Filmation

~ the last words ~

Saturday morning was a business arrangement before it was a memory, and it needed a commercial network schedule to exist inside. Turkish television was a single state channel until the mid 1980s with no advertiser-funded block to sell, so cartoons turned up in whatever slot TRT decided to give them and there was no equivalent institution here for an American studio to sell into. That is the honest distance on Filmation: not that the shows never reached Turkey, but that the machine that paid for them had no local counterpart at all.

Lou Scheimer and Norm Prescott started the company in 1962 and were close to finished by 1965. The rescue was DC Comics handing them Superman, and Scheimer's own account of how he won it has become the studio's founding legend: a visiting executive was shown a building full of animators who had been rounded up that morning to look employed. The New Adventures of Superman went on CBS in 1966 and Filmation had a network relationship for the next fifteen years.

The catalog is stranger than the reputation suggests. Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids ran from 1972 to 1979 with a genuine educational remit attached to it. Star Trek: The Animated Series, made in 1973 and 1974 with most of the original cast reading the lines, won the franchise its first Emmy in 1975 and was written off by Paramount for decades afterward. Then came the syndication years, which is where the money was: He-Man and the Masters of the Universe from 1983, She-Ra from 1985, BraveStarr in 1987.

Ownership moved twice and both times to companies with no interest in cartoons. TelePrompTer held it from 1969 to 1981 and Westinghouse's Group W took over after that. In early 1989 Group W sold Filmation to Paravision International, an investment vehicle put together by the French cosmetics group L'Oréal. The sale closed and the studio was shut within days of each other.

~ the record ~

~ drawn in reseda ~

Filmation's defining decision was to keep the drawing in California. While Hanna-Barbera and most of the rest of American television animation were shipping work to studios in Asia through the 1970s and 1980s, Filmation ran union crews in the San Fernando Valley and never sent the bulk of a production overseas. Scheimer was loud about it and meant it.

The look follows directly from the arithmetic. Domestic labor at domestic rates against a fixed license fee per episode leaves you exactly one lever, which is how many drawings you make, so Filmation rotoscoped live-action footage and reused cycles until the same character walked past the same three trees in the same order. People make fun of it. They also got 130 episodes of He-Man out of a two-year window, which is a production rate nobody has matched since.

~ one day before the law ~

The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act was signed in August 1988 and took effect on 4 February 1989. It obliged employers above a certain size to give sixty days of warning before a mass layoff. Group W shut Filmation down on 3 February 1989.

Whether that was deliberate is not documented anywhere I can point to, and it does not really need to be. The staff went home that day with no notice period and no obligation on anyone to have given them one, and the buyer got what it had been after, which was a tape vault. L'Oréal kept the library and had no use for a hundred-odd animators in the Valley.

The library then did what libraries do, which is move: Hallmark Cards in 1995, Entertainment Rights in 2004, Classic Media in 2009, DreamWorks Animation in 2012, and NBCUniversal in August 2016 when it bought DreamWorks whole for 3.8 billion dollars. Lou Scheimer died on 17 October 2013, by which point the company he built had been passed between five owners who had never commissioned a frame of it.

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