May 30, 2018 • 31 mins
Even as his career in comics was at its zenith, Winsor McCay continued to explore other business ventures for his art. He added vaudeville performances to his busy schedule, and then became an animation pioneer.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Uh. Tracy.
We're gonna keep talking about Windsor mackay today, about which
I'm very excited. I know you are. We're going to
(00:25):
finish up this talk about the life of this artist
and animator, and if you haven't listened to the first
part of this one, I really suggest that you go
back and do that, because otherwise you won't know about
Winsor's childhood and how he was drawn to art despite
his family's hopes that he would find a more stable career,
and how he got into newspapers and writing comics in
the first place. In nineteen o five, McKay created his
(00:47):
most popular strip, Little Nemo in Slumberland, which debuted on
October five of that year, and this strip builds on
some of the ideas that Winsor mackay had played with
in his earlier strips. Nemo was a young boy whose
dreams were depicted in the strip, and a lot of
times they were surreal and bizarre, and there wasn't really
(01:07):
a cohesive plot to the strips, they were more about
the exploration and the visuals. Yeah, he basically was kind
of lured into this, this mystical world of Slumberland by
various characters, and it's just so spectacularly beautiful. Often it's
drawn in a rich art nouveau style. And these strips
were huge hits, so much so that McKay became a
(01:30):
celebrity and the comics were translated into seven languages, and
almost instantly from that first appearance, readers were enthralled with
Nemo's adventures. As the strip went on, the world of
Slumberland expanded and it became more and more detailed. It
was like an alternate universe that readers were allowed to
explore under McKay's guidance. Because of the nature of the
(01:52):
premise for a little Nemo, these strips were really imaginative. So,
for example, at one point, for a brief run of
the strip, Nemo visited Mars and found it loaded with
pollution and just an oversaturation of industry. Nemo later found
himself and part of Slumberland that was populated by copies
of himself. Yeah, that Mars section is sometimes pointed to
(02:17):
as almost prescient because it really does kind of look
a lot like what late twentieth century cities look like
in terms of being kind of obsessed with maybe not
always the right things, and uh, it really is kind
of a takedown of greed and uh, corporate entities gaining
too much power. And in nineteen o six, McKay's career
(02:40):
took on another facet, so the focus was still his drawings, uh,
and Nemo was still doing Gangbusters, but he also started
creating drawings in front of vaudeville audiences as a form
of performance. You recall from our first episode he had
first sort of performed unofficially for people when he was
creating these large billboards and minds because he was just
(03:00):
so fabulous to watch work. But at this point, uh,
it became a more structured act. And McKay was not
only incredibly skilled as an artist, but he was also
so fast. So he was one of a number of
artists who didn't act like this on the vaudeville stage
in acts that were called lightning sketches or chalk talks.
(03:21):
And this undoubtedly drew on the work under his mentor
that we also talked about in the first part of
this podcast who was John Goodison? As you recall, he
perfected drawing on blackboards very quickly when he was studying
with him. McKay's initial reaction at being offered regular performance
time at the theater was that he quote side deeply
(03:42):
and shuddered faintly at the idea of being paid several
hundred dollars to do it. He and the theater owner
advertised his appearances in contrast to other similar acts, which
usually featured the artists talking about their work while they
were drawing, But McKay played shy. He wasn't gonna talk.
He let the work be the focus, and in press
(04:02):
interviews before his first appearance, he played up how frightened
he was to work just on his own with no
editor to guide him. This wasn't made up. McKay was
nervous on the first day of his vaudeville career, according
to his diary entry from the day W. C. Fields,
he was working on the same bill, gave him a
swig a scotch backstage to try to study his nerves,
(04:25):
but really he just needed to start drawing to stop
being nervous. He later wrote, quote, once I felt the
chalk in my hand, the tension eased, and after I
had made the first mark upon the blackboard, I was
well at ease. Yeah, he wasn't really nervous about the
drawing part. It was just about being in front of people,
and he wasn't really scared to not have an editor
(04:46):
because he was very confident. That part was kind of
played up. But I think even he was a little
surprised at how nervous he became when it was actually
time to be standing backstage and wait for the matinee
to start. He was also a really heavy smoker. He
mentions in that same diary entry that what he really
wanted was to just start chain smoking, but there was
a sign in the dressing room that said no smoking allowed.
(05:08):
Uh So when W. C. Fields showed up and offered
him a little nip, it was sort of a huge
bit of good fortune, I suppose. Uh. The first part
of his act was called Seven Ages of Man, and
this is really fascinating because he would start it by
drawing too infants when one was a boy and one
was a girl, and then he aged them by adding
(05:30):
to the drawings. He never erased, but he just used
existing lines as the basis for entirely new features, and
this was really fascinating to watch this transition take place.
He also would draw popular characters from his strips, and
the whole show got just rave reviews. His bookings increased,
and he found himself more taxed than ever in terms
of his time because he was still producing his comics
(05:52):
while he was on the road. Nemo was so popular
that it was optioned early on for a musical adaptation.
Several playwrights attempted to adapt McKay's surreal work, and they
didn't succeed. It wasn't until mid seven that the effort
really got some momentum. This was mounted by producers Marcus
Claw and A. L. Erlinger, and it was an expensive,
(06:16):
spectacle latent piece that focused on the visual rather than
the script. The play ran in New York for fifteen
weeks and then it went on to tour for two seasons.
