Television Oddities: Justice League of America (1997)

 

Television Oddities title card

Today, dear readers, I want to take you back. Back to a time when superhero media was no where as prevalent as it is today. Back to the ramshackle days of the mid-to-late 1990s, when superheroes weren't blowing up international box offices and were still largely the denizens of comic book shops, toy boxes, video game consoles and Saturday morning TV. With maybe the occasional evening drama or big budget movie to serve as an exception to the rule.

It was into this environment that this pilot was made. After the ambitious but ultimately doomed 1990 series The Flash, and 1993's rousing success of Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, DC Comics was still interested in continuing to showcase their characters on TV. That's when a pilot for CBS was greenlit for one of DC Comics' premiere teams, The Justice League of America.

Group shot of the cast of Justice League of America.

Now, this is kind of an infamous pilot in some circles. And it's been talked about a lot. But many of the videos and blog posts I've encountered about it seem to mostly be the same thing. They all just kind of seem like comic book fanboys kvetching about how the pilot, and particularly the cast, don't match perfectly with their platonic ideal of what a Justice League of America television show should be. I'm hoping to take a different tack and cover both why it didn't work from a comics fan perspective and why it just doesn't pass muster as a pilot.

Part of me wants to give you a “quick-and-dirty” run down of the history of the Justice League, but that would be a bit much. So, I've decided to save all that for a different post and focus on the one version of the Justice League that this pilot is ostensibly based on.

In 1987, DC Comics wanted to relaunch the Justice League of America. This came right after a big event story titled Crisis on Infinite Earths, which changed the DC Universe to a large degree. And which they were now using as an excuse to try to clean up and revamp their big name characters. Origin stories were retold in different ways. Wonder Woman was relaunched completely. The Flash was a different person. A lot going on. Now, DC wanted to relaunch the JLA with all the big name characters. The last version didn't have any of them (I'll explain that some other time) and it didn't work out well. There was just one problem and it was that all the big name characters were being relaunched too. The editors of those comic books told the editor of Justice League to kindly keep their hands off. So, writers Keith Giffen, J.M. DeMatteis and artist Kevin Maguire reaching for whoever was available. They ended up with a cast of lesser lights, newbies and characters who were being tried for a revival. The cast changed but a general line-up would be something like Martian Manhunter, Green Lantern (the Guy Gardner one), Captain Atom, Rocket Red, Blue Beetle, Booster Gold, Fire and Ice. They had a couple of tricks up there sleeves, though. One is that they maintained the sense of scope for their team even without Superman in their ranks by making the team official. The Justice League was rechristened the Justice League International and was now officially sanctioned by the United Nations. So, now they had to deal with global politics too. The other was the philosophy for the JLI. The idea was that the League would be a place where superheroes could act like people complete with flaws, foibles and rough edges. Some became fast friends, others grated on each others' nerves. And a lot of these interactions would be leveraged towards humor. Giffen, DeMatteis and Maguire essentially created possibly the first superhero workplace comedy.

The comic that introduced the Justice League International.

It was wildly popular. Popular enough for Justice League International to be spun into two series Justice League America and Justice League Europe. Plus a quarterly book they would share.

This was the Justice League I largely grew up with. It's also the Justice League that this pilot is supposedly based on.

Supposedly . . .

We start out with Tori Olafsdotter aka Ice giving a documentary-style confessional to a camera about her lack of confidence and how she never expected to end up a superhero.

In comics, Ice is Tora Olafsdotter and she hails from a race of Nordic “Ice Gods”. Here, she's a meteorologist with self-esteem issues who works for Dr. Eno at the Eno Institute. They are tracking a shurricane headed to New Metro City. A storm that has been predicted by a cryptic individual known as The Weatherman.

Ah, New Metro City. Of all the fake cities associated with DC superheroes, this one seems the fakest. Somehow the city is near a desert and a waterfront and has some sort of film/TV industry going on and yet has no truly noteworthy character. It's not gloomy like Gotham, awe-inspiring like Metropolis or bustling like Central City. It just kind of is.

