Howard Beckerman and Felix

Was ever a bad word spoken about Howard Beckerman? I don’t think so.

Every account I’ve read of Howard makes him out to be a genuine person who anyone would like to meet.

To pin some labels on him, Howard was an animator, teacher, documentarian and (going back to the mid-1950s) union activist. He has passed away at the age of 93. (Howard is with Harry Piel in the picture, purloined from J.J. Sedelmaier’s site).

His home base was New York City where he worked for UPA, Terrytoons (and championed the studio in his column), Paramount and then in commercial animation. Howard was wisely hired in June 1982 by Back Stage magazine to write a weekly column about animation. Some columns were adorned with his own sketches. We reprinted his tribute to Jim Tyer (a must-read for any Tyer fan) in this post. In his column of July 9, 1982, he set the record straight about the creation of Felix the Cat, arguably the biggest cartoon star of the silent era. He championed a modest man named Otto Messmer. Whether Howard was the first to do this, someone else can tell you, but today we know that Pat Sullivan was not the man solely responsible for Felix, which is what newspapers in the 1920s would have you believe.

Here is his column.

In a world where everyday our attention is directed to some new idea or gimmick we tend to forget about older things that once served us very well. Some of the most popular items disappear for our conciousness [sic] once they drop out of public view. It is only when someone revives some once pleasurable but now forgotten item that we realize how fickle our minds are. Well, perhaps you noticed as I did recently the plush black and white dolls that are appearing suddenly at local novelty counters. Felix the Cat is making a comeback.

In the search for properties that generate popular interest and lead to profitable merchandising and exploitation, almost every known character out of the media, has been considered a possible candidate. Somehow, Felix has been overlooked in recent years while other characters have gone onto mass marketing bonanzas. The characters from the Peanuts comic strips are a prime example. I can remember when Charlie Brown and his friends were considered avant garde. This was back in the fifties when the life of the strip was still considered a tenuous thing. Somehow, the antics of Linus and Lucy and the dog Snoopy took hold and the characters today are the most ubiquitous example of cartoon images that are taken for granted as having always been there.
Interest in the acquisition of such potent grabbers of the public interest was heightened in recent months with the debut of American Greeting’s Strawberry Shortcake characters that had already signed up millions in advance sales even before this cherubic creation appeared on television. Not every character can make it into the public conciousness, at least not in the way that would make the accountants jump for joy.
Whatever it is about a series of squiggles or a funny voice that amuses people to reach out for the likeness of a character on a greeting card, a comic book or T-shirt is not easily descernible. Mickey Mouse certainly had it and even today, 25 years after he made his last film, he is more than ever a cult character appearing on all manner of consumer items. Betty Boop had some of the necessary qualities as did Popeye who salvaged many a struggling company from the grips of bankruptcy. Superman and Annie have succeeded in ringing cash register to a crescendo beyond the dreams of their cartoonist creators. Yet before all of these proven popular images of our time made their entrances on the scene, there was Felix.

Felix the Cat was created in 1919 at the Pat Sullivan Studio in New York. His creator was a young man who had stumbled into the animation field almost by accident. When Otto Messmer’s family moved to Fort Lee, New Jersey sometime before World War I, when that city was a flourishing film community prior to Hollywood’s ascendancy, he began to work as a part-time film scene painter at Universal. In August of this year, Messmer will be 90 years old and he still resides in Fort Lee. Messmer met Pat Sullivan, a cartoonist from Australia who had his own studio producing short animated films. Sullivan was impressed with young Messmers talents and together they produced a series of Charlie Chaplin cartoons with the great silent comedians approval. After serving with the signal corps in France during the war, Messmer returned to work with Sullivan. At this point Earl Hurd, another important pioneer from those early years, was turning out films for the Paramount Screen Magazine, and was looking for a filler to complete his schedule. Sullivan wasn’t interested but Messmer, always the amiable fellow, agreed to create a film. He put together a series of gags about cats, namely one key cat, and called it Feline Follies. This was the film that attracted the attention of John King at Paramount who offered Sullivan a contract to produce more of them. Sullivan wasted no-time signing and Messmer went along with the deal as the animator and manager of the series. It was King who choose the name of Felix from the combination of words, Felicity, meaning good luck and feline for cat. In the next ten years Felix became an international success, and the template for a host of imitators. When Sullivan, who had become a millionaire from Messmers creation, died in 1933, the studio passed out of existence because of legal entanglements. Messmer went on to work for other animation companies as well as continuing the Felix comic strip which as part of his celebrity status had been issued by Kings Features at the height of the little black cats’ popularity.
All of this happened before the birth of Mickey, Donald, Pluto, Bugs and Daffy. Felix was revived for a short series of color theatrical shorts at the Van Buren Studio a few years after the closing of the Sullivan studio and were directed by Bert Gillette [sic]. After this short episode Felix didn’t get to smack his lips until the late fifties when cartoonist, Joe Oriolo, who had inherited the chore of drawing the daily Felix strip from Messmer was offered a chance to produce 250 films of adventures of Felix for children’s television programming. These films and all of the old films that remain from the 20’s (many of the classic Felix negatives had been destroyed in a vault fire) were put under the ownership of Oriolo’s Felix the Cat Productions, while the licensing rights still belong to Kings Features.

It was Joe Oriolo, by the way, who with writer, Sy Reit created Caspar [sic] the Friendly Ghost for Paramount. Much like Messmer he signed away the rights. Today with the vast interest in cat characters that have taken the populance’s fancy, Felix is once more in demand, and the demand seems to be big. Already, leading department stores as Bloomingdales, have had to restock the fast selling Felix dolls, according to Joe Oriolo. “I must have signed a thousand autographs,” says Oriolo, who was a guest of the store as a publicity gesture for the Felix dolls and other paraphenalia. For several years the humorous cat drawings of Kliban and the likeness of other cartoon cats such as Heathcliff, and Garfield have been giving Snoopy the dog a great deal of competition. Now it’s Felix’s opportunity once more to prove his undying popularity. “People love Felix,” says the smiling Joe Oriolo, who has been holding the little cat in the wings for this new day, they keep coming over to tell me how much they always liked him and are glad to see him back.” Plans for the future include putting Felix’s visage on every conceivable item. Contracts have already been signed to make Felix once more the world wide celebrity he had been in the past. The little guy may even end up in a new series of cartoons, anything can happen. They say a cat has nine lives, they must have had Felix in mind, except that Felix will probably prove to have more lives than any other cat on the block.

The “A/B” drawing above is from a column on the various ways to move the character from “A” to “B.”

Below is another one of Howard’s columns, from October 28, 1983 (click on it to enlarge). He reviewed books, critiqued animation festivals, gave tips to commercial animators and producers, spoke of changes in the industry and delved into working with computers. Back Stage was a trade magazine so his articles were not written for animation fans, but some are still interesting reading.

Howard was a friend to animators, fans and animation itself. Farewell, Howard.