Ironically, one of Disney's top animators was named-- you ready for this? --
Dick Huemer. With a moniker like that, the guy was
born to make cartoons.
Yes, a lot of the early animators like Paul Terry and Amadeen J. Van Beuren (another great name for cartoonin') were heavily influenced by Walt Disney... so much so, in fact, he actually
threatened to sue the crap out of the latter for turning in characters that were pretty much carbon copies of Mickey Mouse--
sans the charm, of course--though in the end it was all a lot of bluster (maybe because it's so hard to make a plajo accusation stick; maybe it's because these were young studios trying to find their way). Warner Bros., too, played follow-the-leader in its early years, with characters like
Piggy,
Foxy and Roxy and
Goopy Gear, but about 1938 or so Bob Clampett, Fred "Tex" Avery started getting away from that stuff (Chuck Jones took a bit longer, but he eventually got there, though before he found his own two feet to stand on, he played it sort of safe by aping ol' Tex's style for a few more years). Van Beuren, stodgy and resistant to change, stayed with the cutesy-poo crap
like this, and, coupled with his own failing health, it's probably the reason his studio didn't last long. It closed down in '36.
I think you'll find the history of most every major cartoon studio follows about the same--a rough start (esp. those in the '20s and '30's) with forgettable characters and a lot of misfires early on, followed by a creative boom in the forties (the war was mother's milk to a lot of these young houses), with lots of turnover, shakeups, hirings, firings, and migration between studios (smartest thing
Columbia ever did was hire a lot of ex-Disney animators after a huge strike in 1941; it was this period they made some of their best...and of course, some of their worst, ranging from the simply forgettable to the utterly derivative to the downright fecund). The fifties saw trends like the rise (and fall) of 3-D films and the newfound popularity of television, which meant fewer shorts distributed in movie theaters. This led to lower revenue, studio foldings, more turnovers and migration, but also meant a virtually untapped new market for an enterprising thinker. This heralded the the rise of pioneers in limited animation--UPA , latter-day MGM, Hanna-Barbera, later, going into the sixties and seventies, De-Patie-Freleng and Filmation--which get us to my generation.
We had the good and the bad of it--shows featuring quirky characters and largely experimental writing (the names "Bob" and "Eve Forward" turn up on a lot of these shows--again, it's like their parents
wanted these kids to go into the cartoon biz from the day they popped out) , but characterized by low budgets, flat animation, recycled scripts, two-dimensional characterization, and shows that read like 22-minute toy commercials. Sure, there were a few standouts, but a lot of passable and very forgettable stuff you didn't see for years, until, through a series of trades, deals, and handshakes, someone bought these now-defunct studios' old libraries and showed them on networks like qubo and MeTv somewhere between 4 a.m. infomercials and reruns of
Lassie and Westerns.
And when I say "forgettable", I mean
forgettable. I mean, until it was mentioned in the
DuckTales reboot, I hadn't thought of Disney's Gummi Bears in
years. Now I want to go hunt up
Dumbo's Circus and the "hand-clappin' " number... or maybe Milli Vanilli's appearance in the
Mario Bros. cartoon, aired just weeks before
that whole scandal killed their career.