686 - Felix The Cat

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Speaker 42 Don't start with a burp and blow.

Speaker 42 You're listening to the dollop on the all things comedy network. This is an American history podcast recorded under SAG AFTRA union contract.

Speaker 42 I'm Dave Anthony, restored from American History to guy who looks, you know, all right. Strike.
Strike. I want strike.

Speaker 42 Meet us halfway. Gareth Reynolds has no idea what the topic is going to be about and will not work under these conditions.
What conditions? This stuff. This is a sweatshop.

Speaker 42 You can't keep talking to me like that. How many of you?

Speaker 42 Is that where your face is glistening?

Speaker 42 I can't believe you haven't even... I don't know how you haven't noticed the elephant in the room.

Speaker 42 The tattoo? No!

Speaker 42 The fucking huge cut on my forehead. Oh, I couldn't see it because your hat was down.
Hello. That's the idea.
I'm trying to hide it. How'd you do that, little guy? Shower.

Speaker 42 Okay.

Speaker 42 Are you 65 or older?

Speaker 42 What are we doing in the shower?

Speaker 42 First of all,

Speaker 42 this union is under constant arrest from management, and we're not going to take it anymore.

Speaker 42 I was shaving in the shower, which is now, by the way, have you started doing that? The kids are doing that.

Speaker 42 Yeah,

Speaker 42 I used to do that a lot. But I use, obviously, I have a beard, but I use.
But you trim here, don't you? I use an an electric.

Speaker 42 Yeah, see, I'm still, I do a combo, but I shave, I give the clean shave to the part here, and I dropped the razor, and I went over and I went down to pick it up, and I hit my head.

Speaker 42 I have a sliding glass shower door, sure, and I hit my head on the fucking handle so goddamn hard. And I was like, oh, no, how bad is this going to be?

Speaker 42 And then I was like, oh, actually not that bad. And

Speaker 42 then so I was like washing my, you know, washing my face, my hair and and stuff. And then all of a sudden it was like rusty.
And I was like, wait a minute. And I was like, nope, it did dig me.

Speaker 42 And I was like, oh, shit.

Speaker 42 It was pretty bad. I mean, I love it.

Speaker 42 I do too. But then also, because I'm all cut up in other way, I definitely look like I got into something.
Yeah, no. What happened there on your arm? What's going on with you? Are you being abused?

Speaker 42 Blackberry bush.

Speaker 42 Oh, you got blackberries where you live? You got blackberry bushes? Yeah. Dude.
I mean, when I was a a kid, we had blackberry bushes everywhere.

Speaker 42 So I was all summer long, I was just full of blackberries. Yeah.
Boy, there's an album title.

Speaker 42 Full of blackberries. Wait.

Speaker 42 Dave, I know you're making fun of me publicly personally, but June 5th, I have a new podcast called Next We Have.

Speaker 42 This is the eighth podcast or which podcast?

Speaker 42 And we're encouraging people to listen to it. But if you have to choose between the dollop and that,

Speaker 42 you know, we're saying stay here. We're because we became union.
So that is a chip I'll throw in the negotiating table.

Speaker 42 But it's on my YouTube, and you can listen to it wherever you get podcasts. Say the name of it.
Next, we have. I said that.
Say the name of the actual podcast. Next, we have.

Speaker 42 No, but what's the next? We have.

Speaker 42 Don't. Look, I look at it.
You know what I wanted to call it?

Speaker 42 What? Segmental.

Speaker 42 I mean, either way, it's bad.

Speaker 42 How many friends?

Speaker 42 How many really close friends do you have? And how long? I feel like every day you're like a pal cicada.

Speaker 42 I have, well, I don't have as many as the podcast you have because

Speaker 42 I'm actually trying to bond with humans in real life.

Speaker 42 I have bonds.

Speaker 42 I bonded with my Blackberry Bush.

Speaker 42 1885, Year of Our Lord,

Speaker 42 Jesus Christo, J-Town. Sure.

Speaker 42 Who.

Speaker 42 No, you just

Speaker 42 follow the impulse to stop. Wait, did we even tell people we're on tour? Got into huffing.

Speaker 42 Stop.

Speaker 42 Yeah. Jesus is huffing gas rats.

Speaker 42 But it's because he's trying to bring the kids in and he does what he can.

Speaker 42 But Jesus is

Speaker 42 huffing. He's getting into the huff.
We're on tour, dollopodcast.com this whole week.

Speaker 42 Yeah, this whole week.

Speaker 42 Patrick O'Sullivan was born in Sydney, Australia. Whoa, okay.
I'm going to guess right off the bat. He's

Speaker 42 the BCP. He's part of the penal colony.

Speaker 42 Nope. We don't know the day he was born because he doesn't have official birth records or didn't.
He's no longer. Can I make a pitch?

Speaker 42 Better time when we didn't have birthdays. We should go back to that.

Speaker 42 we should go back i agree but then everyone just makes up like they did with uh jesus

Speaker 42 we don't know when he was born he was born on christmas day

Speaker 42 under a tree

Speaker 42 his parents uh saying it was a mushroom

Speaker 42 this is breaking news

Speaker 42 jake tapper started following me on instagram oh my god

Speaker 42 oh he would follow me for literally eight minutes

Speaker 42 i I know.

Speaker 42 I've got a nice thing where it's like,

Speaker 42 if you don't dig too deep, it seems palatable. Once you start digging, you're like, oh, God, all right.
This guy's calling for violence in the streets.

Speaker 42 Just

Speaker 42 put up a post about Bloodthirsty Jig Tapper. I know.
I know.

Speaker 42 All right. So Patrick O'Sullivan's parents were Irish.
His dad, Patrick O'Sullivan Sr., was known around town as Sydney's oldest cab driver. Oh, wow.
Cab driver? What year? Well, but

Speaker 42 you're thinking of a cab. I thought it was a

Speaker 42 motor vehicle, but horse-drawn cab.

Speaker 42 Pat didn't stay in school very long. As a teenager, he sometimes earned money by singing outside hotels with his friends.
I like that. Well, that seems like something you would have done.

Speaker 42 If you were born at this time, that's what you would have done in high school. Well, that was TikTok.

Speaker 42 That was what it was. You and your buddies just went and like got like, I would have, if you're, if you're, if you're saying basically, I'm a tension mosquito.
Yeah.

Speaker 42 And I would have found anywhere to suck blood out of to fill my little butt sack. You know what? You should start a podcast about that.
At 22, he left

Speaker 42 Australia for London. where he tried drawing comics to sell to newspapers and doing a song and dance act at a music hall.

Speaker 42 I don't like that you said this is very me because now I'm picturing that I would do everything he's doing and I bet this goes south. Yep.

Speaker 42 He had mid-success, mild, not very much.

Speaker 42 How many podcasts?

Speaker 42 Not enough to make a living. Okay.

Speaker 42 He then dropped the O from O'Sullivan. That's helpful.
Yeah, fuck yeah. Get rid of that Irish nonsense, especially in London.
It could have been

Speaker 42 helpful.

Speaker 42 He got a job as a debt. And we only say that because the

Speaker 42 English are horrifically oppressive people who murdered the Irish for generations and oppressed them. And so when they came to London to get a job, they would oppress them further.

Speaker 42 That's the only reason I'm saying that.

Speaker 42 He got a job as a deckhand on a commercial ship going back and forth between London and the United States of America. Oh, yeah, finally to a non-colonizing zone.
Great people.

Speaker 42 People very welcoming, always looking to break bread with the land they stole.

Speaker 42 It's, you're just,

Speaker 42 you're trying too hard. Yeah, I'm not.

Speaker 42 Worst genociders, U.S., U.K. I know the answer.
Keep going. UK.
Keep going.

Speaker 42 The ship transported mules. Pat took care of the mules.
Asked ships. He did that.
Did that for a whole year. Yeah.

Speaker 42 And then one day the boat was docked in New York Harbor and he jumped ship and swam to shore.

Speaker 42 Okay.

Speaker 42 Okay. Is that

Speaker 42 an

Speaker 42 I mean, you're not supposed to jump ship.

Speaker 42 I assume he had a contract and was supposed to work. That's how you get out of it.
Yeah.

Speaker 42 I like that. Just jump overboard.
And now we have rocket money. Well, that's an employee.
Had rocket money. That's an employee we don't have anymore.

Speaker 42 What's happening to these mules?

Speaker 42 All right. So he's swaying.
So that's how he becomes an American.

Speaker 42 That's it. See, that, by the way, that's how Trump views America right now.
They're jumping. Oh, I don't do Trump anymore.

Speaker 42 So they, so he needs a job. So he got a job as a boxer.
He's like, well, that'll, I can hit people.

Speaker 42 Very, very short time because he ended up with a cauliflower ear and a flat nose.

Speaker 42 By the way, that is an Irish meal.

Speaker 42 Love it with a cauliflower air. You know, we don't eat right now, is the English talking shit about the Irish.
I'm not English at that. I'm saying it's nice to have a bit of a cauliflower air, eh?

