In the ordinary world, success is determined by what a person has accomplished. In the mind of the genius, success is often determined by what he didn't finish. For one genius in particular, the sands of time ran out before his work was complete. In the world of animated cartoons, he and his brothers were innovators, industry changers, pioneers. Their studio gave moviegoers some of the most popular characters ever created.
Most would presume Disney. Not enough would guess Fleischer. The only studio that could possibly hold a candle artistically at all, even close to the Disney guys, were the Fleischer guys.
In the 1920s, Disney was a nobody, and the Fleishers were already a very well-established animation studio. At their best, the Fleishers were everything Disney wasn't. Tough, gritty, urban. Give them your tired, your poor, and your huddled masses, and they spit back side-splitting humor in syncopated time. They were going for what was going to entertain the audience for seven minutes, with song, with humor, and...
That's where they succeeded, and they succeeded very, very well. They were Disney's rival. But faster than a speeding bullet, Fleischer's studio was gone.
The flip side of their comedic coin revealed a mysteriously dark and tragic tale of big business and a family forever divided. It got to the point where they weren't speaking. It's a tragedy that the studio ended when it did, because I think they could have done a lot more.
The Fleischer story is one of triumph and tragedy. The result of genius catching lightning in a bottle. Genius that could not be contained in an inkwell.
The cartoons you love today, even The Simpsons, South Park. If it wasn't for the Fleischer Studio, you wouldn't have these cartoons that we have today. They were the original bad boys of animation. The Fleishers were artists and inventors who revolutionized animation with everything from synchronized sound film to 3D sets.
They held up a mirror made of ink and cells and showed us America as it was. The working man's America, a hopeful America, a hilarious America. Surely their success was rooted in an immigrant's tale which began once upon a time in the 19th century.
My grandfather immigrated to the United States. United States in 1887. He was four years old. And he came from Krakow, which was, I believe, Austria at the time.
Today it's Poland. And his family moved to Brooklyn. Their father, William, was a tailor who was at one time successful.
But the family, after there were business reverses, grew up in abject poverty in the Williamsburg section of New York City, very close to Coney Island. At the time Max was 12 years old, it was clear his talents were more than just more suited for the arts than for the family business. His ability to draw was surpassed only by his sense of show business.
The moment he spotted little S.C. Goldberg was proof he would do anything to put on a good show. He had a bicycle, and she would sit on her porch, and he would ride his bike back and forth trying to get her attention, and one day he did a handstand on the handlebars and fell off, landed, and my grandmother ran to see if he was okay after the fall. and they fell for each other.
And they would be at each other's side for the rest of their lives. Max and Essie made quite a team, as did the rest of the amazing Fleischer brothers, whose collective talents blended perfectly for what would become a family-run business in a brand-new industry. Lou Fleischer was a musician and very much attracted to the arts and towards intellectual pursuits. Max was an artist, trained as a musician, as an artist, but was also deeply interested in engineering.
The oldest brother, Charles, was an inventor and invented a version of the popular Penny Arcade claw machine where you manipulate a claw to come down and pick out a prize. Dave Fleischer was a bit of a huckster, worked at Coney Island when he was in his teens as a clown on one of the amusement rides. The family believed in progress, And we're very much enamored with modernism.
And we're constantly working on new inventions and trying to patent things. And I think it was this love of invention and a love of modern age that really impelled the Fleishers towards animation. Max had seen...
Animated films had read technical articles about animated films, but thought that most of them were awkward and stilted. Animation was in such an early stage that nobody really related looking at real things and the way real things move. and caricaturing it, making it a caricature of life.
Like some of the early animators were trying to animate in sort of a sporadic way. They would have a character hold for a foot and a half and then suddenly pop to another pose and their walks were kind of stiff and crude. They hadn't really studied action very much yet.
My father invented a machine called a rotoscope, which is still in use in every special effects house in the world. And that made a complete change in the look of animation. What he did with the rotoscope was to film live action, project it back frame by frame onto a translucent piece of glass, and put a sheet of drawing paper over it, and draw each image sequentially by using live action as a guide. In the original one, it was Dave wearing a clown costume, which later became Coco the Clown, their first kind of star. Dave was very interested in vaudeville and performing and the clown costume that they used for Coco the Clown was actually a costume that Dave had made for himself.
