Private Events Specialist Greg is here today to talk about that one cartoon bulldog mascot. You know the one.

As trivia purveyors, we get a lot of debate about Sports Questions. “More sports questions” many of you cry. “No sports questions,” others plead in response. “Both,” we respond, Rorschach-ily. All things in balance. We treat it as settled law on our editorial team that good sports events and players tell stories, and stories make for good trivia!

That said, we look for opportunities to reach beyond the gridiron stat grids of sports. We love writing questions about mascots, sports persons as spokespersons, and graphic design. Graphic design is our passion, you could say, among our multitudinous passions. And that particular Venn diagram overlap piqued my curiosity when I found a tweet by writer and comedian Eliza Skinner. Just where DOES that commonly used bulldog come from?

And the short answer on that is a simple one: Preston Blair.

Okay, thanks for reading, that’s all there is to know for this week!

I kid, I kid! Preston Blair, like a lot of animators, was a journeyman artist. He worked for Disney, notably on the Sorcerer’s Apprentice segments (in three parts) from “Fantasia,” and the memorable hippo/alligator ballet segment set to “Dance of the Hours.”

The Disney Animators Strike of 1941 pushed Preston across the street to MGM, where he worked on numerous shorts, and animated the Red Hot Riding Hood character, which was memorably swiped by Jim Carrey and some pioneering CG animators for “The Mask.”

Speaking of swiping, that’s a term worth defining. In animation (as well as comics), a “swipe” is a term for when an animator traces the work of another. Disney, as a studio, is notorious for this. Throughout their history they have re-used and repurposed animators’ work frame by frame across dozens of their films, from signature animation moments to backgrounds.
In 1948, presumably between stints at MGM and Disney and Hanna-Barbera, Preston Blair published a book called “Cartoon Animation.” This book would become a precursor to the how-to tomes in the genre of “Draw 101 Anime Characters,” “Learn to Draw Cartoon Animals,” “How to Draw Ducks and Influence People,” etc. that cluttered up so many of our childhood bookshelves after we aspirationally purchased them from the Scholastic Book Fair.

But Preston’s book was pioneering in the form. In its initial 1948 printing, he traced his own work (and likely others’) from his time at Disney and MGM. Later editions would include re-drawn illustrations that would hide the original characters just enough. That book found its way to many of his colleagues’ and contemporaries’ bookshelves, and to other even-less-scrupulous-than-Disney illustrators. And the success and spread of that book is where Preston Blair’s immortality on stadiums, sweatshirts, high school gyms, and midway attractions would be secured, with his name studiously scrubbed away.

Unfortunately, the work of many Disney animators (women especially) languished, uncredited and unacknowledged, for far too long. Frames would continue to be swiped. Sinuous snakes would be repeated from “Robin Hood” to “The Jungle Book.” Heck, Disney would swipe entire concepts from other studios.

As we celebrate this week the historic deal won by the WGA to defend writers from the encroachment of AI on their work, we shouldn’t turn our backs on the age-old battle for animators to secure respect, credit, and compensation for their work, even as Disney continues to cannibalize its history without paying the original animators and storyboard artists that made their animated originals into smash successes. The Animation Guild is nearing the end of their 2021-2024 contract. Hopefully they can trace the success of the WGA to secure fair treatment for years to come.