The Stone Age family that changed television
Cartoons were once short films shown in cinemas before the main feature, and on television they were mostly for Saturday mornings. That changed in 1960, when The FLINTSTONES became the first animated series shown in the evening, when families watched together. A Stone Age family with a car powered by their feet, it was modelled on a popular comedy about a bus driver and his wife, and it ran for six years. It proved that cartoons could be for everyone, and without it there might never have been a SIMPSONS.
Before that, the golden age of cinema cartoons had produced many of the characters in this grid. TOM AND JERRY won seven Oscars for best animated short film between 1943 and 1953. BUGS BUNNY first said his famous line, what's up, doc?, in 1940, voiced by Mel Blanc, the man behind dozens of cartoon voices, including TWEETY, whose gravestone reads that's all folks.
Cartoons from around the world
Many of the best-loved cartoons are not American. The SMURFS began in 1958 in a Belgian comic by an artist known as Peyo, and they live in mushroom houses in a village hidden in a forest. DORAEMON, a blue robot cat from the twenty-second century who travels back in time to help a lazy schoolboy, has been hugely popular in Japan since 1969 and is an official anime ambassador for the country. POKEMON grew out of a video game, as our Pokémon page explains.
PEPPA Pig comes from Britain, and some American parents noticed their children picking up British accents from watching it. BLUEY, a cartoon about a family of Australian cattle dogs from Brisbane, became one of the most-watched shows on American streaming services in 2023 and 2024, and many parents say they enjoy it as much as their children do.
Thousands of drawings for a few minutes
For most of the twentieth century every cartoon was drawn by hand. Artists drew each small change in movement on paper, then traced and painted every drawing onto a clear plastic sheet called a cel, which was laid over a painted background and photographed one at a time. A single seven-minute cartoon could need several thousand drawings.
Today most cartoons are made on computers, but a lot of the work is still planned by hand. Writers and artists sketch every scene first as a storyboard, a comic-strip version of the episode, and voice actors record their lines before the animation is finished, so the characters' mouths can be drawn to match. Many famous boy characters, from cartoon schoolboys to talking babies, have been voiced by women.
Comic strips on screen
Several cartoon characters started in newspapers. SNOOPY, Charlie Brown's dog, first appeared in the Peanuts comic strip in 1950, drawn by Charles Schulz for almost fifty years until the day before the last strip was printed, in 2000. GARFIELD, the lazy orange cat who hates Mondays and loves lasagne, began in 1978, and POPEYE the sailor started in a comic strip in 1929, appearing in films from 1933. ARTHUR, the aardvark, came from a series of picture books, and his TV series ran from 1996 to 2022, one of the longest-running animated children's shows in America.
Our SpongeBob and Scooby-Doo pages cover two of the biggest names in the grid. MICKEY MOUSE, GOOFY, the POWERPUFF Girls, RUGRATS, GUMBALL, the ANIMANIACS, RECESS and PIKACHU complete the line-up.