same reason why half of mexico city is here now, cheap labor.
Jay Ward was a real estate mogul before he got into the business of animation. He understood how to make a buck and took his investment dollars in real estate and parlayed them into the fledgling TV cartoon industry with a guy named Anderson. They produced the first solely for TV cartoon show, Crusader Rabbit, somewhere around 1949.
That lasted for a couple of years, after which he tried one or two other character shows that were never picked up by the networks. Actually, Crusader Rabbit was not networked either, but sold on an individual station basis.
Meanwhile, Bill Scott was working as a animator for Paul Terry, of Terrytoons (Mighty Mouse, Heckle and Jeckle, etc) and wanted to branch out into TV, but couldn’t get Terry to budge. He quit with him in the mid fifties and joined up with Ward on ideas that Jay had about characters that lived in a fictitious town called Fostbite Falls MN. By 1959, those ideas congealed into the first morning versions of Rocky and Bullwinkle that appeared on ABC.
Animation was a very tedious process, as I said, five seconds worth of action requiring 120 frames of pictures (actually, Steve just told me that even though it requires 24 frames per second, animation generally requires each cell to be snapped twice, so five seconds of animation actually only requires 60 individual cell movements). Ward found that if the grunt work of drawing and painting of the cells could be paid cheaply enough, and their first idea was to create the studio in Japan, they could turn a bigger profit. I think Steve said at that time, they were paying the Mexican employees the equivalent of 7 cents on the dollar for the same work done in the states.