Windsor's son Robert, on whom the character of Nemo was modeled,
would dress up as the character and would offer fans
a chance to see Nemo in the lobby of the theater. Yeah,
(06:36):
at this point, Windsor mackay has so many successful things
going on at once, and this was by most accounts
a really successful show. It sold out regularly, it got
incredibly good reviews everywhere it went, but it was a
money pit. It costs so much to stage because they
really focused on creating surreal sets and costumes that would
(07:00):
you know, accurately carry that sense from the comics onto
the stage. That there was just no way this show
could be profitable. Throughout its run, though, McKay would arrange
as often as he could to book his own vaudeville
act at theaters nearby to each of the venues where
the play was being staged, so he was simultaneously giving
these lightning talks on vaudeville, touring with the play, and
(07:22):
sometimes you know, overseeing his son being kind of an
actor in the theater in the lobby, and then keeping
up his comics work, and he was making a really
nice living. But obviously this was burning the candle at
both ends. I feel like it's got additional it's got
more than two ends at this point. Yeah, it's like
the ends in the middle and maybe could we just
(07:42):
wrap a wick around it and like that too. So
it wasn't long even with all this going on, before
McKay also ventured into animation. His first film, Little Nemo,
was completed in nineteen eleven. It's ten minutes long. If
you remember our lot of Reineger episode, we mentioned that
she was making animation in the twenties, ten minutes seemed
(08:03):
really long for a cartoon. McKay's film is really less
than two minutes of actual animation. The majority of it
is the lead up story of him telling his frands
he's going to make moving drawings and then them mocking
him in disbelief. The opening card on the film read
winds Or mackay, the famous cartoonist for the New York
(08:24):
Herald and his moving comics, the first artist to attempt
drawing pictures that will move. Produced by the Vitograph Company
of America. And the film opens, as we said, with
McKay telling his friends he's going to draw moving pictures,
and they're completely incredulous at this idea. So he walks
over to a page that's mounted on a wall, and
he draws the static image of three characters, and then
(08:46):
he pulls that paper off and rolls it up, and
then he draws another character, and he pulls that page
off and rolls it up, and all the while his
friends are kind of chuckling to each other, and he
promises them that he's going to make four thousand drawings
in a month that will move and then the film
cuts to h delivery men bringing him a massive amount
of paper and other supplies to do just that. The
(09:08):
last two minutes are where we see his two clownish figures,
a little Nemo dancing, and the Nemo draws a beautiful
lady who comes to life. The pair of them ride
away in the mouth of an alligator. Even by today's standards,
the animated segment is smooth and impressive. It really is.
It's quite beautiful. Uh yeah, that I can't say enough
(09:31):
about it. I'm always sort of awe struck when I
think about how early on an animation that was. And
we're gonna talk a little bit more about Nemo's transition
from comic strips to animation, but first we're going to
pause for a little sponsor break. There were, of course,
(09:51):
other artists that were making animation in the US at
this time, one of them John Stuart Blackton, who also
did vaudeville lightning sketches and was a little ahead of
McKay in terms of starting to draw motion pictures. Oversaw
the photography on McKay's Little Nemo short. But what made
McKay's animation unique was that it took characters that were
already really popular and then committed them to the new medium.
(10:15):
So it basically started a new avenue of exploration and
revenue for cartoonists. In nineteen eleven, McKay moved papers once again.
He was hired away from The New York Herald by
William Randolph Hurst. Nemo moved with McKay, although the strip
took on a new name, in the Land of Wonderful
Dreams that appeared in Hearst's New York American and ran
(10:38):
for three years there. Yeah, his other cartoons moved over
as well, and in fact, the Hearst publications ran a
drawing by Windsor McKay kind of announcing this move, where
all of his characters were kind of delighted and happy
that they were moving to a new home. Uh. That
turned out to be not really how things played out.
(11:00):
But in he made a second animated short, and that
was a film called How a Mosquito Operates. And in
this cartoon, we the audience see a large mosquito busily
going about his job. That job being biting humans, and
the mosquito systematically goes after a sleeping man diligent despite
getting slapt out repeatedly, and the mosquito is so good
(11:23):
at his job that it becomes massively swollen with blood,
so much so that it has difficulty flying. There's a
point where the mosquito's body is so swollen it's almost
the size of the man's head, and it finally exerts
itself so much in trying to fly that it explodes,
waking the sleeping human victim to a shower of bug bits.
(11:44):
That sounds horrifying and disgusting, and it sort of is,
but it's also really engrossing. And what's really interesting is
the characterization and the personality that the mosquito has, something
that we take for granted in modern animation, but it
was really novel in nineteen twelve to give a mosquito
a personality. Yeah, most of the things that were being
(12:05):
animated were humans, even if they were very stylized. So
this was kind of the first time that someone was like,
I think this, this mosquito can be a character and
not just a thing. Um. But the project with which
McKay is perhaps most famous for to this day, at
least among anybody who follows animation was created from nineteen
(12:26):
thirteen to nineteen fourteen, and that was Gertie the Dinosaur.
Gertie was important as an animated character in a number
of ways. So one, she was the first character that
McKay created specifically for animation, rather than him using an
existing comic that he had already drawn and adapting it
to a motion picture. And second, Gertie was a massive
(12:49):
feat of artistry. Mackay, who was working with an assistant
named John A. Fitzimmons, drew every single frame of the
Gurtie animation by hand, thousands thousands of drawings. And this
was the time before the idea of separating layers of
animations into the backgrounds and the cells for the moving
characters existed, So every frame was a full version of
(13:12):
the scene with all the background objects there and Gertie
moving among those objects. The backgrounds for Gertie were also
more complex than his previous efforts. Little Nemo animation had
virtually no background elements. It was just the characters on
a white page. The Mosquito animation has some backgrounds, but
(13:32):
they're pretty uncomplicated. They consist mostly of lines used to
suggest the walls of a room, but Gertie strolled along
mountain paths that had rocks and other details. Yeah, there
are trees, there's a water feature, there's a whole thing
going on there. And throughout the production of this ambitious work,
mackay was still doing his editorial cartoons and his vaudeville act.
(13:55):
He basically never stopped working. But he also had no
regular ship jewel whatsoever, So he would blaze through a
bunch of Girtie drawings and then hand them off to
his assistant Fitzsimmons to trace the backgrounds in from a
master version, and then he would be busy on the
road doing his act and not come back to Gurtie
for a week or more. To make Gurtye as efficiently
(14:17):
as possible despite the heavy workload required, McKay pioneered a
number of practices that have become animation standards. One was
reusing the drawings. So once he had timed out exactly
how many images he needed to make Grtie breathe in
for four seconds and out for two, he drew all
of those frames. But then he re photographed the same
(14:38):
drawings for more than a dozen cycles so that you
see Gertie lying on her side breathing continually. Yeah, he
has a great story about how he was trying to
trying to time his own breath and it kept being
a problem until he found himself in front of a
clock that had a really unique and easy to follow
tick that was like a metronome. And then, just as
we talked about in a lot of Rhineger episode, once
(15:00):
he had that timing, he calculated it out by how
many frames per second the film would run at, and
that's how he got the number of frames that he
needed to make. And he also invented the concept which
came to be known as key framing, So he identified
key poses that the character would hit, and then he
broke the workload down into the sections between one key
(15:21):
pose in the next, and drawing those connectors between the
two came to be known as in between ng And
this was all a way to manage the project and
keep the story focused, and it also kind of combated uh,
just growing very tired of the work because he would
be like, Okay, I know I'm working on this section now,
I can move over to this section now in this
section now, but the other really interesting thing about Gertie
(15:44):
is how she was presented to audiences. Unlike previous animated shorts,
Gertie didn't just appear on her own while she was
shown on the vaudeville screen when their mackay was her
live action co star, so he appeared on stage as
Gertie's trainer carrying a bull whip. He spoke to her
on the screen and she would respond. At one point
(16:04):
in the act, he'd tossed Gertie a snack in the
form of an apple, and then the on screen dinosaur
would catch the apple delightedly. It's so charming. It's just
so charming. Uh. And it's one of those things that
to me, I think if someone did this in the
modern era, people would be wowed and like, oh, this
(16:25):
is so creative and interesting, and it's like this has
been going on since the nineteen Windsor McKay was way
ahead of the rest of us. Uh. And while Windsor's
act with Gertie was a huge hit, they literally became
international stars. He did not repeat this act of, you know,
creating an animation that he then went out as an
actor and interacted with. He turned back to editorial cartoons,
(16:47):
which he was still doing as an employee of William
Randolph Hurst, and it turned out that Hurst was not
super happy about the fact that Winsor mackay had his
hands in so many pies outside his job at Hurst Publishing.
