Fiddlesticks: The First Color Cartoon

The happy-go-lucky, bow-tie wearing Flip the Frog was the impressive debut solo effort of Ub Iwerks. Irwerks was Walt Disney’s oldest friend, and shared a lot of the same talents. On this day, August 16, 1930 “Fiddlesticks”, the first Ub Iwerks cartoon, as well as the first one to be produced in the two-strip Technicolor process, premiered. Click "Next" to read more. When young Walt Disney met fellow teenager Ubbe Iwerks in Kansas City, Missouri in 1919, neither man likely knew how fruitful their eventual partnership would be. With Ub’s talent and Walt’s ambition, the two pioneered the art of animation, in the process creating the most iconic cartoon character in history. But their partnership eventually ended in acrimony, leading to Iwerks’ leaving the Disney company to form his own animated studio–at least for a while. After working together for several years on Disney’s “Alice Comedies”–a series of live-action/animated shorts featuring the characters from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland(which Disney would famously adapt in full animated feature form in 1951)–Disney and Iwerks collaborated on the creation of an original character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Oswald premiered in 1927, but his reign as Disney’s flagship character was brief. Walt lost control of his creation to his distributor, and embittered by the experience, he turned to Iwerks to create a new face for the Disney company. And soon enough, Mickey Mouse was born. Click "Next" to read more. While Mickey became a huge hit–as did another new Disney series, the musical Silly Symphonies, on which Iwerks also worked–the friendship between Disney and Iwerks began to disintegrate under Disney’s growing demands. Iwerks believed that he was not receiving all of the credit he should have gotten as Disney’s proverbial right-hand man, and he chafed at Disney’s notoriously temperamental attitude. Disney, for his part, was frustrated by his distribution deal with Pat Powers, the owner of Celebrity Pictures, who was not paying Disney everything he was owed through the deal. Walt took out his frustration on his animators, and Iwerks bore the brunt of his displeasure. Angry and tired of the fractious working relationship, Iwerks signed a deal with Powers to leave Disney Brothers Studios and found an animation company under his own name. Disney and Iwerks via Documentary Tube Ub Iwerks’ own self-named animation venture, the Iwerks Studio, opened in 1930. Backed by Celebrity Pictures, with a distribution deal from major studio MGM, Iwerks was in an enviable position right out of the gate, making more money than he had ever made working with Disney. He hired a group of fresh animators to work with him (a group that briefly included a young Chuck Jones). His first creation under his own banner was an anthropomorphic musical frog named Flip, who debuted in the six-minute short Fiddlesticks. Fiddlesticks via Classic Cartoons Flip is seen dancing on lily pads until he reaches land and dries himself off. He walks to a party, where he performs a dance for the audience, accidentally climbing to a spider web. He also performs a duet, playing piano alongside a mouse (who bears a striking resemblance to Mickey Mouse, which Iwerks co-created with Walt Disney during his days at Disney's company) playing the violin. They perform two songs. In the first song, the mouse starts crying, and so do Flip and the piano. The second song makes Flip start hugging the piano, which then kicks Flip. The cartoon ends with Flip beating on the piano; he kicks all the piano keys into the air, and they drop onto him. What else would occur following the premiere of this pioneer of a cartoon? Click "Next" to find out. Despite a series of Flip the Frog cartoons (which also included cameos by an unnamed mouse bearing an unmistakable resemblance to a certain Mortimer, né Mickey, Mouse), Iwerks was never as successful with his own creations as he was with Warner Brothers, where he produced several early Porky Pig cartoons. Iwerks later returned to Disney, where he developed much of the technology that combined live action and animation in Song of the South. Nevertheless, his appearance in Fiddlesticks marked an important moment in the history of animation. So happy 82nd birthday to Fiddlesticks and Flip the Frog, one of a handful of dancing critters who paved the way for decades of animations after him. Source: (Famous Daily, Gizmodo, Wikipedia, The Retroset, )

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