28 Facts About Max Fleischer

Max Fleischer brought such comic characters as Koko the Clown, Betty Boop, Popeye, and Superman to the movie screen, and was responsible for several technological innovations, including the rotoscope, the "follow the bouncing ball" technique pioneered in the Ko-Ko Song Car-Tunes films, and the "stereoptical process".

Majer Max Fleischer was born July 19,1883, to a Jewish family in Krakow,.

Max Fleischer's family immigrated to the United States in March 1887, settling in New York City, where he attended public school.

Max Fleischer's teens were spent in Brownsville, a poor Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn.

Max Fleischer received commercial art training at Cooper Union and formal art instruction at the Art Students League of New York, studying under George Bridgman.

Max Fleischer attended the Mechanics and Tradesman's School in midtown Manhattan.

On December 25,1905, Max Fleischer married his childhood sweetheart, Ethel Goldstein.

Max Fleischer devised an improvement in animation through a combined projector and easel for tracing images from a live-action film.

Max Fleischer chose a political satire of a hunting trip by Theodore Roosevelt.

Max Fleischer produced his Out of the Inkwell films featuring "The Clown" character, which his brother Dave originated; he had worked as a sideshow clown at Coney Island.

Max Fleischer set the style for the series, redesigning "The Clown", and named him "Ko-Ko".

In 1924, Max Fleischer partnered with Edwin Miles Fadiman, Hugo Riesenfeld and Lee de Forest to form Red Seal Pictures Corporation, which owned 36 theaters on the East Coast, extending as far west as Cleveland, Ohio.

Inkwell Films, Inc filed for bankruptcy in January 1929, and Max Fleischer formed Max Fleischer Studios, Inc in March 1929.

Max Fleischer first set up operations at Carpenter-Goldman Laboratories in Queens with a small staff.

At Carpenter-Goldman, Max Fleischer began producing industrial films including Finding His Voice, a demonstration film illustrating the Western Electric Variable Density sound recording and reproduction method.

At this early stage in the sound era, Max Fleischer produced many technically advanced films that were the result of his continued research and development that perfected the post-production method of sound recording.

Max Fleischer's Betty Boop character was born out of a cameo caricature in the early Talkartoon, Dizzy Dishes.

Finally, in May 1937, Max Fleischer Studios was affected by a five-month strike, resulting in a boycott that kept the studio's releases off theater screens until November.

Jonathan Swift's classic novel Gulliver's Travels was a favorite of Max Fleischer's and was pressed into production.

In 1940, Max Fleischer was relegated to business affairs and continued technical development.

Max Fleischer's efforts resulted in a reflex camera viewfinder and line transfer methods to replace the time-consuming and tedious process of cel inking.

The actual figure stated in Max Fleischer's contract was in the $30,000 range, twice the cost of a Popeye cartoon.

Unable to form a studio due to the demand for military training films, Max Fleischer was brought in as head of the Animation Department for the industrial film company, The Jam Handy Organization in Detroit, Michigan.

Max Fleischer was involved with top-secret research and development for the war effort including an aircraft bomber sighting system.

Max Fleischer won a lawsuit against Paramount in 1955 over the removal of his name from the credits of his films.

In 1958, Max Fleischer revived Out of the Inkwell Films, Inc and partnered with his former animator Hal Seeger, to produce 100 color Out of the Inkwell cartoons for television.

Max Fleischer died from arterial sclerosis of the brain on September 25,1972, two months after his 89th birthday, and in announcing his passing the press labeled him "dean of animated cartoons".

Max Fleischer's death preceded the reclaiming of his star character, Betty Boop, and a national retrospective.