Made of Pen and Ink: The Fleischer Cartoons

Film Fun clipping

2008-10-07T13:55:00.000-07:00

For many years the only celebrity animator was Walt Disney – at least when I was growing up in the 1950s and '60s. Of course I also knew of Walter Lantz because of his appearances on his Woody Woodpecker television show.

During the silent era, though there were two men who stood out with different degrees of public awareness. Pat Sullivan, the "creator" of Felix the Cat, was deft with publicity. Max Fleischer, though, did one better as he was the co-star with Ko-Ko of many of the silent shorts.

Max in the 1940s

I've not been able to find any reference to why Max starred in these shorts – as opposed to hiring an actor. My theory is that he was simply following the tradition set by Winsor McCay and other cartoonists who appeared on the stage with a lightening sketch act. He was the cartoonist presenting the drawings.

Max's fame was noted in this clipping from "Film Fun," a movie magazine that took stills from popular films and put "funny" captions to them. This was the opening image from the story supposedly written by Max and its shows a little of the Inkwell Studios facility from the mid-Twenties.

I've not been able to identify any of the artists in the shot, but have always been impressed by the dark and cramped quarters depicted in it.

© 2008 by Gordon Michael Dobbs

2008-04-12T12:51:00.000-07:00

The following is a draft of the chapter on Betty Boop for my book "Made of Pen and Ink: The Fleischer Studio." Please post comments on my other blog Out of the Inkwell for quicker responses. Thanks for reading!

The legend is that in the crowded studio at 1600 Broadway in mid-town Manhattan, Grim Natwick was given the assignment of animating part of the Fleischer Studio’s newest sound cartoon “Dizzy Dishes.” Part of Natwick’s assignment was creating and animating a nightclub singer. For inspiration, he was handed a photo of then-popular Helen Kane, a bouncy brunette who was acclaimed for her high pitched child-like, but none-the-less sexy, singing voice.

That was the beginning of Betty Boop, quite possibly the most popular female cartoon character in the world. Despite the fact the Betty Boop cartoons stopped being a staple on local television decades ago and two contemporary versions of the character failed to ignite a revival, Betty’s popularity in licensing has guaranteed the immortality that few cartoon characters have been able to maintain.

The Web site www.welovebettyboop.com reports it has over 1,150 products, while another site. www.bettyboopstore.com has over 1,000 items featuring the character. Bank of America even offers a Betty Boop Master Card. One could make the argument the character is generating more money today for its owners than it did when the cartoons were in their heyday.
And one might safely say that many of the teen and young adult women who buy the Boop tee-shirts, purses and other merchandise may never have seen a single Betty Boop cartoon. The cartoons themselves have not had an authorized release on DVD as of this writing. The only cartoons available on DVD are those that have fallen into the public domain.

When the Betty Boop cartoons were released on home video in a boxed set in 1996, they were met with critical success and proved to be a good seller. Their qualities still seem to attract an audience 70 years after they were made.

The often times surreal and risqué Boop cartoons are revered today for their imagination and hipness. Their funky urban qualities continue to delight audiences 70 years later. Of all the studios producing animation in the 1930s, the Fleischer Studio made cartoons which best reflected the blend of emotions that characterized that time; a contradictory blend of hope and despair and of domesticity and running wild.

Beginnings
In 1930, The Fleischer Studio was in a state of change. Max had recovered from the economic failure of his Red Seal distribution company just four years previous. He was back in charge of his own operation with his brother Dave as the vice president. Establishing a distribution deal with Paramount Pictures, Max was trying to regain the prominence he once had in the industry.

The challenge, though, was coming from the introduction of sound. The “talkies” had revolutionized the movie industry with only a handful of silent films produced for the few holdout theaters in the country. The two biggest stars in silent animation were Felix the Cat and Ko-Ko the Clown. With the coming of sound, Ko-Ko, a classic pantomime character, seemed out of place.

Max produced his “first” sound cartoon in 1929, and wisely adapted his Song Cartunes with the famous Bouncing Ball to sound production. (Fleischer was no stranger to sound as he had produced the first synchronized sound cartoons with Dr. Lee DeForrest in 1924. Both inventors were ahead of their times, and Disney’s triumph with “Steamboat Willie” obscured their earlier accomplishments to generations of film historians.)

The success of the Song Cartunes aside, Max needed a new star to replace Ko-Ko. A dog-like creature named Bimbo was created as an obvious answer to Mickey Mouse. The design was crude, and the character was actually little more than a stick figure. Bimbo didn’t make much impact in the early Fleischer Talkartoons.

The late Myron “Grim” Natwick was a fairly recent addition to the Fleischer operation. An animation vet, Natwick had entered animation prior to the First Word War at the studio set up by publisher William Randolph Hearst to publicize his newspaper’s comic strip characters. Later, Natwick studied art in Europe for three years and came back to the United States where he worked on Felix and Krazy Kat shorts.

Producing shorts at the Fleischer Studio in 1930 was a far looser process that one could imagine. Animators had more responsibility for plots and gags, and there wasn’t direction in the accepted sense. The early sound Fleischer shorts were, more often than not, merely a collection of gags linked together by a very general “plot.” The creative process was a carry-over from the silent days, but it was clear a more standardized method of production was needed to meet the demands of sound.

Grim Natwick recalled to me in a 1978 interview, “the animator simply received a scene or a group of scenes or a whole picture. An animator like myself would receive an entire picture, and they’d put a couple of younger animators to work with us. The animator was virtually the director of the picture. If there were any characters necessary, the animator created them and animated them. There was no supervision.

“I remember on this picture [“Dizzy Dishes”] there was a ‘Boop Oop A Doop ‘ song and it had been recorded by Helen Kane, and I believe at the time, before the unions got tough, they may have even used her original track.

“In the first picture...I animated a big part of it. I created the character [who would become Betty Boop]. They had this little dog Bimbo. She had to sing and dance and I forgot about the dog thing. She became looking more and more like a girl. In her early pictures, the first two or three perhaps, she retained those long poodle ears.”

“Dizzy Dishes” is a remarkably crude affair. There really isn’t a plot, but instead a string of gags centered in a nightclub. The Bimbo character was a waiter trying to accommodate the needs of his customer. He was attracted to the singer – clearly a caricature of Kane – who sang one song.

Kane looked like a flapper from the 1920s. She wore her hair short and in curls and her fashions included the shorter dresses preferred by many young women at the time.

Natwick’s time at the Fleischer Studios was brief. He accepted an offer in 1931 to join the Ub Iwerks Studio in California. In 1934, Walt Disney hired him where he eventually did his most significant work on “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” and by 1939, he was back with Fleischer working on “Gulliver’s Travels.”

“Their [the Fleischers] comedy is typical American slapstick comedy the way it impressed them. You look at some of the Betty Boops and they are wild. They’re really wild. Disney never got that wild,” Natwick said.

Natwick worked on the first six shorts, which featured Betty as part of the cast. He insisted to me that, other than changing her dog-ears to earrings, the design and personality changes to the character were “insignificant.” While Natwick was a trailblazer, the ultimate success of the character rested on the animators, writers, voice actresses and composers who would follow him after he left the studio.

Among animation historians and fans, this version of how the character came to be was accepted to be true. In Max’s biographical writings he never took credit for Betty Boop’s creation. In his son’s Richard’s memoir of his father, “Out of the Inkwell: Max Fleischer and the Animation Revolution,” Richard wrote: “The script for ‘Dizzy Dishes’ called for a female entertainer to play opposite Bimbo. Since Bimbo was a dog, Max devised a character that was half dog and half human female. In its first appearance the character was nameless, but what a character is was – gross, ugly with an enormous bouncy behind. However it did have round, saucer-like eyes and shapely feminine legs.

“The executives at Paramount flipped for the dog-lady and wanted more films made with her. Max was delighted to oblige and made her the lead in every cartoon. But Max immediately began to work with his animators on refining the character. The dog-like features didn’t last very long…

“Since my father’s death in 1972, Grim Natwick, one of Fleischer Studios’ oldest and most talented animators, has often been quoted as claiming to be the creator of Betty Boop. But before his death, my father had sworn under oath in two lawsuits that he, Max Fleischer, was the sole creator of the character. He acknowledged that many animators contributed to her development, not just Natwick, but also Seymour Kneitel, Myron Waldman, Doc Crandall, Ted Sears, Willard Bowsky and Al Eugster. I find it more than passing strange that, to my knowledge at least, Natwick never made such a claim while my father was alive.”

Stephen Worth is the director of the animation archives for ASIFAS-Hollywood, the southern California chapter of the international association that promotes animation. Worth sent me the following reaction to Richard Fleischer’s claims:
“At the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive, I have an exhibit hanging on the wall that proves conclusively that Grim created Betty Boop.

“Included in the exhibit are Grim’s character designs for Betty from ‘Dizzy Dishes,’ ‘Barnacle Bill,’ ‘Accordion Joe’ and ‘The Bum Bandit,’ as well as a studio gag drawing of a beautifully drawn Grim Betty from ‘Mysterious Mose’ asking a horribly drawn Betty Boop, ‘What happened to you little girl?’ The badly drawn Betty replies, ‘Boo hoo! Eggy made me!’ On the back of the sketch is a note from Grim saying, ‘Rudolph Eggeman’s drawings were messy.’ This confirms Grim’s stories about how after Betty became successful, they tried to have other animators draw her, but none had the chops to draw a pretty girl like Grim did.
“I believe Grim’s account of how Betty Boop was created.

“Grim said that Dave Fleischer told him they had found a girl who could do a perfect impression of Helen Kane. They wanted to do a cartoon with her, so Dave gave Grim a photo of Helen Kane clipped from a magazine and told him to make the girl look like the photo. At ASIFA, we have the inked key cleanup of Grim’s design. It isn’t crude and grotesque the way the film looks. Grim said that he was rushed, trying to do all the girl animation himself, while Ted Sears focused on Bimbo and the restaurant gags from Grim’s thumbnail layouts. Grim animated the girl very loose and fast, expecting the assistants to follow his key cleanup, but they weren’t able to. I attended a screening of ‘Dizzy Dishes’ with Grim at the LA County Museum of Art, and Grim grumbled through the song. After the cartoon, Charles Soloman introduced him from the stage as the creator of Betty Boop, and Grim took a bow. After he sat down, I asked him why he had been grumbling during the film. He said, ‘The damn assistants messed up my lipsync!’

“The most telling drawing in the ASIFA exhibit is a drawing that Grim referred to many times in interviews. Grim said that Dave Fleischer came to his desk one day and said, ‘Mickey Mouse has Minnie. Do you think Bimbo needs a girlfriend?’ Grim thought about it and said he would come up with an idea for a girl for Bimbo. Dave explained he had the idea to do a Talkartoon based on the song ‘Barnacle Bill the Sailor,’ and told Grim that he would check back to see what Grim came up with for the ‘fair young maiden.’

“Grim had just finished ‘Dizzy Dishes,’ so he proceeded to adapt his Helen Kane caricature to serve as Bimbo’s girlfriend. He drew a sketch of Betty Boop looking out a window as if to say ‘Who’s that knocking at my door?’ Dave returned to his desk and Grim showed him the sketch. Dave said, ‘I like the face, but Bimbo is a dog. Shouldn’t she have a dog body?’ Grim grabbed his pencil and drew Betty Boop’s head with a four legged canine body and pointed at it and the voluptuous one leaning out the window and replied, ‘What do you want? A dog’s body or a pretty girl’s?’ Dave laughed and said, ‘You’re right, Grim.’

“Grim told me these stories on his front porch in Santa Monica. After he passed away, his family asked me to sort through his artwork that had been in storage for decades, and I found the very drawing from ‘Barnacle Bill’ he was referring to. It shows Betty Boop leaning out the window, and below it in the margin is a small sketch of Betty with four legs and a stubby tail. The dog Betty is circled and a line from the circle points to the Betty in the window. When you look at the drawing, you can see Grim gesturing with his pencil as he says, ‘What do you want? A dog’s body or a pretty girl’s?’

“Grim spoke very highly of Dave Fleischer. He said that he considered him a fine director, even if he didn’t do his own layout or timing like the directors at other studios did. Grim said that Max was a fine gentleman too, but indicated that Max was more interested in running the ‘front office’ and working with the camera department on technical developments. His day-in, day-out creative supervision was from Dave. The only aspect of Betty Boop that Max could possibly have had a part with is the casting of the Helen Kane sound-a-like, but I tend to think that was most likely either Dave or Lou Fleischer.

“Grim told me a story about the last bit of Betty Boop animation that he did. When he was working on ‘Gulliver’s Travels,’ Max came into his office one day, (which was unusual). Max told Grim that he appreciated that Grim had created Betty Boop. He told Grim that they had had a good run with her, but they were making the last Betty Boop cartoon, and he wanted Grim to work on it ‘for old time’s sake.’ (My guess is that the last cartoon would have been ‘Musical Mountaineers,’ because there’s quite a few scenes in there that look like they may be by Grim.)

“Grim said that Max told him as a sign of his appreciation, that after the completion of this cartoon, he would make a gift of the character to him. Grim thanked Max for the gesture, and shook his hand. Grim went on thinking that he owned the character, until years later, he read in the trades that Max had licensed his rights to the Fleischer characters for a great deal of money. The article mentioned that Betty Boop was one of the properties Max had licensed.

“Grim was always on good terms with Max, so he picked up the phone and called him. A woman (Max’s daughter?) answered and Grim asked to speak with Max. She asked who was speaking and Grim told her. She went away from the phone and was gone a long time. Finally Richard came to the line and told Grim that his father was sick and couldn’t be disturbed. Grim asked when would be a good time to call back because he had a question about the licensing deal he had read about. Richard told him that there was no good time, told him never to call the house again, and hung up on him.

“Being treated like this rankled Grim. He spoke to a lawyer who filed a claim with the Fleischers for a portion of the money from the licensing deal. Grim ended up losing, because he had never filed the paperwork necessary to prove the transfer of ownership.”

The authorship of the character has become more and more important with the increased amount of licensing. Natwick wasn’t the only person who had a claim. Long-time Fleischer animator Myron Waldman created Betty’s dog Pudgy that is prominent in currently licensed products. Waldman never received any money for his contribution.

Who’s the Boss?
Dave Fleischer took the screen credit as director of nearly all of the Fleischer shorts through the demise of the studio in 1942. For animation fans and scholars who understand the role of a director, Dave’s constant screen credit makes him appear an animation genius or that “director” meant something else than at other studios.

The truth is that Dave was not a director in the same way as Chuck Jones or Tex Avery. Directors such as Jones and Avery headed their own animation units, and were responsible for working with writers on a short, overseeing the design of the characters, drawing key poses, directing the voice actors, and even animating sequences.

Dave acted as a line producer. He was more of a general supervisor of the shorts rather than the primary creative force. He did direct the voice actors in the recording schedule, and, according to ASCAP records, he also dabbled in composing some of the music for the cartoons.

