Trivia / Felix the Cat (Joe Oriolo)

• Acting for Two: Jack Mercer voiced all of the characters in the Joe Oriolo Felix cartoons.
• Cross-Dressing Voices: In "Stone Age Felix," Jack Mercer voices a cave woman who favors Felix's pelt over that of the stone age creatures of the time. As a result, her voice bares an uncanny resemblance to Felix's falsetto.
• Executive Meddling:
  • Trans-Lux wanted the series to exclusively be aimed at children, and had a mandate that Felix had to be everyone's friend and always had to win against Professor and Rock Bottom's schemes. Felix also always had to be able to help anyone out in any situation, even if it meant taking the easy way out, hence why the Magic Bag of Tricks was introduced into the show.
  • The reason for the amount of new characters in the show (i.e. Professor, Rock Bottom) was because Trans-Lux wanted new ancillary characters for the show.
  • Vavoom was originally called Sneezy, but while Trans-Lux liked the character, they told Joe Oriolo "You can't have him promote unhealthy, sickly behavior!" (and it probably would have gotten them into legal trouble with another company who has a character named Sneezy), so Joe changed his name to Vavoom, after the Jackie Gleason phrase "Va-va-va-voom!"
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Only the first 31 Trans Lux Felix cartoons have made it onto DVD, with the others remaining in limbo. And the DVD set containing the episodes is out of print and fetches fairly high prices on amazon. While VHS tapes containing episodes not on DVD have been released, they've been out of print for decades and aren't easy to find.
• No Budget: The made-for-TV Felix cartoons were made on very tight, shoestring budgets. The entire series only had a budget of $1,750,000 (which, despite what one would think, is not big money for a 260 episode series of animation) or basically $6,700 per episode (which was paltry, even by late 1950's standards), hence why Limited Animation is in full effect, why there are so many shots just showing off the backgrounds and stock music cues, and even parts where they just slide cels across a background with no animation at all! To further limit the need for more elaborate animation and save money on the already meager budget, Jack Mercer (the sole voice actor for the series) was asked to enunciate his dialogue very slowly so that the animation would require less labor intensive artwork. Mercer also had to continually alter the pitch of the voice during takes, because he preformed his audio recordings straight through instead of recording each character separately and editing their dialogue together later on to save on money. They didn't even have a recording booth at the studio; all of the voice work was recorded out in the studio hallway! To make matters worse, they had extremely tight deadlines-—they had to turn out three completed episodes per week (one animator was cranking out 150 feet—or close to two minutes worth of animation each week just to get the episodes done) and were given mere hours to write the scripts for each episode. John Canemaker's Felix book summed up just how frugal Joe Oriolo was forced to be on the show;
  "One of his dictums became well known within the industry: scenes that could not fit under his office door, said Oriolo, held too many drawings."
• Recycled Script: A few episodes suffer from this. For example, "The North Pole and a Walrus Hunt", "The Trip Back From The North Pole" and "North Pole Jail Hole", three episodes running right alongside each other, all feel like mad libs rewrites of each story, to the point where the story doesn't advance in any of them and makes the episodes come off as padding out one story instead.
• Referenced by...: Us! Felix's grinning mug is the icon for the Western Animation tab.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Originally Felix was meant to have a Magic Carpet but then it became a Magic Sack of Laundry, which eventually became The Magic Bag of Tricks.
  • When Joe Oriolo originally created Vavoom, he was loosely called Sneezy as an early name. Trans-Lux liked the character, but said "You can't have him promote unhealthy, sickly behavior!", so Joe changed his name to Vavoom, after the Jackie Gleason phrase "Va-va-va-voom!"
  • Joe Oriolo originally wanted to do a follow-up series to his made-for-tv Felix cartoons after the success of the first one, but Trans-Lux refused to come up with the money to support the larger studio Joe would've needed to do such a project, forcing his studio to disband.
• Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: According to Don Oriolo, the son of the TV Felix showrunner Joe Oriolo, the Trans-Lux cartoons had absolutely grueling production schedules to go in hand with the low budgets—they had to churn out a few episodes of the show every week (one animator was reported to have been doing around 150 feet—or around 2 minutes of animation—per week). The scripts for each episode were written in hours, hence why there was so much inconsistency between the Professor being Felix's sworn enemy, and then hiring him as a helper now and then.
  "It's sort of the same concept as Bluto being friendly to Popeye in a couple of episodes. It just happened by way of scripts that were churned out in hours. Don't forget they were doing a few episodes a week. They didn't overthink anything or analyze anything because there was nothing to analyze. They were creating what is our history now—-and didn't think of the ramifications!"
• Write What You Know:
  • Poindexter's name was inspired by the surname of Joe Oriolo's lawyer, Emmett Poindexter.
  • Vavoom was inspired by Joe Oriolo's own son, Don Oriolo, according to an interview with the latter.
  • "I had a little drawing board next to my father... I was home sick one day from school, and as my father was doing the daily Felix strip, I sneezed. He flew off his chair. I thought "Wow, I have a powerful magic sneeze!" So I "force-sneezed" at my father who flew backwards, and stumbled down the stairs as I continued to "sneeze" at him. Not long after that he designed a character loosely called Sneezy. When they were deciding on the cast of the Felix TV series, he brought that character up; Trans-Lux liked the character, but said "You can't have him promote unhealthy, sickly behavior!" After which my father changed his name to Vavoom, after the Jackie Gleason phrase—va-va-va-voom!"