Latest news with #FelixtheCat
New York Post
12-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Post
Felix the Cat heirs claim they were cut out of $100M in business from popular cartoon feline
There was no cash in this magic bag. The Australian descendants of one of the creators of Felix the Cat claim an upstate New York man cut them out of the business for decades and controlled the rights to the cartoon feline — setting them back $100 million. Felix, the distinctive black and white cat with a big grin whose catchphrase is 'Righty-O!,' was co-created by a team of cartoonists, including Patrick Sullivan, in Manhattan in 1919, nearly a decade before Mickey Mouse was born. 3 Later, he became a TV cartoon character with an iconic song and a 'magic bag of tricks' that could transform into any shape. Three heirs of Sullivan claim Donald Oriolo, of Pine Island, NY — whose cartoonist dad Joseph helped bring Felix back to prominence in the 1980s and created Felix's scientist pal Poindexter — failed to inform them of the character's modern day resurgence and spent decades 'siphoning off revenue and assets for his sole benefit.' After struggling through bankruptcy in the '70s, Felix bounced back to become a cult hit in Japan. He was licensed to brands like Sony, Chevrolet, Wendy's and others and eventually sold for an undisclosed sum to Dreamworks in 2014, they said in a lawsuit against Oriolo. Felix the Cat's earning power over the years was thought to be in the 'billions,' according to a January report in Animation Magazine. But there's no legal catfight to be had, insisted Oriolo's lawyer, who denied his client cheated anyone. 3 Oriolo, whose dad helped create the 'Felix the Cat' animated series, took control of the business after his mother Dorothy died in 2004. He long believed all the other shareholders were bought out decades ago, attorney Robert Meloni told The Post. 'Nobody knew about them,' Meloni said, noting the Sullivan trio were children when they inherited their shares. 3 'It was an honest mistake. We thought they had been bought out.' Oriolo 'intends to engage in good faith discussion with the three Sullivan heirs to make sure they're treated right and fairly,' the attorney pledged, while noting, 'What they're entitled to remains to be seen.' A lawyer for the Sullivan heirs disagreed. 'We are confident that the evidence will show Mr. Oriolo was well aware of our clients' ownership interests in the company,' attorney Evan Michailidis said.
New York Times
20-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Cartoonist Who Tapped His Own Psyche and Found America's Unruly Id
R. Crumb, the underground cartoonist, bumped into things when he was young. Before his eyes were tested in first grade, and he was fitted for Coke-bottle glasses, he could perceive neither depth nor distance. His parents thought he was clumsy. With no sense of spatial dynamics, he had to think his way into the world rather than enter it the way most of us do, by simple intuition. When he began to draw, it was as if he was already dipping into a deeply personal and self-replenishing reservoir. He was unusual — a weirdo, to borrow the name of one of his comic book series — right from the start. It's been nearly 60 years since Crumb helped define the visual iconography of late-1960s psychedelia, with surreal imagery that's as instantly recognizable as a Deutsche Grammophon record label and that seemed to come from the past and the future at the same time. His Zap Comix, not for kids, read like a stoner version of the Sunday funnies and gave us the loping and big-footed dudes in his 'Keep On Truckin'' panels and the bald, bearded and semi-baffled mystic Mr. Natural, who in one strip was kicked out of heaven for telling God it was 'a little corny.' There was his version of Felix the Cat, later adapted into the first X-rated animated film, and the cover he drew for 'Cheap Thrills,' the hit second album from Big Brother and the Holding Company, with Janis Joplin — the one with 'Piece of My Heart' on it. It's been more than 30 years since Terry Zwigoff's eye-popping documentary 'Crumb' (1994) reintroduced him to the world and fleshed out his sexual fetishes (notably his inclination to ride piggyback on big women's backs, occasionally uninvited), his demons and his obsession with old-timey 78 r.p.m. records. The movie humanized him — it made him seem like an earnest citizen out on a peculiar limb. The documentary also, as if interpreting the freak-show nature of many of his cartoons, the coarse Russian fairy tale vibe of them, set him alongside his troubled and profoundly eccentric family, which included his often institutionalized mother and a sibling