This could certainly account for the differences in how characters such as Betty Boop looked from cartoon to cartoon in the early sound era. Characters often even looked differently within the same cartoon due to the use of several animation units and how each would draw the characters.

“Dancing Fool” (1932) is an excellent example of the problems of weak direction. The short was animated by units headed by Seymour Kneitel and Bernard Wolf and involves the slenderest of plots in which painters Bimbo and Ko-Ko happen upon Betty’s dance studio, join in dancing and literally shake the building down around them.

Not only is the story is non-existent, but Betty, Bimbo and Ko-Ko change appearance depending upon which animator had that particular scene to do.

A story on the studio in the Dec. 28, 1930 edition of “The New York Times” described the story process at the studio during the early sound era.

“The complex, efficient mechanism which transfers Bimbo’s madcap adventures to the screen is not a little prosaic. Properly speaking, there is not even a scenario. Somebody, anybody, one of the photographers, perhaps, suggests an abstract subject – a bullfight, a mailman, a steelworker, and a sailorman. Thereupon the idea is approved, the basis of approval being simply the probability of its being fertile in humor and the gagmen consult in Dave Fleischer’s office.

“The whole thing is quite informal. Any one who is not busy at the moment drops in [Dave Fleischer’s office] and takes a hand in the proceedings. A rough scenario emerges from the discussion. The cartoonists then receive their assignments, each to draw a sequence in the mad narrative. The artists are informed of the hatching plot and instructed to prepare backgrounds and scenery, which will later be blended with the action drawings of the cartoonists.”

Even after the studio began to use a separate story department, Fleischer animator Myron Waldman told me that he remembered getting scripts without an end, “They hadn’t thought of a gimmick, yet,” he said.

I believe that Max enjoyed participating in the production of the cartoons as revealed by his continuing role as Ko-Ko’s straight man in the silent shorts. When the new Fleischer Studios was set up, though, there was an apparent arrangement that Max would handle the business end of the studio while Dave would oversee production. Dave’s role apparently included the screen credit as director much to the chagrin of the real directors of the Fleischer cartoons. Max’s interest in the production of the shorts, though, can be seen in his inventions, such as the tabletop 3-D process.

Part of the vitality – and perhaps the roughness as well – of the early Betty Boops may be attributed to the influx of young artists at the studio. Al Eugster told this writer that in 1930 a number of the head animators left for other employment, including veteran artists Dick Huemer and Sid Marcus.

“The experienced animators left for elsewhere and left Max without a staff,” Eugster said. He was then in-betweening along with artists such as James “Shamus” Culhane and Willard Bowsky.

“We became instant animators with a contract,” said Eugster. Despite their lack of experience, he recalled, “it worked out somehow.”

The Birth of a Star
Considering the somewhat haphazard way the Fleischer Studio used to create cartoons, it’s little wonder that it took them a while to figure out what exactly to do with Natwick’s Helen Kane-ish singer.

Bimbo was the star of the early cartoons, but he was a character with little or no definition. His voice changed from short to short as well as what he was and what he could do.

These were shorts driven by a string of gags or by a popular song, rather than by a strong narrative.

In “Barnacle Bill,” the still unnamed Betty character is the “fair young maiden” who is the object of the rough sailor’s attention. Although the lyrics are cleaned up from the sexually explicit ones when know from the folk song, it is still a sexually charged cartoon and typical of the Fleischers’ work prior to the Production Code in 1934 that censored sexual material in films. As in “Dizzy Dishes,” the star of the show is Bimbo.

The Fleischer animators – and Max and Dave themselves – obviously had no problem with using the female character as a vehicle for naughty gags. In “Mysterious Mose,” the Betty character loses her nightshirt and display some cleavage twice.
This cartoon shows the free association that some might interpret as sloppiness – a fish from underneath Betty’s carpet, an odd enough image, is transformed into a saxophone-playing caterpillar for no real narrative reason. It just happens.
That sort of free-flowing association marked the style of the silent Ko-Ko cartoons and was clearly a holdover from those days. It also reflected the lack of structure in the writing of the cartoons at that time.

“Silly Scandals,” the seventh cartoon to feature Betty, illustrates how the character was definitely a second fiddle to Bimbo.

“Silly Scandals” (1931) is an example of what was right and wrong with the early Fleischer sound shorts. The plot involves Bimbo sneaking into a theater to see Betty perform. After she sings her number, the gags shift around a stage hypnotist.
Nothing remarkable has happened in the short until the very end when Bimbo, under the spell of the hypnotist, has hallucinations that seem to have come straight out of the psychedelic era of the 1960s.

At least the character was given the name “Betty” in this short.

Betty was still very much a supporting player in these shorts. Although her very next Talkartoon was a quantum leap over “Silly Scandals,” she was still just part of the punch line.

“Bimbo’s Initiation” (1931) introduced a new Bimbo, a design that actually looked like a dog and was much more appealing than the stick figure. Here the Fleischer “looseness” served the cartoon well. There isn’t really a plot; Bimbo, innocently walking the street, stumbles into a trap laid by an anxious secret fraternity who would like him to join. When he refuses, he is put through a variety of tortures and perils designed to make him change his mind. He only changes his wind when the ominous figure who keeps asking him “Wanna be a member? Wanna be a member?” turns out to be Betty.

“Bimbo’s Initiation” is one of the studio’s best shorts. Genuinely creepy at times with a truly surreal concept – who are these guys and why are they so insistent? – it’s quite funny and very well animated. It’s only marginally a Betty Boop cartoon, though.

Throughout these early cartoons, Mickey Mouse, or a character that looks very much like Mickey Mouse, keeps making little cameo appearances. In “Bimbo’s Initiation,” he appears as Bimbo disappears down a manhole for his first encounter with the fraternity. Why the Fleischers were winking at their colleagues at Disney has never been explained.

With “Bimbo’s Express,” (1931) Bimbo had to share the billing with Betty and the two had a memorable exchange of dialogue. “I can’t let you in. I’m in my nightgown,” Betty said. Bimbo replied, “I’ll wait until you take it off.”

Betty’s footage increased in “Dizzy Red Riding Hood” (1931) as she had the title role, but it was “Boop-Oop-A-Doop” (1932) in which the Boop character really started to gel. Betty is more than just an attractive accessory. She is definitely the star of the short, while Bimbo and Ko-Ko are her co-stars.

Betty plays a circus performer who is the object of unrequited affection from the ringmaster. This is one of the most openly sexual of the Boop shorts. The ringmaster corners Betty in her dressing area and rubs his hand up and down her thigh. He then tells her if she wants to keep her job she’ll... and he whispers something in her ear that horrifies her. She then launches into the song “Don’t Take my Boop-Oop-A-Doop Away.” Ko-Ko manages to save her and winds up the hero.

So what is “Boop-Oop-A-Doop?” The refrain that singer Helen Kane made famous was essentially meaningless, but when used in the right context it could inspire risqué interpretations. Betty prevails over her unwanted suitor with the help of Ko-Ko who receives a burning kiss as his reward.

“Boop-Oop-A-Doop” marks the first phase of Boop’s cartoon persona. She is the sexy but innocent star in a no-holds-barred cartoon universe. Sometimes her co-stars are animals, sometimes humans, sometimes something in-between. A few of her cartoons resemble the classic silent Ko-Kos in which Betty emerges from an inkwell into the “real” world.

With “Boop-Oop-A-Doop” Betty’s character began to be more developed as a working class person, often times involved in some sort of performing. One could see in these early cartoons, the Fleischer animators struggling to present Betty as something more than just sex appeal and more than just a foil for gags in the surreal Fleischer universe. Sometimes Betty could as innocent as a child and other times she was as knowing as Mae West.

Ko-Ko the clown had been a cinematic version of “Peck’s Bad Boy,” the brat you love to hate who rebels against his father, but Betty was far more difficult to define.

The next Boop cartoon was another milestone. “Minnie The Moocher” (1932) featured Cab Calloway and his big band playing one of their signature tunes. The Fleischers, with their base in New York and ties to Paramount and its Famous Music division, began using well-known singers and big bands in their Betty Boop and Screen Song cartoons. Radio stars such as Arthur Tracy, Singing Sam, Broadway performers such as Lillian Roth and Ethel Merman, and recording artists such as Rudy Vallee, the violinist Rubinoff and the Mills Brothers were among the stars featured in Fleischer shorts.

If nothing else, the Fleischer Betty Boop and “Screen Songs” provide a fascinating musical time capsule of some of the best-known popular artists of the time. No other animation studio during the 1930s seemed as interested in presenting contemporary music as the Fleischer Studio. Dave had a keen interest in music, while Lou was a violinist. Sammy Timberg was the studio’s composer during the period and he had a strong Tin Pan Alley background.

Lou and Timberg worked on the musical tracks for the cartoons and were able to use songs that had appeared in Paramount films. Sometimes these songs are used to accompany the action, while at other times Betty performs them.

This interest in music was coupled with the use of live-action footage that was part of the Ko-Ko silent cartoons. Although other studios had used live action in its animated shorts – most notably Walt Disney in his “Alice in Cartoonland” shorts and Walter Lantz in the “Dinky Doodles” series – the Fleischers became known for the technique. The result was that in the period of 1930 to 1935, the Fleischers’ cartoons, with their use of popular music and live-action, continued to be singular. No other studio at the time was apparently willing to go to the extra expense and trouble of filming performers to be used in an animated short.

“Minnie The Moocher,” like “Bimbo’s Initiation,” is almost plot-less. Betty, living with her parents, decides to run away from home, accompanied by Bimbo. At nightfall they stay in a cave, which they discover they’re sharing with a variety of ghosts who launch into the title song. The lead ghost, who sings and dances, is a rotoscoped Cab Calloway. His antics scare the two back to their homes.

Calloway’s song of the life and death of a drug-user was a popular hit, but one wonders if people at the studio understood what the urban slang meant.

The eerie backgrounds and the macabre jokes in the cave are typical of the sense of humor of Fleischer vet Willard Bowsky who worked on 11 of the Betty Boop shorts. A significant talent at the studio who contributed much to the Popeye series, Bowsky was a controversial figure. He was among the “inner circle” of confidants surrounding the Fleischers, but had a reputation, ironically, for anti-Semitism among many of his co-workers, according to Waldman.

Lou Fleischer, who headed the music department at the studio, told animation historian Ray Pointer about Calloway’s reaction to the shorts.

“When Cab saw this [his cartoon form] he screamed in laughter and stretched himself out on the floor!...Some months later I met Cab Calloway and asked, ‘Did our cartoon help or hurt your show when it went on the road?’ He said, ‘Are you kidding? We had your cartoon shown the week before we arrived at every theater, and on its account none of the houses could accommodate the crowds that came. Are you kidding?’”

Calloway was delighted with the results of the short and returned to the studio twice to do more. He and his band appeared in “Snow White” (1933) and “The Old Man of the Mountain” (1933). No other musician, other than crooner Rudy Valle, appeared as many times as Calloway and his band.

The Fleischer version of “Snow White” takes the basic plot of the fairy tale and presents it in seven minutes. The centerpiece of the film is a performance of “St. James Infirmary Blues,” another Calloway hit and another song rife with drug references. Once again the action takes places in a cave in which the wicked witch has transformed Ko-Ko into a singing ghost who accompanies the seven dwarves as they transport Betty’s body to its resting place.

“The Old Man of the Mountain” has Betty daring to confront a violent recluse who is terrifying a mountain town. As Betty travels up the mountain she is met with a parade of refugees who all cite “The Old Man of the Mountain” as the source of their unhappiness. One woman pushing a baby carriage flips the carriage open to reveal three bearded babies; a gag that couldn’t be used after the Production Code was implemented.

Jazz legend Louis Armstrong appeared with Betty in “I’ll be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal You” (1932). The Armstrong band not only performed for the soundtrack, but Armstrong was transformed into a cannibal in this less-than politically correct cartoon.

Perhaps the most elaborate use of a guest star musician was in “I Heard” (1933). Instead of performing a song or two, Don Redman and his band provided the entire soundtrack to the cartoon. Guest musicians were often filmed before a non-descript curtain, but Redman’s band was shown in front of an elaborate backdrop with mechanically animated Fleischer animal characters.

Crazytown
Once there seemed to be some stability about the name and character of Betty Boop, some of the kind of experimentation that was fairly common in the silent Ko-Ko cartoons began to be seen in the Boop series.

In “Chess-Nuts (1932),” the short opens with two middle-aged men playing a game of chess and studying the board intently. The shot shifts to the board itself where the pieces move by themselves before the three dimensional animation switches to cel animation. The last shot of the short shows an altered photo of the two men now with long grey beards.
Animated photographs were featured in “Ha! Ha! Ha!” (1934) when Betty, attempting to play dentist for Ko-Ko and his aching tooth, releases laughing gas into the city. Photos of city buildings are animated to literally laugh along.

A great use of the Fleischer rotoscope process was in “Betty Boop’s Bamboo Isle” (1932), in which the Polynesian musical group The Royal Samoans performed. The male dancers were rotoscoped for one scene and a female dancer performed a hula that was the basis for one of Betty’s most memorable moments. Animator Shamus Culhane claimed he did the hula animation without the help of the rotoscope, although the motions appear to have the quality of rotoscoping.

“Betty Boop’s Rise to Fame” (1934) was a bit of cheat as it used the cost-cutting measure of recycled animation from older cartoons, but the short is really a delight. A reporter visits the Fleischer studio to write a story about Betty and Max – in his only sound cartoon appearance – draws the character that obligingly recreates scenes from some of the earlier triumphs. The short features some accomplished blending of live action and animation, staples of the studio’s silent shorts.

In 1934, the studio produced its own Betty Boop color short, “Poor Cinderella.” Since the superior Technicolor process was contractually unavailable to the studio, the staff used Cinecolor, a two-color process that used red and green. The result is not very satisfactory as the color process has a limited palette. The animation is quite good and the backgrounds are impressive.

“Poor Cinderella” also used the 3-D process developed by Max, one of two prominent efforts to bring the look of three dimensions to cartoon animation. Ub Iwerks, the former partner of Walt Disney and the driving force behind Mickey Mouse’s earliest successes, developed a multi-plane camera that allowed a series of background and foreground drawings to be combined with an animation cel when he had his own studio in the mid-1930s. When Iwerks retuned to Disney, he perfected the camera.

Fleischer’s approach was literally three-dimensional. He developed a system in which a background model was built on a revolving turntable. The animation cels were photographed in front of the background model, which was turned to match the movement in the animation. Sometimes the models were cut-out paintings mounted on cardboard to give the illusion of depth, but often times the models would be three-dimensional constructions that would result in even more impressive results. The results could be spectacular. “Betty Boop and the Little King” (1936) has some great 3-D sequences, as does “House Cleaning Blues” (1937).

