Long considered "children's entertainment" by audiences and popular media, Hollywood's animation has received little serious attention. Eric Smoodin's Animating Culture is the first book to thoroughly analyze the animated short film. Smoodin argues that cartoons appealed to a wide audience--not just children--and did indeed contribute to public debate about political matters. He examines issues often ignored in discussions of animated film--issues such as social control in the U.S. army's "Private Snafu" cartoons, and sexuality and race in the "sites" of Betty Boop's body and the cartoon...

The New Republic airbrushed a Hitler mustache on Saddam Hussein. CNN reporters described the bombing of Baghdad as "fireworks on the Fourth of July." The Pentagon fed prepackaged programs to the TV networks. Veiled Arab women became icons of an exotic culture. These are some of the ways the media brought home the war in the Persian Gulf as a national spectacle.

Looking to old and new technologies for mass communication-from CNN to comic books, from international news agencies to tabloids, from bomb sights to the Super Bowl-the essays in this collection show the ways in which public...