We're all about the history of rock & roll at BoomtownAmerica.com!
Every week, we present “ROCK REMEMBERED,” a deep dive into the hidden history of rock & roll, the stories behind the artists and songs that changed the world. Join host, “Boomtown Bill” Cross each Wednesday at 7 pm (Eastern) with an encore broadcast on Saturday at noon (Eastern).
Join us this Saturday as we explore "Commercial Jingles That Became Hit Songs!"
The history of made-for-TV cartoons is not a particularly glorious one. The overriding concept from the beginning has been to see how cheaply they can be made, not how entertaining or artistic they can be.
The man to blame or praise is a guy named Alex Anderson. In the late forties, he was toiling away at the Terrytoons cartoon studio in New York. He could see that the days of theatrical cartoons (their home since the birth of movies around the turn of the last century). He had an idea that the future of animation lay with that new medium, television.
Alex went to his boss, Paul Terry, who was also his uncle, with a way to make cartoons on the cheap and sell them to the new local TV stations that were starting to pop up around the country. Uncle Paul liked the idea, but at the time, the output of the Terrytoons studio was distributed to theaters by 20th Century Fox. In those days, the movie studios considered television to be Public Enemy #1. If they caught Terry selling cartoons to TV, they would end his distribution deal, effectively shutting down his studio.
But Uncle Paul did let Alex use some of the people at the studio to help him put together a pilot film. Alex’s first idea was to make the hero of his cartoon series a donkey, but Terrytoons model designer Artie Bartsch didn’t think donkeys lent themselves well to cartoons and instead suggested a rabbit, a small, plucky rabbit.
Anderson then had the idea to pair the rabbit with a bigger sidekick, a tiger. But to help with the comedy, he would switch the traits of the animals, making the rabbit brave and fierce and the tiger cowardly and dumb.
Anderson then needed financial backing, so he teamed up with a guy he’d known since childhood, a California real estate agent with a truly bent sense of humor named Jay Ward. Together, they formed Television Arts Production. Ward also suggested the names Crusader for the rabbit and Rags for the tiger (a play on a then-standard song “Tiger Rag”).
They produced a pilot they called “Comic Strips for Television.” In that pilot, there were two other segments besides Crusader Rabbit. One of those segments featured a Canadian Mountie that Anderson had created, called Dudley Doright. Keep that name in mind.
NBC initially liked the Cusader Rabbit segment and wanted to schedule it on the network. But they changed their mind after TAP went into production. So, Anderson brought on board another partner, Jerry Fairbanks, who actually came up with most of the financing for the project and who had extensive experience selling programs to the fledgling TV stations.
In those early days of TV, there were no reruns, and the Hollywood studios, as mentioned, were reluctant to sell any of their product to TV. In that marketplace, Crusader Rabbit was quickly gobbled up. But production took longer than they first anticipated. So, the project that had begun in 1949 didn’t reach America’s airwaves until September 1950.
To say that Crusader Rabbit was crude is an understatement. The episodes were mostly still illustrations with little to no movement. The gags tended to come from the soundtrack. It was more like illustrated radio. Crusader and his pal lived in a forest village called Galahad Glen, and they got involved in adventures that were called “crusades.” The first involved the pair traveling to Texas, where the state was attempting to wipe out all jackrabbits. Each black-and-white episode ran about 5 minutes and ended with some sort of cliffhanger, like the movie serials that were popular in the 1930s and early 40s.
Yes, the animation was almost non-existent, but Ward and Anderson filled the episodes with plenty of groan-inducing puns, like career criminals Sam Quentin and Al Catraz, and occasional jokes aimed at adults (who they wisely figured might be watching the TV with their kids).
With no competition, Crusader was seen in most markets. 195 five-minute episodes were cranked out from 1949 to 1951, with the reruns keeping the show on most stations well into the mid-1950s.
Anderson and Ward went their separate ways. Eventually, Television Arts Productions was acquired by what we would today call a venture capitalist named Shull Bonsall. Bonsall decided to revive Crusader, this time with better animation and color. He was able to bring back many of the people who had been involved with the first series, including several of the original voice actors.
Bonsall produced an additional 260 episodes, retaining the cliffhanger story structure. These new episodes debuted in the fall of 1958. They did well initially, but Bonsall now had some serious competition.
Former M-G-M animators William Hanna and Joe Barbera (creators of “Tom & Jerry”) had launched their own made-for-TV cartoon factory with the series “Huckleberry Hound,” and Jay Ward himself was back in the cartoon business with a new series he called “Rocky and His Friends.” The success of both those shows (Huck was syndicated and Rocky was on ABC every weekday afternoon) totally overshadowed Crusader. He soon retired to Galahad Glen, and his adventures quickly faded from America’s TV screens.