So he became the on-camera star of the cartoon. He and his brother used the living room. room of Max's house and every night they would work from after their day job, so it would be like from 7 at night, and they'd work until maybe 2, 3 in the morning. While they were working one night, they actually spilled a bottle of...
of indie ink that sort of occurred to them, hey, out of the inkwell, that was a good name, and they used that for the series and eventually for their company. The Fleishers were off and running with their New York-based company Out of the Inkwell Films. They had bridged animation from stiff movement to lifelike mobility in just a few short years, and Coco the Clown was the star that took them there. He came out of the inkwell, literally, onto the paper and then into life. It made Coco a truly animated character.
This was considered remarkable at the time. When his first films were released, they were reviewed in things like Variety and the New York Times, talking about Mr. Fleischer's animated clown and how remarkable the movement was and how lifelike. The clown appeared as a cartoon along with my father, who was live, live action.
And the two played together. and had adventures together. Usually it starts with Max Fleischer at the drawing board.
We're doing something, and Coco comes out of his inkwell. He comes into the live-action world, usually does something, some kind of mischief with Max, and usually causes complete chaos in the real world, in our world. I think that's very endearing, and it sort of says to the audience, here's a little peek behind the scenes, but with a fantastic element to it. It was the idea...
that they knew how to take this notion and make a story out of it and develop a character who had a reason to exist in a live-action world and that's what made it so clever. Coco films delighted post-world war one audiences and pushed the Fleishers to the front of the early animation industry. The inventive mind of Max Fleischer could not rest.
What is not so well known is that the Fleischers were actually the pioneers in making an animated sound cartoon. And they worked with Dr. Lee DeForest, who was actually the inventor of sound on film, recording the sound not on a separate disc that would be played along with the film, as was the case with Al Jolson's The Jazz Singer. But this was sound that was recorded and exposed right onto the side of the film strip.
The big thing that people still remember now, and you still see it in some context, is the bouncing ball. This is for a series they did called The Song Cartoons, which would animate and illustrate the lyric of a popular song, sometimes an old song. And what you would get would be a bouncing ball picking out the lyric so that a theatre audience could sing along with it. And the story goes that the audiences wouldn't let the feature go on until the cartoon had replayed three or four times.
They were ahead of Steamboat Willie. They were ahead of their time. In fact, the Max Fleischer Studio did many technical innovations that were ahead of other studios. They were also, I think, quite awed by the work of Disney.
This was clearly quality work. My grandfather and Walt Disney were intense competitors. It was constant. And my grandfather was this gentle, sweet man, but if you said Walt Disney around him, he would have a fit.
And that was kind of the relationship between the two families and companies. We always thought of the Eastern Studios as being relatively backward and primitive. And I don't know why, but that was just our attitude. See, we were working at Disney, which was a primo, top of the line. Flash was just...
a dump back in New York. Anyhow, it wasn't so, because I got to meet a lot of the Fleischer guys. They were as good as we were.
While Disney staked his claim in California, the Fleischers remained in New York, though they did move out of Max and Essie's apartment to a new home. to the heart of Manhattan's theater district. An East Coast-West Coast animation rivalry was born.
By the 1920s, they had moved into 1600 Broadway, a large building that was also the headquarters of Paramount Studios. And at this point, they probably had 200 or 300 people working for the studio in the early years of the Depression. And these were animators, in-betweeners, inkers, opakers. It was very much a family feeling. I think the first chapter in my PhD dissertation was a family affair.
Max was the producer. He oversaw the running of the studio. Dave was the director, and he oversaw the...
individual making of each film. And here's other brother's, Louis, who is the music director, and there's Joseph. Max usually had the invention ideas.
Joe usually carried them out, and Dave usually used them. His daughter, Ruth, acted in some live action films. Max produced. All of Max's employees looked upon him as Papa Max. There was a very, very cohesive, very family atmosphere.
If you needed a ride and Max Fleish was going to Brooklyn and you live in Brooklyn, give you a ride there. He was a sort of this, Seamus Glehane called him the sort of a Victorian gentleman. Christmas was like a big thing among studio staff because everybody did their own Christmas card and then they exchanged them, hand-colored them.
