Again I am going to take another look at one of the most overlooked animation studios of the golden age of Hollywood animation. This is of course the Terrytoons Studio, a studio whose films I have a personal fondness for.
The first film we are going to look at is called Pink Elephants from 1937. This cartoon was directed by George Gordon, who directed a lot of Terrytoons around this time. He would also later work as a director for some of Hanna-Barbera's TV shows, such as Superfriends, and The Smurfs. This is important to bring up because of a writer on this film. This cartoon is written by a man named Joseph Barbera, who spent a very brief time working on Terrytoons. In fact I fail to find another Terrytoon he worked on. Interestingly both Barbera, and Gordon would be working on cartoons for MGM a year later. This clever and creative cartoon is definitely a highlight among Terrytoons of this period, and a good cartoon in it's own right. I do apologize, all I can find of this cartoon is a TV version that was cut for time. I do not know what is missing. Let this serve as a reminder of how important film preservation is, especially to us film buffs.
Next up comes quite an odd 1944 Mighty Mouse cartoon called The Wreck of the Hesperus. In this cartoon Mighty Mouse saves the passengers on that famous ship. This film even uses narration taken from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's famous poem. It was originally thought that the Terrytoons Studio would make quite a few cartoons in the same vein, but Paul Terry (studio founder) decided that audiences would rather see Mighty Mouse fighting a villain, than saving people/mice/whoever from a disaster. This film was directed by Mannie Davis, who was one of the most prolific Terrytoons director, and had worked with Paul Terry on the silent Aesop's Film Fables cartoons, before the Terrytoons Studio was formed. Though he would stay with the Van Beurn Studio (Aesops Film Fables Studio with it's name changed), until 1933 (Terry was fired in 1929), he moved to the Terrytoons studio the same year and stayed there until he retired in 1961. Davis had also worked at the Raul Barr'e Studio (on Mutt and Jeff cartoons) and the Fleshier Studio (on Out of the Inkwell cartoons) as an animator, before any of this. This film is an entertaining little cartoon, that while not a classic has it's own charms.
In 1955 Paul Terry, about to retire, sold the studio to CBS. CBS put UPA animator Gene Deitch in charge. Deitch was not at all a fan of Terrytoons' previous output, and wanted to completely reinvent the studio. He would get rid of all of the main characters including popular ones such as Mighty Mouse, and Heckle and Jeckle, and replace them with new ones. These characters included Sidney the Elephant, Clint Clobber, John Door Matt, and Gaston Le Crayon. The films would also show much more of an apparition for modern art design.The look of the cartoons would be much more stylized. A perfect example of a Terrytoon of this time is our next film Flebus, directed by Ernest Pintoff and Gene Deitch himself. This brilliant little film is much closer to a UPA cartoon than a Terrytoon. In fact it doesn't even resemble an earlier Terrytoon. However the great design work by Pintoff, Allen Swift's great voice work and the brilliant script by Pintoff, makes this a great cartoon, and possibly the best Terrytoon of the Deitch era. So from 1957 enjoy this great cartoon.
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