The Television School of Art
There were three televisions across my childhood, and each one was its own era.
The first was a console, a piece of furniture as much as an appliance, heavy dark wood with a dial you turned and a screen that took a full thirty seconds to warm up — the picture resolving from a bright point in the center outward, like the universe expanding in miniature. That was the living room TV, the one I remember from my earliest years, up to about age seven. The second was a small portable on a rolling stand that migrated between the kitchen and the living room depending on who needed it. Mom watched while she did chores — Abbott and Costello, Gunsmoke, Star Trek reruns, Leave It to Beaver, Lucille Ball. She loved that stuff. The portable was the classic TV era, the one that smelled like warm dust and sounded like canned laughter from the next room. The third was a normal television with push buttons instead of a dial, twenty-some inches, bolted to the living room. By then the programming had shifted: GI Joe, Transformers, Inspector Gadget. Saturday mornings got louder.
Always antenna. Never cable. Cable was the devil.
That was not a figure of speech in our house.
Mom had a complicated relationship with the television. She watched it. She also believed it was destroying the moral fabric of the family, possibly the nation. She followed Christian thinkers who warned of spiritual corruption through the screen — the same people who said they saw demons at rock concerts. Every so often, acting on conviction or guilt or some combination of both, she would get rid of the TV entirely. Just remove it. There would be stretches with no television in the house at all, silence where the Saturday morning noise had been, and we’d fill the hours with other things until the TV returned, as it always did, like a tide.
What this meant was that every moment of watching carried weight. Television wasn’t background noise in our household. It was permission. When it was there and when it was on and when nobody was telling you to turn it off, you absorbed what came through that screen with the intensity of someone who knew it might not last. I didn’t understand this at the time. I just knew that Saturday mornings mattered, and that the glowing rectangle in the living room was both a gift and a contested object.
Cereal. Pajamas. The dial, or later, the buttons. The screen warming up, the static resolving into color, and then the morning began.
Saturday morning cartoons were my first art school, and I didn’t know I was enrolled.
The quality ranged from garbage to extraordinary, but you watched it all because you were seven and it was Saturday and there was nothing else. Hanna-Barbera’s limited animation — characters sliding across painted backdrops on a two-frame cycle, mouths opening and closing like ventriloquist dummies — and then a golden-age Looney Tunes rerun would come on and even as a kid you could feel the difference. The movement had weight. The timing had music in it. The backgrounds weren’t just backdrops; they were paintings.
I didn’t know Maurice Noble’s name. I didn’t know he’d designed the environments for Chuck Jones’s best work — the expressionist deserts in the Road Runner cartoons, those vast empty spaces of mesa and sky where a coyote was always falling and the horizon went on forever. I didn’t know that What’s Opera, Doc? was seven minutes of Wagner staged with expressionist lighting and dramatic shadows in a cartoon about a hunter and a rabbit. I just knew it looked different from everything else. It looked like it meant something, even when the punchline was Elmer Fudd in a Viking helmet.
Then there was Thundarr the Barbarian. Jack Kirby designed it — I didn’t know that either, not for decades. But the shapes were right. The energy. Thundarr had that Kirby crackle running through it, the same cosmic dynamism that powered the comics I hadn’t yet discovered. He-Man, Thundercats — those came too, and they were fine, they were plastic and bright and sold a lot of toys. But when a rerun of something older came on, something drawn by someone who cared about composition, you could feel it in your chest before you could name it in your head.
I was being trained. I just didn’t know in what.
The holiday specials were event television, and we watched them as a family.
Rankin/Bass stop-motion: Rudolph, The Year Without a Santa Claus, Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town. Those puppets had a warmth to them that came from the handmade, the slightly imperfect, the way a knitted scarf on a clay figure catches real light and casts a real shadow. The 2D specials were different — The Hobbit in 1977, The Return of the King in 1980. I saw Tolkien before I read Tolkien, and the version I saw was filtered through something I wouldn’t understand until I was forty: Arthur Rackham’s illustration style, channeled through Lester Abrams’s designs, broadcast into a farmhouse living room on antenna signal. The gnarled trees. The heavy crosshatching. Gollum crouched in his cave, pale and enormous-eyed. The trolls arguing over how to cook the dwarves while dawn crept up behind them.
I recorded The Hobbit on our VCR and watched it many times. That sentence deserves more weight than it carries. The VCR was a revolution. We had Beta first, then VHS — the format war playing out in our house like it played out everywhere. Before the VCR, a movie was an event. You watched it when the network aired it or you didn’t watch it at all. After the VCR, a movie became a text. You could rewind. You could study. You could pause on a background painting and stare at the way the trees tangled against the sky. The Rankin/Bass Hobbit stopped being a holiday special I’d seen once and became something I could sit with, return to, absorb at my own speed. That’s when watching became studying, even if I didn’t know the word for it yet.
