FBI Warning
What follows is a decidedly personal look at the relationship between advertising and television animation in the U.S. Where it is now, how it got there, some thoughts on where it's going, and how we can all thank Ronnie Reagan for where we are today, although not necessarily in that order. Advertising's relationship with TV animation is symbiotic; some may even call it a morbid dependency: love and hate equally mixed, but the need for each other approaching an addict's craving. You've been warned.

Where It Is Now
Television animation as we knew it has changed so completely that it is no longer recognizable as the medium it was as recently as earlier this decade. We've all seen the statistics, best summed up by one simple fact: available weekly national timeslots for TV animation have increased by a factor of nearly 10 since 1980. (Approximately 75 to over 600.) Remember though, that's for available timeslots, most of which are not filled with your latest production; in fact, the overwhelming majority of what's on is a repeat. Nevertheless, there is substantial production of new material to fill these timeslots.

Those of us who ceaselessly toil in the field of animation know all too well that the name of the game is TV. There may be big bucks over the fence in the feature pasture, but the total output pales in comparison to TV in all its forms: broadcast, cable, home video and - it really is TV to the audience - the 'net. And, with the exception of most home video, this veritable feast of cartoons is brought to the tube courtesy of advertisers - those whose appetite for young eyeballs seems insatiable, one bound to take animation to yet new heights of popularity.

Well, folks, it wasn't always this way, and it wasn't that long ago that those of us old enough to remember were bemoaning the slow, painful death of the animation industry. There are a few left from that lean generation of animation (myself included), those who were so crazy that we went headlong into the breach in the '70s while those around us fled to safer and more secure futures in book illustration, greeting card design, live action film, or, in at least one case, baggage handling at JFK. How did an industry left for dead in the '70s manage to fight its way back, to a scale of work unprecedented in its history? First, let's put aside all the deconstructivist theories about the audience changing - that an audience raised on cartoons somehow made it possible for animation to rise phoenix-like from the ashes and become acceptable as grown-up entertainment. The previous two generations were raised on the same diet, perhaps even richer, in the movie palaces of the '30's, '40s and '50s. Yet they fomented no renaissance. So, what happened this time?

History in a Nutshell
To understand better this phenomenon, we need to plunge deep into the past, at least as far back as the '60's. If you were born after 1960, you probably aren't aware that there was no large television animation industry in the '50's. Sure, there are a few old favorites and oddities, and Hanna-Barbera did start near the end, but there was no market in the sense of what developed over the following decades. The whole idea of the Saturday Morning animation ghetto was yet to be born, and it only came about because of a convergence of several forces.