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In the Silver Age few new stars emerged, and old stars appeared in cheaply animated pictures.

When reporters covered all-cartoon “kiddie matinees” just for “special interest” stories, only then would discussions of animated shorts appear.Ī 1972 Woody Woodpecker cartoon rates billing in this newspaper ad – from The Detroit Free Press, 10/24/73 – on a triple bill of R-rated action pictures. During those two eras, fewer theaters advertised individual shorts by name in newspapers, and even the trade journals stopped reviewing new releases.

A “Silver Age” began by 1953, and a “Bronze Age” succeeded it in the ’70s. However, budget reductions from movie companies, over-stylization of characters and backgrounds, excessive dialogue in the films, and technological gimmicks like 3-D and CinemaScope damaged the cartoon short in the years afterward. In the “Golden Age” of the 1930s and ’40s, motion picture companies sponsored animation studios and in return received cartoon stars and popular short films. March 2017 is the forty-fifth anniversary of that event, and my column for this month is about how the press covered the last years of theatrical cartoon shorts. Jim Korkis noted in his “Animation Anecdotes #134” for Cartoon Research that Lantz held a farewell luncheon for his employees on March 10, 1972, as his studio closed. I often wondered if people documented their experiences of watching late-era theatrical cartoon shorts, but recently I found some primary sources that seem to answer my question. However, that sequence reuses animation from the 1950s, and there’s sadness in knowing that the animation of Woody in the five-minute cartoon to follow will not be nearly as polished as those few seconds of the bird’s former self because of slimmer budgets in the intervening years. The animation is fluid, and Woody’s face is expressive. After the logo for Universal Pictures fades to black in the opening sequence, Woody pops his head out to the audience, pecks his name on some wood, and hops around maniacally. Watching a Walter Lantz “Woody Woodpecker” cartoon from the early 1970s feels like a bittersweet experience.