Fleischer Brothers 100th Anniversary Celebration (Tommy José Stathes, Turner Classic Movies, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I spent most of last night watching movies on Turner Classic Movies, starting with a two-hour, two-part tribute to the Fleischer Brothers animation studio billed as a commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the founding of Fleischer Studios in 1921. I had thought this would be a documentary history of the company that, being longer, would go into more depth than Out of the Inkwell: The Fleischer Story, a documentary I’d seen before on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xemq4sNfMf8). Instead it was a pair of compilations of Fleischer cartoons, six from the silent era and six from the sound era, curated by Tommy José Stathes, who has become the largest collector of early animated films. The Fleischer brothers, Max and Dave, started their company in 1921 after Max had worked as a newspaper cartoonist. It was originally named “Inkwell Studios” after the clever gimmick they worked out to open and close the cartoons: their first series character, a relatively shapeless but still recognizably human clown named Ko-Ko, literally emerged out of an inkwell and formed himself out of spilled ink, then dissolved and returned to the inkwell at the end. It’s difficult to evaluate the Fleischers’ work because our expectations of animation have been so conditioned by Walt Disney, who actually started his studio a year later than the Fleischers did (1922) and who set rules for how cartoon films should be made that the Fleischers didn’t conform to. Disney insisted on a high artistic “finish” for his films – even in the early Alice in Cartoonland movies in which a live-action girl interacted with cartoon characters (which, in those early days, they could do only by having both the girl’s scenes and the animation done against plain white backgrounds) – while the Fleischers’ work was deliberately rough.

Disney attempted to plunge you into a complete world; the Fleischers were big on frame-breaking and constantly reminding the audience that this was a cartoon world that interacted with our own. (In this they were following in the footsteps of Winsor McKay, the first important maker of animated films; like Max Fleischer, McKay had been a newspaper cartoonist, and he made his mark in movies with 1914’s Gertie the Dinosaur, a film he would present in person: its famous climax showed the real McKay ostensibly throwing an apple at the screen, but actually palming it, while the animated dinosaur appeared to catch it.) Many of the Fleischer films, especially the silent ones, show Max and Dave Fleischer at work in their studio – Max at the drawing table and Dave working the camera (in later films Max was credited as producer and Dave as director) – with the animated characters running around the studio interacting with them. The first Fleischer short on TCM’s program was The Boxing Kangaroo, made in 1920 for a company called Bray Studios, which judging from its logo – an artist’s palette with two brushes sticking out of the thumb hole – appears to have made only animated films. (Tommy José Stathes wrote a history of the Bray Studios, http://brayanimation.weebly.com/studio-history.html, originally as a term paper in history at Queens College in 2010.) It was called The Boxing Kangaroo. and featured Ko-Ko boxing with the title character, who at first seems clueless about the sport but ultimately delivers Ko-Ko a near-knockout punch, following which the two go at it and, as was customary in Fleischer’s fight scenes, roll themselves up into an undifferentiated ball.

The next items were from Fleischer’s own studio – including Reunion (1922), a supposed family get-together that turns disastrously (but comically) ugly, with Ko-Ko and his relatives fighting over a giant cake; Cartoon Factory (1924, with a not particularly creative soundtrack dubbed in some time in the 1930’s so the film could be reissued with sound), which shows the titular factory at work stamping out toy soldiers that gang up on Ko-Ko; and Vacation (1924), which features the most audacious frame-breaking of any of these movies – it’s supposedly Ko-Ko taking a vacation and ending up on a merry-go-round, but lt also takes place in the Fleischer studio and shows Max Fleischer desperately trying to get Ko-Ko to hold still so brother Dave can take his photo with a large view camera. (One gag they missed that would have made their movie even funnier: when Ko-Ko is seen through the lens of the view camera he’s right-side up. A real view camera inverts the image, and if the Fleischers had correctly shown Ko-Ko through the camera lens upside down it would have been both more accurate and more hilarious.) The next short was It’s the Cat’s (1926), about Ko-Ko’s vaudeville theatre whose performers are dogs and whose audience are cats (including one that appears to be a live-action cat, though it was probably just a still photo), and of course the final gag involves the fabled antagonism between those species.

