Disney shorts during the 1930s typically featured Hollywood luminaries as storybook characters who were often joined by Mickey Mouse on screen, as Mickey was a bona fide celebrity himself. © Disney. All right reserved.

Animation and celebrity have a long mutual history. As far back as 1916, when the art form was younger than Angelina Jolie's latest adoptee, Kinèma Exchange produced films featuring "Charles Chaplin." The merry tramp was soon joined onscreen by animated depictions of contemporary comedian Ben Turpin. Animation and the public perception of celebrities began to evolve together. There was something endearing about seeing beloved entertainers caricatured, and virtually every studio tried their hand at it.

Some celebrities seen in Warner Bros. cartoons had more appearances than some of the studio's animated characters. Jack Benny appeared in eight Warner Bros. cartoons, W.C. Fields nine, Eddie Cantor 11. Laurel and Hardy were in 10 shorts. Jerry Colonna appeared in an even dozen, the same as Bing Crosby and Jimmy Durante. Cartoons, such as The Coo Coo Nut Grove (1936) and Hollywood Steps Out (1941), featured a gala of Tinseltown's elite. One charming effort, The Woods Are Full of Cuckoos (1937), caricatured Hollywood stars as animals.

Disney enjoyed producing shorts during the 1930s that typically featured Hollywood luminaries as storybook characters (Mother Goose Goes Hollywood, 1938), or as toys (Broken Toys, 1935). Often they joined Mickey Mouse on screen, as Mickey was a bonafide celebrity himself (Mickey's Gala Premier, 1933; Mickey's Polo Team, 1936). The Fleischer studio also animated celebrities, though less frequently.

In the 1960s, celebrities appearing in animation largely disappeared from the scene. Hanna-Barbera created its own cartoon celebrities, such as Huckleberry Hound. © Cartoon Network.

In every animated short (with the possible exception of Bingo Crosbyana, 1936), these celebrities were loved. Their physical features and personal foibles were the object of gentle gibes; good-natured pokes that stars might take from their best friends. As we know, Hollywood was rife with promiscuity, addiction, infidelity and other miscreant behaviors for all of its history. The very people animating these short films were among the most aware of these facts, but racy innuendo was stringently off-limits. Publicizing any star-related scandals would have hurt very valuable studio property. Such disclosures would have also counteracted the work of studio publicity agents, who put out countless fires and were often a star's first line of defense.

The same was not true outside of the studio system. Gossip specialists, such as Louella Parsons, Walter Winchell and Hedda Hopper, wielded a mean axe throughout the 1940s and 1950s. Bereft of a cell phone/camera, text messaging capacity, broadband connections, or anything in the media-heavy arsenal that a Perez Hilton possesses, these columnists were able to dig up amazing amounts of dirt on the stars. Many a Hollywood heavy lived in perpetual fear of those journalistic jackals, the forerunners of today's paparazzi.

Yogi Bear was another Hanna-Barbera celebrity. © Cartoon Network.

The scandal sheet dates back to 1916 with Stephen G. Clows' tabloid Broadway Brevities. In later years, magazines such as Confidential, Dare, Whisper and Uncensored titillated the public during the 1950s. Allegations of affairs, crimes and same-sex liaisons among the stars were bandied about with gleeful abandon, keeping publicity agents -- and lawyers -- busy souls indeed. Informants for these magazines often consisted of private investigators, call girls or even rouge publicity agents copping a buck on the sly. Nothing on any website or blog today could match these drugstore smear sheets in terms of mean-spirited ferocity, and they were widely read. Nowhere in the world of theatrical animation could similar sentiments be expressed.

Nothing in any studio would go beyond caricatures of Clark Gable with elephantine ears, Greta Garbo with gargantuan feet or the comical situation between Eddie Cantor, who had five daughters, and Bing Crosby, who had four sons. Warner Bros. continued to produce such harmless films throughout the 1950s (Jack Benny was a favorite guest).

In short, as long as animation was tied to the studio system and used as theatrical filler, it was unlikely that any star would suffer humiliation in any cartoon short. Disney's independence meant that they were free to take such shots as they wished, but the studio was concerned with presenting a clean image and, by the 1940s, was pretty much done with depicting celebrities in any case. Their last such extravaganza was the Donald Duck short, The Autograph Hound (1939).

With the demise of the Hollywood studio system around 1960, the greatest stars in the world were free agents and major targets. No studio spin doctors were there to soften the blows, and the tabloids began a field day. The romantic imbroglio concerning Elizabeth Taylor, Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds, which began in 1959, consumed enough ink and paper to deplete the world's existing resources. When Liz dumped Eddie for Richard Burton in 1964, it is likely that the deforesting of the Amazon also began at that point. (Note: For those of you not familiar with this chronology of spouse-stealing chicanery, ask your grandparents; I have a word limit. You'll know what I mean when your grandkids ask you questions like who "Bennifer" was. -- Dr. T.)