00:12Wendell McKay was a eminently an artist. I mean, that's what he loved more than anything else.
00:20And people have asked me often why he didn't proceed with this business and go into on a production basis
00:27and make a big business out of it. And my only explanation for that is that I could never conceive
00:35Wendell McKay doing it because he got so much pleasure out of just doing the drawings
00:42that I just couldn't conceive him sitting in a room with 10 or 15 artists doing work that he just
00:47loved to do.
00:48So that, to me, it was just simply out of the question. He just never gave it a thought, I
00:52don't think.
00:53I never heard him talk about going into a proposition where he visualizes being in what we know Walt Disney
01:03is now.
01:04You know, he never had anything like that. He just did it because he enjoyed doing it.
01:11I can remember ever since I was a little kid, I used to make little theatrical sets, you know, and
01:18engines and things.
01:19So when I came to Sheepshead Bay in about 1906, I got wind of a boy in the school in
01:30Sheepshead Bay, 98,
01:31and his father was quite a celebrated artist. And when I found out about that, the boy and I became
01:38very good friends.
01:39I saw it for that.
01:49He arranged for me to come and meet his father who lived in Sheepshead Bay and worked in Sheepshead Bay.
01:55And that was my first encounter with McKay. And when we went in to see him,
02:00he was working in the front room of his private house in those days on 17th Street in Sheepshead Bay.
02:08And he was working on a little Nemo picture at that time and doing the drawing on it.
02:16And after the introductions, he was very congenial and very friendly.
02:22And for somehow or other after that, he took a liking to me.
02:26And I had an inside track with him from then on.
02:30And I was one of the few that was privileged to be in the room working with him.
02:35And we'd get into some interesting conversations about different things.
02:41And he was pretty broad-minded about lots of things.
02:44And that's how I became acquainted with him.
02:47And then when he came to this moving picture business,
02:50he knew I was going to art school at the time, up the Art Students League.
02:54And he asked me to come over and help out.
02:57So he'd hand me a batch of these drawings.
03:00And I'd take them home and work on them on Saturdays and days I didn't go to school and nights.
03:06So that's how I came to get tied up with him.
03:10And we became very good friends after that.
03:14Winsor McKay's was a real American success story.
03:17He was born the son of a Michigan lumberman.
03:20And he had this God-given talent for drawing that he developed without academic training into a great artistic skill.
03:29McKay took to the road about 1889 when he was a teenager.
03:33And he became a poster painter for traveling circuses and melodrama companies.
03:39And he drew out ads for freak shows and museums in Chicago and Cincinnati.
03:52Eventually, Winsor McKay became famous for his newspaper comic strips.
03:56The most popular being Little Nemo and Slumberland, which began in the New York Herald in 1995.
04:04Little Nemo and Slumberland was an immediate success around the world.
04:08And it raised a comic strip cartoon to the level of fine art by virtue of McKay's unsurpassed virtuosity of
04:16dressmanship and imagination.
04:29These Little Nemo panels demonstrate McKay's fascination with progressive movement in settings and characters.
04:37And his almost movie-like presentation of illusion of time and space.
05:07McKay's energy and drive enabled him in 1960 to devise and store a new design.
05:11And his own unique vaudeville act, in which he toured for 11 years, whenever his newspaper commitments allowed.
05:19Yeah, the vaudeville act was a very sweet and lovely thing.
05:22And I can remember he'd have a big blackboard on the stage and he'd come out and he'd draw two
05:29figures,
05:30a simple childish head on two facing pictures.
05:34And then he'd, with his blackboard eraser, he'd erase one and go over to the other.
05:40And he finally brought these two characters through middle age, marriage, and up to the very old, very old people.
05:47And it was quite a thing.
05:49And I remember particularly Victor Herbert's Sweet Mystery of Life was the theme song that went all through this thing.
05:59That's right. They made a bet that they'd do this animated cartoon.
06:02I don't know how serious the bet was, but anyhow, that's what the story went.
06:06And, uh, so he, uh, he started out on this and, uh, probably more or less of a, a novelty
06:14act, you know.