And Max usually had a Christmas party that was a really big deal thing where a lot of the people made up these crazy variety acts that they put on. It wasn't really like a party for families or anything like that. It was really a party for the studio staff.
In his time there were really only two styles of animation. It was the Fleischer style and the Disney style. Disney shorts, I'm talking only the shorts now, had this kind of Midwest, you know, attitude. A little more sunny, a little more farmy, whereas the main animators from the Fleischer Studios were first-generation Americans or even immigrants who were out of Queens and Brooklyn, the Bronx, and so forth. They were kind of rough and tumble.
And it shows in the cartoons. The cartoons are grittier than the stuff that Disney was doing. All the elements of the Fleischer's environment came together to create their most popular and longest-lasting original character.
They stirred up a part of their streetwise immigrant ethnicity, roaring 20s sensibilities and some uptown jazz, and out popped Betty Boop. One big bundle of high skirts and sexual innuendo. Fleischer vs. Disney had been elevated to Main Street. versus manhattan wholesome versus taboo art versus life mr flasher can you let me see how belly does her stuff yes i'll have her ready for you in just a moment and i'll have a go through some stuff for you having established the trend for sound cartoons in a big way they launched a series called the talk cartoon and they had an ongoing star character called Bimbo who was a dog. And in a 1930 cartoon called Dizzy Dishes, Bimbo meets a rather curvaceous and, in fact, at this point, overweight nightclub singer who turned into Betty Boop.
They had the idea that Betty could be a girlfriend, a doggy girlfriend for Bimbo. And so originally she had a few minor canine features, but this proved not really to be workable, so they were eliminated. And then Betty, as a fully-fledged human star, became the biggest name at the Fleischer studio. She was modeled after Helen Kane, who was at that time a popular Paramount star, who started the Betty Boop, Boop-Boop-A-Doop song, I Want to Be Loved by You, and so forth. And Helen Kane was very talented and very popular in those early 1929, 1930 period.
In a strong sense, Max, from the word go, liked to project himself as this avuncular figure in charge of the operation. She'd actually call him Uncle Max. And I think that Max was entirely happy to project his image as really the face of Fleischer Studios.
Well, so long, everybody. Betty Boop's popularity really grew and grew. There was really no precedent for her on the screen in terms of cartoons.
There were very few female characters, and certainly no female characters with a more realistically drawn body. Betty Boop was a fully rounded character. At the West Coast studios, the tendency was to just take the cartoon star and slap a bow and a skirt on it, and it would be a girl.
The style of the cartoons emerging from the 1920s was pretty much gag-oriented, just one gag after another. I call them just gag string plots where there was no real plot. So the Betty Boop cartoons were kind of an outgrowth of this, and although some of them had a loose plot, most of it was almost like a hanger upon which to just hang gags and funny ideas.
Maybe you could give me that a little imitation from me, no? Okay, Fanny. Of course, Betty was a singer, so they could throw in some popular songs of the day. They had access to all the New York-based musicians who could come in. They could be filmed, they could be rotoscoped into the action, as well as providing the soundtracks.
And that was another big advantage to being in New York. Betty Boop would also introduce a new star to the world, a woman who would be the gold standard of female voice actors for the next 60 years, the incomparable Mae Questel. Close the manual window! Mae Questel, who became the primary voice of Betty Boop, was a mimic. She started out as a little comedian, and so when she won a talent contest, it was a Helen Kane look-alike contest, she won that contest because she did the best Helen Kane.
She really almost became Helen Kane. She took on so many of the similar characteristics. Her acting range was terrific, but it was always fun. That's kind of the hallmark of a Mae Questel performance.
Betty Boop. was always enjoying herself. There's no angst to it or anything.
It's just pure fun. And that's one of the best things about the Fleischer cartoons. They revel in just pure cartoon candy. Three years after Betty Boop's debut, Mae Questel would become an integral part of the Fleischer's signature work. While Disney had taken over the industry lead and received the most critical acclaim, the Fleischer's went back to their bread and butter and brought to the screen their grittiest, most urban character yet, Popeye the Sailor.
Popeye was a very successful character at the time. E.C. Seeger, the artist, had created this strip, and Popeye slowly came to the fore of popularity within the Thimble Theatre comic strip.
