The Making of Of Mice and Magic

There was a time, and this will be hard for people weaned on the internet to believe, when there was next-to-no information out there about animated cartoons, especially those without the name “Disney.”

In fact, cartoons weren’t treated seriously. They were something for kids. You were kind of an outcast if you were past the age of 12 and liked cartoons. You might have thought you were the only one out there.

But there were plenty of outcasts out there. And they were brought together when someone decided to write a history of animated cartoons.

That someone was not a dry, dull historian. He was the movie reviewer for the most populist television show dealing with show biz—Entertainment Tonight.

Leonard Martin’s name was known to millions of movie fans. He had instant credibility. And he and a team of trusty researchers began to delve into the glory days of animated shorts that had appeared on the big screen.

Remember, this is before internet sites and home video formats. If you wanted to watch a cartoon, you had to find a 35 or 16 millimetre print. The origins of some of the cartoons was muddied because their credits had been chopped off and replaced by the names of television distributors. As odd as it may seem to fans today, discovering there was something called Van Beuren Productions and that someone named Ub Iwerks had a studio that made cartoons were major revelations to many.

Of Mice and Magic banded together adults who loved Bugs Bunny, Tom and Jerry, Betty Boop, Woody Woodpecker, Mighty Mouse and many other characters from a dead movie era. And it provided the foundation for all further research.

Just how did the book get written? Maltin talked about it in a feature story that appeared in a Sunday edition of the Hartford Courant, Dec. 28, 1980.

Movie Writer's Work Was All Animated
By HENRY McNULTY
To Leonard Maltin—author, historian, and film buff extraordinaire—the limit of the 24-hour day is a major problem.
Maltin writes movie history, and that means seeing hundreds even thousands of films. The reference book "TV Movies," which he edited, is now in its ninth printing; he has just written "Of Mice and Magic," the first complete, scholarly history of American animated cartoons. And, he said, there simply isn't enough time in each day to do the research for such books, let alone the writing.
"I get very frustrated," he confessed recently in a conversation at his publisher's office. "How I got it done, I don't know," he said.
Living in New York City helped, said Maltin. In fact, it would have been nearly impossible for him to see so many movies if he had happened to live anywhere else—even Hollywood.
Maltin has a film collection of his own (mostly cartoons and short subjects), but for his research he also made use of the dozens of first-run theaters and movie revival houses in New York, had access to several private collections, took advantage of the plentitude of movies shown on television in New York and haunted the Department of Film at the Museum of Modern Art. "If you live in New York," he said, "you're all set."

The new book deals with the rise and fall of every American animated cartoon figure from Gertie the Dinosaur to Fritz the Cat. All the big ones are there, of course—Mickey Mouse, Betty Boop, Porky Pig, Tom and Jerry, Popeye, Mighty Mouse, Donald Duck, the Pink Panther, Woody Woodpecker, Bugs Bunny, Superman, Mr. Magoo, Casper the Ghost, Daffy Duck, Deputy Dawg, Farmer Al Falfa and dozens more. But there are also passages devoted to the importance of formerly popular characters who have nearly been forgotten. Koko the Clown, Bosko, Herman and Katnip, Flip the Frog, the Egghead, Barney Bear and Gerald McBoing Boing are all studied.
Maltin, 29, teaches a course in the history of animation at the New School for Social Research in New York. But his interest in cartoons goes back, as one would expect, to his childhood in Teaneck, N. J.
"My love of cartoons is based on TV and the shorts they used to show in the movies," he said. "I was a Saturday matinee freak—when they still had Saturday matinees."
The move away from merely enjoying films to writing about them came in Maltin's early childhood. He and a friend put out a neighborhood newsletter dealing mainly with comic books and films; it was printed using a device known as a hectograph, basically a plate of firm gelatin which is used to transfer written images. (It’s a lot easier in this age of Xerox, when any kid with a nickel can get something copied," he commented.)
This led to a mimeographed magazine—"a giant leap forward" which featured the young Maltin's interviews with the likes of cartoonists Jules Feiffer, Charles Shulz [sic] and Rube Goldberg.
In his early teen-age years, he began contributing occasional articles to a Canadian journal called Film Fan Monthly, a struggling publication with a mere 400 subscribers. “It was offset-printed," Maltin said. "This was Valhalla for me." After a while, however, the man who headed the magazine discovered that he couldn't keep it up and offered to turn the whole business over to Maltin, by then his premier writer. At age 15, the film buff found himself in the publishing business.
"We dealt with old Hollywood movies," he said. "From the '20s, '30s and '40s. Everybody worked for free, of course, and we loved writing about film personalities who weren't the really popular ones. We were almost doggedly non-commercial; we'd say, 'I don't want to do this—just because everybody else is doing it.’” Film Fan Monthly eventually built its circulation to about 2,000.
While editing the magazine, Maltin continued his education, though he considered Film Fan Monthly "much more important than high school." (He said he was a better-than-average student, although between seeing hundreds of movies and writing about them, he found little time for his studies.)

