Mighty Mouse the Money Mouse

At the start of 1955, Paul Terry told the New York Herald Tribune there was nothing he’d rather do than make cartoons. At the end of 1955, Paul Terry wasn’t making cartoons any longer. He was counting the millions he made selling his cartoon studio to CBS.

There isn’t a lot to be said about Terrytoons that hasn’t already been said. The studio had popular characters in Mighty Mouse and Heckle and Jeckle; in fact, they were the only ones I had ever heard of when I was a kid in the ‘60s. By the time Terry talked to the Trib his cartoons were the least polished in all of theatrical animation and had been for many years. They filled time and, to be honest, that’s all cartoons were meant to do in movie houses by the early ‘50s. Distributors didn’t care. And kids seemed to like them.

Here’s the Tribune article, published November 13, 1955, about six weeks before Terry closed the deal to sell everything to CBS.

Mighty Mouse Invades 10-Million-a-Year Class
By David Steinberg
Forty years ago Paul Terry “spoiled some good movie film by drawing all over it” and produced his first animated cartoon. Today Mighty Mouse is a Money Mouse and Terrytoons have become a $10,000,000-a-year business.
Terrytoon characters appear on motion picture and TV screens, in books and comic books, as foam rubber toys, puzzles and games and as designs for children’s clothing, jewelry and playing cards.
Farmer Al Falfa, Dinky Duck and the rest of the Terrytoon family make their home in New Rochelle, N.Y., “to be near the city where the major decisions of the movie industry are made.” In the studio Paul Terry and his staff of animators, photographers, tracers, writers, composers, engineers, sales personal and office help produce an average of twelve wide-screen cartoons a year to be distributed by Twentieth Century Fox.

Sixty-eight-year-old Paul Terry has made some 650 Terrytoon shorts since he started the firm on Forty-second St. in 1931 and made many other films prior to that time. Mr. Terry estimates that 40,000,000 people see each of his cartoons in theaters on every continent.
The average seven-minute Terrytoon reel today costs $60 a foot, or $40,000, to produce excluding prints. In 1915 Mr. Terry recalls working around the clock for a month—“a privilege accorded to the self-employed”—to produce his first animated movie, “”Little Herman.” He spent almost as much time trying to find a buyer and finally settled for $1.35 a foot, slightly more than the cost of the raw film.
Mr. Terry asserts that he has never worked a day in his life. As he puts it, “if you’re doing one thing when you would rather be doing something else, you’re working. There’s nothing I’d rather do than make cartoons.”
According to Mr. Terry, cartoons are more popular today than ever. On a global basis he reports that the best markets outside of the United States are England and France. He attributes part of the increased interest to television, which he says, “makes people more picture-minded.” One phase of the Terrytoon operation is the Barker Bill TV show on C.B.S. twice a week. Plans have been formulated for a new TV program, the Mighty Mouse Playhouse, also slated for C.B.S., to begin after Jan. 1.
The latest enterprise of Terrytoons, Inc., is a reversion to the nickelodeon, spiced with modern gadgetry. When the Mighty Mouse Playhouse hits the streets, the nation’s small fry will be able to hear and see in three dimensions any one of four different Terrytoon stories in each machine for only a nickel.