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The super cute story behind Andy Panda
It was pure panda-monium!
It was 1937, and Walter Lantz was retiring his star character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. After nine years and 190 cartoons, it was time for a fresh new cartoon character to help Lantz Productions stand out amongst the competition. Following Oswald's retirement, Lantz spent months producing cartoons without recurring characters until Universal Studios asked him to make a new recurring character, one that could be another reliable success like Oswald.
He desperately needed inspiration for a hit character, one who could be counted among the ranks of Tom and Jerry or Bugs Bunny. Lantz was also looking for an animal that had not yet been made into a cartoon character - a tall order considering Disney and Warner Bros. were churning out dozens of animal cartoon characters a year.
So, he went to the zoo!
Luckily for Lantz, there was a special baby bear that had garnered national attention. The Brookfield Zoo, home base of the Chicago Zoological Society, had just made history by becoming the first U.S. zoo with a panda. Specifically, a baby giant panda named Su-Lin, who was brought from China in 1937 by explorer Ruth Harkness. Su-Lin was a huge media hit, and one year after his arrival, two other pandas named Mei-Mei and Mei-Lan were also brought to the zoo. Celebrities like Shirley Temple and Kermit Roosevelt were making trips to Chicago to see the pandas. It was a national phenomenon - pandas had never been in the United States before, and their mere presence was very exciting.
Nowadays, there are tons of cute videos and photos of pandas on the internet, so it's hard for us to imagine the public frenzy around the pandas. These pandas were brought to the zoo as babies and then raised in captivity, so when Lantz visited, they could only be described as extremely cute little toddler bears. Lantz drew sketches of the pandas playing and realized their mischievousness and natural cuteness would make perfect features for his new character, the first cartoon panda. According to the Pasadena Star-News, Lantz visited the zoo with a camera and filmed the pandas. Then, he brought the film and his sketches of the pandas back to the studio so the animators could begin developing Andy Panda.
The first Andy Panda cartoon was Life Begins for Andy Panda, where Andy is born, and all the animals in the forest rush to see the new baby panda. The cartoon was meant to capture the hype and interest around Su-Lin's arrival at Brookfield Zoo. Fans loved it, especially because Andy Panda looked so natural and real compared to other cartoon bears.
In Andy's first few cartoons, he looks like a baby panda, but then he grew up a little, and animators drew him with clothes to make him more of a panda kid. Kids loved Andy because he was mischievous and fun, but also smart and correcting the mistakes of his bumbling father, Papa Panda. As the years went on, Andy became the go-to character to help kids understand World War II concepts like rationing, victory gardens, and Meatless Tuesdays. Lantz also used Andy cartoons to introduce new characters to the audience, including Woody Woodpecker.
