Here’s Charles Mintz’s entry in the biographical section of the 1937 Film Daily Product Guide and Director’s Annual. It speaks of the cartoon producer in the third person, but one suspects that it’s his official view of himself. And it’s fascinating.
Mintz doesn’t mention his wife, pioneering cartoon distributor Margaret Winkler. He does assign himself credit for some series we usually associate with her, including the Felixes and Alice cartoons. And he dwells on his ill-fated association with Walt Disney, claiming to have “discovered” Walt and been the first person to “appreciate the young man with great ideas.”
Mintz calls himself the producer of the Oswalds and calls Disney his production chief for the Alices and Oswalds; I’m not sure if that counts as downplaying Disney’s role, but it surely emphasizes Mintz’s involvement more than most people would. (Elsewhere in the directory, Walt Disney’s entry says that he was the producer of the Alice cartoons and Oswald’s creator and producer.)
Oh, and Mintz says that he’s released cartoons solely through Columbia since the dawn of sound — news which would come as a surprise to RKO’s Toby the Pup.
Was Mintz haunted by the Oswald debacle? We may never know for sure. But once Disney became a phenomenon, he seems to have been happy to remind everyone else in the business that he was once Walt Disney’s boss.
He also cheerfully takes credit for personally creating Scrappy — and mentions that he’s president of the Motion Picture Cartoon Producers Association, an organization I’m unfamiliar with. Wouldn’t you love to have been a fly on the wall at its meetings?
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