Then we get another confessional featuring Barry Allen aka The Flash. The Barry Allen we know from the comics and recent TV shows is a forensic scientist. This one is unemployed. And he's seemingly going out of his way to communicate that he is basically “Joe Shmoe”. He talks about how he likes to go bowling and watch football on the tube and all that. And then we're treated to a scene of Barry's landlord evicting him from his apartment, including throwing his stuff out of a second-story window. Right before Barry has to race off and deal with the rogue hurricane.

Next the camera trains itself on Guy Gardner, aka Green Lantern. There have been a number of different Green Lanterns in the comics. This version seems to be three different ones squished together into one character. For a more accurate take on the Guy Gardner version, watch 2025's Superman movie. Anyway, he laments that Barry gets to have such an uncomplicated life while his is so complex. We then see him on a date trying to make up with his girlfriend Cheryl, who apparently is angry because he keeps disappearing to save the city. And then he disappears to save the city.

I feel like this will go a long time if I keep doing this as a blow-by-blow.

To keep things short, we are introduced to two more heroes via on-camera confessional. One is B.B. DaCosta aka Fire. In comics, Beatriz DaCosta, a Brazilian supermodel and secret agent with fire powers. Here, she's a struggling actress. The other is Ray Palmer aka The Atom. Here he's a science teacher who can shrink down in size. In the comics . . . actually, Ray's pretty much spot on. Except he's a college professor instead of a science teacher.

The Justice League right before they run off to the final battle. 

The confessionals continue throughout the pilot. The plot becomes about finding and stopping the Weatherman, who is manipulating the weather while dealing with their own personal struggles. Barry keeps looking for a job. Guy keeps trying to get back together with Cheryl. B.B. Doesn't struggle so much with pursuing acting as being pursued by a guy she meets at an audition who's way too young for her. Ray deals with his growing attraction to Tori while Tori deals with her confidence issues. This is also an origin story for Tori as she gains ice powers from being zapped by the Weatherman's machine.

To aid Tori in her quest to control her powers, she's brought to the Justice League's mysterious, shadowy leader/mentor, The Martian Manhunter. He's played by David Ogden Stiers, of M*A*S*H fame. He's got an amazing voice for the role, but he's more than a little, shall we say, paunchy. The pilot uses Martian Manhunter very sparingly anyway. The two times he leaves the League's secret underwater headquarters, it's shape-shifted into someone else.

David Ogden Stiers as The Martian Manhunter

As for the Weatherman . . . I'm just going to spoil it up front. The Weatherman is Tori's boss Dr. Eno, played by Miguel Ferrer. They tried to do a fake-out thing where one of Tori's co-workers is hinted to be the Weatherman. But anyone watching should have figured it out. Because there are only two actors in the whole cast that seem capable of projecting enough gravitas to be a supervillain. One is David Ogden Stiers, who is already playing Martian Manhunter. The other is Miguel Ferrer.

So, I'm going to say something that would be considered blasphemy in some comic book circles: the problem with this pilot was not the lack of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. Adding them to this specific pilot would not have improved anything (imagine Barry complaining about not having a job while billionaire Bruce Wayne is right there). And under normal circumstances and with proper characterization, the characters they did have are good characters. After all, Justice League International was able to succeed using a group of characters who are even lower tier than this (Note for the uninitiated: The Flash and the Atom are generally considered to be bigger characters than, say, Blue Beetle or Booster Gold). And most regular people and network executives would not be comparing it to a comic book.

The problem is that it's just a bad pilot.

