Death to Terrytoons

Terrytoons died because the dollar signs didn’t add up.

The Saturday morning cartoon business was huge. In the late 1960s, CBS was buying shows from Hanna-Barbera and Filmation. That’s even though CBS had its own cartoon studio. And the company let it die.

It made no sense. CBS should have easily created its own Saturday morning shows, maybe even selling them to other networks. But, instead, it let its Terrytoons studio wither away. Reader Andrew Lederer points out the studio was sold in 1971 to CBS' former Viacom division.

The studio had been creating TV cartoons in the early ‘60s. It invented Deputy Dawg as well as the insufferable Luno, the flying horse. But soon everything was shut down.

The Daily News in Tarrytown, New York looked back at the studio in a two-part feature story that ran on January 4th and 5th of 1973. Here it is below. We presume the author used a pseudonym.

Terrytoons' departure ends an era
First of two articles
By DICK TRACY
It was 63 years ago that Gertie the Dinosaur first flickered across the American consciousness.
Since then innumerable one-dimensional lions and cats and insects and dogs and nonsense creatures, as well as people, have entertained and influenced generations of movie goers and television watchers.
Millions of drawings on paper and celluloid have gone into building an art form and an industry which is now a vital part of the 20th century imagination.
LAST MONTH, in New Rochelle, what was an important chapter in the development of animated cartoons was brought to a close.
Terrytoons, which had operated there since 1934, closed down its Centre Avenue studio and moved its headquarters to offices in Manhattan.
The move out of Westchester County comes following a fall-off since 1969 on production by the company, which over the years created such one-dimensional stars as Mighty Mouse. Heckle and Jeckle and Deputy Dawg. It also marks the end of the only remaining complete animation studio on the East Coast.
"If our production of cartoons were to resume again, and it might someday," said William Weiss, the retired president of Terrytoons, "we'd probably have to open on the West coast."
Weiss, who has been retained as a consultant by Terrytoons' parent company, Viacom International Inc., blamed the wind-down in production over the past few years on a combination of factors, including changing forces in the animation industry and the nation's economy as well as in television program syndication.

The television market has been an integral part of Terrytoon operations since the company was sold in 1956 to CBS by the late Paul Terry, founder and guiding force behind the growth of the Westchester-based cartoon company.
IT WAS IN the years following 1956 that the tempo of operations at the New Rochelle headquarters began to speed up as the staff of artists, directors and technicians bore down to meet the deadline pressures of a weekly Saturday morning show on CBS.
Before the changeover to television, a staff of slightly more than 100 people working on the three floors of the company's operations had turned out 26 shorts each year for screening in movie theaters in the U.S. and overseas.
During the late '50s and into the 1960s, a smaller staff was producing about 100 shorts each year for both movie theaters and the network.
This pace of mid-century activities would most likely have been unrecognizable to early animators such as Winsor McKay [sic]. whose "Gertie the Dinosaur" in 1909 was one of the earliest touchstones of animated magic.
IT WAS THE work of McKay and other early cartoonists that gave Paul Terry the idea of trying his hand at animation in 1915.
An illustrator with the New York Globe at the time, Terry worked in his living room for six months to produce his first scratchy short, "Little Herman," a character based on a magician whose vaudeville stage name was "Herman the Great."
He had trouble selling the work until he came up to New Rochelle and approached officials of the Thanhouser studios, a long defunct motion picture company. The company bought the work after youngsters invited off the street by Terry broke up in laughter at the moving cartoon.

"Those children sold my picture for me," he said later. "They laughed and everybody laughed but I wasn't sure whether Mr. Thanhouser and his crew were laughing at the picture or at the children, they laughed so hard."
There followed a steady growth in the fortunes of Paul Terry and his moving cartoons as he produced first a series based on Aesop's fables and later a stream of characters ranging from mosquitoes that sang jazz, to villainous spiders and peg-legged pirates.
IN THE MIDDLE '30s, when he moved his studios out of New York up to the city where he had sold his first short, the animation industry was poised on the threshold of what was to become a period of growth which still he hasn't ended.
Techniques and technology were improving, and the public was demanding quality in their cartoons People had grown used to moving cartoons, and so were no longer beguiled by the mere novelty of drawings that moved.
At the same time that Terrytoons was beginning to move, a man by the name of Disney, who had a studio on the West Coast, was beginning to get a very good reputation among animators.
Weiss tells the story of a secret meeting held in a movie theater in New Rochelle at which some of Terry's top animators were lured out to work on projected full-length animated movies — notably Snow White.
"Some of Disney's key men received their training in our studio." adds Weiss, who didn't learn about the meeting until some time after it had occurred.
CORPORATE PIRACY wasn't the only bad news plagued the Terry operation in the late '30s. One news story which hit the front pages was the report of a law suit filed against the famous illustrator by Frank H. Moser, who had been Terry's partner until 1936 when he sold his 50 per cent share of the company for $24,200.
Moser charged that fraud and deceit had been used to paint a bad financial picture of the operation when in fact the company was in the pink financially and about to expand. The courts found in favor of Terry. This ended what had been an early triumvirate of Terry, Moser and Philip Scheib, the music director who remained with the company longer even than Terry.
As the country entered the forties, the Terry characters went to war along with everybody else. Shorts such as "All Out For V" stressed "preparation and the importance of individual work" and swing shifts of war factories were treated to the midnight spectacle of helmeted screen animals marching to victory.
IN 1942. a birth took place at the Terrytoons studio which was destined to lift the firm to its highest pinnacle of public recognition. The new creation was called Mighty Mouse.
Thirty years ago this year this screen hero, who was the product of the combined efforts of several people, has fulfilled Paul Terry's original predictions that he would be the most popular Terry character ever. His shorts, along with other Terry Creations, are still released by the company at the rate of 12 each year.
After the war years, the forties blended into the fifties and television became king of the media mountain. The impact of the electronic media on the art and industry of animation would generate forces which
would eventually bring abort a severe cutback in Terry operations.
NEXT • the machinery behind the ghost.

