TV Spots

You couldn’t get much more honest in the name for a company that made commercials for television than TV Spots.

Here are some trade paper ads from 1955 and 1956 showing off some of the designs in the company’s animated commercials. You can click on each strip to make it larger.



TV Spots got into the television business when there were only two stations in Los Angeles, and only one was allowed to air commercials. It was the brainchild of animator Bob Wickersham. He had been a cartoonist in high school and contributed to the Los Angeles Times as early as 1926. His obit in the April 30, 1962 issue of Broadcasting says he joined Walt Disney Productions in 1932, and moved to Columbia/Screen Gems in 1941. In 1943, Wickersham was responsible for the art in a campaign by Mobil Oil about “gremlins.” And we learn from the Oxnard Press-Courier of April 25, 1946 he drew sequences for the Rosalind Russell movie “She Wouldn’t Say Yes” and “To Each Their Own” starring Olivia de Havilland.

The obit states he organised TV Spots, Inc. in 1947. Evidently business wasn’t altogether good for a while, as his name turns up on screen at Warner Bros.

Now, Shull Bonsall enters into the picture. Bonsall had money and he liked to play hardball with it. He bought Consolidated Television Sales in 1954 (Variety, March 3) which gave him ownership of 195 Crusader Rabbit cartoons made several years earlier by Alex Anderson and Jay Ward. His next move was buying control of TV Spots in 1955 from Wickersham (Broadcasting, Aug. 8) and shipping the company president to New York, putting creative director Sam Nicholson in charge of production. As you might guess, Wickersham knew he had no future at his old company. In 1956, he became president and partner of Chadwick, Inc., in New York, then left two years later to work as the art director for TV commercials produced by Leo Burnett in Chicago. Wickersham died in 1962 at age 51.

Bonsall had big expansion plans for TV Spots. He owned the old Crusader Rabbit cartoons and wanted to make new ones. As Keith Scott’s book The Moose That Roared explained, Bonsall threatened Ward and Anderson with lawsuits to drive them into bankruptcy if they didn’t sell him all rights to the Crusader characters. Defeated, they accepted a paltry $50,000. Bonsall then announced he was making new Crusader cartoons (Crusader’s voice, Lucille Bliss, received her own my-way-or-the-highway threat from Bonsall. She chose the highway. She claimed Bonsall mounted a campaign against her in revenge).

Regardless of what was going on behind the scenes, TV Spots was turning out some pretty attractive, modern-looking commercials for clients on both coasts. In 1958, the company’s animation director was veteran Paul Sommer, who soon accepted an offer from Hanna-Barbera.

H-B was getting rave reviews for its half-hour syndicated shows and more ratings success with the debut of The Flintstones on ABC in fall 1960. Animation in prime time was suddenly hot, and Bonsall wanted a chunk of the potential profits. He set up a division of TV Spots called Creston Studios to make television cartoon series. After animating for Leonardo Productions’ King Leonardo and his Short Subjects for Saturday morning, a handful of Popeyes for syndication directed by Gerry Ray, and some Fractured Fairy Tales for Jay Ward, the studio broke into prime-time in 1961 with Calvin and the Colonel. Creston’s “nifty animation” was praised in a review of the debut show in Variety, but chided “No matter how you slice it, it’s still Amos ‘n’ Andy, and times have changed.” The show lasted a season.

Suddenly, the prime-time animation craze was over. Creston proposed a satire series called Muddled Masterpieces (Fractured Fairy Tales ripoff, anyone?), another about a talking dog called Shaggy Dog Tales, and Sir Loin and Socrates, an English version of Don Quixote, all designed by Norm Gottfredson. None of them sold. By February 1963, Nicholson was producing The Funny Company for former ad agency senior v-p Ken Snyder; Broadcasting of Feb. 11 stated he had been creative director of TV Spots since 1953. Creston Studios, the corporate name for TV Spots since late 1961, was no longer listed in the Radio Television Daily Yearbook. It was bye-bye Bonsall.