Anti-Smoking Cartoon for Kids 1915 : Smoking is bad?

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Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Wallace Carlson moved with his family in 1905 to Chicago, where he took a job at the Chicago Inter Ocean newspaper as a copy boy. Soon he was contributing cartoons to the paper. Some time after the newspaper folded, Carlson created his first animated cartoon, Joe Boko Breaking Into the Big League (1914) completely on his own, the same year as Winsor McCay's Gertie the Dinosaur. The success of this short gained the attention of the Essanay Film Manufacturing Company, who engaged Carlson to create a series, Canimated Nooz Pictorials, that was combined into their newsreels. At first the character Joe Boko continued from the older subject, but shortly Carlson introduced Dreamy Dud, a winsome lad whose daydreams gets him into various troublesome situations.[1] Carlson's Dreamy Dud pictures remain his best known work in posterity.

In 1917, Carlson began to work for John Randolph Bray and developed other characters, including Otto Luck and Goodrich Dirt, the latter being a short, squat bearded hobo in ragged clothes who seemed to have perpetual bad luck. When Carlson introduced the Us Fellers series at Bray in 1919, it provided him the opportunity to bring back Dreamy Dud, who was the main focus of these subjects.

Although Wallace Carlson's early and late careers as a newspaper cartoonist added up to some 30 years of activity, it is for his animation that he is remembered; in just seven years Carlson made over 100 cartoons, albeit short ones of the split-reel variety. Most of these are either lost or otherwise unaccounted for, though several of his titles were circulated in the home 16mm market of the 1920s and 30s and newly discovered ones continue to be located periodically. The earlier, freely drawn Essanay titles tend to be more interesting than later Bray subjects as the recycled cel backdrops and the demand of producing cartoons at the rate which Bray preferred tended to compromise their quality. Nevertheless, Carlson belongs to the first generation of American animators and his work retains considerable interest in its close visual relationship to comic strip art and imaginative flights of fancy, particularly in the Dreamy Dud series.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallace_Carlson

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