FELIX KEPT ON WALKING [438]

Original and current versions of Felix the Cat and "Felix the cat"

Felix the Cat is an animated cartoon character that first appeared in the cartoon “Feline Follies” in 1919. Like a hand-drawn Charlie Chaplin, but with a tail that magically transformed into anything needed in the moment, Felix’s surreal cartoons were a big hit in the 1920s, making him a mascot to celebrities and sports teams, and entering homes in toy form. Losing out to Mickey Mouse by the end of the decade, Felix continued in newspaper comics strips and on television, now carrying a magic bag that changed shape as required. Having not starred in a major film or series in over twenty years, Felix survives as intellectual property owned by DreamWorks Animation since 2014, his image licensed for merchandise in a manner not unlike that of another character not seen on screen in years, Betty Boop. 

“Felix the cat” has been the mascot of Felix cat food since 1989. Originally a manufacturer of dry cat biscuits in Biggleswade, Felix Catfood Ltd was bought by the Quaker Oats Company in 1970, and a relaunched product range included wet food in tins. A new advertisement campaign launched in 1989, including television for the first time, which featured a realistically-drawn black-and-white cat, named for the product and behaving as mischievously as any regular cat. This campaign continues to the present day, surviving the brand’s change in ownership to Spillers, the former makers of Kattomeat, and to Nestlé Purina Healthcare.

Searching “Felix the Cat” on Amazon.co.uk brings up “Felix” ahead of Felix, and while that is an indicator of which one has consistently made more product in the last thirty-five years, it still annoys me – I never got used to one of the UK’s Brexit negotiators being named David Frost, when they were not the same David Frost that interviewed Richard Nixon and presented “Through the Keyhole”.

There is precedence in the UK, also involving cat food and a cartoon cat, of something arriving with the same name, but it resulted in a name change to avoid confusion: Spillers already had a cat food named “Top Cat”, meaning the Hanna-Barbera series was renamed “Boss Cat” on television from 1962. This cat food is no longer produced, so there is no longer any confusion. Later in the 1960s, Marvel Comics were able to introduce their own superhero named “Captain Marvel” in the absence of the original Fawcett Comics character, now largely known as “Shazam” due to new owner DC Comics being legally unable to use their original name to title their books.

With DreamWorks’ copyright for Felix the Cat extending to “prerecorded goods” and “musical instruments, namely, guitars” with licensing of that image from there, there is the space for two Felix-es to exist, and because they exist in industries separate from each other, there should be no issue, apart from my own cognitive dissonance.

What I do find amusing is that, while DreamWorks’ copyright covers the later version of Felix the Cat, with a rounder head, larger eyes, no whiskers, longer legs and shorter body than the 1920s version – this also means that, like the “Steamboat Willie” Mickey Mouse, the original Felix the Cat is in the public domain – the cat food “Felix” that continues to appear in animated ads on television was recently redrawn with larger eyes, a more human-like smile and, like the original Felix, their own song “It’s Great to Be a Cat”, sung by Robbie Williams. However, this will remain contained within the space of an ad break, and away from the original Felix.

A FIGHT FOR LOVE AND GLORY [310]

Warner Bros. 2020 logo redesign by Pentagram

Watching Warner Bros’ latest film “Space Jam: A New Legacy” at the cinema was an interesting experience. With a story based within the company’s computer servers, I needed the cinema-sized screen to catch all the references to the company’s characters from their films and “properties” in the crowd watching the climactic basketball match between LeBron James and the program running the show, “Al-G Rhythm”. 

The film has received negative reviews for the general product placement of, well, Warner Bros. itself: it is strange to see a family film sprayed with characters and locations from far more adult productions, like “Mad Max: Fury Road”, “A Clockwork Orange,” “Game of Thrones,” Pennywise from “It”, and Vanessa Redgrave’s Sister Jeanne des Anges from Ken Russell’s “The Devils” – I sincerely doubt the latter would get as worked up over basketball than what goes on in their own film (really, look it up).

 

As a film fan and student, I believe Warner Bros. is the Hollywood studio, shaping the art form, staying on top of it for a hundred years, and preserving its past, even if through mergers and acquisitions: the new “Space Jam” film features MGM’s “The Wizard of Oz” and Tom & Jerry alongside Hanna-Barbera characters, including The Flintstones, and RKO Radio Pictures’ original King Kong. The breadth and scale of Warner Bros. today is belied by only just mentioning Looney Tunes now, followed by DC Comics, HBO, CNN, and “Friends”. 

