ABSTRACT
This chapter will provide a context for the debates and issues that have arisen about the development of animation for television, principally in the American Broadcast arena. I will discuss how animation changed from its “classic” configuration in the theatrical era to the “reduced” styling for television, largely pioneered by Hanna-Barbera, but intrinsically related to work by United Productions of America (UPA) and Disney in the 1950s. In privileging the intrinsic “modernity” characteristic to the medium, I will challenge the prevailing argument that this move towards reduced animation was to the detriment of animation as an art-form, suggesting instead that the changes necessitated by the much-reduced economies for production both created a new aesthetic for animation which foregrounded its versatility and variety, and re-introduced the public to animation in a way which spoke to the ongoing “recombinancy” strategies in programming for television per se. This, in turn, will lead on to an analysis of how television animation has sustained this recombinancy strategy, and invoked an intertextuality which is not merely concerned with the relationship between previous forms and conditions of production in animation, but with other aspects of social, visual and new media cultures.
