What that history is, I don't know. I thought I might free-associate a little here, just to see what other explanations I could come up with. I've tried this before and what I came up with was woefully inadequate, but maybe I'll do better this time. Here goes.......
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Well, there was TV. In the 50s and early 60s adults hadn't become addicted to it yet, but kids watched a ton of it. Most of the dramas were clear-cut, good guy vs. bad guy stuff. The situation comedies and H&B cartoons were mind-numbingly stupid. My guess is that TV kids of this era...the future hippies... grew up idealistic under the influence of the dramas, but filled with a revulsion for ordinary life the way it was portrayed on the sitcoms. |
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Then there was the fact that lots of late 50s kids had allowances, something only rich kids had in the 19th Century. With money to spend they developed a youth culture built around the things they liked to buy, like records.
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Talking about the 19th century, let me digress for a minute to take note of the Romanticism of that era, with its emphasis on the mysterious workings of the inner mind. That idea spilled over into the 20th Century, carried there by people like Freud and Ibsen and the Surrealists. Marxism was carried over too, only it was modified by the romantics who absorbed it and gave it a different flavor.
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One result of the Marxist-Romantic synthesis was fascism. For decades central Europeans lived under fascist or communist governments which which portrayed America in the worst light possible. Amazingly, a lot of pre-hippies picked up on this view of ourselves and believed it.
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That's the young Paul Newman (above) at the Actors' Studio in New York. Ibsen's theories, which emphasized character conflict and the need to bring the mysterious inner life to the surface, ruled at that studio.
Stories favored by this school were always about sensitive people who were damaged or made insane by the irrational demands of normal society. That seems like an odd theme to dwell on exclusively, but actors liked these stories because they were full of emotional fireworks, and seemed kind of edgy because normal society was always the villain.
If you lived at that time, and were destined to be a hippie, you saw and read a LOT of stories where normal people were the bad guys. |
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One of the most influential people of the early 60s was Alvin Toffler, who's almost forgotten now. He wrote futurist books which predicted a right-around-the-corner society where machines made possible a twenty hour work week and an overabundance of cheap food and material possessions. Our only problem would be what to do with the spare time. Toffler's important because an awful, awful lot of people...including future hippies... believed what he said, and concluded that...Damn!...if unlimited wealth was right around the corner, then we should loose the work ethic, have a party, and redistribute everything. With so much to go around, it would be positively stingy to do anything else. |
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Toffler's book sold big in cheap paperbacks, which was the only kind of book most young people could afford to buy. The innovative publishers who pioneered the paperback revolution were mostly left-inclined, so the books that young people read were usually limited to that point of view (Salinger isn't overtly left in this book, I just liked the picture). |
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Hmmmm.....anything else? No, I guess that's it.
In spite of all I just said I don't think Romanticism, left-leaning records, paperbacks and movies, or any of the standard explanations really add up to what we saw in the 60s. I told you I didn't understand where the 60s came from, and I don't.
Maybe there was something else, something more off the wall. Maybe miniskirts (above) were to blame. I mean, they make a powerful visual argument for the rightness of something or other.
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No wonder the hippie philosophy spread so fast. Imagine that you were a file clerk in an insurance company in 1964, and had an abusive boss. There he is behind you telling you what a good-for-nothing you are, and your eyes happen to wander over to the poster above, which is on the wall. How inviting it would be to drop everything and follow the girl with the guitar! |
29 comments:
"I never thought of it that way, but in a way, it actually makes sense. Who knew I'd be starting an indoctrinating counterculture among my own children without even knowing it! The 1960s counterculture and the Vietnam War changed the world forever, and in my opinion, for the worst, because a lot of young Americans were rebelling against established principles and standards, and it eventually lead to rampant LSD and other drug use across the country, Scooby-Doo (that's what I'd like to call cartoon anarchy. It went against everything Hanna-Barbera stood for, and ruined their reputation forever), M.A.S.H., and a total disrespect of authority. I don't know too much about the subject, but in my opinion, I think that era is still influencing our modern culture, and I think animation has been affected by it for a long while now, hence all those "hip" executives you talk about in your posts."
That's probably the best explanation of why the 1960s even happened in the first place. The latter part of the decade is one of the weirdest eras America ever went through, when the hippies practically took over the world with their primitive, backwards ideas. In my theory, this country has never recovered from the disaster that was the Vietnam War and Woodstock, because now these hippies control the bulk of mainstream animation today, which is why they don't hire well-meaning cartoonists like you anymore.
"The situation comedies and H&B cartoons were mind-numbingly stupid."
I disagree with the Hanna-Barbera part. From 1957 to even 1962, those cartoons were probably some the most innovative and creative bits of animation around that time in terms of all the funny stuff that the animators were allowed to get away with under Bill and Joe's watch. All the major theatrical cartoon producers were starting to decline at this point, not just economically, but creatively as well. Just look at what happened to the Warner Bros. cartoons after 1962 and '63, when they closed down their original department (they were already declining, IMO. Friz Freleng, Bob McKimson, and Chuck Jones were spending a heck of a lot more time on producing bits for The Bugs Bunny Show then they were on their own cartoons, in my theory, and it really starts to show on the cartoons they were producing at the time. None of them, with the exceptions of Now Hear This and a few other Jones cartoons produced during this period, and something like Banty Raids had the energy and sheer brilliance that the earlier 1950s and 40s productions had like One Froggy Evening or The Foghorn Leghorn or Friz's earlier cartoons. Plus Mike Maltese and Warren Foster had left for H-B in the late 50s, so their stories were never the same under John Dunn, who had previously worked at Disneys). Those Speedy and Daffy cartoons were even more mind-numbingly stupid than whatever H-B was churning out for a while. I'd take something like Magilla Gorilla or Mushmouse (terrible cartoons I know) over those disasters. And compared to the Gene Deitch Tom and Jerry cartoons, Hanna-Barbera was at its peak of brilliance, especially with The Flintstones. Bottom line, Hanna-Barbera, for a while, provided fresh air for the animation industry at the time, supplying jobs to laid-off animators and assistant animators who had left places like Disneys, while also producing cartoons with lots of funny accidents (I stole that from John. I'm not trying to parrot him) like Yogi Bear and The Huckleberry Hound Show. It was not until 1962 that their cartoons started really decaying and became incredibly stupid and dumb like all those Yogi Bear knock-offs they produced. After Walt Disney's death in 1966, it was all over for animation for a long while. Hanna-Barbera quickly went down the toilet after that, stealing from Filmation, and eventually, we end up with formless cartoon anarchy like Scooby-Poo, which was one of the most stupid "cartoons" H and B ever produced. In fact, it's so terrible, that I don't even consider it a cartoon at all.
I talked about this with John K. on that Jim Tyer post he did a few days ago, when I said I would restrict future children's entertainment and he said that would have been a bad idea. Here's what I said. I'm going to have to separate this in another comment, because Blogger says that my HTML or some stupid crap cannot be accepted.
I've also heard that the Baby Boom generation was the first (in probably the entire history of humanity) that had all their basic needs met as children. This didn't necessarily make them spoiled, but it did free them up to do a lot more philosophizing that any generation immediately previous. Any kids growing up during the Depression certainly didn't have that luxury.
I think that may be the bottom line as to what lead to the counter-culture movement on the 1960's.
Interesting post. There are a lot of theories about how things have dramatically changed in a short period of time.
I think what happened is people were becoming aware of the problems of society, and unlike the previous generation, they weren't going to sit back and accept it. Also unlike the previous generation, they didn't blindly accept what society told them at face value.
I think that you have a point that TV may have played a role in influencing the 60s generation. Sure, the previous generation had the "newsreels", but they were so sanitized and censored by the bigwig studio owners that the previous generation, more often than not, didn't get the "rest of the story". It seemed that because it was so new, some TV execs were more willing to take chances and push boundaries.
I also agree with you that the realism trend in theater and film also influenced the generation. Filmmakers like Otto Preminger were giving the "one-finger salute" to the Hays code and releasing their films anyway. Once filmmakers saw that Preminger didn't experience any real reprocussions for releasing his films without the "stamp of approval", it opened up the floodgates.
There is a lot that we owe to the 1960s generation - both good and bad.
My Dad used to say that the sixties began in the forties. World War II broke the back of America's Puritan morality, and it never did heal again.
"How did it do that," I asked.
"Well, for the four years I was in the Navy, I never paid for a drink in a bar."
