Lost Cartoon: Family Jubilee

Okay, the title of this post may be a little misleading. Family Jubilee may not actually be lost. A print may be in a canister buried on a shelf somewhere for decades. But it’s a safe guess nobody reading this has seen it before.

We’ve talked about industrial cartoons here before, films funded by corporations for a variety of reasons. Some were used internally. Others were distributed to church and community groups. A number of them appeared on television as ads disguised as institutional/educational films. And a handful showed up in theatres, like some of the shorts produced by John Sutherland.

There seems to have been quite a number of industrial/commercial film outfits. Some specialised in animation. Others would accept contracts for an animated film and then sub-contract a studio to do the work. One of these companies was Wilding Picture Productions, which mainly focused on live action films and film-strips.

Industrial animation historian Jonathan Boschen points out Wilding’s best-known animated film was Big Tim, which was contracted out to UPA in 1949. It was also responsible for a half-hour cartoon movie called The Legend of Dan and Gus, produced for Columbia Gas System in 1952. It tells of the careers of two brothers and the firms they founded—Dan’s Doorknob Co. and Gus’ Gas Co.

We’ve spotted another Wilding-led animation effort while leafing through Business Screen magazine: a 1954 short called Family Jubilee for New York Life Insurance Company. The company debuted it January 12th at a meeting of 4,500 agents from its 160 branches. (Ah, yes, a big audience for a cartoon, isn’t it!?). Business Screen gives us a little taste of the cartoon:

In case any of the “Show Me!” agents thought the hoopla was more of the same old stuff, the company had on hand as a first order of the day’s business a new film, Family Jubilee, which couldn’t have kidded New York Life more effectively if it had been made by a group of competitors. ...
Family Jubilee turned out to be a color cartoon analogy of New York Life, with a family of beavers—ma, pa and the little eager beavers—who run a hotel. In a hilarious lampoon of itself, New York Life showed that when customers of the hotel’s restaurant couldn’t get enough variety of food (policies), they’d go to another restaurant (Met, Pru, John Hancock, etc.). Likening Nylic’s assets and surplus to the hotel’s safe, the film showed it guarded in the 5th sub-basement vaults.

Business Screen printed some frames from the cartoon. Interestingly, they were in colour; generally frame grabs or drawings that appeared in the publication, ads excepted, were in black and white.

The cartoon was 13 minutes long and printed on Kodachrome in 16 millimetre. It was copyrighted on January 15, 1954. While Big Tim may have been animated for Wilding at UPA, the designs from Family Jubilee hardly look like anything from that studio. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to discover who made it.

Wilding was based out of Chicago and had some heavyweight clients in 1954, including the Ford Motor Company which paid for a 35 mm live-action short in CinemaScope. But this appears to have been the only animated film produced by the company that year.

It’s a shame there are so many industrial cartoons from the 1940s and ‘50s that haven’t been exposed to viewers for years. Perhaps more of them will come to light.