MIAMI WAS FORMER HOME OF BETTY BOOP AND POPEYE

Miami Herald, The (FL) - February 13, 1987

Author/Byline: IRENE LACHER Herald Staff Writer

Edition: FINAL
Section: AMUSEMENTS
Page: 11D
Readability: >12 grade level (Lexile: 1540)
For one sweet moment, Miami was full of movie stars whose presence was considered a harbinger of glittery things to come.
Of course, the "movie stars" were really animators for Fleischer studios, a mammoth cartoon production facility that briefly cranked out
such classics as Popeye and Betty Boop in the American tropics.
Still, during its five-year stay in Miami, Fleischer rivaled cartoon giant Walt Disney in the field, hosting movie premieres with all the glitz of
Hollywood.
One of those feature-length films, the Capra-esque Mr. Bug Goes to Hollywood, will be shown at 2 p.m. Sunday in a Miami Film Festival
program devoted to the city's fling with animation, "A Salute to the Fleischer Studio." Also on the program at Gusman Center for the
Performing Arts are cartoon classics and a documentary on the studio, one of Miami's largest employers from 1938 to 1942.
More than 500 animators, assistant animators, in-betweeners (cartoonists who drew interim action after the animators drew the broad
strokes), sound men, writers, directors and others worked out of a 32,000 square-foot facility at Northwest 17th Street and 29th Avenue,
now a youth home run by Dade County.
The studio had moved south from New York's theater district after a strike convinced Paramount Pictures, the five Fleischer brothers'
overlord, that the facility would thrive in Florida's labor climate. The brothers had already found fame and some fortune in animation
inventions and creations -- including the rotoscope, which translated live action into animated, song cartoons whose words were noted
with a bouncing ball, and Betty Boop, modeled after the sultry cabaret singer Helen Kane in 1930.
"She was based on the flappers of the era," said Frank Gladstone, who teaches animation at the University of Miami. "She was a New
York-type of character, a tough, sexy, flapper, independent woman."
Also on Fleischer's hit list were Popeye the sailor, notable for his bulging forearms, and cohorts Olive Oyl, Bluto and Wimpy. They were
based on a popular newspaper comic strip called Thimble Theater. And in a case of life imitating art, Fleischer fired up the publicity mill
when the voice of Popeye, Jack Mercer, said "I do" to one of the voices of Olive Oyl, Margie Hines.
"The big headline at the time was Popeye marries Olive Oyl," recalled Frank Spalding, a cartoonist who later did illustrations for the Miami
News and Miami-Dade Community
College.
Max Fleischer, generous, a spare 5-foot-2 inches tall and known for his trademark suspenders, was also, by all accounts, a creative
genius. But that didn't save him when Paramount decided to shut down the Miami operation, rename it Famous and move it back to New
York in 1942.
The move was triggered by the commercial failure of Mr. Bug, which had the misfortune to open during the same month as the bombing
of Pearl Harbor, not a high point for cartoons in America.
"Paramount did an awful job of distributing it, so the picture failed," said Gladstone. "Whether Paramount wanted them to fail is debatable.
They said the studio was losing money and the Fleischers weren't running it well and they pulled the plug."
Caption: photo: woman drawing CARTOONS in 1938-1942 cartoons were king in Miami the Fleischer cartoon s
Memo: MIAMI FILM FESTIVAL
Record: 8701130057
Copyright: Copyright (c) 1987 The Miami Herald