What was good about Popeye's idea was a cartoon, a real cartoon character. Therefore, you could animate it or move it easily because you understood what it was. Max Fleischer himself loved the character, and he said to his wife, This is a...
funny little creature. It's a crazy, nutty little character, but I think I can do something with him."So he contacted King Features and they were skeptical. They said, you can't do anything with a lovely character like that. And then Max said, well, yeah, but the funnier he looks, the funnier the cartoon will be. So he had great confidence, sight unseen without even doing a test or anything. But King Features wanted a test. So the first Popeye was actually part of the Betty Boop series. Right off the whale. It was common to try out a character before you give him his own series. And so Popeye jumps on the stage with Betty Boop, imitating her hula dance. And in this cartoon, you had Bluto as well as Olive Oil. So pretty much the whole scene was set for the future of Popeye the Sailor series that was to come. The film's kind of turned over to Popeye in such a way like, you know, this is going to work, not in a shy, coy, ooh, I hope they don't even notice that there's a Popeye character in the film. It was just already working and already had this amazing presence. When Max Fleischer got the rights to Popeye in the early 30s, that was a real coup. And when the first cartoon made its debut, it was a sensation. I'm Popeye the Sailor Man! A very big deal. In fact, that first year, of the Popeye series, I've read several accounts saying that it outpaced Mickey Mouse. That it, in fact, unseated Mickey Mouse from the top rank of most popular cartoon star. So it was a big, big success. Goodbye. I am what I am and that's all what I am. It was a new type of storytelling for animation. What is the type? ...type of story, you get them. Popeye is courting olive oil. Here, tanks! Ludo comes along, and there's a fight between them. And the fight, the violence escalates. Ludo gets the better of him, and then he... He has to get his spinach and then the violence really escalates into a big crescendo and Popeye comes out on top. Now this increased level of story with increasing levels of violence, it was It was this sort of thing which was a staple of silent comedy that Fleischer's for the Popeye cartoons pick up on and is then copied by the Looney Tunes, the Mary Nolides, MGM, Tom and Jerry cartoons, and so forth and so on. They were able to bring a new dimension to the character that I think was not evident. Hey, stupid, who are you waiting at, huh? He gave a whole new life to Popeye because he had to supply Popeye's walk, Popeye's voice. the song on Popeye the Sailor Man, and he gave all of this additional things that the comic strip never had. I come to help you move. Oh, yeah? Yes, please. What do you want from me? They were able to literally give a kind of three-dimensionality, not just in the fact that they were animating Popeye now, but to expand upon Popeye's personality and let us really look into the character of this man. If you think about it, if... Popeye was focus tested. It would do terrible. We've got this one-eyed sailor and a really skinny girl that has limbs like spaghetti, and then there's this big fat guy and they fight through the whole cartoon. And then Popeye eats some spinach and beats him up and the girl ends up leaving both of them. That would focus test terrible. You knew that you were in Fleischer World when you saw one of their cartoons because the Fleischer cartoons were not as polished as the other ones. as Disney, and I think that's what gave them a lot of their charm. Popeye is kind of a rough, down-at-the-heels character, and he lives in a rough, down-at-the-heels sort of world. And I think that was a reflection of Fleischer in their New York days, because the cartoons had a very urban feeling for that time. You really got the idea that Popeye could be walking around the Bowery someplace, and that the Fleischer artists were finding the humor in those kind of down-low situations. And I think whereas Walt, in his career, crew were concentrating on how to give the illusion of life and make things look more realistic. Bleicher was concentrating more on experimentation and design, crazy gags, funny story setups, and character personality, which comes through all through the Popeye series. On a technical level, these ran covering the finest cartoons ever made. They had a top flight team of animators, and new guys were always coming up. They'd be trained through the ranks of flyers. It was a remarkable system that encouraged new talent all the way through. They used to have these women who would check the animation, and if they thought that one drawing was a little too far apart from another drawing, they'd throw in an in-between. So it's one reason that this stuff kind of goes like this in a Fleischer cartoon. There's a scene in Customers Wanted where it's a clip of Bluto, you know, putting two barrels on his shoulders and sticking his feet through ropes on boxes and, you know, sidling his way out the door. And that's got the most weight in it I've ever seen in an animation sequence. On the mechanical level, you had the Fleischer brothers themselves who were inventors as