since Albert Einstein published his general theory of relativity in 1915, Fleischer had been fascinated by it. The theory had revolutionized how scientists thought about space and time, but very few laypeople understood it. It was just the sort of puzzle Fleischer had once worked on as art editor of Popular Science magazine, and he thought animation might help explain the concept.
He started by enlisting the help of Professor Garrett P. Serviss, a science writer for the New York American whose mind “worked at the speed of light,” Fleischer liked to joke. Soon after the two men began working together, however, they clashed over how best to translate Einstein’s complex ideas. Serviss was a literal-minded scientist, uncomfortable with making the leaps of faith that good storytelling often requires. Fleischer was sympathetic, but also knew that audiences become confused by too many details. After Fleischer suggested using a title card that read, “When you see the stars twinkle,” Serviss pounded his fists on the table in angry disagreement, arguing that stars don’t actually twinkle, and that such effects are actually just an illusion.
Fleischer pleaded with Serviss to see things like a storyteller. “Poets make pictures,” Max explained. “They paint with words, but give you a mental picture nonetheless, and since the world has poets and people like poetry, in my opinion it is correct to say that the stars ‘twinkle’ as I think they do.”
Serviss rose from his seat and continued pounding the desk. “I will not go any further, nor will I permit the use of my name in connection with a gross misrepresentation of scientific fact!” he roared. “It’s too bad that after sixty years of scientific writing for the public, here comes Max Fleischer trying to tell me what is right or wrong to say.”
Fleischer gave Serviss a few days to cool off, then tried again. People can reread confusing sections of articles, he calmly explained, but they have a harder time rewatching films. “We must tell our audience these facts in a language they understand the first time,” he said. Serviss finally relented but refused to watch the “stars twinkle” segment whenever it came up on the screen. “It amused me,” Fleischer remembered. “But Professor Serviss was a true scientist.”
When Albert Einstein saw the film, titled The Einstein Theory of Relativity, he was impressed enough to write Fleischer a fan letter. Other reviewers were equally positive, lauding the film for staying as simple as possible. “They have wisely confined themselves almost entirely to the more popular aspects of this complicated theory and have not attempted to delve deeply into the sections regarding the fourth dimension and the bending of light rays which Einstein himself is quoted as saying can only be clearly comprehended by about a dozen persons,” a writer from Moving Picture World wrote. Another reviewer was more succinct, writing that Fleischer was “either a man of super-intelligence or just plain crazy.”
Despite the positive reviews, the film flopped. Fleischer thus learned a valuable lesson about audiences: they generally want to be entertained rather than educated, to see a clown fall down an open manhole rather than learn about Einstein’s theories regarding space and time. Fleischer would later joke about the film’s commercial failure. “There were supposed to be only three people who understood Einstein’s theory,” he said. “Now there are four.”
Two years after The Einstein Theory of Relativity, Fleischer was ready to try making another similarly ambitious cartoon. This time, he wanted to tackle the theory of evolution. The papers of the day were full of stories about the Scopes “Monkey Trial,” in which John Scopes, a substitute high school teacher in Tennessee, was accused of violating state laws forbidding the teaching of human evolution in state-funded schools. The case attracted some of the most famous legal names in the country, with three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan arguing for the prosecution, and famed defense attorney Clarence Darrow speaking for Scopes. Fleischer figured the controversy would drive interest in his cartoon, a combination of animation and live action that chronicled Earth’s creation and the advancement of life, progressing from single-celled organisms into dinosaurs, lower mammals, and eventually humans.
When the film debuted, more people showed up to protest than to buy a ticket. During the premier at New York’s American Museum of Natural History, fistfights erupted in the lobby as angry mobs pushed over display cases, scattering shards of glass across the marble floor. Failing to gain wide release after that, the film failed financially. “The picture made an attempt to merely illustrate Darwin’s theory and not to teach the theory,” Fleischer would later explain defensively.
Throughout the rest of his career, Fleischer would continue to occasionally dabble with similar conceptual material. But he would also remember what kind of cartoons paid the bills. In 1924, the studio began releasing Song Car-Tunes, a series that used an animated bouncing ball over song lyrics to lead audiences in theater sing-alongs. It was a smash hit.
The Fleischers weren’t the only ones to leave Bray’s studio for more creative endeavors. And though they were the most well known of the Bray alumni, they weren’t the most financially successful. That honor would go to Paul Terry, whose unique path would lead somewhere very different. Many considered his cartoons some of the worst ever, although he made a fortune from them.
In person, Terry was charming and witty, describing himself as “a dreamer, more or less.” Around 1904, he dropped out of high school and got a job working with the cartoonists at the San Francisco Chronicle. He later headed east after landing a cartoonist job with the New York Press. After seeing Winsor McCay present a screening of Gertie the Dinosaur, he decided to become an animator.
Two formative experiences guided him. The first came in 1915 as he tried to sell a cartoon to famed film mogul Lewis J. Selznick, who watched Terry’s film, paused for a second, then offered him a dollar a foot for the finished product.
“Mr. Selznick,” Terry answered, “the film I used cost me more than a dollar a foot.”
“Well,” Selznick replied, “I could pay you more for it if you hadn’t put those pictures on it!”
The second experience came after a distributor told Terry that he used his cartoons to clear people out of their seats after the feature. Terry wasn’t even sure if the distributor knew that he was the creator.
From that point on, Terry thought of cartoons strictly as a commodity, not an art. The business became, to him, entirely about cool logic, math, and figuring out the business angles. During his stint working for John Bray, he improved his ability to draw quickly and efficiently, two important skills. He left in 1917 after selling a cartoon with his original character, Farmer Al Falfa, to the Edison company. After World War I—he animated training films for combat surgeons—he struck out on his own. Then, in 1920, Terry received a call from a young actor-turned-writer named Howard Estabrook, who pitched him the idea of a cartoon series based on Aesop’s fables. Terry had never heard of Aesop or his fables, but he was intrigued when Estabrook said it might be profitable.
Terry also liked how the fables featured animals. In many ways, animals made better characters than humans, as Felix’s rising popularity was starting to prove. “When you do something with an animal, it’s unconscious satire, and it seemed to be more sympathetic,” one of Terry’s colleagues would recall. People who act like animals get shunned, but animals that act like people can become immortal. Animal characters also reduced the possibility of offending audiences through ethnic stereotyping, thereby helping them gain wider national appeal, as well as avoid the New York in-jokes commonly found in most other cartoons of the time. Anthropomorphized animals could still be offensive, but started on relatively safer ground, thus helping boost their reputation with distributors and theater owners.
Terry organized his studio the way a factory owner might lay out his plant, with about twenty cartoonists working at desks lined up in rows. Like Bray, he divided the labor into specific tasks, as in an assembly line, to create a hierarchy of labor that was by then becoming an industry standard. The best artists drew only “extreme” poses—that is, poses that anchored the major points of movement in a character’s action. A second tier of artists, known as “in-betweeners,” would then trace in all the drawings between the extremes. These in-between drawings were considered easier to draw, since more tracing was involved, and thus freed up the better artists to