Speaker 42 A bit of a cauliflower air and a flat face. One of those things.
Bloody hell, that's nice. With a bit of gravy upon it.
Oh, that's nice. That goes nice.
Well, Irish, hey, is it? You know what?

Speaker 42 The problem with your accent right now is his accent, because he was born in Sydney and raised by Irish parents, it is a crazy amalgamation, I'm sure, of Austria Irish. It's Austria Irish.

Speaker 42 Yes, I'm sure.

Speaker 42 May I attempt it? Yes.

Speaker 42 Oh, fuck.

Speaker 42 All right.

Speaker 42 Well, I was telling him the other day that I dropped ship out there. No, it's too much Irish.
Yeah, now you sound like a leprechaun.

Speaker 42 Well, here, let me try Australian and I'll add in a little, I'll miss his dash in some Irish.

Speaker 42 He signed him all night the other day that we were dating AY. You need to tell him he's going to be hardy.
Yeah, it's not easy.

Speaker 42 Yeah, it's almost almost impossible, I would say. It just sounds like a bad Irish.

Speaker 42 Yeah, it does. That's all right.
We're still proud of you. Thank you.
So he decides to go back to drawing because boxing doesn't work. The problem with that is he's not really a very good artist,

Speaker 42 but he's very charismatic and he's a really good storyteller, especially when it comes to anecdotes about his colorful past.

Speaker 42 So he gets a job at McClure's, which is a cartooning house,

Speaker 42 drawing comic strips strips that were syndicated to papers around the country. Wow.

Speaker 42 So he is an assistant to William Mariner, who is an old alcoholic who had

Speaker 42 been a cartoonist since newspapers started printing comic strips. Okay.

Speaker 42 He was known for comics, which you'll know these names,

Speaker 42 like Glad Rags, the corpulent tramp.

Speaker 42 Yeah, that's the best of the corpulent tramps. Billy Blinks, the boy burglar.
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Speaker 42 And Wags, the dog that adopted a man.

Speaker 42 Absolutely. I love.

Speaker 42 Yeah, I love that one. Those are all.
Your favorite out of those?

Speaker 42 Probably the boy burglar.

Speaker 42 Wags for me.

Speaker 42 Yeah, Wags. It's a real surprise.

Speaker 42 It's an upside down.

Speaker 42 It's kind of what happened to you. What? Say it again.
Say it to my face. Okay, you were adopted by an abusive cat.

Speaker 42 What?

Speaker 42 You got to stop. I got to stop what? Where'd the cut come from?

Speaker 42 This was from the shower, and this was from a blackberry bush. For sure, man.

Speaker 42 I'm in a sell.

Speaker 42 Et Mariner's most popular comic was Sambo and his funny noises.

Speaker 42 Yeah,

Speaker 42 I really think that, and I've said this for a while, that noises translate to the written word very well

Speaker 42 azoinks an oopsie a kerploosh

Speaker 42 so uh sambo and his funny noises were a light-hearted

Speaker 42 sambo and his funny noises it's a light-hearted strip about a naive black child who gets into funny scrapes with two white kids

Speaker 42 what you see uncomfortable it's not comfortable but it could be worse so far

Speaker 42 So far, I'm like, okay,

Speaker 42 this is not great, obviously, but it

Speaker 42 premise-wise, when you hear

Speaker 42 in the 1800s, a comic featuring a black child, you're like, buckle up.

Speaker 42 A common punchline is Sambo getting beaten up by the white boy. So, see, there's what I'm talking about.
Now it is

Speaker 42 awful and, you know, not to be enjoyed. So, yeah, there you go.
There it is. You just got to wait for the other shoe to hit the floor.

Speaker 42 Or also getting credit for doing work the white boys have done.

Speaker 42 Fuck me.

Speaker 42 I bet you Stephen Miller's office is just like this all over the wall.

Speaker 42 The amazing reversal of

Speaker 42 making it seem

Speaker 42 the whites aren't doing the stealing. I think that's really what is so,

Speaker 42 if I may, amazing about the whites is is the way that they're the worst and then talk about how everyone's trying to take stuff away from them. Yeah,

Speaker 42 they steal everything and then shout, I've been robbed. Yes, it's really great.
It's really, and it seems to be in the DNA. Yeah, I can't, the nature-nurture part of it is very difficult.

Speaker 42 Yeah, it's great. Good lord.

Speaker 42 Every time you hear Stephen Miller talk, you're just like,

Speaker 42 wow,

Speaker 42 that's a lot of bullshit to shoot shoot out of a fucking head

Speaker 42 on october 1914 mariner was drinking heavily at a summer home near hackensack

Speaker 42 and his wife took their child and left as she often did when he got really hammered so mariner told the neighbor that if his wife didn't come back that night he would burn down the village as you do like what else how else can what was her concern with him he seems to be pretty balanced well she sounds like she's just weak once again

Speaker 42 if it's not a black kid, taking credit, it's a white woman not understanding what we're going for.

Speaker 42 I mean,

Speaker 42 that night, Mariner lit his house on fire and then shot himself. Oh, Jesus Christ.
That'll show her. That's a real kablooey.

Speaker 42 His charred remains were found the next morning.

Speaker 42 So,

Speaker 42 like, I got to say,

Speaker 42 that sounds like it worked out for everybody, but yeah.

Speaker 42 Wow, that is

Speaker 42 quite an exit.

Speaker 42 That's quite a

Speaker 42 ta-ta.

Speaker 42 Now, that's how at the age of 29, Pat Solomon took over the comic strip, Sambo and his funny noises.

Speaker 42 So for him, when Mariner

Speaker 42 self-amalgated or whatever it's called, he was like, oh, this is great. All right.

Speaker 42 Yeah, I get full control. Awesome.

Speaker 42 So he ghost wrote the strip for a year until McClure ended it, and then Pat rebooted one of Mariner's old comic strips. See, this one we thought was in poor taste, but now we can bring it back.

Speaker 42 Johnny Boston beans.

Speaker 42 All right, let's party.

Speaker 42 Which ended in

Speaker 42 1905, but he changed the name to, I don't, I, see, I,

Speaker 42 someone did the research for me on this one, Seurat. And

Speaker 42 it says Johnny. So he changed the name to Johnny Boston Beans.
So I think the difference is that Boston Beans is one word when Mariner did the strip, and then he separated the two words.

Speaker 42 So now it's Johnny Boston.

Speaker 42 So like they were like legally were clear. Yes.
So now he wouldn't have to pay the estate.

Speaker 42 Okay.

Speaker 42 That's just.

Speaker 42 I like to call that one everything stupid.

Speaker 42 So animation is a very new technology that's still not really popular. Right.
Pat charms his way into a job at a Raul Barr Animation, animated studios.

Speaker 42 Sorry, the lip. Raul Barr Animated Cartoons in the Bronx.
Okay. And Barry works on a series of films for Edison Film Company called the Animated Grouch Chasers.

Speaker 42 These names are coming hot. I want to see.
I want to see. Grouch Chasers.
Yes. Have you tried to find the Grouch Chasers? Oh, no, I'm sure it doesn't exist anymore.

Speaker 42 There's no way.

Speaker 42 Grouch Chasers. Okay.
Pat is supposed to be learning on the job, but he's not really good at the whole learning student thing.

Speaker 42 Heavy drinking, very common amongst animators, but even by their standards, Pat is an absolute drunken mess.

Speaker 42 You need a steady hand to do your animating. That's correct.
Yeah.

Speaker 42 He's constantly late. He's visibly hungover, and he reeks of alcohol.
Dave, I think he was drinking.

Speaker 42 Well, also, Gareth, he's not that great at animating to start with. Do you remember that part? Like, he's not very

Speaker 42 good at it. Right.

Speaker 42 So this is not a good combo. Right.

Speaker 42 So Barr found his work, quote, unsatisfactory and fires him. Nine months.

Speaker 42 That's how long he lasted. Nine months.
So Pat then starts his own animation studio. Good.

Speaker 42 Pat Sullivan Productions. And he's much, much better at producing than he is at animating, mostly because he copied everything he had seen Barr do.

Speaker 42 He even negotiated. He copied his management style.
Yeah, everything. Yeah.
Right.

Speaker 42 He even negotiated his own deal to make cartoon ads for Edison Film Company because Barr had a deal with Edison Film Company.

Speaker 42 So Pat adapted Sambo and his funny noises into a cartoon. And once again, he changed the main character's name to avoid getting sued by the Mariner

Speaker 42 family. And Sambo became Sammy Johnson with

Speaker 42 J-O-H-N-S-I-N Johnson. Okay.
First of all, it's nice that the Mariner family is finally going to get screwed over by life. And second of all, am I the only one who's glad that the

Speaker 42 comic about abusing a young black child is back? And now we get to actually see it, you know, move?