My first impulse with the VCR was to catalogue. I thought I could record all of television — organize it, index it, have it. The archivist instinct at ten years old, the same impulse that would become filing cabinets of design work, then folders on hard drives, then a markdown-and-git repository decades later. The technology changed. The compulsion didn’t.
The Last Unicorn I saw in theaters, at the Stadium Theater in Green Bay. There was a contest — or what I thought was a contest. Draw a picture from the movie and bring it in. I was maybe eight. No reference material except possibly a commercial I’d half-remembered. I drew what I thought was an epic scene: a magical-looking mountain, a lush forest, creatures of my own invention because I didn’t know what a manticore or a centaur actually looked like, and a unicorn, which I did know, though I wouldn’t have admitted to liking unicorns because my sister was caught up in the eighties unicorn craze — glitter iron-on t-shirts, the whole business — and the boy/girl divides had to be defended. Same creature, different packaging: she wore the glitter, I drew it in a dark forest surrounded by made-up monsters so it was acceptable.
I arrived at the theater feeling like an artist. They’d hung everyone’s drawings on the wall behind the ticket counter and given everyone a free ticket. No contest at all. Just a promotion. My first encounter with marketing, and maybe my first taste of cynicism — the moment you realize the thing you thought was special was just a apparatus. I don’t remember being devastated. I remember the recalibration: Oh. That’s how that works.
The movie itself was something else. Animated by Topcraft in Japan — the same studio that had done the Rankin/Bass Hobbit — and the backgrounds looked like medieval tapestries that had learned to breathe. Illuminated manuscripts in motion. The melancholy tone was unlike anything else marketed to children: genuinely sad, genuinely strange, a story about mortality and loss dressed in watercolor and scored with folk rock. Schmendrick the magician, incompetent and earnest, the holy fool who stumbles into grace. I didn’t have those words. I had the feeling.
Topcraft dissolved three years later. Its key staff went on to form Studio Ghibli with Hayao Miyazaki. The line runs: Rankin/Bass Hobbit, to The Last Unicorn, to Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, to everything Miyazaki built after that. I was watching the headwaters of a river I wouldn’t discover for twenty years.
E.T. I saw with Jon Deprey. The bike scenes in particular felt like my childhood — not the alien, not the government agents, but the bikes. Kids on BMXs riding through suburban streets in a pack, the freedom of it, the wind and the speed and the sense that your neighborhood was big enough to contain an adventure. The flying scene was the fantasy version of something I already knew: the feeling of riding so fast the wheels barely touch the ground. E.T. was the first movie that treated kids’ emotional lives as serious — the loneliness, the protectiveness, the grief — and it did it in a setting that looked like the streets you actually rode through. Spielberg understood that the ordinary neighborhood was already magical. You just had to point a camera at it the right way.
The Goonies felt like us. Kids on their own, no adults needed, following a map into the unknown. The underground chambers, the pirate ship — I knew that feeling from the Bay, where we’d find shipwreck pieces washed up on the shore, old timbers and rusted hardware that could have been anything, from any era, from any story you wanted to tell. The Goonies oath — “Goonies never say die” — and the fantasy that the adventure was yours, not something you watched from a seat but something you lived with your friends. The friend group as adventure party. We were already doing that on the farm, on the trails, on the playground. The Goonies just confirmed it was a genre.
The NeverEnding Story I also saw in theaters. The three characters at the beginning — Rock Biter riding his stone bicycle, the Night Hob on his bat, the tiny racing snail — fascinated me. A bestiary introduction: three completely different creatures establishing the range of the world before the story even started. You knew immediately that this place had rules and depth and species that existed whether or not you were watching.
Falcor really stands out as amazing — the luck dragon, white-furred, dog-faced, flying through clouds. Gmork, the wolf, really terrified me. And Morla the Ancient One, the giant turtle so old she’d stopped caring about anything, her shell indistinguishable from the landscape she sat in — she was a huge inspiration, though I couldn’t have said why. As an adult I get the allegory. As a child, it was the world. That distinction matters. I wasn’t interpreting. I was inhabiting.
