In Monday's Globe, I wrote up an appreciation of Ub Iwerks, the Disney animator who more or less invented Mickey Mouse. The occasion was Disney Home Video's release of the pre-Mickey "Oswald the Lucky Rabbit" cartoons, and in the piece I praised Iwerks' visual innovations.
Comes an email from an acquaintance, Summers Henderson:
Ty,
I enjoyed your review of the "Oswald the Lucky Rabbit" DVD yesterday. It makes me curious to see it for myself.
But I have one quibble, on a point of film history. You say, "The shorts are full of cognitive leaps fresh with the delight of their own discovery: Oswald plucking a question mark from his own thought balloon to hoist a plane in the air, popping off his own leg to use as a hammer...." But I think that Ub Iwerks stole those visual gags from Otto Messmer's "Felix the Cat" series. When I taught a class on media history at Emerson College last semester, I did a little research into Felix. He was the most popular cartoon character of the silent cinema, before 1927. And I've seen Felix use his question mark as a tool, and pop off his tail to use as a cane.
I guess I can't prove it conclusively, by pointing to the specific films which show Iwerks copying Messmer. But if Iwerks deserves credit for creating Mickey Mouse -- which I'm glad you wrote about, because most people don't know it -- then Messmer deserves credit for being the model that people like Iwerks and Disney copied. These days more people know about Felix the Cat from his 1950s TV show, with his famous bag of tricks. But he was the first cartoon superstar, in the silent film era.
Thanks, Summers. So who got seriously surreal first: Felix the Cat? Or Oswald the Rabbit? Looks like a subject for further research on my part, although the dates favor Messmer, no slight intended to the protean Iwerks. If you want to do your own comparison, the early "Felix" cartoons are on DVD, and there are more details and links to RealVideo clips at this thoroughgoing fan page.
