understandinganimation

Paul Terry & The History of the Terrytoons

2007-10-21T10:37:00.000-07:00

"Disney is the Tiffany's in this buisness, and I am the Woolworths."
Quote by Paul Terry, date unknown

PAUL TERRY AND THE HISTORY OF THE TERRYTOONS

Critics in the field of animation have unfairly considered the Terrytoons to be the most poorly produced cartoons.

According to Steven Worth, director of the ASIFA Animation Archive, Paul Terry was once the acknowledged "Dean of American Animation;” he was one of the earliest pioneers of the business, and his studio remained intact well into the television era. Sad to say, it’s ironic that Terrytoons have become the most misunderstood and least appreciated cartoons today.

“When the first few animation histories were being written in the late 1970s, only a handful of Terrytoons were syndicated on television. They weren't well presented, and the titles in circulation didn't fairly represent the quality and depth of the studio's output. Critics tended to unfairly dismiss Terry as a third-rate studio, because they were comparing the handful of Heckle and Jeckyl and Mighty Mouse cartoons in TV circulation to the entire output of the Disney and Warner Bros studios. While other studios enjoyed popular revivals in the 80s through home video releases, the Terry cartoons remained on the shelf gathering dust. Today, most people only know these cartoons as dim memories from seeing them on TV as a child, or through the short shrift they receive in books and articles on animation history.”

Click the link to go read more about the studio, and download the brilliant ‘Al Falfa’ cartoon, Pink Elephants (1937)

With today’s post, we’ll focus on the early stages of Paul’s lengthy career, and how the studio came to be.

But before we begin, besides using the information I got from “Of Mice and Magic” and “Masters of Animation”, written respectively by Jerry Beck/Leonard Maltin and the latter by John Grant, the biggest of thanks should first go to Milton Knight.

Milt has been studying the studio’s history& artists for years, so he’s fairly knowledgeable on just about the works of Paul Terry and friends. Milt is also a talented cartoonist, so if you were smart enough, you should go and visit his official website, and tell him I’ve sent you. You’ll be thankful that I did.

Also, a big thanks is entitled towards Thad K. of Animation I.D. fame, who had given me the advice of going to Milt for the information that I needed for this post, as well for posting those hysterical Sour Puss/ Gandy Goose clips on his blog, Animation I.D. Thanks again, to both of you guys!

EARLY YEARS AND INSPIRATION

Paul Houlton Terry (pictured left,) native of San Mateo, California, was born on February 19, 1887. During his education in San Francisco, he soon dropped out of high school to take various jobs in the newspaper industry, only to follow in the footsteps of his elder brother, John. Around in 1911, he moved to New York with the ambition of becoming a newspaper cartoonist, but after a brief stint in advertising, his desires had fallen into the profession of an illustrator, soon working at the New York Press.

Terry’s interest in animation didn’t blossom until some of his colleagues from the New York Press invited him to see one of Winsor McCay’s performances of ‘Gertie the Dinosaur.’ This soon changed the direction in his life: he now wanted to become an animator himself, once again following the example of his older brother.

The very first animated film he made, entitled Little Herman, was released in 1915. Paul Terry had once told the story of how he tried to sell his first film: He screened it for Lewis J. Selznick, a producer/distributor, who then offered Terry one dollar per feet. When he (Paul) protested that the film cost him more than a dollar a foot, Selznick replied, "I could pay you more for it if you hadn't put those pictures on it."

Eventually, Terry sold it to Thanhouser for $1.35 a foot. It earned him barely more than the cost of the film it was made on, but with optimism, he then approached Bud Fisher, suggesting that an animated series could be based on the idea of the cartoonist’s Mutt and Jeff comic strips. Sadly, nothing came for their partnership, despite Fisher’s eagerness of the proposal; the idea for a Mutt and Jeff theatrical series was a brewing through Charles Bowers’s mind, so he persuaded Fisher to go with him and Paul Barre for the production of what proved to be an extensive series, done by various studios and hands.

THE WAR YEARS, & THE BIRTH OF A STAR

Terry soon applied to work at John Randolph Bray’s studio. He was put to the task of devising his first series character, Farmer Al Falfa, directing and producing a series of eleven Farmer Al Falfa films. Established in the Aesop’s Fables series, which had originated from a writer named Howard Estabrook. The creator’s credit usually went to Terry, whom immediately recognized the series potential.

Before the end of the year, Terry left Bray, with taking the rights of the character with him.

However, he was quickly drafted for war service in 1917. This passage from John Grant’s book, Masters of Animation, explains what had happened during his stay in the army: “He was soon placed in the department to make medical films that mixed animation and live action. In the process, he learned a great deal about anatomy, although there is no evidence to use in his animation, the drawing of which remained as rudimentary as ever.”

After his time in the Army, along with such talents as Earl Hurd, Frank Moser, and his very own brother, a new studio was quickly established.

This didn’t last long.

John got the opportunity to establish himself as the John Coleman Terry Studio. Employing most of his staff and inheriting many of the studios properties from the Hearst studio that recently closed down. One series was ‘Brining up Father,’ that was based on the strips of George McManus. McManus worked on a number of different short lived comic strips (including Nibsy the Newsboy, Panhandle Pete, Let George Do It and The Newlyweds.) After he’d joined the New York Journal American, he gained great success through the creation of the "Bringing up Father" comic strip. Its popularity lasted, but limped along until its 87-year run came to a close on May 28th, 2000.

AESOP'S FABLES, CUTBACKS

According to John Grant, Paul returned to churning out more Farmer Al Falfa & Aesop films.

“The basic formula for these cartoons, was that an Aesopian –style funny animal fable would be told in the early days the fables were indeed Aesop’s, or mangled versions thereof, but as time went on, The Aesopian well began to run dry – and then, after the telling, there would be a moral supposedly drawn from the story, or at least from Aesop ( often there was just a made up gag-line either by Terry or his animators). It became obvious that the final gag-line was actually more important than the preceding cartoon, and this was a very good thing, for Terry had contracted with the Keith Albee Theater chain of movie theaters – which held a majority holding in the studio he set up especially to cope with the series, Fables Pictures Inc. - to produce a new Aesop’s Fables cartoon each week, a horrific schedule.)”

The series launched on May 13, 1921 with The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg. Only the earliest films were loose adaptations of the actual Fables while later entries usually revolved around cats, mice, and the disgruntled Farmer Al Falfa. Each short concluded with a "moral" that usually had nothing to do with the actual cartoon itself. Terry staffer Mannie Davis once remarked that the morals were even "funnier than the whole picture itself." "The fact that their ambiguous is the thing that made 'em funny," Terry once said.

