CARTOONS ARE NO LAUGHING MATTER

It was 1927, the year Hollywood discovered sound. Any actor who could talk, any playwright who could write talk, was worth hundreds of thousands. But the man who would revolutionize movies with a talking mouse was having a hard time raising the $18,000 for his first talking picture--a thing with a mouse. To get his Steamboat Willie sound track recorded on the equipment owned by a con artist named Pat Powers, Walt Disney agreed to let Powers distribute his cartoons. Mickey Mouse was an instant star, but Disney saw little cash from Powers. From this he learned to trust no one. Walt's invaluable animator, Ub Iwerks, learned less. Powers lured him away to make Flip the Frog cartoons, and Iwerks sold his 20% share in Disney for $2,920. Today that stock would be worth perhaps half a billion dollars.

Cartoons are cash cows, money mice, dollar ducks, beyond the dreams of Iwerks or even Walt. The Lion King earned $300 million at the domestic box office, more abroad, and zillions more in video. This summer's Disney feature, Hercules, looms huge: it might make Simba roar with envy; it will surely spur the rebels at DreamWorks, under the command of former Disney exec Jeffrey Katzenberg, to draw bigger and faster on their animation slate. On TV, The Simpsons, now in its eighth superb season, begot Ren and Beavis, Duckman and King of the Hill. Disney and Warner stores sell upmarket T shirts and gewgaws based on new and classic cartoons.

The mania has now produced a spate of books--catnip for the nostalgia connoisseur and the mogul hoping to extend his franchise line and move the vintage-cartoon cassettes off the video-store shelves. Warner Books has published Chuck Reducks, the second (after Chuck Amuck) memoir of Warner Bros.' cartoon glory years by its major double-domo, Chuck Jones. Turner Publishing, literary outlet for the owner of mgm cartoons, honors animation's wildest spirit with John Canemaker's handsome Tex Avery: The MGM Years, 1942-55. It is essentially a reprint of Pierre Lambert's original, one of four French books on Avery.

Hyperion, the Disney book subsidiary, could level all the trees in Snow White's forest for its nostalgia and tie-in tomes--not just the inevitable The Art of Hercules, due any day now, but fond, if incestuous, tributes to the anonymous heroes who toiled on Disney cartoons. Canemaker's Before the Animation Begins: The Art and Lives of Disney Inspirational Sketch Artists is a sumptuous introduction to the craftsfolk whose paintings suggested a mood and design for Disney directors. Hyperion has also begun a sketchbook series of drawings from its early works; the first is a beguiling Bambi. In concert these volumes illuminate the unseen artistry that helps create movie magic.

Now that animation has been recognized as art, it's time to remember that it has always been big business, bad business--Serious Business, to borrow the title of a helpful cartoon history by Stefan Kanfer, a former TIME film critic and senior editor. (The book is published by Scribner, which, oddly enough, has no cartoon division.) From the Jones, Canemaker and Kanfer works emerges a picture of the industry that might have been painted not by Disney but by Goya. It's compelling and instructive, and it ain't pretty.