I mean, the costumes are a problem and the special effects are a problem. But a further problem is that it's just so generic. The city they're in is generic. The villain is generic.  The characters feel like the generic character types you'd pick if you were doing “Five young people getting by in the big city”. There's the guy with relationship problems, the guy who has trouble holding down a job, the struggling actress and two varaiations of the nerd with self-confidence issues. They're clearly trying to run with the same “What if superheroes were human beings with feelings” approach as the comic book and seem to have circled around again to “What if superheroes' personal lives were kind of boring and mundane”. The scope has gone downright local and domestic. And they're relying on trends of 1990s television to make it work. Instead of a workplace comedy like the original JLI, they went with a friend group dynamic like the NBC show Friends. And while the confessional bits may remind modern people of The Office, back then it would have been considered evocative of the MTV reality show The Real World.

The final line-up sans Martian Manhunter and including Ice.

But for some reason I still find it kind of charming. Because it reminds me of a time earlier in my life when depicting the Justice League didn't have quite so many rules attached to it.

Anyway, this pilot never aired in the United States. But I believe it did air in some places overseas. And bootlegs of it did start popping up on the comic con circuit shortly thereafter. If you're morbidly curious, I found it online at Dailymotion.

Cartoon Stars Re-Animated: Felix the Cat.

 

Cartoon Stars Re-Animated title card

There's a famous quote by Walt Disney that goes “I only hope that we never lose sight of one thing-that it was all started by a mouse”.

And that may be true of Disney's huge business empire. However, in cartoons before there was a mouse there was a cat.

The artform of the animated cartoon started before Disney and a lot of others came on the scene. The concept first arose in the teens (uh, the decade runnng from 1910 to 1919. There really isn't a non-awkward term for this decade). Much of it grew out of the world of newspaper cartooning and comic strips. One of the earliest movers and shakers in the animated cartoon world was Winsor McKay, cartoonist of the comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland, and creator of the animated Gertie the Dinosaur. William Randolph Hearst, newspaper magnate and owner of the King Features comic strip syndicate, even started his own animation studio. But as the teens moved into the '20s, we saw some of the old studios go under and new ones arise. It was at this time that we saw the rise of Pat Sullivan Studios.

Pat Sullivan was Australian and had lived a rather checkered past before coming to the U.S. and becoming a newspaper cartoonist. Sullivan was working to turn some of the comic strips he worked on into animated cartoons when he met a young cartoonist named Otto Messmer. Messmer was only learning the basics of cartoon animation when Sullivan met Messmer but as Messmer got better and better, Sullivan gave him more and more responsibility for the cartoons until he stopped drawing them altogether. Though, he continued taking credit for all of Messmer's work.

It was under Messmer's pen that gold was struck in 1919. With the studio being particularly busy, Sullivan prompted Messmer to create a cartoon at home on his free time (Sullivan really isn't beating any “bad boss” allegations, is he?). What Messmer created was a cartoon titled Feline Follies, which starred a black cat that at the time was called Master Tom. Paramount loved it, which netted Pat Sullivan Studios a contract to be part of their Paramount Screen Magazine that aired before Paramount feature films. Moreover, the public seemed to love the little black cat as well. And over subsequent cartoons, the character would be developed further in design and would get a new name.

An early Felix the Cat

He became Felix the Cat. And Felix would go on to be one of the biggest cartoon stars of the 1920s. He also went on to be one of the first highly merchandised cartoon stars in history. Sullivan would license out the character to numerous different parties. Felix toys would be manufactured. A Felix comic strip would be developed (back then, it usually went the other way. A comic strip first and then an animated cartoon) which Messmer worked on for years. Musical acts would write and record songs that mentioned Felix.

Why was Felix so successful. Well, one of the big things was that he had “personality”. A lot of animated cartoons back then were mostly just strings of visual gags and lots of motion for about six minutes. The characters weren't characters yet even in the strictest sense. But “personality animation”, something Walt Disney specialized in and propelled his cartoon empire, wasn't really a thing yet. But people saw the beginnings of it with Felix. One of the big things that hit with people was “the walk”. When Felix met with an obstacle, he would do this specific walk. Head down, hands clasped behind his back, hunched forward and eyes narrowed. It was a thinking walk. Felix had hit a roadblock, was disappointed, but was thinking of a way around it. This was one of the first suggestions that an animated cartoon character had some kind of internal life. (Here's a fan recreation of the Felix walk done by FTF the Toonist).