Morals included "Go around with a chip on your shoulder and someone will knock your block off" or "Marriage is a good institution, but who wants to live in an institution?"

The series proved to be enormously popular with the public during the 1920s, and Walt Disney admitted that his earliest ambitions were to produce cartoons of comparable quality to Paul Terry. With the popularity of Al Jolson's part-talkie The Jazz Singer in 1927, as well as the huge success of the first all-talkie Lights of New York in 1928, producer Amadee J. Van Beuren realized the potential of sound films and urged Terry to add the new innovation to his films. Terry argued that adding sound would only complicate the production process, but ended up doing so anyway (the series would now be renamed Aesop's Sound Fables). Released in October 1928, Dinner Time became the very first cartoon with a synchronized soundtrack ever released to the public. However, the film was overshadowed when Walt Disney, after viewing Dinner Time decided to convert one of his silent Mickey Mouse cartoons into sound. Walt Disney's Steamboat Willie was released a month later and Paul Terry's cartoon was forgotten.
In 1929, Terry quit and John Foster took over the series under the Van Beuren Corporation, formally Fable Studios, Inc. The series then came to a close in 1933.

Much of the animation was reused throughout the series, mostly to ease the pressure on the animators. It’s only likely that Terry could have managed to meet the demand; he’d soon recognized, with the little profit earned in the Little Herman shorts, discovered that the only way of deriving much immediate money from animated shorts was to reduce the whole process to an assembly-line operation. While some of the other studios, Disney first comes to mind, reckoned in the long term that the way to profitability in animation was through the quality of production; Terry opted to take the route of speed. Fables Pictures Inc, later renamed Fables Studio, thus became a sweat shop that mainly attracted inexperienced animators to churn out most of the input of the ‘Fables’ cartoons.

And that’s the end of Part One.

In the next post:

WHY RKO PICTURES SOLD OUT ON THE FABLES STUDIO

PAUL’S FIRST EXPERIMENTS WITH SOUND

WHICH HUMORIST GANDY GOOSE WAS BASED ON (Hint: His distinctive giggly wavering voice, which he created for his "Perfect Fool" character remains much imitated, especially by voice actors of animated cartoons.)

MIGHTY MOUSE WAS ONCE PLANNED TO BE A MUSCA DOMESTICA (house fly for all you Latin haters)

Later, from a cartoonist/ artist who wants to work in the industry,

Bruce

Just a little update for you all..

2007-10-17T00:44:00.000-07:00

Paul Terry and The History of The Terrytoons - 60% done

The History of John Kricfalusi (so far) - 7% done

Ralph Bakshi: The King of Cartoons - Researching

History of Popeye - Unknown

Work is killing me, and I have quite on my plate to accomplish (getting my passport updated is one of them.)

I haven't left you guys yet, so just be patient, O.K.?

From an inspiring cartoonist/ artist

Bruce

The Jungle Book. Disney. I WANNA BE LIKE YOU

2007-10-10T02:38:00.000-07:00

In tribue to the recent release of The Jungle book, as well for the king of swing, Louis Prima.

Enjoy, from an inspiring cartoonist/ artist

Bruce

Happy (Canadian) Thanksgiving

2007-10-10T01:36:00.000-07:00

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

While I might be late for the party, I would just like to say a very Happy Thanksgiving to you all, in Canada or in the States.

For today's update, I'm almost finished with the research for the Terrytoons post, with a lot of help goes to Thad Komorowski & especially Milton Knight, for the information that Milt provided to me about the animators at Terry. Hopefully, the post will be up soon.

In other news, Kevin Langly had posted the 1947 Charles M. Jones cartoon, "A Pest In The House", which will soon be included in the Looney Tunes Golden Collection Vol. 5 later this month. On the same topic, Walt Disney's final film, The Jungle Book had its due: it's the latest in the line of Platinum DVD’s the Walt Disney Company had released so far.

While worth the pick up, this new 40th Anniversary release will include an all-new digital restoration of the film and for the very first time ever, this release will feature the movie in 1.75:1 widescreen aspect ratio (be aware that "Jungle Book" was filmed in 1.37:1 aspect ratio and was cropped for its theatrical screenings. The movie loses a little from top and bottom here in this restored version so think twice before selling off your old copies, which featured the movie in its original full screen ratio).

Here is a screenshot, taken from the 2000 DVD release of the film

Now here is an identical screen cap from the 40th Anniversary of the film. Note that the background has been altered as well.

Don't be too discouraged; the DVD is chocked filled with extras, and two note worthy features on the DVD, is a reflective documentary, entitled The Lure of The Jungle Book - with many of today's biggest names in animation reflect their inspiration, after seeing the film, to pursue their careers in the field of Animation; this features new interviews with today's animation greats, including Brad Bird, Andreas Deja, Sergio Pablo, Eric Goldberg & one of my very own inspirations & an otherwise cool fella Will Finn. Be on the look out for a deleted character that was suppose to be part of the film.

One of my inspirations and one of the many animators that I will love to meet one day, Will Finn.

After all that, take a look at this short segment, that shows the king of swing, Louis Prima, and how he and his band preformed in an audio recording session for the film.

Speaking of Will, he had posted a tribute to Ken Anderson, which dedicates the post to the unforgettable work of Ken Anderson on this unforgettable film. Go and have a look, and tell him I sent ya'.

Later

From an inspiring cartoonist/ artist

Bruce

Halo 3 - Making Of the Believe Diorama

2007-10-08T10:11:00.000-07:00

A hero need not speak. When he is gone, the world will speak for him.

Believe.

A taste of things to come

2007-10-02T02:54:00.000-07:00

Hello, everyone. As of now and so forth, I'm currently writting various posts, and in the upcomming weeks you'll get to see the following, in chronological order:

Paul Terry and The History of the Terrytoons

History of Popeye, Part 3

A size comparative model sheet, from the 1987 Edition of 'The Fleischer Story'

From the Private Collection of Kevin Langley

Ralph Bakshi: The King of Cartoons

"Sweetheart, I'm the biggest ripped-off cartoonist in the history of the world, and that's all I'm going to say." Quote from the man himself

And maybe, if I can find enough information, I'll do a post about this loveable old Buzzard, and how he was one of many that changed the face of the Animation industry.

Later all, from a wannabe cartoonist/ artist

Bruce

Feedback from the ASIFA Hollywood Animation Archive!

