"The White Seal"

In
1974, Chuck Jones brought to life the story of Kotick, the white seal, while a
vice-president in charge of children’s programming at ABC.  This television special was based on the
story of survival and perseverance of a group of seals living in the Bering
Straits.  The original tale is by Rudyard
Kipling and can be found in his collection* of stories, The Jungle Book.   Chuck Jones also recreated for television
two other Kipling tales, Rikki Tikki Tavi in 1975 and Mowgli’s
Brothers in 1976.  This image featured above was created from an original production cel and
background used in the film and later featured on the cover of the book based
on the television special The White Seal. 

*From Chuck Amuck by Chuck Jones:  “We always had books in the house we lived
in.  We not only had books, we had books
(old or new) that were fresh to us.  The
way it worked was this: a house in those days of the early twenties had
books.  Incredible as it seems, that’s
what people did: they read.  We didn’t
have a phonograph until I was twelve, a radio until I was seventeen, or
television until I was forty-six.

“So
that left books.  When you rented a
furnished house, it was equipped with furniture and books.  …Father would scout around for a furnished
house.  “Furnished” in his lexicon meant
furnished with books, hundreds being mandatory, thousands being
preferable.  Colonel Terhune’s big house
on the Speedway in Ocean Park had thousands of books, as did Timeseditor Harry Carr’s place on Mount
Washington Drive, so the six or seven or eight of our family stayed in each
house for over five years, until we had exhausted the supply,  a sort of omnivorous plague of indiscriminate
readers.”