Remember when animated shorts were an integral part of the moviegoing experience? Okay, I don't either. But until the early 1960s, a short before a feature was the norm. (Actually, for a while it was more like newsreel, serial, short, A feature, trailers, B feature. It's amazing how far a dime could carry you back then.) A number of factors eventually combined to produce a lack of financial incentive to created theatrical animated shorts to accompany features—they were just too expensive to make.

But starting this April, Cartoon Network in the UK is bringing shorts back to the big screen. And the mechanism is so mind-bogglingly obvious it makes me wonder why no one thought of it sooner. The six-minute shorts, and the bumpers that act as wraparounds, are essentially exercises in brand-building—the shorts serve as advertisments for Cartoon Network, and one presumes certain shows.

It's not such a new idea. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies served much the same function in the 1930s, using popular music in the shorts to encourage Warner Bros.' sales of sheet music. Popeye and Superman also boosted sales of newspapers and comics. And let's not forget that just a few years ago Final Flight of the Osiris served as a gateway to the Matrix sequels.

But more important than that is one simple fact: movies have been acting as advertisements for DVDs for several years now. All Cartoon Network is doing is applying that same logic to cartoons. Suddenly, theatrical cartoons become a marketing expense—and given how much money is spent on marketing, that could be good news for us as moviegoers. If this works out well for Cartoon Network, other companies might start looking at creative ways to use animated shorts. And we might just get a return to the good old days.

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