The World’s First Animated Pop Icon Cat…but Whose ‘Baby’ was Felix?

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Cinema, Leisure activities, Media & Communications, Memorabilia, Popular Culture

Felix the cat,
The wonderful, wonderful cat!
(Popular theme song lyrics)

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❛ I made the cat and the cat made me! ❜
~ Pat Sullivan

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The model for a certain cartoon mouse …

The best part of a decade before Mickey Mouse made his first appearance on a celluloid screen and then went on to establish himself as the international popular culture phenomenon par excellence, there was Felix the Cat. The parentage of Mickey Mouse is not a topic that has generated the same level of controversy as that of Felix, which over the last forty years has been a matter for much impassioned cross-Pacific conjecture.

BF – before Felix…
Felix, the anthropomorphic black cat with the massive white eyes and the broadest of broad grins, was not the first animated cat to grace the screens of movie theatres. That honour went to a mouser called Krazy Kat, the conception of cartoonist George Herriman…first appearing as a comic strip character in the New York Evening Journal, Krazy Kat debuted on movie screens in 1916 in a silent short featuring the eponymous cat and his brick-throwing ‘frenemy’ Ignatz Mouse.

Master Tom, prototype
Not long after, Felix had his beginnings in the prototype form of Thomas Cat. In 1917 Australian cartoonist Pat Sullivan produced a short, animated silent film about a black cat, The Tail of Thomas Cat, through his own New York studio. By 1919 ‘Thomas Cat’ had morphed into ‘Master Tom’ in the short Feline Follies. After a follow-up entry (The Musical Mews) again starring Master Tom, Sullivan’s third short of 1919 (Adventures of Felix the Cat) changed the name of the ‘Tom’ character to the name he would henceforth be universally known as – Felix. Despite the seemingly clear lineage between Thomas Cat and Felix, some American animation historians discredit the connexion, citing Thomas Cat’s non-anthropomorphised nature, the uncertainty of his fur colour, the fact that he loses his tail fighting a rooster without ever being able to recover it (cf. the difference with Felix who can magically transform his tail into other forms) [‘Felix the Cat – McGill CS’, www.cs.mcgill.ca].

The chief animator of Sullivan’s film studio was Otto Messmer, but because of Sullivan’s proprietorial role in the process of animation production it was Sullivan’s name alone that appeared on the credits of films (this was a common business practice in animation at the time), despite Messmer as principal artist conceivably doing a weighty share of the studio’s artwork. After Sullivan’s premature death in 1933 his relatives in Australia took ownership of Felix. It wasn’t until 44 years later, that Messmer in an interview with animation historian John Canemaker belatedly made his claim to have been the originator of the famous feline.

Conflicting stories of Felix’s origin
Sullivan maintained all along that he was the creator – on a visit back to Australia in 1925 he told the Melbourne Argus newspaper that the idea for Felix had come to him when his wife brought a stray cat into Sullivan’s studio one day (as was her wont). On other occasions he said that the inspiration came from a Rudyard Kipling story, ‘The Cat that Walked by Himself’. For the name of his cartoon creation Sullivan explained that he had drawn on his native Antipodes… Australia Felix was a term in use from the 19th century to describe the western districts of the state of Victoria (also later the name of an Australian novel by Henry Handel Richardson). Another source for the cat’s name came from a contemporary fellow cartoonist – appearing in print in 1936 the cartoonist affirmed that Sullivan told him that he derived the name from a black West Indian-born boxer living and fighting in Australia called Peter Felix whom Sullivan was acquainted with (the animator being a big enthusiast of boxing) [Pat Sullivan – I made the cat and the cat made me’, www.vixenmagazine.com].

Messmer by contrast had a wholly different story of Felix’s ‘birth’ and evolution. He recounted to Canemaker for the latter’s 1977 documentary film that because Sullivan’s studio was busy at the time, he (Messmer) went away and by himself at home drew the figure that was to become Felix. He perceived of the mischievous black cat as a kind of animated Charlie Chaplin. Messmer explained that the name “Felix” was thought up by a Paramount Magazine journalist from the Latin words felis (cat) and felix (happy). Canemaker and other contemporary American animation historians have been undisguisedly dismissive of Sullivan’s creative contribution, backing Messmer’s claim, subscribing to the view that Messmer ‘ghosted’ Felix for Sullivan who was preoccupied with his entrepreneurial role (inexhaustibly promoting and marketing Felix to the world)✱.

