‘Buried Treasure Featuring Eveready Harton’: The bizarre story of the first animated adult movie
The pornographic industry has come along in leaps and bounds over the past century.
Through the mid-20th century, the mass production of bawdy magazines edited by horny Hugh Hefner characters kept adolescent curiosities sated. However, with the advance of filming technology over the past five decades, any Tom, Dick or Harry could soon get their hands on a camcorder and commit smut to tape. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back, so to speak.
Today, with the advent of the internet, those without parental control can’t access erotic material. If your computer gets swamped with malware or you navigate to a dodgy site, you can bet your bottom dollar on seeing a pair of breasts and an invite to comfort any lonely middle-aged people within your 20-mile radius. The modern industry undoubtedly leaves very little to the imagination and poses a threat to young minds, but once upon a time, a little more humour, class and dignity were involved.
The most classy and reserved form of erotica would be prose forms, widely known as ‘Literotica’. Coming in at a respectable second place is animated porn. Today, this facet of the industry is thriving, mainly thanks to the immensely popular anime-style cartoons that originated in Japan. Of course, anyone who gets their rocks off watching Pikachu and Charmander give each other a good once-over perhaps needs a timely psycho-evaluation, but at least fewer ethical considerations are involved when real people are removed from the equation.
The burgeoning popularity of anime porn in the 21st century might have you fooled into thinking that it’s a rather novel craze. On the contrary, I’m writing today to inform you that the first was made nearly a century ago.
Dating back to 1929, ‘Buried Treasure’ Featuring Eveready Harton, also known as Eveready Harton in Buried Treasure or Pecker Island, is understood to be the first ever adult animated pornographic cartoon. Considering that the first ever cartoon, Fantasmagorie, was released in 1908, it didn’t take the medium long to get its hands a little dirty.
Buried Treasure is a six-and-a-half-minute silent black-and-white film that follows the character Eveready Harton (a pun on hard-on), who finds it hard to find anything by which he’s not aroused. His comically exaggerated penis often detaches from his body to act of its own accord. Throughout the movie, Harton embarks on sexual escapades with a woman, a man, a donkey and a cow.
The creators involved with the outlandish movie, fraught with bestial sodomy and condemnable racial undertones, remain unconfirmed to this day, but legend has it that a group of famed US animators created the short for a private party in honour of esteemed animator Winsor McCay. According to Karl F Cohen’s 1997 book Forbidden Animation: Censored Cartoons and Blacklisted Animators in America, US labs refused to humour such a movie, and hence, it had to be created in Cuba.
Alas, the Disney animator Ward Kimball gave an account of the pornographic short that places its birthplace as New York. “The first porno cartoon was made in New York. It was called Eveready Harton and was made in the late 1920s, silent, of course, by three studios,” he noted via Cohen’s 1997 book. “Each one did a section of it without telling the other studios what they were doing. Studio A finished the first part and gave the last drawing to Studio B”.
“Involved were Max Fleischer, Paul Terry and the Mutt and Jeff studio,” he added. “They didn’t see the finished product till the night of the big show. A couple of guys who were there tell me the laughter almost blew the top off the hotel where they were screening it.”
You can see the film in full below.
