jwblogofrandomness:

“Okay, I just want to say that this video is full of bullcrap! As someone who has studied the golden age of animation since I was 9 I can tell you this guy got a ton of things wrong.

*First off, Walt Disney never took credit for creating the story of Snow White. He even said in a few interviews that he was inspired by a silent film adaptation of the story when he was thinking of possible stories to adapt to full length animation feature.

*Also it wasn’t necessarily Walt Disney Studios that caused the Max Fleischer to loose his studio. No, that was Paramount Pictures. Paramount wanted full control of the studio and it’s films so they kicked out Max Fleischer and renamed the studio as Famous Studios (which continued making Popeye cartoons in color and helped create Casper the Friendly Ghost).

*Contrary to what’s stated in the video Fleischer’s cartoons were actually the more popular in the 30s than Disney’s. Popeye in particular was the main box office draw to the point where the half hour short “Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor” was billed as a full feature.

*The book seen in the game the “Illusion of living” is actually based on the Disney Animation book “The Illusion of Life”.

*While Walt Disney and Max Fleischer were rivals for a long time they did eventually reconcile. Walt even having his son Richard Fleisher direct the live action film 20,00 Leagues Under the Sea.

I’ll be the first to admit that Walt Disney was far from perfect and did have a rather large ego, but he wasn’t nearly as evil as this video made him out to be!

But really annoys me is how many views this video has and this being the internet everybody is gonna be gullible and go “DUH, I KNOW ALL ABOUT CLASSIC CARTOONS! I WATCHED THE GAME THEORY VIDEO AND IF THEY SAY DISNEY IS THE DEVIL THEN IT MUST BE RIGHT!” and not do any further research. UGH!

While I admit he did get a small number of things right as well as the parallels between Max Fleischer and Joey Drew, that still doesn’t make up for the ton of stuff that he got wrong. Do yourselves a favor folks and if you want to learn about the history of the golden age of cartoons check out the several legitimate books and documentaries about the subject.

Heck there are even websites out there with better info. Probably the best would be Cartoon Research, run by animation historian Jerry Beck and including articles from several historians and industry professionals.

If you want to learn the true history of Fleischer Studios I strongly suggest you pick up Popeye the Sailor Volume 2, which includes a documentary about said history. As well as the book The Fleischer Story.

Also if you want to learn about Walt Disney (both the good and the bad) I strongly suggest you check out the PBS documentary American Experience: Walt Disney.

Just don’t go around spreading this miss-information as fact.