In 1921, Aesop Said...

Jay Ward and Bill Scott’s “Fractured Fairy Tales” and their cousin Aesop’s Fables are still great fun to watch, but the idea for the segment really wasn’t that original.

Back in the silent cartoon days, fairy tales were spoofed in Pathé’s “Aesop’s Fables” series under the direction of none other than Paul Terry.

Terry doesn’t get a lot of love these days. He spent as little as possible to make repetitive cartoons, too many with characters only die-hard fans would remember. He restricted Paul Scheib’s music scoring. He got rid of the great Bill Tytla to save money and waited out employees during an ultimately failed strike in the late ‘40s. He never gave animators or actors a screen credit. He promised Manny Davis and other long-time employees a share of the money when he cashed out. They didn’t get a penny when CBS bought the Terrytoons studio.

Yet it was a different story in the 1920s. It’s a familiar quote that Walt Disney aspired to make cartoons as good as Terry’s Aesop Fables.

The trade papers anxiously awaited Terry’s newest endeavour. Motion Picture World of June 4, 1921, gave a plug. There appears to be some Pathé butt kissing here. How could the writer call the Fables “realistic” with a straight face?

Aesop’s Fables for Release in Animated Form Beginning June 19
At last the rich mines of picture material contained in Aesop's Fables have been suitably developed for popular screen use. This interesting information comes from Pathe Exchange announcing an arrangement with Fables Pictures, Inc., for the weekly release, beginning June 19, of a series of "Aesop's Fables Modernized," in the form of animated cartoons by Paul Terry.
The first Pathe release will be Cartoonist Terry's up-to-date adaptation of the fable of "The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg," which has an honored place in the popular literature of every civilized race and country. It will be followed at weekly intervals by other equally familiar Aesop subjects. The Pathe release schedule shows "The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg" followed successively by "Mice in Council," "The Rooster and the Eagle," "Ants and the Grasshopper" and "Cats at Law.”
It is reported that when the Pathe Exchange authorities viewed the first half dozen or more of these "Aesop's Fables Modernized" they were of one mind with Fables Pictures, Inc., regarding their intrinsic screen merit and popular appeal. Many exhibitors and picture patrons will remember Paul Terry as the cartoonist of the "Farmer Alfalfa" series, which won speedy accceptance a few years ago; also the "Terry Burlesques," animated cartoon travesties of popular screen features.
Those who have been present at projections of Paul Terry's Aesop adaptations appear to agree, it is said, that they are superior to anything of the kind heretofore produced. The comic action of the animal and bird characters is said to be so realistic as to cause the beholder to forget that it is all obtained by the animated cartoon process; moreover, that the modern exceedingly laughable dramatization in pictures and the force of the moral are just as "Aesopian" as in the immortal originals.
The obvious vast advantage of the screen utilization of material so universally familiar, and so highly relished, as the fables of Aesop has been the motive for many attempts to make it effective. Usually they have failed, it is said, through inability to seize the comic spirit inherent — though seldom emphasized — in these ancient classics in which human conflicts are illuminated in the words and actions of familiar animals. In other instances an attempt at modernization has not been accompanied by sufficient creative invention to make the screen fable-drama complete. The use of mechanical animal figures — since there is no "school of acting" of proved efficiency in the case of ducks, geese, donkeys, roosters, wolves and other inhabitants of barnyard and forest — has seemed to be unsatisfactory. So it has remained for Fables Pictures, Inc., to present Cartoonist Paul Terry's solution of the problem — for distribution by Pathe.

The publication, a week later, reported the cartoons had been booked throughout the Keith circuit, arguably the largest theatre chain in the U.S. at the time, as it operated (with the Orpheum) a huge number of vaudeville houses.

The first of Terry’s Fables was a success, judging by this review in Exhibitors Herald of July 9, 1921.

AESOP'S FABLES
(PATHE)
Paul Terry, the cartoonist, has awakened new interest in the ancient Greek classics, by his clever animation of the Aesop's fables. The first to be shown in Chicago was "The Goose that Laid the Golden Egg," and if succeeding pictures of this series are as funny as the first, their success is assured.
At the new Adams theatre, where this one was shown, it met with hearty approval. Terry has taken the familiar story of the farmer and his greedy wife and with a few deftly written titles, and his "gimme" cat, made as delightful a one-reel subject as has flashed across the screen in some time. The animation is good, the photography excellent, and he gets a laugh without striving for it in every' scene. Let us have more of these unique cartoons.

Moving Picture World, reviewing The Ants and the Grasshopper in its July 21, 1921 edition, declared “Paul Terry has done some excellent work in this fable,” and proclaimed the cartoon “just as amusing and instructive as the three earlier members of this series.”

“More of these unique cartoons,” theatres got. Through the 1920s, Terry pumped out one a week, 52 cartoons a year. But that would soon have to change. Nowhere in these stories is there any mention of the man who had the money behind the Fables studio—Amedee Van Beuren. Sound arrived in earnest in 1928 and Van Beuren wanted to add it to the Fables cartoons. Terry didn’t. Terry soon found himself out of work.

Van Beuren carried on with the no-longer-noiseless Fables under the banner of Van Beuren Productions. Terry set up his own studio—by now, he had no choice but to include a soundtrack—first with partners and then on his own, releasing his cartoons through Educational Pictures, which was swallowed up by 20th Century Fox. Fox exchanges continued to send Terrytoons to theatres well into the age of television.

Terry died in 1971. His Fables will live on, if a fund-raising campaign is a success. They won’t be altogether silent; musician Charlie Judkins will provide his usual well-thought-out piano accompaniment to these pictures. You can find out more about the project at this site.