2007-09-19T16:25:00.000-07:00

Painting by Ralph Bakshi, date unknown

Just a small update, I was recently mentioned on the ASIFA website, for the feedback that I had sent to Stephen, viva email, and while he edited it for length, it's otherwise worth a look.

Another reason why I'm anticipating my visit to the archive next year.

Later, from a wannabe cartoonist/artist

Bruce

The Cleaners - 1960s Cinema Ad Richard Williams Studio

2007-09-13T06:21:00.000-07:00

Here is a very charming commercial from the 1960's, which was directed, and probably animated, at the Richard Williams studio. Enjoy!

UPDATE:

This copy of the Williams ad was provided and posted by Poptique, and I'm sorry for not mention it the first time around. In moderation for this, along without asking permission to post his video, I decided to take it down. Sorry about my fubar, Poptique!

Ub Iwerks: An almost forgotten legend

2007-09-09T14:08:00.000-07:00

Here is a publicity photograph of Iwerks, circa 1929, with a sketch of his famous co-creation, Mickey Mouse

Evening all. On this post, we will focus on one Legend in animation that never seems to be mentioned in any conversation, and only briefly in the history of animation, at the Disney Studio or otherwise. Thanks for Kevin Langly of Cartoons, Model Sheets & Stuff fame for the suggestion of an Iwerks post. Thanks for the idea, man.

O.k., let's begin

Ubbe Ert Iwwerks, whom was of Dutch descent, was born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1901, and later graduated from Ashland Grammar School in 1914 with few formal skills. In 1916, he dropped out of High school and then spent a year working at the Bank Note Company.

Ub Iwerks’s name is explained by his East Frisian roots — his father, Eert Ubbe Iwwerks, immigrated to the United States in 1869, from the village Uttum, in East Frisia (northwest Germany). Ub's Original last name was Iwwerks, and you can see this on early Alice Shorts that he signed. It is said that he later dropped the second ‘w’ in his last name, but in other sources, Walter encouraged Ub to Americanize his name, and drop a "w". Ub agreed to do so if Walter changed his first name to Walt. Thus, today we have Ub Iwerks and Walt Disney. Incidentally, in modern America and Germany, most of the Iwerks' have since dropped the second "w" as well.

In October of 1919, he was hired as an apprentice commercial artist by the Pesmen-Rubin Agency another apprentice hired around the same time was a young man named Walter Elias Disney, and the two soon became good friends. The job didn’t last long for the two, and within just a few weeks, they were laid off. They had chatted about starting their own business together; the opportunity had come more suddenly than expected, but they seized it nevertheless and, using Walt’s money, opened up a commercial-art studio. The business, however, didn’t prosper, and at the end of January of 1920 Walt was then forced to take a job at the Kansas City Slide Company a few weeks afterward, in March 1920. Later that year the company they had founded, Iwerks-Disney Commercial Artists, filed for bankruptcy.

What Walt saw in Iwerks, even in those earliest days, was aside from their friendship, was his ability to draw with astonishing speed; it was a skill that meant he was tailor-made to be an animator.

During his earlier days, Walter had seen himself as an enthusiastic amateur cartoonist/ animator. During his spare time, with Iwerks help, he produced an animated movie poking fun at the poor road conditions in Kansas City. This was bought by an executive of the Newman Theaters chain, Milton Feld, an it proved enough of a success that Feld commissioned Walt to produce twelve more to be called the Newman Laugh-O-grams, with the pilot screened on March 20, 1921, in the Kansas City Newman theater.

In May of 1922, Walt incorporated Laugh-O-gram Films, and later in the year Iwerks left the Kansas City Film Ad Company, incidentally being the Slide Company was by then called, to join him. When Laugh-O-gram Films folded in 1923, Walt then jumped coast to Los Angeles to be with his Brother Roy, whom suffered from tuberculosis, while Iwerks remained behind, rejoining the Kansas Film Ad Company; doubtless of Walt, as he was not too keen on the notion of pinning his fortunes any further to the brash, young entrepreneur, who had already folded two companies.

Even before leaving Kansas City, Walt had begun working on a new series of shorts, the animated/ live action Alice Comedies. This time, he struck gold for a short while, selling the series to New York Distributor Margaret Winkler. In March of 1924, Walt asked Iwerks to once again to join him in California; the offer was quickly refused, but a month or two later, he accepted the job, which he started work under Walt for 40 dollars per week. For a couple of years, he animated on the long string of Alice Comedies that Disney Studios produced, first for Margaret Winkler and then for her cohort and husband Charles Mintz.

As for what Alice's Wonderland was about, it starts off with Alice entering a cartoon studio (obviously Walt’s) so she can watch cartoons being created. The cartoons then come to life and play around. Alice is amazed by what she sees, and after heading to bed that night, Alice dreams that she is in the cartoon world, being welcomed by all the funny cartoon animals. Alice plays around with them, that is, until danger approaches: a group of lions break free from a cage and chase her. This short helped set the stage for what was to come in the later Alice Comedies, as it established the world as a playful dream; it also introduced the elements which would soon define the series. Julius the Cat, later renamed Mike to match the name of Ike the Mouse which he often appeared with, bears a striking resemblance to Felix the Cat. This wasn't accidental: Charles Mintz, who distributed both the Felix series for Pat Sullivan and the Alice series for Walt Disney, had insisted on this in an attempt to emulate Felix's success. Ike the Mouse, on the other hand, bears a striking resemblance to a early, nude Mickey Mouse. This couple was one of the earlier attempts to create a cat and mouse pair in the animation business.

Black Pete made his first appearance in "Alice Solves the Puzzle", released on February 15, 1925, and was a recurring antagonist in the series. Legend once had it that Clarabelle Cow made her first appearance in 1926's "Alice on the Farm", but this has since been disproven (the cow in the cartoon is white and looks nothing like Clarabelle.) The title character was played by four young actresses at various times during the series' run: the first being Virginia Davis, then Margie Gay, Dawn Evelyn Paris (later known with the stage names of Dawn O'Day and Anne Shirley), and finally, Lois Hardwick. The series had lasted three years in theatres, from 1924 to 1927, with the series ended with "Alice in the Big League", released on August 22, 1927.

