Cartoon Stars Re-Animated: Felix the Cat.

 

Cartoon Stars Re-Animated title card

There's a famous quote by Walt Disney that goes “I only hope that we never lose sight of one thing-that it was all started by a mouse”.

And that may be true of Disney's huge business empire. However, in cartoons before there was a mouse there was a cat.

The artform of the animated cartoon started before Disney and a lot of others came on the scene. The concept first arose in the teens (uh, the decade runnng from 1910 to 1919. There really isn't a non-awkward term for this decade). Much of it grew out of the world of newspaper cartooning and comic strips. One of the earliest movers and shakers in the animated cartoon world was Winsor McKay, cartoonist of the comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland, and creator of the animated Gertie the Dinosaur. William Randolph Hearst, newspaper magnate and owner of the King Features comic strip syndicate, even started his own animation studio. But as the teens moved into the '20s, we saw some of the old studios go under and new ones arise. It was at this time that we saw the rise of Pat Sullivan Studios.

Pat Sullivan was Australian and had lived a rather checkered past before coming to the U.S. and becoming a newspaper cartoonist. Sullivan was working to turn some of the comic strips he worked on into animated cartoons when he met a young cartoonist named Otto Messmer. Messmer was only learning the basics of cartoon animation when Sullivan met Messmer but as Messmer got better and better, Sullivan gave him more and more responsibility for the cartoons until he stopped drawing them altogether. Though, he continued taking credit for all of Messmer's work.

It was under Messmer's pen that gold was struck in 1919. With the studio being particularly busy, Sullivan prompted Messmer to create a cartoon at home on his free time (Sullivan really isn't beating any “bad boss” allegations, is he?). What Messmer created was a cartoon titled Feline Follies, which starred a black cat that at the time was called Master Tom. Paramount loved it, which netted Pat Sullivan Studios a contract to be part of their Paramount Screen Magazine that aired before Paramount feature films. Moreover, the public seemed to love the little black cat as well. And over subsequent cartoons, the character would be developed further in design and would get a new name.

An early Felix the Cat

He became Felix the Cat. And Felix would go on to be one of the biggest cartoon stars of the 1920s. He also went on to be one of the first highly merchandised cartoon stars in history. Sullivan would license out the character to numerous different parties. Felix toys would be manufactured. A Felix comic strip would be developed (back then, it usually went the other way. A comic strip first and then an animated cartoon) which Messmer worked on for years. Musical acts would write and record songs that mentioned Felix.

Why was Felix so successful. Well, one of the big things was that he had “personality”. A lot of animated cartoons back then were mostly just strings of visual gags and lots of motion for about six minutes. The characters weren't characters yet even in the strictest sense. But “personality animation”, something Walt Disney specialized in and propelled his cartoon empire, wasn't really a thing yet. But people saw the beginnings of it with Felix. One of the big things that hit with people was “the walk”. When Felix met with an obstacle, he would do this specific walk. Head down, hands clasped behind his back, hunched forward and eyes narrowed. It was a thinking walk. Felix had hit a roadblock, was disappointed, but was thinking of a way around it. This was one of the first suggestions that an animated cartoon character had some kind of internal life. (Here's a fan recreation of the Felix walk done by FTF the Toonist).

The surreal gags and animation probably helped too. The cartoons of the 1920s were big on surreal gags. One thing Felix frequently did was detach his tail and transform it into other things like a telescope or a walking stick. He would also sometimes interact with things in the cartoon that weren't supposed to be physical parts of the environment. Like, he'd get surprised and a bunch of question marks would appear above his head, and then he'd climb up onto the question marks. One of my favorite early Felix cartoons is probably Comicalamities, in which Felix interacts with his own animator (which was much more common in 1920s cartoons than you may think).

Before we move on from Felix's original run, I think maybe we should stop and acknowledge that I may have been making all this sound a lot better than it was. Largely, because I've been leaving out elements that were just there as part of a less enlightened era.

Yes, the cartoons were successful. We already acknowledged that Sullivan, though a shrewd businessman, probably wasn't a very good boss. The other thing we need to acknowledge is that Felix and a lot of other 1920s and early 1930s cartoon characters drew elements and mannerisms from a type of show that is very fairly maligned now. That is, minstrel shows and the “pickaninny” blackface stereotypes therein. It's not just Felix, either. There's a lot of it in Mickey Mouse too. Heck, Harman and Ising's character Bosko pretty much took the subtext and made it text. Even the white gloves many cartoon characters wear have roots in costuming used in minstrel shows, despite them having an actual purpose in setting their hands apart from bodies that were often rendered in all black (note: Felix somehow side-stepped the white gloves). The thing is that, back then, it was an easy way of communicating that a character was happy and cheerful and mischevious to an audience largely made up of white people who didn't know how awful they were being.

So now, with that out of the way . . .

Felix the Cat did not survive the transition to sound cartoons. A number of studios hesitated on transitioning to sound and it really hurt them. It hurt Pat Sullivan Studios a fair bit. Mind you, the failure of Pat Sullivan Studios was exacerbated by Sullivan's alcoholism and his failing health after the death of his wife.

