Assembly Line Art in New Rochelle

1955 was a pretty good year for Paul Terry. He was still tied in with 20th Century Fox to put new cartoons in theatres. He was putting his old ones on television thanks to a network deal. And at the end of the year, he decided to take the money and run by working out the sale of his studio to CBS for $5,000,000.

The year was Terry’s 40th anniversary in animation and that made him good copy for national newspaper writers. After all, he pre-dated that Walt guy everyone was so giddy about. Here are two of the stories. The first one appeared in papers around January 18th and the second around March 7th.

The Marquee
By Dick Kleiner
Sure, a little bit of Hollywood fell from out the sky one day, and nestled in New Rochelle right next to the railroad tracks. It's quite surprising, but it's been in that suburban Westchester town for years.
Paul Terry makes his fabulous movie shorts, Terrytoons ("Mighty Mouse," "Tom and Jerry," "Heckle and Jeckle," and so forth), in a pleasant New York suburb. Few people, outside the movie business, know about it, because Terry isn't the type to go around beating drums.
He's an elderly, hearty, philosophical man, primarily an artist, who was one of the first to go into animated cartoons. In those trail-blazing days, all movies were made in the New York area. The live stuff moved to California for weather purposes, and many cartoon studios followed. But Terry stayed where he was and he's still there.

He likes to recall how the chain of events that led him to his present spot started with the San Francisco quake. He was a newspaper artist there at the time, then left and went to Montana for a few years. From there he joined the general eastward movement of artistic young men, and landed in New York.
"My early years seemed sort of aimless," he says. "I drew for newspapers, learned something of photography, developed an interest in the theatre. And then, in '13, I saw the first animated cartoons. I knew then that my aimless wanderings had all been with some point--and this was it. In animated cartoons, I could fuse my interests in art, photography and the theatre into one project. So I began to make cartoons immediately."
His first, "Little Herman," came out in 1915. And he's been making them steadily ever since. Since the name Terrytoons was coined, there have been more than 650 of the six-minute shorts.
The Terry factory—for that's what it is, assembly-line art—works steadily. There are always several shorts in the works—one being written, one being animated, one being filmed, one being colored. Usually more than one in each stage. The place is always humming: it's animated itself.

Animated Cartoon Pioneer Going Strong on TV Show
By WAYNE OLIVER
NEW YORK, March 7 (AP)—A pioneer of animated cartoons who predates Walt Disney is going strong on daytime television.
He's Paul Terry who began with newspaper comic strips 50 years ago and since 1915 has been doing animated cartoons for the movies, for the past year and a half he has been showing his Terrytoons on CBS' Barker Bill five afternoons a week.
"We've got the top rated daytime show on television," beams the 68-year-old cartoon tycoon who, like Disney, makes his big money from the movies but couldn't resist the lure of TV.
"It's due to the power of the cartoon," he declares. "I think the cartoon is one of the best mediums of information and education. It can put over ideas without personalities it doesn't hurt anybody."
"The cartoon is truly an American art," he continues. "It embodies all the arts.
"You have the composer who puts everything he has into the music for the cartoon, the painter who concentrates on providing the most artistic background he can, and the animator responsible for the acting.
"Because they're all shoved at you at the same time, you really enjoy a cartoon more the second time than the first."

Terry was born in California and began his career there, but reversing Horace Greeley's famous admonition, came East and remained.
"In those days the whole motion picture industry was here," he explains. "Then they started moving to Hollywood because of the light. Movies were mostly made out of doors then and the prime reason they moved to California was because of the light.
"Now, with modern lighting a large part of their production is indoors. The movie industry could just as easily have been here if modern lighting had been available then.
"There never was a reason for our end of it to move. There was always indoor lighting."
Terry's studios are in suburban New Rochelle where he still turns out about 26 movies cartoons a year for 20th Century-Fox.
"And they're all switched to Cinemascope now," he adds.