It’s difficult to fairly assess the overall output of Paul Terry’s studio. On one hand, they are certainly the foremost reminder that not every “classic cartoon” is a “classic”. Every aspect of a Terrytoon’s production is generally retrograde. Whereas even a blind man could tell the difference between a 1930s and 1940s cartoon at another studio, it’s rather difficult to make the same differentiation with a Terrytoon without looking at the copyright date.
Whereas what I see in the Famous Studios cartoons are guys who probably could’ve done something better under more favorable circumstances (before they all laid down and died because of the studio’s repetitious constitution), the Terry cartoons are largely the work of willful hacks. Willful hacks clearly having a good time making the cartoons, throwing anything at the wall to see what sticks and refusing to learn from their mistakes.
Paul Terry might have at least been as good a producer as Walter Lantz, who managed to produce decent, entertaining time-wasters in spite of having no aesthetic sense, if it weren’t for the studio lacking a solid story department. Cartoonist/historian Charlie Judkins has been working on a history of the Terrytoons for years, and has done some much needed research on what made the studio tick. It’s common knowledge that Paul Terry was the primary reason the cartoons bearing his name are largely weak, but solid fact is preferable to unsubstantiated blanket statements. I asked Charlie to shed some light on the Terrytoon story department’s mode of operation and here’s what he wrote:
John Foster was put in charge of the story department around 1938. The initial other writers working under him were Al Stahl, Don McKee, and Tommy Morrison. Izzy Klein joined around 1940 and stayed for about two years. Not sure how long Stahl and McKee lasted there. Of course, Paul Terry himself was active in the story department well through the 40s (and probably 50s) which is a big part of why the films are so weakly gagged. Terry forced the storymen to keep whatever he came up with, but he threw out lots of their gags. Foster retired around 1949, at which point it seems like Morrison took over leading the department. Howard Beckerman told me that when Foster retired he needed money, so Terry gave him a job transcribing jokes from popular radio shows to steal. Terry also had a man he paid and sent to NYC once a month to go see whatever the latest “A” cartoon (WB, MGM, Lantz etc.) was and write down gags that Terry could steal. So it seems like there was a lot of repurposed material being used at the Terry studio.
The studio hierarchy may have differed greatly from the Hollywood shops at Fleischer/Famous, but authorial touches were still discernible. Watchful eyes can determine who was responsible for tighter direction (Willard Bowsky, Bill Tytla), superior animation (the Dave Tendlar and Tom Johnson units), or sharper stories (Irv Spector) in the Fleischer/Famous product. Comparatively, it’s inscrutable to determine who was responsible for the success or failure of a Terrytoon because the directorial and writing duties were even more haphazard. It’s therefore impossible to determine why the Heckle & Jeckle series was regularly very funny while the other Terrytoons are all over the map, other than they just are. Further research may not make the films any better, but it’s still direly needed.
This little oddity is one of those Terrytoons that begs viewers not to thoroughly dismiss the studio at face value. The Lyin’ Lion is one of the few decently written and staged Terrytoons of the late 1940s. The NY writers were obviously far more enamored with Bert Lahr, and specifically his performance in The Wizard of Oz, than the Hollywood writers were. Looey the Great shows up in many Terrytoons throughout the decade, and Sid Raymond did an approximation of Lahr’s voice for the Wolfie character at Famous.
This was also among the earliest Terrytoons to feature the work of Jim Tyer. He animated almost the entire first minute-and-a-half, and one of his scenes has what is inarguably some of the most intriguing direction in a Terrytoon. It’s the single scene from 1:27-1:43.
There is a lot going on in this scene and Tyer gets it all across perfectly. One thing that makes Tyer’s work compelling is that along with pulling no punches in his craziness, he was able to do it without compromising the acting. Looey is adamant that he’s a brilliant circus performer, conceitedly and clumsily trying to climb the ringmaster’s head for his outrageously asinine act. The ringmaster is thoroughly exasperated that the has-been hasn’t retired and is clearly mortified at being a part of this disaster.
Tyer emphasizes the ringmaster’s frustration in a most wonderfully cartoonish way: by zooming in on his distorted face while Looey is still trying to climb to the top. This shot is actually three different scenes stitched together almost seamlessly to look like one continuous truck-in/truck-out shot. I’ve slowed the scene down to a quarter of its original speed in this video.
Though a landfill the Terrytoon output may be, inspired moments like this are nonexistent in most animated shorts of the last half-century. Their presence at least moves the studio to an echelon a little higher than bottom-of-the-barrel in the whole oeuvre of twentieth century cartooning.
That definitely explains everything! I still like Terrytoons for having that strange, but delightful New York animation house style on all their cartoons and for the wonderful Jim Tyer animation in the later ones, but you’re right about most of them being really stagnant and uninspired. Combine Terrryoon’s unique house style with the unit system at Famous and the creative cartoon writing at Warners and Terrytoons could have been a powerhouse of ultimate cartoon hilarity in NYC. Thank God Gene Deitch came in later on and brought some newfound energy and creativity into the studio for a short while anyway. Haven’t seen much of Bakshi’s work for Terrytoons so I can’t really comment on what the kinds of contributions he brought to the studio.
His stuff was generally just odd, I have a few Sad Cat VHS’s with his work.
Its not hard to see that he was a druggy when he worked on them.