The surreal gags and animation probably helped too. The cartoons of the 1920s were big on surreal gags. One thing Felix frequently did was detach his tail and transform it into other things like a telescope or a walking stick. He would also sometimes interact with things in the cartoon that weren't supposed to be physical parts of the environment. Like, he'd get surprised and a bunch of question marks would appear above his head, and then he'd climb up onto the question marks. One of my favorite early Felix cartoons is probably Comicalamities, in which Felix interacts with his own animator (which was much more common in 1920s cartoons than you may think).

Before we move on from Felix's original run, I think maybe we should stop and acknowledge that I may have been making all this sound a lot better than it was. Largely, because I've been leaving out elements that were just there as part of a less enlightened era.

Yes, the cartoons were successful. We already acknowledged that Sullivan, though a shrewd businessman, probably wasn't a very good boss. The other thing we need to acknowledge is that Felix and a lot of other 1920s and early 1930s cartoon characters drew elements and mannerisms from a type of show that is very fairly maligned now. That is, minstrel shows and the “pickaninny” blackface stereotypes therein. It's not just Felix, either. There's a lot of it in Mickey Mouse too. Heck, Harman and Ising's character Bosko pretty much took the subtext and made it text. Even the white gloves many cartoon characters wear have roots in costuming used in minstrel shows, despite them having an actual purpose in setting their hands apart from bodies that were often rendered in all black (note: Felix somehow side-stepped the white gloves). The thing is that, back then, it was an easy way of communicating that a character was happy and cheerful and mischevious to an audience largely made up of white people who didn't know how awful they were being.

So now, with that out of the way . . .

Felix the Cat did not survive the transition to sound cartoons. A number of studios hesitated on transitioning to sound and it really hurt them. It hurt Pat Sullivan Studios a fair bit. Mind you, the failure of Pat Sullivan Studios was exacerbated by Sullivan's alcoholism and his failing health after the death of his wife.

Revivals were attempted. The first was by Van Beuren Studio, another studio that definitely existed but would not last a long time. They licensed Felix for three cartoons in their Rainbow Parade series. Those cartoons were Felix the Cat and the Goose that Laidthe Golden Egg, Neptune's Nonsense, and Bold King Cole. The first of these cartoons came about in 1936. To a large extent, these cartoons traded the more surreal elements of 1920s cartoon with fantasticism. Felix found himself fighting pirates to save a magical goose, walking around underwater and meeting King Neptune, and helping a braggart nursery rhyme king from being bedeviled by the ghosts of his ancestors. These cartoons didn't really create a long term revival for Felix. Maybe a better takeaway for them is that cartoon revivals have been attempted for a lot longer than a lot of people think.

In 1953, Official Films purchased the Sullivan-Messmer shorts and gave them new soundtracks, distributing them to home movie and television networks.

In 1958, a new Felix the Cat television series premiered. This one was headed up by Joe Oriolo, who had been Messmer's assistant and taken over the Felix comic strip (he was also one of the creators of Casper the Friendly Ghost). This cartoon, made by Paramount Cartoon Studios and distributed by Trans-Lux Entertainment, saw a much less mischevious Felix get into numerous adventures as a number of villains like the Professor, Rock Bottom and the robotic Master Cylinder try to steal Felix's magic bag of tricks, a carpetbag that can transform and hold anything inside it (the bag of tricks is probably one of Oriolo's most lasting additions to the character). The cartoons were not of the best quality, with severely limited animation and a main character whose personality kind of felt like it was cribbed from Mickey Mouse. Critics and people who remember the earlier Felix the Cat were quick to criticize them as such. None of which mattered, because the cartoons were actually very popular with children at the time.

Title image for 1958 Felix the Cat.

In 1970, Joe Oriolo gained full control of the character. Ownership would later pass to his son Don Oriolo.

