All of you who watch cartoons must be familair with the Fleischer Studio-they produced Popeye, betty boop, and many other cartoon characters, At one point, they rivalled the Disney studio. So why DID Disney go on to fame and fortune, while the Fleischers lapsed into obscurity? Was it poor finances? Anyway, somebody sure is making a LOT of money off these old toons-you still see Might Mouse and betty boop. Also, it appears that the Fleischers had as good animation as disney.
or is there only room for ONE cartoon movie studio?
This recent book details the personal, legal and business horrors that contributed to the downfall of Fleischer Studios. And if I recall correctly, Disney did indeed have a hand in it (though the Fleischer Brothers’ petard had plenty of hoisting to do as well).
I’m not sure. Read Leslie Cabarga’s excellent book The Fleischer Story. Part of the problem may have been that Fleischer never was in Hollywood, where the action was. They started in NYC, then moved down to Florida (prescietly, but prematurely – nobody else was making movies in Florida). Fleischer had hipper cartoons, with jazz greats like Cab Calloway and Louis Armstrong. They had sex, with Betty Boop. They had technical innovation (they had a somewhat Multiplane-like Camera before Disney did). They had innovative plots.
But when Disney folk visited Fleischer’s place, they were inundated with samples and job applications. Disney had, I think, much more business savvy and a better grip on what sold in 1930s America. So he steered clear of Sexy Betty Boop and of the questionable influence of real Jazz music (listen to the lyrics in St. James Infirmary Blues closely, some time). He got his hands on exclusive cartoon rightys to Technicolor for a while, blocking Fleischer from the market.
I really do think a lot of Fleischer stuff as good as or better than Disney’s. Critics say that Gulliver’s Travels isn’t up to Snow White, but I think it’s a great movie, well told. (Every critic’s favorite, Mr. Bug Goes to Town.Hoppity Goes to Town seems a snore-fest to me). The Popeye cartoons and the Betty Boops and the Superman cartoons are great. The Gabby’s and the Caveman cartoons are libveable. A lot of the original one-offs are intriguing. But not everyone saw it that way. Paramount may have had something to do with it, since they became the owners of the cartoons. After Fleischer Studios folded, Paramount kept it going as Famous studios and continued to put out Popeye cartoons (that lacked the gusto of the earlier ones), and moved over to cutesy kids’ cartoons like Caspar the Friendly Ghost and Little Lulu (then Little Audrey, when they decided they didn’t like paying for the character) and Baby Huey. They changed the cartoon logo to as jack-in-the-box. Later Harvey bought up the rights and changed this to their own jack-in-the-box, and started putting out Harvey comics of the characters. But Fleischer was long gone y then.
Disney thrived because they had successful features. Fleischer’s Gulliver’s Travels and Mr. Bug Goes to Town weren’t notable successes. A short cartoon has a limited upside – they were shown for a weeks, maybe two, then forgotten (before TV, of course). A feature could have a longer run, and you were paid a lot more for it. Disney features were big successes from the beginning.
With short subjects, you’re at the mercy of your distributor, too. Disney set up Buena Vista distribution in the 30s, so they owned that, while Fleischer was distributed by Paramount. Thus, Disney was able to keep more money on each film than Fleischer (though Disney was spending a lot more).
Also, Disney was able to branch out to live action, though that was a bit after Fleischer had closed down.
Although Betty Boop was one of the Fleichers’ characters, Mighty Mouse was the product of another semi-obscure animation studio, TerryToons.
RealityChuck pegged it: Disney shifted the focus of the market from shorts to features, and Fleischer didn’t have the story savvy, or the raw ability (Disney aggressively trained their artists), to compete at that level. The move to Florida also took a lot of juice out of the artists and writers; they no longer had the culture of New York to inspire them (the artists used to hang out at the Cotton Club and other hot Harlem nightspots after work) and their work lost a lot of its swing and vigor.
As others have said, Walt Disney was a better businessman. He was willing to take risks and move his company in new directions. Max Fleischer was more conservative and when the business of making animated shorts experienced difficulties his company wasn’t able to survive.
Their respective business skills aside, I wouldn’t be hugely surprised if a significant contributing factor was each studio’s signature character. The fact is that Disney built his empire around an ingratiatingly cute fuzzy animal, whereas Fleischer’s best-known property was a pugnacious, balding merchant mariner with acromegalic dwarfism. When you get right down to it, Popeye is the animated equivalent of a crabby, wiry trailer park manager with blue shins.
