had then recently created was also going through some modifications around this time - Speedy Gonzales (introduced in the 1953 short Cat-tails for Two), a Mexican mouse with speed rivalling that of the Roadrunner, was being reworked by Friz Freleng to serve as another opponent for Sylvester (likely because Tweety had fallen a bit too far into passiveness regarding their rivalry by this point, relying more on outside forces to thwart Sylvester) - while Speedy's personality didn't change all that much, his design was given a complete overhaul to remove the more overtly stereotypical elements. The 1955 cartoon that debuted the new version of Speedy Gonzales (named after the title character) would go on to win the 28th Academy Award for Best Animated Short Subject, ensuring the "fastest mouse in all of Mexico" a spot among the Looney Tunes' cast of recurring stars. Another Freleng-directed cartoon featuring Sylvester, the 1957 short Birds Anonymous, would claim the 30th Academy Award - in it, Sylvester tries to give up chasing Tweety, and as one would expect the prospect is easier said than done. While it's still regarded as a good short in its own right, many animation fans and critics would consider Chuck Jones' 1957 cartoon What's Opera, Doc? (a Wagnerian opera take on the classic "Elmer Fudd hunting Bugs Bunny" formula) to be the more deserving recipient of that award.
Despite all the acclaim that Warner Bros.' cartoons were getting, there was an omnipresent threat to their continued existence (as well as the existence of other theatrical short films in America) ever since the postwar era - the increasing presence of television in American homes. After all, why go all the way to a movie theater and purchase a movie ticket just to watch a Bugs Bunny cartoon when you could watch that same cartoon on TV for free? Warner Bros. studio chief executive Jack Warner (who'd recently tricked his brothers into leaving him in full control of the film studio) must've certainly thought so... which probably explains why he thought it'd be a good idea to sell off all of Warner Bros.' cartoons made prior to 1948 (along with their pre-1950s feature films not long afterward) in 1956 to Associated Artists Productions for broadcast on television, getting $3000 per cartoon sold (plus $21 million for the pre-1950s film bundle) but inadvertently cheating himself and the studio out of the millions those films would make in broadcast revenue on television - by the time he'd realized this, it was too late, as a smaller film studio by the name of United Artists merged with AAP and claimed the rights to the films he'd sold off. The chain of events resulting from this short-sighted decision (and it was far from the only one Jack made - he was just barely talked out of going all-in on the short-lived 3D movie craze, which would've resulted in Warner Bros.' animation studio temporarily shutting down) would eventually lead into the most tumultuous conflict in the rivalry between Warner Bros. and MGM...
Speaking of MGM, they were also well aware of the threat that television posed to the continued production of theatrical animation, and the film studio's executives were considering closing down their animation division in order to save money. But Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, who'd recently been promoted to heads of the animation division while all of this was happening, had a plan to save the studio. After all, if people are watching theatrical cartoons on TV... why not make cartoons for TV?
--------------------------------------------------------
I'm trying something a bit different with the 1950s entries. Rather than covering them in chunks of 3-4 years, I'm going to dedicate each entry to all of the notable events related to a specific studio/company/medium that happened within that decade.
I wasn't quite sure about the release date of Warner Bros.' animated feature film debut at first, but then I figured that, since the film stars Daffy Duck (and more specifically, the Chuck Jones interpretation of Daffy Duck), it'd be kind of fitting if it released on the same day as (and subsequently got overshadowed by) one of the most well-regarded short films in Looney Tunes history. Credit to @TheFaultsofAlts for coming up with the idea of Warner Bros. doing an animated feature adaptation of Don Quixote with Daffy Duck as the lead and to @TheBeanieBaron for coming up with the movie's name!
And yes, I am aware that Bugs did technically appear in Daffy's Oscar-winning short ITTL (IOTL, Duck Amuck didn't even make it past the nomination phase, and the Oscar went to Disney's Toot, Whistle, Plunk, and Boom) - but he wasn't the starring role in that short, Daffy was.
Speaking of Oscars, if I had a nickel for every time Friz Freleng paired Sylvester up with a retooled version of a Looney Tunes character that another director created, and the debut short for that pairing ended up winning an Oscar, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice, right?
And yes, the temporary closure of Termite Terrace in 1953 has been butterflied!