Alex Anderson has since been acknowledged for creating not only Crusader and Rags, but also Rocky and Bullwinkle and Dudley Do-Right, which he graciously allowed his old pal Jay Ward to take to TV immortality (and a theme park attraction at Universal’s Islands of Adventure).
A small handful of Crusader Rabbit’s adventures from its initial run and the color series have popped up on home video from time to time, but the current owner of the series, Paramount, has no interest in making any of the plucky rabbit’s crusades available any time soon. Your best bet would be to track down some of the older DVDS at a thrift store or auction site like eBay.
No other fashion trend quite represents the “swinging sixties” like the miniskirt!
Hemlines had started to creep up as we moved from the fifties into a new decade, moving up above the knee for the first time since the Roaring Twenties. But it wasn’t until the British Invasion moved the center of fashion from Paris and New York to London that skirt lengths shortened radically and the miniskirt was born.
There is some debate over who really started the trend. Carnaby Street designer Mary Quant gets credit, but there is evidence that she wasn’t the first designer in London to come up with the idea. Regardless, young girls all over the world quickly embraced the design.
Here in the U.S.A., the miniskirt gave school principals fits. Schools across the country broke out yardsticks and spent many a morning measuring skirt lengths and sending home those hussies. Of course, many smart girls would begin by wearing a somewhat longer skirt to get by their parents and school officials at the start of the day. Then, they would head to the girl’s bathroom and readjust the length of their skirts to be as short as they thought they could get away with.
(it will seem totally strange to people under the age of 60, but during that decade most schools did not allow girls to wear slacks to school – dresses and skirts only.)
Despite their length, true sixties’ miniskirts were not tight or form-fitting. Instead, they looked like the simply flared, A-line skirts of the 1950s, just cut shorter.
As this style was not conducive to wearing stockings with garters, the miniskirt also helped popularize the recently introduced pantyhose as well as a variety of colored tights.
Of course, a few designers tried going even shorter with the micromini, and skirt lengths continue to go up and down with each new fashion season, but the miniskirt has never really disappeared from the fashion scene.
Tapestry (1971)
Carole King was already one of rock’s most successful songwriters. But no one could have predicted that when she finally started singing her own songs, she would create one of the best selling albums of all-time by a female vocalist, especially when her only previous album had not climbed higher than #84 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Tapestry has sold more than 25 million copies and is considered one of the top 50 albums ever released by a rock artist.
Together with her then-husband, Gerry Goffin, King had already secured a place in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame co-writing such tunes as:
- Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow
- Take Good Care of My Baby
- Some Kind of Wonderful
- The Loco-Motion
- Chains
- Go Away Little Girl
- Up on the Roof
- One Fine Day
- I’m into Something Good
- Just Once in My Life
- Pleasant Valley Sunday
And so many more.
While King often sang on the demo discs (records produced quickly and only intended to demonstrate the song to potential recording artists), she was reluctant to release an album of her own. Friends, including James Taylor, kept encouraging her. So in the spring of 1970, she released Writer. It stiffed.
Undeterred, the very next year she released Tapestry. It was like a dam bursting. Powered by a monster double-sided single “It’s Too Late” b/w “I Feel the Earth Move,” Tapestry roared up the album charts, becoming the first album by a solo female artist to ever rack up at least 10 million in sales.
She copped four Grammys that year for Album of the Year, Best Female Pop Performance, Song of the Year and Record of the Year. Tapestry remained on the Billboard charts for 313 weeks (second only to Dark Side of the Moon).
Her subsequent albums have been very well received, five of them landing in the Top 10.
There is no question that any essential album collection for a Baby Boomer has to include Tapestry. It’s not “too late” to include it in yours.
Research has shown that negative thinking: holding grudges, resentments and negative thoughts can lead to a decline in cognitive thinking in adults 55 years of age and older.
Research has shown that those who engage in prolonged negative thinking have more amyloid and tau deposits in their brain. Those happen to be the biological markers of Alzheimer’s disease.
Of course, we all have negative thoughts from time to time, but here are some ways to make sure they don’t hang around very long:
- Make a list of all the things you’re grateful for. Can you still see? Can you still walk? Do you have a roof over your head and know where your next meal is coming from? If necessary, write the list out on paper or your computer.
- Take some deep breaths. Believe it or not, that can elevate your mood.
- Watch a comedy, be it a movie, TV show or stand-up special.
- Don’t beat yourself up for having a bad thought. Simply acknowledge it and move on.