Revivals were attempted. The first was by Van Beuren Studio, another studio that definitely existed but would not last a long time. They licensed Felix for three cartoons in their Rainbow Parade series. Those cartoons were Felix the Cat and the Goose that Laidthe Golden Egg, Neptune's Nonsense, and Bold King Cole. The first of these cartoons came about in 1936. To a large extent, these cartoons traded the more surreal elements of 1920s cartoon with fantasticism. Felix found himself fighting pirates to save a magical goose, walking around underwater and meeting King Neptune, and helping a braggart nursery rhyme king from being bedeviled by the ghosts of his ancestors. These cartoons didn't really create a long term revival for Felix. Maybe a better takeaway for them is that cartoon revivals have been attempted for a lot longer than a lot of people think.

In 1953, Official Films purchased the Sullivan-Messmer shorts and gave them new soundtracks, distributing them to home movie and television networks.

In 1958, a new Felix the Cat television series premiered. This one was headed up by Joe Oriolo, who had been Messmer's assistant and taken over the Felix comic strip (he was also one of the creators of Casper the Friendly Ghost). This cartoon, made by Paramount Cartoon Studios and distributed by Trans-Lux Entertainment, saw a much less mischevious Felix get into numerous adventures as a number of villains like the Professor, Rock Bottom and the robotic Master Cylinder try to steal Felix's magic bag of tricks, a carpetbag that can transform and hold anything inside it (the bag of tricks is probably one of Oriolo's most lasting additions to the character). The cartoons were not of the best quality, with severely limited animation and a main character whose personality kind of felt like it was cribbed from Mickey Mouse. Critics and people who remember the earlier Felix the Cat were quick to criticize them as such. None of which mattered, because the cartoons were actually very popular with children at the time.

Title image for 1958 Felix the Cat.

In 1970, Joe Oriolo gained full control of the character. Ownership would later pass to his son Don Oriolo.

In the late 1980s, Don Oriolo teamed with various European animators to create Felix the Cat: The Movie. This movie actually took Felix, his friend Pointdexter, his enemy the Professor and Felix's magic bag to a distant science fantasy world called Oriana to save a princess and stop a dastardly plot by her evil uncle the Duke of Zil. Judging from the trailer, the movie was a big, crazy swing visually. But I can't say more about it because I haven't been able to find a copy to watch. Trust me, I've looked! Anyway, the movie went straight to video and was not a financial success.

Felix the Cat: The Movie poster

In 1994, Felix was brought back to TV again for The Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat. This series tried to combine all the elements from different versions of Felix while doubling down on the surreal imagery from the 1920s cartoons. This was probably seen as a viable option because there were more and more cartoons at the time using more outlandish imagery (think Ren & Stimpy). But this production was troubled and only lasted two seasons. Among other things, word is Don Oriolo kept trying to push the show to be more like the version his father created in the '50s.

A host of characters from The Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat.

Personal note: Of all the different versions of Felix, Twisted Tales is probably my favorite version. With the 1920s cartoons coming in second and the Van Beuren ones third. I just prefer a more mischevious Felix.

Anyway, Baby Felix followed in 2000 for the Japanese market (did I mention that Felix is big in Japan.  You haven't experienced Japanese commercials until Felix the Cat tries to sell you a car). This was a preschool show starring the characters from 1958 show. Then in 2004, there was the direct-to-video Felix the Cat Saves Christmas, again drawing inspiration from the 1958 show.

Baby Felix

And that's basically been it for a while. The earliest Felix cartoons have since moved into the public domain. In a move that's sounding very familiar, the later stuff was bought up by Dreamworks Classic (formerly Classic Media), putting him under the auspices of Universal. Though he is no longer owner, Don Oriolo is still very involved in promoting the character.

I know others may not see it this way because the character is just so old now, but it is a shame that one of the first big cartoon stars never really seemed to find a concrete way forward. A character once seen as having so much personality within his medium is now seen as having almost none (like a certain Mouse we alluded to earlier). On top of that, there's the push and pull between creators who want to have more surreal hijinks and those pushing for simple adventures for kids. It wasn't even the problematic origins of the character mentioned previously (after all, it never hurt Mickey). It was just not deciding on who Felix is in the modern day. At this point, it's easier to find him as a pop culture icon on a t-shirt than as an actual character.

So, what might they be able to do with Felix now?

I don't know. Maybe . . . video games?

There's been an uptick in video games that use very retro cartoon art styles in the last couple of decades. One of the big ones is Cuphead from 2017. There was also a horror game titled Bendy and the Ink Machine from the same year (though I'm not sure I'd like to see a horror version of Felix). And I still see trailers for retro cartoon style video games pop up in my YouTube feed today. There's one specific one with airplanes that keeps popping up as an ad, though I forgot the name of it (probably a sign that the advertising is only half working). On top of that, a rerelease of the Felix the Cat NES and Game Boy games from 1992 and 1993 respectively came out in 2024 from Limited Run. It feels like it's only a matter of time before someone does it with an actual classic cartoon character. And if they can run with the surreal visuals like Cuphead did and not turn it into a riff on the 1958 cartoon, maybe it would have a chance.

Beyond that, I don't think we'll see any big revival of Felix coming soon. He's probably a lot easier to make money on as an image for t-shirts and the like. And I don't see a lot of showrunners lining up to take on a 100+ year old cartoon character.

But still, it's a shame.