Speaker 42 No, yeah, yeah, I think you are. Yeah, we get to see.
No, no, no, no, no.

Speaker 42 All right. Hold on.

Speaker 42 Don't woke me now. Let me finish.
Don't woke me. Let me finish.
It'll be nice to see it

Speaker 42 with motion.

Speaker 42 well, we're not, yeah, okay,

Speaker 42 that's great. I'm excited for you.
Don't put me on an island alone here. You're on an island alone.
Uh,

Speaker 42 the studio cranked out cartoons like Sammy Johnson Hunters, Sammy Johnson Strongman, Sammy Johnson, Johnson Slumbers Not, Sammy Johnson gets a job, Sammy Johnson in Mexico, Sammy Johnson at the seaside, etc.

Speaker 42 On and on. It's like Ernest.
And the reason he's cranking it out, Gareth, is because Sammy Johnson's a hit. Okay.

Speaker 42 After a year, Pat hired a young artist named Otto Mesmer, and Otto's father was a Bavarian immigrant, and his mother was a German-American, and they both worked in factories in New Jersey.

Speaker 42 And that's where Otto was born and raised. Okay.

Speaker 42 So after high school, Otto... trained in art through night classes and correspondence courses and he builds up a portfolio by selling cartoons and and humorous poems

Speaker 42 uh to newspapers and and magazines. Would you like to hear a poem?

Speaker 42 No.

Speaker 42 One of Otto's poems? Well, okay, then I'll read it. It's called Ode to an Old Straw Hat.

Speaker 42 People in these fucking hands.

Speaker 42 Last spring, when the winds grew warmer, I purchased mere lid.

Speaker 42 Two bucks was the sum invested. My winter hat.
I hid. Of straw was the thing I purchased.
It cooled my shining plate. But now are my teardrops falling, for we must part, tis fate.

Speaker 42 Tis weak that I thus am sobbing, and I fain wouldst can the weep, but I sigh when I think of winter when my straw lid must sleep. Wow.
So a seasonal eulogy to a hat.

Speaker 42 That's correct. We got to put him away.
Yeah, it's tough. And just

Speaker 42 to be clear, because we've talked about a lot of stuff on this show, yeah. If you wore it outside of Straw Hat time, it was insane.

Speaker 42 Yeah, past Labor Day, you're going to get the shit kicked out of you.

Speaker 42 Of all the times to time travel back to, that might be that might be the

Speaker 42 watching the Straw Hat Riot would have been pretty efficient.

Speaker 42 Just to go back, just to be like,

Speaker 42 it's just, it's awesome.

Speaker 42 So Otto is witty, but he's also very shy. He felt self-conscious signing his name

Speaker 42 on his art. So he would sometimes sign it with the pen name Ottz, OTZ, OTS.
Okay.

Speaker 42 He was inspired by the early animated films of Windsor McKay, and he figured out the fundamentals of animation. And when he was 24, he got his first animator job at Pat Sullivan Studios.

Speaker 42 As far as how they're actually animating,

Speaker 42 what are they doing? I mean, are they

Speaker 42 like it is just the

Speaker 42 drawing by hand and then just taking stills and just editing stills basically like clipping together stills?

Speaker 42 Yeah, I believe so. Okay.

Speaker 42 Yeah.

Speaker 42 I'm not sure if it's like flipbook

Speaker 42 or something. Okay, right.

Speaker 42 I don't think it's flipbook. I think we're actually talking about because these are, yeah.

Speaker 42 These are, yeah, this is actual animation.

Speaker 42 So Pat made his animators study pictures and films of famous comic actors so they could learn their comedic timing and funny movements which is another thing that he stole from bar

Speaker 42 um

Speaker 42 and that kept that's something that still happened that's like in aladdin with robin williams and the little mermaid like that's something that's still

Speaker 42 a thing so totally

Speaker 42 um and that's actually why a lot of the early cartoons portrayed characters in blackface, white gloves, or white face, because they were based on vaudeville or minstrel show, guys.

Speaker 42 All good. Listen to you once again trying to excuse the way blackface.
Again.

Speaker 42 Man.

Speaker 42 In his first year at Pat Sullivan Studios, Otto mostly worked on a series of 12 Charlie Chaplin cartoons.

Speaker 42 Chaplin sent a stack of photographs of himself in different poses for the animators to draw him.

Speaker 42 And Otto just studied them religiously.

Speaker 42 He's not a fan of devices like like Max Fleischer's Rhodoscope, which required subjects in live action and then drawing animated characters over them.

Speaker 42 He thought a cartoon is best when it shows things that are physically impossible. Yeah, right.

Speaker 42 Quote, why animate something you can see in real life?

Speaker 42 So they still say that, by the way. I say that all the time.
No.

Speaker 42 I say that constantly. No.

Speaker 42 It's one of my most common sayings that people love in the business. If people want to see animated dollop stuff, go to Lakeside.
I don't know YouTube.

Speaker 42 Otto had been

Speaker 42 at Pat Sullivan's studios for a year when World War I breaks out and he is drafted.

Speaker 42 So he married his girlfriend right before he ships off.

Speaker 42 Pat did not fight in World War I, probably because he's not a U.S. citizen.
He's just a guy who jumped ashore and swam here. So wait, he goes there and then well.
Oh, no, no, he's here.

Speaker 42 He's just not even draftable. Yeah, Pat's like, I guess, not on the records or something.

Speaker 42 So Otto is a corporal in the Army Signal Corps.

Speaker 42 And once he was just chatting with another soldier in a trench looking, you know, out on the horizon when in the middle of the conversation, just a bullet goes through the other guy's head and he dies.

Speaker 42 Fuck. Which will happen.
That'll happen to you.

Speaker 42 Another time, someone in his unit shot and wounded a a German sniper, and the sniper was still alive when the Americans got to him.

Speaker 42 Otto, who spoke German, confronted him during his final moments, and the German offered the Americans his last cigarettes.

Speaker 42 For the rest of his life, Otto almost never spoke about his time on the battlefield. Is there any reason he didn't want to talk about it? Was it

Speaker 42 tough for him to talk about the time that a guy that he'd just been involved in murdering offered him his last smoke?

Speaker 42 Holy fuck. There is not a,

Speaker 42 I mean, that's quite an encapsulation of the fucking issue with goddamn war.

Speaker 42 Just like two humans who are just like, what's this about? Although, obviously, Germany was pushing.

Speaker 42 Yeah.

Speaker 42 The other thing about war is it's how all the people are fighting and not the guys who that's what I mean. You're just you're just checkers.

Speaker 42 But now the good news is we don't even, we don't even know about those anymore because we can just do it without.

Speaker 42 Now it's just some fucking dude in a room, just fucking or a woman or non-binary, just in a room with a fucking little skin with playing, playing a video game where they're just droning the shit out of people.

Speaker 42 And getting deeply, deeply emotionally scarred and having terrible mental damage. I mean, what about that seems troubling?

Speaker 42 The fact that you're just sitting in an air-conditioned room murdering a family?

Speaker 42 In April 1917, while Otto is in the war, Pat is hanging out with Ernest Smythe, who's an old friend from London.

Speaker 42 He's also an animator at the studio.

Speaker 42 And Pat and Ernest begin flirting with two girls who are staying in a rented apartment in the same building as the studio.

Speaker 42 And then he's like, you want to go to a bar? You want to get...

Speaker 42 some cocktails so the girls are like yeah we'll go to a bar um they have a you know round of cream to mints and uh the girls are alice and gladys um one's brunette one's blonde did i mention 14 and 15 years old yeah

Speaker 42 did i mention i think i probably should have started when i said girls i mean literal girls they had run away from home

Speaker 42 uh five days before and they just wanted to be actresses in the big city

Speaker 42 um

Speaker 42 and then so they're like yeah we're animators we're in show business um which impresses the the young girls because they're girls

Speaker 42 And so they go out with Pat and Ernst the next night. And then on the third night, Pat is like, Alice, let's just, you and I go out.

Speaker 42 And then

Speaker 42 a week later, the cops show up at the studio and they arrest Pat and Ernst. Ernst is charged with abduction, which was later reduced to impairing morals, which is something you need to think about.

Speaker 42 Yeah, I agree.

Speaker 42 And Pat was charged with rape.

Speaker 42 I got to be honest, I'm surprised that that last part part happened. I'm glad.
I am too.

Speaker 42 That to me feels like,

Speaker 42 I feel like,

Speaker 42 you know, like anytime you went into a bar, it looked like a daddy-daughter dance and you were just like, yeah, whatever.

Speaker 42 But I think because these were runaway girls. Right.
That's probably it. But yeah, I know what you mean.
Like it was, yeah, it was a free-for-all.

Speaker 42 It's just like when someone gets arrested for murder in the 1800s, you're like, wait, what?

Speaker 42 Wasn't, wasn't everybody murdering?

Speaker 42 So Alice testified that it wasn't consensual

Speaker 42 her first time. Also, he gave her venereal disease, which is really just a, he's just a great.

