The nickelodeons of the early movie industry showcased
films that appealed to all ages and populations rather
than specifically to children. Moral guardians of the early
1900s were concerned about children attending movies
on their own because it could be an inducement to skip
school or become familiar with unruly characters, both
onscreen and in theaters. Although children did appear in
many films of the early film era, their roles were almost
exclusively as accessories to adult activities, such as the
little girl who frees her father in The Great Train Robbery
(1903) or the numerous children depicted as victims
of kidnappings in films like The Adventures of Dollie
(D. W. Griffith, 1908).
Yet, as Richard deCordova’s research has shown,
Hollywood had indeed become concerned with the child
movie audience by the 1910s. Children’s matinees
became common in many movie houses by 1913, and
groups like the National Board of Review’s Committee
on Films for Young People not only promoted matinees
at the national level but encouraged studios to make
more films suitable for children, despite the fact that
children still often preferred films aimed at adults.
Then in 1925 the Motion Picture Producers and
Distributors Association under Will Hays (1879–1954)
began an effort to identify films suitable for children. By
the fall of 1925, the MPPDA had arranged fifty-two
matinee programs, with many films reedited and retitled
for youngsters. These programs were shipped as a special
block to theaters, and exhibitors were contracted to show
only the selected program films during Saturday matinees. The MPPDA used this approach to promote the
studios’ sense of responsibility and at the same time to
encourage children to be loyal movie customers.
But no sooner had the MPPDA established this
successful program than they abandoned it the next year,
letting the task of staging children’s matinees fall back
into the hands of exhibitors. This brief foray into cultivating a child audience did not induce the Hollywood
studios, which wanted to keep their audience as wide as
possible, to produce a new genre of films aimed at
children. Hollywood even cast established adult actors
in children’s roles, a practice that may seem preposterous
by present standards but at the time fostered a diverse
family audience. Stars such as Lillian Gish (1893–1993),
Richard Barthelmess (1895–1963), and especially Mary
Pickford (1893–1979) were exploited for their youthful
looks in popular stories like Pollyanna (1920) and Little
Annie Rooney (1925). Actual child actors of the 1920s
who gained fame on their own, such as Jackie Coogan
(1914–1984) and Baby Peggy (b. 1918), were cast alongside adult stars to further ensure that their movies were
not exclusively focused on a childhood perspective.
Two genres of film were particularly appealing to
children during this period, even though they did not
gain the respect of features: short subjects (or serials) and
cartoons, which were shown at the beginning of programs. Studios and exhibitors likely thought that children’s attention spans were better suited to shorter fare,
and that placing the shorter films early in a program
would help ensure children’s interest in the longer films
that followed. One of the most famous short subject
series that was clearly geared to children (although also
appealing to adults) was Our Gang, which the producer
Hal Roach (1892–1992) started in 1922. This series used
actual child actors to play children who tended to be of
the working class, curious, and funny. The series of over
two hundred short films was quite successful, running
into the 1940s. Other short-subject series, such as the
slapstick antics of the Three Stooges, though not featuring children were nonetheless of enormous appeal to
them.
Cartoons were quite a different market. Animation,
though effective in telling fantastic stories of unusual,
often nonhuman, characters, was slow to start in early
cinema. By the 1920s a handful of animators had made
short films, with the most popular series being Felix the
Cat, and by the end of the decade an ambitious artist,
Walt Disney (1901–1966), introduced a character who
grew into the sound era: Mickey Mouse. Disney’s success
paved the way for a generation of new cartoon characters,
and by the 1930s all of the major and minor Hollywood
studios had developed their own cartoon series to appeal
to entire families. When Disney made the first American
animated feature in 1937, Snow White and the Seven
Dwarfs, a new approach to making films for children
began.