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Cartoon Movie Posters

September 14th, 2008 by Scott Marks

My friend Tomi over at Celebrity City asks, “Did cartoons get billed with the main feature with lobby posters?”

Many cartoons didn’t even have lobby posters. There would be a stock one sheet with a blank space for theatre owners to insert a title card. In the case of the stock Warner Bros. poster pictured above, the short of the week was Friz Freleng’s Tweety Pie (1947). If there was room, exhibitors would frequently stick the names of popular cartoon stars on the marquee.

According to movie poster guru Bruce Hershenson, “The studios never cared very much about making cartoon posters…Perhaps the studios felt that since theatres already had to display two posters for their double feature, they wouldn’t have space for a cartoon poster.

“In the case of cartoons for which individual posters were made, very few survive. For silent cartoons, there are only a few examples known for most series, even though some series lasted many years, and for some series no examples exist. For 1930s cartoons, a greater number of posters are known on each series but still only a small percentage of the total number made. Most of the posters made after 1940 are known to exist, but certainly not all of them.”

All of these scans come from my collection of animation books, most notably Mr. Hershenson’s Cartoon Movie Posters (1994). Just for the record, I would kill for a copy of that Warner Bros. Cartoons poster. More than an original Holiday, hell, even more than The Day the Clown Cried, that’s the one sheet I’d love to wake up to every morning.

From Disney, to Warners to Avery to Terrytoons and many, many more of your animated favorites, visit the Cartoon Movie Poster Gallery here.

And for even more anthropomorphic fun, check out the Cartoon All-Stars Gallery.

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