I’m thinking it’s Gargoyles. Can anybody think of other, earlier, cartoons with season long continuity (as opposed to 2-5 episode “to be continued” storylines)?
Rocky and His Friends (Rocky and Bullwinkle) comes to mind (started 1959). The length of their adventures varied, but the first and longest one, Jet Fuel Formula, ran 40 episodes and so would have been about a full season long.
transformers…
If you count “Rocky and Bullwinkle”, you also have to count Jay Ward’s earlier cartoon, “Crusader Rabbit”, which shared the idea of cliffhanger endings stretching the storyline out over weeks.
I’ll bet there’s something earlier. Surely somebody back in the 30’s did a cartoon which essentially stretched out as a never ending serial.
Actually, probably not. The distribution of cartoons was such that you couldn’t have that kind of continuity back then. For instance, a Warner Brothers cartoon would show at Warner Brothers affiliated theaters. But people didn’t go to theaters because of their affiliation, but rather because they were showing a film they wanted to see. So they might see the first episode of a continuity cartoon, but not go back to that theater for weeks, so they’d miss the rest. And if a theater were showing the third episode, audiences would not want to bother catching up.
Yes, there were serials, but they were usually limited to Saturday matinees. Kids went to those every week, and usually to their neighborhood theater, so it was more likely they could see the entire serial.
It took television for continuity in cartoons to begin, since it was easy for audiences to keep up. Crusader Rabbit does seem to be the first, doing continuity starting in 1949.
Winky Dinks
Re the movie house serial-
There were a number of Goofy cartoons all on sports.
Even if you didn’t see all of them you knew it was a series, because the had the same voice-over announcer that sounded like he did newsreels.
I can’t recall if Batman: The Animated Series predated Gargoyles or not. It had a little bit of continuity, in that some aspects of a previous show will carry over to the next one… although I will admit that Gargoyles did an EXCELLENT job in making each individual episode feel like one massive continuation. And it was hellacool, too.
I have to concur with Crusader Rabbit. This goes back to 1949. Unless we uncover an animated movie serial, this predates all of the TV cartoons.
http://www.yesterdayland.com/popopedia/shows/saturday/sa1318.php
"A true television pioneer, Crusader Rabbit was produced by Jay Ward, who would later go on to create Rocky and His Friends, George of the Jungle and The Adventures of Hoppity Hooper.
The witty five-minute episodes—presented in serial form—showed the exploits of the diminutive noble adventurer Crusader Rabbit and his dim but loveable sidekick, Ragland T. “Rags” Tiger. Short of temper but lacking the physical strength to back up his threats, Crusader Rabbit got himself in hot water with villains like Bilious Green, Illregard Beauregard and Simon LeGree.
A milestone in TV history, Crusader Rabbit was the first made-for-television animated series. Skeptics thought a weekly animated series would be too costly to turn a profit, but Ward came up with a way to buck the system: limited animation. Most classically animated theatrical cartoons had 40 cels (individual drawings) per foot of film, but Ward’s new style would utilize only 4 cels per foot. As a result, the 19.5-minute shows came in at approximately $2,500 per episode.
Jay Ward worked with partner Alexander Anderson in a Berkley, California garage studio, drawing the pictures for the cartoon. The pair then sent the sketches to producer Jerry Fairbanks in Los Angeles to add the soundtrack. The system remained in effect for the series’ initial run, from 1949 to 1951.
A second set of episodes was produced in 1957, but by this time Ward was already in development on Rocky and His Friends. The new Crusader Rabbit cartoons may have suffered from Ward’s absence, but they did add two elements to the mix: color production and a new villain, Dudley Nightshade (a.k.a. Nightly Dudshade, a.k.a. Shadely Nightdud).
Unavailable for years, Crusader Rabbit (both the Ward version and the later color one) has since emerged from animation limbo, surfacing on videocassette to claim its rightful place among animation’s greats.
Release History
1949 - 1951 syndicated
1957 - ? syndicated
Rhino Home Video attempted to release Ward’s Crusader Rabbit onto home video a couple of years ago, but were sued by 20th Century Fox, who I believe owns the rights. Under the terms of the suit, Rhino sold what number they had of the two titles (Crusader Rabbit vs. The State of Texas and Crusader Rabbit vs. The Pirates) before stopping production.
