Fleischer Studios: 14 Weird Facts You Didn’t Know!

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]Fleer Studio, 1921. 14 shocking facts you never knew. Before Mickey Mouse was a household name, before Disney had built its empire, there was another studio located not in California, but in the middle of Manhattan, making cartoons that were darker, stranger, and more technically advanced than anything else on the market. They gave the world Popeye, Betty, Boop, and Superman. They invented technology that the entire animation industry still uses today. And then in the space of a few years, they lost everything to a strike, a personal feud, and a film studio that took their work and erased their name. This is the real story of Flasher Studios. Fact one, the first cartoon Max Flasher ever made starred his brother in a clown suit. In 1914, Max Fleer was working as the art editor of Popular Science Monthly when he began experimenting with a device that would change animation forever. He and his brother Dave built the rotoscope, a combination of a film projector and an easel that allowed an animator to trace over liveaction footage frame by frame, creating fluid, realistic movement. To test it, Max filmed Dave wearing a Clown Con costume he had worn at Coney Island. He traced over that footage, and the result was the first animated character the Flasher brothers ever created, the clown, who would eventually become Coco the Clown.

[00:01:38]The patent for the rotoscope was granted in 1915. Dave's movements in a secondhand costume on a makeshift set became the foundation of an entire studio's identity. Every fluid character, every realistic gesture in a flasher cartoon traced back to one brother filming another in a borrowed clown suit on an afternoon in 1914. And the technology that footage inspired would put them ahead of their most famous competitor by year. Fact two, they beat Disney to sound by 2 years.

[00:02:13]Steamboat Willie, released by Walt Disney in November 1928, has been credited for decades as the first animated cartoon to synchronize sound with animation. That credit is wrong.

[00:02:26]And the Fleer brothers were the ones who actually got there first. In 1926, using the DeForest phonofilm sound on film system, Fleer Studios released My Old Kentucky Home, a synchronized sound cartoon that preceded Steamboat Willie by two full years. The song cartoon series which featured the bouncing ball singalong technique Max had invented used real synchronized sound years before Disney's mouse ever appeared on screen. The reason history forgot this is partly commercial. Steamboat Willie was a massive cultural event. While the flasher sound cartoons were seen by smaller audiences and distributed through channels that couldn't match Disney's reach. Being first didn't matter if nobody remembered. And for decades, nobody did. The studio that had beaten Disney to sound had started under a very different name. Fact three. The studio was named after an inkwell. When Max and Dave Fleer left Brave Productions in 1921 and established their own operation, they called it out of the Inkwell Films Incorporated. The name came directly from their original cartoon series, which featured Coco the Clown emerging from a real Inkwell into the liveaction world. a recurring visual gag built on the novelty of mixing animation with live footage. The address was 1600 Broadway Manhattan and the studio operated under that original name until 1929 when it was formally renamed Flasher Studios. In between it went through a brief period as Inkwell Studios and Inkwell I imps depending on the contract and the distributor. The name changes followed financial and legal complication rather than any creative decision. But the original image, a cartoon character crawling out of an inkwell into the real world, captured something essential about what the Faer brothers were actually trying to do. And it stayed with them long after the name itself was gone. And the character who had climbed out of that inkwell first didn't even have a name for the first six years of his existence. Fact four. Coco the clown had no name for 6 years. The character who launched the Flasher studio who appeared in their first cartoon. Cartoons who was the face of everything the brothers built in the early years had no name from 1915 until 1921. He was simply called the clown. It wasn't until animator Dick Homer came aboard in 1921 and redesigned the character for more efficient animation that the clown was given the name Coco. Woomer did more than name him. He established the distinctive Fleer visual style with its thick and thin ink lines and moved the studio away from its total dependence on the rotoscope. Whmer also created Koko's K9 Companion. Originally called Fitz, who would eventually evolve into Bimbo, the dog who became Betty Boop first boyfriend, one animator's arrival in 1921, gave the studio its character name, its visual identity, and the ancestor of one of its most beloved supporting players. That was a productive first week. The characters the studio built all shared a specific quality that set them apart from everything Disney was doing. Fact five, their style was the opposite of Disney on purpose. While Disney's cartoons featured anthropomorphic animals in idealized country settings with gentle humor designed for families, Flasher Studios built their world around something completely different. Their most successful characters were humans, not animals. Set in gritty urban environments that reflected the reality of depression era New York. The humor was darker, the situations more adult, the surrealism, more aggressive early Betty Boop cartoons contained content that would have been unthinkable in a Disney production. The flasher approach to animation reflected German expressionism and jazzed New York, not the pastoral optimism of Walt Disney's world. This wasn't accidental. The brothers were New York Jews who had grown up in Brooklyn, and their cartoons looked and felt like the city that raised them. The contrast with Disney was a feature, not a flaw. And for audiences who wanted something raw than Mickey Mouse, it was exactly what they were looking for. And then one evening in May 1937, everything inside the studio changed in a way it would never recover from fact 6. A fivemon strike destroyed the family feeling forever. At exactly 6:30 p.m. on May 7, 1937, union members began picketing outside the Flasher Studios building on Broadway.

