Cayden the Rabbit and Company

Cayden the Rabbit and Company is a 30-minute American television series mainly composed, of the animated cartoon shorts of Cayden the Rabbit and other Joey Drew characters including Woody Woodpecker, Rocky and Bullwinkle, Lucky and Knick 'n' Knock all released by Joey Drew Productions. The series was revived and reformatted several times, but remained popular for nearly four decades and allowed the studio to continue making theatrical cartoons until 1976 when the shorts' division got shut down. It also kept the Joey Drew/Universal cartoons made during the Golden Age of American animation a part of the American consciousness.

History
Movie theater owners in the 1950s were finding that they could release features with reissued cartoons, or no cartoons at all, and the audiences would still come. Because of the practice, the theatrical cartoon business was suffering and losing money. By 1956 there were only seven animation producers in the short-subjects field, and by the end of the decade that number would dwindle down to three. Joey Drew and his distributor, Universal Pictures, knew that the only way to subsidize the rising costs of new shorts was to release their product to television. Norman Gluck from Universal's short-subjects department made a deal with Dancer, Fitzgerald and Sample to release some older Drew product on television. DFS handled the General Mills cereal account and Drew soon met with the General Mills people to sign the contract. Drew admitted that he was only working in the medium because he was "forced into TV" and "cartoons for theaters would soon be extinct".

Cayden the Rabbit and Company debuted on ABC on the afternoon of October 3, 1957. The series was shown once a week, on Thursday afternoons, replacing the first half-hour of the shortened Mickey Mouse Club. Drew integrated his existing cartoons with new live action footage, giving the show an updated look that satisfied both viewers and Drew himself. The live action and animation segments created for the show, called 'A Moment with Joey Drew', featured an informative look at how the animation process for his cartoons worked as well as how the writers came up with stories and characters. The live-action segments were directed by Myron Waldman, who was fresh from the Paramount studio where he had done similar live-action/animation sequences for the Paramount show.

After the initial year on ABC, Cayden the Rabbit and Company was syndicated until 1973. The "A Moment with Joey Drew" segments were eventually replaced with "Cayden's Newsreel" and "Around The World with Cayden" which used footage of Universal Newsreels and featured voice-over commentary by Joey Drew and Cayden the Rabbit.

In 1974, the show reappeared on network television, with 26 additional episodes assembled by Drew for NBC. The show ran on NBC until September 2, 1976, which is the same year the Joey Drew Productions shorts' division shut down. The show was revived again on September 10, 1977, featuring cartoons made from 1940 to 1976, along with new cartoons from 1977-1979. The show ended its network run on September 1, 1979. Local stations continued to air Cayden the Rabbit and Company for the next several years.

In 1984, Drew sold everything outright to MCA/Universal, though he remained active in overseeing how Universal handled his characters (for merchandise, TV, home video, theme parks, limited edition cels, etc.) up until his death in 1986.

In 1987, MCA/Universal and The Program Exchange returned the show to television with a new 90 episode package for syndication. This Cayden the Rabbit Show featured a complete overhaul of the series format. Gone were the newsreels, "Around the World" segments, and live action scenes with Joey Drew, replaced by vignettes known as "Funny-Grams", in which new musical compositions were played over montages of classic cartoon footage. New commercial bumpers were added. Episodes of this Cayden the Rabbit Show typically consisted of two Cayden cartoons bookending another Drew cartoon (typically a Woody Woodpecker cartoon). The series continued airing in syndication until 1998. Around that time, Cartoon Network picked up rerun rights and aired The Cayden the Rabbit Show for several months, after which the series disappeared from television.

After Cartoon Network dropped The Cayden the Rabbit Show, Universal revived most of the Drew characters in Cayden the Rabbit Works with Quinton Flynn voicing Cayden, which ran from 1999 to 2000 as part of the Fox Kids Saturday morning lineup.

In August 2023, MeTV acquired the broadcast rights to Joey Drew cartoons from 1944 to 1985 to air The Cayden the Rabbit Show on Saturday mornings on September 2 as part of MeTV's Saturday Morning Cartoons animation block, marking Cayden's return to television after 21 years.