The humor of the Boop shorts was definitely anything goes and ranged from sentimental and almost cloying at times to adult and cynical. In “Mother Goose Land” (1933), Mother Goose comes alive and takes Betty to meet the characters from her nursery rhymes. As she and Mother Goose are flying off, Betty’s house says goodbye and tells her not to worry because it will keep “the home fires burning.” With that statement, flames envelop the house, and it burns to the ground.

In the early 1930s, the Fleischer artists loved surreal “cartoony” images. A great example is the conclusion of “Betty Boop’s May Party” (1933) when an elephant accidentally taps a rubber tree, spraying the entire area with sap which gives everything the ability to stretch and bounce like rubber. The resulting animation is a lot of fun.

The American cinema before 1934 was a time when filmmakers constantly pushed the envelope on adult themes. The Fleischers took advantage, as did several other animation producers, to give their cartoons the same kind of openness. The results are cartoons that seem delightfully naughty today. They maintain an innocence that keeps them from appearing to be simply pandering towards cheap laughs.

If the Fleischer animators could think of nothing else in these shorts, they would toss in a gratuitous underwear scene. While Betty’s standard costume looked as if she wasn’t wearing a bra, Depression audiences knew she did because they saw it often enough.

The sexual humor can be seen today as offensive. In “Betty Boop’s Big Boss,” (1933) Betty uses her charm to get a job, and then fights off the unwelcome advances from her boss throughout the cartoon. When she is rescued from him, she decides the boss is not so bad.

References to homosexuals are made in several Betty Boop shorts, as well. In “Betty Boop for President” (1932) there is a sequence of gags in which the audience can see what a Boop administration would be like. One of the scenes shows a hardened criminal in an electric chair. When the switch is thrown he doesn’t die, but is transformed into a swishing lisping character.

“Minnie The Moocher” also had, as many other Fleischer shorts of this time, gags aimed at Jewish audience, whether they are inscriptions in Hebrew (such as the Hebrew word for kosher on a ham) or the use of Yiddish phrases. Ethnic humor can be seen in a number of Fleischer shorts, some of which could be seen as offensive today. The cartoons were made during a time in which ethnic humor derived from offensive stereotypes was ubiquitous on radio, in vaudeville, the movies and in print. Rather than stating a point of view, the jokes were simply part of the cultural climate of the time, right or wrong.

The Jewish jokes not only reflected much of the ethnic background of the staff, but also brought a distinctively city flavor to the cartoons as did the cartoons backgrounds and settings. The Fleischer shorts were the most urban of any of the cartoons of the era.

Times Change
The installation and enforcement of the Production Code in 1934 had a major impact on the Boop shorts. The Fatty Arbuckle scandal in 1921 had brought about the first wave of self-policing by the motion picture industry. The former Postmaster General Will Hays was hired by producers to enforce a content standard. This was mostly a public relations move as Hays had little power over the producers.

By 1934, though, the Catholic Legion of Decency had become a force for change. The group regularly condemned movies with objectionable content and there were calls from some people that movies had gone too far.

The early talkies contained rather frank depictions of sexual material and violence, although audiences certainly seemed to approve. Mae West, the comic actress who built her career on double entendrés, was credited as having saved Paramount Pictures from financial ruin.

In many parts of the country there were already state and municipal censorship boards, and the film industry wanted to prevent the establishment of a federal board. Hays, hired Joseph Breen to enforce a new tough content code for motion pictures that detailed what was acceptable and what wasn’t. A film could not be released from one of the mainstream Hollywood distributors without the Production Code seal of approval. Not until 1953 and the unsanctioned release of “The Moon Is Blue” did the strangle grip of the Breen Office begin to loosen.

The Flesichers were not the only syudio that had laced their cartoons with adult himor, but were the most well known and popular. For instance, in Paul Terry’s “In A Cartoon Studio” (1930), there’s not only a female cat character with considerable cleavage, but a gay reference as well, a marked departure from Terry’s standard mouse and cat gags. At the Van Beuren Studios, a series featuring the comic strip character The Little King frequently featured adult material, including the King fathering a group of children with a mermaid.

Another Van Bueren cartoon featuring Sentinel Louie, a character from the Little King comic strip, in perhaps the nastiest non-racial gag ever featured in a theatrical cartoon. In A Dizzy Day (1932), the sound of a woman screaming with pain can be heard, and the cartoon’s nominal hero follows the cries. He discovers a woman being beaten by an obvious criminal type. The two men look at each other and Louie delivers the knockout blow himself. With the woman now silent, the two men shake hands.

Betty’s antics did get her into trouble. There is one often-repeated story in which the Hays Office, responsible for the self-censorship of the film industry, allegedly ordered Max to remove Betty’s garter, but letters from outraged fans brought it back. While I’ve not been able to confirm this incident, one Betty Boop short was definitely banned in Great Britain. “Red Hot Mamma” (1934) has Betty literally freezing Hell over with her disapproving look. British censors found this comic depiction of damnation to be too blasphemous to show in their country.

The Boop cartoons began to change to meet the new standards and the change in the taste of the movie audiences. The cartoons were more polished and the Boop universe was more defined. Gone was the inkwell and references to Uncle Max. Gone was her trademark short skirt, as well as Ko-Ko and Bimbo. Betty had a re-occurring boy friend, Freddie, a younger brother, a grandfather, and a dog, Pudgy. In many cartoons, she was portrayed as a working girl with a career far from show business. There was greater emphasis on the gags coming from the character or the story rather than just being inserted into the cartoon.

Popeye the Sailor had made his cartoon debut in what was technically a Betty Boop cartoon, and now in the post-1934 period, several other King Features characters would do the same.

“Betty Boop with Henry, The Funniest Living American” (1935) is less than successful. The Henry character, a long-standing fixture of many newspaper comic pages, was a pantomime character that was strictly gag-driven with little or no personality. The highly stylized design of the character (supposedly a little boy with no hair, an odd nose and no mouth) was not attractive in animation.

The studio fared better with its next effort “Betty Boop and the Little King” (1936). Otto Soglow’s comic strip had a little more substance than Henry and the character had already been featured in a series of cartoons produced by the Van Bueren Studio. This short, featuring the Little King sneaking out of the opera to watch Betty’s vaudeville act, is a delight.

The last of the comic strip try-outs came with “Betty Boop and Little Jimmy.” Jimmy Swinnerton was one of the true pioneering geniuses of the American comic strip, but this cartoon didn’t capture the themes or the graphics of the original.
For some modern fans, the post 1934 Boop cartoons are frequently too tame. Although the studio was definitely re-defining the character, there are many gems, which wisely use the Grampy and Pudgy characters.

“Betty Boop and Grampy” (1935) introduced the new character that one can assume is actually Betty’s grandfather. Grampy is an inventor, and considering Max’s interests, a perfectly logical character to come out of his studio. When in a spot, Grampy whips out his thinking cap (a mortarboard with a light bulb) and invents a solution with whatever materials are handy. Other good Grampy shorts include “Be Human,” “House Cleaning Blues,” “Grampy’s Indoor Outing.” Grampy was featured without Betty in the sentimental favorite “Christmas Comes But Once a Year.”

Pudgy, Betty Boop’s dog, was designed by Myron Waldman to give the series more story potential and made his debut in 1934 with “Betty Boop’s Little Pal.” The addition of the little dog gave the series more potential for sentiment. Waldman called them “ooh, ahh pictures “ because of the reactions of the audiences. Pudgy could also put over a gag, and wound up being the real star of a good number of the post-1934 cartoons. One of the best was “Not Now,” in which Pudgy fights a cat who scratches him. Pudgy touches his wound, looks at the camera and says “He pulled a knife on me!”

While Grampy and Pudgy could be amusing, another character who periodically made visits to the Boop series was simply odd. Wiffle Piffle was a bug-eyed little guy with an amusing flapping arm walk that looked like he was trying to fly. Jack Mercer provided the voice, and the only characterization one could determine about Wiffle is that he had a habit of screwing things up. Wiffle Piffle also made frequent appearances in the Screen Song series.

The Fleischers had taken the same road as Walt Disney had done when Mickey Mouse was running out of steam. Just like Disney added Goofy and Donald Duck, the Fleischers had added Grampy and Pudgy. In some of the post-1934 Boop shorts, Betty is only marginally involved with the lion’s share of the footage devoted to her co-stars. The issue of longevity was addressed in a “New York Times” piece from Feb. 13, 1936. Bosley Crowther, writing about the growing animation industry, interviewed Sam Buchwald of the studio’s management team.

“But an interesting thing about it [the animation industry] says Mr. Buchwald is the way that the familiar cartoon characters rise, have their day of great popularity, and then wane just as real stars do. Although Disney doesn’t say much about it, his lovable Mickey, greatest animated character of all time, is definitely on the way out. And where are Koko the Clown, Mutt and Jeff and other of those favorites of a bygone era?

“Popeye and Betty Boop (the latter an original film creation and the other a recruit from the newspaper comic strips) have been doing quite well for about six years, but it takes imagination to keep them alive. Betty Boop is constantly undergoing imperceptible changes in size, hair, dress and such and is paradoxically growing younger in appearance, Mr. Buchwald confesses. But after all why shouldn’t she? The essence of the animated cartoon’s charm - the universality of its appeal - undoubtedly lies in its accomplishment of the utterly impossible.”

A cartoon such as “Sally Swing” (1938) shows the problems with the character and the series. Betty is some sort of student activity director at a college and she has to find someone to lead a swing band at a dance. By accident she discovers a cleaning woman who can swing dance. Out of her janitorial clothes, she looks like Betty Grable and is the star of the show.

The short is wonderfully animated by Bowsky and Gordon Sheehan and is in many ways a perfect Betty Boop musical cartoon, except Betty is not the star. She had become a straight man.

Exit and Entrance
Buchwald’s words were prophetic. The Boop cartoons were running out of gas, and the series was terminated in the summer of 1939. It was a new era at the Fleischer Studios with Max moving his operation to the Miami, Florida area and a brand new studio, and perhaps Betty was just not part of it.

When Paramount sold a number of its cartoons for television distribution in the mid-1950s, Max Fleischer’s name was blocked out on the 16mm prints used by the television stations. Max sued Paramount, and through the legal action was able to acquire the rights to the Betty Boop characters. This did Fleischer little good during his lifetime as he died in 1972, a few years before the Betty Boop revival began.

In the mid-1970s, a film distributor named Sidney Tager put together two theatrical compilations of Betty Boop, Screen Song and Talkartoons shorts. Although booked only at art houses and revival theaters, the two features drew attention to the character and to the Fleischer Studio. A modest merchandising effort started in the late 1970s.

While the merchandising revival of Betty Boop began to soar in the early 1980s, an effort to revive the economic worth of the cartoons began. National Telefilm Associates, a long-time supplier of television programming, had bought the rights of a number of Fleischer productions from Paramount in the 1950s. The NTA holdings included both Fleischer features, a number of Screen Song cartoons and the Betty Boops.

NTA had successfully sold syndication packages of these shorts throughout the 1950s and ‘60s, but in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, the bias against black and white programming was beginning to manifest itself at local stations. The solution? Colorize the Betty Boop shorts.

The Boop shorts were not among the first to undergo the transformation to color. Broadcast executive Eliot Hyman had been at Warner Brothers/Seven Arts when he oversaw the colorization of early Looney Tunes. He then colorized 18 Krazy Kat shorts for Columbia. His company, Feature House, then tackled converting 100 Boop cartoons to color in 1972.

Basically, Hyman had the Boop shorts re-animated with color cels. In Asian animation studios, artists would project the black and white cartoons onto a frosted glass drawing board, trace the action onto a new cel, paint it, and photograph it.

There were problems with the process. To save money, not every frame was re-animated resulting in less-than full animation, The marvelous black and white backgrounds, in such cartoons as “Minnie the Moocher,” were not reproduced in color, and were eliminated in favor of less complex background. Finally, the color selection was often times poor. Granted the Fleischer shorts were often surreal, but one doubts anyone at the studio would have selected purple for the color of a cat.

These colorized cartoons became the basis for an odd compilation film released by New Line Cinema in 1980. Record producer and composer Dan Dalton was approached in 1976 by NTA to create a “new” animated feature from the colorized Boop shorts that would be released in August of that year. The idea was to create a new storyline that would be supported by classic Fleischer animation and a new voice and music track. The theme of the feature would capitalize on the 1976 presidential race.

Dalton spoke to me in 1982, and confessed that the selection of the cartoon sequences and the creation of a new story took him much longer than he had expected. “I knew I was going to start with ‘Minnie the Moocher’ [the scene in which Betty is admonished by her father] and would end with ‘Betty Boop for President,’” said Dalton. His problem was finding a suitable middle for his narrative.

Dalton kept some of the classic Cab Calloway numbers, but junked the 1930s scores for his original songs that were recorded by Debbie Boone, The Association and the singer hired to be the new voice of Betty Boop, Victoria D’Orazi. Working with four other writers, Dalton took scenes from 35 shorts to create his story, which depended on a narrator. Tom Smothers did the honors as the voice of Pudgy.

Dalton missed his 1976 deadline. Apparently NTA was anxious to release the film as they advertised an “all singing, all dancing feature length production” called “Betty Baby” in the Oct. 19, 1977 edition of “Variety.” That incarnation of the film was apparently not released in November of that year as promised.

“Hurray for Betty Boop” finally surfaced in 1980 at the Cannes Film Festival (not in competition) and had two trade screenings in the hopes of attracting worldwide sales.

According to Dalton, the production had a budget of $300,000 that included promotion and a test marketing in the college town of Madison, WI. Dalton blamed the timing of the booking – Labor Day weekend– but what few fans saw the finished product weren’t impressed.

“Everyone said I couldn’t do it and keep the continuity, it was very difficult. You and I could notice things [changes in styles of drawing Betty, her costumes and size] but not others [general audiences],” said Dalton.

Despite the lack of critical acclaim, Dalton was very proud of his film. “It’s a great children’s movie, a great dopers’ movie, a great midnight movie.”

The film went to cable television and then to video. It has not yet been released on DVD. Dalton, at the time of our conversation, reported that NTA was then thinking about re-doing the Fleischer’s second feature “Mr. Bug Goes to Town” by dumping the soundtrack and coming up with new dialogue and a rock and roll score. Those plans never came to completion thanks to the failure of “Hurray for Betty Boop.”

Perhaps part of the problem with Hurray for Betty Boop was that people had seen the real Betty Boops on video and liked them. The Fleischer cartoons became very successful on the exploding home video market. NTA, and its corporate successor Republic Pictures, marketed a wide assortment of Fleischer shorts. Because a number of Fleischer cartoons had fallen into the public domain, there was a seemingly endless parade of “bargain” tapes featuring the same handful of Boop cartoons.

Another revival of the character that never got off the ground in the 1970s involved Sid and Marty Krofft –the then-hot producers of such children’s fare as H.R. Puffnstuff and Lidsville). Richard Fleischer (Max’s son and well-known film director) told this writer the producers wanted to produce a live-action Boop show that would star Bette Midler. The project never happened.