"Huh?"
Well, he explained, there were millions of young men who were risking death, death by very painful and ugly means, to protect the rest of us from the Nasties. People were genuinely grateful and they showed it. Young women didn't have money to spare, but they did have one very effective way to show their gratitude...
The rate of premarital canoodling skyrocketed, and never did go all the way back to Puritan levels after VJ day.
I really want to say something on this subject, but I can't think of any words. So I guess I'll just say that I agree with most of what Jennifer has said.
I will say, though, that the best cartoons to come out of the sixties either embraced counter-culture or was otherwise important to its plot. To name examples, Ralph Bakshi's "Marvin Digs" and Hawley Pratt's "Hurts and Flowers" are great cartoons and both are about the hippie movement (Although of the two, "Hurts" had cartoon violence akin to the classic Warner cartoons). The best Gene Deitch cartoons of the time had that counter-culture feel, too, but that may be because he was making them in eastern Europe. He did a series called "Nudnik" (released by Paramount) and it was about this guy who lived in a world full of jerks, and even though he tried to be nice and helpful to them, they push him around.
All the cartoons I listed are on the internet if you want to check them out.
We can probably discuss this more next week.
Very interesting. I do agree with the television part though. It seems to me that eventually the Baby Boomers saw what was on TV, and then they looked at the real world, and saw a disconnect. That, and yes, they did have all of their basic needs met as children, which did allow to philosophize a lot. This, and a lot more, led to the 60s. I personally like some of the influence of the hippies, like the breaking down of the Hays Code and the greater allowance of free expression.
The part I don't like are the crappy cartoons, the over moralizing and preachiness, as well as the rise of phony alternative medicines (those New Age people need a reality check). That and the baby boomers refusal to grow up or grow old.
Anyway, great post. You do make me think, Uncle Eddie, and that is one of the most important things a society must do.
The true hippie movement in all its naive glory has got to have been the shortest social movement that ever existed. From the Summer of love to Nixon... It was immediately mutated into an unlikely combination of idealism and cynicism. The idealism is for when it inconveniences someone else. The cynicism is the excuse to be totally selfish when it came to one's self. There should be another name for the jaded, grown up hippie. Perhaps the "me, not you generation".
You make a good point about TV's sense of good & evil.
When TV showed us black church ladies being attacked by police dogs we didn't know how to feel about it. We'd never seen police acting like the bad guys on TV. The Viet Nam footage showed us the suffering of American kids thrust into the role of redcoats.
I think the photogenic teenagers with their breasts out got a bit more media attention than they deserved, at least on the news. History will remember civil rights as the big event of the 60's.
The boomers preferred the TV Western morality-play version of the world, so they cast Ho Chi Minh as the good guy & Washington as the wellspring of evil.
You know what they say -- Louis XIV earned it, Louis XV spent it, Louis XVI paid for it.
"The cynicism is the excuse to be totally selfish when it came to one's self. There should be another name for the jaded, grown up hippie. Perhaps the "me, not you generation"."
Amen to that brother. I liked that idealism that the hippies had before the horrible mutation. I liked that motivation to change the world for the better. I want that to come back. Well, I guess I'll start that movement by getting myself motivated.
Roberto: I'm afraid I don't like the early H&B product as much as you do, but I admit that there are redeeming features about it, and some talented people worked there.
I agree with you about the hippies, though.
David, Jennifer, Brubaker, Eric: The early hippies certainly were idealistic, and I often find them appealing as individuals. I just don't like the movement in general.
Lester: Haw! A good story, and it explains a lot.
Stephen: True! It all reminds me of the French Revolution which began with such high ideals and ended with an emperor (Napoleon) and pointless agression against the rest of Europe.
Aznmom, Pappy: Haw!
I don't entirely buy the idea that boomers wanted to be the opposite of their parents. If anything the Greatest Generation set such a preposterously high standard for accomplishment and reform of society that trying to then "settle down" simply didn't work. There was so much more to be changed, yet no political momentum to push it along. And the war that had started was the diametric opposite of the last big one, yet it was all just WAR. You're either for it or against it. And by extension your country.
Not to mention that someone who has lived the equivalent of two full and eventful lives and is still only forty or fifty years old doesn't have much energy left. To think, to question himself, to prevent the very things he fought from consuming him. WWII made it easy to be progressive. Then suburbia made it easy to be conservative. And the kids had NO IDEA how long it takes for things to change.
