Here’s issue number 12 of Fleischer’s Animated News from November 1935. Joe Oriolo drew the Thanksgiving-themed cover art of Popeye the Sailor and a marked turkey.
Among its highlights are:
– Tintype biographies of Mae Schwartz (later Dave Fleischer’s second wife) and Morris Fleischer.
– Gag cartoons by Warren Foster, Mike Maltese, and Willard Bowsky.
– Jeff Price writes about the Fleischers’ planning department.
– Reviews of the Color Classic Musical Memories (de facto dir. Seymour Kneitel) and the Screen Song, I Wished On the Moon, Tom Johnson’s first short as a “head animator”/director, and the screen debut of Wiffle Piffle.
(Click to enlarge)
To see the previous 11 issues CLICK HERE.
• Thanks to Jerry Beck and Bob Jaques for sharing 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 
Hmm, on Bowsky’s gag cartoon, I saw under his name there was another name “Hill”. Could that be George Hill?
I see that setback artist Johnny Burks received a special commendation at the beginning of the “Down the Studio Lane” column for the delicious-looking sets he constructed for “Somewhere in Dreamland” (to be released the following January), and rightly so. His plaster cakes, candies and ice cream cones really do look good enough to eat!
Burks’s sets for “Musical Memories”, reviewed in this newsletter, are less fanciful than those he created for “Dreamland”, but no less elaborate. “Musical Memories” is perhaps the only Fleischer cartoon in which the main characters appear as three-dimensional models in one of the sets. Until I read that review, I didn’t realise that there was a joke in that final scene, when the camera pulls back from the old couple’s cozy parlour to reveal “an ultra ultra modernistic home.” It looks old-fashioned to me, but I guess audiences of the time would have understood the joke.
The studio seems to have had high hopes for Wiffle Piffle, or “Whiffle-Piffle” as he’s referred to here in the review of his debut cartoon, touted as “the screwiest character that ever skedaddled across Fleischer’s Screen.” If he was ever going to live up to that hype, then maybe Johnson should have thought of something funnier for him to do other than just flap his arms as he skedaddles along. Say what you want about Wiffle Piffle, at least he had greater potential as a cartoon star than Henry, the world’s funniest looking embryo.
And speaking of Henry, I see that the little guy inspired yet another gag cartoon in Fleischer’s Animated News! What puzzles me isn’t the colour of his T-shirt, it’s how he managed to pull it on over his big bulbous head.
Which one is by Maltese? I saw the cartoons by Foster (2 in fact!) and Bowsky (co-credited with Hill), but I didn’t spot his name anywhere while looking at the signatures for the cartoons.
Oh I see you updated it now! Maltese’s panel is “Maltese-page-23a.jpg”.
(For the record, Foster’s panels are “1935-11-FAN-8.jpg” and “1935-11-FAN-16.jpg”, while Bowsky’s panel is “1935-11-FAN-17.jpg”.)
It’s really a pity that Maltese never got any actual story writing in Fleischer, as he only got promoted to be writer only in WB (not to mention both his WB colleagues, Foster and Tedd Pierce, actually did writing for Fleischer, prominently Popeye). Sometimes I really wonder how it could be if Maltese wrote one cartoon for Fleischer.
“Betty Boop with Henry, the Boringest Dead Comic Strip Character”
I only have photocopies of a couple of these, courtesty of animators Gordon Sheehan and also Veto Stasiunatis (?) and a page or two of copies from one or two other issues. These are great to have in complete form here. Thanks!