In his mind, he had hired a famous cartoonist and
what he had gotten was a busy vaudevillian who was
phoning in his editorial work. McKay was forced to sign
(17:09):
an agreement eventually that he would only take vaudeville bookings
in New York so that he could always be available
to his boss. Eventually, there was a second version of
the Dirty cartoon. This was one that could play on
its own outside of New York. It starts with an
exterior shot of the Museum of Natural History in New
York City. The intertitle card announces the famous Windsor McKay
(17:31):
is on a joy ride with Roy mccarnell, quote and others,
and the car there and gets a flat in front
of the museum, so they decide to go inside while
that flat is fixed, and after they all are observing
a dinosaur skeleton, McKay bets one of his friends, and
the stakes in this bet are a dinner for the
whole group that he can bring that dinosaur to life
(17:53):
with drawings, and McKay's process is depicted dramatically. This is similar,
as you may recall to his previous work uh And
at one point, McKay's friend comes to visit him in
his studio to check on the progress, and Windsor dispatches
his assistant, who was played by his son, to get
the drawings from the photo department where they're being photographed.
(18:14):
But the young man is carrying a huge stack and
as he enters McKay's office he drops them in pages
fly everywhere, and at this point the friend that McKay
has made the bet with seems completely incredulous that that
Windsor McKay will ever be able to pull off this boast.
And the next scene is the big dinner where McKay
will succeed or fail in his bet, because that is
when he's expected to show the moving dinosaur, and he
(18:38):
initially just draws a picture of Gurty for the assembled friends,
who remind him that it has to move for him
to win the bet. That's when the gurdy cartoon begins.
McKay asks her to come out from our cave and
the dinosaur shyly emerges, and the cartoon plays out with
McKay's directions as her trainer appearing in the enter title cards.
(18:58):
Needless to say, when there one the bet, the film
wraps up with his friend paying for everyone's dinner. I
obviously love the Gurtye cartoon. Um And while McKay was
at this point really successful and quite wealthy from all
of his artistic endeavors, his life started to have some
challenges after the massive success of Gurty And we're going
(19:21):
to talk about some of those challenges after we take
a quick break for a word from a sponsor. McKay's
work as a newspaper cartoonist evolved over the next several years,
and his dreamy fantasy scenarios were slowly supplanted by political commentary,
(19:42):
unless made his cartooning career something of a complete circle,
since his early working cartoons for periodicals had consisted largely
of political material. This is actually interesting and that it's
one of those things people point to you and go
No one actually knows what winsor McKay's political opinions were,
because he would always just say, I'm drawing what my
(20:02):
editors tell me to. But he never other than a
time when some of the more pacifist articles or pacifist
images were being published and people started to think that
Hurst and mackay and anyone associated with it was somehow
pro german, and he wrote a letter speaking out against
that was like, no, of course we're not. Other than that,
(20:22):
he really never let on where he stood on most
of the subjects, even though he had drawn cartoons that
kind of indicated he may have felt one way or
the other. But all of this transition to more politics
and less of the fantasy cartoons was also part of
Hurst's effort to control McKay. He kept reigning in the
artist's opportunities to create new strips by way of assigning
(20:45):
more and more editorial pieces. The nineteen teams continued to
bring challenges into McKay's life. Grifters tried to extort money
from him, claiming that they would reveal that his wife, Maud,
had had an extra marital affair. She hadn't had an affair,
and the truth eventually came out in court, and then
a few months later McKay's father, Robert died. Yeah, this
(21:06):
was like one of those phases of life where he
just got hit by hassle after hassle and then heartbreak
and William Randolph Hurst opened an animation studio in nineteen sixteen,
with McKay listed as one of the creators who would
be turning his popular characters into films. There this seemed
like it might be an uptick in the whole situation
and that McKay might have a new outlet, but in
(21:27):
fact this was a terrible fit. Windsor's approach to animation
was really not compatible with the factory style production that
Hirst wanted, and the other studios were already starting to
do instead. McKay finally made another animated short with a
very different style, released in nineteen eighteen. This one was
the Sinking of the Lusitania, and as you may suspect,
(21:50):
it was not a funny cartoon. It was an eight
minute animated account of the ship being struck by torpedoes
launched from a German U boat and going down, claiming
almost twelve hundred lives. The thinking of the Lusitania used
sell animation, so unlike the Guardy cartoons, the action of
the scene was painted onto clear celluloid sheets and then
overlaid onto the background. Which streamlined the animation process. Yeah,
(22:15):
As a little historical side note, at one point it
was believed that the U boat had launched two torpedoes
against the Lusitania, and then later analysis was like, no,
it actually got hit once, and then the second explosion
was from something inside the Lusitania exploding um which has
come up when people talk about this cartoon being not accurate.
(22:37):
But at the time he made it, it was believed
that it was two torpedoes, and the sinking of the
Lusitania was a passion project for McKay. It took two
years to make it, and he paid for the production
entirely out of his own pocket. It was one of
his few remaining outlets away from his work because Hurst
at that point had managed to cut off McKay's vaudeville
(22:58):
performances by upping pay to a matching rate and adding
a clause to his contract that he couldn't moonlight as
a vaudeville performer any longer. McKay clung to animation as
his one remaining non Hearst controlled creative outlet. He made
several more animated shorts, including three that were based on
his dreams of the rare bit bean strip. These were
(23:19):
The Flying House, The Pet and Bug vaudeville. He also
made The Centaurs featuring featuring two centaurs falling in love.
There was also Flips Circus about a circus owner in
his various tricks, and The Midsummer's Nightmare. But just as
Hurst had managed to block McKay's other interests, animation too
(23:41):
was eventually cut off. Hirst realized that McKay was spending
far more time on his side projects than his newspaper duties.