Poster for Alice In the Jungle, 1925

Sometime around the end of 1926 or the early days of 1927, Walt and Iwerks together created a new cartoon character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, with the character soon to debut in Poor Papa. It was then delivered to Mintz in New York in April of that year. Mintz and his colleagues were unimpressed with Oswald; they oddly felt the lucky rabbit was too old and fat, as well with poor production values for the sloppiness of the animation. Despite these flaws, the series went ahead, with Oswald redesigned in a more youthful, leaner look. The first cartoon to star Oswald was the September 5, 1927 cartoon, Trolley Troubles, which premiered in the month of June, and it was entirely animated by Iwerks, with assistance by fellow animators Hugh Harman, Les Clark, Friz Freleng, Ben Clopton, Norm Blackburn, and Rollin "Ham" Hamilton. This can be seen as a great accomplishment, especially by today’s standards.

A promotional poster for a Oswlad Cartoon

According to a Wikipedia article on Oswald, quoted the following: “A few of Oswald's adventures dealt with humor related to the procreative abilities of his species, as illustrated in the episode description of Poor Papa: "Oswald gets a visit from the stork... again and again and again. He has to resort to a variety of strategies to stop the continual flow of babies." Trolley Troubles also showed Oswald surrounded by numerous baby rabbits, this time heckling him while on the job. Other cartoons, however, generally placed Oswald in more human-type conditions and situations.”

While the Alice & Oswald series were successful, neither of them had set the house afire, and it wasn’t long before Disney Studios began industriously to churn out a whole string of Oswald films. Around the month of February 1928, Walt was then visiting Charles Mintz, whom issued Walt an ultimaturn: either Walt must agree to a cut in the advance given for each Oswald cartoon or Mitnz would take over the series himself and move it to his own production company, Snappy Comedies. Naturally for Walt, he refused Mintz’s request, and was soon forced to relinquish all claim to the Oswald character.

Who’s my poppa, pop?

In the most common story told, Walt had taken a trip by train back from New York to L.A. He and his wife, Lillian, invented a new series character, Mickey Mouse (Walt initially wanted to name the mouse Mortimer, but Lillian insisted he should have a popular, down-to-earth name rather than a snobby one.)

According to John Grant, he had stated the following: “In the revisionist-history version, which is better supported by extant documentation, is that in a crisis meeting with Roy and Iwerks on Walt’s return from New York, the three of them thrashed out the idea of a mouse star, and that Iwerks then did the artistic rendition. The Occam’s razor version is that one of the three, probably Iwerks, said something like “Look, for Chrisake, all you’ve gotta do is take the ears off, so, and give him a long tail, so, and he’s a mouse, not a rabbit – see? – So those bastards can’t sue us. In the official Disney Version these days, it accepts that Iwerks created the form of Mickey, but maintains that Walt created his personality. This is only slightly disingenuous: Mickey’s character was initially indistinguishable from the silent Oswald’s, but, as Walt explored the potential opened up by the advent of sound cartoons, Mickey did indeed develop a personality of his own, in a large part based on Walt himself, both his natural self and the performances he put on to demonstrate/ tell each new story or story element.

It was Iwerks who had designed the new character, who was at first distinguishable from Oswald only by the Disney Establishment that, while Iwerks may have designed the form of the new character, Walt was responsible for creating Mickey’s personality. Oddly enough, most cartoon stars of the day, including Mickey, didn’t really have much of a personality, and such arguments could continue well into the night. What seems likely is that Walt and Iwerks realized that, with just a few changes, their rabbit star could become a mouse star, allowing him to continue producing his shorts much as before while obeying the letter of his forced agreement with Mintz, and that Iwerks, as his employee, would effect those few changes.”

By the spring of 1928, most of Walt’s animators had thrown the towel. He not only lost control of the Oswald character, and much of his staff were hired and soon moved to work for Mintz, producing more Oswald shorts. Disney asked Ub Iwerks, who stayed on, to start drawing up new character ideas. Iwerks tried sketches of frogs, dogs and cats but none of these appealed to Disney. A female cow and male horse were created at this time by Iwerks, but were also rejected. Incidentally, they would later turn up as Clarabelle Cow and Horace Horsecollar.

Iwerks eventually got inspiration from an old drawing that, in 1925, Hugh Harman drew some sketches of mice around a photograph of Walt Disney. These inspired Ub Iwerks to create a new mouse character for Disney, so the two were soon to work on producing the very first Mickey Mouse short, Plane Crazy, owning a immense deal to the 1927 Oswald short The Ocean Hop (in reality, the basis of Plane Crazy was loosely inspired by Charles Lindbergh’s first solo flight over the Atlantic.) Walt showed the short at a local movie theater, and on the following day, May 16, he then applied for Mickey Mouse to be made a trademark, as well for Plane Crazy to be copyrighted on the 26th of May of that same year. Walt’s team was working on other Mickey shorts, Steamboat Willie primarily, with a primitive sound track with the songs Steamboat Bill and Turkey in the Straw. The third Mickey Cartoon was given an advanced screening at the Colony Theater in New York, on November 18, 1928, with Mickey to set the world by storm. It wasn’t so much as the cartoon itself, but the film had sound, and that the sound was approximately synchronized with the action happening on the screen. In Richard William’s wonderful textbook, ‘The Animators Survival kit,’ the brilliant Ward Kimball, who animated Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio, the jivin’ black crows in Dumbo, and directed and designed the experimental film Toot, Plunk, Whistle and Boom, had told Richard once, “You have no idea of the impact that having these drawings suddenly speak and make noises had on audiences at the time. People went crazy over it.”

Apart from animating Steamboat, Ub was the one who applied a device, called a Cinephone, adapted from a device by Pat Powers RCA’S sound- recording system, as well to use it to synchronize the soundtrack.

Leaving aside all information, Iwerks was probably filled with a sense pride and felt that Mickey was a character he himself, solely created. Again, according to Mr. Grant, “He had animated Plane Crazy almost – if not indeed – entirely by himself at such phenomenal speed (it taken him roughly three weeks to get the cels ready for inking, so it must have been around drawing 600-700 images a day, so if Iwerks had worked a fifteen-hour day and didn’t stop for food or drink, that’s around one drawing every minute and a half. But such feats were not entirely unheard of among the pioneering animators.” Today, the average animator produces 80 to 100 drawings a week for a feature film.

For a short time, Walt had actually paid Iwerks a higher salary than that of himself (in the Wiki article, Walt received at average of $75.00, while Ub’s pay was estimated around $150.00. Even so, Walt was rolling in the dough, and was soon becoming extremely wealthy.)

However, Iwerks and Disney had a falling-out, and their friendship was further damaged when Iwerks accepted a contract with a competitor to leave Disney, and start an animation studio under his own name. More on that later.

