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Contents  [hide]
1 Early years
2 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer characters
3 Golden Age of American animation
3.1 Early years
3.2 Harman and Ising return
3.3 Hanna-Barbera: Tom and Jerry
3.4 Tex Avery
3.5 1950s, CinemaScope
3.6 Later years
3.7 Legacy
4 Notable crew members
5 Productions
5.1 Theatrical cartoon shorts series
5.2 One-shot theatrical shorts
6 See also
7 Notes
8 References
Early years[edit]

To promote their films and attract larger theater audiences, motion picture chains in the 1930s provided many features to supplement the main feature, including travelogues, serials, short comedy subjects, newsreels and cartoons. During the late 1920s, Walt Disney Productions had achieved huge popular and critical success with their Mickey Mouse cartoons for Pat Powers' Celebrity Pictures (distributing for Columbia Pictures). Several other studios, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer among them, took note of Disney's success and began to look for ways to get Disney or compete.
MGM's first foray into animation was the Flip the Frog cartoon series, starring an anthropomorphic talking and singing frog. The series was produced independently for Celebrity Pictures by Ub Iwerks, formerly the head animator at the Disney studio. Celebrity Pictures' Pat Powers had hired Iwerks away from Disney with the promise of giving Iwerks his own studio, and was able to secure a distribution deal with MGM for the Flip the Frog cartoons. The first Flip the Frog cartoon, Fiddlesticks, was released in August 1930,[7] and over two-dozen other Flip cartoons followed during the next three years. In 1933, the Flip character was dropped in favor of Willie Whopper, a new series featuring a lie-telling little boy. Willie Whopper failed to catch on, and MGM terminated its distribution deal with Iwerks and Powers, who had already began distributing their Comi-Color cartoons on their own.[8]
In February 1934 MGM signed a new deal with the Harman-Ising studio, which had just broken ties with producer Leon Schlesinger and the Warner Bros. studio over budget concerns, to work on a new series of high-budget color cartoons.[2] The director team brought with them much of their staff from their time with Schlesinger, including animators and storymen such as Carmen "Max" Maxwell, William Hanna, and brothers Robert and Tom McKimson.[9] (The McKimsons would later return to Schlesinger.) Also following Harman and Ising from Schlesinger was Bosko, a successful character the duo had created for the Warner cartoons.
The first entry in MGM's new Happy Harmonies cartoon seri

Douglas's opinion reiterated the facts and history of the case and reviewed the District Court's opinion, agreeing that its conclusion was "incontestable".[5] He considered five different trade practices addressed by the consent decree:
Clearances and runs, under which movies were scheduled so they would only be showing at particular theatres at any given time, to avoid competing with another theater's showing;
Pooling agreements, the joint ownership of theaters by two nominally competitive studios;
Formula deals, master agreements, and franchises: arrangements by which an exhibitor or distributor allocated profits among theaters that had shown a particular film, and awarded exclusive rights to independent theatres, sometimes without competitive bidding;
Block booking, the studios' practice of requiring theaters to take an entire slate of its films, sometimes without even seeing them, sometimes before the films had even been produced ("blind bidding"), and
Discrimination against smaller, independent theaters in favor of larger chains.
Douglas let stand the District Court's sevenfold test for when a clearance agreement was a restraint of trade, as he agreed they had a legitimate purpose.[6] Pooling agreements and joint ownership, he agreed, were "bald efforts to substitute monopoly for competition ... Clearer restraints of trade we cannot imagine."[7] He allowed, however, that courts could consider how an interest in an exhibitor was acquired and sent some other issues back to the District Court for further inquiry and resolution.[8] He set aside the lower court findings on franchises so that they might be reconsidered from the perspective of allowing competitive bidding.[9] On the block booking question, he rejected the studios' argument that it was necessary to profit from their copyrights: "The copyright law, like the patent statutes, makes reward to the owner a secondary consideration".[10] The prohibitions on discrimination he let stand entirely.
Frankfurter[edit]
Frankfurter took exception to the extent to which his brethren had agreed with the studios that the District Court had not adequately explored the underlying facts in affirming the consent decree. He pointed to another recent Court decision, International Salt Co. v. United States (332 U.S. 392 (1947)) that lower courts are the proper place for such findings of fact, to be deferred to by higher courts.[11] Also, he reminded the Court that the District Court had spent fifteen months considering the case and reviewed almost 4,000 pages of documentary evidence.[12] "I cannot bring myself to conclude that the product of such a painstaking process of adjudication as to a decree appropriate for such a complicated situation as this record discloses was an abuse of discretion", he said.[12] He would have modified the District Court decision only to permit the use of arbitration to resolve disputes.[13]
Consequences[edit]

Movie studios previously charged low rents to exhibitors because they were owned by the studio. When the studios were forced to sell their theaters, the result was higher rental rates charged to exhibitors (rising from an average of approximately 35% to its current level of approximately 50%), so the studios could recoup their expenses.[citation needed] The inability to block-book an entire year's worth of movies caused studios to be more selective in the movies they made, resulting in higher production costs and dramatically fewer movies made. This also caused studios to raise the rates they charged theaters, since the volume of movies fell.