This is so fantastic…three videos on YouTube of Time For Beany. The clips are very short, but fun to watch. They’re part of a film called M.L. Gunzburg Presents 3-D from 1952 that was produced to introduce audiences to the then-new “Polaroid” 3-D process:

Video 1 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnGLcW5RziA
Video 2 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOAm8AR60Nk
Video 3 – http://youtube.com/watch?v=qgd4jKZrjo0&search=puppet

If you’re not familiar with Time For Beany, it’s one of the most important shows in the history of both puppetry and animation on early American television. The series was created by Bob Clampett and debuted in February 1949 on Los Angeles’ KTLA and ran for six years. Clampett, who’s best known for his legendary work in animation, was probably the first and most important artist to discover the strong similarities between animation and puppetry (Clampett called puppetry “dimensional animation”) and had begun experimenting with puppets in the mid 1930s when he set up an after hours puppet workshop while working as an animator at Warner Bros.

There was actually quite a bit of cross-pollination between early T.V. animation and T.V. puppetry. On Time For Beany Beany and his uncle were performed by the legendary voice actor Daws Butler (legend has it that Daw’s wife Myrtis built the original Cecil puppet using fabric cut from their son’s pajamas) while Stan Freberg performed Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent and Dishonest John, the show’s villain. One of the show’s key writers was Bill Scott, who would go on to work with lifetime puppet enthusist Jay Ward create a little show called Rocky and Bullwinkle, which also began life in puppet form.

What’s absolutely remarkable about Time For Beany was that like all shows from the 1940s and 1950s that were done live-to-air, Clampett and his team wrote, directed a shot an original fifteen minute puppet show almost everyday, five days a week, 52 weeks a year for six years. Just imagine the amount of work that involves!