much as filmmakers. So you'd have all the new innovations, you'd have a good technical man like Joe Fleischer who could have something built. They created a stereo optical process on the backgrounds, and they would actually have the animation shot on a piece of vertical glass like this. And behind the glass was an entire city that they had built on a tabletop just to pan behind Popeye as he's walking. There's a great cartoon where Popeye is taking Sweepy to the zoo, and the zoo is completely three-dimensional. Behind them, these shots would be pans. You couldn't actually travel through the city, but any time that there was a need for a good three-dimensional pan, they would use it. Like the opening of the cartoon, I Never Changes My Altitude, is this great 3D shot of the airport, which finally gets to Olive Oil's diner. And Popeye sitting there reading his Dear John letter, but that opening shot of the airport is unbelievable. It just looks fantastic. And it's really just there to say, yep, you're in an airport. The effect was astonishing. Even in the black and white shorts and even in bad prints of the black and white shorts, it looked marvelous. I remember seeing a terrible print of I Ski, Love Ski, You Ski, but even in that, Popeye... Walking through the snow with all the alpine-type trees just blows your mind. We work a lot with 2D flatness, and in a way we sense that Popeye has that 2D-ness, that flatness about it, but at the same time it's so volumetric, it's so beautiful. It's shape-based design, but the shapes are volumetric. Right, exactly. So it's like seeing the best of both worlds happen. Watch it out, Popeye! Popeye was a major, major character, and that's all any Hollywood studio can ask of its cartoon studio, is to give us successful cartoons with a major character. Warner Brothers couldn't really do it until the 1940s with... A lot of other studios took their time. There were some studios like Columbia Pictures that never really had a starring character. Popeye was huge. So huge that by the mid-30s, the Fleischers and Paramount... decided to put Popeye into his own special color film that was sold to theaters as a feature, even though it was really only like 18 minutes long. But Popeye the Sailor meets Sinbad the Sailor is advertised and is billed on screen as a Popeye color feature. And that was quite a big deal. And they beat Disney to the punch. Popeye meets Sinbad was nominated for an Academy Award. But it was Disney who walked away with the Oscar that night. Not only that, but this groundbreaking feature would in short time be overshadowed by Disney's Snow White. But by that point, Disney would be the last of the Fleischer's problems. Only one thing could derail the family-run shop, and that was from within. As the 30s progressed, there became a lot of dissatisfaction, especially among the in-betweeners and the inkers, those in the lower echelons of the animation work. This eventually culminated at the Fleischer Studios in the first animation studio strike, and that happened in 1937. One held a sign that said, we can't get much spinach on salaries as low as $14 a week. That was a very bitter strike, and it lasted five and a half months. And this split the studio. The family feeling that Max had nurtured was gone. He looked for an option, one where he could make feature-length animated films, and found it in Miami, enticed by no labor problems, cheap land, and a state-of-the-art studio to be financed by Paramount Studios, who had been distributing the Fleischer films since the 1920s. Fleischer's proposed to Paramount that they build them a brand-new studio, a huge new facility, a state-of-the-art facility to compete with Disney. Max had a summer house in Miami. And Miami was a great place to live. Miami in those days was so different from it is now. There's hardly anything there. You know, there was just a few shacks and a few palm trees and a lot of beach, and that was about it. Nobody had even thought of developing the area very much yet. It was an easy decision, but in retrospect, the new financial partnership with Paramount was a gigantic mistake. It was the beginning of the end of Fleischer Studios. But in the short run, it was a new lease on life. For many of the New York staff, it was an adventure. Their first time out of New York. Facilities down there were wonderful. It was the first real building that was built for animation. It was air-conditioned, no longer in these sort of cramped facilities. It was just wonderful. Everybody had overtime, as much overtime work as they wanted to. And my father and my mother... My mother moved down there and my mother didn't have to work. She was a nurse and we were able to rent a seven-room house down there. And we had a maid. One animator went to the vice president of the bank. He was going to buy a house down there. And he said, How much do you make a week? I think it was like $60 a week. And the banker went, That's more than I make. They invited actually everybody in their studio. in New York. Anyone who wanted to come down, they said, come on, we'll pay your way, we'll give you some extra dough, we'll help you find a house. And that's what they did. The animators who did it, which was most of them, when they were interviewed years later, said that