Up next, we get to see if Hanna and Barbera's gamble pays off. However, they're not the only animation studio with their eyes on the small screen...
That character, of course, was Daffy Duck.
Introduced in the 1937 short Porky's Duck Hunt (directed by Tex Avery), Daffy in his introduction was exactly as his name suggested - a screwball trickster of a duck who tormented his adversaries at every turn. However, his greedy, spotlight-hungry side would come to the forefront in the 1940 live-action/animation hybrid short You Ought to Be in Pictures (directed by Friz Freleng, and somewhat based on a real-life experience where he briefly left Warner Bros. to work for MGM), where Daffy manipulates then-mascot Porky Pig into quitting Warner Bros. so that he can take his place as the head honcho of the Looney Tunes. Of course, the short ends with Porky realizing he's been had, returning to reclaim his position, and giving Daffy his comeuppance in the form of a beatdown, but even if Daffy had succeeded, it would've been for naught - later that year, A Wild Hare would premiere, and not long afterward Bugs would displace both Porky and Daffy as the face of the Looney Tunes brand.
Needless to say, it didn't take long for Daffy to switch his sights from Porky to Bugs... except that isn't quite the case. In fact, for the entirety of the 1940s, Bugs and Daffy appeared in the same cartoon a grand total of two times, both in 1943: Porky Pig's Feat (in which Porky and Daffy are prevented from leaving a hotel after the latter gambles away the money meant for their hotel bill; they try calling Bugs for assistance as a last-ditch effort, only to find that he's trapped there with them) and A Corny Concerto (a Fantasia parody with two segments, the first featuring Bugs and the second featuring Daffy; neither of them interact with each other or are even on screen at the same time). Of course, Daffy would have plenty of appearances opposite Porky Pig and Elmer Fudd during this time; his more established maliciousness in comparison to Bugs made it easier for him to serve as an antagonist to either of them while Bugs was edged closer to the heroic side throughout the 1940s. Not to mention he had a good deal of solo appearances without any previously established Looney Tunes characters.
Then, in the 1951 short Rabbit Fire (directed by Chuck Jones), Daffy would finally make his move to directly upstage Bugs, in a scenario very familiar to both characters: getting hunted by (and subsequently outwitting) Elmer Fudd. But while outwitting the likes of Porky and Elmer (more so the latter - Porky tended to have the last laugh in cartoons where he's the victim of Daffy's antics) is easy enough for Daffy, Bugs is a whole other beast entirely - any attempt Daffy makes to get Bugs shot by Elmer, Bugs is able to turn right around so that Daffy is the one blasted instead. This would end up coloring both of the characters' personalities and the interactions between the two of them in Jones' later work - Bugs as the suave, carefree one who always gets the better of his foes (after they sufficiently provoke him into actually getting involved, of course), and Daffy as the selfish, egotistical one who can't seem to have anything go his way no matter how hard he tries (as Jones himself would later summarize, "Bugs Bunny is who we want to be, Daffy Duck is who we are.").
Unsurprisingly, Daffy's luck wasn't much (if any) better in the shorts directed by Jones that didn't have him paired with Bugs, even the ones that had him in a "protagonist" role. Often, these would have Daffy in some sort of "heroic" role only for him to be hilariously incompetent at it - sometimes, Porky Pig would also appear in these as his more competent sidekick. A perfect example of this is the 1953 short Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2th Century, (a spoof of the Buck Rogers comic strip and similar sci-fi stories) which featured Daffy as the titular space hero (and Porky as his "eager, young space cadet") battling it out with a diminutive Martian commander (who'd previously appeared as one of Bugs Bunny's antagonists - later works featuring the character would give him the name Marvin the Martian) over the right to claim Planet X - home of "Illudium Phosdex", the shaving cream atom. Their conflict escalates (with Daffy almost always on the losing end) until Planet X itself is destroyed in the crossfire - after which Daffy claims what's left of it "in the name of the Earth!" (Porky: "Eh, bi-bi-bi-bi-big deal."). Another 1953 short starring Daffy, Duck Amuck, took a more experimental approach - in it, Daffy is toyed with by an unseen (until the end) animator, who messes with the backgrounds, the sound effects, Daffy's appearance, Daffy's voice... basically any and every aspect of the cartoon itself (according to Jones, it was an experiment to see if Daffy would remain Daffy if every single aspect of him was changed beyond recognition). Both of these cartoons received much critical acclaim and are generally regarded as among the absolute best of the hundreds of Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies produced in the heyday of Termite Terrace, with the latter even managing to claim the 26th Academy Award for Best Animated Short Subject, ending another winning streak by MGM's Tom and Jerry (who'd won the 24th and 25th awards for the cartoons The Two Mouseketeers and Johann Mouse, respectively).