In the early 1980s, the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) had formed a division to produce theatrical films and had optioned rights to Betty Boop. In a 1982 advertising supplement to “Variety,” the company announced their slate of up-coming films and listed under “In Development” was a live-action Betty Boop to be produced by Norman Stephens, Barry Krost and Joan Scott. Nothing else was ever announced on the project.

In 1983, plans were announced that CBS would bankroll a Broadway musical based on the character, apparently in response to the success of “Annie.” Those plans never progressed either.

CBS finally did use the character in a half-hour animated television special in 1985. The same team who animated the hugely popular “Peanuts” specials, Lee Mendelson and Bill Melendez, produced “The Romance of Betty Boop."

Melendez, interviewed by UPI’s Vernon Scott, said, “I predict Betty will make a comeback like Tina Turner. She’s a good representative of the women’s movement today. Betty wants to settle down, but she wants a career, too. She’s a female paradox.”

In an interview this writer conducted with Melendez in 1982, he commented that he planned to animate the character better than the Fleischer artists ever had, and that unlike the original shorts, his half-hour would have a story. He told me that he had no plans to hire any of the original animators who had worked on the shorts, nor would he consider using Mae Questel, Betty’s long-time voice.

When the half-hour aired over two years after that conversation, it was relatively easy to see that while the special was competently animated, there was no “feel” for the subject matter. The contempt Melendez exhibited in our discussion for the Fleischer originals was quite apparent. Although he followed the traditional Betty model, the supporting characters were of a different design that clashed with Betty. And indeed there was a story, but it was unremarkable.

The fact that the special never was repeated and there was no sequel clearly indicated the program’s lack of success.
The failure of “Hurray for Betty Boop” and “The Romance of Betty Boop” didn’t put a brake on the merchandising success of the character.

In an Associated Press story from 1986, King Features Syndicate, which administrates the licensing of the character for Richard Fleischer and his sister Ruth Kneitel, reported that in the fiscal year 1985-86 300 licensed Boop products grossed “about $100 million.”

In 1984, King Features syndicated a new Betty Boop comic strip, which co-starred Felix the Cat written and was drawn by Brian, Morgan, Greg, and Neal Walker. It was not a success and lasted just two years.

Betty did make a return to the big screen, though, in an appearance in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” in 1988. The animation directed by Richard Williams perfectly captured the classic Fleischer look, and Betty is well cast as a cigarette girl in the nightclub where Jessica Rabbit is performing. Questel reprised her vocal characterization, and Boop was the only classic cartoon star in the film presented in black and white.

In the late 1980s, Betty began appearing in the annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade in the form of a huge balloon.

With all of the interest in the character King Features commissioned a new animated television show in 1990. San Francisco-based Colossal Pictures produced a half-hour special entitled “Betty Boop’s Hollywood Mystery.” Unlike the Melendez special, Colossal wisely recreated much of the look and feel of the Fleischer originals. George Evelyn, the show’s director, told this writer that the production company wanted to re-create the Fleischer look and did so in part with the help of Richard Fleischer who supplied materials from the family archives.

Evelyn had wanted to use Mae Questel for Betty’s voice, but the actress was busy filming Woody Allen’s segment of “New York Stories.” Evelyn launched a series of auditions, and in true “Hollywood” fashion, the secretary at the recording studio that was producing copies of the audition tapes had the voice Evelyn wanted. Melissa Fahn performed the Boop voice.

Although originally intended for broadcast over CBS, the special was never aired until it was picked up by the Disney cable channel. Evelyn explained that a new management team at the network decided to shelve the special. Most animation fans have never had the opportunity of seeing what is commonly agreed to be a production of which the Fleischers themselves would be proud.

Betty’s voice
No one person has been associated as much with Betty Boop as the character’s primary voice artist, Mae Questel. Although several performers voiced the character before Questel, her take is the rendition that stuck with the Fleischer Studios and with the public.

Questel attempted to begin her professional show business career at the age of nine when she auditioned for the Broadway show, “Daddy.” Although the producers liked her, her grandparents didn’t believe the theater was a proper career for a young woman, and Questel’s show business aspirations were put on hold for a few years.

In 1930, her high school sorority sisters entered her name into a Helen Kane impersonation contest. Questel won the contest that meant four days booking into one of the leading vaudeville houses in New York, the RKO Fordham and $150.00 in prize money. Helen Kane even autographed a photo “To Another Helen Kane.” Neither performer could imagine how ironic this inscription would become in just a few years.

Her four days at the Fordham resulted in bookings in the prestigious Palace Theater and then subsequent bookings from Boston to Baltimore. At the relatively tender age of 18, Questel began her show business career with an act consisting of impersonations of well-known performers such as Mae West, Marlene Dietrich, Eddie Cantor and Jimmy Durante.

Max hired her in 1931 after four other actresses played the role – Margie Hines, Little Ann Little, Kate Wright and Bonnie Poe – to perform the Betty Boop voice, an assignment she had through the end of the series in 1938. Questel told this writer that she didn’t want to move to Florida with the rest of the Fleischer studio, and by that time the Betty Boop series had naturally run its course.

A short brunette with large eyes, Questel bore a resemblance to her cartoon character.

Questel’s mimicry extended to her characterization of Olive Oyl in the Popeye cartoons. Although at first the Olive voice was a deeper voice, Questel’s version was based on popular screen comedienne Zasu Pitts.

Unlike her frequent partner behind the microphone, Jack Mercer, Questel worked hard to have an acting career in front of the camera. She appeared in two Paramount musical two-reelers with Rudy Valle, “Musical Justice” (1931) and “The Musical Doctor’ (1932) and in the film “Wayward” supporting Richard Arlen and Nancy Carroll (1932). She retired from show business in the late 1930s for three years after the birth of her son.

The Internet Movie Database lists Questel in the cast of a 1933 “Hollywood on Parade” short in which she is credited with playing Betty Boop. Set in a Hollywood wax museum, an unidentified actress plays a Betty Boop statue come-to-life who is attacked by the Dracula statue played by Bela Lugosi. Lugosi has the memorable line as he bites Betty’s neck, “You have booped your last boop!”

The actress is neither Questel nor is it Helen Kane, although whoever it was she performed the voice perfectly and displayed far more cleavage than the cartoon Betty ever did.

Questel returned to voice acting with numerous appearances on radio programs during the 1940s and essaying Olive Oyl and other cartoon voices when Paramount moved the Famous Studios operation back to New York in 1942. She worked on the Casper cartoons and was the voice of Little Audrey. According to Jackson Beck, who played Bluto at Famous, Questel even played Popeye in several shorts made during World War II when Mercer was unavailable.

She provided the voice for the television character Winky Dink on the show “Winky Dink and You,” and did scores of voice-overs for commercials. And at an age when performers worry about making the transition to older parts, Questel had no problem with character roles. In 1960, she was praised for her role in the Broadway hit “Majority of One,” and encored her performance for the movie version starring Rosalind Russell. Other Broadway roles came in “Enter Laughing” with Alan Arkin, “Bajour” with Chita Rivera and “Come Blow Your Horn.” She had prominent parts in Jerry Lewis’ “It’s Only Money,” “Funny Girl” and “Move.” Her television appearances included guest shots on series such as “Mrs. G Goes to College,” “The Naked City” and “77 Sunset Strip.”

Questel even starred on her own comedy record in the early 1970s. “Mrs. Portnoy’s Retort” was a satiric response to Philip Roth’s bestselling book “Portnoy’s Complaint.” Roth’s book was lauded for its candid depiction of obsessive masturbation, and the album took full advantage of this theme for a series of cheap laughs with Questel playing the role of the fictional Portnoy’s mother.

In the mid-1970s Questel was picked for the role of “Aunt Bluebell” in a series of commercials for Scott Towels, and was a fixture on television for years.

I talked to Questel several times since 1977 when I began my research at the Fleischer Studio and always found her to be bubbly, out-spoken, and self-confident. Her character of Aunt Bluebell, who would butt into other people’s problems with her unsolicited but friendly advice about paper towels, never seemed to me to be too far from reality. She wasn’t too happy that she wasn’t selected for Hanna-Barbera’s revival of Popeye, and was quoted by her son in a 1977 article that she was always hoping to get a telephone call from someone making more Betty Boops. She finally did get a chance to do Betty again in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit.”

One of her performances of note was in Woody Allen’s segment, “Oedepus Wrecks,” of the1989 anthology film “New York Stories.” Although the film as a whole received mixed notices, Questel’s performance was singled out for praise.

In poor health for a number of years, Questel lived to see and benefit from the rediscovery of Betty Boop. She died at age 89 in 1998.

The “real” Betty Boop
Helen Kane, who died in 1966 at the age of 62, enjoys an ironic form of immortality. Her features and style of singing are definitely caricatured by the Boop character, but relatively few people alive today are aware of it. For any performer that kind of twisted anonymity is a mixed blessing.

At the time of Betty’s birth in 1930, Kane was a successful stage and recording star. With her round face, spit curls and pouty little girl singing voice, she projected a curious blend of sexual knowingness and innocence. She was, like actresses Clara Bow and Joan Crawford, a “jazz baby.”

She began her performing career at the age of 15, and eventually reached the top of the vaudeville ranks earning as much as $8,000 a week. She became known for the songs “That’s My Weakness Now” and “I Wanna be Loved By You.”

At the time of the production of “Dizzy Dishes,” Kane was well known for her distinctive kewpie doll looks and high-pitched singing voice. Ironically, Natwick’s caricature of her in “Dizzy Dishes” is not all that apparent until the unnamed nightclub performer sings. Kane’s trademark was a scat-sing chorus of “boop-oop-a-doop,” which was included in the cartoon performance.

Kane appeared in several early sound films for Paramount, such as the campus musical “Sweetie” and starred in the musical short “A Lesson in Love.” Considering how the Fleischer Studio took advantage of its business arrangement with Paramount, it’s not surprising that a caricature of Kane turned up in their cartoons.

Comic strip historian Bill Blackbeard noted in his collection of the Betty Boop comic strips that Kane contacted King Features in 1933 when she learned that negotiations between the syndicate and Max for a Betty Boop comic strip were stalled. She proposed a strip called “Helen Kane, the Boop-Oop-A-Doop Girl,” which the syndicate accepted and ran in several Hearst newspapers in 1933 and 1934. The strip with its short-term contract was used as a bargaining chip in talks with Max. Once the deal was struck for a Betty Boop strip, the Kane strip was dropped.

Kane was drawn for her strip in a way that closely resembled Betty Boop. Interestingly the Kane and Boop strips both presented a “behind the curtain” view of life in show business.

Kane’s time in the spotlight was waning by the mid-1930s though, while Betty Boop’s career was flying high. Perhaps that is what motivated her lawsuit against Max Fleischer and Paramount in 1934.

On March 6, 1934, “The New York Times” reported that Kane “sails east to her trial in four weeks against Max Fleischer. Besides the previously known demands, Kane wants an accounting of the profits from the Paramount cartoon releases.” Kane was suing for unfair competition and imitation and sought the amount of $250,000. The trial began in April and concluded in May.

At the heart of the argument was just how much of the success of the Betty Boop cartoons could be traced to the spit curls and singing style of Helen Kane. On April 18, the “Times” reported that Max took three young women to court with him who had performed the Betty Boop voice who testified that they had made “no effort to imitate Miss Kane.”
In the April 20, 1934 “Times” story, Max “declared that his character is a figment of his imagination and that the hair dress of Betty Boop also was developed by himself and was in imitation of Miss Kane.” Fleischer had a lot to lose if Kane won the case, and his testimony, clearly a lie, was an effort to keep the lucrative Betty Boop character and to prevent further actions by Kane.

On April 23, Supreme Court Justice Edward S. McGoldrick viewed a Helen Kane sound film with two songs and then watched two Betty Boop cartoons. The “Times” reported McGoldrick was told that out of 46 Boop cartoons 66 songs were sung and of those only four had previously been performed by Kane. McGoldrick saw more footage of Kane on April 24.

“Lou Walton, a theatrical manager, testified that baby Esther, a Negro girl under his management, had interpolated words like ‘boo-boo-boo’ and ‘doo-doo-doo’ in song at a cabaret here in 1928 and that Miss Kane and her manager had heard her there. Justice McGoldrick will hear a sound film of her to aid his decision,” the “Times” reported on May 2, 1934. The implication was clear; Kane’s trademark was not hers and hers alone.

The decision was handed down on May 5, 1934. Kane’s suit was denied on the basis “the plaintiff had failed to sustain either cause of action by proof of sufficient probative action.” Kane and her attorney vowed to file an appeal, but never did.
In a 1935 interview, Kane said she was quitting show business because she was tired. Kane had amassed a considerable fortune during the peak of her fame, and, after fading from the public eye, invested in several businesses. Unfortunately, her investments failed, and Kane tried staging a comeback several times. When Debbie Reynolds portrayed her in the MGM musical “Three Little Words” (1950), Kane’s career was largely forgotten.

The year before her death, she had appeared on the Ed Sullivan’s long-running variety show in her last comeback effort. She had fought cancer for ten years prior to her passing according to her obituary in “Variety.”

Today, performers have greater legal protection over their features and trademark mannerisms and appearances. What Kane endured could not happen again.

Betty’s animators
Of the 120 Betty Boop cartoons, several head animators stand out as having repeated contact with Betty Boop. Willard Bowsky worked on 11, Roland Crandall on 12 and Tom Johnson on 17. No one at the studio matched Myron Waldman’s association with the series. Waldman worked on 29 of them, more than any other animator at the Fleischer Studios.

The Fleischer Studio did not assign animators and their units to particular characters or series. So, unlike directors such as Chuck Jones, Tex Avery and the team of Bill Hanna and Joe Barbara, few people at Fleischer’s ever became identified with a single character. Waldman’s track record with Betty Boop stands out, though. Waldman, who created Betty’s pet dog Pudgy for the series, was very self-effacing about his career in animation, despite the fact that he was the director of two of the four Fleischer shorts to be nominated for an Academy Award (“Hunky and Spunky” and “Educated Fish”). He did outstanding work on the Fleischer Superman series (“Billion Dollar Limited,” “Magnetic Telescope”) and directed the two-reel “Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy” short.

Waldman told me that much of Betty’s success could be traced to the work of animator Roland “Doc” Crandall. Crandall, born in 1892, left the studio in 1941 and was a commercial artist. He died in 1972.

Crandall’s biographical sketch in the studio newsletter reported “he had an early ambition to be a cartoonist and contributed political cartoons to the ‘Stamford Advocate when he was only 13 years-old and still living on the farm [in New Canaan, CT].

