As I said, in this blog I’m writing about the Golden Age of television animation. So I’m going to leave epic animated films like Fantasia and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs out of it, except that I’ll say I‘ve always found the concept of a princess shacked up with seven little people to be a bit disconcerting.

Putting aside animated feature films, many fans contend that The Golden Age of Television Animation began in 1949 with Crusader Rabbit and ran to the 1960s or 1970s Roger Ramjet and Atom Ant.

There’s no question that a slew of iconic cartoon characters who got their start in "shorts" on the big screen successfully made t

he transition to television. Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Pepé le Pew, Foghorn Leghorn and countless others had a big impact on television.

However, the ‘Golden Age of Television Animation’ was driven by stories and art that began in the early 1980s and extended into the 1990s. Prior to the 1980s almost all television animation was ‘limited animation’ – i.e., backgrounds used over and over. To see what I mean, view at any episode of The Road Runner Show, featuring Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner, and you’ll see the same boulders, buttes and mountains in the background used over and over and over.

That changed in the 1980s when animated television moved to "full" animation. For writers, there was another change: animation studios began demanding "real scripts" for their series. That happened largely because of one man.

As they used to say on television, “Stay tuned.”