I’ve watched three of the four discs in the box set Harveytoons, The Complete Series. These 1950-1962 cartoons have proven to be just as perverse, violent and corny as I remember from my childhood.

In my adult years, I’ve learned these films were originally made by Famous Studios, which had been formed in 1942 after Paramount foreclosed on the more prestigious Max Fleischer studio. I also learned that, despite at least two of the films depicting the studio as situated in sunny Hollywood, it was really one of two animation factories in New York. (The other was the even less-respected Terrytoons.)

When Paramount parceled out its old theatrical shorts to TV distributors, it told those buyers to remove the Paramount name and logo from all distributed prints. Thus, when Harvey Comics bought one of the Paramount cartoon packages (plus the rights to all the starring characters therein), Paramount’s “Noveltoons” jack-in-the-box logo became “Harveytoons.”

These retitled films were first televised Sunday afternoons on ABC in 1959. I first saw them three or four years later, when they were syndicated onto local weekday kids’ shows. (As I recall, they aired locally with Brakeman Bill on KTNT, later KSTW.)

I’m surprised at how many moments from the films have been part of my brain’s hard-wiring, after all these decades:

• Casper drinking lemonade and turning pink.
• Herman the mouse turning Katnip into a Christmas tree, then sticking the cat’s tail in a power outlet to light him up.
• In another film, Herman (disguised as a mouse St. Peter) threatening Katnip with a toss into “the fiery furnace” (really a coal-fired home furnace).
• Baby Huey mistaking lab chemicals for “sody pop” and burping fireballs.
• A one-shot musical set in a “candy town” nightclub, with a gun-toting sourball cutting in on a dancing lollypop: “All right Lolly, drop that gum!”
• The “Crazytown Manufacturing Co.” factory, where an entire log is mechanically whittled away to create a single toothpick.

Some aspects of the films which I hadn’t remembered:

• The drawing, animation, backgrounds, and music are all of a much higher quality than I realized as a kid–at least in the package’s earlier films. Starting with the shorts bearing 1956 copyright dates, the budgets started going down. Full character movement gave way to simpler “cycle” animation.
• And Casper, the dominant character in the Harvey package (Popeye was Famous Studios’ biggest star, but those films were sold to a different syndicator) seemed overly infantile to me when I was six, but it resonates more strongly now.

Casper, as first created by Seymour Reit and Joe Oriolo in 1945, was a cloying object lesson in “fair play, overcoming peer pressure and being accepted for who you are (not by how you appear),” to quote a reviewer at imdb.com. As the Famous crew over the years turned the premise into a repetitive gag formula, its life lessons seemed a bit shallow–particularly when juxtaposed against the brutal hijinx of Herman and Katnip.

But in today’s sociocultural context, it makes more sense.

Casper is a sensitive, intellectual (the films often open on him reading a hardcover book), optimistic kid, who wants to spread amity, love, and cooperation in the world–in short, a progressive Democrat.

The other ghosts (later standardized in the comic books as the Ghostly Trio) are snotty schoolyard bullies who thrive on propagating fear, misunderstanding, and discord–in short, conservative Republicans.

Most of the “living” humans and animals in the Casper films have been indoctrinated by anti-ghost propaganda into fleeing at first sight of Casper, even though Casper has only the best of intentions. Heck, the other ghosts are never seen performing anything more harmful than frat-boy pranks.

But those pranks are what the other ghosts “live” for. The other ghosts not only want Casper to be perceived as scary, they want Casper to become scary. By refusing the ghost agenda, Casper is a rebel against, and a threat to, the dominant (ghost) culture.

Ironically, Casper usually gets out of trouble when the predators threatening his new-found friends see Casper and flee in fright. Casper’s curse is also one of his gifts.

But Casper’s bigger gift is perseverance. One new friend at a time, he effectively spreads his message of togetherness. For a non-corporeal being who’d apparently “died” at a presexual age (an aspect of his story that wasn’t discussed until the 1995 feature film), he’s got a lot of interest in helping corporeal humans live better lives together.

I could think of worse role models.