In 1941, a number of animators at the Walt Disney studios walked out on the job, effectively going on strike. At issue was the question of unionization, which some employees demanded as a way to guarantee their rights and fair pay. Disney, who had long propagated the notion of his shop as one big, happy family, was infuriated by the strike, and stubbornly held out for more than a month. By the time the strike ended, the Disney studio lost nearly half its workforce.

The artists who left Disney in the wake of the strike—whether by choice or as a result of having been fired—scattered to other studios (and in some cases, other careers) around town. Preston Blair and Ed Love went to MGM, where they would work closely with Tex Avery on some of that director’s most notable cartoons; also joining MGM were Kenneth Muse and Ray Patterson, who went to work for Hanna-Barbera, animating the Tom and Jerry series. Bill Melendez (later known for animating Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts comic strip) and Maurice Noble (who was later closely associated with Chuck Jones) eventually made their way to Warner Bros. Walt Kelly left and moved to the newspaper funny pages, creating the influential comic strip Pogo. And three former Disney employees—David Hilberman (who left post-strike), Zach Schwartz (who had been fired from Disney the year before the strike), and Stephen Bosustow (who actually had been fired by the company twice, the second time in 1941)—formed a brand-new studio, one that would become a bastion of creativity and innovation in the 1950s.

Their studio, which started out its life in 1943 under the unwieldy name Industrial Film and Poster Service, announced itself with the release of the 1944 propaganda cartoon Hell-Bent for Election, which was commissioned by the United Auto Workers to drum up support for Franklin Roosevelt’s fourth reelection campaign. The cartoon, designed by former Disney animators John Hubley and Bill Hurtz (who were fired from the company post-strike), was directed by Chuck Jones, but Jones’ employer, Leon Schlesinger, would not allow them to use Warner Bros.’ animation facilities after-hours to make the cartoon because of its controversial political nature. Instead, Industrial Film and Poster Service agreed to make the film, and in a matter of mere weeks cobbled together a fully-functioning studio to produce the cartoon.

The success of Hell-Bent provided more opportunities for the fledgling studio’s head trio, and their company, rechristened United Film Productions in 1944, was off and running. In those early years, in addition to an ongoing contract with UAW, the studio’s output was largely government-subsidized, as UFP was contracted to produce a number of training films for the armed forces. These instructional films were designed largely to relay important concepts to recruits, some of whom were not literate enough to understand them without help. The animation worked in keeping soldiers’ attention, entertaining them while they learned what they needed to know. UFP produced several Private Snafu shorts (based on scripts largely conceived by children’s book author Dr. Seuss), and in the process demonstrated the beginnings of a new, highly stylized type of animation that had rarely been seen before.

In 1945, UFP incorporated and became United Productions of America. By the end of the next year, Bosustow—with the help of investors including Hubley—bought out Schwartz and Hilberman and gained control of UPA. Bosustow, searching for new opportunities outside of government work, contracted with Columbia Pictures to produce animated cartoons after the studio shut down its own animation branch, Screen Gems, in 1946. Following in the steps of other studios (Warner’s Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes, Disney’s Silly Symphonies, etc.), UPA’s new series of shorts for Columbia was christened “Jolly Frolics.” At Columbia’s insistence, UPA initially took over Screen Gems’ aging The Fox and the Crow series, producing three cartoons featuring the characters. All three shorts were directed by Hubley, who as part of his investment in UPA had been named its creative head; he would later be assigned as “supervising director” and eventually head his own unit as the studio expanded.


(Gerald McBoing-Boing)
In 1949, the crew at UPA—which by this time had expanded to include another former Disney animator, Art Babbitt (creator of Goofy and sworn enemy of Walt)—convinced Columbia to let them create a new character. Tired of working with animal figures, Hubley worked with screenwriter Millard Kaufman to craft a severely nearsighted, crotchety old man whom they dubbed Mr. Magoo. The studio recruited actor Jim Backus to provide the character’s voice, and threw in a bear as a concession to its wary distributor. The resulting cartoon, The Ragtime Bear, was a smash, and the character of Mr. Magoo would become the face of UPA, appearing in a series of more than four dozen cartoons spanning the entire decade of the 1950s. Magoo would go on to win two Academy Awards for Best Short Subjects (Cartoons), for 1955’s When Magoo Flew and 1956’s Magoo’s Puddle Jumper. The character later found even greater fame on television in the 1960s and 70s.