Speaker 42 Anyway, he's convicted.

Speaker 42 He gets, the maximum sentence was 10 years.

Speaker 42 Pat's wife,

Speaker 42 Marjorie,

Speaker 42 Writes a letter to the judge asking the judge to be lenient on her husband, who's just convicted of rape.

Speaker 42 It was on Sullivan Studio Stationery, the letter she wrote, and decorated with images of Sammy Johnson,

Speaker 42 the beloved cartoon character.

Speaker 42 Just trying to flood the system, I guess. Pat's lawyer also did the same, arguing that his client.

Speaker 42 My client believes that he is working under cartoon law, where a man can swallow a grenade and survive.

Speaker 42 Where if a fellow gets gets shot 15 times and drinks water, it shoots out of him in all different directions, where gravity only exists once you realize you've bent it. I hate to break this to you.

Speaker 42 That's not happening in cartoons yet. Yeah, I guess.
I figured. They're not there yet.

Speaker 42 It's all very realistic. Okay.

Speaker 42 All right. I don't know.
I got no excuse then.

Speaker 42 Well, because they're basically saying the beloved racist cartoon is this is the guy who makes it.

Speaker 42 You know, I got to say, there's been a lot of grim times in American history, but trying to excuse your venereal rape away with beloved racism,

Speaker 42 it's up there.

Speaker 42 Yeah, so his lawyer is literally like, look,

Speaker 42 he's this animator guy, and you know, you should give him some time off because that's really important.

Speaker 42 And so the judge agrees that Pat was, quote, a man of very considerable ability and sentenced him to just two years in Sing Sing prison.

Speaker 42 In the end, he ends up only serving nine months and three days.

Speaker 42 Now, his studio would close down while he was in prison, but reopened when he comes back. And in 1919.
Imagine working for him.

Speaker 42 Just be like, Jesus Christ, dude. How's everyone doing? Let's do some, what do we, let's do lunch in the communal cafeteria room.

Speaker 42 So, yeah, so Otto comes back in 1919 from the war. The studio is open, but it's barely, at this point, it's really having a hard time.

Speaker 42 So Otto starts making Chaplin cartoons again, which puts the studio back in business.

Speaker 42 Imagine having seen what he's just seen and he's like re-he's just picturing the bullet going through his friend's head over and over again.

Speaker 42 But

Speaker 42 it turns the studio around again.

Speaker 42 And now they're actually turning down work.

Speaker 42 So Paramount approaches to make a few original cartoons for a film package, which is like a bundle of features and shorts and cartoons and newsreels and stuff.

Speaker 42 So Pat almost says no because they're so busy, but Otto wants, he wants to pitch something new. And Pat says, okay, go for it, as long as it doesn't interfere with the other work we have.

Speaker 42 Like that comes first. So Otto agrees and works on nights and weekends to complete the side job.
And the the cartoon is called Feline Follies.

Speaker 42 Now we're talking. Are you excited? Yeah.

Speaker 42 It features a black cat called Master Tom

Speaker 42 who romances another cat called Miss Kitty White.

Speaker 42 And Miss Kitty. Can you just make it about cats, you sons of bitches?

Speaker 42 What's your deal? Todd, it's sexy.

Speaker 42 And Miss Kitty, when Miss Miss Kitty reveals she has a litter of Tom's kittens, Tom commits suicide by inhaling coal gas. What Jeff Scott said?

Speaker 42 What? This is the cartoon?

Speaker 42 Is that true? Remember, Otto just came back from war, so he's dealing with some.

Speaker 42 He's working some shit out.

Speaker 42 Oh, my God.

Speaker 42 Yeah, I'm going to take the kids down to the little theater there. We're probably going going to watch a cartoon.
Jesus Christ.

Speaker 42 Well, the Paramount executive in charge, John King, loves it.

Speaker 42 It's great. Can we see penetration? Let's see the little cat dick.

Speaker 42 He tells Otto to make another one.

Speaker 42 So go darker.

Speaker 42 Yeah, make it worse.

Speaker 42 Can there be blood and gut somehow? Let's really see it.

Speaker 42 So Feline Follies premieres on November 19th. Feline 19th Follies is about a litter abandoned and

Speaker 42 Tom offs himself. Technically, those are follies.
Oh, wait a minute. I got an idea now.

Speaker 42 What?

Speaker 42 I'm wondering if I have a fun inkling of where this goes. Uh-oh.

Speaker 42 By the end of the year, Otto had finished the third short featuring the cat, and Master Tom had a new name, Felix. Oh, my God, even weirder.

Speaker 42 Between 1919 and 1921, Otto made 25 Felix the Cat shorts for Paramount holy shit

Speaker 42 they're popular but not lucrative enough lucrative enough for Paramount boss Adolph Zucker and in 1920s Zucker decided to cut the package of films that the Felix series was part of

Speaker 42 And when Pat heard this, he realized he didn't own the rights to Felix. Paramount did.

Speaker 42 Whoops.

Speaker 42 Yeah, that's why they say never trust trust an adolph.

Speaker 42 Well, that, and there's other reasons, but yeah. No, that comes from this, probably.
There was another thing we haven't done a dollar upon it, so you probably don't know about it, but it's not great.

Speaker 42 It's not animated, it's bad. Huh.
Interesting. I'd love to learn more about it.

Speaker 42 No one knows for sure how Pat got the rights to Felix from Paramount. One of Pat's animators said Pat told the story once and only once.
And given Pat's record, may not be true at all.

Speaker 42 But Pat said he got shitfaced drunk. Okay, we can obviously believe that.
Good start.

Speaker 42 And he barged into Zucker's office, screaming that he had been robbed, and stood on Zucker's desk and started pissing all over his papers.

Speaker 42 Zucker then picked up his phone and told his attorney to hand over the rights. Well, I mean, there's a lesson here.

Speaker 42 There's always the nuclear.

Speaker 42 I mean, I could see that working. I could too.
Not just because it's because you're just like, I can't be involved with this guy. Get him out of my life completely.

Speaker 42 It's in chapter six of The Art of the Deal by Donald Trump.

Speaker 42 Never have I wanted to reenact it more.

Speaker 42 So the story would be impossible to believe if Pat hadn't actually nabbed the rights. Maybe Zucker just wanted to get the crazy man out of his office.

Speaker 42 But either way, Pat then tried to sell the series to Warner Brothers, but

Speaker 42 they're not down.

Speaker 42 You pissed all over another guy's desk, so we don't care to make a deal with you. So

Speaker 42 Harry Warner reaches out to Margaret Winkler, who is his former secretary, to take it on as part of her new distribution business. Okay.

Speaker 42 So MJ Winkler Pictures. So from 1922 to 1925, Pat Sullivan Studios made 64 Phoenix shorts

Speaker 42 under MJ Winkler Pictures. And Felix becomes a worldwide hit.
It's massive. Right.

Speaker 42 So Felix's physical appearance is drawn from Otto's studies of Charlie Chaplin.

Speaker 42 He communicates directly with the audience by winking or holding up a finger and doing something funny.

Speaker 42 He has signature movements, most famously pacing back and forth with his hands behind his back while thinking about a problem. Yeah.

Speaker 42 Yeah.

Speaker 42 And before Felix cartoon characters would be designed and animated for one short film, and then that's it. Then they're done.
Uh-huh. Wait, what do you mean?

Speaker 42 They would. You're a one-off.
They're all one-offs. Oh, so they weren't like keeping cells or whatever.
They're like, throw it in the trash. So the re-animator's like, I feel like I drew this already.

Speaker 42 Fucking, we got him walking. We got a bunch of him walking in the garbage.
I mean, so there's like no, there's no franchise. There's no, like,

Speaker 42 yeah, once you're done with the character, you just never bring them back. Like, you're done with them.
Imagine.

Speaker 42 Even the characters that did recur didn't have distinct personalities. It's just like a funny dog and cats.
Like, it's not, you know, the same thing.

Speaker 42 But Felix has a strong, unique personality, and he breaks the fourth wall and rules of reality in ways American animation has never done.

Speaker 42 Did he ever look into the camera and say, you know, the guy who funds these was convicted of rape?

Speaker 42 No, no, he didn't actually. And the rights were returned because he pissed all over a guy's desk.

Speaker 42 So,

Speaker 42 so

Speaker 42 there's also this

Speaker 42 the fluid movement between reality and fantasy. So wild visual gags that Otto was so good at inventing,

Speaker 42 he, like the thing you were talking about before, the getting shot and the

Speaker 42 then all the

Speaker 42 like water coming out of you or like all those things. This is the guy who came up with all that.
Like he took it to the fantasy level. Right.
He took it out of reality. And it's like revolutionary.

Speaker 42 Like people are just like, holy shit. Now, wait a a minute, wait a minute.
You can draw whatever you want. This is...

Speaker 42 Hold on, hold on, hold on. How the hell did he get him to fly?

