The Big Cartoon DataBase

» see bcdb.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The Big Cartoon DataBase began in 1997 as a file on one man's computer. Dave Koch was keeping a list of Disney animated features for himself, and enough people asked him for it that he put the thing online in 1998 as something you could search. In 2003 he incorporated it as a 501(c) nonprofit, which tells you how the project saw itself: a reference work that happened to be free rather than a fan page.

It grew the way hand-built databases grow, which is slowly and then alarmingly. By late 2002 the Sydney Morning Herald and the San Diego Union-Tribune were both writing it up, the latter counting more than 42,000 cartoons and calling it possibly the largest searchable cartoon database on the internet. In 2006 the Reference and User Services Association put it on their annual list of the best free reference sites, describing it as the definitive web compendium for anyone interested in the history of animation. By 2009 the title count passed a hundred thousand.

What it held was the unglamorous part of animation that nobody else bothered with: the shorts. Seven-minute theatrical cartoons from the 1930s onward, with their directors and release dates, the kind of credit information that exists on a title card for four seconds and then nowhere else. Users rated them, argued about them in the attached forum, and filed corrections against them for twenty years.

~ the case file ~

~ the rot ~

It did not get shut down. It broke, and then stayed broken. At some point the database stopped returning anything for cartoons after 2019, which is a strange and specific failure: the site still loaded and the older records still answered, while a whole tail of recent animation came back empty. Contributors stopped submitting, because there was no point submitting into a hole.

Koch was no longer active by then and the moderators did not have the access needed to repair it. A volunteer reference project runs on one person being willing to be responsible for the server, and when that person stops there is no mechanism for replacing them. In January 2024 the whole site became unreachable. Today bcdb.com answers with a bare Index of / directory listing in 482 bytes, and the forum subdomain redirects to somebody's personal page.

~ the dubbing problem ~

American theatrical shorts reached Turkey as television filler, dubbed, usually without a title card and never with credits. You knew the cartoons perfectly well and you knew nothing whatsoever about who had made them, because that information had been cut off the front before the tape ever arrived. A database like this one was the only route from the version you remembered back to the production that made it, and every field in it was English.

~ what the hole looks like ~

The Internet Archive holds captures, so the records are not gone in the strict sense. What a database gives you on top of its contents is the index and the cross-reference, the link between a voice actor and the forty shorts they worked on, and that structure does not survive being photographed one page at a time. You can read an archived BCDB page. You cannot ask it a question.

Animation history now sits on Wikipedia and a handful of studio-specific wikis, both better resourced than Koch ever was and neither of which inherited the hundred thousand records.

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