Illustration from Max Fleischer’s rotoscope patent application.
Fleischer’s younger brother Dave was excited when he heard about the idea. Both had seen Winsor McCay’s Gertie the Dinosaur earlier that year and left the theater enchanted. The film inspired Dave to begin taking whatever paper was at hand—notebooks, phone books, etc.—and create flipbooks. His favorite subjects were scenes to accompany popular songs of the day, creating a kind of precursor to music videos. Earlier that year, Dave had taken a film-editing job for Pathé in Fort Lee, in the hope of starting a career in film. “Dave was fascinated by it,” Max recalled about his rotoscope idea. “He couldn’t sleep anymore.”
The brothers got to work building their rotoscope, enlisting the help of the three other Fleischer brothers, Charlie, Joe, and Lou. Because of their day jobs, they worked in Max’s living room until the small hours of the morning, often around four o’clock, trying not to wake Max’s wife, Essie, sleeping in the next room. Essie, “a five foot three firecracker with a constantly smoking short fuse and a slightly broken nose that was never properly set,” as her son Richard would later describe her, had a vicious temper that Max and his brothers didn’t want to upset. But besides her temper she was otherwise supportive. When Max told her he had spent all their savings, about $100, on his rotoscope idea, she didn’t blow up as the brothers expected; instead, she went off to the bedroom and came back with $150 she had saved on her own—she had a heavy gambling habit and was currently in the black. Handing the money over to Max, she told him, “This is for your crazy idea.”
Once the rotoscope was finished, Max Fleischer got hold of a Charlie Chaplin film. The brothers spent eight months tracing every move of the star’s jaunty waddle, feeling their way through the process, not always fully aware of other animators’ advancements—it was a learning time for all. Again, they worked in Max’s living room late into the night, bleary-eyed when the morning sun peeked through the curtains. Once they finished rotoscoping and tracing, the final cartoon was three minutes long. The brothers were pleased with the result.
Fleischer tried showing the cartoon to film distributors but could get meetings with only two. Once the first one saw it, he looked at Max and asked, “That’s very nice. What are you going to do with it?”
“I don’t know,” Fleischer answered. “I just thought it was something, that’s all.”
“Could you make one of these a week?”
Fleischer laughed at the question—this had taken him nearly a year. He could probably do it faster the second time, but not much faster.
“My dear fellow,” the distributor advised. “Go home and make something practical. If you had something we could offer for sale every week, or every month, you’d have something.”
Fleischer’s second appointment was with J. A. Berst, an executive at Pathé who admired the quality of the brothers’ animation but didn’t want to buy it—what if Chaplin sued? Fleischer was crestfallen, berating himself for not thinking of the legal angle. But Brest was encouraging nonetheless. He invited Fleischer to return once he had something original. After Max shared this news with Dave, Dave came up with an idea.
Max and Dave Fleischer were a good pairing, but not without their differences. Max dressed impeccably, his suits neatly tailored and his Chaplinesque dab of a mustache always precisely manicured. Dave was sloppier, his hair wild and his shirttails sometimes untucked—he had only a nodding acquaintance with decorum. Max’s courtship with Essie was relatively formal, while Dave had proposed to his wife, Ida Sharnow, on Halloween night by handing her a bag of candy with a ring at the bottom.
When Max presented the challenge of creating an original character, Dave recalled his days working as a clown on the Coney Island boardwalk. This was when Coney Island was a rough place of conmen and pickpockets, of lipstick-smeared prostitutes calling down to men from the fire escapes. Dave’s job didn’t necessarily involve normal clown activities, such as making balloon animals, so much as it meant playing questionable pranks on people. One favorite prank involved shocking unsuspecting passersby with a weakly charged electric whip—“They’d scream every time and they’d run like hell, and that was my job,” Dave later recalled. Sometimes he used the whip to scare women into jumping over holes that had fans strategically hidden under them, then watch as gusts of air blew the ladies’ dresses up. As soon as Max told him his problem of needing an original character, Dave dragged his old clown suit out of the closet. The simple design—a baggy suit with three side buttons and a pointy hat, all in clean black and white—would show up well on film and be easy to animate.
Dave Fleischer as “The Clown,” which would later inspire the Fleischers’ character Koko.
The other Fleischer brothers were again enlisted to help make a cartoon of the new character. They climbed up to Max’s roof, rigged up a white sheet as a background, and filmed a minute’s worth of Dave dancing around in the suit. Then they spent roughly a month tracing the images using the rotoscope, followed by five months of inking and photographing the separate images.
J. A. Berst at Pathé was pleased when he saw the final cartoon. He immediately agreed to give them space in his Fort Lee studio, as well as build them three more rotoscopes. The brothers were excited, but within a few days Berst voiced second thoughts. Like many others, he wasn’t convinced that animated cartoons would ever be more than just a novelty. Growing increasingly skeptical, he pressed Max to explain how his cartoons would fit in with the studio’s newsreels, comedies, and serials.
Fleischer tried to reassure him by pitching an idea he thought was a surefire success. Instead of featuring a clown, they would instead feature Teddy Roosevelt, much as John Bray had done with his Colonel Heeza Liar series. Fleischer’s version, however, had a twist: he wanted to add the plot from “Chanticleer and the Fox,” a story from Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales about a proud rooster who believed the sun rose and set based on his crowing. After hearing the pitch, Berst agreed.
Dave sat dumbfounded when Max later explained everything to him. What was wrong with the clown? Max’s plan to involve a Chaucer story illuminated a difference between the brothers’ sensibilities. Max sometimes wanted to go highbrow when Dave wanted to keep their material simple. Nor did Dave see how the Canterbury Tales angle connected with Teddy Roosevelt and the Colonel Heeza Liar series—it seemed disjointed. But Max persisted, telling Dave that he had already discussed it with Berst, and that Berst was comfortable with doing a political satire. Besides, Max continued, adding the rooster storyline might be a good way to flatter studio owner Charles Pathé, who had adopted a rooster as the studio’s mascot. Max didn’t think a funny rooster could miss.
After Dave finally agreed to Max’s vision, the brothers got to work—filming the action, then rotoscoping and animating it. Dave played the rooster and Joe played Teddy Roosevelt, running around the set whipping a lasso over his head until he finally caught the bird, tied it up, and began pumping angry rounds of hot lead into its feathery body. The moment Charles Pathé saw this truly bizarre cartoon—this adaptation of Chaucer ending with the murder of his studio mascot by a crazed Teddy Roosevelt—the Fleischer brothers were fired.
That evening, the brothers glumly rode the slow ferry from Fort Lee back to Brooklyn, sitting apart as if they were strangers. The boat was nearly empty and mostly quiet, save for the engine’s low growl and the light slap of waves against its hull. Joe was first to break the silence. “That would happen to us!” he joked, trying to lighten the mood. His laughter spread to Dave, who looked over at Max, hoping to cheer him up.
“What