Review of Felix the Cat

The silent Felix cartoons were, for the most part, VERY good. Having no soundtrack, all they had to let you know what Felix was thinking or feeling was the artwork, at which the animators were extremely successful. You really can't compare the silents with the Trans-Lux TV Felix cartoons. However, in those TV cartoons, the producers were intelligent enough to hire Voice Actor extraordinaire Jack Mercer. He started at the Max Fleischer cartoon studio in New York City (that studio's original location was the reason for the urban settings of their cartoons.). Unlike the talented people at Warner Bros., Disney and many others, a large percentage of the settings of THEIR cartoons were rural. But watch a Betty Boop or a Popeye cartoon, and you'll fing they take place in urban locations. Jack Mercer was the voice of Popeye for FIFTY-plus years! Though many of the people who made the TV Felix cartoons made the rounds among the animation studios, each studio's product had a personality of its own, and that's where the talents of the artists and writers really shined. Sure, there are settings in, say, W-B cartoons varied and were definitely NOT urban, such as "The Awful Orphan" starring Porky Pig and Charlie Dog. It takes place on a farm, as do many others. But that's the beauty of any animated cartoon - you can make the setting ANY PLACE, on Earth or elsewhere in the known Multiverse. None of those locations are any more difficult to get to or any more expensive than any other. The reason, of course, is that everything you see and hear is the product of the Director's and animator's imaginations. Every cartoon by any studio was drawn at the same desks as any other.

I remember when I was a kid, and the Trans-Lux Felix cartoons were run every day. I watched them then and liked them! But if you told me then that all the characters were voiced by Jack Mercer, I'd never have believed you!