Dark Crystal hit the same way. That world drew me in like no other — the Skeksis terrifying, the puppetry and set-building creating something that felt actually present in a way animation couldn’t. I didn’t know it was the same creator as Big Bird. I didn’t know Brian Froud until adulthood, same pattern as Moebius to Alien — the invisible influence pipeline where you absorb someone’s vision through three layers of adaptation before you ever learn their name. What I took from Dark Crystal was the magical, the darker, the rugged. A complete world where the environment IS the story.
Time Bandits I didn’t fully understand. The humor and references went over my head. But the costumes, the creatures, the design, the kid at the center of it, and above all, the map — the idea that all the time periods could be mashed together, the best of each stolen and combined — that fed Deluvia directly, though I didn’t know it yet. And the ending, where the parents touch the concentrated evil and simply vanish — that was the darkest thing I’d ever seen in a movie, and no adult in the theater seemed to think it needed explaining.
All of these — Dark Crystal, Time Bandits, Secret of NIMH, The Last Unicorn, E.T., The NeverEnding Story, The Goonies — arrived in a tight cluster between 1981 and 1985, all seen in theaters, ages seven through ten. Seven films in four years, each one a complete world built from scratch. I didn’t know that what I was watching was production design, creature design, world-building, and art direction. I thought I was watching movies. I was downloading a visual operating system that would run in the background for the rest of my life.
Then there were the ones I wasn’t supposed to see.
The drive-in theaters — Green Bay had east and west side outdoor screens; we went to the east side most. Double features. The deal was that I’d be asleep by the second movie. The deal was never honored.
Clash of the Titans. Harryhausen’s stop-motion Medusa, jerking frame by frame through torchlight, arrows nocked and loosed with that uncanny deliberateness that only stop-motion has, where every motion costs someone an hour of labor and you can feel the weight of the hand that moved each limb. I was supposed to be asleep. I watched through half-closed eyes from the back seat.
Raiders of the Lost Ark paired with Beastmaster. My parents covered my eyes for the face-melting scene — so they must have seen it before, which means they knew what was coming and brought me anyway. The second film, Beastmaster, was pure drive-in fantasy, muscles and ferrets and a painted barbarian who could talk to animals. I watched all of it. I watched Harryhausen’s Sinbad too, probably the second film of another double feature, the first one forgotten. Didn’t know Harryhausen’s name then. Was equally terrified at the monsters but also very intrigued. Learned the name later through study. Same pattern as Froud, as Rackham, as Gilliam — the invisible hand you feel years before you learn who it belongs to.
The forbidden visual education happening literally in the dark, from the back seat of a car, in a parking lot, on a screen the size of a building. Harryhausen’s stop-motion connects to Rankin/Bass, to Švankmajer, to the whole thread of handmade animation where you can feel the human touch in every frame. I was watching it all and understanding none of it and absorbing every bit.
There were other threads — Labyrinth and Legend and Willow, seen once, not in theaters, loved later. The Smurfs, which Mom flagged for Gargamel and Azrael being too occult. The Littles. The Gummy Bears cartoon, whose forest-tree base was endlessly fascinating. Tom and Jerry as Rube Goldberg machines, the engineering of comedy. Laff-A-Lympics, Hanna-Barbera’s competitive team structure — Scooby’s team versus Yogi’s versus the villains — which now that I think about it appealed to the same kid who would build faction snow forts at recess.
But the thread that matters is the unconscious one. Before I knew what art direction was, I could feel it. Before I knew the word composition, I was drawn to frames that had it. Before I’d ever held an illustration book, I’d spent thousands of hours inside illustrated worlds — animated, stop-motion, puppeted, painted — and the visual grammar had written itself into my nervous system the way language writes itself into a child who hears it spoken every day.
I looked back to study Eyvind Earle and Mary Blair in adulthood. Earle painted the backgrounds for Sleeping Beauty — vertical forests, Gothic architecture, medieval modernism, the most art-directed Disney film ever made. Blair did concept art for Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan — bold, flat, fearless with palette, color that didn’t ask permission. I saw Sleeping Beauty theatrical re-release in 1979. The backgrounds stuck even when the story didn’t. I think I always knew that film had something the others didn’t. Studying Earle’s work decades later was like finally reading the name on a letter that had arrived when I was five.
That’s how a visual education works when nobody plans it. You sit in pajamas in a dim living room eating cereal out of the box, and the television teaches you things it doesn’t know it’s teaching, and you learn things you don’t know you’re learning, and twenty-five years later you’re standing in front of a building with a paintbrush in your hand and every choice you make — the color, the composition, the way the shapes talk to each other — traces back to a Saturday morning when you were six and the screen warmed up and the world expanded and nobody told you to pay attention because nobody knew you already were.