In the late 1980s, Don Oriolo teamed with various European animators to create Felix the Cat: The Movie. This movie actually took Felix, his friend Pointdexter, his enemy the Professor and Felix's magic bag to a distant science fantasy world called Oriana to save a princess and stop a dastardly plot by her evil uncle the Duke of Zil. Judging from the trailer, the movie was a big, crazy swing visually. But I can't say more about it because I haven't been able to find a copy to watch. Trust me, I've looked! Anyway, the movie went straight to video and was not a financial success.

Felix the Cat: The Movie poster

In 1994, Felix was brought back to TV again for The Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat. This series tried to combine all the elements from different versions of Felix while doubling down on the surreal imagery from the 1920s cartoons. This was probably seen as a viable option because there were more and more cartoons at the time using more outlandish imagery (think Ren & Stimpy). But this production was troubled and only lasted two seasons. Among other things, word is Don Oriolo kept trying to push the show to be more like the version his father created in the '50s.

A host of characters from The Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat.

Personal note: Of all the different versions of Felix, Twisted Tales is probably my favorite version. With the 1920s cartoons coming in second and the Van Beuren ones third. I just prefer a more mischevious Felix.

Anyway, Baby Felix followed in 2000 for the Japanese market (did I mention that Felix is big in Japan.  You haven't experienced Japanese commercials until Felix the Cat tries to sell you a car). This was a preschool show starring the characters from 1958 show. Then in 2004, there was the direct-to-video Felix the Cat Saves Christmas, again drawing inspiration from the 1958 show.

Baby Felix

And that's basically been it for a while. The earliest Felix cartoons have since moved into the public domain. In a move that's sounding very familiar, the later stuff was bought up by Dreamworks Classic (formerly Classic Media), putting him under the auspices of Universal. Though he is no longer owner, Don Oriolo is still very involved in promoting the character.

I know others may not see it this way because the character is just so old now, but it is a shame that one of the first big cartoon stars never really seemed to find a concrete way forward. A character once seen as having so much personality within his medium is now seen as having almost none (like a certain Mouse we alluded to earlier). On top of that, there's the push and pull between creators who want to have more surreal hijinks and those pushing for simple adventures for kids. It wasn't even the problematic origins of the character mentioned previously (after all, it never hurt Mickey). It was just not deciding on who Felix is in the modern day. At this point, it's easier to find him as a pop culture icon on a t-shirt than as an actual character.

So, what might they be able to do with Felix now?

I don't know. Maybe . . . video games?

There's been an uptick in video games that use very retro cartoon art styles in the last couple of decades. One of the big ones is Cuphead from 2017. There was also a horror game titled Bendy and the Ink Machine from the same year (though I'm not sure I'd like to see a horror version of Felix). And I still see trailers for retro cartoon style video games pop up in my YouTube feed today. There's one specific one with airplanes that keeps popping up as an ad, though I forgot the name of it (probably a sign that the advertising is only half working). On top of that, a rerelease of the Felix the Cat NES and Game Boy games from 1992 and 1993 respectively came out in 2024 from Limited Run. It feels like it's only a matter of time before someone does it with an actual classic cartoon character. And if they can run with the surreal visuals like Cuphead did and not turn it into a riff on the 1958 cartoon, maybe it would have a chance.

Beyond that, I don't think we'll see any big revival of Felix coming soon. He's probably a lot easier to make money on as an image for t-shirts and the like. And I don't see a lot of showrunners lining up to take on a 100+ year old cartoon character.

But still, it's a shame.

Television Oddities: Inner Tube (1987)

 

Television Oddities title card

Okay! So, my series Cartoon Stars Re-Animated continues apace. But it seems that there's a real lack of variety on this blog. So, I have an idea. Why don't we have a series about TV shows that never happened?! Thanks to the wonders of the internet, we now have access to many things that either were shown only once or weren't meant to be seen at all. By that, I mean failed pilots and pitch reels. Here I will draw attention to the existence of such things, talk about them and give my two cents on why they might have failed to become a series. And I call this series (for lack of a better name): Television Oddities.