 

It is meant to be distasteful to bring business into art, but the history of Warner Bros. is the exception that proves the rule: “The Jazz Singer” is not known as “Warner Bros’ Supreme Triumph” for nothing, not least because the studio proclaimed the film as such upon its release in 1927. Far more than making “talking pictures” viable commercially, through Al Jolson’s effortless use of his established catchphrase “you ain’t heard nothin’ yet,” the notion of what a ALL FILMS made before or since “The Jazz Singer”, and the idea of film itself as a medium, will feature a soundtrack of some kind, whether one is added to a “silent” film, or even when a conscious decision is made to be “silent” for any length of time, for Warner Bros. and Western Electric developed the Vitaphone sound-on-disc system to provide musical accompaniment and sound effects in all cinemas, even those that could not afford its own band or orchestra.

 

For a company only properly incorporated in 1923, and having only built their studios in Sunset Boulevard in 1918, Warner Bros. had enough cash from the box office of “The Jazz Singer” to buy up a brace of music publishers, suddenly a necessary part of film production, and the Stanley theatre chain, which came with a one-third ownership of a far bigger film producer and distributor: the current Warner Bros. studio in Burbank, California was built by First National, whose name continued to be used for some time. These investments helped to pioneer both the musical film genre and the initial use of Technicolor, and to allow a switch to comedy, horror and gangster films when audiences’ tastes changed.

However, the content-rich current state of Warner Bros. is precisely down to the corporate upheavals in Hollywood that took place following the anti-trust lawsuits that separated cinema chains from film producers, the rise of television, and sheer bad luck. Its massive purchase of the Turner Broadcasting System in 1996 reunited Warner Bros. with the pre-1950 films and cartoons it sold in 1956 to support itself at an uncertain time, but this also came with the pre-1986 MGM film library, RKO’s library from “King Jong” to “Citizen Kane”, and all of Hanna-Barbera’s cartoon series too. Ted Turner built up this collection to provide content to his TV networks, from Cartoon Network to TBS and TNT, but he sold on the MGM film company because he overextended himself, despite keeping the rights to their films. Similar divestments by Warner Bros. in previous years included Nickelodeon, MTV and VH1, along with their cable TV network that built these channels, and the computer game company Atari.

 

Watching “Space Jam: A New Legacy” made me think I was watching a film studio writing a love letter to itself, albeit one I’ll happily act as a co-signatory. What I think the scriptwriters could have done, considering the film is mainly set in a virtual reality run by a computer algorithm, is they could have made more of the connection with “The Matrix”, especially with Warner Bros. releasing the fourth film in the series this Christmas.

WHILE STROLLING THROUGH THE PARK ONE DAY [294]

[Above: The Dover Boys at Pimento University, or The Rivals of Roquefort Hall (1942), in the public domain.]

“But hold on, what’s this? It looks like an alert young scout. And that’s just what it is!”

The house style of the Warner Bros. “Merrie Melodies” and “Looney Tunes” cartoons took time to develop. By 1942, the director given the highest budgets, a certain Charles M. “Chuck” Jones, was asked if he could move his cartoons away from the style that had been cemented by Disney, and copied by everyone else. What they got was so different, Jones was nearly fired for it. By the end of the decade, it had changed the industry.

I wanted to start this by concentrating on how batshit crazy “The Dover Boys at Pimento University, or The Rivals of Roquefort Hall” is as a story, how unthinkingly stupid its characters are, and how much of a joy it was to come across it for the first time, but I needed to emphasise from the outset just how important it is in the history of animation – it is like enjoying listening to Jackie Wilson singing “Reet Petite,” then remembering that Berry Gordy, the song’s co-writer, used his royalties from Wilson’s recordings to launch what became Motown Records.

In 1942, American audiences would have got the joke of “The Dover Boys” immediately. It is a satire of “The Rover Boys,” a Boy’s Own-type adventure series set at a military school – one road from it leads to “The Hardy Boys” and “Nancy Drew,” and another to “The Famous Five” and “The Secret Seven.” Names are changed, from Tom, Sam and Dick to Tom, Dick and Larry; their collective girlfriend, Dora Standpipe, was Dora Stanhope; and the most Dickensian name goes to Dan Backslide, formerly Dan Baxter. The Victorian melodrama is played at the expense of the story: we have one-dimensional heroes, a one-dimensional enemy, and a damsel in distress, but from there, the film becomes an onslaught on your senses.

The Dover Boys themselves are introduced on bicycles, all at odd angles, while the narrator refrains from calling them jerks. Dan Backslide is literally green with envy (and probably nicotine), and has no indoor voice: “Confound those Dover Boys! They drive me to drink!” During a game of Hide and Seek, the boys hide across a park, and across the city, and when Backslide sees them, he announces, in a shout that continues to reduce me to laughter with how on the nose the line is, “Dora must be ALONE AND UNPROTECTED!” Even more, when Backslide sees a car, he announces, “a runabout. I’LL STEAL IT! NO-ONE WILL EVER KNOW!” What did I do to deserve the opportunity to laugh so much?!

