Telecomics

Along with Crusader Rabbit and Jim and Judy in Teleland, the Telecomics broadcasts were some of the earliest cartoon shows on television, although they were essentially a representation of comic strips on screen, with a narrator and voice actors talking over still frames, with only occasional moments of limited animation.

[1] The second show, initially broadcast as NBC Comics from September 1950 to March 1951, was created by cartoonist Dick Moores and Disney animator Jack Boyd, who founded the company Telecomics, Inc. in 1942.

[2] In 1942, cartoonist Dick Moores, known at the time for the 1936-1942 crime comic strip Jim Hardy,[5] teamed up with Jack Boyd, an effects animator at Walt Disney Studios, to form the company Telecomics, Inc. Their intention was to produce a television show that would present still panels from a comic strip on television, with a narrator and voice actors performing the characters' voices.

[6] In 1945, Moores and Boyd produced a pilot, Case of the Missing Finger, Chapter 4: The Belt of Doom, starring a character named Peril Pinkerton.

The comics being used are Boots and Her Buddies, Freckles, Brenda Breeze, Our Boarding House, Captain Easy, Carnival, Mister Merryweather and also Otis.

[7]Meanwhile, another Telecomics effort was beginning in 1945, headed by Stephen Slesinger, who created the comic strips Red Ryder and King of the Royal Mounted, and held the licensing rights for Winnie-the-Pooh, Tarzan, Buck Rogers and Alley Oop.

[8] Slesinger intended to use Red Ryder, King of the Royal Mounted, Ozark Ike and Winnie-the-Pooh as his first slate of strips.

No attempt to televise the film, which was in color, was made, but Stephen Slesinger, president of the group sponsoring the demonstration, said that experiments had been carried on through that medium successfully on the West Coast since 1944.

[10]In April 1947, Slesinger signed a deal with the N. W. Ayer & Son advertising agency for television rights of the King of the Royal Mounted comic, serialized in five-minute episodes.

David Gudebrod, manager of Ayer's motion picture and television bureau, expressed his enthusiasm by saying it may "greatly ease current agency-sponsor video problems."

[4] In addition to these, Edgar Bergen also had a set of animated characters called Telekins, a short-lived company called Century Television Corporation had signed deals with twenty comic strips including Joe Palooka and Mutt and Jeff, and United Features Syndicate was pitching Li'l Abner and Nancy.

[12] In 1949, a syndicated show finally got on the air: Tele-Comics, produced by singer Rudy Vallée's short-lived television production company, Vallee-Video.

Boyd and Moores have produced a five-day-a-week package show, employing strictly comic strip art, but filmed in such a way that the viewer gets a distinct illusion of movement.

A serial chapter in one of their series, Jim Hardy, has a runaway streetcar sequence in which the individual drawings are put together on film so cleverly that the viewer is not conscious of the fact that he is looking at a strip of still pictures.

[17][18] Howard McNear (later Floyd the barber on The Andy Griffith Show) voiced Space Barton, Danny March and Kid Champion.

An Associated Press article in April 1951 reported: The partners started with a series for NBC... Once you got interested in the story you forgot the lack of action — almost.