He felt that Windsor McKay was turning in subpar work,
and there were, however, a number of vaudeville appearances that
Hirst did agree to allow his employee to book. It's
unclear how they came to this arrangement or agreement, because
(24:02):
there was sort of this weird their relationship. It looks
so unhealthy and toxic when you're reading about it, because
it is a lot about control and rebellion, and sometimes
they agree on things and then everything turns around and
falls apart. It really seemed that they never were in
agreement about exactly what their relationship was. Because Hurst seemed
to feel that he more or less owned his employees
(24:24):
he thought that McKay should be on call for him
at all times, and McKay saw his job as just
that it was a way to make money while he
was pursuing other interests, and even in his busiest periods
where he was juggling multiple careers at once, Wizard McKay
never missed a deadline. When McKay's contract with Hurst ended
in ninety four, he left. He went back into the
(24:46):
New York Herald and revived Little Nemo for another brief
run there. He thought he would once again rule as
the premier comics artist, but his relaunch of Nemo just
didn't have the same enthusiastic audience at the strip had
used to had previously enjoyed. Just three years later, after
much wooing on the part of the papers leadership, he
(25:07):
was back at Hurst's New York American, and that same
year which he created a minor scandal when he was
addressing a group of artists at a dinner that was
held in his honor. He first started speaking about his
split system, key framing and in between ng and other
technical aspects of animation. But to the assembled crowd that
(25:28):
had become pretty common knowledge and they were not especially engaged,
and finally, a very frustrated and irritated McKay shifted the
tone of his speech and he said, abruptly, animation should
be an art. That's how I conceived it. But as
I see what you fellows have done with it is
making it into a trade. Not an art but a trade.
(25:50):
Bad luck. And that was the end of his speech.
McKay continued to be at odds with his job at Hearst.
When the American tobacco company for the cartoonist a sum
of money larger than his annual salary to take a
side project drawing advertisements in McKay's editor blocked the deal.
The owner of the tobacco company threatened to withdraw all
(26:13):
advertising from Hurst magazines if he couldn't have McKay for
the job. And then McKay was granted permission to take
this offer. He got permission in writing to protect himself. Yeah.
The verbal agreement of oh, I guess you can do
it was not enough. He was like, I do not
trust you people anymore. You need to put this down
on paper. Uh. There's an interesting anecdote that comes up
(26:34):
in nineteen thirty two, which was when McKay was called
on once again as a journalist for kind of the
last time by William Randolph Hurst's son, William Randolph Hurst Jr.
So Junior needed someone to travel with him to cover
the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby, Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr.
After an alleged eighty five mile per hour car ride,
(26:55):
Hurst Junior and McKay arrived at the scene ahead of
any other reporter, so it was apparently two hours after
it had been reported to the police, and they started
interviewing police on the scene. They had access that later
journalists did not have, simply because they got there first
before anyone thought to like close everything off. McKay sketched
out images of the scene, including the ladder that had
(27:16):
been used to reach the child's bedroom from the exterior
of the house, and the story, including Windsor's art, was
so sensational and popular that the New York Americans started
running stories on kidnapping and homicide as often as possible
to keep readership engaged. On July four, mackay, who was
at home at the time, called out to Moud from
(27:38):
her bedroom door that has head hurt and then he collapsed.
Then he realized that his right arm, which was his
drawing arm, was paralyzed. He was terrified, and soon he
lost consciousness. He fell into a coma and died several
hours later, having had a massive stroke. While Windsor mackay
is certainly talked about with reverence by people who of
(28:00):
or have studied animation, he's not exactly a household name today,
but his legacy lives on in virtually all animation. If
you've ever been to Disney's Hollywood studios in Walt Disney World,
you may have noticed that there is a giant dinosaur
by the man made lake in the park. And I
have often heard people when I'm there go, I don't
understand what this dinosaur is doing here, because it's not
(28:20):
from a Disney movie. It is, in fact a nod
to Gurdie. While talking about Windsor and Gurdie on an
episode of the TV show Disneyland, Walt Disney said, quote
Windsor McKay's Gurdie and other animation novelties so stimulated a
great public interest and created a demand for this new medium.
This in turn encouraged other pioneers to creative efforts that
(28:43):
in time led to the establishment of the animated cartoon
as an industry. I clearly love Windsor McKay um, even
though there's part of me that thinks he might have
been a pill to actually know. I have two postcards
today because trying to get a little bit caught up
on the many awesome postcards that we get. The first
(29:04):
one is from Christina, and she sent us a postcard
from the nineteen sixteen rising. Uh. It's a picture of
Sackville Street in Dublin in the aftermath, and it is
um sort of terrifying image, but historically very cool. And
she writes, Dear history ladies, I'm sending you this postcard
as a thank you for the hours of enlightening and
educational audio entertainment you have provided me. I've especially enjoyed
(29:27):
being able to listen to the Ireland themed episodes as
I've been exploring this incredible country for the past two months.
I've visited the g p O Dublin Castle. And then
she lists the places that she has visited and uh,
how they are all steeped in history. All the best, Christina, Christina,
I hope your travels have been delightful. Uh, and thank
you so much for thinking of us and sending us
a postcard. It's lovely. Yeah, it's also from some travelers.
(29:51):
It is from Alice and Jesse and they write Ola,
Holly and Tracy were huge fans of the podcast. In fact,
you have been our two bonus t evel buddies throughout Cuba.
They tell us about the cities that they've visited, and
then they said, we thought it was only fair for
us to send you a postcard and let you know
how much we've enjoyed your company. The CPS. We tried
to find a unique postcard for you. This one is
(30:12):
from a Cuban film, UH, and it's very stylized and
cool and UH has a little bit of an animated style.
I don't know if this is an animated film. I
don't know this film, but now I'm gonna look it
up because it looks fabulous. This is vampires on a habana,
So if it is vampires and it appears to be
one of them, is at least possibly both. And it's
(30:33):
this stylized animation. I love it. Uh. Like I said,
I'm gonna look it up because the Lord knows I
love animation. If you would like to write to us,
you can do so at History Podcast at how stale
works dot com. You can also find us across the
spectrum of social media as missed in History and at
missed in History dot com. If you would like to
learn a little bit more specifically about Gerty and a
little about windsor McKay, you can actually check out my
(30:56):
other podcast, Drawn, which is about the history of animation.
The second episode in that series goes into some more
depth about why Gertie was really uh landmark moment in
animation history, and it's a really fun talk. We have
some great animation historians on that episode. If you would
like come, it is it us as we said at
missed in history dot com, where our entire archive lives,
(31:17):
as well as show notes for any of the episodes
Tracy and I have worked on. So we can't wait
to see you at missed in history dot com or
we can all explore history together. For more on this
and thousands of other topics, visit how staff works dot com.