A Severed friendship

The musician Carl Stalling, pictured left, who was Disney Studios primary source of scores for the shorts the company was now swiftly producing, had an idea for a new series to be run in tandem with the Mickey Mouse cartoons. Essentially, the notion was to produce musical scores based on the classic tunes of that decade, or adapt older orchestrated period pieces and animate them. Iwerks was ecstatic, and Walt gave the two gentlemen permission to try the idea out. The result was 1929 The Skeleton Dance, being the first entry of the long-running Silly Symphony cartoons. Stalling had started his career as an accompanist for silent films on the piano and theater organ in Independence, Missouri. It was there that he met and befriended a young Walt Disney who was producing animated comedy shorts in the Kansas City region. Stalling composed several early cartoon scores for Walt Disney, including Plane Crazy and Gallopin' Gaucho in 1928, (but not Steamboat Willie, Disney's first released sound short). Early discussions with Disney about whether the animation or the musical score should come first led to Disney creating the "Silly Symphonies" series of cartoons. These cartoons allowed Stalling to create a score which Disney handed to his animators. While there, Stalling pioneered the use of "bar sheets" which allowed the musical rhythms to be sketched out simultaneously with the storyboards for the animation. He left Disney after two years, at the same time as animator Ub Iwerks (again, don’t rush me.)

Finding few outlets in New York, Stalling rejoined Iwerks at his own studio in California, while freelancing for Disney and others. In 1936, when Iwerks was hired by Leon Schlesinger, who was under contract to produce animated shorts for Warner Bros.; Stalling went with him to become a full-time cartoon music composer, with full access to the expansive Warner Bros. catalog and musicians.

He remained with Warner Bros. until his retirement in 1958. The last cartoon he composed was To Itch His Own, a cartoon directed by Chuck Jones; it featured ‘The Worlds Strongest Flea’ , the Mighty Angelo, who needed a break from his profession at the flea circus, so the little critter goes on vacation to the country side, promising that he will return once rested. Angelo decides to take his vacation onto the fir of a shaggy pooch sleeping on a suburban estate. When a cantankerous bulldog disturbs the pooch's- and Angelo's- sleep, Angelo decides to fight the bulldog, with the animal befuddled by the unseen powerhouse that drops bricks on his head, pulls him through a knothole in a fence, and whacks him on his head and backside with a mallet. In the end, Angelo and his vacation home/ new friend had finally found serenity around them, with the flea watching Lassie on his own portable television set.

A caracture of Stalling, date unknown

Nevertheless, Stalling is remembered today for setting music to cartoons that have remained wildly popular to this day, and are often remembered for their musicality. His scores are heard constantly, both in re-runs of classic cartoons, and recycled in new Looney Tunes compilations and features such as the most recent lackluster film, Looney Tunes: Back in Action.

Noted film critic Leonard Maltin, on one of the special segments of the DVD series Looney Tunes Golden Collection, pointed out that listening to the soundtracks of the Warner cartoons was an important part of his musical education; and the use of the full Warner Bros. Orchestra resulted in a richness of sound that is often lacking in today’s modern cartoons. After Carl Stalling retired, he was replaced by Milt Franklyn, who had assisted Stalling as arranger since 1950. Carl Stalling died on November 29, 1972, at the age of 81.

Iwerks had directed the following shorts from 1929 to his leave in the 1930’s, The Skeleton dance being his first, to Arctic Antics being his last:

The Skeleton Dance: Directed by Ub Iwerks, first released on 22 August 1929.

Springtime: Directed by Ub Iwerks, first released on 24 October 1929.

Hell's Bells: Directed by Ub Iwerks, first released on 11 November 1929. Featuring Satan, the Grim Reaper, Cerberus, and various unnamed demons of Hell.

Summer: Directed by Ub Iwerks, first released on 6 January 1930.

Autumn: Directed by Ub Iwerks, first released on 13 February 1930.

Arctic Antics: Directed by Ub Iwerks, first released on 5 June 1930.

In time, Iwerks was beginning to grow restive about working for someone else. John Grant explains: “From his viewpoint, he (Iwerks) was the talent behind Disney Studios, and surely he should be striking out on his own.”

Grant had also comment on how big Walt contributed to Iwerks, and Vise versa: “There was evidently a certain amount of animosity between Walt and Iwerks around the time of the split. Iwerks felt that his contribution to Walt’s success was being not so much underemphasized as written out history, while for his part he’d felt betrayed by the man whom he had regarded as his long-standing friend and whom he was paying the biggest salary he could. Both men were partially right, of course. In his years as an independent producer, Iwerks would frequently make little barbed allusions to this resentment in the form of minor characters, which resembled with astonishing closeness those stalwarts he created for Disney Studios, such as Mickey, Clarabell, and Horace Horsecollar. Walt retaliated by making Iwerks a non-person at Disney Studios, downgrading perceptions of Iwerks’s contribution to the extent that it was as if the man had never been there (This may have been the origin of the long-term Disney policy, still evident today, whereby absolutely everything is claimed to have been Walt’s or someone else’s doing - unless it was a disaster of course.”)

Pat Powers, who was Walt’s distributor at the time offered to set Iwerks up in a studio of his won with a salary double of what Walt was giving him ($300.) Pat then set up Celebrity Pictures, with the films being distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Iwerks was set to work, producing a series of cartoons featuring a new character, Flip the Frog (he was once called Tony the frog, but Iwerks hated the name, so subsequently, the character was renamed Flip.)

What a life!

Flip's debut short was released during the month of August 16th, 1930, entitled Fiddlesticks. Although the short looks to be very much like one of Iwerks' Silly Symphony’s, it attracted public attention by being one of the first full-length two-color Technicolor sound cartoons, and is the only Flip cartoon known to have been processed in color.

Poster for the Flip the Frog cartoon, Fiddlesticks

Animation historians & fans speculate however, some evidence points to the second Flip short, Flying Fists to have been produced in Technicolor as well and some have speculated that the later Techno-Cracked (1933) may have been photographed in Cinecolor. The Cinecolor process was a new two-strip color process came out in 1932 and was considered superior to the two-strip Technicolor process, and Iwerks would go on to make extensive use of this process with his ComiColor Cartoon series.

Screencap of the Flip cartoon, Fiddlesticks

Iwerks studio quickly began accumulating new talent such as animators Fred Kopietz, Irv Spence, Grim Natwick, and Chuck Jones (who worked at the Iwerks studio as a cel-washer before going on to inbetweening and then animating at the Leon Schlesinger studio, said "Iwerks is Screwy spelled backwards.)”