who reclined on beds of nails and regularly passed a 29-foot strip of cotton through his digestive system, in the mouth and out the anus. Is the world ready, as if in every-30-years installments, for another rocky wagon ride into Crumblandia? I was, if only because Dan Nadel's new book, 'Crumb: A Cartoonist's Life,' is a definitive and ideal biography — pound for pound, one of the sleekest and most judicious I've ever read. He's latched onto a fascinating and complicated figure, which helps. But there's more going on here. Nadel, a museum curator who has written two previous books about artists and cartoonists, is an instinctive storyteller, one with a command of the facts and a relaxed tone that also happens to be grainy, penetrating, interested in everything, alive. He knows exactly when and how long to pause and tweezer in background information, a skill that flummoxes so many biographers. This machine kills boredom. 'Crumb: A Cartoonist's Life' is an official biography, written with Crumb's permission. He fact-checked the final manuscript, though he had no control over the final text. He imposed one condition, Nadel writes: 'that I be honest about his faults, look closely at his compulsions and examine the racially and sexually charged aspects of his work. He would rather risk honesty and see if anyone could understand than cooperate with a hagiography.' Robert Crumb's childhood was nomadic. He was born in 1943 in Philadelphia, but his father was in the Marines and the family (Crumb had four siblings) followed him from base to base. Crumb and his older brother, Charles, took to cartooning early, on the bedroom floor, their materials stuffed into coffee cans and cigar boxes. They deplored superhero comics, which were filled with intimidators solving problems with their fists. They were into oddball strips, like Walt Kelly's 'Pogo' and the early work out of Disney. When he was in high school in the 1950s, where he was painfully self-conscious, an absolute outsider, Crumb began to tune into discontented voices such as those of Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl. Mad magazine was another revelation. He and Charles began sending their homemade comic books out into the world. He skipped college but lit out for Cleveland, where he got a job drawing for a major greeting card company. He married his first wife, Dana Morgan, when he was 21 and she was 18. They took LSD together and it permanently shifted the contents of his mind, in a manner he liked — it gave him a direct passage to his subconscious. He began to draw for alternative newspapers. He and Dana drifted out to San Francisco, where he embraced the counterculture, and it embraced him. 'Keep On Truckin'' appeared in Zap Comix No. 1, which hit the streets in 1968. The image was a widely bootlegged phenomenon, to the extent that Crumb would see it on the mudflaps of passing trucks. He was a sort of knowingly inverted dandy, to borrow Walker Evans's description of James Agee. He wore corduroy trousers, baggy pants, thick spectacles and fedoras. Joplin advised him to stop dressing like a dude out of 'The Grapes of Wrath.' He was 'beak nosed,' Nadel writes, 'Adam's apple ready to bob in distress.' He was not quite made for this world. Crumb's underground comics were transgressive comics — they were dirty. Zap No. 4, which came out in 1969, contained a strip called 'Joe Blow' about a family that cheerfully and explicitly commits nearly every variety of incest imaginable and sent a signal, Nadel writes, 'that the American nuclear family was not well.' Zap No. 4 was the first comic to be declared obscene. Lawrence Ferlinghetti was arrested in his City Lights bookstore for selling it. Crumb's sudden fame drove him and his wife out of San Francisco. They settled up north in California's rural Potter Valley, where they slowly developed a commune of sorts. They had an open marriage, of which Crumb took more advantage than Dana did. Both had affairs, but Crumb had more of them, with some later ones lasting decades. He had a physical type: big haunches, bold posterior. His sexual obsessions don't swamp this biography, but they linger near the surface. Crumb carried a lot of baggage. He let his warty, untutored id loose in his work. He had a sense of himself as, Nadel writes, 'a grotesque ectomorph.' He sometimes drew comics about domination, about rape, about women without heads who seemed to be little more than pieces of meat. 'He was stuck between shame and desire; the spiritual and material; worship and hatred,' Nadel writes about some of these cartoons. 