Here’s issue number 10 of Fleischer’s Animated News (September 1935), with cover art by Erich Schenk, who gives us an insight into the Fleischer background department in this edition.

Among its other highlights:

• Tintype bios about Lou Fleischer, Vera Coleman, and Larry Lippman

• Gag cartoons by Ben Solomon, Hal Seeger (now an in-betweener at the studio), Gilbert Fox (another Fleischerite who later worked for DC Comics), and Dave Tendlar.

• An early look at Sindbad the Sailor (brandishing a knife) in “The Animator’s Nightmare.”

• The answer to how Popeye lost his eye!

Thanks to Jerry Beck and Bob Jaques for sharing these rare production materials.

In 1918, writer and artist Johnny Gruelle wrote a children’s book about a little doll that would become a big deal. It was called Raggedy Ann Stories. A doll was produced and marketed alongside the book. By late 1938, the year Gruelle sadly passed away, 3 million copies of his book had been sold.

The popularity of Raggedy Ann and her brother, Raggedy Andy, who was introduced in later books, became a phenomenon. The charm and whimsy of their stories made the characters a natural fit for animation.

In 1941, the Fleischer Studio, riding high on the popularity of Betty Boop and Popeye, partnered with Johnny’s son, Worth Gruelle, to bring the characters to life on the screen in the 18-minute, two-reel animated short, Raggedy Ann and Andy, which celebrates its 85th anniversary this spring.

Written by Worth and William Turner, the short opens in a small toy shop with Raggedy Ann and Andy in the window. They are on sale for a dollar for the pair. A little girl runs up to the toy shop with her purse in her hand. She asks the shop owner to buy the girl doll in the window, but he explains they must be sold as a pair and shows their hands stitched together.

Publicity art promoting the “two-reeler” from the April 11th 1941 issue of Paramount News.

The audience is then taken to Ragland, where stitched quilts cover the landscape. From there, the story moves on to the Glad Rags Doll Factory. Here the dolls are made. All workers are objects—material, needles, scissors, spools— that are anthropomorphized. They assemble two dolls, a boy and a girl, who will become Raggedy Ann and Andy. The Paintbrush feeds them both candy hearts, and they both come to life.

However, they need their names, and for this, they are sent off to the Castle of Names, where they must arrive before sunset. On the way, they run into the Camel with the Wrinkled Knees, who agrees to give them a lift. They just have to stop off at a filling station where the Camel is filled up with sawdust.

As they continue their journey, Raggedy Andy falls under the spell of a beautiful doll who is singing. He goes off with this beautiful doll, leaving Raggedy Ann heartbroken, and riding off on the Camel with the Wrinkled Knees.

Raggedy Andy and the girl go off to “Glovers Lane,” while Raggedy Ann and the Camel continue to the Castle. Once there, she gets sick and is placed into the King’s infirmary.

Back in Glover’s Lane, Raggedy Andy is asked by the other doll what his name is. He says he doesn’t have one. She notes that he’s a nobody without a name, and he realizes he needs to get to the Castle.

Meanwhile, at the Castle, the hospital’s doctors use a fluoroscope and find that Raggedy Ann’s candy heart is broken. There’s nothing that they can do. Andy arrives at Raggedy Ann’s bedside, with certificates that reveal their names. He sings to her, and she wakes up. To make sure they can never be separated again, the two dolls have their cloth hands stitched together.

Back at the toy shop, the owner explains to the young girl that is why he cannot sell just one doll. However, he agrees to give her both, as the short ends with a happy ending.

Directed by Dave Fleischer and animated by luminaries such as Myron Waldman, Joseph Oriolo, William Henning, and Arnold Gillespie, Raggedy Ann and Andy is brimming with beautiful visuals. Ragland teems with creativity. The quilted hills seem to go on forever, and the street signs look like needles, as giant gloves surround “Glover’s Lane.”

There are also nice, themed, comedic touches, such as a street named “Linen Lane” and a bakery that sells “rag muffins.”

The Fleischer Studio also made great use of their team of talented voice actors. Pinto Colvig is very “Goofy”-esque as the Camel and also brings great charm. Joy Terry voices Raggedy Ann, Bernie Fleischer plays Raggedy Andy, and Jack Mercer, the voice of Popeye at the time, handles several characters, including the Paintbrush who brings the dolls to life.

Additionally, the musical arrangements by Sammy Timberg, with lyrics by Al Neiburg and Dave Fleischer, provide entertaining songs. These include “You’re Nobody Without a Name,” sung to the dolls in the factory, and “Raggedy Ann, I Love You,” which Andy sings to her toward the end.

The whole short comes together so well, in fact, that it makes one wish that the Studio had done more with Gruelle’s now iconic characters. (Paramount’s Famous Studios did create two more Raggedy Ann shorts as part of their Noveltoons series in the later 1940s)

Leonard Maltin noted this in his seminal book, Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons. He wrote, “It’s a shame that the Fleischers didn’t select this property for feature-length treatment. The ingredients are all there, including the imaginative setting of Ragland, with its echoes of Oz, and more possibilities than either Lilliput or Bugtown (in the studio’s subsequent feature Mr. Bug Goes to Town) ever offered.”

Wanting more than its eighteen minutes is just one reason why, looking back eighty-five years later at Raggedy Ann and Andy, it stands as a very well-crafted, entertaining entry in the Fleischer filmography.

Here’s issue number 9 of Fleischer’s Animated News, published in August 1935, with cover art by animator Nick Tafuri.

Among its highlights:

– Lou Fleischer writes about the Music Department.

– Gag cartoons by Hal Seeger, Joe Oriolo, and Harry Lampert. (Lampert was the assistant manager of Fleischer’s inking department; he later moved into comic books, where he co-created The Flash for DC.)

– Tintype bios on Nelly Sanborn (Dave’s secretary/head of the Timing Department), Joe Fleischer, and Johnny Burks, who constructed the “setbacks” in the cartoons that involved the Fleischers’ stereoptical process.

– Full story and animation credits for Dave Tendlar’s Betty Boop and Grampy (1935)

– What “screwy jobs” did many of the Fleischer artists have before animation?

• Thanks to Jerry Beck and Bob Jaques for sharing these rare materials

Nearly thirteen years have passed since the last issue of Fleischer’s Animated News, the Paramount cartoon studio’s employee newsletter, was shared on Cartoon Research (check the past posts of issues #1-7 HERE). Let’s pick up where we left off…

Charles Hastings, a former Walter Lantz animator infamous for accidentally blinding Tex Avery’s eye with a paper clip, was the cover artist of this edition (credited as “Hasty”). At the time of this issue, Hastings was an animator in the Willard Bowsky unit, but soon shifted to Dave Tendlar’s and Tom Johnson’s respective crews.

Other highlights include: gag cartoons by Sidney Pillet, Hal Seeger, and Herman Cohen; a profile on camerawoman and film editor Kitty Pfister, who was hired by the Fleischers in 1926; an article on timing by Nelly Sanborn, head of the timing department; and reviews for Myron Waldman’s latest Betty Boop, A Language All My Own (working title: A Song for Harmony), and Willard Bowsky’s latest Popeye, Dizzy Divers, that give full credit to the writers and animators.

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Thanks to Jerry Beck and Bob Jaques for these rare materials.