whole adventure in Miami from 1938 through roughly 1942 was the best years of their lives. They lived like kings. They were celebrities down there. They brought Hollywood to a small town. They all... spent a lot of time together. They played together. They partied together. My parents talked on and off about what a crazy bunch of people it was and what a great time they had down there. So there was a lot of gambling that went on and there was horse racing. and dog racing and they were all into it. Maybe it was too good a time. Meanwhile, production was at a high point. New projects were on the horizon and Popoy was in full swing and the look of the cartoons began to change. Instead of being grim, grey, gritty New York looking, suddenly they were much brighter and cleaner. Popeye and Olive were walking through streets not filled with garbage and things like that. But they just had a brighter, sunnier look because that's where they were being made. And the style altered too in subtle ways because suddenly you had an influx of new people who were locals. They had a lot of transplanted New Yorkers, but Max had also come to an arrangement with the local art school. ...to institute a training program with a guarantee of jobs at the studio once they graduated. So, from about 200 people, they moved up to 700 with the addition of all the Miami newcomers. Popeye finally lives in a little house on a country road, like with a lot of land around him. Very different from the New York stuff. And most of that cartoon is putting the jeep out for the night, you know, like putting a cat out. It's a lot simpler situation. And it's less heroic. I don't think... there's even any spinach in that cartoon. Walt Disney had embarked upon his first feature, Snow White, and it began to occur to the Fleishers that they should be doing the same thing. Snow White was a huge financial success. It was the Titanic, the Star Wars of its day. And so Paramount wouldn't mind having one of those. So they had the Fleishers do Gulliver's Travels. It was Max's choice. It was one of his favorite stories. He'd always loved it. Ever since he was a kid. And actually, I think he had in mind to do the whole book, which is like, Gulliver goes to many different lands, even visiting talking horses and things like that. Well, I guess talking horses were a little bit outside the range of the Fleischer animators yet. They hadn't even learned to do realistic people too well yet. So they settled on the little... distribution part of it, which gave them the big and little contrast, which works very well cinematically. They made it in less than a third the time that Snow White took. Snow White took four years, and they spent a little bit less, because Snow White took about a million and a half to make. and they only spent about one million on Gulliver. In behalf of the people of Lefkoskou and Lilliput, with eternal gratitude and love in our hearts, we christen thee Gulliver! The complaints basically were about the story and the critical reviews afterwards. It wasn't so much about the animation, and in fact, in a way, Gulliver's Travels is more ambitious than Snow White. There's crowd scenes and things that Snow White didn't have. The problem was that... The story probably wasn't quite as engaging than the Snow White story, but it was a pretty good movie, and it was a top ten grosser of that year, and it was a success. The film made money. At what cost? Fleischer's made the mistake of trying to imitate the Disneys, and that's when the Fleischer studio really stumbled. When they were in their own element doing cartoons about New York, about the environment that they were living in, and the sorts of characters that they lived around. It was something real. When they tried to imitate Disney, it was just a pale cutout compared to the vitality of the cartoons of the early 30s. But that didn't stop them from trying again, following up Gulliver with Mr. Bug Goes to Town, a Capra-esque tale about a town of insects in New York City and their struggle against humans who begin to trample through their neighborhood. It's us, boss! Swat the fly! And smack the mosquito. It was a terrific film, sabotaged by terrible timing. Mr. Bug has a lot of vitality and energy. It's brighter and just lighter in feel. It's just a really pleasant story, a wonderful story. To me, Mr. Bug kind of resembles a lot of the modern animated cartoons in the feeling. Mr. Bug Goes to Town, I think, is a very good feature, and it balances cartooniness against the reality and the live action. human beings really well and I think the Fleishers could have done a lot more in the feature arena had they been given the chance. Mr. Bug sadly was released on December 7 1941 the eve of Pearl Harbor and nobody was in the mood to see a cartoon about bugs by that point. Even worse because of the war the European market was closed which made it nearly impossible for an animated feature film to turn a The executives of Paramount didn't want to put the money into promoting it when they knew the best they were going to do was break even. So they kind of shuffled it off on a double bill. Hardly anybody saw it. People who did see it were amazed by it. And it is only over the years that it's become like a cult film. It was especially bad