At Prospect

Today I took a quick spin around Marvel Animation's new location on the eastern edge of old Hollywood. (Seen above ... a few years ago).

Marvel Animation's Guardians of the Galaxy (the cartoon version) moved to Disney's Prospect Studios three months back, and is now in full-bore production ...

The newly minted series is headquartered in the middle of the Propsect Street lot.

A lot that was built in 1915 as a Vitagraph Co. outpost on the Left Coast (which complimented its Brooklyn studio). The Vitagraph had been a going concern since the 1890s, but by the roaring twenties the movie company was fading, its market share beaten down by the likes of upstarts MGM, Warner Bros., and Paramount. The Prospect Street Studio was sold to Warner Bros. in 1925, then the ABC network purchased it, and years later the Walt Disney Co. swallowed up the TV network and ... here we are.

Marvel board artists and designers sit on the second floor of a building that dates to the beginning of the lot, looking out on a lumber warehouse, sharing the facility with General Hospital and Gray's Anatomy. But it's fitting that animation has returned to the old Vitagraph Studio, since Vitagraph was one of the pioneers of screen animation.



Could we say that Vitagraph/Warner Bros./ABC/Disney has come full circle? Probably not, but Prospect isn't that far from the old Hyperion Studios, right?