I have to agree that Crusader Rabbit, the first TV cartoon in America, was also the first TV cartoon with continuity in America. As for movies-who knows if there is one?
I would have mentioned Crusader Rabbit (which I watched as a kid), except that the OP asked about “season-long” continuities. I don’t think Crusader Rabbit’s sequences were that long, but I haven’t been able to find anything that says how long they were.
After Jet Fuel Formula, Rocky and Bullwinkle continuities were much shorter, and none approached a full season.
In any case, continuous story lines go back to the earliest days of TV cartoons, at any rate.
In addition to Crusader Rabbit, I’m certain that Batman: The Animated Series predates Gargoyles. (I loved both those cartoons.)
Yep, the IMDB agrees with me. Batman: TAS is 1992, Gargoyles is 1994.
A related question: was Batman: TAS the first primarily serious, dramatic American cartoon?
I’m not sure what you mean by “primarily serious, dramatic.” There were any number of straight superhero cartoons before Batman. (Most of which were badly done, but that wasn’t the question!) There was also Johnny Quest, which was on during prime time in the 1960s.
The first “serious” superhero cartoons I know of were Max Fleisher’s Superman shorts from around 1940 or so.
And the rather bizarrely animated Clutch Cargo dates to 1959.
Wow, thanks for the responses guys. I was totally unaware of the Jay Ward’s work as, well, it’s before my time. Does anybody know how popular they were at the time?
I mean, if they were successful, why was their such a dearth of cartoons with continuity for, hm, some 40 years, until Gargoyles. (Batman: TAS has, I would argue, only limited continuity, in that although the villains seemed to remember that Batman had beat them before, it did not seem as if one episode had any direct influence upon the next episode.)
Sabbath, was JQ in reference to the “serious, dramatic” thing, or the OP? 'Cause I’ll admit that I didn’t watch too many episodes of it, but it didn’t seem as if it had much in the way of continuity. I could, of course, be wrong.
And, you know, Gargoyles is a lot newer than I gave it credit for. Thus I revise my position and say that The Pirates of Dark Water (1992, according to the IMDB) was the first animated series of the since the 50s-60s to have continuity.
I didn’t really know B:TAS had hard continuity. They had a few two parters, but weren’t they mostly self contained? By continuity, do you mean Robotech-esque storytelling? I know Robotech was not American, but I am just trying to get your meaning.
Very. Still are in some circles today. Keith Scott (an Australian chap who is now the official voice of Bullwinkle) wrote a book about Jay Ward (first name at birth: J-I’m serious, just J) entitled The Moose That Roared: The Story of Jay Ward, Bill Scott, a Flying Squirrel, and a Talking Moose, which quotes some reviewers of the time. Some reviews called him better than Flintstones and Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color. “Bullwinkle, a moose with a twinkle,” as Larry Wolters of the Chicago Sun called him (quoted in Scott 184), was “wild and wacky and wonderfully funny” (185).
One might not actually call Bullwinkle “continuity,” per se. Like Crusader Rabbit, it told its story in a movie-serial type style. The longest Bullwinkle story was 40 segments, and the shortest ones were four. (To answer Colibri’s question, the longest Ward-produced Crusader Rabbit was 30 segments, the shortest was 10. I’m not sure about the non-Ward episodes.)
The first Bullwinkle (then Rocky and his Friends) season (1959-1960) consisted of 26 episodes with two stories: Jet Fuel Formula (40 segments) and Box Top Robbery (12 segments).
[sub]Works Cited:
Scott, Keith. The Moose That Roared: The Story of Jay Ward, Bill Scott, a Flying Squirrel, and a Talking Moose. New York: Thomas Dunne Books-St. Martin’s Press, 2000. ISBN 0-312-19922-8.[/sub]
Are you talkin’ to me? Are you talkin’ to ME? Um, well, if you are, I have no idea. I’m not the one that said that B:TAS had any real continuity. And, yes, by continuity I mean Robotech-esque storytelling (sans the splicing together three separate anime series element ;)).
So if R&B (heh) was so popular, why the lack of continuity for so long? Is/Was it a financial thing? Or is it logistically simpler somehow?
There was also the equally bizarrely animated Space Angel in 1962.