Other Competitors
Similar studios flourished throughout the United States, notably the Jam Handy Company based in Michigan, which created animated commercials and industrial films. Mainstream Hollywood even tried to get into the act for a while in the early 1940s through a company called Cartoons, Ltd., which was built on the remnants of Ub Iwerks' Beverly Hills studio by a former Schlesinger and Disney animator named Paul Fennell. Two of Fennell's young staffers, Jerry Brewer and Ed Benedict, began developing outside advertising ideas with the boss' blessing.

"They were elaborate theatrical commercials, among the first in Technicolor with original music recorded live for the specific project," recalled Benedict, who would later achieve renown as the designer of practically all of Hanna-Barbera's early television characters. "The Liggett & Myers Tobacco Company had 'the smoke that satisfies,' so we were going to do 'The Music That Satisfies.' The American Tobacco Company owned Lucky Strike and they had the Hit Parade, so we were going to have 'The Hit of the Month.' We had Esso Gas Corporation and Sunkist Corporation, we never got turned down once!"

Not by the advertisers, anyway. The rejection, according to Benedict, came from the exhibitors. "We never found anybody to release the pictures," he explained. "None of the studio theaters would do it. There were independent theaters, and they would have, but there were not enough of them. The clients were willing to spend the money, but they wanted a lot of theaters." Except for an unreleased ad produced on spec for Richfield Oil and a Technicolor one-minute commercial for a pension plan called "Thirty Dollars Every Tuesday" -- a spot Benedict described as "successful as hell" when it was shown at Hollywood's Pantages Theater -- the Benedict and Brewer commercial collaboration soon fell through.

Going Major
During the 1950s, major animation companies began dabbling in animated television commercials (in fact, for most of the decade, commercials constituted the only original animation on television). In the late 1940s, in fact, UPA had beat every other studio to the punch by turning out a TV commercial for Southern California Ford dealerships, directed by Bobe Cannon, which utilized Dr. Seuss characters! At Disney's, veteran animator and director Charles A. "Nick" Nichols was in charge of the studio's TV commercial unit, developing such original characters as "Bucky Beaver" for Ipana Toothpaste and "Fresh-Up Freddie" (who was a bird) for 7-Up. Commercials quickly proved to be lucrative propositions. "They [7-Up] spent two-and-a-half million dollars on their TV commercials," remembered Paul Carlson, who was Nichols' assistant in the unit. "I think they did 26 one-minute commercials at $100,000 apiece. And we usually handed out the animation to the staff artists at Disney, but they would do the work at home."

Meanwhile at MGM, Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera were producing spots for such clients as General Mills, Schlitz Beer, Proctor and Gamble and Pall Mall cigarettes, all done on the sly, without the approval, or even the knowledge, of the studio's then-division head Fred Quimby. Elsewhere, animator Bill Melendez got his first taste of working for Peanuts by animating Charlie Brown introducing the 1956 Ford Falcon.

Amazing Cascade
Much of the most memorable cartoon commercial work of the 1950s and '60s, however, was created by a small, independent company called Cascade Studios. Like Alexander, Cascade had a knack for attracting major studio artists who were in between jobs or simply trying to supplement their incomes. Looney Tunes director Robert McKimson went to the studio for six-months in 1953 after Warner Bros. had shut down its cartoon unit while waiting to see if 3D filmmaking was going to become the wave of the future. (When it became clear that it wasn't, the studio reopened in January 1954 and continued turning out cartoons in glorious 2D.) In 1955, Cascade got a major creative boost when Tex Avery joined its ranks, having just left the Walter Lantz studio. Avery went to work on some of the most memorable cartoon campaigns in history, including "The Frito Bandito" and the disaster-prone cockroaches that put Raid insect spray on the map. Avery remained at the commercial shop for the next two decades.