“Doc received his school in New Canaan and at the Yale Art School in new Haven, CT. His first job was in New York City with an engraving company. A few years later he decided to go west. He staked out a homestead in Montana sold it, and then went to Los Angeles, CA where he opened a commercial art studio. A year or so later he tried gold mining in Alaska. His next adventure was with the Yale Battalion Field Artillery during the Mexican border trouble. After this he decided to try animating and after a few minutes instruction was put to work animating ‘Foxy Grandpa’ and ‘The Katzenjammer Kids [two Hearst comic strips of the era]. During the World War, Doc went overseas with the 11th Engineers. He was in the Battle of Cambrai and later promoted to sergeant-major. He was then transferred to General Headquarters where he was put in charge of secret maps. At the close of the war he made a 13-reel animated history of war for the War College.

“Upon his return to New York he worked at the Bray Studios. When Max and Dave went into business, Doc was one of their first employees, some sixteen years ago. Ten years after the war, Doc returned to Paris and did a picture for the Paris Auto Show. He retuned to the studio in 1929 and a couple of years later animated ‘Snow White,’ a Betty Boop picture alone. It took him six months to do it.

“Doc is a genial person well liked by those who know him. He is five feet eight inches tall and weighs 145 pounds. He has brown hair, not very much of it. He keeps his blue eyes half shut because of the smoke coming from a cigarette that is always in his mouth. His most favored food is lima beans or clams. In the line of strong drinks give him gin. Demands that the coffee he drinks be good.

“Doc’s hobbies are stone fireplace building, digging lakes and landscaping. He owns a speedboat named ‘Rose Marie.’ His pet peeve is to get free advice. In 1923 he married Julia Hoffman, their son Davenport was born the following year. Doc is very fond of dogs and has a Welsh terrier named Paddy. Doc is a sound sleeper, once he falls asleep, but he usually resorts to counting sheep. Blue is his favorite color and 13 is his lucky number. Doc is now in charge of a new group [and] their first picture will be a Screen Song starring Wiffle Piffle. Max was the first person to call him ‘Doc’ and the name stuck. Someone we just can’t picture calling him anything else.”

Bowsky, according to animation historian Joe Campana, was a native New Yorker born in 1907. He began working at the studio in the late 1920s and was one of the young group of artists who were promoted to animators when a number of senior artists left in 1930.

Bowsky, according to Waldman, was one of the members of the Fleischer inner circle and was well liked by Max and Dave, despite complaints that he was anti-Semitic.

After the Fleischers lost their studio in a take-over by Paramount in the spring of 1942, Bowsky enlisted in the army and became a platoon leader in the 94th Calvary Reconnaissance Squadron. Campana wrote, “The 14th Armored Division arrived at Marseille, France on Oct. 30, 1944. Within a couple weeks Bowsky’s unit was among those mobilized to join the Seventh Army in the Southern Vosges Mountains (due east of Paris, near the German border.)   Willard’s was among the squadrons that comprised The Division’s Combat Command A (CCA). They were soon ordered to advance into an area southwest of Strasbourg, just west of the Rhine. CCA’s mission was to clear German forces from the area and fight its way south to the town of Selestat. Cavalry squadrons were used for reconnaissance and were deployed in front of and along the flanks of advancing armored columns. Bowsky’s unit encountered a German column withdrawing eastward to cross the Rhine. A nighttime firefight erupted and Second Lieutenant Willard Bowsky was killed in action on Nov. 27, 1944. Willard and the men of his platoon were good soldiers who fought bravely. In the end the fight was won. Willard was a genuine war hero. He was awarded the Silver Star and the Purple Heart and is interred at the Lorraine American Cemetery in St. Alvold, France.”

Johnson was also a native New Yorker, born in 1907. According to his short biography in the studio newsletter, he had both an interest in drawing – he had his own comic strip at one point in school – and in motion pictures. Although going to school to become a teacher, his artistic bent made itself known through a side job as a sign painter.

He joined the studio as a writer in the story department and then switched to the animation department where he was eventually made the head of a group or unit. He stayed with the Fleischers and then with Famous Studios literally his entire career working on some of the last theatrical cartoons produced by Paramount in the late 1950s. Some of his last work was on the Felix the Cat television series produced by fellow Fleischer alumni Joe Oriolo. Johnson died in 1960.

Born in 1908, Waldman joined the Fleischer Studio in 1930 after graduating from the Fine and Applied Arts Program at the Pratt Institute. At the studio, he started as an opaquer and then moved into the inking department. After winning a studio competition, Waldman was promoted to the in-betweening department and was given his own animation unit in 1933. Waldman’s strength was with sentimental themes and softer gags, although he worked on several Popeye shorts and proved his abilities with the taxing Superman cartoons.

One Betty Boop cartoon of which Waldman was particularly proud is “A Language All My Own” (1935). Betty Boop was very popular in Japan, and this short was designed to appeal to the Japanese market. In the short, Betty travels to Japan and performs there. Waldman wanted to make sure that none of her gestures and movements would offend the Japanese, so he asked a number of Japanese exchange students in New York to check his work.

Waldman was also the creator of Betty’s dog, Pudgy, who was the star of many of the later Betty Boop cartoons.

Waldman was in a unique position at the Fleischer Studio. On one hand he was a talented and loyal team player, but on the other, he was an iconoclast who wasn’t afraid to speak his mind. Waldman championed the cause of Lillian Friedman, the studio’s first woman animator when others gave her a rough time. He attempted to persuade Max to talk with striking artists in the lengthy 1937 strike.

Waldman returned to animation after serving in the Army during World War II. He worked at Famous Studios on Screen Songs, Popeye. Little Lulu, and Casper shorts. He wasn’t content just with a career in animation, though. He branched out to create a “novel without words,” “Eve,” that was a critical and financial success when it was published in 1943. He was the artist on the post-war Sunday comic strip “Happy the Humbug.” He appeared on television shows during the 1950s with his “Try A Line” drawing act
.
In the 1960s and ‘70s, he worked on a number of Saturday morning series, and was the director of the pilot for the “Out of the Inkwell” series produced by Hal Seeger. Seeger, a former Fleischer Studio employee, had convinced Max not only to sell him the rights to do the series, but to appear in the pilot as well. For his final appearance with his silent screen co-star, Waldman recalled that Fleischer had his hair dyed for the occasion. Waldman quit from the series when the budgets would not permit him to do Ko-Ko justice.

He continued to work with Seeger on subsequent series such as “Milton the Monster.”

Waldman stayed very active up to his death in 2006 with providing original artwork for collectors as well as creating limited edition cels. He was the last surviving head animator from the studio.

Betty’s musical directors
Sammy Timberg was the most important of the several tunesmiths used by the Fleischer Studio to compose music and songs for the Popeye and Betty Boop cartoons, and other productions. Thanks to the efforts of his daughter Pat, he is beginning to receive the attention being afforded to fellow cartoon composers Carl Stalling and Scott Brady.

Sammy’s contributions to the Fleischer Studio productions reads like a cartoon Top Forty list. His works included the “Sweet Betty” theme song heard to introduce the Betty Boop shorts; the biggest hit from Gulliver’s Travels, “It’s a Hap Hap Happy Day”; “Don’t Take my Boop-Oop-A-Doop Away”; “I’m Sinbad the Sailor”; “Boy Oh Boy” from “Mr. Bug Goes to Town” and many others.

Sammy received an opportunity that Stalling and Brady never got at Warner Brothers and MGM. He composed all the music for the Fleischer Superman cartoons that enabled him to show a wider and more dramatic range of his musical abilities.

In a brief interview in 1977, Timberg told this writer that his favorite assignment at the studio was composing for the Betty Boop shorts. His contributions to the shorts were integral to their success. Since many of the Betty Boop shorts have show biz settings or references, Sammy’s classic Tin Pan Alley pop compositions were always on target. He also contributed greatly to the incidental music of the shorts as revealed by the cartoons musical cue sheets maintained by ASCAP.

Sammy obviously understood the intent of the animators and knew his characters. Some of his music provides a structure for the short, such as the great “I Want A Clean Shaven Man” in the Popeye cartoon of the same name. Other songs set the stage for the action of the short such as the song Popeye sings about looking for his father at the beginning of “Goonland.”

“The music had to be synchronized with the action, and I worked with the artists from the first drawings up to the end,” Sammy told one interviewer.

His compositions for the Superman shorts perfectly match the animation as being one of the true highpoints in American animation. The Superman shorts easily prove that Sammy had the talent to score dramatic films.

Sammy with Sammy Lerner (who composed the Popeye theme song) wrote two live-action shorts “Musical Justice” (1931) and “Musical Doctor” (1932). The two shorts starred Rudy Vallee and Mae Questel and the first short features Questel as Betty Boop.

Sammy had aspirations beyond his success in cartoons. His daughter Pat told this writer that her father never saw the value in that work and instead sought fame as a composer of hit popular songs and “serious” music. Considering that he had a classical music education with a teacher whose students included Aaron Copeland and George Gershwin and the lack of critical attention animated cartoons received in the 1930s and ‘40s, it’s little wonder Sammy favored other projects.

One only has to look at what Sammy was doing prior to his start at the Fleischer Studio. In 1930, he led a 100-piece orchestra at New York’s Capital Theater in performing his jazz rhapsody.

Listening to Pat speak about her father and his life is not unlike reading the plot of an old “behind-the-scenes of a show” musical.

Timberg was born in New York City on May 21, 1903, the youngest of seven children of Austrian immigrants. The death of his father forced the 15 year-old to abandon his training as a concert pianist and join his brother Herman in vaudeville.

Herman Timberg was an up-and-coming comedian, and Sammy was his straight man. A legend in vaudeville, Herman wrote one of the Marx Brothers’ early acts while Sammy provided the music for it, and their sister Hattie performed with them and acted as the business manager for the Marx Brothers.

After 14 years on the vaudeville circuit, Sammy decided to devote himself to his music. He wrote songs for several Broadway shows, and then found work with the Fleischer Studios. His music can be heard on dozens of Fleischer shorts and in several of the live-action musical comedy shorts produced by Paramount in New York featuring singer Rudy Valle. His association with animation lasted through the end of the Fleischer Studios and continued with the Famous Studios where he composed music for Little Lulu and Casper cartoons.

While essentially a New Yorker, Sammy ventured out to Hollywood on several memorable occasions. In the 1940s, the great dramatic actor Lionel Barrymore chose Timberg to compose the score for a recording of Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol.”

Sammy collaborated with lyricists Buddy Kaye and Sammy Cahn on a number of popular songs. The song, “Help Yourself to My Heart,” written by Timberg and Cahn, was recorded by Frank Sinatra and included in a Sinatra retrospective released in the mid-1980s. Pat Timberg has discovered dozens of unreleased compositions among her father’s papers, including four other songs co-written by Cahn.

Later in his career, Timberg produced shows and managed performers such as Don Adams, Jackie Gleason and Edie Gorme. Pat remembers going to show business restaurants with her father and having people such as Milton Berle come to their table to greet Sammy. The Timbergs were truly a show business family as Pat’s mother and Sammy’s first wife, the late Rosemarie Sinnott, was a former Ziegfeld Follies dancer and magazine cover model.

His second marriage to a native of Scranton, PA eventually drew Sammy to that city where he spent the last years of his life. Full of old-fashioned show biz charm, Sammy was a well-known figure in the capital city, and just months before his death in 1992, Sammy was honored by the city with a “Sammy Timberg Day.”

“I did everything - managed people, conducted, wrote music, did everything in all ends of show business,” Timberg said in a 1984 interview. “It’s been a busy life.”

In late 1990s Pat released a CD of her father’s music that included new recordings of many of his songs for the Betty Boop and Popeye cartoons as well as an archival recording of Sammy Timberg performing one of his tunes and his theme from the Superman cartoons.

***
Lou Fleischer headed the music and sound department and came into the studio and helped make the process that produced the “Bouncing Ball” silent song cartoons possible.

The studio newsletter profile of him noted “he can not remember having any childhood ambitions around the house, which would indicate that his musical talent began to blossom early.

“He studied violin and piano and mastered them both. He is also an expert mathematician and knows the dope, all the way from zero to square root to the fifth power of the fourth dimension. Or whatever you call the higher mathematics.”

“…After the early period of his musical career had passed, he became associated with his brothers-in-law in the jewelry business. Things were going fine until ‘sound’ was introduced into the picture business. Max and Dave, his brothers, wanted him in the studio; his brothers-in-law wanted him in the jewelry business. Lou had helped out in the studio before, on the ‘bouncing ball’ feature. It was a hard decision to make, with two opposing forces pulling him from opposite directions. Max and Dave won, thus making it a twofold honor – that of having their brother with them and at the same time securing one of the best soundmen in the business.

“Lou’s tastes in music are what might be called broad. He likes all good music whether it is classical or popular. This ability to appreciate the best in all grades of music is a valuable asset to him in his present duties as music director of the Fleischer Studios.”

© 2008 by Gordon Michael Dobbs

Chapter Two: Brothers

2007-02-06T17:21:00.000-08:00

This the second chapter of "Made of Pen and Ink." It is a first draft and your comments are appreciated.

Max worked for Bray for several years and then established his own studio – Out of the Inkwell Films, Inc. – in 1921. He brought along his youngest brother Dave and the two provided a contrast in personalities and styles.

No discussion of the Fleischer cartoons could or should omit his brother Dave. The two were joined at the hip professionally for the height of their careers. As early as the late Twenties, Dave reportedly had wanted to strike out on his own. Max's parents, though, wanted the brothers together, and an uneasy alliance continued.

In an article published on December 10, 1939 in This Week Magazine of the New York Herald Tribune, writer Frederick James Smith described the two brothers as follows:

“Dave sees things in terms of laughter. Max in terms of fantasy. Max is shy and retiring, avoiding publicity, Dave, on the other hand, will enter a restaurant and start clowning with the orchestra leader.”
Smith wrote, “ [Max] Fleischer likes to explain why he made ‘Gulliver’s Travels.’ ‘Every adult is still a child at heart,’ he says. ‘They are sorry they have been told there is no Santa Clause and they would like to say ‘You’re wrong, there is a Santa Claus – and there are elves and witches and fairies.’ People want believe in fantasy because it is an escape from the hard realism of the world.’”

Max repeated to Smith a statement he makes in his autobiographical essay: “ I must have been born with my moustache.” Whether Max was making a joke at his own expense about his age or rather it was an expression of the responsibilities he had, as the family leader, is open to interpretation.

Eventually, aside from his sister, Max did employ all of his siblings. His paternal outlook was well known at the studio. Jack Mercer, the voice of Popeye for almost 50 years, said that Max was like “the Godfather…If you had a problem with something, you went to him.”

“Everyone in this organization can come right into my office and air their grievances and their troubles and speak directly to me,” Max wrote in his 1939 autobiography. “Everyone in the organization calls me ‘Max.’ Not merely as a convenience, but I feel I have actually earned this salutation.”

Working with his big brother certainly had an impact on Dave. He told historian Joe Adamson in an interview conducted in 1968 that “Max’s name was always first. Under that it said: ‘Directed by Dave Fleischer.’ I suggested that he have his name on it. He was my older brother and I never thought we’d separate or anything. It didn’t matter; it was in the family.”