Hey Thad,
I think you have a solid point about the work of the directors at Terry’s feeling indistinguishable from each other. This is chiefly because of the fact that there were no units at Terrytoons and that all directors shared the same storymen and animators . The only thing that varies them up a bit is the fact that Mannie Davis, Ed Donnelly and Connie Rasinski all did layout and animation on their own films exclusively. To me, Connie Rasinski’s cartoons stand out a little because they are the only ones that feature his very stylish animation.
Volney White’s Terrytoons are interesting examples of this as well because they still feel indistinguishable from the others produced at the time despite the fact that White had just come out of Tashlin’s fantastic unit at WB. The fact that he didn’t last long there shows that he probably could’ve done better, but wasn’t being given enough time or control.
When you listen to the music and look at the character designs Terry was using as late as the Barker Bill Show in the early 50s, you get the feeling he would have been perfectly happy to just leave everything as it was around 1938, if not for the need to adjust a little to faster paced gags if only to avoid more complaints from the Fox booking people. The Fleischer-Famous crew, from 1942 through about mid-46, were actually doing work that was just as fast and well-timed as most of the West Coast studios (albeit not as consistently that way as their Hollywood competitors). But at least they were trying and knew the dance steps, which is what makes their post-48 collapse (and semi-recovery from 1955-59) so interesting.
As for New Rochelle, Rasinski by the late 1940s had also become the best of the three directors at doing funny/goofy poses for his characters (to go along with his habit of ‘bouncing’ a character through a scene) . In general that’s why he and Tyer meshed the best in doing animation that may not have looked polished, but at least was entertaining, since Tyer would take Connie’s goofy looks and expand on them by a factor of 10.
Rasinski’s facial poses carried all the way into the Deputy Dawg TV cartoons of the early 1960s, and no doubt were an influence on budding studio animator Ralph Bakshi, who coming of age in the limited animation era, came to rely even more on those goofy facial expressions to get laughs. That doesn’t mean Connie’s cartoons overall stood out way above those from Davis or Donnelly’s units, but Deitch did seem to recognize what the directorial hierarchy was when he took over the studio and kept Connie on in a lead role while blowing up the other units.
Heckle and Jeckle were funnier because they were stronger characters than anything else at Terry at the time. They could be lippy, they could be silly and some of their gags worked because the same gags worked at other studios.
Reading again of the universal shabbiness of Terrytoons, and finding it difficult to articulate what I find great in the studio in the mode of these discussions, I’m startlingly reminded of the academic nature of these discussions, so much so as to suggest that once the cartoon finds itself in the academic space, it becomes unrecognizable, a bad irony, like an earnest analysis of sarcasm or a consumers guide to Rock. Why is it the most venerating devotees of the medium speak as though they have no business watching it ?
Pot calling the kettle insane?
I should have implicated myself more explicitly, perhaps.
Take it in the spirit it’s offered! I simply enjoy finding out why one studio’s cartoons were better than another’s. FTR, I vastly prefer the crude ineptness of these Terrytoons to the meticulously crafted, homogenized ‘professionalism’ contemporary Disney offered.
“FTR, I vastly prefer the crude ineptness of these Terrytoons to the meticulously crafted, homogenized ‘professionalism’ contemporary Disney offered.”
I dig. Seems those moved to comment here likewise cautiously, conditionally, have affection for the studio, – like one’s little backdoor girl… and all her bastards. Now ain’t it a cryin’ shame?!
I enjoyed this well-reasoned and frank appraisal of Terrytoons, a studio too often simply dismissed as the dregs of the industry while ignoring those aspects that contributed to its survival long after many of its contemporaries had closed their doors.
I think the repetitious and derivative nature of so many Terrytoons was an unwitting contribution to that success, particularly among small children, who appreciate such familiarity in stories (as anyone who’s had to read to kids the same bedtime story over and over will know).
As for me, I’ve always had a fondness for Terrytoons’ maintaining what might be called the “crude exuberance” of the early 1930s, maintaining the same haphazard storytelling, rudimentary characterizations and anything-goes gagwriting long after other studios had gotten more sophisticated and slicker in the products.
I never had a problem with Terrytoons. I was exposed to them at an early age as they were on in my local area every day till about 1983 or so. Didn’t see many of the one-shots, but saw a lot of Mighty Mouse, Heckle & Jeckle, Deputy Dawg, Gandy Goose, et all.
I’m not that big of a fan of Terrytoons in general, aside from Heckle and Jeckle who Paul Terry himself considered his best.
Why and how they worked so well I have no clue, they didn’t exactly have much with personalities at first and the shorts tended to be crude in general, though its crude in a good way for once, and frankly the gags were delivered at a far better pace than what Disney generally did.
Perhaps its the old fashioned humor (even for its time) that did it, with most of it feeling like it was ripped from old B\W comedies.
What probably worked in Heckle and Jeckles favor too is that its one of the few original works done at Terrytoons, it wasn’t another Tom and Jerry knock-off nor some superhero.
Later episodes were a bit more simpler in animation, but the writing was better at that point with the characters being somewhat different in behavior. Though after that we had a few failed attempts at remakes that weren’t so hot.
Its just unfortunate that Heckle and Jeckle aren’t the only thing the studio produced. In such world we would all be better off.
Of all the golden age duos, Heckle & Jeckle are only rivaled in cunt-ishness by McKimson’s wretched little gophers.