Emboldened by the win, it was decided that Daffy would be the star of Warner Bros. first ever animated feature film - an adaptation of Don Quixote, with Daffy in the role of the Don himself and Porky in the role of Sancho Panza (and unsurprisingly, with Chuck Jones in the director position). The resulting movie, Daffy Quixote, would release on New Year's Eve in 1955 to much commercial success - Jones would later remark how ironic it was that, despite having written Daffy as the loser to Bugs' winner, Daffy would be the first of the two to receive both an Academy Award and a feature film (Bugs would finally get his Academy Award winning short in 1958, the short being Friz Freleng's Knighty Knight Bugs - and by that point, Termite Terrace had far more to worry about than Academy Award wins). That said, even Daffy's feature film debut would be upstaged to a degree, as the short that preceded it (also directed by Jones) would end up beating it in both popularity and critical reception - a tale about a singing frog and a man's fruitless efforts to profit off of him, titled One Froggy Evening.
Not everyone was fond of Chuck Jones' re-interpretation of Daffy Duck, however. Among those was fellow Warner Bros. animation director Robert "Bob" McKimson, best known for his creation of Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies series regular Foghorn Leghorn, a loudmouthed prankster of a rooster with a Southern accent (first introduced in the Academy Award-nominated short Walky Talky Hawky in 1946). By his own admission, McKimson preferred the earlier screwball trickster interpretations of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, and thus he did his best to maintain elements of those earlier personalities in the shorts he directed featuring those characters.
Incidentally, another Looney Tunes character that McKimson himself had then recently created was also going through some modifications around this time - Speedy Gonzales (introduced in the 1953 short Cat-tails for Two), a Mexican mouse with speed rivalling that of the Roadrunner, was being reworked by Friz Freleng to serve as another opponent for Sylvester (likely because Tweety had fallen a bit too far into passiveness regarding their rivalry by this point, relying more on outside forces to thwart Sylvester) - while Speedy's personality didn't change all that much, his design was given a complete overhaul to remove the more overtly stereotypical elements. The 1955 cartoon that debuted the new version of Speedy Gonzales (named after the title character) would go on to win the 28th Academy Award for Best Animated Short Subject, ensuring the "fastest mouse in all of Mexico" a spot among the Looney Tunes' cast of recurring stars. Another Freleng-directed cartoon featuring Sylvester, the 1957 short Birds Anonymous, would claim the 30th Academy Award - in it, Sylvester tries to give up chasing Tweety, and as one would expect the prospect is easier said than done. While it's still regarded as a good short in its own right, many animation fans and critics would consider Chuck Jones' 1957 cartoon What's Opera, Doc? (a Wagnerian opera take on the classic "Elmer Fudd hunting Bugs Bunny" formula) to be the more deserving recipient of that award.
Despite all the acclaim that Warner Bros.' cartoons were getting, there was an omnipresent threat to their continued existence (as well as the existence of other theatrical short films in America) ever since the postwar era - the increasing presence of television in American homes. After all, why go all the way to a movie theater and purchase a movie ticket just to watch a Bugs Bunny cartoon when you could watch that same cartoon on TV for free? Warner Bros. studio chief executive Jack Warner (who'd recently tricked his brothers into leaving him in full control of the film studio) must've certainly thought so... which probably explains why he thought it'd be a good idea to sell off all of Warner Bros.' cartoons made prior to 1948 (along with their pre-1950s feature films not long afterward) in 1956 to Associated Artists Productions for broadcast on television, getting $3000 per cartoon sold (plus $21 million for the pre-1950s film bundle) but inadvertently cheating himself and the studio out of the millions those films would make in broadcast revenue on television - by the time he'd realized this, it was too late, as a smaller film studio by the name of United Artists merged with AAP and claimed the rights to the films he'd sold off. The chain of events resulting from this short-sighted decision (and it was far from the only one Jack made - he was just barely talked out of going all-in on the short-lived 3D movie craze, which would've resulted in Warner Bros.' animation studio temporarily shutting down) would eventually lead into the most tumultuous conflict in the rivalry between Warner Bros. and MGM...