Dave explained to Adamson, though, that later in the 1920’s, he did attempt to begin his own business, only to have his family insist that he reunite with Max.

In his discussions with Adamson, Dave insisted that he had developed the famous Bouncing Ball and that Max had patented several of Dave’s invention in his name. Dave also claimed that the Rotoscope was at least partially his idea.

Dave’s remarks have to be taken at face value, however. In the same series of interviews, Dave insisted to Adamson that he had made the original Casper the Friendly Ghost cartoon, which actually had been produced years after Paramount had forced Dave and Max out of their studio. He also said that the technique that used models to add three dimensions to the Fleischer cartoons had not been used in the Popeye series, although it had to great effect.

The “he said-she said” quality of the interviews reflected the long-standing resentment Dave had towards his brother and that his efforts should have been given the recognition he believed he deserved. Dave told Adamson at length about his various inventions, which ranged from an artificial sweetener to a penny arcade scale.

The Out of the Inkwell cartoons were initially based on the concept of the cartoonist – played by Max – interacting with his creation from the inkwell, Ko-Ko the Clown. Although it’s not know if Max sought the on-camera role of the cartoonist or not, he acted in many of the shorts through the first half of the 1920s.

His co-starring role put Max in the public eye. He was the head of the studio on letterhead and in the films. This may have been a source of conflict between Max and Dave.

By the mid-Twenties, Max became less involved with the animation of the shorts, although he would still appear on-camera, and concentrated on the management side of the business. Creative control of the cartoons was passed to Dave. Depending upon who was talking Dave has been described as either one of the industry's greatest gagmen or a relatively talent-less man who should not have taken credit for screen direction.

An anecdote from Lou Fleischer as told to writer Ray Pointer illustrated Dave’s early interest in gags. As a child, “Dave went occasionally to Lipman’s grocery to do the marketing. Not yet able to write he would draw symbols representing whatever article was needed, amount, weight, etc. In one instance ‘peas’ were needed. This was represented by a boy urinating. Mr. Lipman kept some of these lists to show customers.”

From the late Twenties through the demise of the studio in 1942, nearly every Fleischer cartoon carried a Dave Fleischer direction credit.

“Well, that's a sore point with me,” recalled the late animator Shamus Culhane in an interview with his writer. Culhane worked at the studio in the early 1930s and again in the 1940s. “

I believe that everybody should get credit for the actual work they did. Now, Dave, although he may have thought himself something else, was a gagman and he was a good one, too. But we usually wrote our own stories. We did for a long time until Bill Turner and [first name] Stoltz became regular story writers, but even then we always wrote a good deal of the stuff. We also developed all the layouts and the characters and the animation. We did the whole schmeer.

“Dave went around during the course of the day, and he'd look over your shoulder to see what you were up to, and would contribute a gag here or there. But the actual direction, I mean the whole damn thing, was done by the animators, and they only get credit as animators,” Culhane said.

During the 1930s, the Fleischer Studio developed a system in which several key animators headed up units of artists. These head animators were the actual directors of a film. They supervised the design of characters, worked with the writers and did key animation. Dave supervised the head animators.

Long-time Fleischer head animator Myron Waldman remembered how he became irritated at Dave's habit of coming around and checking a day's animation progress by flipping the completed drawings. One day, Waldman handed Dave a sheaf of blank paper, which Dave flipped through with great consternation. He was not amused by Waldman's answer that Dave was holding tomorrow's work!

Where Dave seemed most interested was in the direction of the voice and music tracks. He told Adamson with apparent pride that he had “directed” screen composer Victor Young when Young was recording the score for “Gulliver’s Travels,” the studio’s first feature-length production. Dave insisted that Young use his arrangement for a scene and felt vindicated when Young included it in the final score.

Max’s son Richard wrote to this writer that part of the conflict between Max and Dave was due to Max’s refusal to allow Dave to write the score for the brother’s second feature, “Mr. Bug Goes to Town.”

The late Mae Questel, the voice of Betty Boop and Olive Oyl, characterized Dave as “crude,” to this writer and believed he was jealous of his older brother. By the late 1930s, the brothers reportedly were barely on speaking terms.

Dave's divorce in the late 1930s and subsequent re-marriage to his secretary Mae Schwartz when the studio moved to Miami reportedly embarrassed Max. According to an interview with the late Edith Vernick, a long-time employee of the studio, some churches in the Miami area called for a boycott of Fleischer cartoons because of the messy divorce.

Dave left the studio in April 1942 and apparently, he never spoke to his older brother again, although he maintained an affectionate relationship with Max's children.

Richard Fleischer described the two men as “bitter enemies who didn’t speak to one another for 30 years” in a letter to this writer.

In a newspaper article in “The Miami Herald” in 1978, Joe Fleischer said, “During the making of this feature [‘Gulliver’s Travels’] things began to go badly for the Fleischers. Max and Dave agreed to disagree between themselves to the point that they did not speak to one another for various reasons.”

This rift divided the Fleischer family, and continued to do so for years. It's easy to cast Dave as the villain in the story, although it is also undoubtedly simplistic and unfair.

In 1943, Dave was chosen to head the animation unit at Columbia Pictures where he produced the studio’s successful “Fox and Crow” cartoons and started a series based on Al Capp’s popular “Lil Abner” comic strip. The “Lil Abner” shorts didn’t click with audiences. The shorts didn’t capture the sly satire and sex appeal of Capp’s popular strip and instead there was a re-occurring theme in which his mother rescues Lil Abner from a perilous situation. There were striking similarities with the formula of having Popeye rescuing Olive.

Dave’s stay with the company was only about two years. Columbia opted to close their animation unit in favor of releasing shorts produced by UPA.

Dave also appeared as himself in one movie made in the mid-1940s – the low-budget Republic musical “Trocadero” (1944) and was involved also with the making of “That’s My Baby,” another musical review.

Dave’s appearance in “Trocadero” was interesting as he was presented as a household name, something his brother may have been, but he was not. Dave created a new animated character that appears briefly in the film that struck a strong resemblance to Ko-Ko the Clown, the brothers’s first star.

Dave moved over to Universal where he did direct several cartoons similar to the Bouncing Ball shorts. During his lengthy association with the studio, he mainly worked on story construction and special effects. One of his innovations of which he seemed most proud was a story chart, which could analyze the script of a movie or play and determine its audience appeal. Dave claimed that he had used it to show how the “Francis the Talking Mule” films would be a hit.

His last job in animation was in 1959 while he was at Universal on the company’s release of a Russian animated feature The Snow Queen. Universal had bought the American rights to the film and had shot a prologue starring TV personality Art Linkletter. The new English soundtrack featured teen favorites Sandra Dee, Tommy Kirk and Patty McCormack. According to the film’s press materials, “Universal-International engaged Dave Fleischer, one of Hollywood’s foremost animation experts, to supervise the matching of dialogue and sound effects to the picture.”

Dave stayed at Universal until 1967, when he retired. In a note to this writer, he declined a request for an interview in 1976 stating he was too busy preparing a new feature film based on the myth of Pandora’s Box. The feature never was realized and Dave Fleischer died in 1979.

The dynamics were also complicated as the other Fleischer brothers were employed at the studio at various times. Joe was an electrician, Charlie was a machinist and Lou was a musician whose skills were essential with the coming of sound. Other than Dave, Lou became the brother with the greatest responsibility at the studio.

Lou studied both piano and violin as a child and found work as a young man playing the piano in theaters accompanying silent movies and in nightclubs. He went to school for civil engineering – a field he did enter– but was working in a jewelry shop when Dave called him to ask if he would join them at the studio “because it needed someone who knew music and mathematics.”

Lou’s first job was to prepare exposure sheets – the charts used by animator to time their drawing to a soundtrack – for a cartoon featuring a recording by popular banjo player Eddie Peabody. Lou’s efforts were successful and he left the jewelry store.

He stayed with the studio supervising the exposure sheets and working with the cartoon’s composers such as Sammy Timberg.

Lou Fleischer told animator Ray Pointer that “it was customary to allow visitors to go through the cartoon studios to see how things are done, but it got too voluminous and disturbing to the artist so it was only limited to celebrities. We had royalty from England and one day [French singer and actor] Maurice Chevalier.

“He had been shown the entire 9th floor of 1600 Broadway and than shown the sixth floor. Last thing [he was shown] was the [production of a] Screen Song (Bouncing Ball) with my brother Joe turning the drum on which the lettering was and I with a black sleeve, black glove and black shirt [to place the ball over the right words].

“After seeing this he remarked, ‘Marvelous! Marvelous! Marvelous! Five brothers each in a different capacity and each an expert in his field.’ I shall always remember this!”

In the 1979 “Miami Herald” story Joe Fleischer read to the reporter a presentation the then-89 year-old retiree made to school classes. The closing paragraph read: “Finally this to me all seems like a passing dream except to say we remaining Fleischers [Lou and Dave were also still alive at the time] feel grateful for having the opportunity to bring laughter and happiness to people all over the world.”

© 2007 by G. Michael Dobbs

Chapter One

2006-10-02T13:40:00.000-07:00

The following is a draft of the first chapter of my book on the Fleischer Studios.

Chapter One
Art and mechanics: a strange combination

Will there ever be a technology married to an art form that will have as much impact on modern society as motion pictures?

It is difficult to truly imagine how the first motion picture audiences must have felt when they gathered to see the works of the Lumiere Brothers at the end of the 19th century. We have the reports that sophisticated French audiences gasped and moved out of the way when they saw footage of a train arriving into a station in a Dec. 28, 1895 showing.

Consider for a moment that the experience of seeing moving photography on a large screen basically had no precedent for these early audiences. While the Internet has changed our lives today, its form and function were not shocking to us.

The literal reproduction of everyday life was indeed startling and when early filmmakers began to realize that motion pictures could be used for telling stories that normally would have been considered for the stage, new horizons were discovered.
Like the development of the linotype and wood pulp paper, which made the mass production of books and newspapers
possible, motion picture technology created a way for people to share drama, humor, and fact with breathtaking immediacy.

When French stage magician and theatrical producer George Melies discovered through an accident that a wagon was transformed into a hearse on street scene footage he was filming, the reputation of cinema changed from being a medium that mirrors reality to one that could create reality. Melies became one of the most celebrated filmmaker of this earliest era by producing hundreds of short “trick” films that exploited the strengths of the new medium.

It was in this heady time of pioneers that two men emerged who changed the face of motion pictures forever.

Film scholars credit Emile Cohl and J. Stuart Blackton as the fathers of cartoon animation. Blackton, a cartoonist turned film producer, was one of the partners in the Vitagraph Company. He used a chalkboard to create crude animation in 1905. Blackton had come from a rich stage tradition known as the “lightning artist.” These artists, who were a staple of vaudeville, would create humorous drawings in a matter of moments. Blackton used many of the non-animated tricks developed by Melies, in his 1906 “Humorous Phases of Funny Faces,” but also began to actually animate as well.

A French caricaturist and avant-garde artist, Cohl took Blackton’s idea and went further. His film, “Fantasmagorie” in 1908, established much of the format of what we know now as animated cartoons. It was made of sequential drawings – 700 of them – and had a central character that appeared in other Cohl films. It also originated connecting the action on the screen with an artist by showing the artist’s hand at work creating the drawings.

Motion pictures were quickly becoming one of the most collaborative artistic mediums. Cohl’s inclusion of his hand was a reminder that there was a single person behind these moving drawings – a convention adapted by many subsequent artists even though a studio produced the film.

Cohl was a live-action filmmaker as well and he integrated animated sequences into his live action comedies. In his 1909 film, “Les Joyeaux Microbes,” a doctor invites a patient to take a look into a microscope. There he sees a series of gags in which microorganisms transform themselves into human faces.

In 1909, Cohl was the first to combine animation and live action through the use of matte photography in the film “Clair de Lune Espagnol.”

"Le Peintre néo-impressionniste,” made the next year, had the animated sequences as canvases presented by an artist to a potential client. Although “Les Joyeaux Microbes,” used pen and ink on paper as the animated medium, this film featured hinged cut-out paper figures that were introduced by a vaudeville “lightning” sketch.

“Bewitched Matches,” showed what happened when a father shooed away a ”witch” about to tell his daughter’s fortunes. She manages to put a spell on his matches, which move in a variety of ways, terrifying the father.

Another Cohl accomplishment was his producing the first animated series. He made 13 shorts based on the George McManus comic strip “The Newlyweds” from 1912-13.

Cohl’s films were highly popular and influential on both sides of the Atlantic. However, the First World War essentially halted Cohl’s career in animation. His last live–action motion pictures was made in 1921. And he faded from sight and memory for many years.

By today’s standards the stick figure drawings are crude, but Cohl – and to a lesser extent Blackton – deserve their credit as the men who developed the rudiments of animation. In many ways, Cohl was the D.W. Griffith of animation. He developed techniques and conventions that others would follow. There would be many innovations made, but they were always built on the foundation laid by Cohl.

***
It was another artist out of vaudeville who brought animation up to a new level: Winsor McCay.

Still celebrated today for his incredible imagination and draftsmanship in his comic strips such as “Little Nemo in Slumberland” and “Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend,” McCay was also an accomplished stage performer who was a vaudeville star as early as 1906.

McCay was often described – sometimes by himself – as “the father of animation.” He wasn’t, of course. As a seasoned vaudeville performer and newspaper artist, McCay understood the necessity of hyperbole to sell himself in show business.
What McCay did do was to elevate the art of the animated film. He took his time to create films with the kind of detailed art one saw in his comic strips. This attention to detail was timely and costly, but since McCay was producing the films himself, he apparently didn’t care what it took to achieve his artistic goal.

In 1911, McCay had begun using his first film, one based on “Little Nemo,” as part of his vaudeville act. His next film, though, became the one for which he is still known today, “Gertie the Dinosaur.”

Gertie is the first “character driven” film. The humor comes naturally out of the personality McCay established rather than through a succession of gags. Gertie, although looking like a brontosaurus, is just a pet – an occasionally willful one – but a pet none-the-less.

McCay broke new ground in animation again in 1918 with the release of “The Sinking of the Lusitania.” For the first time, animation was being used to portray a real event and to make an overt political statement.

McCay’s films were the product of one artist, with the help of an assistant. For the busy cartoonist and illustrator, they were a sideline to his career, though. McCay made only six films theaters were released to theaters, plus three more that were never completed, from 1911 to 1921.

McCay’s films edged closer to fine art, reflecting his superior draftsmanship, than any other animated film seen in theaters during that time. They were like boutique cartoons, charming and breath-taking single works of art.

For those who didn’t share McCay’s vision of animation reflecting in motion what artists could accomplish in print, animation presented a bruising reality. No matter how much audiences might enjoy it, it was expensive to produce.

The problem remained on how to make animation cost efficient.
***
It was the combined vision of two men who made commercial animation possible. John R. Bray and Earl Hurd were both artists and animators who sought a way to conquer the crushing costs and time needed to produce animation.