The last Fleischer cartoon in the silent group was one of their famous sing-a-longs, Come Take a Trip in My Airship (1924), once again with an added soundtrack from the 1930’s (apparently the Fleischers were experimenting with sound cartoons even before Disney was, and I briefly wondered if the sound had actually been a part of the 1924 film – Lee DeForest’s experimental sound system for movies already existed that early – but a closing credit revealed the sound was added in the 1930’s by organist Lee Broydy and a vocal group called the Metropolitan Quartet). The Fleischers apparently originated the gimmick of making a film with song lyrics printed on the screen and instructions to the audience to “follow the bouncing ball” as they sang along. (Obviously in the silent era the music would have had to be provided by the live orchestra, organ, string trio or piano in the theatre, and the musicians would either have to know the song or learn it from the sheet music. One remembers how Erich von Stroheim handled the big dance number in his 1925 silent film of The Merry Widow: just before the dance the sheet music for the score’s famous waltz flashed on the screen to cue the in-theatre musicians that it was time to play it.) The one thing that disappointed me about Come Take a Trip in My Airship was that the Fleischers didn’t show the airship itself; usually in early-1920’s nomenclature an “airship” meant a dirigible as opposed to an airplane (another song from the period, “Come, Josephine, in My Flying Machine,” was almost certainly about an airplane), and it would have been fun to see how they’d have drawn it.

The six sound shorts that followed were somewhat more interesting – at least they’re closer to what we think of as animated films – and the first one, Hurry, Doctor! (1931), was unusual in that it had a commercial sponsor, Texaco. The film is actually co-credited to the Fleischer Studio, Paramount (their distributor) and Texaco, and the plot is about a doctor who’s called out to an emergency case involving a patient named “Lizzie.” Only Lizzie isn’t a person; it’s an old, sagging car that, when its owner tries to start it with its hand crank (to save money, Henry Ford made the Model “T” – nicknamed the “Tin Lizzie” – with a hand crank as late as 1927, while all other gas-powered cars had self-starters), instead of firing up it literally deflates. The car is lying on its back when the doctor arrives, examines it and pours a bottle of Texaco oil down its mechanical throat, miraculously reviving it. Another bit of trivia about Hurry, Doctor!: the background musical score includes Charles Gounod’s “Funeral March for a Marionette” over two decades before Alfred Hitchcock adopted it as the theme music for his Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV show. The rest of the tribute featured two of the most legendary – and popular – characters the Fleischers introduced in the sound era: Betty Boop and Popeye. Betty Boop was a Fleischer original, though she was based on real-life musical star Helen Kane, who sang in a deliberate falsetto that made her sound like a baby, albeit a sexually precocious one. (Kane actually provided the character’s voice in the early Betty Boop cartoons; later a woman named Mae Questel replaced her – and the long-lived Questel continued to make movies into the 1980’s before her death in 1998.)

The Boop movies featured here were Betty Boop’s Crazy Inventions (1933), which shows the Fleischers poaching on Rube Goldberg’s territory (Goldberg was a cartoonist who drew elaborately complicated inventions to accomplish simple tasks; he also worked in movies as a writer on a series of shorts and at least one feature, Soup to Nuts, the 1930 Fox musical that was the first film by the Three Stooges. Goldberg was so popular he got above-the-title billing on Soup to Nuts even though none of the actors did, and the film featured live-action versions of some of his famous cartoon inventions) and Betty Boop and Grampy (1935), in which Our Heroine visits her grandfather for a hot party that features a chase scene set to the jazz classic “Tiger Rag.” (The Fleischers were interested in jazz even during the early 1930’s, when the initial craze for it had passed and the charts were dominated by “sweet” bands that stayed close to the melodies of their songs and played in strict rhythms to make dancing to them easier. Among the live-action jazz musicians they patched into their shorts were Louis Armstrong and Cab Calloway.) Popeye the Sailor Man, who would become the Fleischers’ most popular character, was created by cartoonist E. C. Segar (he was billed on the credits, but by his last name only) as a promotion for an agricultural association of spinach growers who wanted to promote their vegetable. He’s represented here by two early appearances, Let’s Sing with Popeye (1934) – a bouncing-ball sing-along cartoon to the famous Popeye theme song – and a visually dazzling but rather dull 1936 color cartoon called Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor.