Speaker 42 How do you trade a cartoon cat how to do that?

Speaker 42 Gareth, this dollop, this podcast, whatever this is, is sponsored by Squarespace. Dave.
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But then she's not going to make any money.

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So she's teaching people how to make them now?

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Speaker 42 Do not Sally's crab cakes.

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Speaker 42 It's also seen as very artistic. Before this, gags, like I said, very real, like a Pratfall, stuff like that.

Speaker 42 But Felix would do things like remove his tail, use it as a screwdriver, and then put it back on, or take the number four off a calendar and turn it into a chair.

Speaker 42 He could sneak, he could sneak in a building. He's a magician.
Why are you doing that? Well, Dan, he's not real.

Speaker 42 Don't tell me it's not real. I'm watching him with my dad.

Speaker 42 The tail only exists because a man drew that. Do you understand? They took it off his bottom, Benny.

Speaker 42 No, no, no. But he.
How is it a screwdriver? It's he's a fake.

Speaker 42 I feel like I'm losing my mind. No, Dan, Dan, no, it's right.

Speaker 42 I just weren't.

Speaker 42 It's rage.

Speaker 42 No, it's underwear. No, no, no, no, no, no.
But honey.

Speaker 42 Honey. No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
I saw somebody. No, no, no, no, you didn't.
Didn't some men kill

Speaker 42 in the war. I know.
And none of them

Speaker 42 were able to stop the league of the corks.

Speaker 42 No, they, but they weren't.

Speaker 42 Nobody, even if someone were to be shot today, God forbid, they wouldn't be able to put nine corks in it and stop the water they drank from coming out of it.

Speaker 42 I'm not taking off my hat because there might be an explosion.

Speaker 42 Well, what's true? I'm never taking off my hat is that we haven't seen that in any of the cartoons.

Speaker 42 Yeah. So what, yeah.

Speaker 42 Okay. Yeah.

Speaker 42 All right. You understand how this is fucked up my world.
Yeah, absolutely. We should just.

Speaker 42 What's real anymore? I mean, I just, I don't know, but I'd say the stuff Felix does is not real, and our lives remain quite real.

Speaker 42 Oh, are you ready for deep fakes then, motherfucker? Okay, well, let's just,

Speaker 42 let's take this outside of the theater.

Speaker 42 Let's leave the picture, Haas.

Speaker 42 Uh,

Speaker 42 he could also take the sun out of the sky.

Speaker 42 All right.

Speaker 42 Okay.

Speaker 42 No.

Speaker 42 First of all, no.

Speaker 42 First of all, we'd go into it, we'd die.

Speaker 42 First of all, we'd either burn or hit an ice age. So, no.

Speaker 42 And make it in the body of a banjo and play it. He could tip his ears like a hat.

Speaker 42 Everyone get your hats. We're not going to watch this guy play this sun anymore.
He could tip his ears like a hat. No.

Speaker 42 When he was confused, a question mark appeared over his head, which he would grab and use as a fish hook or straighten it out and use use it as a baton. I've had about enough of this.

Speaker 42 When he got an idea and three exclamation points appeared over his head, he could gather them, fashion them into a propeller and use it to fly away.

Speaker 42 The amount of people who were out there, like, if I could just get the question marks to appear,

Speaker 42 that's the battle.

Speaker 42 Turning them into a copter's not going to be a problem. I just love that.
Why won't they appear?

Speaker 42 It's just so amazing. This is blowing people's minds.
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 42 Wait, wait, wait,

Speaker 42 People were probably like, put the cat in water, drown it. They're dangerous.
By the way, Jose just came over very interesting. I'm sure he did.

Speaker 42 So press around the world considered Felix an icon of the era. Marcel Brayon of the Academy Francais, quote, he becomes the impossible.
Nothing is more familiar to him than the extraordinary.

Speaker 42 And when it is not surrounded by the fantastic, he creates it.

Speaker 42 The whole thing is that even if the environment is banal, Felix will make it dynamic. It has, without question, ruined my marriage.

Speaker 42 There's no way to return home and have a conversation with a normie.

Speaker 42 After you see that Felix takes his talk bubble, expands it into an ocean, swims upon it, catches a squid, turns it into calamari, and then returns it back to its normal talk bubble farm.

Speaker 42 George Bernard Shaw, quote. Whoa, George Bernard Shaw.

Speaker 42 It's really amazing.

Speaker 42 If Michelangelo were now alive, I would not have the slightest doubt that he would have his letterbox filled with proposals from the great film firms to concentrate his powers to the delineation of Felix the Cat instead of the Sistine Chapel.

Speaker 42 That is, that's pretty sad, to be quite honest with you. If to be like Michelangelo is like,

Speaker 42 no, no, no.

Speaker 42 The 16th Chapel just walking in, just like, wow, look at that. Felix touching his own question mark.

Speaker 42 Look at that. Honey, he's playing the banjo.
Oh, that's naughty. Oh, okay.
Oh, my goodness. You know, the guy who came up with this has quite a checkered past.

Speaker 42 So Felix the Cat cartoons remain very dark and relatively topical.

Speaker 42 In Felix Revolts, a town council bans cats and Felix becomes an organizer unionizing the cats to strike so that rats run wild in the town.

Speaker 42 I can't.

Speaker 42 That is like, I mean, I was going to say, yeah, that's just like...

Speaker 42 That just shows everybody.

Speaker 42 That just shows that Otto is doing all of the art and Pat's not paying attention because that's Otto going,

Speaker 42 I'm not treated well. That's great.
Look at all these dirty rats out there ruining society.

Speaker 42 And Felix turns the tide. Rats declare war on cats.
Hell yes.

Speaker 43 No.

Speaker 42 Hell yeah.

Speaker 42 We can like both rats and cats. No.

Speaker 42 And Felix joins the army to fight on the battlefield. His dead bodies one right in the head.

Speaker 42 On the battlefield, dead bodies pile up, clearly from Otto's experiences in World War One.

Speaker 42 You know, the only note is when Felix says, I'm Otto, I need therapy, please help. We should lose that.
That's kind of off topic.

Speaker 42 It's just crazy how much death there is. Like, it's just a guy working out his shit because of fucking.
He's just fully

Speaker 42 trying to process his trauma. He has PTSD and instead he's just animating it.

Speaker 42 It's really insane.

Speaker 42 By 1925, Felix was by far the most popular cartoon character in the world. For many non-Americans, including Italian director Frederico Fellini, he was their first taste of American culture.

Speaker 42 Someday I hope to meet a Felix and I work out with a healing.

Speaker 42 Charlie Chaplin regularly praised him, and Buster Keaton parried him in Go West.

Speaker 42 Oh, really? I fucking love Buster Keaton. Oh, he's the best.

Speaker 42 Felix was merchandised in a way no other cartoon character.

Speaker 42 Did you see when Buster Keaton had to transition to the talkie?

Speaker 42 Like the first time we heard him talk, you were like, what's going on? Uh-oh. Yeah, because he was like so great with his face.
And then he was just in a movie. He's like, I don't know.

Speaker 42 Maybe we'll call Maj. And everyone's like, okay, we're actually

Speaker 42 working to you here.

Speaker 42 So he's merchandised in a way that no other cartoon character has ever been. He had two radio hits, Felix the Cat and Felix Kept On Walking.

Speaker 42 There were Felix tie pins, brute brooches, clocks, Christmas ornaments, cigars, car radiator caps, baby oil, blankets, radios, records, and sheet music. Jesus Christ.

Speaker 42 So this is, I mean, this is, yeah, the full on. By the way, I can't really criticize while I'm surrounded by Jose merchandise.

Speaker 42 But

Speaker 42 that, so it's like it's the first time where this is hitting on this level. It's Disney.
Yeah. Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 42 Felix became the British polo team's official mascot.

Speaker 42 It's an absolute honor to finally find ourselves.

Speaker 42 Now, look, I understand that today it maybe feels low stakes, but remember, what would Felix do?

Speaker 42 Well, I think he'd take the head off of his mallet and he'd turn it into a gavel and you'd see a trial where he would say that the gentleman we're playing should no longer exist.

Speaker 42 A bit heady, but something like that could work for us.

Speaker 42 Yeah, it's the first, he is the first giant balloon ever made for a Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. What the fuck was that parade before that? I can't imagine.

Speaker 42 Just probably us just being like, we stole the land.

Speaker 42 So the merchandising rights are making Pat Solman $100,000 a year, which is about $1.8 million today.

Speaker 42 And then he got $8,000 per Felix film, most of which Otto writes and directs. Right.

Speaker 42 And $80,000 per year for the Felix cartoon strip, which Otto, again, wrote, and then he would actually sign Pat's name on it. And from 1922 to 1925, Pat made almost $19 million in today's money.

Speaker 42 And in 1925, the starting salary for an

Speaker 42 animator at Pat Sullivan Studios was, do you want to guess? A week. The starting salary a week? Oh, God.
A week. $20?

