Christmas Cards From Animation's Greats

Christmas is a time for animators and others who toiled during the Golden Age of Theatrical Cartoons to show their skill to friends and relatives. Many drew their own Christmas greetings. It’s felicitous that a lot of these cards have survived.

This year, Charlie Judkins has scanned some by Terrytoons employees that had been in the collection of animator Red Auguston. You can see them HERE.

Cartoon Brew has a bunch from the Lantz studio, right to the bitter end when a lot of good talent was wasted on crap. Click HERE and HERE. They came from Martin Almeyra.

The Fleischer Studio site owned by the Kneitel family has oodles of cards from old-time Fleischer staffers. Go HERE and click on the arrow to see each one. I believe some of them were published years ago in The Fleischer Story by Leslie Carbarga (my copy seems to have walked away for the holidays). And at Animation Resources, you’ll see Disney studio cartoons HERE.

Before you click on the links, take a look at these which I copied from elsewhere on-line. I didn’t make a notation whose collections they are from, for which I’m sorry. Here’s a great one for you fans of Flip the Frog (and you should be one).



If you don’t know who Friz Freleng, Hugh Harman, Rudy Ising and Tom and Jerry are, you’ve come to the wrong web site. The first three were posted by Kevin Coffey; Tom and Jerry comes from either Jim Engel or Jon Cooke.



Both Jevitronco Duro and Kevin posted this on Facebook. Tex claimed he could never draw, but this is just fine. It’s circa 1930.



More Tom and Jerry, you say? Thanks to Kevin Langley for this. Tom’s missing the white between his eyes but has the thatched fur there.



Finally, from Jerry Beck (you can find this in his Cartoon Research section at Cartoon Brew) comes this great staff photo/Christmas card from the Mintz studio, which made Krazy Kat and Scrappy cartoons that were distributed by Columbia. I’ll list some of the names here because this is really tough to see. Above the building is Ray Fahringer (second from left), with Reuben Timmins (fifth from left) and Ed Benedict next to each other and Irv Spector (second from right). The top row of the building has Emery Hawkins, Dick Marion and Irv Ellis (is he different than Izzy Ellis?) and Lou Lilly. The next row includes Ben Shenkman, Lou Zukowski, Ray and Don Patterson, Clark Watson (layout artist), Ray Patin (misspelled), Ray Huffine and Ed (not Fred) Moore. Ike Mellet, Al Boggs (layout), Paul Novak, Chuck Couch (writer) are in the next row; Mike Marcus, Joe De Nat (fine musical director) and Jimmy Bronis (production poobah) are in the row below; Felix Alegre (a Filipino), Preston Blair and Bill Higgins (both later of MGM) is the row below that. The great Art Davis is below Blair with Sid Glenar next to him and Jimmy Roth, Frank Powers (ink and paint supervisor) and Ruth Love farther down; Sid Marcus, George Winkler and Fred Jones (later of Warners) in the next row and the Rose brothers, Harry Love, Alice and Ed Rehberg, Al Jackson and Joe Voght (perennial assistant animator) included on the bottom. Mintz died just after Christmas six years later. There’s a pleasant Yuletide thought.



My thanks to those fine people who posted these cards and my thanks to you for reading this blog. It’s, more or less, a place for me to dump old screen grabs and newspaper clippings sitting in my computer and I hope you find some of them of interest.