The Propaganda Cartoon King

There was a lot more to the animation industry than making entertainment shorts back in the days when studios were creating Bugs Bunny, Tom and Jerry, Mighty Mouse and Popeye cartoons. Smaller outfits were animating commercials or films sponsored by companies or organisations. They experimented in design and movement and produced some entertaining cartoons, attracting veterans from theatrical studios.

My favourite of the industrial studios is John Sutherland Productions. The Sutherland cartoons are entertaining, well-written and well-animated. The studio employed top creative people: designers included Maurice Noble and Tom Oreb; among the animation staff were Emery Hawkins, Phil Monroe and Bill Melendez; voice actors included Marvin Miller, Frank Nelson, Bud Hiestand and Herb Vigran. Les Baxter and Gene Poddany wrote scores, while Bill Scott and Warren Foster were employed as writers. Its main directors were Carl Urbano and George Gordon, both of whom were veterans of Fred Quimby’s MGM studio.

Like many of the industrial studios, it supplied cartoons to television stations of the early 1950s to run when they pleased; such a practice had gone back to the 1930s. However, Sutherland also managed to have one of his series released along with Tom and Jerry and Droopy by MGM; it happened coincidentally when Quimby dropped the third unit headed by Mike Lah and Preston Blair.

There was only one problem. While the Sutherland cartoons were entertaining, they weren’t entertainment. The ones MGM released were bought and paid for by the Alfred P. Sloan foundation to push a big business/small government agenda as being the patriotic thing to do for America. Finally, a hue and cry rose up against one Sutherland cartoon as being against Truman government policies (it ridiculed a subsidy programme). Soon, Sutherland’s cartoons weren’t on the MGM schedule any more.

But Sutherland was still making industrial films and commercials (he had success in the 1940s with ads for Chiquita Bananas). His magnum opus was Rhapsody in Steel, a 22-minute release in 1959 with eye-popping designs by Maurice Noble and a score by Dimitri Tiomkin that was released on an LP.

Industrial studios rarely got noticed outside of the trade press, but here’s a story about the Sutherland studio from the Christian Science Monitor of August 29, 1957.

Cartoons Animate Ideas In Business-Subject Films
By Richard Dyer MacCann
Hollywood
Ever since he wrote 108 reels of training and information films for the government during World War II, John Sutherland has been figuring out new ways of putting abstract ideas on the screen.
Most film critics doubt whether this can be done at all. Mr. Sutherland does it with animation. He has become, in a dozen profitable years, one of the leading producers of sponsoring films in Hollywood.
Ideas, especially the interesting ones, often have a tendency to be controversial. Mr. Sutherland, who still writes much of his own material and therefore is something of a reader, has a theory that controversy is a continuous factor in the progress of mankind. The gentleness and love taught by Jesus—and in Oriental countries by Buddha—are constantly striving, he feels, with the intellectual approach to life offered by Plato and Aristotle and with the materialistic, person and economic forcefulness worshiped by Nietzsche and Marx.
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He comes down quickly enough from this dizzy philosophical height to point out that in our time there is a quite different three-sided battle going on—among big government, big labor, and big business. His preference is one of conviction, entirely apart from the source of his sponsorships. He believes that big business, these days, is far more dependably responsible toward the public welfare than are the “politicians” or labor and of governmental agencies.
His statement of the case used to be more extreme than it is now. Mr. Sutherland made a series of animated films several years ago for distribution by Harding College in Arkansas. They stirred up a regular storm of criticism among political scientists because they attacked, with devastatingly burlesque humor, a number of New Deal assumptions. “Fresh Laid Plan,” for example, took the view that agricultural subsidies would lead to bankruptcy for the whole community. In the end, the “professor” had to lock up all the producers in the community for violating his “plan” and body was left to produce.
John Sutherland, Inc., is continuing to make films in the category of “economic education.” They are more broadly informative than the older ones, and less likely to irritate people of a different persuasion. “You can’t tell people anything, anyway,” Mr. Sutherland says. “You can’t preach to them on film. All you can do is present information from a point of view and in a manner the audience has never seen or thought about before. If it’s reasonable, then the audience will accept it and perhaps be stimulated to participate more in public affairs.”
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An admirable example of his latest work in this field is “It's Everybody's Business.” In this 20-minute animated Technicolor film, a seller of ladies’ hats in colonial times is compared with a seller of refrigerators in modern days. Economic freedom and competition are the abstract heroes of the story. There is just enough fun in it to keep everybody delighted—as when the newest model of the refrigerator has space in the rear for keeping ladies’ fur coats during the summer. And there is some especially stunning animation explaining how investors’ money keeps factories going.
“The Story of Creative Capitalism,” now completed and ready for release, is in the same groove—with more of a Disney touch. Alf the Elf explains capitalism to a sad young man who thinks he’s useless. Even his insurance policy and savings account make him a participant in big business, he is assured. Both of these films were sponsored by E.I. du Pont de Nemours Company and distributed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Among the 61 films in the current catalogue—some of them live action, some cartoons, some a combination of both—are advertising and sales promotion items on electric lift-trucks, meats for babies, bananas, frozen foods, arc projection equipment, carpeting, wood, and industrial research. Occasionally, pictures are made simply to impress retail dealers with the best way to handle a national product.
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In the wider field of public relations, Mr. Sutherland has won nine different awards for an educational film (sponsored by General Electric) called “A Is for Atom,” and three more for “The Atom Goes to Sea,” “Horizons of Hope” (cancer research) and “What Makes Us Tick” (New York Stock Exchange) have won further prizes.
“The Story of a Main Street Merchant” (J.C. Penney) undertakes to dramatize a company’s employee policy, and, in a more specialized way, “The Dragon Slayer” (du Pont) describes in animation a whole series of employee benefit plans. “The Littlest Giant” traces national wealthy to the constructive force of consumer credit.
One of the most entertaining of Mr. Sutherland’s excursions into abstractions is a 16-minute combination of live action and animation he did for the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. In brightly rhymed couplets, a narrator explains the new electronic bookkeeping and billing system “Behind Your Telephone Bill.”
Mr. Sutherland has three notable new enterprises well under way. Ready for release this winter will be a film about the men who are building the new national expressways. Under exploration are two new sponsored films about physical chemistry, in cooperation with the California Institute of Technology, for use in college classrooms. And in preparation for possible production next year is a feature-length explanation of the discovery and meaning of “The Dead Sea Scrolls.” This is a project which will test to the full John Sutherland’s 65-man organization and his experience in presenting abstract ideas on the screen.

Sutherland’s studio carried on all the way into the early 1990s. Perhaps his studio’s best-known work in the later years was “The Most Important Person” vignettes that ran on the Captain Kangaroo show.

While the political leanings in his cartoons may not be to everyone’s taste, the shorts do deserve to be preserved. Their designs are fine examples of mid-‘50s art, and there’s enough humour to make them enjoyable to watch.

You can find an excellent article on the Sutherland studio, with quotes from former co-workers, and more biographical material by going to this web page.