Celebrate Valentine's Day with Van Beuren Cartoons

BY GARY SCOTT BEATTY, PUBLISHER AND EDITOR, MUSKEGONONLINE.NET 

This month we celebrate Valentine's Day with two Van Beuren Studio cartoons from the 1930s featuring love -- sort of. 

With offices across the street from Fleischer Studios in New York, the Van Beuren Studio produced a steady stream of oddly unfocused, stream-of-consciousness cartoons for the blossoming black and white film market in the late '20s and early '30s.

As the Walt Disney Studio became the cartoon market leader in style and popularity it became necessary to up the quality of Van Beuren cartoons. Producer Amedee Van Beuren decided to hire two Disney veterans to up the cartoons' quality. In 1934 he brought in Burt Gillett, who had recently directed Disney's highly popular The Three Little Pigs, and Tom Palmer, who had worked for virtually every studio in town.

The result was the handsome Rainbow Parade series. Parents, caution, in Cupid Gets His Man: some racial insensitivity, and arrows shot at people (cupids).

http://muskegononline.net/0213/cartoon-0213.html

These Works are in Public Domain and not Derivative as specified by U.S. copyright law (title 17 of the U.S. Code). 

Editor and Publisher Gary Scott Beatty has been working in printing and publishing for over 35 years, including editing Muskegon's On the Shore magazine and typesetting Muskegon Magazine. In 2008 he won a Xeric Foundation Grant to publish Jazz: Cool Birth, a murder mystery in a 1957 jazz club with illustrations inspired by '50s album cover design. This and his other Aazurn Publishing books can be purchased through Amazon.com. Worldwide, he edits and publishes Indie Comics Magazine, 64 pages of the best story and art from today's independent comic book creators.