The silent cartoons were some of the earliest rubberhose cartoons ever made, and they still hold up as appealing to look at and smoothly animated. Later shorts like "Felix Woos Whoopee" are just as great as anything Fleischer Studios ever did.
The three Van Beuren Felix the Cat cartoons have some splendid cartoon animation and downright gorgeous background art and colors. Makes sense, considering they were spearheaded by Disney alumni Burt Gillett, the director of Disney's The Three Little Pigs!
The artwork Otto Messmer did for the newspaper comics and comic books is just as great, if not better than the animated cartoons. One has to read a Felix Sunday strip or read one of the comics from The '40s and The '50s to really see Messmer's drawing chops and super appealing rubberhose drawing style in action.
Awesome Music: Winston Sharples' energetic and dramatic music scores are considered one of the best elements of the Van Beuren Felix cartoons. Fittingly, he would be hired by Joe Oriolo to compose music for his TV Felix cartoons decades later.
Fair for Its Day: "Uncle Toms Crabbin". While the blackface designs and deep south slavery setting would turn heads today, it's surprising in that it clearly shows Felix on the side of a sympathetically portrayed Uncle Tom against Simon Legree (with his race and plight not being played for laughs), with Felix even helping Tom against Legree and coming out on top in the end.
The silent films got off to a good start, but the 1922-1924 period, when Bill Nolan worked at the studio for a couple years, redesigning Felix and introducing smoother animation in the cartoons, was when the series really started getting great.
The newspaper comics greatly improved over time, too. Before 1929, the comics were only partly drawn by Otto Messmer, with a lot of the art being recycled from the cartoons by artist Jack Bogle. This resulted in enjoyable but fairly straightforward adaptations of the cartoons. Ironically, the dearth of new cartoon material to adapt by 1929 proved to be a creative boon for the Felix comics, even as the animated cartoons went into a decline. Messmer, who finally took over all art duties for the daily newspaper comic, starts getting more experimental and ambitious with his artwork, redesigning Felix and the other characters to look more funny and detailed than in the cartoons. He even began to create beautifully illustrated, full blown cartoon story arcs for the funny pages, such as the 17 week "Felix's Ark" storyline, and with some storylines like "Felix the Cat on Cannibal Island" that run as long as a whopping eight months in length.
Hilarious in Hindsight: Felix is remembered as one of the first television stars. How? In the form of an NBC test pattern featuring Felix as a doll. Its significance comes from being one of the first images to be broadcast on the then-fledging medium of television, when NBC was just a decade old. 85 years later, NBC parent NBC Universal acquired DreamWorks Animation, the current rights-holder of Felix, ultimately bringing his legacy back to NBC after more than a century.
Moment of Awesome: Felix gets one of his shining moments in the silent short Uncle Toms Crabbin, a short that is a surprising example of Fair for Its Day—Felix travels to the deep south and finds the eponymous Uncle Tom, who is antagonized by Simon Legree by whipping him and smashing apart his banjo for keeping him awake with his music. While Tom is drawn in stereotypical cartoon blackface of the time, his race and plight is not played for laughs at all, and Felix is clearly on his side. He not only improvises a new banjo for Tom, but when Simon Legree shows up again, Felix distracts him into chasing after him and even hurls rocks back at Legree while he gives chase. And when Legree sicks a hunting dog after him, Felix proceeds to beat the animal into a limp noodle. Considering the institutionalized racism of the 1920's (and that other Felix cartoons sometimes used unfortunate black stereotypes), its amazing that they were able to get away with making a cartoon like this.
In another awesome moment, in Arabiantics, Felix trades a magic carpet for a bag of gems only to have them stolen from him by a sheik who uses the gems as jewelry for his harem. Felix reclaims his stolen gems by using a makeshift banjo to serenade Rimsky-Korsakov's "Scheherazade" to the sheikâs harem, which they give Felix the gems for. It's a nice ending where Felix comes out on top.
Nightmare Fuel: The bizarre climax of "Felix Dines and Pines", where Felix has a truly deranged stream of conscious nightmare induced by eating an old shoe.
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Once Original, Now Common: The silent Felix the Cat cartoons were considered very smoothly animated for their time, and their personality-based visual humor and impossible cartoon gags were very unique compared to other early animated cartoons. The series pioneered many of the standard cartoon tools and cliches (with the rubberhose art style becoming the cartoon industry standard for decades). Felix was also the first cartoon character to achieve significant popularity, being the forerunner for cartoons that took his cartoons' foundation and considerably built on it, like Mickey Mouse, the Looney Tunes and Betty Boop. As a result, it can be rather hard to appreciate just how innovative and creative the original silent cartoons were at the time. The rather slow pacing of the cartoons and Felix being the only central character the bulk of the time doesn't really help matters, either.
Seasonal Rot: While the post-B&W Felix shorts have a divided reception, one point of the series that no fans will defend is the brief period when the original cartoons tried to upgrade to sound, and failed miserably. Cartoons like April Maze and Skulls and Sculls had post-synchronized soundtracks slapped onto them in a half-assed attempt by Pat Sullivan to cash in on the sound cartoon craze started by Disney's Mickey Mouse a few years too late, and Otto Messmer was forced to pad out the length and scenes of the sound cartoons to excruciatingly long periods of time so that it would be easier for the soundtracks to be added on afterward, making the cartoons extremely slow paced and poorly timed.
In spite of the Fair for Its Day example cited above, the silent shorts and a few of the newspaper comics and comic books tended to have some unfortunate racist gags and cannibalistic depictions of African natives sprinkled throughout them, such as in Felix Saves the Day and Tee Time, and even the occasional sexist gag too, like in Felix Lends a Hand.
In a couple Felix comics from The '50s, there is a trio of dwarfs called the Merry Midgets who pop up as side characters. While the word isn't used derogatorily, as it had innocuous connotations at the time, the term "midget" is now considered an unfortunate slur for short people.
What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: Fans only familiar with the TV era Felix will be surprised to find out that the Silent era Felix has subject matter that is definitely not kid friendly—like Felix's womanizing and suicide in Feline Follies, Felix partying hard and getting drunk out of his skull in Felix Woos Whoopee, and the grim, war-torn setting of Felix Turns the Tide, complete with dead corpses of animals laying around—and it is not played for humor. John Canemaker's Felix the Cat history book makes it clear that the early cartoons were not made for kids.
. Its significance comes from being one of the first images to be broadcast on the then-fledging medium of television, when NBC was just a decade old. 85 years later, NBC parent NBC Universal acquired DreamWorks Animation, the current rights-holder of Felix, ultimately bringing his legacy back to NBC after more than a century.