After the first two cartoons, the appearance of Flip the Frog gradually became less frog-like, mostly done under the encouragement of MGM who thought that the series would sell better, if the character was more humanized. Flip's major redesign is attributed to Grim Natwick, whom later on would make a name for himself at the Fleischer Studios with the creation of Betty Boop. Natwick also had a hand to changing Flip's girlfriend, whom in Flip’s earlier films was a cat. Natwick, however, changed that, and soon Flip's new girlfriend, Fifi was now a human who shared some distinct similarities with Betty (even down to her spit curls).

Here is Flip helping a kid in The Milk Man
February 20th, 1932

The frog's personality also began to develop; as the series progressed, Flip became more of a down-and-out, Chaplin-esque character who always found himself in everyday conflicts surrounding the poverty-stricken atmosphere of the Great Depression. Due to the influx of New York City animators to Iwerks' studio, such as Natwick, the shorts became increasingly risqué. In Room Runners (1932), Flip, out of cash and luck, attempts to sneak out of his hotel in order to avoid paying his past-due rent. One of several gags has Flip watching a girl taking a shower through a keyhole in the door. In The Office Boy, released the same year, Flip tries to secure a low-level office job and meets a shapely secretary, and at one point in the cartoon, a mischievous mouse, which Flip tries to catch, scoots up the secretary's skirt (Thad K. had jokingly commented the following about the short: “So. Much. Ass.”)

A very bashful Flip is in need of a job, in The Office Boy July 16th, 1932

In A Chinaman's Chance (1933), Flip and his dog track down the notorious Chinese criminal, Chow Mein. While investigating in a Chinese laundry, Flip stumbles into an opium den, inhales the stuff via opium pipe, and begins hallucinating.
The character eventually wore out his welcome at MGM, with his final short, Soda Squirt, released on October 12, 1933. Flip then became largely forgotten by the public in the coming years, but it wasn’t until the later half of the 20th century, the character would make a small comeback when animation enthusiasts and historians, who began digging up the old Iwerks shorts. Most of the Flip cartoons are now available on DVD, one in particular, on the Cartoons That Time Forgot series. It’s worth the find, as some of Flip’s shorts are simply brilliant.

Here’s Flip’s complete filmography:
Fiddlesticks August 16, 1930. Note that this is the only Flip cartoon to be filmed in Technicolor
Flying Fists September 6, 1930
The Village Barber September 27, 1930
Little Orphan Willie, October 18, 1930
The Cuckoo Murder Case October 18, 1930
Puddle Pranks date unknown
The Village Smithy January 31, 1931
The Soup Song January 31, 1931
Laughing Gas March 14, 1931
Ragtime Romeo May 2, 1931
The New Car July 25, 1931
Movie Mad August 29, 1931
The Village Specialist September 12, 1931
Jail Birds September 26, 1931
Africa Squeaks October 17, 1931
Spooks December 21, 1931
The Milk Man February 20th, 1932
Fire! Fire! March 5, 1932
What A Life! March 26, 1932
Puppy Love April 30, 1932
School Days May 14, 1932
The Bully June 18, 1932
The Office Boy July 16, 1932
Room Runners August 13, 1932
Stormy Seas August 22, 1932
Circus August 27, 1932
The Goal Rush October 3, 1932
The Pony Express October 27, 1932
The Music Lesson October 29, 1932
Nurse Maid November 26, 1932
Funny Face December 24, 1932
Coo Coo the Magician January 21, 1933
Flip’s Lunch Room April 3, 1933
Techno-Cracked May 8, 1933
Bulloney May 30, 1933
A Chinaman’s Chance June 24, 1933
Pale-Face August 12, 1933
Soda Squirt October 12, 1933

Note: This is the end of the line for Flip people. Move along, now.

In "The Room Runners," a policeman chases Flip until his quarry stops and peeks through a keyhole.

Say, did I ever tell ya this one?

After Flip had failed Iwerks then created a new character to replace Flip, an imaginative liar named Willie Whopper. The Whopper series was the second from the Iwerks studio to be produced by Pat Powers and distributed through Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, but it lasted for two years, from September 16, 1933 to September 20th, 1934.

The following is from a Wikipedia article: Willie is a young lad, who tells of his many outlandish adventures, in which most of his tales are then depicted on-screen. His fantastic accounts are in fact, outright lies, or "whoppers", and are usually preceded by his memorable catch-phrase, "Say, did I ever tell ya this one?" The character's first film was Spite Flight (originally titled The Air Race), which Willie tells of how he entered in and won the 1933 National Air Race (even receiving a kiss from Amelia Earhart in the end). Interestingly, the short focuses on Iwerks' own fascination with aviation. One scene even involves a plane crashing into a "Fireworks" stand which, afterwards is reduced in spelling to "I works" (the pronunciation of Iwerks' last name). In Viva Willie out hero journeys further in his imagination to the fictional Wild West, defeating Bandits, Indians and finally getting the gal of his dreams.

Animator Grim Natwick initially designed Willie for Spite Flight and the subsequent Play Ball, the character's first theatrical release. He was, at first, tall and lanky, much more like a boy version of the earlier Flip the Frog. Iwerks wasn't completely satisfied with this design and decided to make the character more "cartoonlike". So, by the series' fourth entry, Stratos-Fear, Willie became roly-poly and more endearing to audiences. Critics too especially went for this new change. Before 1933 was over, Willie also appeared in his first Cinecolor endeavor, Davy Jones' Locker.

1934 was the final production year for the Whopper series. However, some of Willie's best emerged from this particular year. One interesting 1934 entry is The Good Scout, an outrageous short in which Boy Scout Willie manages to help a beautiful girl who has been kidnapped by a big brute in downtown New York City. The bulk of the film's soundtrack is comprised of a jazzy Jelly Roll Morton 78-rpm record and its backgrounds are breathtaking. The final entry in the series was Viva Willie released on September 20, 1934. Other Iwerks staffers on the series included Al Eugster, Norm Blackburn, and Shamus Culhane (who referred to Willie as a "boy Baron von Münchhausen").

Here is Willie’s filmography:

Play Ball September 16, 1933

Spite Flight (The Air Race) October 14, but wasn’t released until 1936

Stratos-Fear November 11

Davy Jones' Locker December 9 This short was shot and Produced in Cinecolor

Hell’s Fire January 6, 1934 This short was ALSO shot and Produced in Cinecolor

Robin Hood, Jr. February 3

Insultin’ the Sultan April 14

Reducing Crème May 19

Rasslin’ Round June 1

Cave Man July 6

Jungle Jitters July 24

The Good Scout September 1st

Viva Willie September 20

In the end, it's all about saving the gal. Screen cap of Insultin' the Sultan

I myself enjoyed the Willie series over the Flip cartoons. That’s not to say that the Flip cartoons are horrible in any form or shape, I love both of them for different reasons. Whereas lack of imagination frequently bedeviled the Flip cartoons, the Willie Whopper cartoons are all about imagination; these take the form of whopping yarns told by the mischievous boy: "Did I ever tell you how I won the national air race?" says Willie at the beginning of "The Air Race." That, and there are a lot of strange, but wonderful, funny looking aliens in Statos-Fear, one of my all time favorites. And isn’t that what a cartoon suppose to be?

