What If Felix The Cat kept his early success? (Part 1: Golden Age Of Animation)
I want to preface this by saying this is a slightly redone version of something I did on r/felixthecat. I'll try to fix any errors that i originally made
Hey everyone, I recently thought of an idea, what if Felix managed to survive the beginning of sound and keep his success from the silent era? This idea has been sitting in my mind for so long and I've decided to write this AU down. This will be in multiple parts, I have envisoned 4 parts, Theatrical (The entire golden age of animation), 50s-70s, 80s-90s and 2000s+. Without further ado, Let's get this What If started!
Our story does not begin in 1919, instead we start in 1927, the beginning of sound. The Jazz Singer had recently released and "talkies" were seen as the future of cinema, Sullivan in our timeline, thought sound was a fad and refused to make the jump with Felix and only did it hesistantly after the success of Steamboat Wille the following year and even when sound was added, it was done very badly and Felix fell out of favour with audiences. However, in this timeline, Sullivan decided to jump on the sound boat, making Felix one of the first sound cartoon stars (although Steamboat Wille will still be the first syncronized sound cartoon). The new sound Felix shorts (actually done well) were very successful but Mickey still surpassed Felix in popularity, but hey second place isn't that bad.
Felix's first actor would still be Harry Edison (I originally called him an unknown actor because that's what David Lee Down Under's video on Felix from 2019 said) who voiced him in our timeline, but obviously with better quality, with a rapsy voice for the character. Educational Pictures would continue to distribute the Felix shorts to theaters. In 1933, Sullivan passed away but instead of the studio completely shutting down, Otto became the head of the studio while the Sullivan estate kept the rights to Felix. By this point, Walter Tetley would take over as the next voice of Felix with a more younger voice for the character but still slightly raspy.
By the end of the 30s, Educational Pictures would go bankrupt, leaving the Felix cartoons without a distributor, luckily 20th Century Fox, who distributed Educational Pictures' films, took over as the main distributor of the Felix shorts. But by the 1940s, things had to change.
The 40s began with a boom of new stars, such as Tom And Jerry, Woody Woodpecker and Bugs Bunny, which started to surpass Felix in popularity. The surreal, wacky and non-sensical shorts of the 30s were being phased out with newer, more dialouge/slapstick heavy stories and if Felix wanted to survive, he would need to adapt. Now we welcome the enterance of Joe Oriolo who would work alongside Messmer on the Felix comics and now recently came to the theatrical shorts team and would help reinvent Felix.
The new 40s Felix has similar personality to his 30s incarnation but with the more naive and joyful demeanor of the Oriolo Felix in our timeline. Kitty, Inky, Winky and Skiddo would be redesigned at this point, taking on their 50s appearances. We would also see the introduction of Waldo the Rooster, who in our timeline was a scrapped character who was meant to be Felix's rival in the canned Van Burean short, as Felix's new main adversary (don't worry we will get to the TV series characters later).
This reinvention managed to breath new life into the shorts which were growing a bit stale at that point, keeping the studio afloat. By 1943, the Sullivan estate would sell the rights to Felix to Messmer and Oriolo and the two would rename Sullivan Studios to Felix The Cat Productions. The new direction for the shorts were mostly well-recevied but Felix was still being overshadowed by the newer, more popular stars such as Donald Duck and Bugs Bunny.
Felix would also star in multiple wartime propaganda shorts as was the norm for most cartoon characters (unless your name is Mickey). These shorts were nothing majorly important for this AU but I just have to mention it.
Despite the new direction of the shorts being decently popular, audiences would begin to wain by the mid fifties due to the rise of televison would cause decline of theatrical animation. Fox would force Felix The Cat Productions to slash budgets in 1955 in order to cope with the decrease in profits, causing a decrease in quality of the shorts although not as bad as the 50s series in our timeline, more so like late 50s Looney Tunes. The lower budgets shorts were not recieved well and profits kept dropping and by 1959, Fox ended their contract with Felix The Cat Productions and ended the theatrical short run, which ran for 40 years with over 100 short flims released. Although this was the end for the theatrical shorts for Felix, our story isn't over yet.
