As we celebrate Memorial Day, I thought it'd be interesting to take a look back at what was happening in the Los Angeles animation world in May 1945 . . .
This page is from the May 1945 issue of the Screen Cartoonists Guild's newsletter, The Animator. During the war they sometimes ran a page, called Khaki Shorts, giving news about animators involved in the war effort, both at home and on the fronts. I'm a pretty poor animation historian, but even I can spot quite a few notables in these pages.
Here's the front page of the April, 1945 issue. I love Bill Hanna's tie!
And here's the Khaki Shorts page from that issue. Be sure to check out the letter from Jim Carmichael for some choice gallows humor (love the "kwaint little karakter"), and the harrowing story of Tony Bujnowski.
Finally, here's a page from the June 1945 issue:
Posts
13 comments:
Kevin, your first image is "temporarily unavailable." If you can do something to fix that, please do. These are wonderful pictures.
Hey, look what a classy logo for the earlier incarnation of the guild newsletter!
Kevin? Could we vote (or just do it) on whether to replace "Pig-Bored" with THIS one? "The Animator"? I for one(as not an animator)wouldn't mind it a bit...after all, it's what we're always called in the press no matter what our jobs are by classification.
And retro stuff is so cool-couldn't be more timely now, either.
I agree with the above comment!! Let's do it!! That old logo is fantastic.
Mark, I have no idea why the image was unavailable. It shows up for me. Is anyone else having the problem?
To the anonymous ones, yes, during that period The Animator had a great masthead. The SCG's newsletter in those days was very cool. They seemed to have been huge fans of The New Yorker magazine, judging from the fonts and style they used (I should post an entire issue so you can see what I mean), plus they frequently gave little raves about the lastest collections of New Yorker cartoonist's work, so their editor was clearly reading that magazine. The issues from the late 40's are beautiful, though they must have had to cut back because issues from later years are ugly mimeographed things with an uninspired masthead.
Like The Animator, our The Peg-Board has changed it's style, format, and masthead over the years. I believe under Tom Sito changing the masthead became an annual event. I like seeing it change every year, and letting notable members try their hand at it, though I agree that this year's model is, uh, underwhelming.
I really hate to change our newletters name, since it's something local 839 has been using for over 50 years. And I already have someone in mind to do the next masthead for 2007. I dunno, maybe as a nod to the past we could use this nifty The Animator masthead for the rest of this year, since the sentiment seems pretty consistent that we not wait until January to make the change).
It seems that Mark is right. The first image is unavailable to me as well.
I'm using Internet Explorer on a PC, and I see all the pictures. What browser are you using?
It seems to be working on both IE/AOL and Safari on my Mac. Not sure what the problem is.
It's turning up for me now and with the same browser I was using before. No idea what the problem was.
There was a terminal slash ('/') in the first photo's html that wasn't in the other photo's code. I removed it, and I'll assume that was somehow causing the problem for some browsers.
For me, posting images here is pretty much trial and error. I'd like to understand html better, so I could really control how the images and text are displayed, but I have too many other things going on to do that now (like waste the hour I just spent figuring out how to get images from by Verizon camera phone into the blog for the next post).
They all look so handsome in their suits and uniforms. Thanks for posting these, Kevin.
I just noticed this in the March, 1945 edition of The Animator:
Banner Design
Maurice Greenberg, Screen Gems background man, is responsible for the banner on the new Animator. John Bajmanian and Al Foster also submitted ideas. Maurices' design was chosen for its uniqueness in depicting drawing and film. The Animator staff wishes to thank all who contributed ideas and urges those interested in designing column heads to contact the Guild.
So know you know who to credit for that great masthead.
Does the Union have the original photographs published in THE ANIMATOR in it's archives?
Also, please keep posting pages from the 1940s & 50s issues.
Unfortunately, Jerry, not only do we not have any of the original photos, our collection of the actual Animator issues is very spotty. But there is a fair sampling, as well as most of the old Peg-Boards, and we definitely plan on posting more.
I'm thinking maybe once a week I'll post an entire issue, though probably not in chronological order. It's fascinating to see how many of the same issues have come up again and again over the decades.
Post a Comment