Cartoon Ads, 1936

The Film Daily gave an awful lot of coverage to short films, cartoons included, in the 1930s. Its pages contained blurbs about the studios, lots of reviews of cartoons and, of course, advertising.

Virtually the whole run of the publication through the silent era is available on archive.org but Mr. Scrappyland, Harry McCracken, alerted me to editions from the early sound era, with a good portion of the editions up to the end of 1936 available. They’re invaluable for researchers. Unlike Boxoffice, which has much of its archives on-line, The Film Daily is searchable. And the scans are pretty good, not murky like the ones at the vault at Boxoffice. Want to know when Tex Avery arrived at Leon Schlesinger? When Carlo Vinci left Van Beuren? Who produced the Bonzo series? It’s all there.

The ads are stunning. Many are in full, vibrant colour. And the ones for cartoons feature studio artwork so the characters look like the characters. I’m going to post some from 1936. The worst that can be said is some of the pages are yellowed and the gutter gets in the way so part of the image isn’t there.

The Popeye and Fleischer studios ads were part of an 11-pager by Paramount. Surprisingly, Warners forked out a two-pager for the short “Let it Be Me”—complete with credits.

You can click on any of them to make them larger.















The ads for 1929-30 are interesting. It can’t be under-estimated how Mickey Mouse created a huge demand for sound cartoons and studios started gearing up to make them. We’ll try to post some of those in the not-too-distant future.