The Lost Art of Animated Campaign Commercials

Thanks to Metafilter I came across a post on historical campaign videos and I was pretty surprised to find a few that were animated! The trend for animated campaign commercials seemed to die out at the very end of the 50s, but it looks like there was a mini-golden age when a civic minded animator could throw his or her hat into the ring. Shown above is a spot for Ike from 1952, what funny is that the elephant reminds me a great deal of Dr. Seuss who was a life long Democrat. Below is a 1956 spot for Adlai Stevenson which is a bit negative. But you know when a negative campaign ad is a cartoon there’s something a bit more lovable about it:

I found this next spot for Adlai Stevenson (also from 1956) interesting because it seems that Barack Obama wasn’t he first candidate to have a “funny sounding name”: