Two years after "Snow White" (when Walt Disney "opened his own mint*") the Fleischer brothers and Paramount Pictures bring forth "Gulliver's Travels".
The nation's second full-length animated feature premiered in 50 theaters one day after "Gone With the Wind" began showing at reserved seat prices. It went on to make Paramount a substantial sum of money, earning a domestic gross of $3,270,000 against a million dollar budget.
For Max and Dave Fleischer, making "Gulliver" was a dream come true. Max had wanted to make a feature since the early thirties, but getting the flick done was like running an obstacle course up a rock-strewn mountain. Their parent company Paramount was steadfast in its refusal to let them make a long-form cartoon. Adolph Zukor, the head man, thought that making eighty minute cartoons was an "iffy" proposition, at best. Plus, he'd been through a few corporate reorganizations with Paramount and had no stomach for losing big money. Or even medium-size money. So the answer was "No".
And then "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" came out and made RKO (Disney's distributor) a tidy fortune. Whereupon Paramount gave the Fleischer studio a hearty "Yes!" to a feature cartoon. They also gave the Fleischers a production schedule of eighteen months and a $500k budget to do "a picture like Disney".
This greenlight came as the brothers were shifting work from New York City to a new studio in Miami to get away from the Commercial Artists and Designers Union. The CADU had organized its New York artists, and Max and Dave believed it would be cheaper and quicker to make their first feature in corporate-friendly Florida.
Wrong on both counts. The Fleischers made the deadline (barely), but overshot their feature budget by a wide margin, as they were forced to pay assistants and journey animators three and four times their New York or L.A. salaries to get them to relocate to the land of palm trees and alligators. Plus, Miami was way the hell and gone from any motion picture center. Inconvenient, to say the least.
Despite "Gulliver's" success, Walt Disney was quoted as saying "we could have done better with our second-string animators". (Ooh. SNAP!) To be fair, however, the Fleischer house style was not ... and isn't ... particularly close to what their west coast competitor was doing, even when Paramount Pictures wanted it to be. The rotoscoping of Gulliver is certainly better than the prince in "Snow White" and most of the rest of the cast is broad and cartoony in the classic Fleischer tradition.
But even with the success of "GT", things were not rosy in Fleischerland. The brothers had to pay Paramount Pictures a penalty for being over-budget on "Gulliver". The Florida studio was split into union and anti-union factions. And Miami at the end of the thirties was little more than a small, humid town at the edge of the Gulf Stream, bereft of any cultural amenities other than sun bathing and 'gator wrestling. The New York animators missed the restaurants and theaters of the Big Apple, the occasional snowstorm. There was also the small problem of Max and Dave Fleischer hardly speaking to one another.
In other words, morale was a trifle ... saggy.
But work continued on the usual program of shorts, also a new feature that Paramount had okayed. Artists were happy to be making higher wages that they'd earn in New York or on the West Coast. And twenty-four months later on the eve of Pearl Harbor, Max's and Dave's "Mr. Bug Goes To Town" was released. Hopes were high for the picture's success, but the onset of war buried "Mr. Bug". The trade papers declared the new cartoon to be stillborn at the box office, and Paramount, seldom slow on the uptake, quickly laid off both Fleischers and shut the Florida studio down. (Never mind that artists were doing sterling work with a new, flossy series of "Superman" shorts.) Walt rode out World War II making films for the military, but for the brothers who'd been in business since bobbed hair and flappers were in vogue, two decades of cartoon creation were at an end.
(Happily, many of the artists relocated back to New York, where Paramount sat up and ran Famous Studios for another quarter century.)
* "If we'd released that picture, we could open our own mint." -- Producer Darryl Zanuck's rote analysis of a competitor's high grossing film...
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