I thought I'd start with something fairly safe and familiar . . .

Actually, no, I'm starting off with something that may be one of the strangest things you've seen on YouTube in a good, long while.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is Jim Henson's Inner Tube.

Inner Tube started as an idea titled In-TV. The basic idea was meant to be an update of the Muppet variety show concept, but with some parody and satire of the then-current state of cable television (it was 1987). The idea is that instead of being on a vaudeville-esque show with a bunch of oddballs, the guest star would get sucked into the TV and would then have to traverse from channel to channel in order to eventually get out. And it would be as they jumped from channel to channel that they would find themselves in the various sketches and musical acts. At the center of the show would be two characters, mechanics Henry and Jake who run their own fly-by-night cable channel out of the back of an electronics shop.

Jake and Henry from "Inner Tube"

A script for a pilot was written by David Misch with John Candy written in as a possible first guest star (no guest star actually appeared, though). Jim Henson had issues with the original script, though. And creative consultant Larry Mirkin called the original pilot “consistently dark, victimized and pessimisstic” and emphasized that it also seemed unfunny. But Jim Henson thought it still had potential and cut down the script to a ten minute pitch reel which was filmed to be shopped around to different networks.

The pitch reel itself establishes the satirical tone right off with an introduction of the “Inner Tube System” by Kermit the Frog (who assumedly would not be in the regular show), selling us the idea that Inner Tube would have “1500 channels so you can find the right channel to match your mood, your IQ, your income bracket and your clothes”. We're also introduced to the mechanics Henry and Jake. The former a younger, thinner, less savvy fellow and the latter older, fatter, mustachioed and with more of a grasp of the situation they're in. There's also a band of characters playing a wonderfully late-80s song which I'd assume is the theme song. And there are three antagonistic characters introduced. One is Crasher, a violent, punked-out fellow who channels his frustration at not being able to star in every show by jumping from channel to channel and literally crashing their shows. Another is Glitch, a msichevious animated glob-like thing that runs from channel to channel and which Henry and Jake seem very concerned with catching (I'm not sure why). And last was Zaloom, a “channel pirate” played by a human actor (or at least his head and hands), who takes over channels to spread his message about the dangers of technology through unusual means (fun fact: Zaloom is actually played by Paul Zaloom, who went on to play Beakman in the kids' science show Beakman's World).

Glitch

One thing I can't help noticing is that with Kermit's whole spiel and Henry and Jake's whole channel-hopping escapade to catch Glitch, the premise of the pitch reel seems to vary from the confirmed premise that's been chronicled online. Instead of two mechanics running a public access channel out of the back of their shop, Henry and Jake seem more like two technicians for the whole Inner Tube System. Perhaps the change came with Jim Henson's tweaking of the pilot into a pitch reel.

The show itself never came to pass. It was pitched to networks like NBC and nobody bit. Henson gave it one last go, pitching it as part of The Jim Henson Hour, now with the name changed from Inner Tube to Lead Free TV. Still didn't happen. The blue screen graphic of the main setting with all the TV screens would be reused for the MuppeTelevision portions of TheJim Henson Hour, and the band's keyboardist Digit would also appear on the show as a supporting player. But that's it.

Digit.  Originally created for Inner Tube, but officially from The Jim Henson Hour

Why did networks pass on it? I don't know for sure, but I can take a coupld of guesses.  For one, a television series that actively makes fun of your product was going to be a hard sell. Even if he only shopped it around to networks like ABC, CBS and NBC, most people were now accessing those channels through cable packages and the networks were benefitting from it. There have been episodes of TV shows that have poked fun at cable, certainly. But an entire series playing off the notion of “cable TV is weird and kind of excessive” probably wasn't going to fly.

