Movies - Gerald McBoing-Boing

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Gerald McBoing-Boing is a 1951 animated short film which won an Academy Award for Best Animated Short, about a little boy who speaks through sound effects instead of spoken words. It was adapted by Phil Eastman and Bill Scott, from a story by Dr. Seuss. It was directed by Robert Cannon and produced by John Hubley for United Productions of America (UPA), who released the short through Columbia Pictures.

UPA film and sequels

Seuss's story had originally appeared on a children's record in 1950, scored by Gail Kubik, issued by Capitol Records, and read by radio personality The Great Gildersleeve.

This film was the first successful theatrical cartoon produced by United Productions of America (UPA), after their initial experiments with a short series of cartoons staring Columbia Pictures stalwarts The Fox and the Crow. It was meant to be an artistic attempt to break away from the ultra-realism in animation that had been developed and perfected by Walt Disney. While Disney's animation methods produced lush and awe-inspiring images, it was felt that realism in the medium of animation was a limiting factor. Cartoons did not have to obey the rules of the real world (as the short films of Tex Avery and their cartoon physics proved), and so UPA experimented with a non-realistic style that depicted caricatures rather than lifelike depictions of real people. This was a major step in the development of limited animation—though despite the abuse of the form that would arise in the future (due to cost-cutting methods), Gerald McBoing-Boing was meant as an artistic exercise rather than merely a way of producing cheap cartoons.

The film has been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.

The complete UPA series is as follows:

Gerald McBoing-Boing (1951)
Gerald McBoing-Boing's Symphony (1953)
How Now Boing Boing (1954)
Gerald McBoing-Boing on the Planet Moo (1956) (Academy Award nominee)

The second and third films in this series maintained the Dr. Seuss-style rhyming narration, but were not based on his work. The final film abandoned this approach.

Having been unavailable for over fifty years, many viewers have recently discovered these classics thanks to their inclusion on disc one of the two-disc special edition DVD of the film "Hellboy", where you will find "Gerald McBoing Boing", "Gerald McBoing Boing on the Planet Moo", and "How Now Boing Boing".

Print Adaptations

A book adaptation of Gerald McBoing-Boing appeared in 2000 (ISBN 0679891404).

TV series

The Gerald McBoing-Boing Show (1956-1957)

In 1956, CBS created a half-hour Gerald McBoing-Boing Show, with well-known radio announcer Bill Goodwin narrating. Run at 5:30 p.m. on Sunday evenings, it was a showcase for television broadcasts of UPA's cartoons, including Dusty of the Circus, the Twirlinger Twins, and Punch and Judy. The program proved too expensive to continue and lasted only three months.

The episodes were repeated on Friday nights in the summer of 1957. As a result, The Gerald McBoing-Boing Show apparently became the first cartoon series to air regularly during prime time, preceding The Flintstones by two seasons.

Gerald McBoing-Boing (2005-present)

A series based on the original cartoon started airing on Cartoon Network (United States) on August 22, 2005, as part of their Tickle-U programming block, and aired on Teletoon/Télétoon (Canada) on August 29, 2005. Each eleven-minute episode features a series of vignettes with Gerald, of which the "fantasy tales" are done in Seussian rhyme. There are also sound checks, gags, and "real-life" portions of the show.

Gerald still only makes sounds, but he now has two speaking friends, Janine and Jacob, as well as a dog named Burp, who only burps. Gerald's parents (names unknown) also fill out the regular cast. The series was produced in Canada by Cookie Jar Entertainment, and directed by Robin Budd and story edited/written by John Derevlany. The animation was done by Mercury Filmworks in Ottawa.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Gerald McBoing-Boing ]

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