Saturday Afternoon Cartoons: Cool for School

2023 / 60min / 16mm

Curator Tommy José Stathes joins Metrograph in the middle of August with Cool For School, a selection of vintage cartoon films that encapsulate the upcoming back-to-school season. Come enjoy silly classroom shenanigans, neurotic school teachers, clever kid delinquents, and other assorted scholarly trials and tribulations. Spanning the 1910s through the ’50s, this assortment showcases classic characters such as Farmer Al Falfa, Bobby Bumps, Flip the Frog, Porky Pig, Baby Huey, Little Lulu, and others.

Saturday Afternoon Cartoons is New York City’s prime theatrical showcase of early and classic animated cartoons, shown in vintage 16mm film prints from the personal archives of historian Tommy José Stathes. Beginning over 20 years ago as a casual effort to find and see early cartoons that were unavailable on home video, Stathes’s collection has grown to become perhaps one of the largest of its kind. It includes many titles and “orphan films” that are difficult to access or view elsewhere.