Now, a Drawing From Our Sponsor

Animated television commercials in the 1950s had great designs, clever copy and fine voice-overs. They were made, for the most part, by artists who had worked on theatrical shorts.

Television Age magazine included stories or blurbs about cartoon commercial production and, best of all, one-frame samples.

These are from the Feb. 8, 1960 issue. To the right is José, the spokes-monkey for Kellogg’s Cocoa Krispies. Eventually, the role was taken over by Snagglepuss. Kellogg’s was sponsoring his cartoons on The Yogi Bear Show, and other Hanna-Barbera characters were already featured in commercials, some of them animated by Ed Love.


It’s a shame high-resolution copies of the trade paper aren’t on-line.

We’ve spoken about Ray Patin Productions in this post; Patin had been at Disney, then moved to Warner Bros. The issue reported:

RAY PATIN PRODUCTIONS, INC.
Completed: IXL Food Co. (food products), Armand Productions; Purex Corporation, Ltd. (bleach), Columbia Pictures; Skippy Peanut Butter Div. Best Foods, Inc. (Skippy), GB&B; General Foods Corp. (Jell-O), Y&R; Bardahl Oil Co., Inc. (oil), MMH&H.
In Production: General Mills, Inc. (Cheerios), D-F-S; Johnson & Johnson (Perfron), Y&R.

Bill Melendez was an animation director at Playhouse, run by Ade Woolery of UPA. Former MGMer Jack Zander was connected with Pelican Films for a time. Elektra was started by Abe Liss, who had been at UPA. Ray Favata was a designer at a number of commercial studios in New York, including Tempo in the 1950s and Gryphon in the early '60s. Lars Colonius had worked at Disney and was the man who brought you the nuke-scare cartoon Duck and Cover. Bill Sturm had animated at Fleischer/Famous.

HFH Productions was Dan Hunn, Ronald Fritz and Howard H. Henkin. Henkin was gone by 1961 and working for Fred Niles' new office in New York, so Hunn and Fritz changed into D & R Productions. Hunn, in 1990, was animating on the Jetsons movie for Hanna-Barbera. Bandelier was operated by Robert Stevens, with Dan Bessie, an ex-MGM assistant animation, as director. TV Cartoon Productions was run by Robert Leo Hovorka and Robert J. Mills, former students of the Art League of California. Paul Kim and Lewis Gifford set up a studio bearing their names in 1959.