Why did studios discard animation art prior to the 1970s?
Storing the thousands of individually inked and painted cels used to produce animation became a problem for the studios once the images were photographed onto motion picture film. To solve this problem, studios would often wash off the inks and paints so that they could reuse the cels. Many cels were simply thrown away by the thousands. The rapid growth of television in the 1950’s created an important new venue for animated productions, but television studios also washed and reused cels. The sad result is that virtually all of the production artwork from the 1920’s to the 1960’s is gone forever.
