While digging around for facts about the late 60s Warner Brothers cartoon Bunny and Claude, I found out it was made for theatrical release. That suprised me because I thought they stopped running cartoons before movies in the fifties. When’s the last time you saw a cartoon (or for that matter newsreels or other shorts) before the movie? Did you ever see the above cartoon or others of that era in theaters?
I recall seeing a few when I was a kid in the 60s. It wasn’t common.
Probably about 1959. Movies got longer, production values got better, and TV was running strong: people lost interest in things like serials, cartoons and newsreels. But I do remember a serial running when I was in Junior High about spies and a master key, which would have been about 1961.
Ah, here it is! Why they chose to run something from 1945, I’ll never know.
Oakland’s Paramount Theater has a classic movie series where they show a newsreel and a cartoon before the movie. Also, don’t the Pixar movies often have a short cartoon before the full-length cartoon (excuse me, animated feature)?
I grew up in New Zealand, where cartoons and shorts were still common in front of movies up to about 1980.
The ChubbChubbs! ran before Men in Black II in 2002, though that was an unusual situation, caused by the latter’s truncated run-time due to a last-minute rewrite due to real-world circumstances.
Pixar does shorts before their movies fairly regularly.
Aside from Pixar films, the only one I remember is seeing the Looney Toons short Carrotblanca before the movie The Amazing Panda Adventure. In fact, I asked my parents to take me to the movie because I thought Carrotblanca WAS the movie. Alas, my 6 year old addled brain was mislead by the advertisements which heavily featured the Looney Toons short on Nickelodeon. I had to sit through an hour and a half of that stupid panda movie after just 8 minutes of Bugs Bunny.
Oh, and here’s a link to the cartoon. Unsurprisingly, the Casablanca references (and the prison rape joke) went over my head way back then.
I saw a Hey Arnold cartoon before some Nickelodeon movie back in the mid 90s. I think it might have been Harriet the Spy.
I recall seeing Warner Bros. cartoons often before movies in the 60’s, and I think a Pink Panther cartoon, once. As they disappeared it was disappointing. After a while it became an unexpected pleasure. I don’t recall any after the 60’s.
I remember seeing '30s and '40s WB cartoons before features as late as 1978 (in British Columbia.)
Aside from cartoons packaged with the movie (there was a Computer Generated Road Runner cartoon shown with last summer’s Cats and Dogs II movie), the last time I saw a cartoon in the movies was about 1972. It was, I think, when I saw Sleuth in Princeton, and the movie was preceded by a slightly risque cartoon from Crunch Bird Productions. It was essentially an animated one-shot joke. From the title of the production company, I can imagine what one of their other cartoons must have been. I’ve never seen another one of their offerings.
They showed cartoons before the feature in both theaters and drive-ins up through the mid-1970s around here. The drive-in ones were usually the same old Chilly Willy episodes.
Before MTV, I remember seeing music videos ahead of movies throughout the 70s and 80s, but not very often. It was as if they were testing the waters to see if this would be an effective use of the new music video format, and evidently it wasn’t. Some of he videos I remember seeing:
“Banapple Gas” by Cat Stevens, mid-70s
“Paradise Garage” by Tim Curry, 1979 (as a bumper for Rocky Horror Picture Show, one of several videos used for this purpose; another was “White Punks on Dope” by The Tubes)
“What’s It To Ya” by Robby Neville, mid-80s
“Dock of the Bay” by Michael Bolton, mid-80s
When Aria was released on the art house circuit circa 1987, the theater I saw it in preceded it with Bugs Bunny “What’s Opera, Doc?”
All of these theaters were in the Washington, DC area.
Didn’t they put a new Roger Rabbit cartoon in front of a few movies a couple years after Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
Yep, so my last one was TOY STORY 3.
The small town where I grew up had two theaters and a drive-in in the 1960’s when I was a little kid. That was down to one (ratty) theater by the time I was in high school in the 70’s. The last movie the remaining theater showed was Grease. All three places showed a cartoon or two before the movie right up to the end. One of the theaters ran a 12-cartoon matinee on Saturdays up through the early 70’s. Thus, I’ve actually seen a great many of the classic WB shorts on a big screen and from the balcony.
:eek:
I recall seeing a cartoon with the Big Bad Wolf (Three Little Pigs? Little Red Riding Hood?) before a kids’ movie back in the early 80s.