Also, well, you've seen what the puppets on this show looked like. One of the unfortunate things about puppets is that they generally seem to fall into the categories of either “cute” or “creepy” with little space in between. And the more human you try to make the puppets, the creepier they seem. These are definitely falling more into the creepy category.

Still, if you can get past that, the pitch reel is an interesting snapshot of a specific time in media technology. The days when cable was king. Nowadays, the common criticism is now that “everyone has a streaming service”. But even before streaming, many of the jokes presented in the pitch reel became outmoded. For example, one of the main jokes seems to be how amazingly specific each channel has to be to justify its existence. But I remember a time in the late '90s or early 2000s when that hyper-specificity was starting to be done away with as cable channels started focusing more on demographic rather than genre. I remember when Cartoon Network started playing live action shows. I remember when the Sci-Fi Channel (later SyFy) started playing non-science fiction programs like the WWE. I remember when American Movie Classics (AMC) stopped focusing on airing classic movies. The days of a channel being focused on something like science fiction are now long gone in favor of being a channel focused on adult males aged 18-35.

Anyway, that's it for the first episode of Television Oddities. I have some idea of what I'd like to do for the next installment. But if anyone knows of a failed pilot or pitch for me to check out, please let me know in the comments.

Next time: more cartoons.

Cartoon Stars Reanimated: Mr. Magoo

 

Cartoon Stars Re-Animated title card.

So! Let's just dive into this one, shall we?

Mr. Magoo was the flagship character of United Productions of America, commonly known as UPA.

Classic Mr. Magoo.

UPA was born in the aftermath of the animators' strike that took place at Walt Disney Animation Studios in 1941. At which point a number of animators left the company. (Didn't know old Uncle Walt was an attempted union-buster? Yeah, life is full of little disappointments). Among those leaving Disney was layout artist John Hubley, who was not happy with Disney's animation philosophy, which involved painstaking imitation of reality and lots of minute detail. Hubley believed that animation didn't have to be a total imitation of cinematic reality in order to work, and that animation could use simpler designs and more abstraction in its art and still work. Hubley, Bobe Cannon and others at UPA aimed to create animated films that could experiment in design. Though Hubley and Cannon contributed to UPA's experimentation in style, UPA actually started as Industrial Film and Poster Service, founded in 1941 by Zack Schwartz, David Hilberman and Stephen Bosustow. They did a lot of work with the U.S. government. They would soon make two films sponsored by the United Auto Workers, at which point, the company was rebranded UPA. Eventually, in the shadow of McCarthyism, government contracts dried up as the government started severing ties with Hollywood. UPA would eventually make a deal with Columbia Pictures, who were dissatsfied with their existing animation studio, Screen Gems. And it was under Columbia's aegis that UPA made the majority of its theatrical cartoons.

There is a lot more to this. There's a lot more to the history of UPA and their creative endeavors in general. If you want to read more about it, I suggest you seek more information out. But I had to get you to this point.

Because in 1949's short The Ragtime Bear, UPA created its most famous character, a crotchety, near-sighted old man named Mister Magoo (probably their second most famous was a character named Gerald McBoing Boing, who was actually based on a story record by Dr. Seuss).

Mr. Magoo, for those not in the know, is a rich, stubborn, self-important, extremely nearsighted old man who constantly gets into and out of bizarre and dangerous situations due to his poor eyesight while being completely oblivious to the situation. Why? Well, Mr. Magoo (full name Quincy Magoo) is too stubborn to wear his glasses or admit that he even needs glasses in the first place. So, he generally just convinces himself that he's seeing what he wants to see. I find it to be a rather well-constructed character in communicating his upper-class stubborn pride. Anytime he percieves any kind of injustice, Magoo always seeks out the highest office he can in order to complain (Magoo is, in fact, a bit of a “Karen”). He also laughs at his own jokes all the time. I knew such a practice was frowned on, but had never noticed how self-congratulatory it can seem until I saw Magoo do it. But he's not necessarily a bad fellow. He loves his nephew Waldo. He loves his alma mater. And he's usually trying to do right by something despite being all wrong. And in his theatrical outings, he's perfectly voiced by actor Jim Backus (also famous for portarying Thurston Howell III on the TV show Gilligan's Island).

