The MGM Oneshot Cartoons are a series of oneshot cartoons, produced by Fred Quimby for MGM's in-house cartoon studio. Many of these shorts were directed by Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising, as well as future star directors Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.
Most of these cartoons were made from 1939 to 1943. The shorts were made in an attempt to find a new star series for MGM, as well as to make up for the previous failures of The Captain And The Kids and Count Screwloose. One of these experiments, "Puss Gets the Boot", did start a series that being the Tom and Jerry cartoons, one of the most famous cartoon series of the golden age. Another notable oneshot was the anti-war short Peace on Earth.These shorts were succeeded by Tom & Jerry and by the Tex Avery MGM Cartoons, many of which were also oneshot cartoons. Two final oneshots were produced in the 1960s by Chuck Jones for the studio while he was working on his revival of the Tom and Jerry series.
After quitting Warner Bros. Cartoonsnote in 1941 following a squabble with Leon Schlesinger, director Tex Avery was hired by the MGM cartoon studio to give them something to offer the public aside from Harman and Ising's cutesy one-shot shorts or Hanna and Barbera's newly-launched Tom and Jerry series, taking over Hugh Harman's unit.
And to say he succeeded with flying colors would be a big understatement.
Free of the budgetary and creative constraints he'd faced at Warners, and with a staff of skilled animators (some of whom were even ex-Disney employees) at his side, Avery went on to make some of the funniest and most acclaimed cartoon shorts of The Golden Age of Animation, if not of all time. From 1942 to 1955, he cranked out dozens of classics, many of which would codify the Zany Cartoon and thereby serve as an influence on countless followers, including master animator Richard Williams and Ren & Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi.
Syndicated reruns of the shorts on UHF stations during The Dark Age of Animation and on various Turner networks (including TBS, TNT, and most notably, Cartoon Network) during The Renaissance Age of Animation cemented their popularity in the lexicon of pop culture and helped them influence future generations of cartoonists and cartoon enthusiasts. Warner Archive released a blu-ray collection of 19 shorts in February 2020, followed by another in December. WB's ownership of Avery's work for MGM is ironic given that he left the former studio on bad terms in 1941.
After decades spent as arguably the studio's top director, Chuck Jones's time at Warner Bros. ended rather abruptly in 1962, after it was discovered that he had violated his exclusive contract – a violation that was discovered when he left his name on an independent project that was subsequently shopped to the studio for distribution, that being the UPA feature Gay Purr-ee. (Earlier, during Warner's temporary shutdown of its cartoon studio in 1953 as it hopped on the 3D Movie fad, Jones spent four months at Disney, where he chafed under that studio's rigidly hierarchical structure and evidently made no real contributions save for some minor uncredited work on Sleeping Beauty (1959).)
Post-Warner, Jones still had a few tricks up his sleeve. He went to MGM, where he took over the Tom and Jerry series for a time (although, because of a lower budget and Chuck's self-admitted ignorance about the characters, his T&J shorts are often criticized for not being up to either his own standards or those of Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, who had originated the series – never mind that the Gene Deitch cartoons that came in between were deranged and far worse on a technical level than what Jones put out), while also creating a few memorable one-shot cartoons based on children's books, most notably the Oscar-winning "The Dot and the Line".
Jones also found himself reuniting with Ted Geisel, a.k.a Dr. Seuss, and with the help of the voice of Boris Karloff, created the much-beloved television adaptation of How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, which is still rebroadcast every holiday season on Warner Media-owned networks. Jones is also famous for his well-animated version of The Phantom Tollbooth, making him and Frank Tashlin the only Looney Tunes directors to direct a feature film that wasn't just a compilation of old shorts.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Animation was Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's third attempt at an animation division, following the famous Golden age studio and the Chuck Jones run Sib Tower 12, later known as MGM Animation/Visual Arts, and its only wholly-owned operation since Ted Turner bought the pre-1986 library (which now lies with Warner Bros.). The studio was operated by Paul Sabella and Jonathan Dern.
It was founded primarily as a low-budget studio to produce kids' cartoons, as well as theatrical sequels culled from MGM's then-growing library, but neither it nor its product really made much of an impact (the closest to doing so being the All Dogs Go to Heaven franchise, but its sequel flopped in the box office, cultivating in all their intended theatrical releases to be regulated straight to video and produced on even cheaper budgets). The studio was all but dead by 2002, Sabella and Dern left the company by 1999, forming their own independent production outfit; Sabella Dern Entertainment.
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