early animation

[minor muppetz]

It seems like while many different companies have contributed to different animation segments over the years, during the early years a lot of animation was done by the same company, or at the very least in the same style.

In the first season most animated bits had the style of only characters, character clothing, and neccessary props being drawn and colored. Examples include the Speech Balloon segments, Alice Braitwaite Goodyshoes, the alphabet soup fisher boy segmnet, some letter "commercials" (for D, J, and other letters), and so on. I think parts of the Jazz Numbers series was also like this (though those cartoons also had amny shots with more background colors). But otherwise the segments had plain white backgrounds, and I don't think any ground or floors were drawn.

Does anybody know whether all these were done by the some company/ animators? Of course the early style was used for some post-1969 segments, like the cartoon where a man uses a lower-case q as a hatrack, or the cartoon where a man interviews gthe letter N, or some cartoons in the Detective series, or Bud Luckey's cartoons, and so on.

 

[mikebennidict]

This might help

http://forum.muppetcentral.com/showthread.php?t=3178&highlight=favorite+number

 

[Greedo]

I've been wondering the same. The animation for School House Rocks is eerily similar to early SS animation, no? That's what I think.

 

[SesameMike]

Slightly off-topic, but regarding those cartoons where everything was against a plain white background:

Do you remember the Electric Company cartoon with "Happy Birthday Miss Jones"? That, too, was a cartoon where all that we can see onscreen is the boy, a telephone on a box/stand, and the transient words of his proposed greetings. Otherwise it was just plain white. Then suddenly, with no warning whatsoever, a heretofore invisible door opens in the background whereupon his buddy enters. It closes about a second later (at which point it vanishes again), but for that instant we see a mostly black background and some sound effects suggesting a busy city street. I always liked how that plain animation was suddenly given context... a setting... a sense that the scene actually took place somewhere. I wonder if having that door appear wasn't an experimental twist on this animation genre.

A door also appears as needed at the end of the SS "Exit, good-bye" Hubley Letter X animation, but it doesn't quite present the same stark contrast as the TEC one.