He Wasn't Quite Mickey

Who has “all the comic seriousness or a Harold Lloyd, the lightning agility of a Douglas Fairbanks, and the grotesquely funny feet of a Charlie Chaplin”?

Would you believe Flip the Frog?

That’s how an English movie trade publication termed him in its edition of May 15, 1930. Mind you, the writer hadn’t seen a Flip cartoon because none of them had appeared in Britain as yet. He was taking the word of a publicity release.

From what I can tell, more has been written about Flip in recent years than when he was actually appearing in theatres. That gives you an idea of the impact he had at the time.

The Motion Picture News reported on February 22, 1930 that Ub Iwerks would be making the cartoons in colour and black and white “in the next few weeks” under the auspices of Celebrity Productions, “current distributors of the Disney cartoons. Definite releasing arrangements subsequently will be announced” with a monthly release beginning “on or about March 1.” Film Daily had the roughly the same story the day before.

The first indication of Flip I can find in the popular press is in the Brooklyn Standard Union of February 26, 1930.

New Films Flip the Frog,
Ub Iwerks Latest Cartoon
By BURKE HENRY
Only a brash reviewer would take it upon himself to analyze the antics of “Mickey Mouse” or the concatenations of the “Silly Symphony,” animated cartoons. Oftimes the cartoons are the only lively events on the program when the feature films fall into the doldrums.
Now comes the announcement that Ub Iwerks, who has been associated with Walt Disney, is to become a producer on his own and for his independent series has chosen animated sound cartoons in color as well as in black and white, to be entitled “Flip the Frog.”
“A frog more nearly represents a human being than anything else in all nature,” Iwerks, speaking from the wisdom of his twenty-eight years of age, declares: “A frog may be the epitome of laziness or lightning-like action as suit his erratic impulses.”

In the Birmingham News of February 24, 1932, Ub’s tale of how Flip was created sounds in league with the stories Walt Disney related over the years about how he invented Mickey Mouse.

TADPOLE INSPIRATION
Flip The Frog Grew From National Early Start
In most countries frog legs are a delicacy enjoyed only by the epicurean who is also the possessor of a fat purse. In all countries where frogs abound, they are (in various states of health) to be found among the treasured possessions of small boys. It remains, however, for the artist U. B. Iwerks to recreate the frog into a signal for mirth for cinema audiences throughout the world in his “Flip the Frog.”
Iwerks first became acquainted with the potentialities of humor in the frog some twenty years ago, when in school he casually slipped a tadpole down the shocked neck of a more studious classmate. The result was untold merriment for all pupils except for the shocker and the shocked Young Iwerks was made to sit in the corner and sport a dunce's cap, following which his rather stern father was obliged to pay a visit to the teacher. It presented a serious problem to youthful Master Iwerks. Says Iwerks concerning this: “It is not therefore remarkable that when I decided to extend my drawing board activities to include the movies, I should have thought of Mr. Frog.”

Back to 1930: the rise of Mickey Mouse and the Silly Symphonies had the major studios itching to release cartoons. Warner Bros. signed with Harman-Ising. Educational signed with Paul Terry and Frank Moser. RKO signed with Charles Mintz to make Toby the Pup. That left the studio where there were more stars than there were in Heaven—MGM. And Celebrity’s Pat Powers had the good fortune to ink a distribution deal with Metro. MGM began showing off something to do with the cartoons at the studio’s convention in Chicago around May 20th. It found space for Flip in advertising its wares in the trades for the 1930-31 season; this ad was in the Motion Picture News of June 14th.

So just when did Flip appear in theatres? There’s no answer in the pioneer reference book Of Mice and Magic; Leonard Maltin and his researchers merely list copyright dates. The Los Angeles Evening Express of May 2, 1930 reported:

FIRST COLOR CARTOON
The first all-color talking cartoon has been completed and is ready for release through Celebrity Productions. It is titled “Fiddlesticks” and is the first of the “Flip the Frog” series being produced by U. B. Iwerks. This subject was done entirely in the new Harriscolor process with recording by Cinephone.

Exhibitors Daily Review revealed on May 7th that European rights had been sold ten days after Flip was announced in the trade press. MGM staged a sneak preview of its shorts—where it happened is not reported—but the same paper of August 14th gave a mixed opinion. “Synchronization that is nearly perfect. Mr. Bullfrog is okay.”

Motion Picture News reviewed Fiddlesticks in its issue of August 16, 1930 and in later editions gave that as the release date. Where it was playing is unknown; the Los Angeles Times does not list it in movie theatre ads. The reviewer wasn’t impressed. Under the heading “Same Old Stuff,” he opined:

AND Fiddlesticks to you, Mr. Producer, for being so much like the rest of the cartoonists who have no more sense of originality than cartoon characters have life.
This one, while expertly produced and set to music, has the same line-up of stuff as every other cartoon (but with few exceptions) in the current season’s group. There’s too much sameness in all of them. New ideas are needed, and needed badly. Will get by on a bill needing a light touch.

To the left is an ad from the New York Daily News from Flip’s first appearance in the Big Apple; he premiered on October 3, 1930 (Fiddlesticks had already played a few weeks earlier in Ithaca, New York). Motion Picture News of October 11th reported the theatre grossed $14,000 the first week with Flip on the bill, and in the same issue, previewed the Flip short The Barbershop, praising the ending but pointing out “Except for an element of sameness common to all cartoons, it clicks nicely.”

The animated amphibian continued to show up in theatres, not so much in the media except in the occasional newspaper story that had a paragraph listing theatrical cartoon characters. Variety’s review of The Milkman on July 12, 1932 didn’t mince words: “An insipid and lazily penned cartoon. Easiest the most economical way is to be repetitious so the youngster in this just keeps on dropping milk bottles.” This is the cartoon where the delivery van horse sings the word “hell” and is about to do it again when Flip crashes a bottle on his head.

Flip ran into trouble with the censor in Virginia. The Hollywood Reporter revealed in Fire, Fire, Iwerks was ordered to eliminate a scene where Flip hits another frog over the head with a chamber pot.

Somewhere along the way, it appears Flip stopped being a frog. The MGM opening title card changed from “Flip the Frog” to just “Flip” by the end of 1932 (in The Music Lesson?) and remained that way until the series was dumped. MGM announced on June 27, 1933 that its largest shorts schedule in history would include 13 Willie Whopper cartoons. After 38 shorts, Flip disappeared.

Well, not entirely. Official Films and Blackhawk Films released at least some of the cartoons for the home film/service club market in the 1940s. In the 1950s, the shorts appeared on TV along with Molly Moo Cow, the human Tom and Jerry and other forgotten 1930s stars of the B-list studios. Then animation historians came along in the 1970s and pieced together the history of Flip and the Iwerks studio (Mark Mayerson’s history of MGM cartoons for The Velvet Light Trap in 1978 included a capsule Life of Flip.

And there were later inspirations. Take, for example, the revelation in the New York Times in 2013 that a Lower East Side bar had a cocktail named after Flip, a gin-cucumber mix sweetened with St. Germain, for $12. The Guardian Angels Catholic School in Stittsville, Ontario, staged a carnival in 2014 where contestants use a mallet to send a fake frog named Flip flying into a pot (as best as we can tell, it wasn’t a chamber pot).

Many of the Flips appeared in 1999 in the two-volume DVD set “Cartoons That Time Forgot” in various states of wear. We hope, for the sake for frog and quasi-frog cartoon fans everywhere, the full series of shorts will soon be available.

Note: My thanks to Thunderbean and Jerry Beck for the higher-quality frames you see here.