Hurd’s 1914 invention of using transparent cels instead of paper as the medium for animation drawings was the key to affordable animation. Up until then, artists had to re-draw everything in the scene over and over, including backgrounds. The clear acetate cels meant the illustrative elements that comprised sequences could be broken down and only those elements that actually moved needed to be re-drawn.

Artists could draw a background one time and use it over and over for a sequence. For instance, McCay and his assistant re-drew the background mountains in “Gertie” on every rice paper drawing.

A character could be drawn on one cel and only those parts of his body that moved needed to be drawn again on other cels.

Bray’s contribution was borrowing the division of labor from manufacturing. Bray understood that one artist could not produce an animated film like they would a comic strip.

Cels enabled producers to establish an assembly line to produce animation in a cost effective manner and Bray and Hurd’s collective patents made them the industry leaders.

Taking a page out of Thomas Edison’s playbook – who tried to control the film industry by making producers take out licenses on cameras and other equipment – Bray and Hurd then enforced their patents, making other animation companies buy a license from them if they wanted to us the techniques they developed.

What Bray and Hurd did was to wrestle the medium of animation away from individual artists and make it commercial. It was the official acknowledgment that commercial animation had to be collaboration in order to be commercially successful. One person could guide an animation studio, but one person couldn’t do all of the artistic chores.

***
Max Fleischer was one of the second generation of cartoon animators, artists who followed pioneers such as McCay, Cohl and Blackton. Max was just a teenager when Blackton produced his first animated films that used a chalkboard instead of paper and pen.

Max's “class” included Paul Terry of Terrytoons and Mighty Mouse fame and Walter Lantz, the father of Woody Woodpecker, both of whom had long and successful careers. Unlike Terry and Lantz, though, Max was something more than just an artist. He was an inventor and innovator.

It’s no wonder that Max was attracted to animation and its combination of art and science.

Born in 1884 or 1885, Max immigrated with his family to the United States from his native Austria when he was four or five years old. Max's father was a tailor, specializing in riding outfits for the upper classes. The family settled in New York City and had a shop where Radio City Music Hall now stands. Max was the second eldest child in a family of four other boys and one girl. The talents of his brothers and his relationship as the leader of the Fleischer siblings would later prove to be both an asset and a hindrance to Max's adult career.

Max described the roles his siblings played at the Fleischer Studio in a 1939 autobiographic essay.
“I have four brothers. Dave is the director. Joe is the electrician. Lou is in the music department. Charlie is the machinist. I have one sister – Ethel – whose job is being married.”

In a 1980 interview conducted by film historian and animator Ray Pointer, Lou Fleischer said that his father’s business was successful until ready-to-wear garments became popular. Despite an effort by the elder Fleischer to enlarge his operation so he could sell to wholesalers, his business failed and the family moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn.

There was an additional Fleischer brother, Sol, whom Lou said died at age two of typhoid fever.

Max’s daughter, Ruth Kneitel showed this writer yellowing notebooks that attest to Max's childhood love of drawing. Max attended the public schools of New York, the Art Student’s League, Cooper Institute, The Mechanics and Trademen’s School and the New York Evening High.

Surviving comic strips from Max's days at the “Brooklyn Eagle” at the turn-of the-century show an interest in humor. Fleischer started as a copy boy at the newspaper and eventually became a staff artist, a position he left to go to “Popular Science Magazine” as its art editor. At his new position, Fleischer produced many two-color illustrations of engines and other machines.

At age 21, Max married Ethel Gold and subsequently had a family of two children; his eldest was Ruth who eventually married the Fleischer Studio artist Seymour Kneitel, and the youngest was Richard who became a prominent and successful film director.

“I worked with cartoons ever since I can remember – even when I went to school. My first job was with the ‘Brooklyn Daily Eagle’ in the art department. Got $2 a week running errands. I was willing to pay them $2 a week to let me in. I was advanced and became a cartoonist on the ‘Eagle.’ Then I went into the photo-engraving business and stayed in that business for a number of years. I became art editor of the ‘Popular Science Monthly” and while I was in their employ, I realized I was not only artistically inclined, but had a very keen and instinctive sense for mechanics. I liked them both. A strange combination. To me, machinery was an art, also. I still see great art in machinery.”

Ruth Kneitel still had originals of Max’s artwork when I met her in 1977. She had a pen and ink original of a comic strip Max did when at the “Brooklyn Eagle” and several paintings of various machines he did for “Popular Science.” The paintings are small masterpieces of the use of gray tones to portray the shine of metal surfaces.

This fascination with machinery became a re-occurring theme in Fleischer cartoons. Perhaps the most famous is “A Dream Walking,” in which Popeye tries to rescue a sleepwalking Olive Oyl as she passes through a construction site narrowly making missteps on moving girders.
***

In the new medium of animation finding the artists who could imagine movement in their minds and then construct the sequence of drawings to convey that movement to the screen was not easy. Undoubtedly the cost of labor was one of the most significant expenses in the industry.

Perhaps that’s why Bray was intrigued by Max’s invention of the Rotoscope.

The Rotoscope was designed to produce life-like movements by tracing over individual frames of live-action footage. The skills of the artists did not have to be as developed when working with the Rotoscope and yet the results were very life-like.
“While working with the Popular Science Monthly, I had an opportunity to write technical articles on the latest inventions and I began to wonder whether it wouldn’t be possible for me to apply cartoons to the mechanics and make it a practical thing for producing motion picture cartoons by machinery,” Max wrote in his 1939 essay.

The first rotoscoped film was begun in 1915, the year after Gertie the Dinosaur’s debut. The youngest Fleischer brother, Dave, had always shown an interest in show business, and he was photographed on the roof of Max's Brooklyn apartment building cavorting in his clown suit. The live-action footage was then projected one frame at a time onto a frosted glass plate that was part of a drawing board. The animator could then trace the movements of the live action, frame by frame onto paper or cels. The completed drawings were then photographed, and the first rotoscoped cartoon was made. The Fleischer brothers worked at night in Max's apartment with improvised equipment, and the production took two years to complete.

Max patented the Rotoscope in 1915. It is still a basic tool in the special effects field more than 90 years after Max developed it.

Max recalled an anecdote that described the origins of the name “Out of the Inkwell,” which was ultimately the name of Max’s studio and his first cartoon series. Max wrote of an accident during the production of the first rotoscoped cartoon. Late one evening in 1917, Max and his brothers Dave and Joe knew they were in serious trouble. They had been testing the patience of Max's wife Essie by working nightly in her parlor on Max's animated cartoon, but now they were worried. A bottle of India ink had fallen off their worktable and had left an indelible stain on her prized carpet. No amount of soaking or scrubbing could lift the blot, so, quietly they re-arranged the furniture to hide it.

“At the time I was making these experiments, I explained the idea to my brother Dave. Told him I had applied for a patent. I used up every cent I had on the machine with which I was experimenting – about $100. I explained the system I intended to use and he was fascinated by it. He couldn’t sleep any more. We built the machine but we had nowhere to work it, so our missus said we could use the living room, if we didn’t upset it too much. But we wanted a place that no one could disturb during the day because I was working at ‘Popular Science.’ We would meet at night and work after hours, from seven in the evening until three or four ever morning. We would close the doors and ask our missus not to disturb us. We did make the room look very bad, I guess. We had electric wires from the chandeliers, motors, etc. But we didn’t want anyone to go in there until we were through, for the slightest disturbance would upset our work.”
The first production took the Fleischer brothers almost a year to make and ran only 100 feet – about a minute’s worth of footage.

Max made the rounds of the New York studios with his test reel with initially no luck.

“I took the film to a distributor and in the blink of the eye it was run off. He said, ‘That’s very nice. What are you going to do with it?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. I just thought it was something. That’s all.’ He said, ‘Could you make one of these every week?’ I laughed. ‘Why no, it’s a physical impossibility.’ ‘How long did it take you to make this thing?’ he asked. ‘It took a year.’ ‘My dear fellow, go home and make something practical. If you had something we could offer for sale every week or every month, you’d have something, but once a year – Nix.’ ”

He finally found some interest at Famous Players where a colleague from the “Brooklyn Eagle” was in charge of short subjects. J.R. Bray.

Bray realized Fleischer's film had beautiful fluid movement and was impressed enough to hire Max and Dave Fleischer. World War One interrupted Bray's plans to use the Fleischer product as part of the “Paramount Screen Magazine,” a weekly short subject that had both cartoon and newsreel elements.

While serving in the Army, Max made some of the first training films used by the U.S. military.

“In 1917, I joined the general staff of the U.S. Army under [General John] Pershing. I went to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, with the U.S. Army and produced a series of education motion pictures for the rapid training of troops. The pictures were very successful. They were practically all drawn by hand and it was estimated that the films cut training time down by ten percent. Prints of these pictures were sent to all army camps and are still in use [in 1939]. They were designed to show men what went on inside their rifles as there was no other way of showing them.”

Some of the films Max worked on included “How to Read an Army Map,” “How to Fire a Rifle Grenade,” and “Methods of Harnessing Artillery Horses.”

Out of the army, Max rejoined Bray and Max’s cartoon creation began his career there. Slowly but surely, a star in the shape of a cartoon clown named Ko-Ko was born.

Ko-Ko the Clown was undoubtedly inspired by Dave Fleischer’s cavorting in a clown suit in the earliest experiments, but the character soon developed into a classic 19th century “bad boy” in the tradition of Tom Sawyer and Peck’s Bad Boy. Although he was the creation of the on-screen cartoonist played by Max, Ko-Ko held little respect for him, and delighted in making as much mischief as possible.

“I selected the character ‘Ko-Ko the Clown’ because he would be universally understood in pantomime. A clown doesn’t have to say very much because his action tells the story. The title ‘Out of the Inkwell’ was used for want of better name. The pictures were done in pen and ink. In addition, there are so many things which can come out of an inkwell.”
The early Fleischer cartoons were part of the Goldwyn-Bray Pictograph, an omnibus sort of short subject reel that could also included educational footage. Bray had not been wrong about the Fleischer short. Trade publications and even the staid New York Times loved the misadventures of the Fleischer clown.

“One's first reflection,” wrote a critic in New York Times on April 21, 1919, “after seeing this bit of work is ‘why doesn't Mr. Fleischer do more?’ After a deluge of pen and ink ‘comedies’ in which the figures move with mechanical jerks with little or no wit to guide them it is a treat to watch the smooth motion of Mr. Fleischer's figure and enjoy the cleverness that animates it.”

© 2006 Gordon Michael Dobbs

Introduction

2006-08-19T04:44:00.000-07:00

It would be easy enough to reduce a discussion of the Fleischer Studio cartoons and the men and women who made them to simply either an exercise of nostalgia or a time-line of technical achievements.

It would also be easy enough to paint the Fleischer story in dark colors – how the personal differences between two brothers in business together ultimately cost each of them their careers.

The story of the Fleischer Studio is all of the above and much more. It is a story of artists creating an ephemeral product that turned out to be enduring and influential.

Don’t take my word for it. Just look around. The Fleischers come up as inspirations with a lot of contemporary animators such as Bill Plympton and John Kricfalusi. Frank Miller credited Max and Dave Fleischer in his seminal “Dark Knight” comic book series that revived and re-defined Batman. Warner Bros. Animation turned to the design of the Fleischer Superman cartoons as inspiration for its first “Batman” cartoon series.

That circle construction and rubber-limbed look that the Fleischers did the best remains a favorite of art directors. And the Japanese love of Betty Boop was the basis of that big-eyed look prevalent in many manga and anime.

The Fleischer’s “Follow the Bouncing Ball” is a pop culture icon that is still used today. It’s simply part of the American landscape.

Max’s invention of the rotoscope has remained one of the standard tools in special effects. I doubt, though, that the critics who lavished praise of the 2006 release of “A Scanner Darkly” understood that the device that made the execution of the film possible was developed before the First World War.

The star the Fleischers owned themselves – Betty Boop – has become one of the best “evergreens” in modern day merchandising. Whether or not the adults or children who wear Betty Boop clothing have seen many, if any, of her cartoons doesn’t matter. They like the character: her design and what she apparently stands for.

Betty is definitely the first cartoon “grrl.”

***
Although Betty may have more fans today than Mickey Mouse, one has to remember that the Fleischers, in fact everyone who worked in animation in the 1930s and ‘40s, worked in the shadow of the Mouse.

Pop culture is often times ephemeral in nature. Many pop culture elements are designed to be disposable and among them were motion pictures.

Aside from revival houses that would bring back certain films or re-releases by the studios themselves, for the most part in the pre-television days when a film was done with its release, it was gone.

There has been serious criticism of film since the time of D.W. Griffith, but that examination was aimed at feature films.
There were whole genres of film – cartoons, newsreels, live action short comedies, serials, B-films – that received scant and scattered “serious” notice.

The only animated cartoonist who received that serious recognition was Walt Disney after the 1928 release of “Steamboat Willie,” the first synchronized sound cartoon.

Max had flirted with sound in a series of his song cartoons produced with the sound system promoted by Dr. Lee DeForrest in the mid-1920s. The DeForrest productions were ahead of their time and too few exhibitors wanted to take a chance with them.

Although Max did receive some press attention over the course of his career, his cartoons were never acclaimed in the manner that Disney’s productions received.

Like so many others in the movie business, only the people liked the Fleischer cartoons. This popular touch would serve the work of the studio well when a new medium rescued cartoons and B-films from oblivion– television.

Although the broadcast of these cartoons didn’t help the finances of anyone who made them, they did bring back a level of name recognition that had been long gone.

***

When Max Fleischer died in 1972, “Time” called him “the dean of animated cartoonists.” It was a gracious tribute to a man who had been out of the public’s eye since 1942.

He spent his final days in the Motion Picture Country House with his wife Essie and long-time secretary, Vera Coleman, near by.

Max’s brother and former partner, Dave, was employed by Universal Pictures as “troubleshooter” who was asked to supply solutions on special effects and scripts.

Frankly, by Hollywood standards both men were has-beens. They had not ridden the changes in the animation industry as well as several of their contemporaries.

Walter Lantz, who started in the business just a few years after Max, was still making Woody Woodpecker shorts at that time. The decrease in theaters willing to pay an additional rental for a theatrical cartoon and the rising costs of production meant that Lantz’s shorts were taking longer and longer to turn a profit.

The writing was on the wall, though, for Lantz. He had the distinction of being the longest lasting theatrical cartoon producer in this country.

Walt Disney, who died in 1966, had proven to be an ultimate Hollywood survivor by switching from animated shorts to features and showing he understood the concepts of branding before almost anyone else did in the movie industry.
Hugh Harmon and Rudy Ising, and Ub Iwerks, all important figures in silent and early sound animation, were shadows from the past.

The Warner Bros. directors were still active in varying ways, but it was former MGM directors William Hannah and Joseph Barbera who had become the most influential people in animation.