Speaking of MGM, they were also well aware of the threat that television posed to the continued production of theatrical animation, and the film studio's executives were considering closing down their animation division in order to save money. But Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, who'd recently been promoted to heads of the animation division while all of this was happening, had a plan to save the studio. After all, if people are watching theatrical cartoons on TV... why not make cartoons for TV?
--------------------------------------------------------
I'm trying something a bit different with the 1950s entries. Rather than covering them in chunks of 3-4 years, I'm going to dedicate each entry to all of the notable events related to a specific studio/company/medium that happened within that decade.
I wasn't quite sure about the release date of Warner Bros.' animated feature film debut at first, but then I figured that, since the film stars Daffy Duck (and more specifically, the Chuck Jones interpretation of Daffy Duck), it'd be kind of fitting if it released on the same day as (and subsequently got overshadowed by) one of the most well-regarded short films in Looney Tunes history. Credit to @TheFaultsofAlts for coming up with the idea of Warner Bros. doing an animated feature adaptation of Don Quixote with Daffy Duck as the lead and to @TheBeanieBaron for coming up with the movie's name!
And yes, I am aware that Bugs did technically appear in Daffy's Oscar-winning short ITTL (IOTL, Duck Amuck didn't even make it past the nomination phase, and the Oscar went to Disney's Toot, Whistle, Plunk, and Boom) - but he wasn't the starring role in that short, Daffy was.
Speaking of Oscars, if I had a nickel for every time Friz Freleng paired Sylvester up with a retooled version of a Looney Tunes character that another director created, and the debut short for that pairing ended up winning an Oscar, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice, right?
And yes, the temporary closure of Termite Terrace in 1953 has been butterflied!
Up next, we get to see if Hanna and Barbera's gamble pays off. However, they're not the only animation studio with their eyes on the small screen...
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I imagine that it would at least do modestly well.
Indeed it is!
IIRC superheroes went through a decline in popularity during the early 1950s, so I don't think Disney would have much of a motivation to "get into the superhero game" around this time, especially since one of the major factors that resulted in superheroes making their comeback in the 1960s (or rather, the factor that made the superhero comeback a necessity to preserve the continued existence of American comics) is going to be butterflied.
I haven't fully decided if that's going to happen yet. Right now, I'm still keeping them separate, though I can certainly see the advantages to them merging.
It'll still involve them getting the license from Kinney National, but ITTL it'll be because they purchase it from them rather than being the side effect of a series of mergers involving Warner Bros., Kinney, and Seven-Arts Productions... I admit, I haven't fully worked out the details of how this will happen, so it's still subject to change!
Let's just say for now that their troubles will start with Sleeping Beauty...
Yes! ...for now, at least. Things will slow down by the time we get to the 80s entries, possibly even earlier if I decide this format isn't working out as well as I hope it does.
I had Screen Gems and/or UPA in mind, though part of that depends on if Bob Clampett remains with them or if he decides to go independent with his TV endeavors like IOTL.
Maybe. IIRC MGM was struggling financially by the time Kerkorian purchased them in 1969, but since TTL's version of MGM has Hanna-Barbera as part of its media library/production unit I'm not sure if it'd be in as dire financial straits as OTL's MGM was.
Perhaps. Hanna-Barbera under MGM, assuming they're as successful as they were in the '60s in OTL, could help support them, though I think the overall company may still have struggles if their live-action film and TV division isn't up to snuff like they were in OTL. Then again, if Columbia may be able to survive into the '70s, then maybe MGM could too, or at least fall under one of the better owners like MCA or Gulf+Western or such.
How about having Time-Life fully purchase MGM in the late 60s instead of just being a shareholder?
I am curious about the butterflies that could result from any of these companies purchasing MGM - IOTL Gulf+Western was the company that purchased Paramount in 1966 (and then Desilu Productions and Sega not long afterward), MCA took control of Universal in 1962, and Time-Life was part of the Time, Inc. conglomerate that merged with Warner Bros. in 1990.
