Instructor: Karl Menninger

No image available Biography:

Karl Menninger is a retired government lawyer who seems to have found an avocation teaching courses on disability law, citizenship, comedy and James Bond, among other topics.

Classes by this instructor


Cartoons: From Disney to Saturday Morning to Pixar and Beyond

We started watching cartoons as children, either at the movies or on television on Saturday mornings. Many of us continue to watch them, even without children or grandchildren. We'll look at the invention of the animated cartoon in the Silent Era, the creation of a certain Mouse by a guy from Kansas City and the entertainment empire that spawned, cartoons from other studios (Betty Boop, Popeye, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Tom and Jerry, Mr. Magoo, Mighty Mouse), how cartoons went to war in the 1940s and how they migrated to television, both on Saturday mornings and on "kiddie" shows on weekday afternoons. We'll review the Disney renaissance in the 1990s, with "The Little Mermaid" and "The Lion King," long-running prime-time cartoons such as "The Simpsons," recent Disney competitors (Don Bluth, Ralph Bakshi, DreamWorks), and Pixar, who led the way in computer-generated animation with "Toy Story" and "Frozen". We'll also share where we watched cartoons: the movies, television, VHS/DVD/BluRay and now streaming services like Disney+.


Instructor bio: Karl Menninger is a retired government lawyer who seems to have found an avocation teaching courses on disability law, citizenship, comedy and James Bond, among other topics. 


June 11-25, 2026, Beacon Mental Health (Clay County)