October Original Titles

Wak! It's been forever since I've updated around here. Sadly, I'm still under the gun with one project or another. But the least I can do is return briefly to a topic everyone's been asking for: the hunt for original titles. Like Ozzie of the Mounted (1928), my fellow scholars and I will get our men—even if we lose our heads!

It's not a new discovery, of course, that many theatrical cartoons had their original title cards replaced for later reissue. The actual revelations are the original titles themselves—often because the cartoons' corporate owners dumped their originals, but sometimes because originals perished in spite of the studios' best efforts. Luckily (see my lengthier discussion here), in-depth research has brought back stragglers of all stripes.

The Moose Hunt (1931) is a Mickey Mouse short for which Disney's original titles elements went missing at some point in the past. Here we see a faux-original title card recreated for a recent DVD set...


...and here is an actual original I more recently got the chance to see. In this case, the recreation attempt was about as close as could be imagined; the positioning of the words is different, but the proper card style was chosen and even the title font is similar.


Alas, sometimes the re-creator can't be quite as prescient. In the case of Fiddlin' Around (1930), it's new knowledge that the cartoon was called that from the start. Studio records suggested that Mickey's violin-recital short was titled "Just Mickey" in its first release, and the faux title for DVD reflected this conventional wisdom:


But the CW isn't always right. The late Denis Gifford was the first to show me theatrical materials that suggested Fiddlin' Around as the 1930 release title, and now we get a look at the original title card as well:


Interestingly, this shows that the first and second seasons of Columbia Mickeys had slightly different card styles. The background is darker on this 1930 episode (as with a few more that I'll share later on); much of the white lettering lacks a black outline; and most critically there's an effort to make the text on the chalkboard look like it's Mickey's own work. Better take some handwriting courses there, Mick.

Hm, and maybe you ought to get some plastic surgery while you're at it:


Thanks to research buddy Cole Johnson and collector Ralph Celentano, above we have an item I'd never seen before—the 1930 Columbia reissue card for a Celebrity-era (1928-29) Mickey cartoon. While I'm not aware of an original Celebrity card surviving for When the Cat's Away (1929), others hold out from the period:


With no extended knowledge on the matter just yet, I'll make an educated guess that Columbia staffers—rather than anyone at Disney—drew up that new title card for Cat's Away (and, presumably, other Celebrity Mickey shorts). It's hard to imagine anyone on Uncle Walt's per diem transforming the studio stars into possums.

Of course, sometimes you didn't change species when your title card was remade. You just went from professionally drawn to fourth-grade level. Here's Dick Huemer's Toby the Pup as seen on reissues...


...and here's the hound as viewed by cinemagoers in 1931:


Should I be disturbed that Toby's feet look as much like hands on the original card as on the fake? I'm just not sure why he had to wear shoes with toes. Maybe Pervis the Goat ate all the normal shoes in the area—in Circus Time (1931), he eats one of Toby's gloves.

Gotta dash back to meeting deadlines, but I'd be a boob if I didn't go without delivering another item I'd promised for awhile—one more early Tom and Jerry title card. Most of us know The Zoot Cat (1944) as looking like this reissue print:


But here's what audiences saw in 1944. Dig that color, squares. Go man, go go go:


For completeness' sake, here also is Fraidy Cat (1942), with a rare intro card that we've already seen on the earlier Midnight Snack (1941).


That's it for now—but there are more discoveries being made all the time. Sometimes, as my friend Tom Stathes is always showing me, certain reissues are interesting, too:


Yes, that's a Columbia-era short with the United Artists title design. But some things are worth the wait...

Update, October 18: I'd formerly pictured an MGM lion card for The Zoot Cat that understandably misled some of you—the lion was a circa 1940 card, while the cartoon is from 1944. Thad K, who has looked at this print as well, remembered that its lion opening had in fact been spliced on from a different source.
Zoot Cat almost certainly had a standard 1944-era opening as seen on this print of Screwball Squirrel (1944).

Ub Iwerks' Rep: From Flip to Flop

Why did Ub Iwerks leave Walt Disney's employ in January 1930? For leave he did, and fast; enticed by an offer that, according to Michael Barrier and John Kenworthy, Iwerks at first didn't realize was masterminded by Pat Powers, Disney's own distributor.
Conflict with Walt himself is thought of as the main reason for the split, with the suggestion that Walt took Ub's talent for granted. But another reason has been leveled, too. At the same time that Iwerks got bad vibes from his longtime friend and employer, he is also said to have received a growing number of good vibes, plaudits, and credits from voices outside the studio. This external praise, as much as any internal strife, may have convinced Ub that departure was in his best interest. Once he made that departure, the praise continued quite strongly for a time—seemingly validating Iwerks' action.

Most of us haven't seen actual examples of this praise before, but today I'm presenting two for your reading pleasure. The first example, from Germany's Reichsfilmblatt in 1930, was reprinted in Storm and Dreßler's superb Im Reiche der Micky Maus (1991). Coming on the cusp of Iwerks' independence, this early announcement of his solo productions explains that

Following the exemplary success of capricious little Mickey Mouse, a new star has now turned up in sound film heaven: Flip the Frog. Again it is Ub Iwerks, the ingenious creator and artist of Mickey, who has taken a great hop forward. His Flip is far more capable than the spindly mouse of mimicking and mocking the posturing and fussing of humanity...

Yet a better, if briefer, clue to the admiration Iwerks received came months earlier in fall 1929—in an item I don't think has ever been reprinted. When Columbia Pictures—again through Pat Powers—first contracted to release Disney's Silly Symphonies, its four-page "press sheet" was remarkably frank about how at least certain parties viewed the Disney/Iwerks relationship. "Walt Disney is head of the studio," Columbia's corporate voice explains, "but the artist who perfects the details is named 'Ub' Iwerks. He is assisted by a staff of 'animators' [sic], who follow his sketches and continuity..."
Reality notwithstanding—the same presskit calls "Oswald the Cat" an earlier Disney creation and scrupulously avoids mentioning Mickey, a non-Columbia property until 1930—the implication could not be more clear: Disney was the businessman, Iwerks the artiste and director. The back page's biography of Disney, calling him a "child of fate," certainly lavishes Walt with purple prose, yet still cannot walk back that first impression.


(Momentary break to discuss the poster art illustrated in Columbia's presskit: I've seen these one-sheets before, but never any for El Terrible Toreador (1929) until now. The poster and presskit call the film The [sic] Terrible Toreador, but that's actually a mistake; though the original titles are not on DVD, collectors possess them—see image at left—and they carry the commonly accepted El at title's start.)

Only some time after Iwerks' split did the first impression begin to recede. Later in 1930, another German article was entitled "The True Creator of the Mickey Mouse Films." It contended that

The creator of the now world-famous Mickey Mouse is the American film producer Walt Disney. The original concepts for Mickey and his inamorata Minnie stem from him, as do all the ideas for the Mickey Mouse film treatments. The artist Ub Iwerks, falsely credited as the father of the Mickey Mouse films, was initially an employee of Walt Disney. He has long since been expelled from the Disney firm.

From hero to pariah overnight. What a crazy trip.