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Uh. Tracy.
We're gonna keep talking about Windsor mackay today, about which
I'm very excited. I know you are. We're going to
(00:25):
finish up this talk about the life of this artist
and animator, and if you haven't listened to the first
part of this one, I really suggest that you go
back and do that, because otherwise you won't know about
Winsor's childhood and how he was drawn to art despite
his family's hopes that he would find a more stable career,
and how he got into newspapers and writing comics in
the first place. In nineteen o five, McKay created his
(00:47):
most popular strip, Little Nemo in Slumberland, which debuted on
October five of that year, and this strip builds on
some of the ideas that Winsor mackay had played with
in his earlier strips. Nemo was a young boy whose
dreams were depicted in the strip, and a lot of
times they were surreal and bizarre, and there wasn't really
(01:07):
a cohesive plot to the strips, they were more about
the exploration and the visuals. Yeah, he basically was kind
of lured into this, this mystical world of Slumberland by
various characters, and it's just so spectacularly beautiful. Often it's
drawn in a rich art nouveau style. And these strips
were huge hits, so much so that McKay became a
(01:30):
celebrity and the comics were translated into seven languages, and
almost instantly from that first appearance, readers were enthralled with
Nemo's adventures. As the strip went on, the world of
Slumberland expanded and it became more and more detailed. It
was like an alternate universe that readers were allowed to
explore under McKay's guidance. Because of the nature of the
(01:52):
premise for a little Nemo, these strips were really imaginative. So,
for example, at one point, for a brief run of
the strip, Nemo visited Mars and found it loaded with
pollution and just an oversaturation of industry. Nemo later found
himself and part of Slumberland that was populated by copies
of himself. Yeah, that Mars section is sometimes pointed to
(02:17):
as almost prescient because it really does kind of look
a lot like what late twentieth century cities look like
in terms of being kind of obsessed with maybe not
always the right things, and uh, it really is kind
of a takedown of greed and uh, corporate entities gaining
too much power. And in nineteen o six, McKay's career
(02:40):
took on another facet, so the focus was still his drawings, uh,
and Nemo was still doing Gangbusters, but he also started
creating drawings in front of vaudeville audiences as a form
of performance. You recall from our first episode he had
first sort of performed unofficially for people when he was
creating these large billboards and minds because he was just
(03:00):
so fabulous to watch work. But at this point, uh,
it became a more structured act. And McKay was not
only incredibly skilled as an artist, but he was also
so fast. So he was one of a number of
artists who didn't act like this on the vaudeville stage
in acts that were called lightning sketches or chalk talks.
(03:21):
And this undoubtedly drew on the work under his mentor
that we also talked about in the first part of
this podcast who was John Goodison? As you recall, he
perfected drawing on blackboards very quickly when he was studying
with him. McKay's initial reaction at being offered regular performance
time at the theater was that he quote side deeply
(03:42):
and shuddered faintly at the idea of being paid several
hundred dollars to do it. He and the theater owner
advertised his appearances in contrast to other similar acts, which
usually featured the artists talking about their work while they
were drawing, But McKay played shy. He wasn't gonna talk.
He let the work be the focus, and in press
(04:02):
interviews before his first appearance, he played up how frightened
he was to work just on his own with no
editor to guide him. This wasn't made up. McKay was
nervous on the first day of his vaudeville career, according
to his diary entry from the day W. C. Fields,
he was working on the same bill, gave him a
swig a scotch backstage to try to study his nerves,
(04:25):
but really he just needed to start drawing to stop
being nervous. He later wrote, quote, once I felt the
chalk in my hand, the tension eased, and after I
had made the first mark upon the blackboard, I was
well at ease. Yeah, he wasn't really nervous about the
drawing part. It was just about being in front of people,
and he wasn't really scared to not have an editor
(04:46):
because he was very confident. That part was kind of
played up. But I think even he was a little
surprised at how nervous he became when it was actually
time to be standing backstage and wait for the matinee
to start. He was also a really heavy smoker. He
mentions in that same diary entry that what he really
wanted was to just start chain smoking, but there was
a sign in the dressing room that said no smoking allowed.
(05:08):
Uh So when W. C. Fields showed up and offered
him a little nip, it was sort of a huge
bit of good fortune, I suppose. Uh. The first part
of his act was called Seven Ages of Man, and
this is really fascinating because he would start it by
drawing too infants when one was a boy and one
was a girl, and then he aged them by adding
(05:30):
to the drawings. He never erased, but he just used
existing lines as the basis for entirely new features, and
this was really fascinating to watch this transition take place.
He also would draw popular characters from his strips, and
the whole show got just rave reviews. His bookings increased,
and he found himself more taxed than ever in terms
of his time because he was still producing his comics
(05:52):
while he was on the road. Nemo was so popular
that it was optioned early on for a musical adaptation.
Several playwrights attempted to adapt McKay's surreal work, and they
didn't succeed. It wasn't until mid seven that the effort
really got some momentum. This was mounted by producers Marcus
Claw and A. L. Erlinger, and it was an expensive,
(06:16):
spectacle latent piece that focused on the visual rather than
the script. The play ran in New York for fifteen
weeks and then it went on to tour for two seasons.
Windsor's son Robert, on whom the character of Nemo was modeled,
would dress up as the character and would offer fans
a chance to see Nemo in the lobby of the theater. Yeah,
(06:36):
at this point, Windsor mackay has so many successful things
going on at once, and this was by most accounts
a really successful show. It sold out regularly, it got
incredibly good reviews everywhere it went, but it was a
money pit. It costs so much to stage because they
really focused on creating surreal sets and costumes that would
(07:00):
you know, accurately carry that sense from the comics onto
the stage. That there was just no way this show
could be profitable. Throughout its run, though, McKay would arrange
as often as he could to book his own vaudeville
act at theaters nearby to each of the venues where
the play was being staged, so he was simultaneously giving
these lightning talks on vaudeville, touring with the play, and
(07:22):
sometimes you know, overseeing his son being kind of an
actor in the theater in the lobby, and then keeping
up his comics work, and he was making a really
nice living. But obviously this was burning the candle at
both ends. I feel like it's got additional it's got
more than two ends at this point. Yeah, it's like
the ends in the middle and maybe could we just
(07:42):
wrap a wick around it and like that too. So
it wasn't long even with all this going on, before
McKay also ventured into animation. His first film, Little Nemo,
was completed in nineteen eleven. It's ten minutes long. If
you remember our lot of Reineger episode, we mentioned that
she was making animation in the twenties, ten minutes seemed
(08:03):
really long for a cartoon. McKay's film is really less
than two minutes of actual animation. The majority of it
is the lead up story of him telling his frands
he's going to make moving drawings and then them mocking
him in disbelief. The opening card on the film read
winds Or mackay, the famous cartoonist for the New York
(08:24):
Herald and his moving comics, the first artist to attempt
drawing pictures that will move. Produced by the Vitograph Company
of America. And the film opens, as we said, with
McKay telling his friends he's going to draw moving pictures,
and they're completely incredulous at this idea. So he walks
over to a page that's mounted on a wall, and
he draws the static image of three characters, and then
(08:46):
he pulls that paper off and rolls it up, and
then he draws another character, and he pulls that page
off and rolls it up, and all the while his
friends are kind of chuckling to each other, and he
promises them that he's going to make four thousand drawings
in a month that will move and then the film
cuts to h delivery men bringing him a massive amount
of paper and other supplies to do just that. The
(09:08):
last two minutes are where we see his two clownish figures,
a little Nemo dancing, and the Nemo draws a beautiful
lady who comes to life. The pair of them ride
away in the mouth of an alligator. Even by today's standards,
the animated segment is smooth and impressive. It really is.
