Night at the movies

Actually, the cartoons and the newsreel and the travelogue and other such additives were deliberately appended onto the feature film by the studio that produced it. The idea was to limit how many times per day any given feature film could be played in a theater, since the studio could only charge a one-time fee for the film.

Then, in 1948, the Supreme Court ruled that this practice, called "block booking," was a form of unconstitutional monopoly. Studios could no longer require theaters to screen all the frills and extras that came with the feature film. Without this enforced mechanism in place, studios began to reassess whether cartoons were worthwhile additives.

In many cases, producers simply skipped making cartoons and such; only the largest and heartiest studios continued the practice, such as Walt Disney Pictures and Warner Brothers Pictures and MGM Studios. And in time, these studios also abandoned the theatrical cartoon. Currently, only animated features make it into US theaters. All other, shorter cartoons are relegated to television.

Except for the shorts shown before most Disney and Pixar features, like "Get A Horse," and "Bounding." Plus WB produced new shorts in the '90's, like "Carrotblanca."

True, but that's still about a forty year dry spell from when most studios shut down their animation departments, and the reintroduction of opening cartoons ushered in by Pixar. Disney's "Runaway Brain" and a Pink Panther cartoon were rare exceptions that appeared in the late Nineties.

The dedicated movie theater is dead, dying not long after the demise of the drive-ins. Today's cineplexes are geared more toward throughput, playing as many features as they can as fast as they can, to rake in the audience dollar. People tend to have mixed schedules, so confining a film's showing to a fixed time slot will preclude a percentage of the market. The closest we get to the folderol and fiddledeedee of the Forties is the Coming Attractions previews, which are blatant commercials for the studio's upcoming films. Today's streaming media put consumers in charge of screening, so producers of animation (or any media, for that matter) are confined to television (The Simpsons, Family Guy, American Dad) or putting their work in "the cloud" where pay-per-view sites like Netflix and Hulu handle distribution. Time Marches On, Science Marches On, and the Market Marches On.