Michael Croog

Michael
Croog DirectorFirst Color Cartoon:

Producer John Randolph
Bray's (and Bray Picture Corporation's) The Debut of Thomas Cat (1920) has often
been credited as the first color cartoon, using the expensive Brewster Natural
Color Process (a 2-emulsion color process), an unsuccessful precursor of
Technicolor. This was the first animated short genuinely made in color using
color film. Drawings were made on transparent celluloid and painted on the
reverse, then photographed with a two-color camera. However, some sources have
claimed that the Natural Colour Kinematograph Company's In Gollywog Land (1912,
UK) was the earliest, using Kinemacolor.
Michael Croog
Walt Disney Pictures was very busy in the year 2000, releasing the
computer-animated Dinosaur (2000) about prehistoric life, and the hand-drawn
animated comedy-adventure The Emperor's New Groove (2000). DreamWorks also
released its second feature-length animated film The Road to El Dorado (2000)
(loosely based on The Man Who Would Be King (1975)), and Fox produced the
visually-striking science fiction epic Titan A.E. (2000) combining classic
animation and CGI (before closing down its traditional animation division).

Michael
S Croog Producer

Michael S Croog Producer: Jay Ward --
Crusader Rabbit and After:

Crusader RabbitAnimator Jay Ward, working
with Alexander Anderson, Jr (whose idea was first turned down at Terrytoon
Studios), created the immensely-popular animated, serialized NBC-TV show
Crusader Rabbit, through their new company Television Arts Productions. It was
the first American animated series produced especially for television. The show
originally aired from 1950 -1952 and also had a color version in 1957, with both
Lucille Bliss and GeGe Pearson providing the voice of the Don Quixote-like title
character. It told about knight-in-armor Crusader Rabbit and his tiger companion
Rags, combatting nemesis Dudley Nightshade, with episodes ending in a
cliffhanger. Ward went on to produce animated cartoon shows, such as The Rocky
and Bullwinkle Show - composed of Rocky and His Friends (1959-1961) and The
Bullwinkle Show (1961-1964), Hoppity Hooper (1964-1967), George of the Jungle
(1967), and The Dudley Do-Right Show (1969-1970) about a Canadian Mountie. The
only live-action TV comedy show that he produced was Fractured Flickers (1963).

Michael Croog
Producer
Michael Croog Studios
Michael
S Croog

Other Exceptional Animations with Mature Subject Matter
in the Late 70s-Early 80s:

Nepenthe Productions and writer/director
Martin Rosen (and animator Tony Guy) made two dark films with mature
(serious-minded) subject matter - both based on Richard Adams' best-selling
novels about animals and ecological concerns:

Twice Upon a Time -
1983Watership Down (1978), a bleak, allegorical animated fantasy film, the most
successful British animated feature of its time. It told about the desperate
quest of a warren of rabbits to find a new home, led by heroic Hazel (voice of
John Hurt), a small, nervous rabbit named Fiver (voice of Richard Briers), and
courageous Bigwig (voice of Michael Graham Cox). In the anthropomorphized tale,
they must escape the destruction of their land during the construction of a
housing development, and join a rival warren named Efrafa led by a vicious
militaristic dictator, General Woundwort (voice of Harry Andrews). The film also
included the last involvement in a motion picture for legendary actor Zero
Mostel who played the voice of the cantankerous seagull Kehaar.