When cartoon studios in a major filmmaking city like Los Angeles closed in the 1960s and 1970s, it rarely received press attention in newspapers like the Los Angeles Times. In contrast, a studio operating out of New Rochelle, New York received coverage for multiple days about its closing. The story broke on November 29, 1972, that Terrytoons–the studio responsible for Mighty Mouse, Heckle and Jeckle, and Deputy Dawg–intended to shut down operations in its facility on 38 Centre Avenue and transfer to an office run by the studio’s owner Viacom in New York City. A few papers in cities near New Rochelle reported that news the next day. Then, a new wave of reports began on January 4, 1973, announcing that Terrytoons had indeed closed. The coverage is revealing in that it offers a glimpse into the state of animation at the time and a look at what happens when an animation studio shuts down.
The November 1972 reports noted that shortly before the studio’s decision to close, Bill Weiss, who succeeded founder Paul Terry as head of Terrytoons, had retired in September 1972, but Viacom had retained him as a consultant for the studio. The New Rochelle Standard-Star said that the studio at its peak had employed ninety people, and it mentioned that the studio’s building had three floors. Most revealing is that Terrytoons admitted to not having actually made new cartoons for a while. “The firm’s operations … in recent years consisted mainly of sales and servicing for existing cartoons,” stated the Standard-Star. To add insult to the injury of the studio’s demise, the headline out of the White Plains Argus of November 30 had a cartoon reference from another studio: “That’s All Folks! Terrytoons Closing.”
J.J. Sedelmaier grabbed this image of 38 Centre Avenue off Google Maps back in 2013.
On January 5, 1973, the final story about Terrytoons’ shuttering appeared in the Standard-Star. This time it was a joint interview with Weiss and longtime studio employee Tommy Morrison. The article physically describes Morrison as a “thin, ruddy-faced man” with “light blue eyes and quick movements.” As Weiss and Morrison were interviewed, they “sat in their New Rochelle office, amidst cartons and furniture labeled for shipment to New York.” The interview itself took place on January 3, and Viacom’s sale of the New Rochelle building on December 29, 1972, had necessitated the packing away of the studio’s property.
When asked that day about animation’s future, Weiss replied that computer animation was the future. “They’re now working on a way to produce animated work by computer.” Morrison, however, sharply responded, “Never!” He added, “It won’t be animation if the human intelligence, the creativity is taken out of it.” Of course, Weiss’s prediction proved correct, but Morrison’s response showed how much he cared for animation as it had existed exclusively from the hands and minds of New Rochelle’s artists for so many years.
Pop artist Charles Fazzino has installed this tribute to the studio on the corner of North Ave. & Huguenot St. in downtown New Rochelle. More about the legacy of the Terrytoons studio: CLICK HERE.
Christopher P. Lehman is a professor of ethnic studies at St. Cloud State University in St. Cloud, Minnesota. His books include American Animated Cartoons of the Vietnam Era and The Colored Cartoon, and he has been a visiting fellow at Harvard University.
You know the truly sad thing about all this is that we will never see the Terrytoon cartoons again as they actually appeared in theaters. No one seems to be interested in releasing these cartoons or restoring these cartoons for release either on physical media (That is DVD or Blu-ray) or on television Via the MeTV cartoons channel.
Either way, it would be such a plus to see these cartoons back in circulation again after so many years. You can find links to these on YouTube, but these are in varying qualities. Some are fair to poor!
Intersestingly, METVToons got Terrytoons, and is set to start airing them. Don’t know if they will unedited.
Whatever one may say about Bill Weiss, he was probably the first person on record to predict, correctly, that computer animation would someday supplant the hand-drawn variety. Given the limits of computer technology in 1973, I don’t blame Tom Morrison for being sceptical. I’m not surprised that the closure of Terrytoons received so much coverage in the local press. The studio was probably one of the city’s biggest employers and would surely have been a source of great civic pride.
Some might attribute the decline of Terrytoons to Paul Terry’s sale of the studio to CBS, others to the firing of Gene Deitch, still others to Ralph Bakshi’s departure for Paramount. As for me, I think Terrytoons began its long downward spiral with the 1947-48 animators’ strike. No matter how good they are at their jobs, or how much pride they take in their work, if an employer treats his workers with disrespect, that business is doomed to failure in the long run.
38 Centre Street in New Rochelle is a grocery store today. Dare I call it… a “Super Market”?
I’m not sure Morrison’s answer was related to some technological stage of the moment, but to a more “metaphysical” underpinning. “Animation” comes from ‘Anima’, “soul”. It takes one to project it into a work. The funny thing is that both Weiss and Morrison were right.
“It won’t be animation if the human intelligence, the creativity is taken out of it.” Morrison’s statement is all the more prescient now with the rise of AI.
“When cartoon studios in a major filmmaking city like Los Angeles closed in the 1960s and 1970s, it rarely received press attention in newspapers like the Los Angeles Times. In contrast, a studio operating out of New Rochelle, New York received coverage for multiple days about its closing.” Well, what do you know? Terrytoons, not only did it just operate out of New Rochelle, but was also better known as one of the lowest-quality houses in the field, yet it received a lot of attentions.
Bill Weiss and Tom Morrison were probably the only guys that were left in Terrytoons at that time, since guys like Mannie Davis, Ed Donnelly and Phil Schieb had left and Connie Rasinski, Bob Kurahawa and Art Bartsch had already passed away.
“When asked that day about animation’s future, Weiss replied that computer animation was the future. “They’re now working on a way to produce animated work by computer.” Morrison, however, sharply responded, “Never!” He added, “It won’t be animation if the human intelligence, the creativity is taken out of it.”” Huh, who would know both of them are right at that time? Especially now with that AI trend.
And, gain i ask, when (or will) we see the Terrys on MeTVToons!!???
Mighty Mouse, like many other theatrical series, had Saturday morning reboots — first by Filmation, then by Ralph Bakshi. Considering Hollywood’s insatiable appetite for properties with any kind of name recognition, it seems very possible we could see Mighty Mouse fly again.
Perhaps in live action …
If you can log in to Kickstarter you can read about this massive effort by That Komorski to restore Terrytoons’s original silent “Aesop’s Fables” https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thadwell/aesops-fables-the-1920s-vol-1-blu-ray-dvd/posts?lang=es
I grew up in New Rochelle, and found out long after the fact that decades-worth of cels and background art were tossed into Dumpsters when the studio closed.
Those cels and backgrounds were worth preserving. Oddly, an appreciation/nostalgia of classic animation had started at the time Terrytoons shut its facility. It’s a shame that the studio didn’t save its artwork for nostalgia’s sake.
An equally significant aspect of the history of the Terrytoons studio was the Mighty Mouse statue that for decades served as the centerpiece of nearby theme park Rye Playland (thereafter moved to another theme park in Massachusetts). I would like to see a seperate article covering the history of this “mighty” monument.
As for Morrison’s predeliction about computer animation being the next frontier in the field: It’s quite possible he had taken notice of what Ed Catmull and Fred Parke were up to at the University Of Utah at that time and foresaw the eventual consequence of their pioneering efforts.
Thank you. I’d been wondering what kind of computer animation was taking place in early 1973.