Paul Fennell

Animated television commercials were still popular with ad agencies and clients as 1960 drew to an end. Small production houses continued to make them on both coasts and in a number of other cities, including Albuquerque.

Below are some far-too-low resolution frames taken from the pages of Television Age for November and December 1960.

A bit of a key if you haven’t caught these compilations before—

Ray Fatava was a former animator for Gene Deitch at Terrytoons. Elektra was fronted by Abe Liss, ex-UPA animator. Ray Patin was an ex-Disney and Warners animator; his art director was John Dunn. Lars Colonius had been a Disney man, who later made the favourite fallout paranoia film Duck and Cover. Film Fair was run by Gus Jekel. Playhouse Pictures was owned by Ade Woolery with Bill Melendez as one of his top creative people. Animation Inc. was led by Earl Klein, who was a layout artist for Chuck Jones in the war years. Fred Crippen was the president of Pantomime. Pelican was the company started by ex-MGM animator Jack Zander. And Joe Oriolo was in charge of the Felix the Cat TV cartoons made at Paramount and distributed by Trans-Lux. In what looks like a promo frame below, Felix is doing a send-up of Ed Murrow's Person to Person TV show, complete with lit cigarette and ashtray.



A number of studios aren’t represented in the frames above, including Quartet Films (Art Babbitt, Arnold Gillespie, Stan Walsh and Les Goldman), Grantray-Lawrence (Ray Patterson, Grant Simmons), Cascade Pictures (Tex Avery and Bill Mason), Herb Klynn’s Format Films (gearing up to produce The Alvin Show) and Paul Kim and Lew Gifford out of New York.

One other name missing from the list is Paul J. Fennell, who seems to have wound down his studio on North La Cienega Blvd. and accepted a job as a director at Hanna-Barbera before being hired four months later in July 1959 as an associated producer by Larry Harmon Productions, makers of Bozo the Clown TV cartoons and sub-contracted to make some of the Popeye cartoons for Al Brodax of King Features, as well as Dick Tracy and Mr. Magoo TV shorts for UPA. An ad in Billboard in its Dec. 16, 1957 issue marks the studio’s 12th anniversary with a list of clients, including Campbell Soups, Kellogg, Philco and U.S. Rubber, makers of Keds running shoes. The company animated Kedso the Clown. The studio’s art director was Ed Benedict before he went to MGM.

But Fennell went back long before that and was one of the veterans who stuck around animation for decades. Chuck Jones says his first job at Leon Schlesinger’s studio in 1933 was assisting Fennell, who had been hired from Disney to animate when Schlesinger parted with producers Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising earlier in the year.

Fennell was born November 9, 1909 in Grafton, Nebraska. The 1930 Census reports he was a private at the U.S. Naval Air Station near San Diego. In April the following year, his career took a large turn as he was hired at Walt Disney. After his stint at Schlesinger, he was employed by Harman and Ising on their MGM cartoons; Bill Hanna said he was the uncredited co-director of To Spring. Hugh and Rudy were bounced in 1937; by December that year, Fennell was hired at Ub Iwerks’ newly refinanced Animated Cartoons, Inc., which was renamed Cartoon Films, Ltd. Through some set of circumstances, Iwerks returned to Disney and Fennell took over the operations, making animated commercials for movie theatres and the Gran’ Pop Monkey cartoons originally intended for British cinemas. Among his animation staff were Rudy Zamora, Don Williams, Tom McKimson and Ed Benedict.

We’ll allow the Los Angeles Tidings, a Catholic newspaper, of October 1, 1954 to fill us in about Fennell’s biography and his post-war studio.

Inside TV Commercials
When those little figures in the cartoon commercials dance across your TV screen, do you flip to another channel while Junior howls: “I want to see the funnies?"
Or do they "get" you as they must be getting millions of others?
These little creatures of crayon are big business in TV today. Yet few persons realize the time, effort, and hard cash that go into the making of each single, one-minute cartoon.
According to Paul J. Fennell, one-time Disney animator, who now operates his own studies at 404 La Cienega Blvd., it takes staff of about 20 talented artists, technicians and ideas experts from 10 days to two weeks to turn out a commercial cartoon you'll see on your TV set in one minute flat.
At the Fennell studio, equipment and processes are just the same as at the vast Disney plant. The scale is smaller, but the objective is the same. And Paul Fennell is quick to point out that the inspiration behind the commercial cartoon had its source in the fertile land of Walt Disney.
Told It to the Marines.
Back in 1931, Fennell, "always able to draw a little," joined the Disney staff. He was there 3 1/2 years. He worked too for Schlesinger’s cartoon department at Warners and for Paramount in New York, where he drew some of the early caricatures of Popeye.
Paul Fennell himself was a marine. He joined them first when only 19 and got into that Nicaragua jaunt. His second hitch, during World War II, found him at the photo-science labs operated by the Navy where, directly under late Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, he organized a team to "draw pictures of battles: not to fight them."
Every naval engagement had to be filmed to instruct personnel and inform strategists. This couldn't be done during actual battles, so it had to be reconstructed by Fennell and others. They used "doodles" for ships, and in cartoon form tested the deployment of US and enemy warships.
When Paul Fennell, by this time a lieutenant colonel, left the service in 1945, he'd had a lot of additional experience. Friends offered to put up the cash to enable him to "start on his own." Shaking a bit, he agreed. For one thing, his wife Lucille—a convert, by the way—already had presented him three of the four children they now have. They had the family—it's now two of each—but, as yet, no home.
The firm now is debt-free, and the Fennells have a fine home out in the San Fernando Valley parish of St Francis de Sales. Prayer, faith and enterprise have been rewarded.
Precision Amazing.
The Fennell studio, humming like a hive, turns out such familiar animated cartoon characters as the Campbell Soup Kids; the tumble-haired boy with a Cheerio muscle in his arm; Snap, Krackle and Pop, the Rice Krispy trio; and several other of the little folks you let into you home for a minute, now and again.
Everything is done with precise sketches and suitable forms of animation. You would be amazed how many different drawings have to be made.
Even a one-minute cartoon often meant drawing and coloring 1,000 different, consecutive pictures. The backgrounds, all drawn separately, change from 20 to a hundred times—which multiplies the chores.
Success Speaks Well.
There's more to it, however, than just drawing. These cartoon creatures—whether used in commercials or theatrical films—begin to live, to take on personality. Then, like real mortals, they begin also to reflect examples, good or bad.
Paul Fennell, a life-long Catholic, makes sure that what they say, sing or do is always morally decent.
He speaks more of "keeping them in good taste,” but says “they're comical and amusing only when they’re clean.”
And his success proves that at least some of the more important TV sponsors are thinking along the same healthy lines.

Among Fennell’s other projects were illustrating the children’s book “The Bear Facts” by Polly Cuthbertson (1947), a award-winning, 18-minute short for Penn Mutual Life Insurance named A Century of Security (also 1947) and a ten-minute film for the National Tuberculosis Association called You Can Help (1948). The company even registered the music for a jingle for Schmidt’s Ale (1951).

Larry Harmon’s studio fizzled out in the early 1960s, as did many of the commercial operations; Harmon’s Laurel and Hardy series was finally produced at Hanna-Barbera. Friz Freleng brought in Fennell and put him “in charge of cartoon blurbs” (Daily Variety, Feb. 9, 1966) but I don’t believe he was credited with any cartoons at DePatie-Freleng. He then was hired for a decade-long run at Filmation.

In 1984, he was among the honourees by the Screen Cartoonists Guild for a half century in animation. He died January 18, 1990.

We leave Mr. Fennell now to post some ads from the year-end edition of Television Age for 1960.