What was the first cartoon produced for television? There are a couple of contenders for that honor…shows that told stories via drawings that were not exactly animated. But the first one with at least a little animation (and as you'll see, I do mean little) was Crusader Rabbit. In 1948, Jay Ward teamed with animator Alex Anderson and just a few other people to produce a show for NBC. The show was done in black-and-white and there were ten storylines broken up into 195 four minute cartoons.
In 1957, following some ugly custody battles over the property, another series was done. This one was in color and involved neither Anderson nor Ward. Slightly more cash was spent on the animation of 200 cartoons that formed 13 storylines. (This material was also edited into thirteen longform episodes that nobody but me seems to ever have seen on TV.) If you have any memory at all of Crusader Rabbit, you probably remember the color episodes, and you probably remember them as looking better than they actually did.
Both batches of episodes were probably more entertaining than they should have been, given their budgets. But the writing was strong and the voice work was good, and the artists produced drawings that were nice, even if they didn't move much. Here's the first episode of the first series. That's Lucille Bliss supplying the voice of Crusader, Vern Louden as Ragland T. Tiger, and Roy Whaley as the narrator.