A look back on the 'golden days'
Second of two articles
By DICK TRACY
Tommy Morrison, who once supplied the voice of Mighty Mouse, is a thin, ruddy-faced man whose light blue eyes and quick movements might fit your image of a cartoon animator.
The other day, he and Bill Weiss, who retired this fall as president of Terrytoons, sat in their New Rochelle office, amidst cartons and furniture labled for shipment to New York, and talked about the end of an era.
THE ERA BEGAN 38 years ago when the late Paul Terry moved his animated cartoon studio up to the southern Westchester city.
Over the years such celluloid celebrities as Mighty Mouse, Heckle and Jeckle, Dinky Duck, Deputy Dawg, Tom Terrific, Koolcat [?] and a host of other quick-witted rascals and kind-hearted dimwits danced their seven minute stories upon the animation camera stage and then were gone back to the story room.
Now, the story room, like the rest of the Centre Avenue studio, is empty. The few remaining pieces of furniture—a couch, a table, the fiberboard where artists pinned up their rough drawings—have been sold, given away or junked, gone the route of the special photographic equipment and the metal shelves where films were stored and the special desks where once animators and background men, inkers and opaquers toiled to supply a public hungry for funny cartoons.
All gone.
TERRYTOONS will operate out of the Manhattan offices of Viacom International Inc., formerly a division CBS and now the cartoon firm's parent company.
The scale of operations, however, has been considerably reduced from the early and middle '60s when the Centre Avenue studio hit full stride with its production for a weekly television show plus creation of commercials such as Bert and Harry, the Piels Beer duo.
It was in those golden days that, despite what business manager Nicholas Alborti terms a heavy production schedule, the company was still able to turn out quality material such as Eli Bauer's "Hector Heathcote," the minute-and-a-half man.
The short "Drum Roll" took first prize at the Venice Children's Film Festival for "using the particular possibilities of animation to realize a visual amusement permeated with intelligent humanism."
TODAY THE firm is engaged solely in sales and servicing of existing cartoons, unlike the days when dozens of animators like Tommy Morrison would wrack their imaginations in the story room or animators' cells. At times, they'd jump up to grimace or do a jig in front of the mirror, which was standard equipment for each animator, to help him realize the character he was working on.
"An animator has to be an actor," explained Morrison, who is a resident of Larchmont, as was his ex-boss Paul Terry.
"He has to have a feel for the character, then he has to make these feelings intelligible with his drawings. He gets very close in his mind to the character." Given such working conditions, it's understandable that the atmosphere at Terrytoons was unlike any conventional working environment, such as, say, a bank or a factory.
"Our approach over the years was strictly a fun approach," said Weiss who, like Morrison, went with Terry in the early '30s. "We wanted to make the kids enjoy themselves; to stir their imaginations."

THIS FUN approach carried over into the workday world, and some of the two men's fondest memories are of the early days in the Pershing Square building in New Rochelle, when the staff seemed to have as much fun as their celluloid creations.
The tale is told of one Christmas party when the 12-story building's elevators were commandeered by members of the Terry staff, and everybody using the elevators that day ended up at the seventh floor party—whether they liked it or not.
This spirit seemed to depart the company's operations in the '50s and '60s, perhaps, they suggest, because of the increased production pressure caused by television and because the new generation of animators, while dedicated the their craft, seemed less inclined to fool.
The two also claim the new batch of animators, while serious in their work, can't match up to the craftsmanship of those who were trained in pre-television days.
"Anytime you see really good work nowadays," said Weiss, "you can almost bet it war, done by one of the old timers; their training was more painstaking and they had time to develop greater skills.
MUCH OF THE work done on contemporary shows, which all feature humanoid characters, does not require the patient workmanship and craft which young animators cut their teeth on in the days when movie-goers were treated to a cartoon and newsreel as well as the feature show.
"There are a lot of would be good animators around," said Weiss, "but there aren't any places where they can get the type of training that used to be offered by us and by other studios."
Because cartooning is such a big business in this country, he explained, development of mass production techniques and specialized services to do stages of animation work have tended to shift the emphasis away from the individual animator's skillfulness.
"In the old days they'd study things like Grey's Anatomy or books on the bone structure of animals," he said. "Today this type of accomplishment isn't needed, so not many have it.
"In the United States, Australia and Japan, animation is a business. In most European countries it's an art form."
A GREAT DEAL of the work done for contemporary television animation is contracted out, he said, and the Japanese have captured a good portion of this market because of their ability to do the work less expensively.
And what of the future?
"Computers," said Weiss, "they're now working on a way to produce animated work by computer."
"Never," said Morrison. "It won't be animation if the human intelligence, the creativity, is taken out of it." He said this wistfully, as though afraid to think of a computerized future replacing what was in his lifetime an exacting art requiring close cooperation between the human brain and man's machines to produce the 8,000 to 10,000 frames, carefully drawn and colored, which made up the average short.
BUT ALL HOPE isn't lost. Questioning of several members of the under-30 set indicates a complete antipathy to much of the animation now turned out for mass consumption.
"There's one good thing about these modern cartoons," said a young mother, "kids don't stay glued to the TV set all Saturday morning like we used to. They go out and play."
Another girl summed it up more succinctly. "Cartoons just ain't funny no more," she lamented with a grimace and a wink in the best tradition of animation.