Speaker 42 Last 10. Oh, Jesus Christ.
God damn.

Speaker 42 We are sick.

Speaker 42 We are sick. That's about...
In today's money, that would be about

Speaker 42 $8,600 a year.

Speaker 42 Fuck.

Speaker 42 In the fall of 1925, Pat and Marjorie, and by the way,

Speaker 42 1925.

Speaker 42 Animation,

Speaker 42 what do I want to call it? Just exploitation continues today. Like it is one of the most exploitive parts of show business.

Speaker 42 Having worked on a few animated things, the amount you kind of can't even get over the idea that factored into the budget is the work will be coming from Malaysia. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 42 Yeah, it's terrible. I'm sure that that's going real healthy and great over there.
And look, and it's, you know, it's also like most of it's not unionized and you're still sending it out.

Speaker 42 You're already paying people shit in America and now you're like, well, let's not do it here. It's not shitty enough.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 42 So in the

Speaker 42 In the fall of 1925, Pat and Marjorie went on a five-month Felix promotional tour through England, France, the Mediterranean, Africa, China, and Australia. Jesus Christ.

Speaker 42 They sailed on a luxury ocean liner, the HMS Majestic. Reporters often asked Pat about Felix's origins.

Speaker 42 I can only imagine that tale tells Endo Tendo.

Speaker 42 Well,

Speaker 42 he would change the story depending on the audience.

Speaker 42 But he never mentioned Otto.

Speaker 42 and always referred to himself as Felix's only creator.

Speaker 42 In the press, Pat used a rags to riches storyline, calling himself, quote, a poor boy who made good abroad.

Speaker 42 Sometimes Pat brought up Sammy Johnson and tied into Felix.

Speaker 42 Wait, who is Sammy Johnson again? Sammy Johnson's the

Speaker 42 old

Speaker 42 Sambo character that he changed to

Speaker 42 more often. He would say his wife came up with the idea.

Speaker 42 Quote, she came bursting into the studio carrying in her arms the most washed-out, pope-eyed, half-starved ragamuffin of a cat that ever lived in a New York back street.

Speaker 42 And she said, She said, Everybody's drawing men. Why not do an animal feature? And that was how Felix began.
Completely untrue. Just totally fabricated, 100% fabricated.

Speaker 42 I mean, but he's trying to make up for the fact that he,

Speaker 42 you know, that there was a statutory charge.

Speaker 42 There's that.

Speaker 42 So.

Speaker 42 you know what I mean? You got to remember, it's always in the back of his normal mind.

Speaker 42 Sometimes Pat said Felix's name came from the phrase Australia Felix, a term used by early European settlers on the continent. I don't know what it means.
When it was a penal colony.

Speaker 42 There was also a 1917 novel called Australia Felix. Pat said Felix was named and or colored black after the black Australian boxer Peter Felix.

Speaker 42 Also, should I mention that Pat would not hire any black animators at his studio? Yeah, it's

Speaker 42 good.

Speaker 42 Meanwhile,

Speaker 42 this guy sounded pretty

Speaker 42 good.

Speaker 42 By the way, may I say ahead of his time a little bit. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 42 So while this is going on, Otto is actually writing and directing the Felix cartoons. According to Sullivan, Studio Animators, Pat hardly ever came into the office.

Speaker 42 Otto ran the studio when Pat was away, during which he would forge Pat's signature on checks, memos, and other paperwork. So Otto's running the studio completely.
Wow. Yeah.
And drawing.

Speaker 42 He's

Speaker 42 the guy. It's his studio.
It's literally all.

Speaker 42 Meanwhile, Pat's abroad with his wife saying that she helped him conceive it all.

Speaker 42 This is capitalism. Yes.
Yep.

Speaker 42 What Pat did show up sorry when pat did show up he would stumble through the doorway hammered toss a bag of dirty laundry to the nearest animator and tell him to take it to the cleaners

Speaker 42 i gotta say though to only show up to work when you're drunk is pretty awesome

Speaker 42 like to just get hammered and be like i should go to the office

Speaker 42 if the animator didn't jump up fast enough to do laundry pat would fire him on the spot. Jesus Christ.

Speaker 42 What's the tinkling? Is the cat playing with something? No, you hear that? It's a wind chime. What is it? Yeah, I hear your wind chime.
Is that magic? Would we close the door? It's far away.

Speaker 42 It's fine. It's weird, but we can handle it.
It kind of sets the mood. I'm sure somebody will scream about it, but that's just them not being able to handle it.

Speaker 42 Well, you took an icy sip earlier, and in my head, I thought, there's a comment. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 42 Sorry. Sorry, Sorry, we're living.

Speaker 42 The idea of doing this without water is shocking.

Speaker 42 Like what someone was just basically like, is it possible for you guys to just hydrate before? It's like, well, you know, why don't we just get IV backs?

Speaker 42 Why don't we just work for Pat?

Speaker 42 Okay, so he would fire the guy and then Otto would give him a severance check. and send the guy home.

Speaker 42 And then the next day, the animator would just quietly sneak into work and Pat would have forgotten about it.

Speaker 42 So best case scenario would be to not get up fast enough when he wanted his laundry done because then you would get severance and weekly.

Speaker 42 I mean, yeah.

Speaker 42 So, that's what I would do. I'd be like, do your laundry, you're fine.
That's right. That's actually, yeah.

Speaker 42 So, Pat's employee, Seamus Calhoun,

Speaker 42 Calhane? How do you say C-U-L-H-A-N-E?

Speaker 42 C-U-L-H-A-N-E, Culhane.

Speaker 42 Collahane? Yeah, probably Colhane. Seamus Colhane, and now there's a bunch of Irish people screaming.

Speaker 42 Pat's employee, Seamus Cohane, called Pat, quote, the most consistent man in the business, consistent in that he was never sober.

Speaker 42 Like any pop culture phenomenon, Felix had many imitators. Cartoonist Paul Terry, creator of Mighty Mouse, introduced a cat that looked similar to Felix.
It was also named Felix.

Speaker 42 I mean, you pushed it. You pushed it.

Speaker 42 I love that guy.

Speaker 42 He's just the least creative thief on the

Speaker 42 just coming in like you feel like, guys, I had an idea last night for how we can take a slice of this Felix action. So Mighty Mouse will introduce a cat into Mighty Mouse's world.
Uh-huh.

Speaker 42 Kind of a little bit antagonistic, doesn't play by the rules of physics, is not bounded by the society norms in any way. Sounds exactly.
He's got a real Felix feeling to him.

Speaker 42 Yeah, he sounds like Felix. But he's not Felix.
And he's in Mighty Mouse's world. And I think he could be a bit of an antagonist for Mighty Mouse, which we've been looking for.

Speaker 42 I think this way we can capture some of the Felix. Okay.

Speaker 42 Okay.

Speaker 42 Yeah. What's his name? What are we calling him? Felix.
We're going to call him Felix.

Speaker 42 He will also be named Felix. He is Felix the Cat.
I have to go. I'm about to golf.
All right, guys.

Speaker 42 Take out.

Speaker 42 This is terrible.

Speaker 42 Pat threatened to sue, so he changed the name to Henry.

Speaker 42 Did you not expect that lawsuit?

Speaker 42 How did you do it?

Speaker 42 The only way that's not a lawsuit is he never finds out.

Speaker 42 How do you change it to Henry also? Fine, we'll call him Hank.

Speaker 42 Fine.

Speaker 42 John Bray, who had gotten an animation by faking being a reporter to interview Windsor McKay about his production methods and then tried to copyright the methods that McKay told him about.

Speaker 42 And then he sued McKay

Speaker 42 for using them and

Speaker 42 created a character named Thomas the Cat who looked exactly like Phoenix. Felix.

Speaker 42 So animators are full of

Speaker 42 loads. That is a loaded operation.

Speaker 42 I am reporting the name of the publication, The Real Times.

Speaker 42 At Margaret Winkler's suggestion, Walt Disney, very early in his career, created a Felix-ish rabbit called Oswald,

Speaker 42 which in combination with the Disney studio style and use of sound became very successful.

Speaker 42 Now, Pat was pissed that Winkler ripped off Felix, so he switches distributors. It's so great for him to be furious about someone stealing Felix.
It's crazy. It's like

Speaker 42 it's crazy. It's awesome.

Speaker 42 America's awesome. Yeah.

Speaker 42 The new distributor, Educational Pictures, released two cartoons a month for two and a half years.

Speaker 42 So when Walt Disney finds out that Otto is actually Felix's creator, he tries to hire Otto away. But

Speaker 42 he wants Otto to move to California. And Otto's like a fucking New Yorker, like one of those weird New Yorkers that can't leave the city.
Yeah. So he turns Disney down.

Speaker 42 Although, let's be honest, it's not like Disney treated people well either.

