Scrappy's Television

With a lot of fuss and bother and replacing of blown vacuum tubes, Scrappy shows his audience -- Oopie, a cat, and a bird -- television images of a squirrel, cats on a back fence, and a comic boxing match from Madison Square Garden.

It was a science fiction fantasy even then. John Logie Baird in England, Charles Francis Jenkins in the United States, and Kenjiro Takayanagi in Japan had all come up with working television system using Nipkow disks in the middle of the 1920s. By 1927, Bell Labs was transmitting using a plasma display for its receiver, and in 1928, RCA had established its first television station in Schenectady. So it wasn't a fantasy by 1934; it was the coming thing, even though World War Two got in the way.

Of course this cartoon used it for comic effect. And pretty funny it was, too.