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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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. 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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. 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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. 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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. 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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.