Speaker 42 No, but he didn't know that. It would be, it's strange.
It's just strange to be under the conditions he's under and he's just to be like, yeah, but California doesn't smell like egg piss

Speaker 42 in 1928. Two talkies,

Speaker 42 so now we have films with sound, came out. By the way, that feels like a slur now.
Yeah, a little bit. Okay.

Speaker 42 It changes the industry. So the jazz singer and a cartoon called Steamboat Willie, starring Mickey Mouse.
Yep. Steamboat Willie is the setup of Buster Keaton's film, Steamboat Bill.

Speaker 42 It was the third Mickey Mouse short and the first cartoon with synchronized sound and music. So, you know, good visual gags, happen in perfect sync with the rhythm of the music.
It's a massive hit.

Speaker 42 People go fucking bananas. They can't believe it.

Speaker 42 It's so funny. It's so funny.
I mean, obviously, we're spoiled.

Speaker 42 Obviously, we've fucking ruined everything by the amount that is thrown at us entertainment-wise. But the idea of grown adults going to watch Steamboat Willie and be like, that's it.
We're peeking.

Speaker 42 When it's just like a mouse on a boat, like, I don't know. Oh, boy.

Speaker 42 Like, grown men were like, this is the height of cinema.

Speaker 42 So, like,

Speaker 42 like Pat, Walt is a very, very good promoter, and Mickey became famous worldwide as quickly as Felix had.

Speaker 42 Now, everybody wants cartoons with sound, and the animation industry, which has been in a kind of a slump, is revived.

Speaker 42 So, the

Speaker 42 popularity of sound cartoons is not good for Felix, who is a silent film character.

Speaker 42 Pat's staff had been pushing

Speaker 42 having Felix's films have sound and color for years, but Pat was refusing to do it. Quote, you don't change when you're making money.

Speaker 42 Yep.

Speaker 42 Spoken like a true thief.

Speaker 42 As Mickey eclipsed Felix in popularity, Educational Pictures dropped Pat Sullivan Studios.

Speaker 42 And in 1930, two years after Steamboat Willie, Pat gave in and said, okay, let's convert Felix into a sound cartoon. Sure.
All right, I get it. All right.
This sound shit ain't going away.

Speaker 42 It's not a threat like I said. Well, you definitely had the people who were like, all right.
You know, it's like how Howard Stern views podcasts. Like, enough already.
It's a flash in the pan.

Speaker 42 It's not going to hold.

Speaker 42 Yeah. Okay.
Is what? Him with podcasts? It's insane. Is that how he is? That's hilarious.
Such a curmudgeon.

Speaker 42 Like, like it's any different. It's just people doing their own thing.
Like, it's any different. And like this idea of, you know, you need to go live in 18 different markets to fail.
It's like oh no,

Speaker 42 okay,

Speaker 42 okay, cool. What? Yeah,

Speaker 42 we've all failed a ton. I mean it's like whatever.

Speaker 42 Um okay, so he gives in, they make a sound cartoon. It doesn't go well.
Pat had fired most of the staff and replaced them with cheaper freelances. So Felix was voiced by

Speaker 42 Harry Edison, who was a sound engineer and whose voice was whiny and annoying. So

Speaker 42 yeah, All right.

Speaker 42 I thanks a catty calf.

Speaker 42 Good. All right.
Let's do one more.

Speaker 42 This time,

Speaker 42 when you discover that the manhole cover is taken off of the sewer, I want you to be pretty upset about it. Okay.

Speaker 42 And then quickly jump in there. So let's hear the sound of you, how you feel to jump.
We'll add the sound at the sound after

Speaker 42 you begin. Okay, ready? All right, here we go.
And rolling, go.

Speaker 42 Okay, great.

Speaker 42 The levels are a little low on our end.

Speaker 42 So we're trying to really, we would really like to, like, let's say someone was listening to this in a car or something right now. Oh, okay.
We want them to turn it down when they're here, okay?

Speaker 42 So, and also, let's hear you take the sewer cap off. So, maybe it's heavy.
They're heavy. Okay.
Oh, okay. Here we go.
All right. Here we go.
And go for it.

Speaker 42 Go.

Speaker 42 Good, got that. Okay, great.
That's good.

Speaker 42 Now we're going to.

Speaker 42 Now we've got some more.

Speaker 42 Are you okay?

Speaker 42 I got to take a week off. No, no, no, no, no.
Nope. Not in this business.

Speaker 42 My throat is filling up with blood. Let's hear, why don't we get one of those? Why don't you show us how that feels in your throat right now?

Speaker 42 Good, good, good. All right, great.
Uh, let's take one.

Speaker 42 I'm at what?

Speaker 42 Yep. All right, good.
I'm a cute. Just talking to the guys in here.
We're a little tired. We're going to take a breather.
You stay in there and scream for a little while.

Speaker 42 We're going to go out for a minute. Get some,

Speaker 42 what do you call it?

Speaker 42 What's the sandwich? I'm the sound sandwich here. What's the sandwich?

Speaker 42 Hold on.

Speaker 42 Hold on. We're trying to figure out.
What's the sandwich that you dip in the au jus? What's that one called? A Russian MILF.

Speaker 42 Okay. What's.

Speaker 42 Wow. Nope.
All right.

Speaker 42 That's not a good look, and I've committed the ultimate sin.

Speaker 42 It's not the same time period, so it doesn't mean that.

Speaker 42 What?

Speaker 42 What are you talking about? What is a MILF to you?

Speaker 42 Since 1928 or whatever. It's a what? It's a little Harry Roden.

Speaker 42 A MILF?

Speaker 42 Yeah.

Speaker 42 All right, pal.

Speaker 42 You're concerned about it.

Speaker 42 I need emotional help. Yeah.

Speaker 42 Well, look, stop. Just give us a minute.
We're figuring out what it's called. It's a.

Speaker 42 The hell is the same? Would you dip into

Speaker 42 it's the auge. Anyway.
All right, we're going to take it to a scavenge.

Speaker 42 What? Goodbye.

Speaker 42 So he used this guy with a terrible voice. The films were made cheaply and in a rush so the picture and sound didn't line up.

Speaker 42 You know, there's nothing better than not making the pivot and then rushing it and fucking it up.

Speaker 42 He blockbustered.

Speaker 42 So good.

Speaker 42 Copley Pictures, Felix's new distributor, stopped making new Felix shorts in 1931. Again, Walt Disney tries to hire Otto away and Otto turns him down.

Speaker 42 He keeps drawing the Felix cartoon strip for newspapers and Pat taking most of the profits.

Speaker 42 Pat's ex-employee, Hal Walker, quote, Pat was an alcoholic and sex maniac who used Marjorie for purposes of influencing other men. Oh my God.

Speaker 42 So that's way darker. But

Speaker 42 I don't think that he's pimping her out. I think that's flirting and like, yeah, yeah, yeah, but yeah.
Like he probably

Speaker 42 sex, a sex maniac? Hey, go. Well, I mean, we're all sex maniacs when we get in the situation.
No, I don't agree.

Speaker 42 Which led to his next piece called Sex Maniacs. Yeah, Sex Maniac's not a great description.

Speaker 42 This is a dog who loves to fuck.

Speaker 42 Or you could, you know, own it. Yeah, I'm a sex maniac.
Yeah.

Speaker 42 Oh, it was a compliment. Thank you.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 42 Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you very much. I could not from just thinking, I'm a sex maniac.

Speaker 42 So,

Speaker 42 yeah, so he's probably using her to flirt or whatever but who knows maybe maybe it was more i'm sure she was doing well too he's he's not a good

Speaker 42 well he's not a good guy so you know not a good guy but the loyalty to this guy is pretty bizarre yeah

Speaker 42 so pat uses felix money to finance uh madam and open a brothel

Speaker 42 Okay, well,

Speaker 42 what would you do now? Definitely not go back into the animated world where I've had a tremendous amount of success, even if it's on the back of others. I obviously would start a Hooters rip-off.

Speaker 42 It's just such a crazy pivot. Hold on.
He's a sex maniac.

Speaker 42 He's like, finally, I have enough money to open a place where I can just fuck. Oh, can you imagine when the sex maniac boss walks into a brothel that he owns? Terrible.
Ugh.

Speaker 42 And of course, the second he'd walk in, I'd be itching my crotch. Like, oh, oh, hey, Pat.
Oh.

Speaker 42 Well, he did contract syphilis there. Oh, man.
Finally, a contract he honored and he's married gareth yeah time for noses to drop so he gave syphilis to marjorie well listen

Speaker 42 and her body was covered in syphilis scars and went out in public she wrapped herself in scarves to hide

Speaker 42 she had scarf scars she had scar scarves scar guards now you're just talking about peter she was rumored to be sleeping with their chauffeur and one day pat confronts them in their luxury apartment, seventh floor of the Forest Hotel in New York.

Speaker 42 And after an argument, this chauffeur storms out.

Speaker 42 And a minute later, Marjorie fell out the window and hit the ground and died.

Speaker 42 I'm sorry.

