cartoon theater :: OSSmile

📺 OSSmile TV

Pull up a beanbag and grab the cereal. 🥣 Everything on this dial is public domain — film whose copyright has long since lapsed — streamed straight from the Internet Archive, the planet’s greatest dusty attic. We don’t host a single frame; we just point the rabbit-ears in the right direction. No ads. No pop-ups. No “skip in 5.” Just television. 🎬

The set boots up off the air — those color bars are the old test pattern, not a dead screen. Give the POWER knob a turn and we’ll roll a genuine vintage commercial (’70s & ’80s, all free from the Archive) to warm up the tubes. Then browse the guide below — channels down the side, showtimes across the top — and click any cell to tune in a show. Use your arrow keys to move around the grid, and knock the 📼 BREAK knob any time you miss the commercials.

There are three stations on the dial and every one of them is on the air. Turn the knob along and see what the neighbours are showing.

📡 OSSmile Cable — 🎬 Saturday-Morning Cartoon Theater

Rubber-hose, Technicolor and Syncro-Vox — the shorts and serials whose copyrights have long since lapsed.

⬤ OFF AIR — turn the set on

OFFON POWER 📼 BREAK

📺 GUIDE

7:00 AM

7:30 AM

8:00 AM

8:30 AM

9:00 AM

9:30 AM

10:00 AM

CH 21

CH 57

CH 68

CH 71

CH 93

CH 97

Full lineup — every short links straight to the Internet Archive:

▶ CH 21 · 7:00 AM — “Superman: The Mechanical Monsters” (1941) Fleischer Studios’ gorgeous Art-Deco Superman. A mad scientist, an army of flying robots, and some of the most beautiful hand-drawn animation ever put to film.
▶ CH 21 · 8:00 AM — “Gerald McBoing-Boing” (1950) A little boy who speaks only in sound effects. UPA’s flat, modern, lovely style won it an Academy Award — and it’s aged into pure public-domain charm.
▶ CH 21 · 8:30 AM — “Betty Boop: Minnie the Moocher” (1932) Betty runs away from home and straight into a cave of ghosts — led by a rotoscoped walrus dancing to Cab Calloway’s “Minnie the Moocher.” Spooky, swinging, unforgettable.
▶ CH 21 · 9:00 AM — “Colonel Bleep: Arrives on Earth” (1957) The first cartoon series made in color for TV. Colonel Bleep from the planet Futura, a caveman named Squeek, and a wind-up cowboy puppet defend the galaxy. Space-age Americana at its finest.
▶ CH 57 · 7:00 AM — “Betty Boop in Snow White” (1933) Cab Calloway rotoscoped into a ghostly “St. James Infirmary” number. People still call this one of the greatest cartoons ever made — and it’s pure public domain.
▶ CH 57 · 7:30 AM — “Color Classics: Somewhere in Dreamland” (1936) A Fleischer “Color Classic” in gorgeous early Technicolor. Two poor children dream of a candy wonderland; the town wakes up and makes the dream real. Unapologetically sweet.
▶ CH 57 · 8:00 AM — “Balloon Land” (1935) An Ub Iwerks ComiColor short where every single thing is made of balloons — until the Pincushion Man turns up. Gloriously, wonderfully weird early Technicolor.
▶ CH 57 · 8:30 AM — “Clutch Cargo: The Big X” (1959) Famous for Syncro-Vox — real human lips filmed and superimposed onto still drawings. Uncanny, thrifty, and weirdly hypnotic. Adventurer Clutch Cargo takes to the skies.
▶ CH 68 · 7:00 AM — “Popeye Meets Ali Baba’s Forty Thieves” (1937) A Technicolor two-reeler. Popeye, Bluto as a desert bandit, and an absurd amount of spinach-powered chaos. Big, loud, delightful.
▶ CH 68 · 8:00 AM — “Felix the Cat: The Cold Rush” (1925) Silent-era Felix — the original rubber-hose superstar, plucky and surreal, from the days when cartoons were brand new. Crank up your imagination for the soundtrack.
▶ CH 68 · 8:30 AM — “Woody Woodpecker: Pantry Panic” (1941) Early, fully unhinged Woody — the manic-cackle era. Winter’s coming, the food’s running out, and a cat and woodpecker settle it the hard way. Pure cartoon anarchy.
▶ CH 68 · 9:00 AM — “Space Angel: Ghost and the Crystal Maze” (1962) More Syncro-Vox lips, more deep-space derring-do. Scott McCloud — code name Space Angel — patrols the solar system for the Interplanetary Space Force. Saturday-morning sci-fi, distilled.
▶ CH 71 · 7:00 AM — “Daffy Duck and the Dinosaur” (1939) Early, unhinged, hoo-hoo-hoo Daffy versus a caveman and his pet dinosaur. A restored print of a Looney Tunes that slipped into the public domain.
▶ CH 71 · 7:30 AM — “Popeye Meets Sindbad the Sailor” (1936) Popeye’s first Technicolor two-reeler and an Academy Award nominee. Bluto plays Sindbad, “the most remarkable, extraordinary fella” — until a sailor with a can of spinach wanders ashore.
▶ CH 71 · 8:30 AM — “Tom & Jerry: Pencil Mania” (1932) Not the cat and mouse — Van Beuren’s human Tom and Jerry, from the wild pre-Code days. A magic pencil draws whatever they need into existence. Meta before meta was a word.
▶ CH 71 · 9:00 AM — “Rocky Jones, Space Ranger: Crash of the Moons” (1954) Live-action rocket-opera from early TV — two moons on a collision course and only the Space Rangers can help. Stitched from serial chapters into a feature. Ray-guns, jetpacks, cliffhangers.
▶ CH 93 · 7:00 AM — “Aesop’s Fables: The Fire Fighters” (1930) A Van Beuren “rubber-hose” short from the very dawn of sound cartoons. Everything bounces, everything sings. Wonderfully strange.
▶ CH 93 · 7:30 AM — “Superman: The Mad Scientist” (1941) The very first Fleischer Superman cartoon — the one that gave us “faster than a speeding bullet.” A mad scientist, an electrothanasia ray, and animation so lush it cost a fortune.
▶ CH 93 · 8:30 AM — “Private Snafu: No Buddy Atoll” (1945) A Warner Bros. short made for the U.S. Army — same crew as Looney Tunes, minus the Hays Code. Snafu learns why you never go it alone. Government work, so bulletproof public domain.
▶ CH 93 · 9:00 AM — “The Space Adventures of Flash Gordon” (1954) Live-action Flash Gordon, filmed in West Berlin for early television. Flash, Dale and Dr. Zarkov patrol the year 3203 for the Galaxy Bureau of Investigation. Rocket-age serial fun.
▶ CH 97 · 7:00 AM — “Bugs Bunny: The Wacky Wabbit” (1942) Elmer Fudd goes prospecting for gold in the desert; Bugs makes that his problem. “Oh, Suzanna” has never been used as a weapon so effectively.
▶ CH 97 · 7:30 AM — “Bugs Bunny: Falling Hare” (1943) The rare one where Bugs is outsmarted — by a pint-sized gremlin loose on an airbase. A beautifully restored print of a wartime Looney Tunes now in the public domain.
▶ CH 97 · 8:00 AM — “Crusader Rabbit: Crusader vs. Texas” (1950) The very first cartoon made FOR television — Crusader Rabbit and his tiger sidekick Rags, told in cliffhanger chapters. Jay Ward would go on to make Rocky & Bullwinkle. History, right here.

🍿 Want to run your own theater?

The Internet Archive has thousands more public-domain cartoons — Betty Boop, Popeye, early Looney Tunes, Felix the Cat, Gerald McBoing Boing, Fleischer’s Superman, the whole Van Beuren menagerie. Go digging:

🎞️ archive.org · Animation & Cartoons — the big collection
🦸 Everything Fleischer Studios — Superman, Betty Boop, Popeye, the Color Classics
📼 archive.org · Classic TV Commercials — the vintage ads on our 📼 BREAK knob live here
🔎 Search any title + “public domain” — if it has an /embed/ page, it drops right in here.

We only embed shorts & spots that are genuinely free to share — public domain, Creative Commons, or the free-use Prelinger Archives. Those ’70s and ’80s commercials are period advertisements; the brands belong to their owners, we just point at the archived tape and sell nothing. The science films are period films too — where one carries the science of its day rather than of ours, its blurb says so. If we got a call wrong, leave a note and we’ll pull it.

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📺 OSSmile TV

📡 OSSmile Cable — 🎬 Saturday-Morning Cartoon Theater

🍿 Want to run your own theater?

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