He Never Owned Any Mice

Say what you will about Paul Terry, but he was a pioneer in animation and successfully ran his own studio for almost 25 years. And he realised television had a hunger for cartoons, so he sold 112 old Terrytoons to CBS on November 10, 1953, then worked out a five-million-dollar deal in late December 1955 for the network to buy his studio, its characters and 1,100 master reels of cartoons, enabling him to live a life of ease at a gentleman’s club for the rest of his life.

Terry (photo to the right with musical director Phil Scheib) must have had his publicity machine churning at the start of 1955. Several feature stories about him were syndicated to newspapers across the U.S. We’ve transcribed one from Dick Kleiner of the Newspaper Enterprise Association. (He called Terry “elderly.” Terry was 67).

This column is from the Hearst news service, Jan. 25, 1955. Terry’s story sounds more fanciful than anything that actually went into his cartoons.

Assignment America
By PHYLLIS BATTELLE
NEW YORK, (INS) — Almost anyone who has had close dealings with the parlor variety of mouse will agree, I think, that this is a rodent with no charm.
There are exceptions, of course, as in the case of a man I knew who claimed mice were quite nice when happy. You put out a wedge of cheese in a kitchen corner, he contended, and your friendly mouse will return your kindness by eschewing your fruit cake. This man recently left us, however, and I think the state took him gently out of circulation.
Anyway, what puzzles me is why — if mice are so generally unloved in the home — they are so popular in the theatre and the comic book?
True, Mickey and Mighty Mouse and their crawling cinematic friends do not look like the mice we hear behind the walls when the lights are out. But they are mice, no doubt about it.
And a mouse is a mouse, even in top hat and tails.
The answer, according to Paul Terry, 67-year-old creator of Mighty Mouse (the flying super-mouse), is not easy to put down in black and white. It has something to do with egomania, sympatica, quantum mechanics, lend-lease and Einstein's law of relativity.
That is, if I understood Mr. Terry correctly.
"You see," said Terry, furrowing his brow, "mice are really pretty interesting little fellows when you look at them analytically.
"The trouble is that most people in the home don't take the time to study their mice. They don't stop to think 'there's a cute little rascal when a mouse runs between their legs. They are too startled. But I am digressing, am I not?"
We gave it to him straight. “Yes.”
"Well, I recognized the inherent values in mice about 15 years ago," Terry resumed. "Their very smallness made them the perfect heroes for animated animal cartoons. A basic rule of cartooning is that the hero has got to be the underdog . . . people have to feel sympathy for him.
"So one day I took this little church mouse and put him in a very tough situation. I got him out in the open with hundreds of kitty-cats chasing him, see, and then to get him out of danger I had him grab a lot of fruit from a market he was passing by—and he grew so big and strong that all of a sudden he just took off and flew through the air."
Wow, Mr. Terry.
"And that's how Mighty Mouse was born. People loved him from the start because he was so little and apparently helpless, but underneath it all had heroic tendencies."
Terry, who doesn't care to say how much income little Mighty has netted him, is celebrating his 40th birthday in the animated cartoon business this year (he turns out dozens at his "terrytoons" plant in New Rochelle, N.Y.) and he insists he came by his career quite naturally.
His mother and brother were artists, so he was more or less born to create, and his father was an animal-lover, which meant that as a child Paul had as personal pets at home in San Francisco: one sheep, one goat, one mule, 50 pigeons and 25 or 30 hares.
"No," he admitted reflectively, "I never owned any mice. I wish that I had.”
He might then have thought up Mighty Mouse 40 years ago, instead of 15, and beat Mickey Mouse to the punch!

An indication of the success of Terry’s studio was given by columnist Sid Shalit in the New York Daily News, Jan. 18, 1955.

Mighty Mouse has the same initials as Marilyn Monroe, and apparently is as popular with the small fry as the shapely movie queen is with their ever-lovin’ daddies. Latest rating figures reveal that Paul Terry’s cartoon character, who appears every third week on the “Barker Bill” show, is CBS-TV’s highest-rated afternoon property.

Barker Bill left the CBS schedule Nov. 25, 1955, but the network wasn’t giving up on Terrytoons. It moved them to Saturday afternoons, as of December 10, 1955 and created The Mighty Mouse Playhouse, the first Saturday network cartoon show. Then they appeared in prime time on June 13, 1956 on CBS Cartoon Theater hosted by Dick Van Dyke.

In the meantime, 20th Century-Fox continued to distribute new Terrytoons until the studio petered out in the late 1960s. Terry was admitted into a cancer hospital and died October 25, 1971, age 84.