So basically you had docile adults with agitated pasts looking at their agitated children worrying what's going to happen to them, and the kids are looking back at their parents wondering what happened to them. I emphasize HAPPENED TO THEM. There's nothing more terrifying than seeing someone who USED to be cool....and wondering what you'll have to do to keep that spirit yourself. I think there was a general feeling that if you wait to do anything, you'll be too late. "Be the change you want to see in the world". Ghandi never meant orgies, but what the hell, right?
I want to clarify a point I think I glossed over earlier:
It's a mistake to view the whole Us vs. Them mess of the boomers and the hippies as the product of "authority is bad" instead of "authority is good" or even "authority is okay" - the fact is, authority CHANGED. It was corrupTED. It BECAME the enemy. You can't compare FDR to LBJ and LBJ to Nixon and blame it all on the kids who got drowned out. And yes, actually there WERE young people who got out of bed, pulled their dirty hair out of their drooling mouths, put on clothes that weren't caked with rat feces, walked far enough to make them slightly tired and VOTED for George McGovern like the lazy, no-good hippies they were. Same with Kerry. That's democracy. I'm Canadian and we got Trudeau.( YAY!)
And hey, what happened to Bobby Kennedy again? Never mind....
The point is, I think Who Is Provoking You and How has a huge effect on how one behaves. Once upon a time we fought the ACKNOWLEDGED enemy in a war that made sense. But when authority won't even admit what's clearly wrong, or even DEFENDS it, and makes demands of you that you can't possibly fulfill without respecting the morality behind them.....It is no longer a stretch to see childish, anarchic behavior as the escape. People were unified by their dissatisfaction before the hippies. But the chemistry was different. I wish I could elaborate on that, but I'm starting to give myself a headache. I might be back later....
When the Elite Loved LSD
Zoran: Interesting comments! You seem to think that middle-aged people are more conservative because they're just plain worn out. Maybe, but I'm inclined to think that's only a half truth.
I see much, much more variety of opinion and taste among middle aged people. Young people are tribal and tend to think alike. They're more vulnerable to trends. They produce more bullies and criminals, and in most societies (not ours presently) they tend to be more warlike and are more intolerant. They have more energy, but they tend to waste it.
Super creativity tends to be a youthful attribute, but the more common form of creativity tends to be an attribute of people in their thirties.
Aristotle believed that youth is rash and old age is cowardly, and so favored the middle years. Maybe he was right.
In spite of all I said, I'd still prefer to be young, and so would most people. I hate to admit it, but energy counts for a lot.
Eddie, that was in no way a general comment on middle age. I was referring exclusively to people who were born into a world at war, were dirt poor and desperate for years, went to war with the world when it happened all over again, and THEN had to contend with McCarthy and the Bomb while civil rights was turning into a nasty hot potato. That comment in no way reflects my beliefs about middle-aged people in general. If anything, the reverse is true today. Consider how we're taking apart "hippies" right now. Talk about self-reflection?
Responsibilities I shirk
Cos I'm a hippie and I don't work!
Zoran: No offence was taken. feel free to rip middle age whenever you think it deserves it.
A great deal of Marxist thought, (the Frankfurt School in particular) mounted a critique of Romanticism, (the latter which began as an anti-rationalist, counter-enlightenment movement steeped in religious/metaphysical convictions in the early 19th century). I don't think alot of Dialectical Materialists would associate themselves with Romanticism, as they see themselves as an analytic and prognostic philosophy of the effects of capital. This of course doesn't mean we can't romanticize Marx, or labor movements, etc. Fascists were really the only totalitarian group to have a direct line to Romanticism, though there is certainly something romantic about the Hegelian Phenomenology of Spirit, and it is this ethno-nationalist doctrine of historical preeminence, that both helped shape Marx's thought, (tho' he turned it on it's head) and what we could call the romanticism of the Communist International, and the Third Riech.
Frued thought he could elaborate the unconcious and explain the mechanism of conciousness, and likewise the Surrealists elaborated methodologies to rationalize their phantasmagorias, but this was not an effort to languish in some sort of romantic mysticism, it was an attempt at speculative science and aesthetics.
