Here’s the January 1936 edition of Fleischer’s Animated News! (The next installment will be the March 1936 issue—February’s edition is missing, as of this writing.)
Among its highlights:
• Tintype bios of Rose Schoenberg (1910-1982) in the planning department and Bill Turner (1902-1983[?]), the head of Fleischer’s story department. [Top Cel, the New York cartoonists’ union newsletter, stated Rose Schoenberg’s employment at Famous Studios in the timing department from June 1944 to April 1945.]
• Frank Paiker (1909-1989)* writes about the coloring department.
• Gag cartoons by George Hill, Mike Maltese, and Warren Foster.
• Reviews of Betty Boop and Henry (de facto dir. Myron Waldman) and Somewhere in Dreamland (de facto dir. Seymour Kneitel).
* Frank Paiker’s animation career began in the 1920s in New York when he became an assistant cameraman on Walter Lantz’s early films produced by J. R. Bray. In 1930, Frank joined Max and Dave Fleischer’s studio as an inker before he became its department supervisor. In the mid-thirties, when these Fleischer’s Animated News house organs were published, Paiker managed Fleischer’s coloring and planning departments. During the 1937 strike, Frank was reassigned to the in-betweening department, a position he continued to hold when the Fleischers relocated to Miami. After Paramount Pictures ousted Max and Dave Fleischer from their Florida studio, Frank migrated to California, where he took a job at Raphael Wolff Studios. In 1944, Paiker joined MGM’s animation department as its chief camera operator and remained at Metro until its division closed in 1957. When Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera opened their television enterprise, they appointed Frank as head of the camera department. Paiker later became the studio’s technical supervisor at H-B until his retirement in 1977.
Click thumbnails to enlarge:
• Thanks to Jerry Beck, Bob Jaques, and Richard O’ Connor for these rare production materials.
DEVON BAXTER is a film restoration artist, video editor, and animation researcher/writer currently residing in Pennsylvania. He also hosts a 
A magnificent drawing by Lou Freeman paying tribute to the world’s greatest artists, with the added bonus of text written in French! (Oui, monsieur !)
What fascinates me about these newsletters is that they make it clear that many of the Fleischer Studio employees who worked in other capacities were talented cartoonists themselves, even if their efforts never appeared on any screens. Some, like Warren Foster, continued in animation careers of other kinds, but most of the signatures on these often striking illustrations are only long-forgotten names now.
Max and Dave had quite an “esprit de corps” atmosphere going on there! Everyone wanted to draw, and some of the non-animators became really proficient at drawing the main Fleischer characters.
Too bad that adverse circumstances finally put an end to all this— what might have happened if Paramount hadn’t pulled the rug out and some of these talents had never left for new horizons? Maybe the Fleischers would have gone head-to-head with the 1950’s Uncle Walt, by producing more animated features? Perhaps an animated Superman feature? It’s too bad that we’ll never know what such an “alternate timeline” might have produced…