"April Maze" (Felix the Cat)- Benedict reviews #8
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- Опубліковано 27 вер 2024
- Part 2/3 of Felix the Cat: the Good, the Bad, and the Okay.
A picnic in the park goes wrong and the 7-minute cartoon it features in even more so.
The use of all media in this review is considered fair use under Section 107 of the US Copyright Protection Act
"April Maze" is in the public domain
End song: Poisoning Pigeons in the Park by Tom Lehrer. (Public domain)
As far as I’m aware,the sound isn’t the short’s fault. To my knowledge,they did the exact same style of audio recording that the fleischer brothers used,which somewhat is evident with how clearly Felix says “That’s mine!” The reason for the iffy audio is just poor preservation for how unknown Felix was after 1930.
The last produced black and white Felix film is a lost unknown cartoon, in 1930. Also, the titlecard for April Maze in this video is incorrect. There aren't borders around it, the one in this video is edited.
i think i get it< hollywood is the good, april maze is the bad, and golden egg is the okay
You got it! 😉
Hi. It's me again. Now, about this cartoon. After the sensational success of "Steamboat Willie", all the major cartoon producers jumped into sound production- All of them except Pat Sullivan. Sullivan, his judgement probably clouded by alcoholism, dragged his feet about making "talkie" cartoons. As a result, after the 1928-1929 Felix series, Educational Pictures refused to renew its contract with Sullivan, and the cat was dropped. Scrambling for a new distributor, Sullivan tied in with Jacques Kopfstein, who had once worked for Bray Studios as a manager, and knew about producing animated cartoons. As a producer, Kopfstein was something of a scavenger- He'd gotten the right's to Disney's early silent "Alice In Cartoon-land" shorts, added sound tracks to them, and kept these primitive cartoons in circulation for years, much to Walt's annoyance. Kopfstein did the same thing with a bunch of silent Felixes, but either he or Sullivan... Nobody is certain which one... put up the money to make a handful of made-for-sound Felix The Cats. There were production problems. Otto Messmer's ad-lib production methods didn't work well with sound. The new cartoons were postsynchonized. Messmer wouldn't- or couldn't- animate to a pre-recorded soundtrack like the other studios did. Plus, Sullivan didn't hire a staff musician to work on the cartoons with Messmer. There was no Carl Stallings, Lou Fleischer, or Philip Scheib for Otto to collaborate with .Messmer had ideas himself about music and sound effects, but they weren't very good. Music, sound effects, that was all left up to Kopfstein who, if my information is correct, had no input about how the Felix cartoons were made. The results- Well, they were dreadful, "April Maze" being a good example. Messmer was imitating the Disney's "Silly Symphonies", but couldn't pull it off. The other "talkie" Felix's were pretty much the same- Flashes of imagination stuck in cartoons that didn't work. After the release of the last Felix "Hootchy Kootchy Parlais Vous" (which was set during The Great War), the 1930 sound series collapsed, and Sullivan never produced a cartoon again, though like the "Alices" Kopfstein kept this batch of sound Felix's in circulation for years afterwards. Sullivan lost the rights to them. Out of a job, Messmer concentrated on drawing the Felix The Cat comic strip while Sullivan slowly descended into madness brought on by alcohol and tertiary syphilis, dying in 1933 at the age of 48. After Sullivan died, MGM and RKO contacted Messmer and tried to buy the rights to Felix under the mistaken assumption that Otto owned the cat, which he didn't. With the promise of big Hollywood money backing the project, they both offered Messmer a chance to do a Disney and run his own own studio, making Felix the Cat cartoons with sound and in Three Strip Technicolor. Messmer turned them down, and told them to contact Sullivan's estate concerning the rights to Felix. The problem was, Sullivan's estate was in such disarray, it took his lawyer, Harry Kopp, four years to get everything straitened out. When he did, that would lead to Felix getting one last chance on the big screen in 1936, but I'll talk about that later. I go now.
I do really appreciate your animation history and hope you scored no less than an A
Thanks a lot
Why did you censor the logo of your shirt ?
I could barely hear the word “follow” when Felix went back outisde
I listened to 3:12 a couple times and my best guess on what he’s saying is “Come on, fellas!”