timing for the film. For the Fleishers who were already in debt to Paramount Studios. But about that time, from out of the sky, America's newest superheroes swooped down and came to the rescue. Superman was a hot property. Superman was the latest thing. Paramount Pictures, one of the biggest A studios, wanted to buy the rights to Superman. And they outbid the other comers and gave it, handed it to the Flashers and said, you've got to make this. We're doing this. We want to release Superman. cartoons. And what a crazy thing, because no one had done dramatic animation, serious cartoons, cartoons that weren't comedies. Their best guys were brought in to do the Superman cartoons, and they were exceptional because there was nothing like them in the history of cartoons up to this point. This looks like a job for Superman. It was really, really ideal that the Fleishers do this. Their New York sensibility, although they now had been in Miami, was perfect for the... Metropolis set. So, you know, a match made in heaven. They created new ways to tell the stories. Film noir in cartoons is really what they did. I think it was before that expression was coined, but they were doing it in the Superman, color Superman cartoons. Again, a whole new look. They were spending a fortune. They were learning the stuff and creating the stuff on the fly with no idea how to do it. And it was the most impressive stuff. In fact, in a lot of ways, it rivals in the. or surpasses what Disney was doing. Max Fleischer's Superman cartoons look like the Siegel and Schuster comic books come to life. And of course the first Superman cartoon was nominated for an Academy Award, and I think it deserved to win, actually. It's amazing how much plot the Fleischer people were able to get into a seven-minute cartoon. What they managed to do was to set up the problem, make the problem worse, make the problem even worse, where a rational person would say, well, he's never going to win, there's no way, he's been pushed all the way back down the field. and he comes from nowhere. He just manages to pull it out of left field and save the day. Fleischer Studios produced 13 Superman cartoons, but in the end, the Man of Steel could not save the studio it needed it most. The problem at the studio had nothing to do with what was on screen. They were probably making their best cartoons as we entered the decade of the 1940s. They were on a roll, and then Paramount took the studio away from them. Well, that's the way it looks to us. from hindsight, but the reality was that things were slipping away behind the scenes. There was trouble between the brothers. Some believe it was a professional dispute over who would write the music for the feature films. Others say it was a personal matter. Whatever the reason, it caused a split that was deep and permanent. It got to the point where they weren't speaking, and if they met in the hallway, they would look at the wall. It was that icy. And they would only communicate by written memo, back and forth. It's always been kind of a mystery to me, what really created that rift and why it was so strong. I've always considered it a real tragedy that those two brothers, who were obviously so close, came to a parting and never spoke to each other again. Paramount had decided that if we can't get the two partners, Max and Dave, to work together, we might as well pull this in. And I think it was a degree of opportunism where they said, hey, you know, we'll own everything if we can oust these guys. In a recent book by Richard Fleischer, Max's Son, talks about how Max was handed a contract. Pretty much it was demanded that he sign it, releasing his ownership of the Fleischer Studios to Paramount. Dave left the studio in early 1942 before his contract was up. He accepted a job with Columbia Pictures in Hollywood to run their cartoon studio and left. And that was really the end right there. Everything was transferred from Fleischer Studios, all their cartoons, their copyrights, everything they possessed at the time was taken over by Paramount. Eventually, the Fleischer Studios was to become Famous Studios, and Lou Fleischer remembers standing online at a Miami unemployment office feeling somewhat conspicuous for being a Fleischer, and now relegated to the unemployment line. Max and Dave went on to new ventures, but never came close to matching their previous success. Dave went out to Hollywood. He was involved with running the Columbia Pictures Screen Gems Studio for about a year, maybe two, and ended up at Universal Pictures. And Dave actually just worked for Universal Pictures in their technical department for years and years and years, doing everything from special effects, dubbing foreign films, anything they needed done. Max taught. He wrote a couple of books, some fiction novels. He ended up working for the Jam... ...M Handy Company in Detroit. That was a very big maker of industrial films. Industrial films are educational films, commercial films for certain clients. But Max could never let go of the premature ending of his studio. Finally, nearly 15 years after Paramount closed down Fleischer Studios, Max and Dave filed separate lawsuits. As his cartoons were sold to television syndicators, Max's credits were removed and replaced by the new