06:15He didn't have, he had no intention of going into the abysms because nobody was doing any work at that
06:20time, you know.
06:23That's McKay at the drawing board.
06:26And that's Winsor McKay's hand drawing, uh, some of the characters from his comic strip, Little Nemo and Slumberland.
06:32This film, made in 1911, was used as a prologue to, to date, to McKay's first animated cartoon.
06:38It was called Little Nemo and it contains the most beautiful, flowing, and well-timed animation ever drawn
06:44before the Walt Disney Studios came on the scene about a dozen years later.
06:48He was a very fast worker and a very skilled draftman.
06:54Those are supposed to be his friends, but they're really actors,
06:57and this scene was filmed at the Vitagraph Studio in Brooklyn.
07:05You see, Winsor McKay was not the first man to make animated cartoons,
07:10but he was the first, uh, to consider animation a new art form,
07:13and he approached each of the ten films he made as an artist.
07:18For example, he preferred to do all the drawings in this film by himself
07:23without resorting to shortcuts.
07:26And there were over 4,000 separate drawings used to make these characters move.
07:48There were four years on the drawing,
07:49You see, love it.
07:49And there were four years in the drawing.
07:49You see, there were three years ago.
07:49which is where I'm going to be like.
07:49And then there were two Instruments that were taken
07:51And that was just a lot of theché tienen.
07:55And there was a little bit of a place where he wanted to do,
07:55What I was thinking about is that?
08:59This is probably 60 years, but this is one of the first, this is drawing number 336 of the Gertie
09:10series that Windsor McKay made, and I happened to work on them.
09:14Why did the background here, the rocks and stones and things like that, and it's, we can, there's a very
09:25crude arrangement.
09:26We had these cardboards cut and printed, and then we had to make these register marks on the, in the
09:34corner, so that we could put the tape, the papers on them and take and paste them, paste them down.
09:40And that was a tedious job compared to the later process that they used, but it's very interesting to see
09:47this type of drawing.
09:51This is a rice paper that was very, had a very nice tooth to it, and it took, took the
09:56drawings very, very well, but it was a long drawn out process.
10:03McKay used Gertie as part of his vaudeville act.
10:06The film was projected onto a large screen, and McKay would stand in front of it and talk to his
10:12cartoon dinosaur, and the audience loved it.
10:38Mohamed crédie as part of his
11:02Come on out, Goody, and make a pretty bow.
11:26Oh, stop that.
11:27Be a good girl now and bow to the audience.
11:36Thanks.
11:37Now raise your right foot.
11:51That's good.
11:52Now raise your left foot.
11:58Never mind that sea monster, Goody.
12:00Raise your left foot.
12:09You're a bad girl.
12:10Shame on you.
12:12Oh, don't cry.
12:13Here, catch this apple.
12:18Now raise your left foot.
12:46Goody, don't hurt Jumbo.
12:56Here, catch this apple.
12:57Here, catch this apple.
12:58Here, catch this apple.
13:29Did you see that four-winged lizard?
13:32Yes.
13:34Are you in the habit of seeing things?
13:37Are you tipping to me?
13:39Will you have a little drink?
13:56Gertie will now show that she isn't afraid of me and will take me for a ride.
14:08I ride your mountain in 1914.
14:11That's as near as I can come to a date that this was released for.
14:22McKay was incensed at the wanton brutality of the sinking of the liner, Lusitania, which
14:28was torpedoed by a German submarine without warning in 1915.
14:32He proposed to make an animated cartoon graphically depicting the horrible tragedy that killed almost
14:391,200 innocent people.
14:41This film, which took 22 months to complete, is the result.
14:46It contains over 25,000 drawings on celluloid and is the only McKay film to depict an actual
14:53event rather than a fantasy.
14:59I did the waves and there was a series of 16 drawings.
15:03Mr. McKay's drawing number 17 would be my number one again and that's the way we'd
15:08continue through the whole series of drawings.
15:40The following is the first time, Mr. McKay, which was the most important part of the
17:41And I probably was simplified a lot since my days and maybe a bit easier, but I just
17:48didn't understand why anybody would want to make 10,000 or 15,000 drawings.
