Max Fleischer

But some asshole animator John Randolph Bray took advantage of this, and he went on to patent several of McKay's techniques, like registration marks and tracing paper, though Bray's legal attempts to monopolize them ultimately failed.

And the dinosaur itself, with its personality and lovable quirkiness, Gertie deeply influenced the next generation of animation pioneers, including Walt Disney, the Fleischer Brothers, Otto Mesmer, Paul Terry, and Walter Lantz, who all came a little bit later in the world of animation.

Now, Gertie the Dinosaur is the best preserved of McKay's films because of its influence, and in 1991, the U.S. Library of Congress selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry, recognizing it as, quote, culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant, end quote there.

And the next huge step in animation came not long after Gertie, and it was the rotoscope, which was invented in 1917.

Max and Dave Fleischer, who we just mentioned, patented rotoscoping, which was tracing live action footage frame by frame, creating the series out of the inkwell, In the process of rotoscoping, it is where animators use live action reference footage and trace its outlines or details frame by frame.

And originally, physical film was projected onto a glass panel or easel for manual tracing, but today the process is predominantly digital, heavily integrated with motion tracking, onion scanning, and specialized software.

and the technique was invented and patented around 1917 by Polish-American animator Max Fleischer, and he designed the original rotoscope device to project live-action film onto a drawing board, and Fleischer famously used it in his Out of the Inkwell series featuring Coco the Clown with his brother Dave Fleischer acting as the live-action model, and it was utilized in Fleischer's Betty Boop shorts for jazz artist Cab Calloway, Dance for Reference, Gulliver's Travels in 1939, and the classic Superman theatrical shorts in the early 1940s.

Walt Disney Studios frequently utilized rotoscoping as a reference guide for human characters and features like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937, and Cinderella in 1950, Alice in Wonderland in 1951, and Sleeping Beauty in 1959.

It is now not that it's like the biggest melting pot in Florida, but everything there is a testament to how big things were in the fucking fifties where Jackie Gleason is shooting a talk show.

Max Fleischer is making Popeye cartoons and the mob is running wild against stucco backdrops and beach.

It's fucking awesome.

I really do think, I thought about this, like if I had a podcast when the original Vice City came out, came out i think required reading should be cocaine cowboys like if you really want to get the essence of south beach in miami because and what i loved about what the trailer did and we talked about the boom the boom bass like you saw the opening of like section 8 housing like when they go and they go in and then you go into the opulence that is like south beach and i think like the original white city game, it is just South beach.

So that was the first thing I was attracted to.

Early Fleischer's? That stuff, oh yeah, Max Fleischer's stuff is among the best.

And also the Leroy Shields.

themes in Hal Roach comedies.

Steroids, go for it.

Max, look max, max looks.

Hormone replacement therapy, you know, when you're 14.

Okay, so...

And not to mention all the superhero stuff that you guys did.

I mean, I just find it interesting that...

And I mean, well, good Lord, HBO Max isn't running the new Batman animated series.

Caped Crusader, it's on Amazon.

Okay.

It's H3 Max, a new post-trained video model by Foul Research.

They don't say it here.

But yeah, basically, they took Minimax and then did their own training on top of it.

This might be a full-weight train then, sounds like.

Yeah, I'm curious what this process is like and then how doable that is if you wanted to just make a very specific Minimax for like your own animated style or something.

They had someone who was at Fallout also training a Minimax that was just sort of trained on, what's his name, a Max...

Who was one of the early animation pioneers? Why am I blanking on the name? There was Disney, and then there was Fleischer.

Obviously, we've spoken about this very much before.

I love the Max Fleischer design for Superman.

And so does Darwin Cook.

And so does Darwin

What people usually reference when trying to pin plagiarism on an animated sequence is, quote, rotoscoping.

Tracing live footage frame by frame in a process created by Max Fleischer in 1915.

I think he was animating a clown or something crazy, I don't know.

All I know is that they did it in Prince of Persia.

Let's talk a little bit about Fleischer's background, because I was at Pordenone Silent Film Festival once.

last year, and they had a whole season of shorts by his father, Max Fleischer, the Inkpot shorts.

And I thought these were amazing.

And I know, obviously, maybe today you can explain who Max was, Richard's father.

But at the time that these shorts came out, he was famous.

He was like, you know, he was famous in the world of animation when Walt Disney was still sharpening his pencils

And so that's what he went to college for.

Um, he got his degree in psychology from Brown.

Is it Herman? I've got, I've got-

I keep thinking Max Fleischer, and I don't think that's right.

I, I think you are right.

Um, I have the technology.

Like, you know, I watched – I remember as a kid I watched the old, like, 1940s Superman animated show.

Yeah, wasn't that still fascinating? Yeah, I think – was it Max Fleischer did that one? Is that – Yeah, you're right.

But anyway, so seeing Superman, the Superman from that long ago – It's so interesting to see the things that were part of the character then and then seeing the things that had not become part of the character yet.

So like the S symbol didn't look the same.