'They are also curiously devotional, drawn with great care and attention, as though Robert was mesmerized by his own fantasy.' Nadel presents the voices of women who were appalled; he cites just as many who ardently defended him, who felt that women have masochistic fantasies too, and that no one should be in the business of regulating fantasies. Crumb certainly did not run a P.R. campaign on behalf of his own psyche. He tinkered in his work with ugly racial stereotypes. These drawings deeply troubled many of his liberal cartoonist friends. His work was purging satire, he insisted, and others, including the poet Ishmael Reed, agreed with him. He became his own best character in his work; he was both ventriloquist and dummy. The second half of this biography shows us Crumb mostly running away from things, first in Potter Valley and later in rural France, where he moved with his second wife, Aline Kominsky, with whom he frequently collaborated. Too much socializing made him squirm. He'd often start drawing in the middle of a busy party. He ran from fame. He was determined not to be perceived as a joke that 1968 left behind. He avoided Jane Fonda and Roger Vadim when they wanted to make a movie with him. He turned down an opportunity to play banjo on 'Saturday Night Live' with his band, which sometimes went by R. Crumb and His Cheap Suit Serenaders. He declined a $10,000 offer to draw a Rolling Stones album cover. He blocked most attempts to commercialize his work and characters. Over the decades he slowly began to feel that he'd run out of original ideas, though the sketchbooks he filled over the decades prove otherwise. Still, he more often illustrated the work of other writers — notably Harvey Pekar in the autobiographical and blue-collar 'American Splendor' series, but also James Boswell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Franz Kafka, Charles Bukowski and the Book of Genesis. He drew dozens of photorealistic and often solemn portraits of the long-forgotten musicians he so loved. There are a lot of road trips in this biography. Crumb was too dyslexic to learn to drive. He enjoyed the existential state, Nadel writes, of being the 'eternal passenger.' He took two stabs at being a father, a role for which he felt ill equipped, and did a bit better the second time around. His second marriage was an open one, too. Aline died in 2022, at the age of 74. Nadel is a canny visual reader of comics, and he traces Crumb's influence on a long line of cartoonists, from Art Spiegelman and Matt Groening to Daniel Clowes, Lynda Barry and Seth. 'Every cartoonist has to pass through Crumb,' Spiegelman tells him. 'What happens when you encounter Crumb is like the accelerated evolution scene in '2001.' You had to pass through him to find out what your voice might be.'
Yahoo
20-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Ask Chris: Who was the first female movie executive?
FORTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, Sherry Lansing made headlines around the world when the former math-teacher-turned-model-turned-actress-turned-executive broke the glass ceiling of the movie industry by being named head of 20th Century Fox. The Oscar-nominated producer was honored with footprints at Grauman's Chinese Theater and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. Lansing's appointment was a milestone, but not the first time ladies were in charge. 'Bottom line,' historian Mindy Johnson, author of Ink & Paint: The Women of Walt Disney's Animation, says, 'there were more women in power — in front of and behind the camera — in the silent era, than there are today.' In 1912, actor/writer/director Lois Weber took over Universal's Rex Motion Picture brand. Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks were dating when they teamed up with Charlie Chaplin and D.W. Griffith to launch their United Artists studio in 1919. Another actress, Mabel Normand, became a director and ran the Mabel Normand Feature Film Company. 'The whole industry was small studios,' Johnson says. 'And many were owned and run by women.' Marion Fairfax, who adapted the dinosaur action epic The Lost World in 1925, was one of the women who formed her own production company. Producer Margaret Winkler was a titan in the animation industry, distributing Felix the Cat, Fleischer cartoons, and Walt Disney's first films. In 1945, Virginia Van Upp, who had written and produced hit films for Rita Hayworth, was chosen by Columbia Pictures chief Harry Cohn to supervise all production at stat studio, the last time a woman would hold that position for many years. Said Lansing in 1980, 'I hope as the new decade goes on, the appointment of a woman to a major post will not be so noteworthy: That it will become natural for women to have high positions in every industry.'
