YMMV / Max and Dave Fleischer

• Animation Age Ghetto: In a peculiar example, Max Fleischer, while never saying animation could only be for kids, was strongly against the idea of animation trying to emulate other mediums like fine art on their own terms, believing that direct cartooning is an art in itself and was only handicapped by trying to stray from it. See the quote page for his thoughts.
• Archive Panic: They made 629 cartoon shorts and two feature films, from 1918 up to their studios demise in 1942. Even discounting all the missing Out of the Inkwell shorts, just about every other cartoon short they've made still exists in some form.
• Audience-Alienating Era: The period of their shorts from 1934 and onward, where the Fleischers gradually abandoned their house style and urban humor in favor of emulating Disney, especially the crop of shorts made in Miami, namely the Animated Antics, Stone Age and Gabby cartoons. The Color Classics and Gulliver's Travels do have their fans, but are generally considered to be mediocre Disney knockoffs as well. The Betty Boop series went into a steep decline once the Hays Office was through with it, and even their later Popeye shorts from late 1938 and onward weren't safe from this. They finally found their footing again by the time the Superman shorts and Mr. Bug Goes to Town came out (along with Popeye adapting into a war propaganda series), but by that time it was too little, too late.
• Awesome Art: One thing that has always stayed consistent about the studio is its art and animation. Their animation is solid, fluid and splendidly inked, and their ink wash backgrounds are downright splendid to look at. Their Stereoptical model sets are a technical marvel.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • Fleischer fans tend to overlap and often be acquainted with fans of the works of Ub Iwerks' post-Disney cartoons (i.e. Flip the Frog, Willie Whopper and the Comi Color Cartoons) due to their series having very similar comedic/surreal tones to each other due to the influence of ex-Fleischer animation staff (mainly Grim Natwick) working on Flip.
  • Fans of Van Beuren Studios tend to have a lot of overlap with Fleischer fans as well due to the two studios having very similar approaches to their cartoony animation.
  • Disney and Fleischer fans tend to have an overlapping love of the two despite being day and night in their approaches to it, though there's a fair amount of Fandom Rivalry sandwiched in.
• Growing the Beard: They went in-and-out of this; first, their abandoning of rotoscope on their Out of the Inkwell cartoons to do more inventive personality animation, then the animation upgrade on their Talkartoons series due to the arrival of Grim Natwick, and, as mentioned above, their attempts to go toe-to-toe with Disney, while mostly fruitless, eventually paid off with the three Popeye Color Specials, and later the Superman cartoons—Mr. Bug Goes To Town proved that the Fleischers had the potential to compete with Disney in the features from a technical perspective, while keeping their own POV intact (or would have, if Paramount hadn't thrown them out of their studio or bothered to even promote the film).
• Older Than They Think: As noted by the page quote, the Fleischers pioneered many, many animations techniques which would go into greater effect in The Golden Age of Animation, even though Disney is widely credited with inventing them (and in some circles even accused of stealing credit), which is ironic because Walt Disney always took the time to mention how great an influence the Fleischers were on him. The general consensus is that the Fleischers made many innovations, but it was Disney who refined and perfected them.
• Sweet Dreams Fuel: Max Fleischer's adaptation of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is filled with heartwarming and lighthearted moments and is one of the few works by the Fleischers that remains timeless to the general public.
• Unintentional Period Piece: The Fleischer cartoons, especially the ones from the early 30's, are loaded with topical gags, popular music of their day and visual hyperbole that have long lost their proper context, making their work seem a lot more bizarre and non sequitur than it was seen as in their day.
• Values Dissonance: Fleischer cartoons feature occasional racial stereotyping, particularly black and Native American stereotypes. That said, they don't have nearly as much of this as other studios of their era.

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