When I mean we, I’m referring to most of us in our late twenties and early-to-mid thirties. This week, I’d like to look at one of my favourite shows as a child, and that was Rolf’s Cartoon Time on the BBC.
What I loved about this show was that Rolf would show PROPER cartoons, as made by multi-award winning animators back when cartoons were lovingly created. Animators such as Bob Clampett, Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, and Hanna-Barbera (to an extent – I thoroughly dislike most of their stuff from the late 50s and 60s, such as that of the Flintstones and Scooby Doo, but their earlier work with Tom & Jerry was superb).
As a kid I really disliked most of that 13-frame a second nonsense commissioned by toy companies just to sell their products (namely anything from Mattel, as one good example). It was sloppy, uninteresting and little thought went into them. But the classic cartoons from Warner Bros., MGM et. al were works of art. They made me laugh like a loon (along with the rest of the family) and were just the most entertaining thing on TV.
Rolf eventually went over to CITV for his Cartoon Club, which I fondly remember as actively getting kids to try their own hand at animation. It also sparked an interest of mine in ray tracing and computer animation as Rolf would occasionally feature short CG films from around the world (particularly from Pixar who were producing a lot of their famous shorts at the time, such as Tin Toy). This was way before Toy Story. I seem to recall they even featured Ray Harryhausen helping kids to animate on one of the shows. Hugely inspiring stuff.