[00:07:45]The strike led by the commercial artist and designers union lasted 5 months.

[00:07:51]Pickers spread to multiple location including outside the personal residences of Max and Dave Flasher.

[00:07:58]Dave's house was stink bombed during the strike. Strikers jered at screenings of Flasher cartoons in theaters, chanting, "Get that scab picture off the screen."

[00:08:09]Paramount, worried about the negative press affecting their liveaction production, pressured Mac to settle.

[00:08:16]When the strike finally ended, the damage was deeper than any contract negotiation could measure. Animator Orestus Kalpini later recalled simply, "The family feeling was gone. Max became increasingly withdrawn, spending his work days alone in his office rather than on the production floor. The studio that had felt like a family had become something else entirely, and it would never feel the same again." The decision Max made to end the strike's leverage on the studio would trigger a chain of event nobody could reverse. Fact seven, they moved the entire studio to Miami to escape the union. On January 21, 1938, Max Flesher officially announced the studios relocation to Miami, Florida.

[00:09:06]The move was presented publicly as a practical decision. More space was needed for the production of their first feature film, but historians have noted consistently that the timing was not coincidental. Florida was a far less union friendly state than New York, and the move effectively dissolved the union's leverage over the studio. Many pro-UN employees refused to relocate and were not replaced with organized workers. The studio went from approximately 250 employees in New York to eventually 700 in Miami, built on a new non unionized workforce, the Miami studio opened in October 1938.

[00:09:52]Constructed with loans from Paramount, what the move also did unintentionally was place the two Flashier brothers in a new city under new pressure, far from everything familiar. And that proximity under stress would prove catastrophic for their personal relationship. What happened between Max and Dave in Miami was something neither of them could have predicted when they left New York. Fact eight. Dave started an affair with his secretary and it ended the brother's relationship. Shortly after the move to Miami, Dave Fleer began an adulterous affair with his secretary May Schwar.

[00:10:32]The affair was not a secret within the studio. It was, as documented sources describe it, very public, combined with the professional pressures of producing their first feature film under a paramount deadline. The personal betrayal that Max felt transformed the working relationship between the two brothers into something irreparable. By the end of 1939, Max and Dave Fleer had stopped speaking to each other entirely. They communicated solely by memo. Two brothers who had built an animation studio together from a single rotoscoped clown now unable to hold a conversation.

[00:11:14]The feature film they were completing, Guliver's Travels, suffered visibly from the internal dysfunction. The script lacked unity. The characters were inconsistent. Paramount had forced them to rush, and the brothers, who normally balanced each other's instinct, were no longer in the same room. And in the middle of all of this collapse, Paramount handed them one more project, the most expensive short film in their history. Fact nine, they asked for $100,000 per Superman short, and got $50,000. When Paramount approached Fleer Studios about producing an animated Superman series, Max Flasher didn't want to do it. His studio was already stretched thin. His relationship with his brother was broken, and feature film production was consuming all available resources. To discourage Paramount from pursuing the idea, Max quoted them a budget of $100,000 per short, approximately four times what a typical flasher short cost to produce. Paramount entered into negotiations and came back with a counter offer of $50,000. Max accepted. The first Superman short was produced for that budget, the highest ever spent on a flasher theatrical short. And when it was released in September 1941, it was immediately recognized as some of the most sophisticated animation the studio had ever produced. Its ultra realistic style, art deco design, and intricate scoring made it something genuinely new. Max's attempt to price Paramount out of the project accidentally produced a masterpiece. And in the process of making that cartoon, the studio did something that would permanently change the character forever. Fact 10. Superman learned to fly because of Flasher Studios. In the original comic book, Superman could not fly. His power was described as the ability to leap an eighth of a mile, a predigious jump, but not flight. When the Flasher animators began working on the character, they looked at the leap and concluded that it looked awkward in animation. A figure jumping from to point didn't translate well to the fluid movement the studio was known for. They approached the Superman rights holder and asked for permission to change the power to actual flight. Permission was granted. The first flyer Superman short depicted the character flying genuinely smoothly with the kind of animated grace the rotoscope had been perfecting for 25 years. The change was accepted immediately by audiences and eventually folded back into the comics and every subsequent version of the character.