See anything you like, fellas? Screen cap from Sinbad The Sailor, a Cinicolor cartoon

I myself enjoyed the Willie series over the Flip cartoons. That’s not to say that the Flip cartoons are horrible in any form or shape, I love both of them for different reasons. Whereas lack of imagination frequently bedeviled the Flip cartoons, the Willie Whopper cartoons are all about imagination; these take the form of whopping yarns told by the mischievous boy: "Did I ever tell you how I won the national air race?" says Willie at the beginning of "The Air Race." That, and there are a lot of strange, but wonderful, funny looking aliens in Statos-Fear, one of my all time favorites. And isn’t that what a cartoon suppose to be?

Sadly, the public didn’t think so, and once Willie was given the boot, Prowers needed another cartoon series for the satiability of the studio’s future, so in 1933, the Comicolor Cartoons were effectively clones of the Silly Symphonies, they had quickly become much more successful than the Flip and Willie shorts before it. With the ComiColor shorts, Celebrity pictures had continued to struggle well into September of 1936, when MGM canceled the series and, with it, all plans for a new series based on Gene Byrnes’s long running newspaper comic strip Reg’lar Fellers (the strip lasted from 1917 to 1949) with the short, which debut in 1936, called Happy Days, being the last of the ComiColor cartoons.

While creating the Willie Whopper series, Iwerks began work on another series--CmiColor Cartoons. While pleasant but bland, these were some of the best looking cartoons produced by Iwerks, but it did contain a few gems: "Humpty Dumpty" begins like a musical with two young lovers--Humpty Dumpty, Jr. and the Easter Egg--singing "Spooning in a Spoon" while a chorus of dancing eggs kick up their legs in the background. Our hero and heroine are menaced by the Bad Egg, who pushes Easter into a pot of boiling water. Humpty rescues her but now she's hardboiled: "Aww, scram," she tells the boy egg. In "Jack Frost," a bear cub runs away from home and meets a scarecrow who provides a scat vocal reminiscent of Cab Calloway. And in "Balloonland," we get a classic bit of fantasy--a world made entirely of balloons is menaced by the Pin Cushion Man, who would even give the Terminator a run for his money; After he weasels his way inside the gates of the squishy city, he starts flinging pins left and right. It wouldn’t be too long before Pin Cushion is counter attacked, by using a strong, sticky cohesive, that he soon falls off the floating island, towards his inevitable doom.
Anyway, elsewhere in 1933, Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising quarreled with Leon Schlesinger, producer of the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, over money – they wanted bigger budgets for the shorts, whereas he was constantly trying to pull the costs down – and the two animation directors had backed their bags, while taking the character, Bosko, with them. After a brief pause, they were welcomed with open arms by MGM, which had previously been thinking of setting up an animation studio and was only to glad to recruit an outside contractor, in the form of Harman-Ising Productions, to accomplish this for them.

The main series Harman & Ising produced for MGM, made in Technicolor at double the budget Schlesinger had been prepared to afford, was Happy Harmonies, conscious imitations of Disney’s Silly Symphonies, with an influence from Warner’s Merrie Melodies. The Happy Harmonies were, at their best serious rivals to the Disney series in terms of animation and general visual appeal. Both men were interested in character animation, and this too is generally strong point of the series.

However, where the shorts generally fall down is in terms of character creation – too many of the characters are in effect the same, despite visual differences – and, even more importantly, story; this latter failing became especially obvious because, as their own producers without any editorial control, Harman and Ising could let their cartoons run on as long as they liked, often exceeding 10 to 11 minutes, while the standard in the industry was 6, 7 or 8 minutes.

The series would occasionally feature Bosko, who originally starred in the Merry Melody short, Stinkin’ in the Bathtub, with a new redesign of the character after a few releases, to a semi-photo realistic black boy from his rubber hose/ ink blot origins. As of now, no official releases of these cartoons are on to VHS or DVD, and it’s unknown to me if they are part of public domain. The overrun in duration had an impact on the series budgets, which likewise tended to overrun. MGM grew impatient with this and in 1937 dispensed with Harman Ising, who determined to do what they perhaps should have done the first place: start their own animation studio!

Not too soon after, they (the bosses at MGM) had installed Fred Quimby, a MGM executive with no knowledge whatsoever with animation, along being a man of unrelenting humorlessness, to head their new studio, and his first act was to lure most of the Harman-Ising staff away from their directors. Among these men were William Hanna, in partnership with Joesph Barbara, in due course will help put MGM’s animation studio in the same league with Warners and Disney, with the Tom and Jerry Cartoons, while elsewhere, a man who went by the name of Fredric ‘Tex’ Bean Avery, a former director at Walter Lantz and later at Warner’s, immediately signed up at MGM.

Reasons for this, goes the following: It was a Bugs Bunny short, 1940’s The Falling Hare, that led to Avery’s downfall at Warner’s, mostly due to that he never got along with Leon Schlesinger; at one point, he laid him off for a couple of months over the arguments about an idea of Avery’s that Schlesinger vetoed (live action animals saying funny things with animated mouths; the series, oddly enough, was eventually produced by Paramount.)

While given the young men and women total freedom to create whatever they please, as long as they keep it on budget & in the span of six minutes & never a second longer; for some reason, he had interrupted Avery while directing the said Bugs’ short. The version of the short that was released ends, quite abruptly and untidily, with Bugs and the George-like dog he had been trickstering, surviving a long fall; when watching this cartoon, their was the most abrupt feeling that it was left unfinished. This is more or less true, because in Avery’s original ending, the two had fallen to their apparent doom (rumor has it, that the 40 feet of the sequence had survived and was saved by Tex, but it hasn’t been proven.)

After Schlesinger and Avery, with the former heavily believing that audiences would cry in tears of pain and wrath if their beloved star was killed, and to Avery’s fury, 40 feet of the short was cut, and relations between the two men swiftly gotten so bad, that Schlesinger had seen Tex as an unnecessary paycheck, so he fired him. Avery’s best years were spent at MGM, creating a slew of memorable animated shorts, and a couple of these characters would become iconic and most familiar to us today (Red Hot Ridding Hood, The Wolf, Spike, and least to forget, Droopy.)

