Here’s a special “April Fool’s Day” issue of Fleischer’s Animated News from 1936!
Among its highlights:
– Cover art of Popeye by Roland Crandall.
– Tintype bios of animator Ed Nolan (1908-1943) and inker Sydel Solomon (1913-1990).*
– Gag cartoons by George Hill and Mike Maltese.
– Reviews of I Feel Like a Feather in the Breeze (de facto dir. Tom Johnson), and We Did It (de facto dir. Willard Bowsky).
*Ed Nolan left the Fleischer Studio a week before the strike on April 30, 1937, to take a job in Detroit with Jam Handy. Two years later, Ed came to Hollywood to work at Walt Disney’s studio around 1939. In the fall of 1941, Ed joined Screen Gems and remained there until his passing in 1943 (family members noted that Ed succumbed to a black widow spider bite).
*Sydel Solomon had a lengthy animation career from the 1940s up to the early 1980s. Sydel moved to Los Angeles and joined MGM’s ink-and-paint department for a brief spell. She chose to remain in New York, where she occupied numerous studios: Cineffects, Tempo, Shamus Culhane, Ben Harrison, Archer Productions, UPA-NY, Bill Sturm, Lars Calonius, Pelican, Storyboard, Hal Seeger, Stars & Stripes, The Hubley Studio, and The Ink Tank.
Click each thumbnail to enlarge:
Thanks to Jerry Beck, Bob Jaques, Vincent Alexander, and Richard O’ Connor for these rare materials.
DEVON BAXTER is a film restoration artist, video editor, and animation researcher/writer currently residing in Pennsylvania. He also hosts a 
Continued success in reprinting these rare issues of FLEISCHER’S ANIMATED NEWS and (hopefully) FLIP (or was it FLIPS) magazine? Gordon Sheehan told me that when he was doing some animation for GULLIVER’S TRAVELS, co-director Willard Bowsky was going to let him do some rotoscoped animation of “Gulliver” but he was “aced out of it” by animator Roland “Doc” Crandall instead. Great cover art by Crandall, though!
Roland Crandall made the right decision because rotoscoping yields only mediocre results in animation; as proof, the least attractive and least natural scenes in the Disney film “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” are those in which the animation was rotoscoped.
Another excellent issue of the animators’ newsletter, showing us that the animators at Fleischer Studios were all very talented.
I think that if the Fleischers hadn’t wasted their time and resources on producing animated feature films and had stayed focused on short films, the studio would have remained a major player in the field of animation at least until the late 1950s.
Unfortunately, like many other studios, they chose to imitate Disney and they all failed miserably.
Hey, I happened to like some of their early 40’s stuff such as “Hoppity” and “Raggedy-Ann”. Plus, I consider their “Superman” shorts some of the biggest triumphs in animation at the time and Disney wasn’t even doing something like that!
If you want my opinion, I also think that all the cartoons you just mentioned were mediocre, and light-years away from the surrealist masterpieces the Fleischers created in the early 1930s.
Never knew that Warren foster was working at fleischers, as you can see with the “We Did It” blurb in Previews.
This issue contains two reports, one of them illustrated, that Marilynn Werner — who we learned last month had previously worked as a chorus girl on Broadway — had just returned from a vacation in Detroit. Now, I’m from Detroit, and I love Detroit, but even I have to admit that it’s unlikely to be high on anyone’s list of preferred holiday destinations — all the more so in the midst of the Great Depression, which hit the city hard. Moreover, we’re reading this in the April edition of the Animated News, indicating that Marilynn made her trip in late winter or early spring, when the weather in Detroit is not at its best: grey skies, chilling winds, huge piles of blackened snow everywhere you look. I can only guess that she must have gone there to visit family or friends, or perhaps a former colleague who had taken a job at Jam Handy.
Both reports mentioned that Marilynn travelled by air, which is likewise puzzling. Commercial air travel was then in its infancy, with fewer than one million tickets sold in 1936 (the industry would reach that milestone the following year). Airplane cabins were not insulated, and they became very cold and noisy in flight. Planes also had to fly at lower altitudes in those days before jet engines, with consequently greater turbulence, and free falls of over 100 feet were common. A flight from New York to Detroit would have taken three to four hours and been an unpleasant, uncomfortable, frightening ordeal. Air travel was also very expensive; you could buy a new car for the price of two coast-to-coast round-trip air tickets. Marilynn would have actually saved money by taking the New York Central’s 20th Century Limited express train to Toledo and then transferring to the Mercury streamliner on the DMT line, a trip of about fifteen hours in luxurious comfort.
So either Marilynn was in a hurry, or she simply wanted to have the experience of flying in a plane. If the latter is the case, then she must have been a very brave and adventurous woman — and, if the illustrations in the Animated News represent an accurate likeness, quite an attractive one as well.
I see that the studio was striving to promote its latest cartoon star Wiffle Piffle, with Norma Fain, in her review of his appearance in the latest Screen Song, describing him as “the goofiest waiter ever to grace (or disgrace) a night club.” What??? Wiffle Piffle isn’t even the goofiest waiter ever to grace (or disgrace) a nightclub in a Fleischer cartoon. Had everybody forgotten about Bimbo in “Dizzy Dishes”?
I was interested in Roberta’s profile of animator Eddie Nolan, but I was puzzled by his “ambition to learn the Westchester.” Turns out that the Westchester — presumably named after that suburban county — was one of the hundreds of now-forgotten dance moves that emerged during the swing era, and apparently a difficult one to execute. There is, however, an anonymous and undated booklet from that time titled “Swing Steps – Learn the Latest Dance Steps – Dancing in a Few Hours” containing instructions, in the form of footprint diagrams, on how to dance the Westchester, as well as other contemporary dances such as the Snake Hips, the Shim Sham Shimmy, and the Suzi-Q. Too bad Eddie was never able to get his hands on a copy, but perhaps some enterprising jitterbugs from White Plains or New Rochelle might revive the Westchester as a point of regional pride.
It’s extremely unusual for a healthy young man to die of a black widow spider bite. By coincidence there was another Eddie Nolan, a former silent film comedian, who also passed away in 1943.