Dave Fleischer Biography

A cutter at Pathé Films in the early teens, Dave Fleischer and his brother Max made the first of their imaginative "Out of the Inkwell" cartoons starring Koko the Clown for Paramount in 1916. They took this popular series into the 1920s, when they also devised the audience sing-along "Song Car-Tunes" series. In the '30s, the Fleischers had even greater success with their beloved characters Betty Boop (Boop-Ooop-A-Doop, Is My Palm Red?) and Popeye the Sailor (Beware of Barnacle Bill, Popeye the Sailor Meets Sinbad the Sailor). By the end of the decade, they branched out into animated features with an adaptation of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1939); they followed it with their insect-filled feature Mr. Bug Goes To Town (aka Hoppity Goes To Town [1941]), but found greater success with their handsome series of short Superman cartoons in the early '40s. After leaving Paramount, Dave Fleischer became head of animation at Columbia until 1944; afterwards, he served as a gag writer for live-action comedies at Universal into the late 1950s. ~ Rovi