Pretty much. Time had also briefly owned stock in MGM around the late '60s, being one of the major stockholders along with one of the Bronfman family who owned Seagrams (With his son later buying Universal in the '90s, funnily enough, so maybe he could also be a potential full buyer). Neither were very effective though, or at least effective enough to lift up the company before Kerkorian came in. You could certainly imagine that some leadership or decisions associated with those buyers may be applied to MGM instead. Though what happens to the companies they bought in OTL, I'm not too certain.
1950s (MGM): The Biggest Show in Town
The 1950s were an important decade for Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera. Fresh off of their seventh Academy Award win, both they and MGM decided that it was high time that they directed their first animated feature film. MGM would be the ones to decide what the film would be about - they ultimately went with an animated sequel to their classic 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz, to coincide with a re-release of the original film in theaters (since the movie was based on the first entry in a series of fantasy novels by L. Frank Baum, there was already sequel material to draw from). Bill and Joe were up to the task, and despite some setbacks (namely, Tex Avery leaving MGM in 1953 to work at Walter Lantz's studio), Return to Oz would premiere in 1954 as a double feature with the original Oz movie. It was a commercial success but drew some notable criticism for its darker tone in comparison to the 1939 movie that it was a sequel to (apparently it was too much of a contrast, and the fact that it was paired up with the original movie only made it more obvious) - on the plus side, it did wonders in regard to bringing the original movie back into the public consciousness and cementing its place as one of MGM's most renowned cinematic achievements. In any case, MGM was satisfied enough with the results of Return to Oz that, come the departure of Fred Quimby from MGM the following year, they would place Hanna and Barbera in charge of the entire MGM animation studio.
Normally, this would be cause for celebration for the two, especially now that their former boss who, as they put it "knew nothing about animation", was gone, but they could see the writing was on the wall for theatrical cartoons - television was making it more profitable for studios to rerun old cartoons and less profitable to make new ones. They had to come up with a plan to keep the animation studio from being shut down - as it turns out, their main inspiration for this plan would come from two of their biggest competitors, one of those being television itself.
You see, back in 1950 an animated television program called Crusader Rabbit aired in syndication, catching viewers' interest with its clever writing full of wit and satire. To Hanna and Barbera, this indicated that there was clearly an audience for animation made exclusively for TV, and thus the right course of action was to provide exactly that. Only one problem - Crusader Rabbit had barely any animation to speak of, as the budget for TV programs was far lower than that for films, both in terms of live-action and especially animation (former Disney animator Sam Signer found that out the hard way when his attempt to make it into television, The Adventures of Paddy the Pelican, ended up airing in a blatantly unfinished state and promptly got canned after 6 episodes). How could Hanna and Barbera be able to make animation for TV if they couldn't afford for the characters to be fully animated?
That's where the second competitor - UPA - comes in. By this point, their partnership with Columbia had gone so well that they were merged with the latter's Screen Gems animation studio, with their limited animation techniques providing a unique style to Columbia's cartoons that made the most of the bare essentials of animation. But while UPA's use of limited animation was entirely an artistic choice, Hanna and Barbera saw the potential in using those same techniques as a way to reduce the cost of animation. To that end, they innovated some limited animation techniques of their own - these include animating specific parts of a character's body (this last one commonly resulted in their TV characters wearing some sort of neckwear to hide the division between their head and body) and looping animation cycles and backgrounds (especially during chase sequences). These cut corners regarding animation meant that, like with Crusader Rabbit, a lot more emphasis had to be placed on the cartoon's dialogue - Chuck Jones (who, like UPA, used limited animation for artistic purposes only) would later derisively regard this early era of TV animation as "illustrated radio". It's worth noting that one corner that Hanna and Barbera didn't cut was the cartoons' use of color - while color television had not yet become widespread, they knew that it eventually would be and chose to plan ahead for it, producing all of their TV cartoons in full color (though they wouldn't be the first ones to distribute a made-for-tv cartoon in color - that would be Robert D. Buchanan with his obscure sci-fi series Colonel Bleep in the September of 1957)
With their plan of action established, the duo made their pitch to MGM regarding their plan for the animation studio to produce cartoons for television. Though skeptical of the idea, the executives at MGM ultimately decided to put their trust behind Hanna and Barbera. After all, the two of them were already proven successes in the field of theatrical animation (with the Academy Award wins to prove it), so if anyone had a chance at succeeding in the field of televised animation, it was them. And if they didn't succeed... well, that just confirms to MGM that their animation division wasn't financially viable to keep around anymore. Fortunately for everyone involved, they succeeded.