In the earliest Magoo cartoons, Magoo was more of a gruff, hard-nosed reactionary type. One can see a bit of political satire built into Magoo. A bit of a poke at the conservative upper class who, like Magoo, can be short-sighted and see things they want to see them. Even after Magoo got revised into more of a friendly, avuncular sort, some of that still remained. The cartoons frequently emphasize Magoo being a proud alumnus of Rutgers University, a famously conservative university at the time (whether it still is, I don't know).

Magoo had a long and distinguished cartoon career. UPA won two Academy Awards from the Magoo shorts When Magoo Flew from 1954 and Magoo's Puddle Jumper from 1956. In 1959, Magoo was featured in UPA's first feature length animated film 1001 Arabian Nights. In the 1960s, Mr. Magoo made the leap to television with a show aptly titled Mr. Magoo. Along the way, Magoo's one major supporting cast member, his nephew Waldo, was spun off into his own subseries of cartoons. Waldo's absence was largely accomodated by the introduction of Charlie, Magoo's servant who was an unfortunate Asian stereotype. Not long after, in 1962, Magoo would star in the first ever animated Christmas special, Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol. And TV would remain a home for Mr. Magoo for a long stretch. Magoo's brush with Dickens would lead to a new series The Famous Adventures of Mr. Magoo, which would cast Magoo as numerous famous characters from literature and history. In 1970, Magoo would star in another TV special, Uncle Sam Magoo. After that from 1976-77 would come the new series What's New, Mr. Magoo. By this point though, UPA had given up in-house production. What's New, Mr. Magoo was produced by DePatie-Freleng, the same people who animated the Pink Panther.

Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol

But positive vibes toward Mr. Magoo didn't last forever.

In 1997, chasing the success of Universal's live action The Flintstones movie, Disney put out a live action Mr. Magoo film starring Leslie Nielsen. The film actually met with a great deal of controversy from the National Federation of the Blind and was released with a disclaimer at the end (for more on that production, see the Mr. Magoo video by Hats Off Entertainment.

Disney's live-action Mr. Magoo.

Since then, Magoo projects have been few. A straight-to-DVD movie entitled Kung Fu Magoo was released in 2010. In 2019, a French animated series produced by Xilam Animation SAS was produced, first premiering in Portugal then on Boomerang Africa HD and then in the UK on CITV and the ITVX streaming service. Neither seem to have produced much in positive accolades.

The 2019 version of Mr. Magoo.

So, does Mr. Magoo still work in 2025?

Well, I still think his cartoons are funny. But that's not worth much. I find Magoo's bumblings and mistakes amusing. And I tend to find this sort of bumbling due to a combination of pride and nearsightedness a lot easier to forgive than bumbling and stumbling out of sheer stupidity (for an example of this type of stupid character, see Inspector Gadget). And his bumbling is in large part due to Magoo's pride and stubbornness. Because if Magoo just chose to wear his glasses, he'd have no problem. But it's still a hard sell. It's the pride, the stubbornness and the visual impairment that make the comedic situations happen. But a lot of people are just going to see it as laughing at an old man's disability.

Unfortunately, not every character can make it into modern media. Some of them are just better to leave where they are.

The odds of seeing anything new Magoo-related are slim anyway. Near as I can tell, the rights to the original theatrical shorts and the 1001 Arabian Nights movie are with Sony Pictures, the entity that swallowed up Columbia Pictures some time in the 1980s. But the rights to UPA's various TV shows and the character himself fall under the umbrella of Dreamworks Classic, just like Casper. That puts ot under the auspices of Comcast/Universal.

That's all I've got here but I thought I'd put a companion piece up on my other blog Fairy Tale Fandom, where I look at Magoo's 1001 Arabian Nights film. Check it out if you're interested.