Contesting Felix
Not surprisingly the strongest argument for endorsing Sullivan as Felix’s true creator comes from Australia, the animator-cum-entrepreneur’s homeland. Australian cartoonists, including some who knew Sullivan, have drawn attention to a comment during an interview when he visited Sydney in 1925 (quoted in the local papers): Sullivan stated that his practice was to ‘do the “key drawings” and leave the rest to a staff’ [Vixen Magazine, op.cit.]. Moreover, the Australian Cartoonist Association have argued that the distinctive lettering style of Sullivan can be detected on the Felix artwork, eg, in Feline Follies (Felix’s first incarnation), the lettering used matches examples of Sullivan’s handwriting. Additionally, certain speech bubbles in the short uses expressions and terms which have distinctive Australian usage, especially ” ‘Lo Mum! “. Australian animators, argue that had Otto Messmer conceived and created the prototype Felix film, as he claimed in 1977, he would have used the traditional American form of shorthand for mother, ‘mom’ (not ‘mum’) and he would not have dropped the ‘h’ in ‘hello’ which is more characteristically Australian or British◰. [‘Reclaiming Felix the Cat in the Picture Gallery’, (Judy Nelson, Exhibition, 1-May to 7-Aug 2005, State Library of NSW, Sydney), www.pandora.nla.gov.au]

Animator Ub Iwerks drawing animated rodent extraordinaire, M Mouse ▶

Sublime collaborations
Whether it was Messmer or Sullivan who was the true creator of Felix we may never know for sure, given that the episode occurred around 100 years ago and both claimants have been long dead. For a very long time the reflected glory for the creation of the animal superstar even more famous than Felix, Mickey Mouse, was almost exclusively falling on Walt Disney. Only in a relatively recent period, historically speaking, has the role of animator Ub Iwerks been properly acknowledged. Today even the Disney Corporation (metonymically known as the Mouse House), more or less unequivocally recognises Iwerks as the real creator of the mouse. But this doesn’t diminish Walt’s integral role from the origin point in developing Mickey’s personality and traits (not to mention the story lines). Similarly with Sullivan and Messmer, the fairest course may be to attribute causation, Felix’s genesis and transformation to the screen, to what was quintessentially a collaborative effort between two creative individuals.

PostScript A: Felix, a template worth copying
One green-eyed embryonic animator in the US in the mid-Twenties very much aware of Felix’s ascending star was Walt Disney. Disney’s earliest innovation in the field was his Alice Comedies where he inserted a human figure “Alice of Wonderland” into an animated landscape. As foil to Alice, the main animated figure in these shorts was Julius, a cat with a particularly strong resemblance to Felix…basically a clone of Felix [‘Felix the Cat’, (Ian Gordon), St James Encyclopaedia of Popular Culture (2002)]. Disney’s later followed up Julius with Oswald the Lucky Rabbit (a product he ultimately lost creative control of) and then lucked in again, hitting the jackpot with Mickey Mouse…Oswald and Mickey were both different animals to Felix but again the physical similarities to the (original) Felix are there – albeit with reshaped faces and ears.

PostScript B: Felix, the image de jour to launch a new medium
Felix with his funny, all-too-fallible anthropomorphic ways (fond of a drink or two in ‘speakeasies’, given to making whoopee and his general hijinks and manic spurts in surrealistic situations)✪ suited the “Jazz Age” to a tee! [Michael Cart, ‘The Cat with the Killer Personality’, New York Times, 31-Mar-1991, www.nytimes.com]. Capitalising on Felix’s success on the big screen (upward of 150 animated shorts made in the 1920s), Sullivan introduced a comic strip version of Felix in 1923 (syndicated by King Features 1923-1967). Everyone wanted a piece of the famous celluloid feline, the US Navy’s Bombing Squadron adopted Felix as its insignia, his countenance was used as the logo for car dealerships, he was the mascot for the New York Yankees at one time and for many high schools [‘Felix the Cat’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. The universal appeal of Felix made him the prime candidate to introduce television to Americans…in 1928 broadcaster RCA choose a papier-mâché doll of Felix as THE image for testing the new technology [‘The First Star of Television’, MZTV Museum, www.mztv.com].