On December 14, 1957, The Ruff and Reddy Show made its debut on NBC (acronym for National Broadcasting Company). The show revolved around the various adventures of the titular Ruff (a cat) and Reddy (a dog), who contrary to the usual expectations of cat-and-dog pairings in cartoons were best friends instead of enemies. Each storyline would take place over the course of 13 5-minute episodes, with a full season consisting of 4 of these storylines. In total, the series ran for 156 episodes across 3 seasons, and, while not doing particularly well in ratings, received generally positive reception - positive enough that MGM decided their animation studio (now rebranded as Hanna-Barbera Productions, Inc.) was worth keeping around, at least for the time being. But if there were any doubts about this decision left over at MGM, their next TV show's success would quickly dispel them.
The Huckleberry Hound Show would premiere in syndication on September 29, 1958. Each episode of the show consisted of three different segments - the first of these featuring the titular Huckleberry Hound, an easygoing blue hound dog with a Southern drawl and a penchant for singing "Clementine" off-key. Generally, these segments featured Huck in a different job or role each episode, with him proving to be inept or unlucky at it until he eventually succeeds (in some fashion) toward the end. The second segment, Pixie and Dixie and Mr. Jinks, follows a similar formula to Tom and Jerry, in that it features a cat (Mr. Jinks) trying to catch two mice (Pixie and Dixie) and being outwitted at (nearly) every turn. There are some notable differences, however - aside from the obvious fact that there are two main character mice instead of one, the segment had a greater emphasis on verbal humor over physical slapstick (which is understandable given the limited budget Hanna-Barbera was under with their TV cartoons at the time - later on in the mid-70s, after they'd gotten in a more financially secure position, they'd try their hand at adapting Tom and Jerry for the small screen for real). The third segment would prove to be the most popular, featuring a boisterous bear with a penchant for rhyming, by the name of Yogi Bear. A resident of Jellystone National Park, Yogi prefers to eschew the traditional bear diet of nuts and berries in favor of sandwiches, cake, and other human-type foods, with the majority of his cartoons revolving around the self-proclaimed "smarter-than-the-average" bear's various efforts and schemes to get his paws on them - typically from the "pic-a-nic" baskets of unsuspecting tourists. Yogi's best friend/sidekick Boo Boo often accompanies him on his misadventures (usually to try and dissuade him from his thievery or warn him when one of his schemes is about to go wrong, to no avail), while Jellystone Park's head ranger Smith does everything in his power to thwart Yogi's picnic basket-stealing endeavors (episodes tended to vary over which of the two of them comes out on top).
The show proved to be the huge hit (both with critics and audiences) that Hanna-Barbera needed to stay in the animation business. It even went on to be the first ever animated program to win an Emmy Award (essentially the television equivalent to the Academy Awards/Oscars) - specifically, the award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Children's Programming at the 12th annual Emmy Awards ceremony on June 20, 1960 (and this time, Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera would be able to personally receive the award on-stage). And to think, this would only be the beginning of Hanna-Barbera's success in TV animation...
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And now, we have the beginning of Hanna-Barbera's TV animation empire! For historical context, I also decided to mention a few notable animated TV series that pre-date Hanna-Barbera's first forays into TV animation.
It should be noted that, IOTL, MGM's executives had absolutely no faith that Hanna-Barbera's plans to enter into the field of made-for-TV animation would work and weren't about to justify keeping their animation studio around just for an idea that they were certain would fail. ITTL, with the medium of animation being relatively more respected as an art form, I figured that they'd at least be willing to see if Hanna-Barbera's gamble pays off, trusting in their previous successes in the field of theatrical animation.
As for if MGM will continue to make theatrical cartoons past the point where they laid off their animation division IOTL... I honestly don't know. On the one hand, since their animation studio is still functional (albeit rebranded) ITTL, they theoretically could continue to make theatrical cartoons with their original in-house team rather than outsourcing them (like with the Gene Deitch Tom and Jerry shorts) or hiring a new team for them (like with the Chuck Jones Tom and Jerry shorts). On the other hand, doing so would take production time and resources away from Hanna-Barbera's television cartoons - and I highly doubt that, even in a timeline where animation is more respected, MGM would be willing to spend time and money desperately clinging to the already sinking ship that is theatrical animated shorts, especially if it meant that their televised offerings would suffer as a result. This is also why I haven't brought up the Loopy De Loop theatrical cartoons yet, even though they debuted in 1959 IOTL.