The appearance of color in the last two films on this program is a story on its own: in 1932 Walt Disney secretly made a deal with Technicolor for a three-year exclusive on using their new three-strip Technicolor process in animated films. As a result, other cartoon makers that had started shooting films in three-strip Technicolor had either to abandon them, release them in black-ajnd-white or reshoot them in Cinécolor, an inferior competing process. (Among the companies that got caught by Disney’s machinations were the Van Beuren Studios, whose pioneering animator, Ted Eshbaugh, made a 1933 one-reeler loosely based on The Wizard of Oz in which Dorothy was in black-and-white back home in Kansas and turned to color when she got to Oz. A lot of film historians have wasted much time and energy trying to determine who had the idea to have the 1939 classic version of The Wizard of Oz start in black-and-white – actually sepia in the original prints – and turn to color when Dorothy got to Oz. Almost nobody realizes it was actually an obscure cartoonist working on his own version of the story six years earlier!) The final two films on this tribute to the Fleischer Brothers were in color, including a 1935 short called Dancing on the Moon in which the characters are tourists who’ve bought tickets for a one-night excursion to the moon where there’s a ballroom so they can literally dance on the moon.

Not surprisingly, the Fleischers and their writers cheerily ignore the fact that there is no atmosphere on the moon and therefore humans can’t survive on its surface without spacesuits – had they had the ballroom guests descend via an air-locked elevator to a ballroom built inside the moon à la Robert Heinlein’s classic science-fiction novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1965), this film would have been both more scientifically accurate and more imaginative. The plot of Dancing on the Moon features various species of animals who go on the moon ride (they get there on a rocket ship but, as in a lot of the science-fiction movies of the day, the rocket launches sideways instead of straight up), only one male cat accidentally strands his female partner on Earth (the shot of her frantically trying to clutch at the spaceship door to get in at the last minute, only she can’t, was reused in another Paramount release, George Pal’s When Worlds Collide, in 1951), and when the ship returns, instead of a tearful reunion, she attacks him for leaving her behind. The short could have been better if the voice actors singing the title song had had better voices (the gravelly noises coming from the throats of not particularly well designed anthropomorphized animals get wearing after a while), though there’s a great gag of two giraffes twirling their necks around each other and proclaiming how much they enjoy, you guessed it, necking.

Dancing on the Moon was almost certainly shot in Cinécolor – for all the limits of their process, Cinécolor figured out how to photograph blue before Technicolor did, and the blues in this movie are unusually bright and shiny – while Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor (that name is usually spelled “Sinbad” but the edition of the Arabian Nights I had as a child called him “Sindbad” and, since it was originally in the Arabic alphabet, one transliteration is probably as good as the other) was made in 1936, after the Disney monopoly on three-strip ended, and proudly proclaims in the credits that it’s in Technicolor. It’s also not a particularly interesting movie: Sindbad gets turned into a Bluto-style villain and the gags seem old, forced and routine. (I remember seeing one Popeye cartoon called The Two-Alarm Fire from the mid-1930’s that had one of the funniest and most creative gags I’ve ever seen in an animated film: Olive Oyl’s house is being consumed by the titular fire, and Popeye has to rescue her – the gag I’m thinking of is when the two halves of the fire meet across the roof and literally shake hands as they get together.)

The TCM presentation was a celebration of the Fleischers’ legacy and ignores the sad final days of the company: Paramount, their distributor, fronted them money to build a new studio in Florida, where they made their only two feature films, Gulliver’s Travels (1939), a major hit; and Mr. Bug Goes to Town (1941), a major flop. With Fleischer’s shorts – aside from the Popeye films and the cartoons featuring Superman, which they made between 1939 and 1941 (a decade before the first live-action Superman movie, a 1948 serial by Columbia featuring Kirk Alyn as the Man of Steel) – also flopping, the brothers ended up in debt to Paramount, which foreclosed on the Florida studio and took control of the operation. Max and Dave Fleischer might have been able to fight back if they hadn’t been so busy fighting each other – apparently long-running antagonisms between them worsened and even got physical – and the Fleischers left the movie business, though their offspring continued: Max’s son Richard Fleischer became a major director in the 1950’s, 1960’s and 1970’s (even making a version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in 1954 for his dad’s hated rival, Walt Disney), while his grandson Mark has regained ownership of the Fleischer characters (except for Popeye and Superman) and licenses them to merchandisers.