It's quite beautiful. Uh yeah, that I can't say enough
(09:31):
about it. I'm always sort of awe struck when I
think about how early on an animation that was. And
we're gonna talk a little bit more about Nemo's transition
from comic strips to animation, but first we're going to
pause for a little sponsor break. There were, of course,
(09:51):
other artists that were making animation in the US at
this time, one of them John Stuart Blackton, who also
did vaudeville lightning sketches and was a little ahead of
McKay in terms of starting to draw motion pictures. Oversaw
the photography on McKay's Little Nemo short. But what made
McKay's animation unique was that it took characters that were
already really popular and then committed them to the new medium.
(10:15):
So it basically started a new avenue of exploration and
revenue for cartoonists. In nineteen eleven, McKay moved papers once again.
He was hired away from The New York Herald by
William Randolph Hurst. Nemo moved with McKay, although the strip
took on a new name, in the Land of Wonderful
Dreams that appeared in Hearst's New York American and ran
(10:38):
for three years there. Yeah, his other cartoons moved over
as well, and in fact, the Hearst publications ran a
drawing by Windsor McKay kind of announcing this move, where
all of his characters were kind of delighted and happy
that they were moving to a new home. Uh. That
turned out to be not really how things played out.
(11:00):
But in he made a second animated short, and that
was a film called How a Mosquito Operates. And in
this cartoon, we the audience see a large mosquito busily
going about his job. That job being biting humans, and
the mosquito systematically goes after a sleeping man diligent despite
getting slapt out repeatedly, and the mosquito is so good
(11:23):
at his job that it becomes massively swollen with blood,
so much so that it has difficulty flying. There's a
point where the mosquito's body is so swollen it's almost
the size of the man's head, and it finally exerts
itself so much in trying to fly that it explodes,
waking the sleeping human victim to a shower of bug bits.
(11:44):
That sounds horrifying and disgusting, and it sort of is,
but it's also really engrossing. And what's really interesting is
the characterization and the personality that the mosquito has, something
that we take for granted in modern animation, but it
was really novel in nineteen twelve to give a mosquito
a personality. Yeah, most of the things that were being
(12:05):
animated were humans, even if they were very stylized. So
this was kind of the first time that someone was like,
I think this, this mosquito can be a character and
not just a thing. Um. But the project with which
McKay is perhaps most famous for to this day, at
least among anybody who follows animation was created from nineteen
(12:26):
thirteen to nineteen fourteen, and that was Gertie the Dinosaur.
Gertie was important as an animated character in a number
of ways. So one, she was the first character that
McKay created specifically for animation, rather than him using an
existing comic that he had already drawn and adapting it
to a motion picture. And second, Gertie was a massive
(12:49):
feat of artistry. Mackay, who was working with an assistant
named John A. Fitzimmons, drew every single frame of the
Gurtie animation by hand, thousands thousands of drawings. And this
was the time before the idea of separating layers of
animations into the backgrounds and the cells for the moving
characters existed, So every frame was a full version of
(13:12):
the scene with all the background objects there and Gertie
moving among those objects. The backgrounds for Gertie were also
more complex than his previous efforts. Little Nemo animation had
virtually no background elements. It was just the characters on
a white page. The Mosquito animation has some backgrounds, but
(13:32):
they're pretty uncomplicated. They consist mostly of lines used to
suggest the walls of a room, but Gertie strolled along
mountain paths that had rocks and other details. Yeah, there
are trees, there's a water feature, there's a whole thing
going on there. And throughout the production of this ambitious work,
mackay was still doing his editorial cartoons and his vaudeville act.
(13:55):
He basically never stopped working. But he also had no
regular ship jewel whatsoever, So he would blaze through a
bunch of Girtie drawings and then hand them off to
his assistant Fitzsimmons to trace the backgrounds in from a
master version, and then he would be busy on the
road doing his act and not come back to Gurtie
for a week or more. To make Gurtye as efficiently
(14:17):
as possible despite the heavy workload required, McKay pioneered a
number of practices that have become animation standards. One was
reusing the drawings. So once he had timed out exactly
how many images he needed to make Grtie breathe in
for four seconds and out for two, he drew all
of those frames. But then he re photographed the same
(14:38):
drawings for more than a dozen cycles so that you
see Gertie lying on her side breathing continually. Yeah, he
has a great story about how he was trying to
trying to time his own breath and it kept being
a problem until he found himself in front of a
clock that had a really unique and easy to follow
tick that was like a metronome. And then, just as
we talked about in a lot of Rhineger episode, once
(15:00):
he had that timing, he calculated it out by how
many frames per second the film would run at, and
that's how he got the number of frames that he
needed to make. And he also invented the concept which
came to be known as key framing, So he identified
key poses that the character would hit, and then he
broke the workload down into the sections between one key
(15:21):
pose in the next, and drawing those connectors between the
two came to be known as in between ng And
this was all a way to manage the project and
keep the story focused, and it also kind of combated uh,
just growing very tired of the work because he would
be like, Okay, I know I'm working on this section now,
I can move over to this section now in this
section now, but the other really interesting thing about Gertie
(15:44):
is how she was presented to audiences. Unlike previous animated shorts,
Gertie didn't just appear on her own while she was
shown on the vaudeville screen when their mackay was her
live action co star, so he appeared on stage as
Gertie's trainer carrying a bull whip. He spoke to her
on the screen and she would respond. At one point
(16:04):
in the act, he'd tossed Gertie a snack in the
form of an apple, and then the on screen dinosaur
would catch the apple delightedly. It's so charming. It's just
so charming. Uh. And it's one of those things that
to me, I think if someone did this in the
modern era, people would be wowed and like, oh, this
(16:25):
is so creative and interesting, and it's like this has
been going on since the nineteen Windsor McKay was way
ahead of the rest of us. Uh. And while Windsor's
act with Gertie was a huge hit, they literally became
international stars. He did not repeat this act of, you know,
creating an animation that he then went out as an
actor and interacted with. He turned back to editorial cartoons,
(16:47):
which he was still doing as an employee of William
Randolph Hurst, and it turned out that Hurst was not
super happy about the fact that Winsor mackay had his
hands in so many pies outside his job at Hurst Publishing.