Speaking of 1959 animation debuts, I've actually decided to cover the TV ones once we get to the 60s (hence why I also haven't covered The Quick Draw McGraw Show yet). I figure that it'll flow a bit better then, as I cover each of the studios that produced these shows on an individual basis. Plus, it'll provide a greater scope to the ripple effects in the animation industry caused by the massive success of The Huckleberry Hound Show.
Next time, we see how the other animation studios are handling the rise of television - to put it simply, some are handling it better than others!
Normally, this would be cause for celebration for the two, especially now that their former boss who, as they put it "knew nothing about animation", was gone, but they could see the writing was on the wall for theatrical cartoons - television was making it more profitable for studios to rerun old cartoons and less profitable to make new ones. They had to come up with a plan to keep the animation studio from being shut down - as it turns out, their main inspiration for this plan would come from two of their biggest competitors, one of those being television itself.
You see, back in 1950 an animated television program called Crusader Rabbit aired in syndication, catching viewers' interest with its clever writing full of wit and satire. To Hanna and Barbera, this indicated that there was clearly an audience for animation made exclusively for TV, and thus the right course of action was to provide exactly that. Only one problem - Crusader Rabbit had barely any animation to speak of, as the budget for TV programs was far lower than that for films, both in terms of live-action and especially animation (former Disney animator Sam Signer found that out the hard way when his attempt to make it into television, The Adventures of Paddy the Pelican, ended up airing in a blatantly unfinished state and promptly got canned after 6 episodes). How could Hanna and Barbera be able to make animation for TV if they couldn't afford for the characters to be fully animated?
That's where the second competitor - UPA - comes in. By this point, their partnership with Columbia had gone so well that they were merged with the latter's Screen Gems animation studio, with their limited animation techniques providing a unique style to Columbia's cartoons that made the most of the bare essentials of animation. But while UPA's use of limited animation was entirely an artistic choice, Hanna and Barbera saw the potential in using those same techniques as a way to reduce the cost of animation. To that end, they innovated some limited animation techniques of their own - these include animating specific parts of a character's body (this last one commonly resulted in their TV characters wearing some sort of neckwear to hide the division between their head and body) and looping animation cycles and backgrounds (especially during chase sequences). These cut corners regarding animation meant that, like with Crusader Rabbit, a lot more emphasis had to be placed on the cartoon's dialogue - Chuck Jones (who, like UPA, used limited animation for artistic purposes only) would later derisively regard this early era of TV animation as "illustrated radio". It's worth noting that one corner that Hanna and Barbera didn't cut was the cartoons' use of color - while color television had not yet become widespread, they knew that it eventually would be and chose to plan ahead for it, producing all of their TV cartoons in full color (though they wouldn't be the first ones to distribute a made-for-tv cartoon in color - that would be Robert D. Buchanan with his obscure sci-fi series Colonel Bleep in the September of 1957)
With their plan of action established, the duo made their pitch to MGM regarding their plan for the animation studio to produce cartoons for television. Though skeptical of the idea, the executives at MGM ultimately decided to put their trust behind Hanna and Barbera. After all, the two of them were already proven successes in the field of theatrical animation (with the Academy Award wins to prove it), so if anyone had a chance at succeeding in the field of televised animation, it was them. And if they didn't succeed... well, that just confirms to MGM that their animation division wasn't financially viable to keep around anymore. Fortunately for everyone involved, they succeeded.
On December 14, 1957, The Ruff and Reddy Show made its debut on NBC (acronym for National Broadcasting Company). The show revolved around the various adventures of the titular Ruff (a cat) and Reddy (a dog), who contrary to the usual expectations of cat-and-dog pairings in cartoons were best friends instead of enemies. Each storyline would take place over the course of 13 5-minute episodes, with a full season consisting of 4 of these storylines. In total, the series ran for 156 episodes across 3 seasons, and, while not doing particularly well in ratings, received generally positive reception - positive enough that MGM decided their animation studio (now rebranded as Hanna-Barbera Productions, Inc.) was worth keeping around, at least for the time being. But if there were any doubts about this decision left over at MGM, their next TV show's success would quickly dispel them.
