Felix Makes a Mistake

No, this isn’t the name of a cartoon. I was doing some Felix hunting and found this article from the Victoria Advocate of March 6, 1927.

Felix ran in serial form (dubbed “reels”) in newspapers in the ‘20s. One adventure seems to have caused a bit of a flap. I can't find the actual comics in question, but I’ve included a poor copy of the graphic that accompanied the story. It’s not the best quality but you should get the idea.

Yes, Felix Will Be Careful About Bananas
Felix the Cat must watch his step more carefully in the future. The children who follow him so closely have just given him a lesson he will not forget. Of course Felix wasn’t to blame. He had to do what Pat Sullivan told him or get out of the picture and lose all of his nine lives at one and the same time. But since the children who read The Advocate know Felix and do not know his inimitable creator, it is Felix who has been put on probation. Hundreds of letters have come to Mr. Sullivan’s studio from children telling Felix “what’s wrong with this picture.”
“I didn’t know that I was letting Felix put his foot into it when I had him jump upon a bunch of bananas hanging from a tree to escape from a snake in the jungle,” said the artist in telling of the avalanche of letters. “It seems to me that he put all four feet into it, judging by the number of letters I have received, and now I shall have to appeal to The Advocate to help extricate him. Please tell your little readers for me that I would love to answer each letter that came to me. I started out to do so, but so many came that I am forced to answer through the column of their favorite newspaper.
“What happened was this: Felix was shown jumping upon a bunch of bananas which hung from the stalk just as they do from a stalking hanging in a grocery store. From their studies in commercial geography or from some other source the little letter writers know that bananas don’t grow that way. The bunch in the grocery store is reversed from the way it hangs from the tree in the tropics.
“It looked for a time as if Felix and I would be able to wiggle out of the difficulty by writing the young people that when the bananas are first formed and they are very small they hang down just as they do in the picture. This explanation was going well during the first few days when I was trying to answer all letters personally. It went very well until indeed until I received a reply to my letter from a very young lady who said, ‘If bananas were small they would not have been ripe and then Felix would not have had such a good time eating them in the last picture because we learned at school that you shouldn’t eat an uncooked banana until the yellow skin has some black spots on it.’
“Now, when a little girl is as matter of fact as that there is no answer which can possibly let Felix save his face. All I can say is that when he goes into the jungles again he will be very careful to observe all the rules.”
So, at the request of Mr. Sullivan, The Advocate is taking this means of telling the little friends of Felix that they will have to look sharp if they ever catch him again. Watch for Felix every Sunday.