In his mind, he had hired a famous cartoonist and
what he had gotten was a busy vaudevillian who was
phoning in his editorial work. McKay was forced to sign
(17:09):
an agreement eventually that he would only take vaudeville bookings
in New York so that he could always be available
to his boss. Eventually, there was a second version of
the Dirty cartoon. This was one that could play on
its own outside of New York. It starts with an
exterior shot of the Museum of Natural History in New
York City. The intertitle card announces the famous Windsor McKay
(17:31):
is on a joy ride with Roy mccarnell, quote and others,
and the car there and gets a flat in front
of the museum, so they decide to go inside while
that flat is fixed, and after they all are observing
a dinosaur skeleton, McKay bets one of his friends, and
the stakes in this bet are a dinner for the
whole group that he can bring that dinosaur to life
(17:53):
with drawings, and McKay's process is depicted dramatically. This is similar,
as you may recall to his previous work uh And
at one point, McKay's friend comes to visit him in
his studio to check on the progress, and Windsor dispatches
his assistant, who was played by his son, to get
the drawings from the photo department where they're being photographed.
(18:14):
But the young man is carrying a huge stack and
as he enters McKay's office he drops them in pages
fly everywhere, and at this point the friend that McKay
has made the bet with seems completely incredulous that that
Windsor McKay will ever be able to pull off this boast.
And the next scene is the big dinner where McKay
will succeed or fail in his bet, because that is
when he's expected to show the moving dinosaur, and he
(18:38):
initially just draws a picture of Gurty for the assembled friends,
who remind him that it has to move for him
to win the bet. That's when the gurdy cartoon begins.
McKay asks her to come out from our cave and
the dinosaur shyly emerges, and the cartoon plays out with
McKay's directions as her trainer appearing in the enter title cards.
(18:58):
Needless to say, when there one the bet, the film
wraps up with his friend paying for everyone's dinner. I
obviously love the Gurtye cartoon. Um And while McKay was
at this point really successful and quite wealthy from all
of his artistic endeavors, his life started to have some
challenges after the massive success of Gurty And we're going
(19:21):
to talk about some of those challenges after we take
a quick break for a word from a sponsor. McKay's
work as a newspaper cartoonist evolved over the next several years,
and his dreamy fantasy scenarios were slowly supplanted by political commentary,
(19:42):
unless made his cartooning career something of a complete circle,
since his early working cartoons for periodicals had consisted largely
of political material. This is actually interesting and that it's
one of those things people point to you and go
No one actually knows what winsor McKay's political opinions were,
because he would always just say, I'm drawing what my
(20:02):
editors tell me to. But he never other than a
time when some of the more pacifist articles or pacifist
images were being published and people started to think that
Hurst and mackay and anyone associated with it was somehow
pro german, and he wrote a letter speaking out against
that was like, no, of course we're not. Other than that,
(20:22):
he really never let on where he stood on most
of the subjects, even though he had drawn cartoons that
kind of indicated he may have felt one way or
the other. But all of this transition to more politics
and less of the fantasy cartoons was also part of
Hurst's effort to control McKay. He kept reigning in the
artist's opportunities to create new strips by way of assigning
(20:45):
more and more editorial pieces. The nineteen teams continued to
bring challenges into McKay's life. Grifters tried to extort money
from him, claiming that they would reveal that his wife, Maud,
had had an extra marital affair. She hadn't had an affair,
and the truth eventually came out in court, and then
a few months later McKay's father, Robert died. Yeah, this
(21:06):
was like one of those phases of life where he
just got hit by hassle after hassle and then heartbreak
and William Randolph Hurst opened an animation studio in nineteen sixteen,
with McKay listed as one of the creators who would
be turning his popular characters into films. There this seemed
like it might be an uptick in the whole situation
and that McKay might have a new outlet, but in
(21:27):
fact this was a terrible fit. Windsor's approach to animation
was really not compatible with the factory style production that
Hirst wanted, and the other studios were already starting to
do instead. McKay finally made another animated short with a
very different style, released in nineteen eighteen. This one was
the Sinking of the Lusitania, and as you may suspect,
(21:50):
it was not a funny cartoon. It was an eight
minute animated account of the ship being struck by torpedoes
launched from a German U boat and going down, claiming
almost twelve hundred lives. The thinking of the Lusitania used
sell animation, so unlike the Guardy cartoons, the action of
the scene was painted onto clear celluloid sheets and then
overlaid onto the background. Which streamlined the animation process. Yeah,
(22:15):
As a little historical side note, at one point it
was believed that the U boat had launched two torpedoes
against the Lusitania, and then later analysis was like, no,
it actually got hit once, and then the second explosion
was from something inside the Lusitania exploding um which has
come up when people talk about this cartoon being not accurate.
(22:37):
But at the time he made it, it was believed
that it was two torpedoes, and the sinking of the
Lusitania was a passion project for McKay. It took two
years to make it, and he paid for the production
entirely out of his own pocket. It was one of
his few remaining outlets away from his work because Hurst
at that point had managed to cut off McKay's vaudeville
(22:58):
performances by upping pay to a matching rate and adding
a clause to his contract that he couldn't moonlight as
a vaudeville performer any longer. McKay clung to animation as
his one remaining non Hearst controlled creative outlet. He made
several more animated shorts, including three that were based on
his dreams of the rare bit bean strip. These were
(23:19):
The Flying House, The Pet and Bug vaudeville. He also
made The Centaurs featuring featuring two centaurs falling in love.
There was also Flips Circus about a circus owner in
his various tricks, and The Midsummer's Nightmare. But just as
Hurst had managed to block McKay's other interests, animation too
(23:41):
was eventually cut off. Hirst realized that McKay was spending
far more time on his side projects than his newspaper duties.