[00:14:15]Popeye's Studio gave Superman one of his most iconic abilities and then lost their own studio before anyone properly credited them for it. While the Superman series was at its peak, the studio released their second feature film on the worst possible day. Fact 11. Their second feature film opened 2 days before Pearl Harbor missed. Bug Goes to Town was Flasher Studios second and final animated feature film. It was completed on time, brought in within its $500,000 budget, and previewed on December 5, 1941. 2 days later, on December 7, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into World War II. The film's general release in early 1942 landed in a country that was mobilizing for war and had little appetite for an animated story about insects in a city god and it never recuped its cult. The timing was not the studio's fault.

[00:15:20]Nobody could have predicted the attack, but the result was devastating. Mr. Bug Goes to Town became the film that confirmed Paramount's worst financial fears about Flasher Studio. The loans were called in. The ownership papers were prepared. And the brothers who had built the studio were about to lose it on the basis of a film that was released into a world that had just changed overnight. And the way that loss happened was shaped by a telegram Max sent about his own brother. Fact 12.

[00:15:53]Paramount used a telegram Max sent about his brother to fire him as work on Mister Bug Goes to Town was wrapping up.

[00:16:02]Dave Fleer quietly left for Los Angeles without informing Max. He had accepted a position as head of Colombia's Screen Gems animation unit, a direct competitor, while still under contract to Paramount. Max, unaware that Dave had already left, sent a telegram to Paramount's New York office. stating that he was no longer willing to work with his brother. Paramount's executives read that telegram as a resignation letter and immediately produced the signed resignation documents they had required from both brothers as a condition of earlier financing. Max was summoned to an emergency meeting in December 1941 and effectively fired from the studio he had founded. Dave announced his own resignation on New Year's Eve. The two brothers, who had stopped speaking to each other, had now both lost the company. Their rotoscope clown had built, one by desertion, one by a telegram he thought was a complaint. And when Paramount installed new management in the studio, one of the appointments was deeply personal. Fact 13. Max's own son-in-law was installed to replace him. When Paramount reorganized Flasher Studios into famous studios in May 1942, they promoted four existing employees to run the operation.

[00:17:29]One of them was Seymour Kennle, Max Flasher's son-in-law. The man who had married into Max's family was now sitting in the chair Max had built.

[00:17:39]Canidal became one of the supervising producers and credited directors of famous studios, sharing responsibilities that had previously belonged to Dave, the studio Max had founded, the characters he had created, the building in Miami he had constructed with Paramount's loan. All of it now operated under a name he hadn't chosen, run in part by a member of his own family who had stayed while he was pushed out.

[00:18:08]Paramount moved Famous Studios back to New York within 8 months of the takeover, sold the Miami property, and reduced the staff significantly. The city Max had relocated to the building he had opened in 1938 was simply abandoned. And then, more than a decade after losing everything, Max found one more fight. He was willing to have Fact 14. Max sued Paramount in 1956 and won.

[00:18:37]In 1955, Paramount sold a large portion of its pre950 cartoon library to M andM TV Corporation for television distribution. As the cartoons began appearing on television screens across America, Max Fleer noticed something troubling. His name was being removed from the credit. The title alterations required by the sale had stripped his name from cartoons he had produced in violation of his original contract with Paramount. On June 17th, 1956, Max Fleer filed suit against Paramount and its television distribution partners seeking $2,750,000 in damages. The infringement was corrected. His name was restored to the prints exhibited on television. It wasn't the studio back. It wasn't the characters back. It wasn't the decades of lost income or the credit history that had been quietly erased. But it was something, a legal acknowledgement that his name belonged on the work he had made. Max Flesher died on September 11th, 1972 at the age of 89. They invented the rotoscope. They beat Disney to sound by 2 years. They created the character that your parents and grandparents grew up watching. They built a studio from a single device Max assembled in a spare room, grew it to 800 employees, and lost it to a combination of a labor strike, a family feud, an affair, and a telegram. The cartoon survived. Popeye is still sailing. Betty Boop is still on merchandise around the world. Superman can still fly because the Flasher brothers asked if he could. The studio is gone, but the work it made is everywhere. If you know where to look,