In his senior year, Maltin was introduced to an editor at the New American Library publishing house who was a fellow film fan. The editor, it turned out, was a subscriber to Film Fan Monthly—and was surprised to discover that this 18-year-old was the brains behind the magazine.
The rest, as they say, is history. The book editor had been searching for someone to put together an encyclopedic guide to old movies on TV and, before long, he and Maltin had signed a contract. "TV Movies" has been updated over and over again, and now contains listings for some 13,000 movies and 1,200 more made-for-TV films.
During the 1970s, Maltin attended New York University and majored in journalism. More books followed, all dealing with films of one type or another—"Movie Comedy Teams," "Our Gang," "The Great Movie Shorts" and others.
Maltin attended an International Animation Festival in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, in 1974, and while there got to talk to animators, fimmmakers, journalists, artists and others in the cartoon business. He also saw about 200 animated films and became interested all over again in his first love, cartoons.
Back in the United States, he made some inquiries and discovered that almost nothing in a serious vein had been written about animated cartoons.
"A lot of books talked about early experiments he said, "and of course there was lots of stuff on Disney. But as for Bugs Bunny, Popeye, or anything like that—forget it."
So he started assembling material. He reviewed and organized his own cartoon collection, and began viewing obscure or forgotten cartoons at the Museum of Modern Art (a service, by the way, that is open mostly to experts and scholars, not to the general public). "It was all original research," he said, "because so little had been written."
During his research, Maltin always carried a notebook to screenings—a practice of his for years now. "I try to rely on my memory, but sometimes it just can't be done," he said. "I'm sure to forget some minor but important point."
He also made it a point to talk to cartooning pioneers. "I cornered John Hubley (the Disney animator who later headed UPA Studios) at a cocktail party," Maltin said. "He has since died. I was very lucky to get to talk to him. And others filled me in on a lot of material; Dick Huemer is a virtual one-man history of animation. He started with Mutt and Jeff and went through Disney, Fleischer, Mintz—he wrote 'Dumbo' for Disney."
Not one person Maltin asked for an interview turned him down. "Everybody in this field feels very keenly the neglect that animation has suffered over the years," he said.
"Of Mice and Magic" deals with such subjects as why it was so difficult to animate the Seven Dwarfs (they all had to move in different ways, yet keep in step) and how the success of Hanna-Barbera cartoons on TV changed Warner Brothers' Looney Tunes series. It is informative on such technical matters as Max Fleischer's rotograph and Disney's multiplane camera.
But it also takes a nostalgic look at the "stars" of animated cartoons and the characteristics that endeared them to millions of children—and adults. Popeye's fondness (nay, obsession) for spinach; Woody Woodpecker's inspired zaniness; and Bugs Bunny's cheerful "What's up, Doc?" are all treated with affection.

Bugs is Maltin's favorite cartoon star, although he added hastily, "I like so many for so many different reasons."
He isn't only captivated with old-timers, either; many of today's cartoons fascinate him, but he pointed out: "Most people only see what is shown on TV on Saturday morning. And if they see that, they see garbage there's no getting around it."
Animated cartoon festivals are held in various places all the time, he said. Last year, he attended a festival in Canada which featured some 600 different brand-new animated firms—some short, some long, some serious, some humorous, some fantastic and some realistic. "The talent is there," Maltin said. "The technique is there. But the films are being done by people who are starving."
He suggests that those who like cartoons petition local colleges and museums to book The Tournee of Animation and other traveling film packages that highlight recent animated films. But he quickly admits that the public may not take to foreign animated films with the zest that greeted Mickey Mouse. "I know I know," he said.
"People think, ‘Yugoslavian cartoons? Get away!’ What they want to see is Tweety and Sylvester! But I can tell you that seeing new animated films is not like swallowing medicine. It's like watching wonderful movies."
With the cartoon book into a paperback printing and the 1981-82 edition of "TV Movies" behind him, Maltin says he is now "quieting down" in his movie-viewing habits. What that means is being content with seeing every new film in New York, reviewing old favorites, and not worrying about much else.
"My quieting down," he said, "is someone else's film mania."

Of Mice and Magic proved the commercial saleability of research involving the history of animated cartoons and the people who made them. From it sprang, slowly but surely, further revived knowledge of cartoons through fresh interviews and old films. We, as fans of cartoons, have all benefited. The internet has been a boon. Yes, well-meaning people have published their hard-to-kill personal theories as cold, hard factual history. But oceans of information about cartoons are now available with a few keystrokes. Video cassettes, then laser discs, then CDs/Blu-rays have brought animated shorts into the home that would have been almost impossible to see before, some thanks to incredible amounts of love by fans that have restored them.

Leonard Maltin deserves some credit for sparking all this. I’ve never met him, but I do thank him.