Sutherland Main Street

Will Mrs. Consumer of 1954 choose the Quickchill or the Permafreeze refrigerator? Look at the Permafreeze. New style! Better quality!



Yes, it’s a John Sutherland propaganda cartoon. America! Free enterprise equals freedom! Down with government controls!

The scene is from It's Everybody's Business, a 1954 short funded by DuPont for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The designs in this cartoon are great, though it seems the restored version of the short is a little dark in places. The man behind them was Maurice Noble; he left Warners a week before the Chuck Jones unit was laid off at Warner Bros. for the last six months of 1953. Ex-Warners artists Abe Levitow, Emery Hawkins and Bill Melendez are among the credited animators, and part of the score was provided by Gene Poddany, who had been Carl Stalling’s copyist.

Here’s a little more of Main Street, USA from a darker print.



And here’s Mrs. Consumer and her family at one of the USA’s national parks—funded by taxes, thanks to business competition driving the American economy.



The obligatory flag scene. No background artist is credited but I wonder if it’s Joe Montell. The art direction is by the great Maurice Noble.



Both NBC and CBS were experimenting with colour broadcasts during daytime hours in 1954, with NBC showing a number of industrial films. It’s Everybody’s Business was one of them, airing on Thursday, July 1st at 3 p.m. Business Screen Magazine of August 1954 pointed out:

It is always more difficult to judge color quality of animated films, like It’s Everybody’s Business, because the animator’s tints have always been at his own whim and not subject to comparison with “natural.” In telecasting them, the electronic color trimmer does not feel obliged to constantly “correct” as much. As a result, the film seemed “steadier” in its color than live action films. It demonstrated that animation will probably be a favorite device for colorcasters for some time.

We’ve got a little more on the cartoon in this post. We’ll have more on the Sutherland studio tomorrow.