1948 Screen Song Camptown Races

In 1942, Paramount forced out feuding brothers Max and Dave Fleischer from their cartoon studio and re-christened it "Famous Studios." Famous continued to make the popular Popeye, Superman and other cartoons begun by the Fleischers and in 1947, they decided to revive the sing-along Screen Song format. The series officially relaunched with "The Circus Comes to Clown," after five similar "bouncing ball" cartoons were made under the Noveltoon banner in the intervening years. The first color Screen Songs were produced in the short-lived Polacolor process invented by the Polaroid Corporation. It was a three-color, dye-coupled, monopack system meant to compete with the very expensive dye-transfer Technicolor system. It had limited success, though the results seem good, and Paramount switched to Technicolor after making about a dozen each of the Screen Songs and Popeyes. Screen Songs were eventually stopped in 1951 by a Fleischer lawsuit over the ownership of the bouncing ball idea. But they weren't dead yet and returned as "Kartune Musical Shorts," bouncing along sporadically until 1963 when declining audiences, probably due to television, brought about their demise.

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