Celebrating A Lost Art Form

The process used in the 1970’s to produce Saturday morning cartoons and animated specials represents a lost art form. Where today’s animation is primarily created digitally, fifty years ago before the advent of computers animation production was a time and labor intensive process that was done by hand.

The process started with a script, which was turned into a storyboard by storyboard artists who laid out the sequence of all of the action.

Audio was recorded so that the animation could be synched with voices performed by voice actors, music and special effects.

An animatic, a rough video version of the storyboard where still images are synced to a preliminary soundtrack with voices, was produced to see where adjustments needed to be made.

The storyboard was sent to the design department where model sheets for each character that showed their appearance, poses, expressions and gestures were created for animators to refer to during the animation process.

Character artists and background artists then determined the specs for each scene. Their work led to production of a second animatic, which was used to guide animation.

Animation was produced by hand drawing each movement of each character in each scene on paper one frame at a time. Lead animators drew the major action of the characters in a scene. Assistant animators filled in the missing frames in each scene. The drawings were sent to the clean-up department where clean-up animators traced them on new sheets of paper to make everything look consistent. Inbetweeners or inbetween animators added any missing scenes. Background artists drew and painted the backgrounds.

Leo Sullivan and Floyd Norman are two legendary Black animators and two of the first to integrate Hollywood animation studios.

Sullivan and Floyd worked on the first primetime Fat Albert cartoon special, Hey, Hey, Hey It's Fat Albert, that aired in 1969, and created the Soul Train animated train for Don Cornelius. They also formed their own pioneering production company in 1966 called Vignette Multimedia which they ran for a number of years.

Leo Sullivan worked in the animation industry for more than 50 years as an animator, layout and storyboard artist, writer, director, and producer for various companies including Hanna-Barbera, Warner Brothers, Spunbuggy Works, Campbell/Silver/Cosby and others.

He worked on the following 1970's Saturday Morning Cartoon Series that featured Black characters: Fat Albert & The Cosby Kids, Scooby’s Laff-A Lympics, I Am The Greatest!: The Adventures Of Muhammad Ali, Challenge Of The Super Friends, and Casper & The Angels.

He is currently the President/CEO of Leo Sullivan Multimedia.

Floyd Norman has worked for a number of animation companies, among them Walt Disney Animation Studios, Hanna-Barbera Productions, Ruby-Spears, Film Roman and Pixar.

Norman was employed as an inbetweener (the process of generating intermediate frames between two images to give the appearance that the first image evolves smoothly into the second image) on Sleeping Beauty (1959) at Walt Disney Productions, becoming the first Black artist to remain at the studio on a long-term basis. He also worked on One Hundred And One Dalmations (1961), The Jungle Book (1967), Robin Hood (1973) as well as Toy Story 2 (1999), Monsters, Inc. (2001) and Mulan (1998), to name a few.

Norman worked on the following 1970's Saturday Morning Cartoon Series that featured Black characters: Josie & The Pussy Cats, Sealab 2020, Scooby’s Laff-A-Lympics, I Am The Greatest!: The Adventures Of Muhammad Ali and Casper & The Angels.

Then the ink-and-paint process began. All of the drawings were transferred to celluloid material or cels. The outlines of the drawings were hand inked on the front of the cels. The images were hand painted on the reverse side of the cels. Cels were placed on top of backgrounds and shot frame by frame under the animation camera to produce the cartoon.

According to Hanna-Barbera, to produce one 30-minute cartoon episode required “more than 12,000 individual drawings and the labor of 150 skilled artists, such as animators, layout people, background painters, inkers and painters.”

Jim Simon created the first award winning Black owned animation studio, Wantu Studios. He produced Black animated film shorts for Sesame Street and The Electric Company. He also worked on The Brown Hornet, an animated segment in the Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids cartoon series.

Simon began his animation career as an animator for Paramount Pictures working on the Spider-Man animated series. After this experience he became a freelancer and formed his own animation studio in New York. He then moved his company to Los Angeles.

His first short film Hey Diddle Diddle, produced for the PBS show the Electric Company won several awards. He collaborated with Filmation Studios on the design of the Brown Hornet character and animated segments for Bill Cosby's Fat Albert TV series. Later he was designer and animator of the Soul Train animated opening and partnered with Don Cornelius in the creation, design and development of a proposed Lil' Soul Train TV cartoon series.

Throughout the years Simon has been a producer, director and animator on numerous Saturday morning TV series for major Hollywood studios. He also started an animation studio from the ground up in Dublin, Ireland for a major Hollywood studio. Jim also spent several years as an Overseas Animation Production Supervisor in various countries.

Morrie Turner created Wee Pals, the first nationally syndicated comic strip created by a Black Cartoonist. Wee Pals, introduced in 1965, was also the first nationally syndicated comic strip to feature a multicultural cast. In 1972, Turner's Wee Pal characters were animated and featured in the Kid Power Saturday Morning Cartoon series.

Morrie Turner was a self-taught artist who began drawing as a child and did cartoons for Army newspapers while serving in World War II with the all-Black 477th Bomber group – stationed in the South. Although Morrie was a groundsmen he was a part of the famed Tuskegee Airmen. You see that in the cartoons he published in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s in Negro Digest, Black World and Ebony magazines.

Kid Power was the first truly multicultural Saturday morning cartoon series. It was also the first positive Saturday morning cartoon series featuring Black characters to be created from a syndicated comic strip.

Phil Mendez has worked for several animation studios, including Disney, Hanna-Barbera, DC and Marvel, in various capacities. He has worked on numerous animation projects, including 1970's including the Flip Wilson animated special Clerow Wilson’s Great Escape, Saturday Morning Cartoon series Hong Kong Phooey and I Am The Greatest!: The Adventures Of Muhammad Ali, the 1979 short film Meadowlark Lemon Presents The World, and the 1992 animated feature Bebe’s Kids.

Mendez is also the author of the award winning The Black Snowman (1989), Kissyfur of Paddlecab County (1986) and Kissyfur and the Birthday Hugs (1986). His Kissyfur books, originally created for his son, became a popular animated series, along with his Foofur series.

As a Co-Founder of Landmark Entertainment, Phil led the animatronics design concept for all Six Flags Parks. He also spent five years as concept and development designer for various shows and rides in Epcot’s World Showcase.

Unfortunately, fifty years ago no one foresaw the future interest of animation fans to collect original production drawings, cels, model sheets and backgrounds, so the artwork was typically thrown away after each production was completed. Due to the expense of celluloid material, the hand painted cels were typically washed and reused. Luckily some of the artwork was saved and has been made available for purchase. But for many 1970’s cartoons, particularly those that featured positive Black characters, the original production drawings and original productions cels that were used under the camera to produce these cartoons are rare.

You can learn more about Black animation at the Museum Of UnCut Funk.