He felt that Windsor McKay was turning in subpar work,
and there were, however, a number of vaudeville appearances that
Hirst did agree to allow his employee to book. It's
unclear how they came to this arrangement or agreement, because
(24:02):
there was sort of this weird their relationship. It looks
so unhealthy and toxic when you're reading about it, because
it is a lot about control and rebellion, and sometimes
they agree on things and then everything turns around and
falls apart. It really seemed that they never were in
agreement about exactly what their relationship was. Because Hurst seemed
to feel that he more or less owned his employees
(24:24):
he thought that McKay should be on call for him
at all times, and McKay saw his job as just
that it was a way to make money while he
was pursuing other interests, and even in his busiest periods
where he was juggling multiple careers at once, Wizard McKay
never missed a deadline. When McKay's contract with Hurst ended
in ninety four, he left. He went back into the
(24:46):
New York Herald and revived Little Nemo for another brief
run there. He thought he would once again rule as
the premier comics artist, but his relaunch of Nemo just
didn't have the same enthusiastic audience at the strip had
used to had previously enjoyed. Just three years later, after
much wooing on the part of the papers leadership, he
(25:07):
was back at Hurst's New York American, and that same
year which he created a minor scandal when he was
addressing a group of artists at a dinner that was
held in his honor. He first started speaking about his
split system, key framing and in between ng and other
technical aspects of animation. But to the assembled crowd that
(25:28):
had become pretty common knowledge and they were not especially engaged,
and finally, a very frustrated and irritated McKay shifted the
tone of his speech and he said, abruptly, animation should
be an art. That's how I conceived it. But as
I see what you fellows have done with it is
making it into a trade. Not an art but a trade.
(25:50):
Bad luck. And that was the end of his speech.
McKay continued to be at odds with his job at Hearst.
When the American tobacco company for the cartoonist a sum
of money larger than his annual salary to take a
side project drawing advertisements in McKay's editor blocked the deal.
The owner of the tobacco company threatened to withdraw all
(26:13):
advertising from Hurst magazines if he couldn't have McKay for
the job. And then McKay was granted permission to take
this offer. He got permission in writing to protect himself. Yeah.
The verbal agreement of oh, I guess you can do
it was not enough. He was like, I do not
trust you people anymore. You need to put this down
on paper. Uh. There's an interesting anecdote that comes up
(26:34):
in nineteen thirty two, which was when McKay was called
on once again as a journalist for kind of the
last time by William Randolph Hurst's son, William Randolph Hurst Jr.
So Junior needed someone to travel with him to cover
the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby, Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr.
After an alleged eighty five mile per hour car ride,
(26:55):
Hurst Junior and McKay arrived at the scene ahead of
any other reporter, so it was apparently two hours after
it had been reported to the police, and they started
interviewing police on the scene. They had access that later
journalists did not have, simply because they got there first
before anyone thought to like close everything off. McKay sketched
out images of the scene, including the ladder that had
(27:16):
been used to reach the child's bedroom from the exterior
of the house, and the story, including Windsor's art, was
so sensational and popular that the New York Americans started
running stories on kidnapping and homicide as often as possible
to keep readership engaged. On July four, mackay, who was
at home at the time, called out to Moud from
(27:38):
her bedroom door that has head hurt and then he collapsed.
Then he realized that his right arm, which was his
drawing arm, was paralyzed. He was terrified, and soon he
lost consciousness. He fell into a coma and died several
hours later, having had a massive stroke. While Windsor mackay
is certainly talked about with reverence by people who of
(28:00):
or have studied animation, he's not exactly a household name today,
but his legacy lives on in virtually all animation. If
you've ever been to Disney's Hollywood studios in Walt Disney World,
you may have noticed that there is a giant dinosaur
by the man made lake in the park. And I
have often heard people when I'm there go, I don't
understand what this dinosaur is doing here, because it's not
(28:20):
from a Disney movie. It is, in fact a nod
to Gurdie. While talking about Windsor and Gurdie on an
episode of the TV show Disneyland, Walt Disney said, quote
Windsor McKay's Gurdie and other animation novelties so stimulated a
great public interest and created a demand for this new medium.
This in turn encouraged other pioneers to creative efforts that
(28:43):
in time led to the establishment of the animated cartoon
as an industry. I clearly love Windsor McKay um, even
though there's part of me that thinks he might have
been a pill to actually know. I have two postcards
today because trying to get a little bit caught up
on the many awesome postcards that we get. The first
(29:04):
one is from Christina, and she sent us a postcard
from the nineteen sixteen rising. Uh. It's a picture of
Sackville Street in Dublin in the aftermath, and it is
um sort of terrifying image, but historically very cool. And
she writes, Dear history ladies, I'm sending you this postcard
as a thank you for the hours of enlightening and
educational audio entertainment you have provided me. I've especially enjoyed
(29:27):
being able to listen to the Ireland themed episodes as
I've been exploring this incredible country for the past two months.
I've visited the g p O Dublin Castle. And then
she lists the places that she has visited and uh,
how they are all steeped in history. All the best, Christina, Christina,
I hope your travels have been delightful. Uh, and thank
you so much for thinking of us and sending us
a postcard. It's lovely. Yeah, it's also from some travelers.
(29:51):
It is from Alice and Jesse and they write Ola,
Holly and Tracy were huge fans of the podcast. In fact,
you have been our two bonus t evel buddies throughout Cuba.
They tell us about the cities that they've visited, and
then they said, we thought it was only fair for
us to send you a postcard and let you know
how much we've enjoyed your company. The CPS. We tried
to find a unique postcard for you. This one is
(30:12):
from a Cuban film, UH, and it's very stylized and
cool and UH has a little bit of an animated style.
I don't know if this is an animated film. I
don't know this film, but now I'm gonna look it
up because it looks fabulous. This is vampires on a habana,
So if it is vampires and it appears to be
one of them, is at least possibly both. And it's
(30:33):
this stylized animation. I love it. Uh. Like I said,
I'm gonna look it up because the Lord knows I
love animation. If you would like to write to us,
you can do so at History Podcast at how stale
works dot com. You can also find us across the
spectrum of social media as missed in History and at
missed in History dot com. If you would like to
learn a little bit more specifically about Gerty and a
little about windsor McKay, you can actually check out my
(30:56):
other podcast, Drawn, which is about the history of animation.
The second episode in that series goes into some more
depth about why Gertie was really uh landmark moment in
animation history, and it's a really fun talk. We have
some great animation historians on that episode. If you would
like come, it is it us as we said at
missed in history dot com, where our entire archive lives,
(31:17):
as well as show notes for any of the episodes
Tracy and I have worked on. So we can't wait
to see you at missed in history dot com or
we can all explore history together. For more on this
and thousands of other topics, visit how staff works dot com.
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Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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