A Cartoon Legend Sketches His Roots

Nearly 50 years have passed since the last "new media" venue arrived to shower entire populations with its glow. Television gave cartoonists a massive audience and created a whole new, multidimensional industry. But Ed Benedict, the cartoonist who designed one of America's favorite television towns, Bedrock, doesn't get too teary-eyed about the old days of television cartoons. Benedict's deepest roots take him back to the 1930s and 1940s, when animation was young and more a labor of love.

"I'm a super fan of Disney's stuff," says Benedict. But he's not that impressed with the more recent Disney material. "After Jungle Book, it just went downhill," he says. "They lost the force after losing Walt Disney." For Benedict, Walt Disney is a wonderful rarity -- someone who can apply outstanding genius to a prolific work ethic and create magic.

Today's cartoonists, he feels, aren't willing to pay their dues -- to start out by spending years doing grunt work for animation houses. "All of this time was spent being an in-betweener just to become an assistant animator. And these snot-nosed kids nowadays call themselves animators right out of school," he says.

Today, Benedict feels that the medium has become largely disposable, uninspired, and lacking the integrity he remembers from the golden age of cartoons. However, he gives credit to John Kricfalusi (a big Benedict fan, and a personal friend) for The Ren and Stimpy Show.

Benedict doesn't bother to watch new-school animation. Asked if he had seen any of the new animated shows on the Internet, he expressed a complete disinterest in the medium. When asked if he had a computer, he replied as if the very word itself were vulgar. "No, I don't have a computer, I hate computers. I don't see that there's any use for them," he says. "Today, you have a hell of a time just getting a live person on the telephone."

With The Flinstones and Yogi Bear to his name, Benedict has every right to demand more out of today's animators. The process of developing a new creative platform hasn't really changed, though; Benedict's remembrance of the birth of animation sounds anything but dated: "They just experimented," he recalls. "One person saw that and said, ‘Hey, I can improve on that,' and then a young kid [Walt Disney] in Kansas City followed through."

A return to the animation standards of old, as far as Benedict is concerned, actually requires a return to the collective mindset of the mid-to-late 1930s, or perhaps the emergence of a new cartoon visionary for the new century. "Everything and everybody needs a leader," he says. "Everybody animating nowadays is satisfied with their own work."

But as Flash artists begin to create more animated content than you can swing a mouse with white gloves and suspenders at, perhaps a few hungry innovators will break out ahead of the pack and design something of lasting value.

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