Pop quiz time: name the animation studio of the 1920s that was reputed to be the world's largest. Here's a hint: it wasn't Disney's or Fleischer's. If you guessed the Denver, Colorado-based Alexander Film Company, you are absolutely correct. You are also one of the few people who has ever heard of the Alexander Film Company, a pioneering company whose obscurity has remained constant in large part because it dealt exclusively in the field of commercials.

Alexander Was Ads
It may come as a surprise to some to learn that decades before the advent of television and its reliance on product sponsorship, commercials and public service announcements were a common sight in movie theaters, even in the silent days. Among the first to realize the possibilities of using the then-fledgling motion picture industry as an advertising tool were two entrepreneurial brothers named Julian Donald Alexander and Donald Miller Alexander -- known to associates as J. Don and Don M. As early as the first decade of the century they were creating advertising slides for exhibition in nickelodeons, and by 1922 they had built a self-contained studio in Denver. After a devastating fire destroyed the Denver facility, the company relocated to Colorado Springs in 1928 and constructed a new studio, complete with a soundstage and film processing lab. From there Alexander turned out literally thousands of animated spots (as well as some live-action ones) over the next four decades. Many were national campaigns for clients such as Pepsi, Borden (whose trademark character Elsie the Cow was featured in animated spots), Colgate and Chevrolet, but equally as many for small local advertisers. The company even produced spots for other countries. "These played in theaters throughout the world," says Linn Winstead Trochim who, along with her husband Bob, owns the Alexander Studio's artwork archives. "We have stuff in different languages. A lot of it was done for South America."

At its peak in 1951, Alexander claimed to have 24,000 accounts, with its ads showing in 10,000 theaters. "The theaters showed a lot of animation for commercial products," Bob Trochim says. "In the town I was from we used to have cartoon days on Saturdays, when they'd show cartoons all day, and there'd be commercials in between from local products and nearby towns, and I did not realize they were not done by the major [studios]."

There was a good reason the work done by Alexander looked like Hollywood-quality cartooning: in addition to the regular animation staff that Alexander employed in Colorado, a work force of some 750 people by the early 1950s, it also turned to the majors in Hollywood for freelance talent. Some of that talent was the best in the industry, including animator Volus Jones, who freelanced for Alexander while working for Disney's (as did Trochim himself, who was then Jones' assistant), Jack Hannah, who at one point directed for Alexander, and even the great Tex Avery. Another Disney talent, T. Hee, designed characters for the studio.

One of Alexander's specialties was creating what it called "playlets," animated situations that would change each week, giving the client an option of having its product seen in fifty-two different "playlets" each year. By keeping the playlets nonspecific to the product, the company could reuse them for different clients. "Pretty much everything was so generic that you could sell dog food and screen doors with the same commercial," notes Trochim. "The content was the dialogue."

Ironically, the company that was built on the foresight of its founders ultimately failed because of lack of foresight. Believing television to be a flash-in-the-pan, the studio never geared up for television production, continuing to rely on theatrical contracts, and even though it turned out some black-and-white spots for TV, its refusal to take the new medium seriously resulted in its closure by the late 1960s. (For the record, animation was not the sole interest of the Alexander brothers: they were also the designers and creators of the Alexander "Eagle Rock" airplane in the 1920s.)