Out on the street, once again

Meanwhile, Iwerks was out of a job, but he was swiftly picked up by Leon Schlesinger of Warners, where, during his brief stay, he directed a couple of Porky Pig Looney Tunes (Porky and Gabby and Porky’s Super Service, both released in 1937 and 38 respectively.) He was then offered a contract with Columbia Pictures to direct their Color Rhapsodies series of shorts. During the next four years he directed 14 shorts for Columbia, with the majority of them featured Scrappy, a cheeky little boy created by Dick Huemer in 1931, along with the studios main stray, Krazy Kat. With a total of fourteen shorts in four years suggests that Iwerks was not exactly over-employed, especially since this is the man that could single handedly animate a short in less than three weeks, maybe even less. Eventually in 1940, he, along with everyone else, had left. In later reflections, when working at Columbia, it was a sweatshop to churn cartoon after cartoon, and was greatly regarded as the pits in the industry. Iwerks then had a brief break in the United Kingdom, and all that was recorded during his tenure their, was working on some extremely obscure, and short lived cartoon series, The Way-Out and the Gran’pop shorts, with the latter had stared a wizened, yet wily old chimpanzee who had been created for a popular series of postcards by the prolific British illustrator Clarence, Lawson Wood. Only three Gran’pop shorts, A Busy Day (1940), Baby Checkers (1940) and Beauty Shoppe (1940), were produced.

Return to Walt, and PROMOTION!

When Iwerks returned to the United States sometime in the mid 40’s, his friendship with Walt had been patched up along the way. He then rejoined the Disney Studios, but not as an animator, but was now employed in the special effects department (this term had yet to gain currency.)

Ub was the technical genius behind the live-action/ animated films The Three Caballeros, Song of the South, So dear to my Heart, Mary Poppins, and Bedknobs and Broomsticks, along with directing the special effects for The live action adaptation of 20, 000 Leagues Under the Sea, which was modified from the book of the same name by Jules Verne, was directed by Richard Fleischer, son of Max from Fleischer studios fame, with a screen play by Earl Felton. Two Oscars: the Technical Achievement Award in 1960 for “the design of an improved optical printer for special effects and matte shots” and a nomination for Special Visual affects for his work on Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, which sadly he didn’t revieve.

He also received the Academy Award of Merit in 1965 for “the conception and perfection of techniques for color traveling matte composite cinematography.” Much earlier, after the flop that was Sleeping Beauty, Wald had needed to find a way to recover the costs, but on the same token, to save money; Iwerks had devised the technique whereby the animators drawings could be Xeroxed (and early version of a photo copier) onto cels rather than painstakingly traced with inks; its first use was on the short Goliath II, then extensively on the feature film One Hundred and One Dalmatians.

Animation Drawing of the Tiger in Goliath II,

from the Private Collection of Will Finn

Iwerks had passed away on July 7, 1971, of a heart attack in his home in Burbank, California, aged 70. He was mostly remembered for his technical achievement, rather than his expertise and ventures as an animator. What I found interesting, in the following paragraphs by John Grant in Masters of Animation:

“Iwerks is certainly not a forgotten figure in the history of Animation, but equally he is not the major figure back when he and Walt, in the late 1920’s, were together forming the cutting edge of this relatively young art form. What went wrong?

Iwerks problem was that he never matured as animator; the early animators were all, initially like kids who have been given a new computer and spend all their time playing video games, because video games are impressive novelty and easy fun. To those animators, it seemed that presenting audiences with comic cavorting of drawn characters on the screen was quite enough to constitute entertainment; the very novelty of seeing such a thing was supposed to enthrall. To egg the pudding, additional amusement was supposedly conveyed through the fact that the characters were, in general, not human beings but animals behaving as humans might; anthropomorphism was, it was assumed, to itself inherently funny. For these reasons, most of the very earliest commercial animation, whether by Disney, the Fleischers, Terry or whomever, is actually pretty dire to the modern audience and, one suspects, was little more palatable to the audiences of the day.
Very soon, however, the best animators began to discover the true potential of animation and moved on from mere comic cuts to all the other things this new medium might be able to do. This is not to day that they abandoned comedy and knocked about farce, but more inventive animators swiftly discovered the form of surreal, reality-bending comedy that the genre had mined ever since. Iwerks was perfectly aware that this capability of the medium existed, and so naturally he incorporated such elements into his work what he seems never to have realized, however that important component of such humor is – every bit as important as the visual surrealism – is the surrealism of the creators mind; Genuine wit, in other words. Either Iwerks lacked it entirely or it never occurred to him that the ingredient was essential – one suspects a bit of both. Either way, the net result is that watching his cartoons, one sees farm animal after farm animal being stretched into improbable forms or flattened by impact after impact, without the distortion of reality ever once really engaging the interest.”

Here are a few Iwerks facts:

After World War Two, much of Iwerks' early animation style would be imitated by legendary Anime artists Osamu Tezuka and Shōtarō Ishinomori.
Iwerks Entertainment, a filmographic company, was founded in 1985 in honor of Ub Iwerks.
The 1986 DC Comics character Dr. Ub'x was named in his honor.
In the The Ren and Stimpy Show episode Superstitious Stimpy, Stimpy is chanting in garbled talk and mentions Ub Iwerks.
In the 1996 The Simpsons episode "The Day the Violence Died," a relationship similar to Iwerks' early relationship with Walt Disney is used as the main plot.

I hope you all enjoyed reading this post.

My favorite Walter Lantz short

2007-08-25T05:37:00.000-07:00

On That Komorowski's blog, Animation I.D., he had posted one of my favorite Walter Lantz shorts, Pixie Picnic, which was originaly released theatrically on May 1st, 1948.

The short, which was designed by Disney vetrein Fred Moore, who was one of the primary artists for the look of the Seven Dwarfs, animated by Fred and Verne Harding (were there any other animators, Thad?) backgrounds by Fred Brunish, and music conducted by Darrell Calker (the short was animated in tune, from the overture of Rossini's 'La Gazza Ladra' or in English as 'The Thieving Magpie'.

It was directed by another Disney Vetrein, Dick Lundy, who would probably best known today as the creator of Donald Duck, and is most notable for directing the Woody Woodpecker & Andy Panda cartoons at Universal, and the Barney Bear cartoons at MGM. Enjoy!