This is before you even get to the visual gags: all dramatic poses are held in time until we go back to the characters, the Dover Boys punch themselves out in a triangle of fists, missing Dan Backslide, and Dora Standpipe is unnaturally strong, fulfilling her role in shouting “Help!” while throwing Backslide about, until he himself is crying for help – all the while, Dora could either break through the door she pounds on, or just unlock it. It is as if the story was left to replay for years, and now we have come back to it, it has glitched, or degraded, until only bits of it are left.

The animation is much more stylised here – it is more limited, and smear animation is often used between key poses, making for some brilliant freeze frame images. It may also be why, at approaching nine minutes, it is two minutes longer than an average Warner Bros. cartoon without any extra drawing. These techniques are more likely to be found in TV cartoons from Hanna-Barbera, and in cartoons from UPA like “Gerald McBoing-Boing,” and their Mr Magoo series, but it is generally acknowledged that, because Chuck Jones did it in “The Dover Boys,” everyone else could now follow. 

However, for 1942, this may have been too far away from Disney for Warner Bros and producer Leon Schlesinger – they refused to release the cartoon, and Jones was on the verge of being fired, especially when the kind of satire presented could be misconstrued as coming from someone that either didn’t care, or could be taking advantage of their situation by submitting deceptively low-standard work. But because there was a release schedule to keep, and the onset of World War II meant extra talent would be harder to find, everything had to stay where it was. In fact, “The Dover Boys” was one of the last cartoons not to be war-related for a while, as Jones went on to help with the “Private Snafu” shorts for the US army, and all animation companies made war-related cartoons for a few years.

Put simply, just watch “The Dover Boys,” for animation history is remade from here onwards. It was the first time Chuck Jones found one of his own cartoons to be funny, and when you consider what was attached to his name afterwards, that says an awful lot.

AND ALL I HAVE TO DO IS ACT NATURALLY [194]

For the life of me, I cannot remember how I tripped up on this cartoon, but here it is, it exists, and I must now deal with that fact: the Beatles had their own Saturday morning cartoon series in the United States, made from 1965 to 1967, and it looks bloody awful.

The idea for “The Beatles” came from Al Brodax, a TV producer with a track record of developing new programme formats who, in 1960, joined King Features Syndicate, a company which syndicates content to newspapers like columns, puzzles and games, and comic strips. “Popeye” was the first of their strips to get a new series on television, with Brodax overseeing 220 new shorts between 1960 and 1962 – these are the ones where Bluto was renamed “Brutus,” when they thought they didn’t own the character, but actually did. These were followed with a revival of “Krazy Kat,” “Beetle Bailey” and “Snuffy Smith,” but seeing The Beatles perform on “The Ed Sullivan Show” defined the rest of Brodax’s career.

Unfortunately, the animation style of “The Beatles” is mired in the funk of limited animation that affected the reputation of Brodax’s productions of “Popeye” and “Krazy Kat.” The head of animation for the series, George Dunning, had experience in using limited animation to great stylistic effect when working for the famed animation company UPA - they of “Gerald McBoing-Boing” and “Mr. Magoo” - but their modernist ambitions were traded here for a more realist style that, in the face of the glut of Hanna-Barbera cartoons, looks cheap, jerky, and arguably unfinished.

The storylines themselves are, well, not really there: each half-hour show is built out of a number of 5-6 minutes shorts, again much like “Popeye” and “Krazy Kat,” and are animated around a song. The Beatles arrive somewhere, and things happen – John fights a bullfighter to “When I Saw Her Standing There,” while the band are shown where leprechauns keep their gold to “Do You Want to Know a Secret.” Characterisation was also kept simple: John was the squared-jawed leader, Paul his pretty deputy, George is dry and witty (with a slightly Irish accent), and Ringo is as dopey as hell. Brian Epstein even made an appearance in one episode, but he was drawn to look like Al Brodax. 

The Beatles did not provide their voices: Paul Frees, of “Rocky & Bullwinkle,” voiced John and Paul, while the British comedy actor Lance Percival took George and Ringo. The band themselves originally disliked the series, but it appeared to grow on them later. What didn’t help was how the series froze them in time as lovable mop-tops in navy blue suits, especially as their music and style developed incredibly quickly: once reruns of the series had ended in 1969, “Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band,” “The White Album” and “Abbey Road” had been released, and their early work is almost that of a different band. What is more, the network showing the cartoon, ABC, now had their own legally distinguishable version, named “The Monkees.” 

Giving Al Brodax and George Dunning the last film of The Beatles’ contract with United Artists would have been an admission that they simply did not care what was produced – good thing that, without the confines of TV animation, they delivered “Yellow Submarine” instead.