The guy at the piano played by ear. Yes, this is yet one of I-don't-know-how-many visual puns in Tex Avery's Symphony in Slang (...

Information Please was, in a way, the Jeopardy! of the network radio era. It was a question-and-answer programme that aspired to be not lo...

Chuck Jones very capably uses a variety of limited animation techniques in the Private Snafu short It's Murder She Says... (1945). Her...

Pop culture references of the 1930s and ‘40s were, to a large degree by my experience, still common in the 1960s when I grew up. Some from t...

Jack Benny “interviewing” Jack Benny was a gimmick used early in his radio career. Here’s an example from Radio Guide magazine of March 31,...

Fortune didn’t smile on too many cartoon studios in the early 1960s that tried to break into television. Hanna-Barbera had been the huge su...

UPA didn’t want slapstick or funny animals in its cartoons. Horrors! It was quite happy to inflict, jealous, vengeful or self-pitying childr...

Need a crowd scene? Just use the same drawings a second time. You see it occasionally in the Harman-Ising cartoons released by Warner Bros....

Don’t bother with the Riddler and King Tut to eliminate Batman. Try monsters instead. That was the master plan of Arch Producer Irwin Allen...

Tex Avery didn’t rely on dialogue for many of his gags; think of the huge eye-takes in some of his MGM cartoons. In the 1947 short King-Si...