Tomorrow evening on TCM, Robert Osborne and animation scholar/historian Jerry Beck will be co-hosting a six-hour block of classic, rare animation in prime-time.

To say this is an extremelywelcome night of entertainment is an understatement.

Classic animation gets the short shrift nowadays. Sure, you can find hour-long blocks of Looney Tunes and Tom & Jerry cartoons weekdays on Cartoon Network (though these ‘toons tend to derive solely from the 1940s through the 1960s). And sure, there’s Boomerang, the cable channel specifically established as an outlet for classic cartoons, whose schedule sadly now includes only a handful of those classics (and usually late at night). But rarely, if ever, do the cartoons being highlighted Sunday night on TCM get even that relatively minuscule amount of attention. That’s why this move on TCM’s part is so very important. As Beck pointed out in a post on his essential animation site, Cartoon Brew, earlier this…