True, it seems as though the overtly saucy Betty Boop cartoons should have tipped the scales in Fleischer’s favor, but only up to a certain point. The effective half-life of her flapper antics was probably predestined to end when teenagers started going, “Hey, she sounds an awful lot like my mom when she starts talking about her wild misspent youth— eewwww!!!” When you additionally consider the ongoing presence of Olive Oyl, Fleischer Studios’ overall ‘romantic appeal’ value actually starts dipping into negative numbers.
To sum up:
Disney = ingratiatingly cute fuzzy animals;
Fleischer = weirdly off-putting, deformed humans.
You raise a good point up against CalMeacham. He says Fleischer was innovative – in fact very much so. But innovation isn’t necessarily a strategy. In fact it can distract creative folks from being aware that what they make is product for a market. Disney understood that so well he never let creativity get in the way.
As an aside, the classic Popeye cartoons produced by the Fleischer studios have never been released on DVD, due to legal disputes between Warner Bros., who owns the cartoons, and King Features, who owns the Popeye characters. To express your desire for Warner Bros. to expedite whatever agreements are necessary to clear the way for a Fleischer Popeye DVD, you can contact Warner Home Video here.
Actually, Walt’s brother Roy was the better businessman. It was the combination of the creative and practical that made success. Roy made sure the “risks” that Walt took wouldn’t risk the entire studio.
Actually, I’m one of the ones he quotes who said that Disdney was the better businessman:
That said, Disney wasn’t all business. In Joe Adamson’s book on Tex Avery one of the animators he interviews says that Disney was the bane of business – making expensive experimental films like Fantasia when he had little money to fall back on.
But yo look at the way they set up their own distribution company (after being burned in the past), the outrageous ratwes they charged for theaters to show their films (we used to know the folks who ran our town’s theater), and the way tyhey mass marketed their stuff practically from the beginning, and there’s no doubt that they knew how to control the money resulting from their artistic efforts better than their competitors.
Another thing that hurt Fleischer Studios was when the Production Code was implemented in 1934. In particular, the Code’s restrictions on racy content hit the Betty Boop cartoons–at the time, the studio’s most popular–the hardest. Betty’s skirts were lowered and the surreal craziness of her cartoons all but disappeared thereby reducing interest in the character.
It’s true Disney, then and now, was the General Motors of animation (or, in the words of Terrytoons’ Paul Terry, “Disney is the Tiffany’s of the business; we’re the Woolworth’s.”) Still, during the era of the studio system, there was enough room for animation studios like Warner Brothers (Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd, etc.), MGM (Tom & Jerry, Droopy, etc.), and UPA/Columbia (Mr. Magoo abd Gerald McBoing Boing) to thrive. Of course, once the studio system was dismantled, the animation units all suffered except for Disney which–because it had its own distribution system–had successfully diversified into other areas (full-length cartoon features, live-action films, TV, and theme parks).
Interesting that this particular topic is being debated this week:
Richard was Max’s son, and the director of Disney’s 20,00 Leagues Under the Sea .
Another story I read claimed that when Richard was offered the job, he wouldn’t take it unless his father (Disney’s rival) gave him his blessing. According to the story, Max gave it “heartily”.
Good for you, Max.
Another thing to point out is that during the silent era, the Fleischer studio was arguably more successful than Disney owing to its extremely popular “Song Car-Tunes,” films wherein the audience was invited to “follow the bouncing ball” and sing along to a popular standard played by the theater organist. The best Disney had to offer at the time were the Alice cartoons, a mix of animation and live action directly derived from the Fleischer’s other successful series, Out of the Inkwell.
Excellent point. A good rule of thumb for Betty Boop cartoons – if her butt is covered, the cartoon is lame. It’s pretty amazing how racy some of the pre '34 cartoons are.
That’s also probably the reason why I never saw Betty Boop cartoons shown on local TV kids’ shows while I was growing up.
Disney distributors:
1929-1932: Columbia Pictures
1932-1937: United Artists
1937-1956: RKO Radio Pictures
1956- : Buena Vista
A more likely reason: the Betty Boop cartoons were made in black and white. From the mid-1960s onward, television was loathe to show black and white cartoons when plenty of color cartoon were available.
That may be true but that never stopped the TV stations where I lived from still showing Fleischer’s B/W Popeye cartoons in the early 70’s. Also, Fleischer’s Superman cartoons were in color but, for some reason, I never saw them aired and was unaware of their existence until I read a book about Fleischer in the late 70’s.
Just out of curiosity, does anybody remember seeing Betty Boop cartoons on local TV kid shows while they were growing up?