CARTOONS ARE NO LAUGHING MATTER

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Unlike Walt, who refused to syndicate his films to TV, Jack Warner sold his pre-1948 cartoon library for a fire-sale $3,000 each; they have made much more than that in each year since then. Later, to make room for its record division's accounting files, the company trashed its archive of the cels used in its great cartoons; those cindered cels would now be worth tens of millions. Ub Iwerks wasn't the only financial rube in the business.

Kanfer writes with sweep and concision, but when he tries to graft U.S. political traumas onto cartoon fables (blaming the failure of the 1988 Land Before Time on its inability to harmonize with Reagan's happy talk), he can pretzel himself like an Avery wolf. Jones, incapable of writing a sentence that doesn't sing like Bugs in What's Opera, Doc?--joyous, impish and in perfect pitch--is fashioning, in his 85th year, a second career almost as wondrous as his first. May it make animation's favorite uncle rich, wealthy, or moderately well off.

And happier, at least, than Avery, who just before his death in 1980 was reduced to working as a Hanna-Barbera gag man, largely forgotten and afraid that he wasn't "funny anymore." Avery knew that the serious business of cartoon making had a Pagliacci side. If it didn't make you laugh like a kid on the first day of summer, it could pretty much break your heart.