owner's name. Max sued to have his credits restored. It speaks a lot for Max. He never asked for any money damages. This was really kind of a thing about his feeling that he deserved the recognition that went along with having your credit on the program. The lawsuit looked promising. The time proved to be an opponent they could not defeat. The end result was that the court dismissed both actions without getting to the merits of the case on the basis of statute of limitations. The defense was that you waited just too long for this and we're not going to give you any relief. Max was out of legal options and out of money as well. Sadly, Max never did reconcile with his brother Dave, but he did finally make peace with an enemy he had never met. With the help of Max's son Richard, who directed... 20,000 leagues under the sea for Disney. Walt Disney himself helped break the ice. Walt said, I'd like you to do something. I'd like you to extend an invitation to Max to come to my studio, and I'd like to host a reunion for Max with his animators, most of whom are now working for me. So my father extended that invitation to Max, and Max accepted. And they came to me, They came out and they had the reunion at Walt Disney Studios. We have a photograph and everyone sitting there with Walt Disney and my grandfather and my father and all the animators with all of their signatures on this photograph. And the two men who had... been such bitter competitors for so long reconciled and became friends. And when Walt came to New York, he'd pay a visit on my grandfather. And it's the type of Hollywood story that you never hear. The really good ones where people of great character, as my grandfather and Walt Disney were, ended up seeing that and acknowledging that in each other and appreciating that in each other. Throughout his life, Max Fleischer danced the precarious dance with time. And in the end, time was the one thing this genius could not conquer. Max did not dwell on his incredible accomplishments. Rather, he was a genius. He waged a long battle with the one thing he could not quite master. I'll tell you what his dream creation was that he never achieved. And that was a perpetual motion clock. needed to be wound he invented maybe 50 of them none of which actually worked they were kind of but they always needed something to drive them I find that the most endearing thing in the world my grandfather who was this great genius a great inventor set his sights on something that still no one has figured out how to do but this was his his invention obsession and I think it's a very charming one time ran out on max before he could produce his perpetual clock, just as it did before he could complete his work on Popeye and more feature-length animated films. And sadly, the clock ran out one last time on Max, just before he conceived the multi-million dollar licensing success of his beloved Betty Boop, a deal that started at only $500. 1972 was the year I made that first $500 contract, and I had come out... to California to let him know that we were doing this. He was in the motion picture home at the time and not well at all, and Essie was with him. And when I got off the plane and I made my first call to this very house to ask for, to talk to Dick, I found out that his father had passed away. And the time was just as I landed at LAX. Time may have been cruel to Max Fleischer, but it will certainly remember him and his brothers kindly. The work of the Fleischer Studios only spanned about 25 years, but the power of those films and the Fleischer legacy will always be there. be felt forever. It doesn't matter if Max and Dave are completely forgotten, because what they did is. It exists, and that's the bedrock that the industry's built on, and it will always be there. You ain't never seen none better! You ain't never seen none better! People remember Popeye and Olive Oil and Bluto. You know, they're part of the... The fabric of them growing up and they're universally beloved characters and they're still being watched today. The characters have a life of their own. So they've basically created icons that people still love. And I think that's really the best way of understanding their legacy. When the studio was reorganized by Paramount, with virtually the same staff that had been there all along, it became... It became clear what was missing. What was missing was Max and Dave. Fleischer. Our generation grew up with them, and now, unconsciously, we're constantly referencing them. And we hold them to a really high standard. Yeah. You think Warner Brothers, Disney, and then Fleischer will always be, like, third place. But I don't think any studio radiated the pure joy of animation better than the Fleischer studios. The most popular films we have are the Fleischer Popeye cartoons. A lot of the young animators are studying these and try to figure out what makes them tick. And I'm hoping that the next generation of animators will go back and find the fun of cartooning that we seem to have lost in animation today. I'll save her, you Popeye freak! Papa Max, his dreams were unlimited. He would be delighted to see the extension of the joy that his creations have brought to the hearts of... of so many people in the world. And that's what it's really all about. I