The Huckleberry Hound Show would premiere in syndication on September 29, 1958. Each episode of the show consisted of three different segments - the first of these featuring the titular Huckleberry Hound, an easygoing blue hound dog with a Southern drawl and a penchant for singing "Clementine" off-key. Generally, these segments featured Huck in a different job or role each episode, with him proving to be inept or unlucky at it until he eventually succeeds (in some fashion) toward the end. The second segment, Pixie and Dixie and Mr. Jinks, follows a similar formula to Tom and Jerry, in that it features a cat (Mr. Jinks) trying to catch two mice (Pixie and Dixie) and being outwitted at (nearly) every turn. There are some notable differences, however - aside from the obvious fact that there are two main character mice instead of one, the segment had a greater emphasis on verbal humor over physical slapstick (which is understandable given the limited budget Hanna-Barbera was under with their TV cartoons at the time - later on in the mid-70s, after they'd gotten in a more financially secure position, they'd try their hand at adapting Tom and Jerry for the small screen for real). The third segment would prove to be the most popular, featuring a boisterous bear with a penchant for rhyming, by the name of Yogi Bear. A resident of Jellystone National Park, Yogi prefers to eschew the traditional bear diet of nuts and berries in favor of sandwiches, cake, and other human-type foods, with the majority of his cartoons revolving around the self-proclaimed "smarter-than-the-average" bear's various efforts and schemes to get his paws on them - typically from the "pic-a-nic" baskets of unsuspecting tourists. Yogi's best friend/sidekick Boo Boo often accompanies him on his misadventures (usually to try and dissuade him from his thievery or warn him when one of his schemes is about to go wrong, to no avail), while Jellystone Park's head ranger Smith does everything in his power to thwart Yogi's picnic basket-stealing endeavors (episodes tended to vary over which of the two of them comes out on top).
The show proved to be the huge hit (both with critics and audiences) that Hanna-Barbera needed to stay in the animation business. It even went on to be the first ever animated program to win an Emmy Award (essentially the television equivalent to the Academy Awards/Oscars) - specifically, the award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Children's Programming at the 12th annual Emmy Awards ceremony on June 20, 1960 (and this time, Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera would be able to personally receive the award on-stage). And to think, this would only be the beginning of Hanna-Barbera's success in TV animation...
--------------------------------------------------------
And now, we have the beginning of Hanna-Barbera's TV animation empire! For historical context, I also decided to mention a few notable animated TV series that pre-date Hanna-Barbera's first forays into TV animation.
It should be noted that, IOTL, MGM's executives had absolutely no faith that Hanna-Barbera's plans to enter into the field of made-for-TV animation would work and weren't about to justify keeping their animation studio around just for an idea that they were certain would fail. ITTL, with the medium of animation being relatively more respected as an art form, I figured that they'd at least be willing to see if Hanna-Barbera's gamble pays off, trusting in their previous successes in the field of theatrical animation.
As for if MGM will continue to make theatrical cartoons past the point where they laid off their animation division IOTL... I honestly don't know. On the one hand, since their animation studio is still functional (albeit rebranded) ITTL, they theoretically could continue to make theatrical cartoons with their original in-house team rather than outsourcing them (like with the Gene Deitch Tom and Jerry shorts) or hiring a new team for them (like with the Chuck Jones Tom and Jerry shorts). On the other hand, doing so would take production time and resources away from Hanna-Barbera's television cartoons - and I highly doubt that, even in a timeline where animation is more respected, MGM would be willing to spend time and money desperately clinging to the already sinking ship that is theatrical animated shorts, especially if it meant that their televised offerings would suffer as a result. This is also why I haven't brought up the Loopy De Loop theatrical cartoons yet, even though they debuted in 1959 IOTL.
Speaking of 1959 animation debuts, I've actually decided to cover the TV ones once we get to the 60s (hence why I also haven't covered The Quick Draw McGraw Show yet). I figure that it'll flow a bit better then, as I cover each of the studios that produced these shows on an individual basis. Plus, it'll provide a greater scope to the ripple effects in the animation industry caused by the massive success of The Huckleberry Hound Show.
Next time, we see how the other animation studios are handling the rise of television - to put it simply, some are handling it better than others!