Inside Magoo (1960): Comedic Commentary on 1950s America and Cancer

This chapter traces the role of humour in Inside Magoo (1960), an educational film released by United Productions of America (UPA) for the American Cancer Society (ACS). Humour, I suggest, provided 1) a response to ACS’s concerns that public fears of cancer led people to avoid appropriate medical help, and 2) a commentary on 1950s America from the perspective of someone – Mr. Magoo – who rejected the post-war world of white, male, middle-class, consumerist suburbia. This film was thus not only about cancer. It wrapped the ACS message within humorous observations on life in the 1950s to charm audiences into adopting ACS approaches to the disease; a technique, I suggest, that was common to other UPA cancer educationals of the 1950s.

UPA (United Productions of America)

Hollywood cartoon studio UPA (United Productions of America) was founded in 1943 by former Disney animators Steven Bosustow, Zachary Schwartz, and David Hilberman. It profoundly influenced animation art and practice around the world with its modern design and adult themes. UPA created highly praised theatrical cartoon shorts, distributed by Columbia Pictures, from 1948 until 1959. During this time it also produced television commercials, the ground-breaking animated television series The Boing-Boing Show (1956–1957), and the feature-length cartoon, 1001 Arabian Nights (1959). Although UPA continued as a business entity into the 21st century, its aesthetic significance and influence effectively ended with its theatrical shorts. UPA animators, most of them graduates of college art programs, had become frustrated with the stratified studio production system pioneered by Walt Disney and with Disney’s relatively realistic character animation, both of which had been widely imitated. Language of Vision (1944) by Gyorgy Kepes, head of the Light and Color curriculum at Chicago’s New Bauhaus, significantly influenced UPA animators with its notions of the educational function of visual art and its analysis of design components.

Hubley, John (1914–1977) and Elliott, Faith (1924–2001)

Animator John Hubley, born in Marinette, Wisconsin, served as creative head of UPA (United Productions of America) in its early years and originated its most popular character, the near-sighted Mr. Magoo. He had previously worked on several Walt Disney animated features but left the studio during the 1941 strike. Hubley played a crucial role in UPA’s development. In 1944 he brought the fledgling company a United Auto Workers project promoting the re-election of Franklin D. Roosevelt, which effectively turned it into an animation studio. He directed the first films that UPA made for Columbia Pictures, which demonstrated the young studio’s ability to make successful theatrical cartoons and so secured a long-term distribution contract with Columbia. Besides creating Mr. Magoo, Hubley earned the studio three Oscar nominations in its first four years of production. His crowning achievement at UPA was Rooty Toot Toot (1951), a modern retelling of the popular ballad "Frankie and Johnny." The film could serve as a compendium of design features characteristic of UPA cartoons: very simple backgrounds; angularly rendered characters; and an extremely idiosyncratic use of color, which includes unusual shading, unmotivated chromatic change, and spillover drawn outlines.