PostScript C: A marketing bonanza
Felix as a commodity had an electrifying impact on the world of celebrity merchandising in the 1920s – the iconic image of the black cat popped up on toys, dolls, ceramics, postcards, cigarette cards, jigsaw puzzles, clothing, pencils, sheet music and so on (earning Sullivan an estimated $100,000 a year) [Dictionary of Sydney staff writer, Felix the cat, Dictionary of Sydney, 2008, http://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/felix-the-cat, viewed 6th Oct 2018]

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✱ the generally accepted view of Sullivan’s character and behaviour, which was very far from exemplary, seems to have jaundiced the opinion held by some commentators (particularly Canemaker) as to the merits of the Australian animator’s achievements
◰ as Nelson et al have argued, these discrepancies in the case for Messmer have not been accounted for satisfactorily by American animation historians including Canemaker
✪ this said, Felix could also be contemplative at times, deep in thought, working things out, solving problems…a cat for all seasons!

The ‘Monopoly Myth’, a Review of The Monopolists

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Commerce & Business, Leisure activities, Old technology, Popular Culture, Retailing history, Society & Culture

Monopoly: (n.) a market situation where one producer (or group of producers acting in unison) controls supply of a good or service, and where the entry of new producers is prevented or highly restricted; “exclusive possession” of the commodity is customarily implicit in the term [www.businesssdictionary.com; www.en.oxforddictionaries.com]

⌖⌖⌖ ⌖⌖⌖

As a kid my favourite board game wasn’t Monopoly, it was an old Milton Bradley game called Pirate and Traveler✱, however I certainly did play Monopoly an awful lot of times growing up (and it seemed like every game went for an interminably long amount of time!). So, having clocked up that amount of wasted Monopoly game-time, I was more than mildly interested to revisit my youth via a recent book on the universal and ubiquitous board game, and even more intrigued that its author, Mary Pilon, presents a radically different take on the genesis and development of Monopoly to what hitherto was been the received orthodoxy.

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Pilon’s book starts with two very different Americans, one an out-of-work Eastern Seaboard “average Joe” wallowing in the depths of the Depression, the other a fairly nondescript, left-leaning economics professor at a Californian public university –– Charles Darrow, the individual identified as the putative inventor of Monopoly, and Ralph Anspach, the man who almost inadvertently exposed Darrow as the faux inventor of the game. The unemployed Darrow learned the game from friends during his enforced leisure time…then with the germ of an idea in his head, got other friends to provide artwork (especially political cartoonist FO Alexander) and a written set of rules. Darrow crafted a version⊚, copyrighted it and eventually sold “his” game of Monopoly (without acknowledging or recompensing the contributions of his friends) to games manufacturers Parker Brothers who mass-produced and distributed it – and the rest is blockbuster games sales history!✥

Ralph Anspach comes into the story in 1973, six years after Darrow—made a multi-millionaire by the runaway success of Monopoly—had died. Anspach is an avowed anti-monopolist, by conviction a “trust-buster” who is mightily annoyed at the OPEC oil cartel’s stranglehold over that essential world commodity at the time (the 1973 Oil Crisis). He pursues his ideals by creating an Anti-Monopoly game in opposition to Parker Brothers’ über celebrated game. Parker Brothers sues Anspach for breach of copyright and so begins nearly ten years of legal battles with Parker Bros (in fact by this time the company was controlled by the General Mills corporation)…Anspach’s tireless research for the case leads him to the true, albeit convoluted, origins of Monopoly☸.

The Monopolists recounts Anspach’s monumental efforts and endlessly time-draining “detective work” in minute detail. Anspach traces the game back to one Elizabeth (Lizzie) Magie (long pre-dating Darrow), and here’s where the story gets really interesting! Magie, an independent-thinking, politically progressive Midwestern woman, was a staunch supporter of Henry George. George was the author of Progress and Poverty, a widely influential text which fuelled the introduction of the Progressive Era in the US (1890s-1920s). George advocated the introduction of a Single Tax on land and property (AKA Land Value Tax). Ms Magie invented and patented a board game in 1903-1904☯, called the Landlord’s Game, based on Georgist principles of wealth redistribution. Magie’s game was in her words, “a practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing with all the usual consequences” [Single Tax Review, 1902], the Landlord’s Game was intended to educate Americans about the dangers of unbridled capitalism (ie, ultimately resulting in the monopolisation of business, benefitting only one player)⌑.

