Sponsored Films

Albert in Blunderland (1950)
Sponsor: National Education Program, Harding College, with funding by Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Production Co.: John Sutherland Productions. Transfer Note: Scanned from a 16mm print held by the Library of Congress. Running Time: 8 minutes.

Animated critique of New Deal–type liberalism. In a dream “Albert,” a worker in a statist economy, is forced to watch a state-sponsored “free movie” on national planning. On awakening, he is convinced of the failings of excessive government control.

Note: Produced in Technicolor and distributed theatrically by MGM, this was among the cartoons in the Fun and Facts about America series. Received a Freedoms Foundation award in 1950. Revised in 1961. The Sloan Foundation provided funding to Harding College for other films extolling free enterprise, including Brink of Disaster and Make Mine Freedom. For more about Harding College, see Gene Blake, “Aims of Conservative Freedom Groups Told,” Los Angeles Times, July 2, 1961, B2.

Resources
Irving Spiegel, “Sloan Unit Denies Aid to Extremists,” New York Times, Sept. 21, 1964, 31; L. Edward Hicks, “Sometimes in the Wrong, but Never in Doubt”: George S. Benson and the Education of the New Religious Right (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1994), 63–74; William L. Bird Jr., “Better Living”: Advertising, Media, and the New Vocabulary of Business leadership, 1935–1955 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999), 176.