Ha-haa!
I know I'm an irritating, imperious, little teenage know-it-all (though I'm nearly 40)... i jis' can't help myself.
The apocryphal Nietzche: " A philosophical argument between two philosophers should be taken as seriously as an argument between two bricklayers."
"One result of the Marxist-Romantic synthesis was fascism."
You know what Eddie, I really don't think the Romanticism movement was a precursor to facism. I think of it as more of an artistic movement, rather than a societal movement. Percy Shelley and Wordworth were not even close to being facists.
As for Marxism, may I share this gem from literary critic Harold Bloom:
"Marxism, famously a cry of pain rather than a science, has had its poets, but so has every other major religious heresy."
Nacht: Interesting comment! So far as I can tell fascism saved Marxism from withering away and dying. Othodox Marxism was made obsolete by unionism and by its record of poverty and oppression.
Fascism on the other hand, was a looser, more adaptable varient of Marxism, which allowed private business to exist provided that it followed government edicts. In my opinion present day, post-Maoist China is fascist. The American New Left was our own varient, though they'd probably be appalled to hear themselves described that way.
I wish historians would pay more attention to the 19th century Romantics. They're not very well understood here because we inherited the English take on it, which is mostly literary and benign. On the continent that movement was much darker.
In my humble opinion, sex is always the answer. Be careful what questions you ask!
They say that revolutionaries are unfit to lead once the revolution has been won. Perhaps that has something to do with it.
There were a lot of neo-romantics among the hippies. Many were freshmen who had just read "On Walden Pond" for the first time. Rousseau filled their heads with fantasies of returning to the land & becoming independent farmers.
Interestingly, Thoreau himself wasn't so different. His mom used to bring him doughnuts & fried chicken (She was worried he was losing weight) & he walked home on Sundays for dinner.
Some of the campus radicals were red-diaper babies who were carrying on their traditional family values. I can only guess how many kept the same shameful secret which a bohemian wouldn't share with his best friend: money from home.
...damn, I was going to bring this back to the subject of cartoons, but I lost my train of thought.
I don't see Marxism itself withering away any time soon. The current recession corresponds pretty well with Marx's observations.
The Chinese government seems to have had the best response to the crisis in hindsight. By making infrastructure investments (instead of raising the deficit), they responded directly to the massive collapse of a lot of fixed investment. The market was looking for something less abstract than these ingenious Wall Street 'products' & the surge in GDP from the investment soon brought in new tax revenue.
http://ablog.typepad.com/keytrendsinglobalisation/
Today, Chinese workers are up in arms in the wake of a rash of suicides. The foreign plant owner responded by putting nets around the edge of the factory building & requiring workers to sign a non-suicide pact. In the resulting publicity, the practice spread nationwide & came to be understood as a way to express job dissatisfaction. This has led to strikes & demands for better working conditions. The government half of the corporate partnership leans back, folds his arms & says that the demands seem reasonable.
The righteous rage of the industrial proletariat is turned toward the foreign imperialist privateers!
The end result of all this noise might be a powerful, conservative, nationalist union movement, something like the US labor unions in the 60's.
The 1960's were always kind of confusing to me.
The 1960's still was a hit and miss to me. As long the French and Belgium comics industry was at their best in the early-1960's but you should take a look to characters like Natacha who make the industry forward than backwards for a while. It was created in 1967 by Francois Walthery who was helped by the most common of the conservative artists ever existed but was a master of good taste at this time... Smurf's creator Peyo!
At my opinion, yeah i don't know so much about the 1960's because i wasn't born. I know they having a big darkness in the 1950's by Maurice Duplessis regime who hired companies from others countries for developped the little Quebec we was. And then, we have the Peaceful Revolution in 1960 who ended tragically in 1966 or something like that by the likes of Pierre Elliot Trudeau and ended for good with two lost referendums in 1980 and 1995 for the future of our Independence. They never learn it from their past mistakes because the medias start to take the international brands at home like the NRJ crap and the Playhouse Disney channel we have currently.
Comics like Natacha was quickly a hit because it was in Europe the first series when the main character is a young lady, and despite the severe censor to this medium in Europe, the artists winning. But now i seen too much comics conducted from executives and feminists who told you what tell and what draw. And they believe they know everything about our pfosession! My ass!
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