Speaker 42 Define fell?

Speaker 42 Well,

Speaker 42 in my defense, Your Honor, I've been working in animation so intimately, I thought she'd bounce back up.

Speaker 42 So he shot her out of a fucking window after the chauffeur left. Yeah, I mean, that's how it sounds.

Speaker 42 If it's suicide or murder or an accident, it's never made clear. A lot of people in Pat's life had their suspicions because he's a drunk, abusing maniac.

Speaker 42 And her obituary in the Times said Marjorie had wanted to go shopping and lean too far out the window while trying to attract the attention of the chauffeur. She didn't know.

Speaker 42 She didn't know what she was doing that day. God, I miss her.
Yeah, I I do miss it. It's so hard.
I kept telling her you don't know how to yell out windows.

Speaker 42 She was trying to grab stuff from the stores with her hands, but we were on the seventh floor.

Speaker 42 Sweet Marge didn't understand how it worked, and nobody grieves her more than I, her loving husband, who gave her syphilis.

Speaker 42 And while we were together, committed the ultimate sin and raped a young girl, basically. But that day, none of that mattered.

Speaker 42 Even though we had an argument with the chauffeur, the very chauffeur she was trying to communicate with,

Speaker 42 she just fell she fell and as i tried to push her back up to the balcony i tried to shove her back up and she just it was too late

Speaker 42 uh it sounds

Speaker 42 i mean it sounds suspicious yeah i know when you put it that way i know yeah i tried to shove her back up to the seventh floor as best i could actually and she was fight she was fighting to not fall too and i tried to shove her it was just oh even thinking back on it.

Speaker 42 I don't think you know how.

Speaker 42 The second I saw her splat, I just, I looked up and I said, yes, that's what I wanted.

Speaker 42 What? Oh, yeah, I was just in a lost head space, man.

Speaker 42 I didn't know what I was doing at that time, and I saw her pass away, and I said, and now I can go do what I want with my penis.

Speaker 42 Now can you do this in an Australian slash Irish accent? I was like, basically, like it's just a bit different but I thought I could maybe find a way to go put it inside of a glarry hole.

Speaker 42 I mean that was that was

Speaker 42 a little better.

Speaker 42 It was a tough one.

Speaker 42 Okay, so after Marjorie's death, Pat is depressed. He falls into depression and he AJ.

Speaker 42 The idea of probably murdering and then being like, I'm so low.

Speaker 42 Probably. Absolutely murdered her.
Absolutely. I mean, I guess she could have run and jumped, but come on.
No, she was killed. Come on.

Speaker 42 Uh, so he is very fucked up from years of alcoholism and syphilis. And in the last year of his life, he couldn't recognize Otto.

Speaker 42 I mean, that is. Well, to be fair, he didn't really recognize it before that.
Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 42 Pat Sullivan died of the motor. I love, I love the like simple, like, it's just like Felix.
Oh, yeah, I know him. Well, did you know that

Speaker 42 the studio was a little hijinksy?

Speaker 42 So he dies of pneumonia and alcohol-related damage in the hospital in 1933. He was 47 years old.
Wow.

Speaker 42 His company was in shambles. He hadn't kept records for years.
Pat Sullivan Studios closed down. He had no children, so the rights to Felix go to his nephew.

Speaker 42 Now, Otto keeps writing and drawing the daily and Sunday Felix cartoon strips. He'd get freelance animation work.

Speaker 42 And in 1971, Pat's nephew dies. And that's when animation historians learned that Otto was the creative force, if not the sole creative force, the main, behind Felix the Cat.

Speaker 42 And 50 years after Felix debuted, Otto was publicly recognized as his creator for the first time.

Speaker 42 When Otto, in 1976, when Otto was 83, the

Speaker 42 Whitney Museum showed a retrospective of his work.

Speaker 42 And the next year, animation historian John Kennemaker released a TV documentary, Otto Mesmer and Felix the Cat, in which Otto talked on camera about Felix and Pat Sullivan's studios for the first time.

Speaker 42 And in 1983, Otto Mesmer died of a heart attack in New Jersey at the age of 91. He was survived by his first and only wife, his children and grandchildren.
Wow.

Speaker 42 So at least he got the recognition before he died, which isn't common in this sort of situation. No.

Speaker 42 He should have been wildly rich. He should have been way more, you know, successful and beloved.

Speaker 42 Almost, I would say, a Walt Disney type person.

Speaker 42 And he didn't get any of that because drunken, abusive guy. I also think a lot, at least

Speaker 42 in this business, there is this,

Speaker 42 there are people who

Speaker 42 are geniuses and they don't have the ability to also be

Speaker 42 they're so fixated on the creative that they're unable to put the pieces together to be the pushy creative voice, you know, or whatever.

Speaker 42 And,

Speaker 42 you know, it's like, I mean, I'm sure we both in many circumstances have found the person who is willing to take all the credit and is not skilled at the work.

Speaker 42 That is a real, and this obviously to the nth degree, but that is a real like

Speaker 42 trope. And I know we both personally have dealt with that before.

Speaker 42 But at least he did get recognized, but also, you know.

Speaker 42 We're just run by fucking psychopaths.

Speaker 42 And like we were saying before, it's like, you know, money, money capitalism, exponential growth, winning it, winning the money game is truly the cultural cancer of,

Speaker 42 you know, you think of what we could have and how money completely fucks all of that up. Well, it's a system in which once a guy's rich, everyone goes, you're awesome.

Speaker 42 Nobody is ever like, so how'd you do that exactly? Yeah, and nobody's ever like, dude, that's like, that's, you're clinically insane for wanting to have a trillion dollars. Yeah, you're you're insane.

Speaker 42 You're an insane. Like, think of what, think of what the internet could have done.
And instead, we're like, we got to get rid of it.

Speaker 42 Right now we're like, oh, it's, so it's going to destroy the world. No, we're fully just like, oh yeah, like AI, like, let's go.
And I was, I was talking to my brother last night.

Speaker 42 We were sort of talking about all that stuff. And it was just like, you know, okay.

Speaker 42 Go, you know, go run your little project for every, just, if you just gave everyone a UBI and we just had that and that was just kind of built in, then it's like, all right, at least then we're not thinking, like, oh, yeah, nobody's going to have anything, and you're trying to do that as soon as possible.

Speaker 42 Right.

Speaker 42 Yeah, you get to have that. Anyway, dollar podcast.com.
Doll heads, bring your doll heads. Get them on stage.
We love them.

Speaker 42 So

Speaker 42 this was written, or the research written by Sarah Sabsey and

Speaker 42 Sarah.

Speaker 42 I always, Sarah, apologies.

Speaker 42 And the sources are Wild Minds by Reed Mittenbuehler, Felix by John Kennemaker, and the birth of an industry by Nicholas Simond and the New York Times.

Speaker 42 Boy, boy, oh boy. Well, we are.
I thought it was just a cute little cat. I thought it was going to be Tom and Jerry.
That's where I thought we were headed. Oh, yeah.
No, that story is much worse.

Speaker 42 No, that one's actually dark. I don't know.
I don't actually know. But you know what's funny is

Speaker 42 that was my favorite cartoon growing up, Tom and Jerry. That was awesome.
Insanely violent. Oh, God.

Speaker 42 Like off the charts violence. Like,

Speaker 42 the older I get, the more I'm like, you know, I'm like, Wiley Coyote

Speaker 42 really

Speaker 42 funny Roadrunner. There's this whole thing where everyone's like, well, all these older people had lead, and that's why they're all like this.
And while, yes, I think that's a big part of it.

Speaker 42 But I also think, like,

Speaker 42 the media, the culture we absorbed was so fucking seeped in violence. It's watch the Three Stooges.
Watch the Three Stooges. Yeah.
Like, we were just comfortable with it. Yeah.
Super funny. Yeah.

Speaker 42 Still is funny.

Speaker 42 Yeah.

Speaker 42 All right. Well, thank you for listening.
And

Speaker 42 remember, no problem. Remember, Gareth is a problem.
What?

Speaker 42 That's our new clothes. Who's your deal? Why not?

Speaker 42 That's fantastic.

Speaker 44 Hey, dollop fans. I know you love the dollop.
You love listening to the dollop. Do you want to watch the dollop? You're like, Gareth, what are you talking about?

Speaker 44 By the way, it's not Gary, it's Gareth. Well, we have partnered with Lakeside Animation and we are starting to animate some of our episodes.

Speaker 44 So if you want to go watch a five-parter animation, which is actually like a 22-minute episode or 30-minute episode, I can't remember, of the Rube, you You can go to Lakeside Animation on YouTube and watch a really awesome animation of The Rube.

Speaker 44 It really genuinely kicks ass and we're very proud of it.

Speaker 44 And the more you share it, the more you give it to people, the more you follow Lakeside, all that stuff, the better chance we have of making a lot more of them.

Speaker 44 We're already making a second one, so go there and watch The Rube.

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