Laugh-O-Gram Studio was a short-lived film studio located on the second floor of the McConahay Building at 1127 East 31st in Kansas City, Missouri.
The studio played a role in the early years of animation: it was home to many of the pioneers of animation, brought there by Walt Disney, and is said to be the place to have provided Disney, but more importantly Ub Iwerks, with the inspiration to create Mickey Mouse. Laugh-O-Gram was the subject of two feature films As Dreamers Do and Walt Before Mickey.
History
In 1921, Walt Disney was contracted by Milton Feld to animate twelve cartoons, which he called Newman's Laugh-O-grams. On May 23, 1922, Laugh-O-gram Films was incorporated by Disney using the remaining assets of the defunct Iwerks-Disney Commercial Artists company and additional $15,000 from local investors. LOGF produced nine of the requested 12 films with little income. But encouraged by his shorts' popularity at the theatre, and inspired by Terrytoons' Aesop's Fables, Walt decided he wanted to make his own animated versions of fairytales too, and invested six months on his first attempt Little Red Riding Hood.
Among Disney's employees on the series were several pioneers of animation: Ub Iwerks, Hugh Harman, Friz Freleng, and Carman Maxwell. The company had problems making ends meet: by the end of 1922, Disney was living in the office and taking baths once a week at Union Station.
During the studio's sales manager Leslie Mace's stay in New York, where he was looking for distributors, he ended up signing a contract for six animated shorts with Pictorial Clubs, Inc. of Tennessee on Sunday, September 16, 1922. Pictorial agreed to pay $11,000 for the cartoons, which were supposed to be shown at schools and other non-theatrical places, but only paid $100 in advance. The rest of the payment would have to wait till January 1, 1924, when all the shorts had been delivered. When Pictorial went bankrupt only a few months later, the studio never received the rest of the payment and its financial problems became even more serious, and the staff ended up leaving. But when the local Kansas City dentist Thomas B. McCrum, from the Deener Dental Institute, contacted Disney and offered him the job of producing a short subject about dental hygiene intended for the Missouri school system, he brought together some of his staff again and made Tommy Tucker's Tooth. This earned the studio $500, which was invested in the live-action/animation demonstration film Alice's Wonderland, starring the youthful Virginia Davis. Walt had noted how popular the Out of the Inkwell series from the Fleischer Studios was, which had animated characters interacting with the real world. By reversing this gimmick and using a real-life character in a cartoon universe instead, he hoped for a hit.
Virginia Davis's contract with Laugh-O-Gram was signed by her parents on April 23, 1923 with term giving her 5% of the Alice's Wonderland film's receipts. Looking for a distributor for Alice's Wonderland on May 14, Disney wrote to Margaret Winkler, a New York film distributor.
After finishing the raw edits of Alice's Wonderland, the studio filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in July 1923. Disney sold his movie camera, earning enough money for a one-way train ticket, moving to Hollywood, California; he brought along an unfinished reel of Alice's Wonderland.
The bankruptcy trustee was able to force LOGF's erstwhile distributor and debtor, Pictorial Films, Inc., to pay LOGF's agents the sum owned while agreeing that Pictorial could exercise its contractual distribution rights for LOGF works and to purchase several of LOGF's films: The Four Musicians of Bremen, Jack the Giant Killer, the Lafflets series, and Alice's Wonderland.
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Fate of the building
The studio building fell to ruin and efforts were made to restore it by a non-profit group called "Thank You, Walt Disney". The Disney family promised $450,000 in matching funds for the restoration. The exterior was restored and the building stabilized in 2009. "Thank You, Walt Disney" is currently working to raise money to construct a museum (to show what the crew used to make Laugh-O-Grams and exhibit other Disney memorabilia and to tell the history of Walt Disney's life in Kansas City), a movie house (to exhibit original and restored Laugh-O-Grams), and an education center (to tell people and children about animation and to make their own animations) inside the building.
Inspiration for Mickey Mouse
Disney told interviewers later that he was inspired to draw Mickey by a tame mouse at his desk at Laugh-O-Gram Studio in Kansas City, Missouri.
In 1928 during a train trip to New York he showed the drawing to his wife Lillian Marie Bounds and said he was going to call it "Mortimer Mouse." She replied that the name sounded "too sissified" and suggested Mickey Mouse instead.
Filmography
Of the original seven Laugh-O-Grams fairy tales, four were long known to have survived, and have been restored for DVD: Little Red Riding Hood (1922), The Four Musicians of Bremen (1922), Puss in Boots (1922), and Cinderella (1922). These shorts later became available on Blu-ray Disc as bonus features for Disney's Beauty and the Beast. Tommy Tucker's Tooth (1922), and Alice's Wonderland (1923) are also available on DVD, and Alice's Wonderland eventually became a bonus feature for the 60th Anniversary Blu-ray Edition of Alice in Wonderland. The original piece of filming/animation known as Newman Laugh-O-Grams (originally released theatrically on March 20, 1921) is available on some DVDs too. Due to their date of publication, all 10 shorts produced by the studio have fallen in the public domain.
The missing fairy tale cartoons were Jack and the Beanstalk, Jack the Giant Killer, and Goldie Locks and the Three Bears (all 1922). On October 14, 2010, animation historian David Gerstein announced that copies of all three had been found. For many years the two Jack cartoons were believed to be one, until researcher John Kenworthy located old studio assets sheets confirming that they were separate shorts.
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