When I played Monopoly in the 1960s the takeaway message for me always aligned with the “Gordon Gecko/Greed is Good” world view…gold standard instruction on how to win at capitalism! Pilon points out the fundamental irony of Magie’s “thought-child” – once Parker Bros got their hands on Monopoly, the company left not a single stone unturned in the pursuit of eliminating any rival claims to “their game”⊡. Monopoly, under the aegis of Parker Bros, a game with the sole raison d’être of annihilating all business competitors, leaving a solitary victor, was the complete opposite of what the game’s prototype inventor intended it to be! Moreover, to further underscore the irony, the game became controlled by a company (Parker Bros) that “fought tooth and nail to maintain its own monopoly over it”.

Back to Ralph Anspach’s anti-monopoly crusade – as well as introducing or reintroducing Lizzie Magie to the world, the economics professor’s years of searching, digging in archives, interviewing people of interest across the United States, word-of-mouth, friend-of-a-friend, sometimes down blind alleys, etc, revealed that the games (or games) of Monopoly had been played in various forms and under various names for decades before Charles Darrow’s Pennsylvanian neighbours introduced him to the game. Pilon ties together all the threads of Monopoly’s antecedents – as unearthed by the indefatigably never-say-die Ralph Anspach. What came to light was that Magie’s game, either in its original published form (‘The Landlord’s Game’) or in derivative ‘backyard’ versions, had been played (prior to the publication of Darrow’s Monopoly) as follows:

⌲ among members of the early 20th century rural community of Arden (Delaware), an “alternative lifestyle” arts and crafts colony of “Single Taxers” (including the influential writer Upton Sinclair and the radical economist Scott Nearing who spread the word about Magie’s game to other locations)

⌲ among members of the Quaker community residing in Atlantic City in the 1920s (many Quaker families held “Monopoly nights”)

⌲ among left-wing university students and college “frat boys” on the Eastern Seaboard

⌲ among couples and families in urban Philadelphia (including those neighbours who first taught the game to Charles Darrow)

Unbeknownst to Lizzie Magie, many versions of her ‘Landlord’s Game’ had sprung up in the North-East of the country, often these early, widely dispersed players made their own homemade versions of Monopoly using hand-painted oil cloths, local street names and substitute tokens. In addition George Layton created and sold his own commercial version (which he called ‘Finance’) in the early 1930s. By the thirties a version of the game had spread to Texas – Rudy Copeland’s published board game of ‘Inflation’.

Parker Brothers’ whole claim on Monopoly was based on the contention that the game had no precedents to its 1935 patent with Darrow. Anspach’s pains-taking spade work proved that the game in various guises and forms existed “in the Public Domain” years and years before the Parkers and Darrow came on the scene!

Pilon injects many diverse strands in the narrative, even Abraham Lincoln makes a brief (oblique) appearance in The Monopolists – in the late 1850s Lizzie’s father James Magie, a newspaper editor and abolitionist, was an instrumental part of Lincoln’s political campaigns for office…this digression has a very tenuous connexion with Monopoly! The various currents traversed by the author takes the story beyond the purview of being a straightforward account of plagiarised copyrights and game inventions. The book illuminates the position of women in late 19th/early 20th century American society by positing what made Magie stand out from others of her sex at the time and what she was able to achieve – taking on a number of vocations and pursuits, retaining her autonomy and avoiding the “marriage trap”, becoming an inventor (in addition to the Landlord’s Game she held patents for inventions in the realm of stenography as well).

