Ninety Years—Nine Lives

As late as the 1930s, J. R. Bray's Colonel Heeza Liar was remembered as "the Mickey Mouse of his day," but the first true cartoon superstar was Felix the Cat. I've covered this character's great appeal before, but there's never enough Felix for me—so I'm taking the occasion of his big 90th anniversary to offer some specials for your reading and viewing pleasure.

Let's start with animation. While a picture isn't always worth a thousand words, classic Felix creator/director Otto Messmer crafted beautiful, artistic acting that really does defy description now and then. Here's a special Ramapith birthday tribute just for our hero—oops! Looks like Felix's pals Kitty, Inky and Winky (and Dinky), Laura, and Skiddoo got into it too...

(Music: Scott Joplin's "Pineapple Rag"; Itzhak Perlman, violin, and Andre Previn, piano)

Longtime Otto assistant and Magic Bag inventor Joe Oriolo came aboard in the 1940s (at right: probable cover collaboration with Jim Tyer, 1949). While we can never forget Oriolo's most famous creations, odd-couple bad guys The Professor and Rock Bottom, I'm sharing a different side of Oriolo today. His circus story "The Big Finale," below (from Harvey's Felix the Cat 106, 1959) is one of my favorite Oriolo works—with its 1920s-style mayhem, inimitable punning, and a great one-off female lead. Joe cut his artistic teeth at the Fleischer Studio, and the Betty Boopish "Katrina" is a sweet tip of the hat to his old mentors.
By the time of "The Big Finale"'s publication, Oriolo had taken over creative control of Felix and launched his famous TV series. But I'm not sure everyone at this particular circus considers our hero a "wonderful cat"...


Today Felix keeps on walking, as Joe's son Don plans new projects at Felix the Cat Productions—including a few that I think fans of the classics will appreciate! Don is also personally taking oil to canvas to paint Felix modern art, visible now on the studio's Facebook page.
Special thanks to Don for encouragement in the course of prepping today's little tribute. And props to the unsinkable Tom Stathes and Mark Kausler for providing select source materials. On his own blog, Mark is also celebrating Felix with classic 1930s daily strips right now... don't miss them!

(Magazine spread courtesy Cole Johnson; art attributed to Dana Parker)

Ninety Years—Nine Lives (Preview)

November 9, 1919-November 9, 2009.
Incredible, ain't it?
Just a placeholder so I don't miss the actual anniversary (though I'm already a few minutes late by Eastern time). More soon.

Felix Down Under: The Oily Bird Comic Strip

From kat to cat: it's time to bring one of my all-time favorite cartoon stars to this blog. Otto Messmer's Felix the Cat was one of the first animated characters who really acted—emoting to the audience, nodding and winking and turning viewers into co-conspirators. Who didn't want to go on an adventure with this wonderful cat? And those adventures... ranging from wacky comedy to truly far-flung fantasy. I've been a classic Felix buff since childhood—and the Silver Age Felix of Joe Oriolo, replete with funny bad guys and Jim Tyer animation, deserves his bon mots, too. Apart from these screen incarnations, Felix had just as rich a life in the comics, with Messmer, Oriolo, and Tyer once again contributing most of the great moments.

But there was another Felix besides those we know so well. From 1927 to 1931, Felix's then-new daily strip featured stories drawn largely from recent cartoons—in adaptations so close you'd think actual animation drawings were used. And they were! Early Messmer assistant Jack Bogle was called upon to create these continuities, and his process evidently involved choosing the "best" frames from each scene, then reinking them and adding comics details such as dialogue and extra shading. But the stories, though near to their inspiration, weren't exact. Their dialogue, dense where Messmer's was sparse, painted Felix as a kind of smart-alecky hick—an interpretation that appeared nowhere else. No Felix but Bogle's babbled "The Night Before Christmas" every time he got knocked unconscious. And no Felix but Bogle's had a canine sports coach pal named Julius, who featured in several Bogle continuities that weren't adapted from films.

Very few of Bogle's continuities have ever been anthologized in the United States. But curiously enough, Australia's Adventures of Felix comic book couldn't get enough of them in the late 1930s and early 1940s. That comic book's annual extras provided the striking covers I'm displaying here today, and that comic also offered the complete Bogle continuity seen below, an adaptation of The Oily Bird (1928) that originally ran from October 24 to November 3, 1928.

"Luke McCluck, a barnyard chicken, enters the house for no good reason..."


Nothing more to see here—keep on walking! (To the official Felix website, where their Oriolo "Comic Strip of the Day" features vintage 1950s strips... with Felix as almost a feline Dagwood.)