In 1949, Dr. Seuss approached UPA with a new character concept, one that Bosustow immediately seized upon for the studio. The character, a mute boy named Gerald McBoing-Boing, was something of an anomaly, only able to communicate through a myriad of sound effects. The concept practically begged for a dynamic visual presentation, and luckily, it got it from Robert “Bobe” Cannon, an innovative artist who had worked on Chuck Jones’ modernistic Warner Bros. cartoon The Dover Boys at Pimiento University in 1942 (a short long cited as a definitive precursor to and influence on UPA’s filmography). Bosustow assigned Cannon to direct the project, and he worked closely with Hurtz to design a minimalistic, flat world for young Gerald. The resulting cartoon, simply titled Gerald McBoing-Boing and released in 1950, resonated with moviegoers, and the following year, it became UPA’s first production to win an Oscar. Three more Gerald shorts were released to theaters in the following decade, and like his predecessor Magoo, Gerald also found further success on television, headlining his own CBS series in the late 1950s.

UPA’s success was not found solely in its popular recurring series, however. A number of one-off cartoons produced by the studio are remembered today for their revolutionary artistry and inventiveness. Three of these remain particularly memorable. In 1951, Hubley directed a racy, violent, and deliriously sexy short called Rooty Toot, based on the classic tune “Frankie and Johnny.” In 1953, Hurtz helmed an adaptation of the James Thurber short story The Unicorn in the Garden; this was originally intended to be a segment in a full-length theatrical animated film based on Thurber’s work, but that movie never materialized. Later that year, UPA released an eerie take on the classic Edgar Allan Poe short story The Tell-Tale Heart, narrated with gloomy effectiveness by James Mason.

UPA started out with immense promise, but ultimately, its decline was just as swift as its meteoric rise. The studio’s theatrical heyday only lasted a little over a single decade. Some of the most infested roots of its collapse were found almost in its beginnings. In 1947, when Walt Disney appeared before the House Un-American Activities committee, he labeled David Hilberman a Communist. It did not seem to matter that, by this point, Hilberman no longer even worked for UPA or had any stake in the company—the studio was soon put under investigation by the FBI. Director Hubley (who had been a member of the Communist Party in his youth) and writer Phil Eastman were fired; Eastman’s writing partner, Bill Scott, who was not named in the investigation, was also fired as a result of his association with Eastman. The departure of these three hurt the studio immeasurably. By the end of the 1950s, other notable figures, like Cannon and Bill Melendez, had moved on as well. The heart of the studio went with them.

UPA shuttered its theatrical animation division in 1959, and a year later, Bosustow sold the company to television producer Henry G. Saperstein. To keep UPA up and running, Saperstein turned the focus to television. UPA thrived for a brief time on the small screen with a series of Magoo cartoons and another based on comic strip detective Dick Tracy. In the meantime, the studio also produced the 1962 animated feature Gay Purr-ee. But the quality of later UPA productions never quite matched that of those infinitely fantastical creations of the 1950s, and the memory of that once influential and daring studio began to fade. Still, the legacy of UPA and its brilliant cartoons, crafted by a cadre of immensely talented artists, directors, and writers, cannot be denied. The highly stylized aesthetic that UPA espoused remains an influence on animators, and it’s safe to say that most, if not all, cartoonists working today owe a great debt to the groundbreaking work of those audacious UPA folks.

For a much more detailed and fascinating tome on UPA, check out Adam Abraham’s essential history of the studio, When Magoo Flew: The Rise and Fall of Animation Studio UPA (Wesleyan University Press, 2012).

UPA: The Jolly Frolics Collection is available for rent now through ClassicFlix.

Brandie Ashe no longer eats cold cereal while wearing footy pajamas…but does maintain a love for all things animated. She is one of four passionate classic film authors at True Classics.