The three Parker Brothers ➚

Another strand follows the career of George S Parker, the founder of the eponymous games empire. Parker published his first board game (‘Banking’) at 17, and from the get-go was determined to establish a monopoly, systematically building up a catalog by buying up other manufacturers’ games (leading him headlong into an ongoing rivalry with fellow games giant Milton Bradley). In Parker’s zeal to totally tie down the company’s ownership and control of Monopoly, the company even went round buying up old (Pre-Parker) Monopoly sets. Eventually George Parker talked Lizzie Magie (by this time now Elizabeth Magie Phillips) into parting with her patent for the Landlord’s Game, and paying her a pittance for it with no residuals (despite inventing the archetypical business game Magie lacked business acumen and naively trusted Parker’s intentions to do the right thing by her and her invention, which he didn’t!)

The author takes the reader on another diversion, straying away from the origin controversy to surprisingly explore Monopoly’s role in World War II! The US Military purchased Monopoly sets to be sent to POWs detained in German prisons (and elsewhere in Europe). The intent behind this practice had a dual purpose: to boost morale for the imprisoned soldiers, but also a practical one –

Coda: The after-affects of Ralph Anspach’s 1983 victory over Parker Brothers in the US Supreme Court (including the ruling that the word monopoly was in fact generic) hasn’t brought any sense of closure to supporters of Elizabeth Magie Phillips. The public acknowledgement warranted her as the true and original inventor of Monopoly has not been forthcoming. Pilon points out that in the 1980s Parker Bros “quietly began to massage its Monopoly history”…a 1988 history of the company by a former Parker Bros R & D head admits that Darrow was not the game’s inventor, but neglects to mention Lizzie Magie. Similarly, on the official Monopoly website in the Nineties, Hasbro, Inc, which purchased Parker Brothers in 1991, starts the Monopoly story at 1933 with Darrow and scantly acknowledges the influence of the Landlord’s Game (again without mentioning Lizzie by name!) No plaque for Lizzie’s prototype of the Monopoly game exists anywhere (although there is one in Atlantic City recognising the contribution of that city’s Quaker players to the invention of the game!)

FN: Mary Pilon’s research for The Monopolists is nothing if not thorough. In the end-piece she includes a long, long list of acknowledgements of her sources, helpers and supporters, she even gives a hearty shout-out to coffee shops in seven different cities (I said she was thorough!)…one very notable exception missing from the author’s acknowledgement of research help is Hasbro! Hasbro denied Pilon’s request to access the Parker Brothers’ archives and outright refused to answer any of the many fact-checking queries she submitted to the world’s largest toy and games company. Zero marks to Hasbro for the cause of corporate transparency…ummm, given how much she gleaned from other sources, I wonder what else they didn’t want her to discover?

The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World’s Favorite Board Game, by Mary Pilon [Bloomsbury New York: 2016 p/b ed.]

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✱ Pirate and Traveler with some modifications and an updated, aviation emphasis eventually morphed into a similar game called Pan American which I played with equal relish. The idea of these two games was to spin a number or roll a dice, collect a destination card and progress from one city to another city somewhere in the world. When you completed a requisite number of destinations, you hightailed it back to a home base city (Godthab, Greenland), first one there was the winner! The games educated me on political geography and I learnt the distance (in miles in those days) between different places on the world map
⊚ with Atlantic City street names on the earliest editions of the Monopoly sets (later editions of the game utilised New York City streets and London streets on their boards)
✥ a comparison of the visuals of Magie’s original 1904 patented game and Darrow’s 1935 patented Monopoly reveals profound continuities…Darrow’s replicates essential features of Magie’s – a square board, a space “for the emblematic GO TO JAIL”, a “Public Park” space (anticipating the Parkers’ “Free Parking”), ‘chance’ cards, the use of tokens representing money, deeds and properties
☸ Parker Bros, when taking on Darrow’s game, accepted and promoted the myth that Darrow had fed them, ie, HE invented the game from his own head in the early 1930s, and that there were NO precedents for it
☯ by a remarkable happenstance of history Lizzie filed her patent claim on the same day in 1903 as the infinitely more famous Wright brothers filed their “flying machine” patent
⌑ interestingly Magie devised two versions of the Landlord’s Game – version 1, the objective was to crush all of your opponents (= the contemporary game of Monopoly produced by Parker Bros), and version 2 – the objective was to create wealth for all to share
⊡ the three Parker brothers (especially George) were evangelically zealous about this because, as the author explains, the company had been “badly burnt” twice before with two products that they had thought that they held exclusive control and ownership of – ‘Tiddlywinks’ and ‘Ping Pong’