This is a delight. I lived in Sweden from 1970-75 and continued visiting family there through 1980. It was the height of the Cold War.
Sweden was studiously non-aligned, committed to Western Classical Liberal values but aware of their delicate position across the Baltic from the totalitarian Soviet Union.
There were several distinct features to media life in Sweden at that time. Color broadcasting was only introduced in 1970. There were only two TV stations, both owned by the government. TV1 and TV2. Both had restricted showtimes. My vague recollection is that it might have been something like 3pm to 10pm.
Being government corporations, their budgets were tight. What was shown was what could be afforded which was not a lot. I owe a reasonably deep knowledge of American cinema history to the fact that the two stations licensed a lot of presumably cheap American black and white silent movies from 1900 to 1930s or so. I knew Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, Laurel & Hardy, the Marx Brothers, Bori Karloff and Charlie Chan in a fashion alien to my American age peers. These movies of my childhood were almost unknown to people of my generation in the US.
Another cheap broadcast filler for the Swedish stations were cartoons from Eastern European Comecon nations. Primarily from Poland, East Germany and maybe Romania if I recall correctly. Most had sound but no dialogue so they could be broadcast across language boundaries.
In the seventies, they very much had a 1930s Disney Fantasia aesthetic. Not only was there no language barrier but there was no real logic barrier either. You just had to go with the flow regardless of its surreal nature.
I have just come across a Twitter account, Eastern European Cartoons Out of Context offering Soviet and Eastern European animation pre 90's.
They have the full range, from quixotic Salvador Dali like cartoons:
— Eastern European Cartoons Out of Context (@EasternOoC) June 8, 2022
To those which were acceptably subversive to the authorities.
— Eastern European Cartoons Out of Context (@EasternOoC) May 20, 2022
And everything in between. A pleasant discovery of a vanished era.
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