Hanna and Barbera had solved the economic problem of producing animation for television – by replacing movement with great voices and funny scripts. By the 1970s, though, the team was no longer producing shows with the impact of “The Flintstones,” and much of their studio’s out-put adhered slavishly to formulas.

Although it’s safe to say that the Fleischer brothers understood their cartoons had made a comeback though television syndication, they – for that matter no one else – couldn’t have predicted what kind of effect they would have on the Baby Boom generation.

***
By 1972, many of the Fleischer cartoons had completed almost 20 years in syndication on television. The Popeye shorts had proven to be such a huge money-maker that King Features, the owners of the character, commissioned over 200 more shorts to go into its own syndication package in the early 1960s.

With the increasing pressure on television programmers to use color instead of black and white material – from which the Warner Bros. and the color Popeye cartoons benefited – the black and white Fleischer shorts only had a few more good years on television.

The shorts had been on television long enough that when the Boomers started entering college, the Boops and other Fleischer shorts began appearing in college film programs and art house theaters as items of nostalgia.

In 1975, a small company called Crystal Pictures released a compilation of Fleischer shorts titled “The Betty Boop Scandals,” that included some of the best Betty Boops, including “Minnie the Moocher” and “Snow White.”

Both of these cartoons featured filmed performances by Cab Calloway and his orchestra.

If someone elected to watch these shorts due to a sense of nostalgia, they were in for a surprise. The gags and silly drawings that had amused children were now supplemented by the realization of other elements that had flown under a child’s radar: sexual and drug references, classic jazz and pop performances, and an artistic style that bordered on the surreal.

The collection included “Bimbo’s Initiation” one of the most nightmare-like cartoons ever made, as well as the amazing silent “Ko-Ko’s Earth Control” and a mini Boop biography, “Betty Boop’s Rise to Fame.”

In many ways, the Fleischer shorts seemed to have more in common with the underground comix of the day than with what one expected from animated cartoons.

During the same time, Boomers also renewed their appreciation with the Warner Bros. shorts. Directors such as Chuck Jones and voice actor supreme Mel Blanc discovered they had fans who were older than eight or 10.

It can be argued that in many ways the sound output of the Disney Studio is the overtly influential animation produced in the country. Disney sought to elevate the medium by making his films as polished and technically stunning as possible.
However, because Disney elected not to syndicate packages of his theatrical shorts, Boomers simply couldn’t easily see the Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck cartoons that had captivated a generation.

What they could see were the feature films, which by the 1950s and ‘60s were much more of a mixed lot. By the 1970s, Disney animation was seen as old-fashioned and part of the “establishment.”

It didn’t matter that the Fleischer shorts may not have been as well animated. What was seen as subversive by Boomer audiences matched the tone of the times.

Disney loyalists might grind their teeth at the thought, but people such as Max and Dave Fleischer, Chuck Jones, Tex Avery, Bob Clampett, and Friz Freleng, have proven to have far more impact on contemporary animation than the only animator to get his face on a postage stamp.

***
The home video revolution changed everything in the motion picture business. Before home video, if you were a film fan you only had access to those films that were on television or in theaters where you lived.

Local stations bought packages of movies to run in various time slots, but there was no guarantee that you had the chance to see a specific film.

The home video explosion may have killed the drive-in theater, but it created a new breed of film fan – someone who could actually assemble a library of films, like a personal library of books.

The Fleisher cartoons benefited from home video with the Betty Boop shorts and the studio’s two features coming out in authorized editions. The fact that many of the shorts had fallen into public domain – including the Superman series – had both an up and down side. There were plenty of VHS tapes out there with Betty Boop shorts, but the pictorial and sound qualities could vary wildly.

For whatever reason, King Features, which owns the Popeye cartoons, elected not to strike a deal for the release of the Fleischer shorts until 2006. The newspaper syndicate released VHS collections of Popeyes they had produced, but nto the shorts that fans wanted.

Unfortunately today, too few of the Fleischer productions have made it to DVD. Their second feature “Mr. Bug Goes to Town” isn’t out and only the Betty Boops that are public domain are on the dominant platform.

This situation is not unique to the Fleischer shorts. The Lantz output isn’t on DVD and the Terry-Toons, as awful as many of them were, are languishing on a shelf somewhere.

For the legacy of these cartoons to be handed down to a new generation of fans, they need to be made available. Considering how important the Fleischer cartoons have become, I’d hate to see a dead end here.

***

This book has been made possible through the generosity and time of many people. It’s my goal to use as much of the interview material I’ve gathered since 1977 in order to tell the story of the Fleischer cartoons from the perspective of the people who were there.
© 2006 by Gordon Michael Dobbs. All rights reserved.

Read as it's written!

2006-08-02T22:03:00.000-07:00

Made of Pen and Ink: The Fleischer Studio and Cartoons

Your childhood does mark you.

I loved Popeye as a kid and I wound up being an animation nut. So much so that I edited and published two magazines on the subject and started researching the life and career of animator and inventor Max Fleischer for a book that has proven to be my Holy Grail.

Non-fiction writers, especially reporter types such as me, aren't supposed to be artists. One of my journalism professor argued that journalism itself is not a "profession" such as law, medicine and engineering. Journalists, he said, were craftsmen...like artisans turning out pots. Some are better looking than others, but if you follow the rules of construction each pot will be adequate. They, like a properly written story, will serve their purpose.

Now I don't go along with this theory, but I do know that over the years the words "creative" and "reporter" seldom go together in many people's minds. They do in mind, but I'm prejudiced.

Therefore I do not have any of the usual artistic excuses that I've heard about why my book on Max hasn't seen print.

This is my way of trying to get the material into print. This blog will feature a first-draft on my book on the Fleischers. There will not be any illustrations. Those will be reserved for the hard-copy book .

Comments and questions are invited. Agents and publishers, drop me a line at mdobbs@crockerDOTcom.

Here’s how my interest in the Fleischer came about

The innocence of youth

While I was in college (University of Massachusetts, class of 1976) my love for the classic Fleischer cartoons re-asserted itself when I attended a screening of a compilation film released by a company named Crystal Pictures in 1975. The Fleischer Popeyes and Superman cartoons played a prominent role in my childhood memories.

Little had been written about the Fleischers and I decided to undertake a book on them. Ah, the innocence of youth!

I had sent a letter to Dave Fleischer in June of 1976 and in August I found an address for Max’s widow and wrote her how I would like her permission to write a book on her husband and his brother Dave.

Dave replied first saying he was too busy to speak with me about a project as he was preparing a new animated feature based on the myth of Pandora’s Box.

Richard Fleischer’s son, Mark, wrote back on Sept. 5, 1976, giving me a green light and I was elated. Mark suggested that I contact Vera Coleman, his grandfather’s long-time secretary, as his grandmother had not been feeling well.

“She also feels that she doesn’t remember enough about the business and sequence of events to be of much help,” he wrote.

I forwarded an outline that I had assembled based on my knowledge up until that point to Coleman.

However a letter that came to me on March 1, 1977 that at first caught me off guard.

“Dear Mr. Dobbs,
“Your letter to Mrs. Vera Coleman has just been turned over to me. I’m sorry for the delay in answering but I have been in England until just a few days ago and Mrs. Coleman was waiting for my return.

“As you probably realize we receive many requests for the kind of cooperation you are seeking from people interested in writing a book about the Fleischer family. We have never cooperated for several reasons, the main one being in all cases the lack of professional writing ability. A perfect example of this is the Leslie Carbaga book…The unfortunate outcome, however, was that Carbaga went ahead with his book but without the cooperation of the Max Fleischer family, which is ninety percent of the story, the book turned out to be a completely distorted and lopsided affair full of inaccuracies and slanted so as to denigrate my father. It is interesting to note that Carbaga has subsequently realized his error and wishes he could rewrite the book.

“Another reason we have not cooperated thus far has always been the idea that either my sister [Ruth Kneitel] or myself would one day write the story. More and more this seems increasingly remoter and we have just about given up that idea.

“I have read over your material and your outline carefully and I feel that perhaps you are the most qualified person I’ve heard from to take on this assignment. I would be able to make available to you a vast amount of material that has never been seen or utilized in any biographical study. However, I think it would be proper that if a book such as you contemplate writing with out cooperation should be published there should be a profit participation for us.

“Please let me know how and if you wish to proceed.”

It was signed by Max’s son, Richard Fleischer.

Needless to say I was over the moon. It looked as if I was given the green light by a guy whose work I admired – I’m still of the opinion that Richard Fleischer is a very under-rated director – on a dream project.

The nitty gritty

Still there were details to discuss and in a letter dated April 20, 1977, Richard made it clear that the project he would authorize would be a biography of his father and not a book that would present Max and Dave as equals. He also wanted a fifty-fifty spilt on the profits from the project.
I wrote back that my intent was to feature Max and that the split was fine. I was in no position to bargain and again, it was his family’s story, not mine.

On May 10, 1977, Richard wrote back saying he was “much relieved” by the contents of my letter and answered some questions I had posed about the whereabouts about various people who had worked at the studio.
He also sent a “to whom it might concern” letter stating that I was authorized by the Max Fleischer family to write a biography.

I subsequently made an appointment with Ruth Kneitel who lived in New York. She was very gracious and talked about her father and showed me a wide variety of artifacts, which she allowed me to photograph. She also gave me information about Myron Waldman and how I should contact him.

After our meeting, Ruth looked over my outline and made some factual corrections.

I take the plunge

I was working in a department store at the time by day and writing freelance articles at night – a full-time journalism job hadn’t come my way as yet. However I chased down people as best I could for telephone interviews and spoke with animator Grim Natwick in April, 1977. I interviewed composer Sammy Timburg during this early period as well as singer Lanny Ross who provided the singing voice for the prince in Gulliver’s Travels.

I wrote British director Richard Williams about the Fleischer Raggedy Ann short. William has finished his own feature on the classic children’s story and wrote back in a letter dated Jan. 20, 1977:
“When we started ‘Raggedy Ann,’ we bought a print of the Fleischer colour short from 1940 and ran it at our first animation conference with Art Babbitt, Emery Hawkins, Tissa David, John Kimball and Corneilius Cole. We were appalled and although we may not have been altogether successful in getting Raggedy Ann, as we wanted her, I hope to God we did better that they did! I must say I do like a lot of Fleischer’s work but he really missed on Ann. Here’s hoping we don’t.”

I took my slides of Ruth’s memorabilia and put together a presentation that made its debut at the late Phil Seuling’s – the father of all comic book conventions – Tenth Annual Comic Art Convention in July of 1977 in Philadelphia. The reception was excellent and I felt that I was on my way. I organized several screenings of Fleischer films and spoke about my research.

When the chance came to work for a company that provided reader teachers for private schools, I took it, thinking this was a way to be closer to the New York area. I exploited the locations of my three assignments in New York City, Baltimore, and Annapolis in the period of Oct. 1977 through April 1978 as best I could.

During this time I interviewed Popeye’s voice Jack Mercer, long-time Fleischer employee Edith Vernick, animator John “Wally” Walworth, and director Myron Waldman. I went to the Library of Congress, while in Maryland and the Lincoln Center library when in New York.

To a person, everyone was pleased to speak with me. The fact that Richard has given me his blessing opened many doors.

Fifty ways to say “no”

I started sending out my outline and quickly found that publishers in the late 1970s and early ‘80s could care less about Max Fleischer and his role in animation history. And I knew that I needed to do serious interviews with Richard and Ruth.

Ruth replied to my request in April of 1979 and stated that she didn’t give interviews any longer, and although I pleaded with Richard – I still have a Western Union “Mailgram” from the summer of 1979 I sent to him – there was no interview forthcoming from him.

I got the impression that until I got a serious bite from a publisher Richard wasn’t going to give me the time I needed. Although irksome, I rationalized it as a by-product of dealing with a guy who was jetting around the world making movies.

So, I continued on with interviews with people such as Hal Seeger who worked at the studio as a teen to Alden Getz, who played a role in the bitter strike. I also met with animators Shamus Culhane and Joe Oriolo and spoke on the phone with Al Eugster.

And I kept sending out the outline, which I would revise periodically for the next nine years. Interestingly enough, one re-occurring theme in the rejection notices was that editors wanted a book on Popeye and Betty Boop and not on Max.

There were also several false starts from smaller publishing companies that initially accepted the book and then backed out.

The end…or not?

My career had taken an interesting course. After the teaching job, I sold ads for a local daily newspaper and then landed a reporter’s job at another daily. That led to an editor’s job at another daily. I then spent five years on local talk radio as an evening drive time host. A gig as the program supervisor for a historic house museum followed. When the city cut the funding for the job, I was hired as the manager of a new independent first-run theater in our area.

I continued to write freelance articles and columns on my Fleischer research.

Through 1988 I continued my research. I had stopped communicating with Richard as I didn’t see the point unless I had good news. In September of 1988 I learned that Richard was working with Layla Productions on a book. The book packaging company was seeking a writer and I wrote a long letter to Richard asking for the chance to work on the project.

“You certainly have been tenacious about the Max Fleischer book and I certainly commend you for that. But I’m sure you will understand when I tell you that ten years without attracting a publisher doesn’t exactly instill confidence in the future of your project,” he wrote back on Sept, 12, 1988.
Ouch! But he did give me another chance. Lori Stein, president of Layla Productions wrote me on Oct. 13, 1988, that Stanley Handman had given her my letter to Richard and that she was interested in collaborating with me. I set up an appointment to see her in New York.

She had worked on a book on the Warner Brothers cartoons and wanted to do something similar for the Betty Boop cartoons. She had a very impressive mock-up of some laid out pages, but I dropped a bomb that she hadn’t considered. She wanted to do an opulent full-color book and I told her only one Betty Boop cartoon had been in color.

The book never went forward.

My last efforts were an exchange with a publisher in 1989 as well as a meeting with a literary agent who wanted me to write the book in a narrative style. At that time, I was tired of rejection, tired of people asking me when the book was coming out and tired of people wondering who was Max Fleischer.

So, I gave up. I never wrote Richard Fleischer. I’m sure he figured it out.
When my former partner and I bought Animato! in 1992, I though that this would be the vehicle for sharing some of my research. As I said before, the articles I wrote were well received and that was quite gratifying.

When I folded Animation Planet – because of the dwindling ad base and increasingly unfavorable distribution deals – I had planned another lengthy Fleischer piece.

A book on the rise of adult animation I had planned with a writing partner almost got a contract at St. Martin’s in 2000. A change in editors doomed that project. It would have had substantial material on the Fleischer shorts.
So here we are in 2005 and I really want to write this book. I’m the managing editor of a group of weekly newspapers serving over 130,000 readers in the Springfield, MA, area. I write about animation every chance I get – I did a lengthy interview piece with Joe Dante on the Loony Tunes movie and another on Bill Plympton.

But the Fleischer material still calls to me. It needs to be written. It will be written. It won’t be the book I envisioned in 1976, but it will be entertaining and informative.

So keep coming back!

© 2006 by Gordon Michael Dobbs