This is an interesting twisting of facts, many of which I am privy to. First I have stated before that there were sound versions of certain song films that were rereleased by Alfred J. Weiss in 1928. Here is the reason. There are two versions that I've come across on MY OLD KENTUCKY HOME and TRAMP, TRAMP, TRAMP. The silent vesion of TRAMP uses the standard animated opening of the silent series with different bouncing ball lyrics footage than in the sound version. Also the tempo is different.
The sound version had credits to other people than Max and Dave Fleischer, but the Inkwell Studios end title art remains at the end of the film.

MY OLD KENTUCKY HOME has had the animation of the dog added to the same bouncing ball footage from the silent version. There is also a longer ending gag with the black "laundry girl" hopping into a wagon and extending a watermelon slice in front
of a Black man like dangling a carrot in front of a mule. In the silent version, the girl hops onto a toy train and leaves.

Weiss had acquired a number of silent cartoons by 1928, and was adding soundtracks to them, including a number of Disney's ALICE COMEDIES, and OUT OF THE INKWELL films. The studios as you cite did not own or controll the recording devices. There was also RCA, which as you probably realized formed RKO-Radio Pictures to enter the sound film market as well. Although William Fox had bought a number of sound patents (including the Tri-Ergon System), he did not have exclusive ownership of the Variable Density recording method, and went into a partnership with Western Electric, who was about to abandon the Vitaphone system in favor of the more practical sound-on-film method. And in 1928 there were other similar optical recording systems available, the most famous being the bootleg Powers Cinephone used by Walt Disney to record STEAMBOAT WILLIE and all of his first sound cartoons.

From the way they sound, the Weiss sound reissues sometimes sound like the early
Disney sound cartoons, as the dynamics of the recordings in these were actually inferior to those of the tracks on the SONG CAR-TUNES originally produced using the Phonofilm Process under Fleischer and the Red Seal Company. And the Red Seal Company, which consisted of a chain of 36 theaters on the East coast lasted for only three years, going out of business in 1927. This coincided with the demise of the deForest Phonofilms Company as well and the near bankruptcy of Out of the Inkwell Films, Inc. It was Alfred J. Weiss, whose company, Artcraft--a later division of Paramount, who rescued Fleischer and teamed him with Paramount in 1927. Weiss became a problem for Fleischer, and after entering litigation, Fleischer filed bankruptcy in 1929, to reorganize as Fleischer Studios with Weiss out of the picture. In the meantime, Weiss was re-releasing silent Fleischer and Disney cartoons without their being compensated.

Under the Paramount contract, Fleischer continued the KOKO films under a new name, THE INKWELL IMPS to avoid complications associated with the dissolved Red Seal Company. This series continued to be released until the summer of 1929. At the same time, Fleischer revived the song films as SCREEN SONGS with the first being THE SIDEWALKS OF NEW YORK in 1929.


Theodore Case worked with deForest for a short time when deForest leased a type of Photoelectric Cel invented by Case that was needed in improving the recording and playback. They worked in the open on this with the full knowledge of what the other was doing. This is a fact supported by deForest's lab associate, Dr. Elwin P. Meyers, who later testified to this during deForest's lawsuit that started in 1928. And in some of the original Phonofilm title cards, deForest DID INDEED give credit to Case, as it clearly shows "DEFOREST-CASE PATENTS" in the title frame.

Within two years, Case knew enough to go off on his own, and he and Sponable sold Case's version of Phonofilm to William Fox. The problem with it was amplification and clarity, however. This was the key that everyone needed, and was the source of controversy and jealousy regarding deForest since they all needed vacuum tubes to amplify sound, and this was deForest's patent. Frankly, whatever improvements resulted from Case's work, they do not sound to be greatly different from what deForest already had before.

In 1928, deForest filed suit for patent infringement against Western Electric. It was a very complicated issue with counter suits and loose interpretations of licenses to varous companies. Basically, when deForest had licensed Western Electric for the use of vacuum tubes in 1917, it was with the implication that they would be used to amplify telephone signals. However, there was a clause in the license that gave Western Electric rights to anything that deForest invented during that term of the six year license. It was during this period that deForest was experimenting with optical recording, and because of this, Western felt they owned the technology. This was also assumed when Case sold his "improvement" to Fox, and as Fox went into a joint venture with Western Electric, they collectively felt they had the rights to the technology.

The lawsuit went on for eight years. Finally in 1936, The Supreme Court ruled based on all registered patents going back to 1918-1919 and onward, deForest was legally "the first to invent." In 1959, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
awarded Dr. Lee deForest the Special Lifetime Achievement Oscar for his"pioneering efforts the brought sound to the motion picture."

From this point in time, we can take for granted the final results. But what many fail to realize is that the entire process had to be pioneered, as there were no cameras that existed that could photograph sound waves onto film. The aperature of the picture area had to be made narrower to accomodate the soundtrack area. A method of printing had to be devised. DeForest worked closely with Eastman Kodak to discover film stocks that would photograph sound well, which resulted in finer grain films. He had to devise developing (Gamma) standards for film negatives, which previously did not exist. He had to experiement with various photographic speeds to determine which would most intelligably record sound. And most of all, he had to build the equipment to playback the sound films. All these things did not exist before, and are many details that are not taken into consideration.

As the producer of FIRST SOUND OF MOVIES, a documentary on the invention and first public display of the deForest Phonofilms 80 years ago, I have gained a great deal of insight to this story, which I believe qualfies me to address these issues with an amount of authority. I have also been involved with the research of the career of Max Fleischer for 30 years. I have been reserecting many of his silent film classics including 1/2 of the pre-Paramount OUT OF THE INKWELL films, and a number of the early KO-KO SONG CAR-TUNES with the original pre-1928 soundtracks.

With some 700 post, numerous questions I have answered on this subject, contributions I've already made to books, and articles by other researchers, I do believe that the validity of most anything that I have to present here is well substantiated because I have done the research. I do not wish to leave the impression that I am a "know-it-all," but I have spent a lot of years with this subject matter, and am offering quite a bit more than convoluted, misinformed opinions. It is not fair to others who may not wish to be engrossed in all these technical details to raise issues such as these in this forum. But I believe I have presented satisfactory evidence of the qualfications of this post and any others that I have posted in the past or may continue to post in the future.

The term "cartoon animator" is already defined. It means exactly that. And by that definition, Emile Cohl qualifies as "Le Grandpare de les designes Animes"--The Grandfather of Animated Cartoons. What J. Stuart Blackton did was "trick films" using various stop motion techniques with sketch pad set ups, cutouts and tricks with glass.
These were not cartoons, and they were not drawn animated figures in the ture sense of what animated cartoons are. There has been some indication that some of the Blackton experiments may have been done as early as 1898. But from all evidence, Cohl in France seems to be the first CARTOON animator. Winsor McCay followed after him in the United States a number of years later.