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A Harpo Marx Flip Book…And More

Features
by Leonard Maltin
March 7, 2012 11:34 AM
5 Comments
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Chico with Marilyn Monroe in a Flip-O-Vision book
I don’t know if everyone shares my fascination with flip books, but I’ve never outgrown my youthful fondness for them. In recent years I’ve tracked down a number of unusual movie-related examples, but I’d never seen or even heard of one featuring Harpo Marx, let alone Chico and Marilyn Monroe! Now, thanks to fellow pop-culture fan, cartoonist and illustrator Drew Friedman, I’ve been exposed to the amazing Flip-O-Vision series. There were sixty of these in all, which did require assembly: you had to cut the perforated images of a photo sheet and assemble the “book” yourself. Topps put some money and effort into this project, hiring notable show business figures and licensing footage of others, including Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Burns and Allen, Leon Errol, Jack Haley, Rudy Vallee, Victor Moore, and such odd choices as Johnny Weissmuller, Roland Winters as Charlie Chan, Bert Parks, Kay Kyser, Henny Youngman, and Leo Gorcey. They even offered such musicians and singers as Buddy Rich, Johnny Desmond, and The Ink Spots—though watching these performers in silence doesn’t seem to make much sense.

I’ve been collecting flip books for years, and have some unusual ones from the silent-film era featuring Clara Bow, in a promotion for her movie It, and Gilda Gray, touting Aloma of the South Seas. A company called Ideal Moving Pictures issued one with Conrad Nagel (misspelling his name Nagle) that features barely any movement at all! Max Fleischer and Paramount made some Betty Boop flips in the 1930s, which sell for big bucks today. In the late 1940s Grape-Nuts Flakes offered flip books as a premium and enabled kids to play with animated sequences featuring such MGM cartoon stars as Tom & Jerry, Droopy, and Barney Bear, as well as Walter Lantz’s Woody Woodpecker and Andy Panda. They must have distributed tens of thousands of these, as they are fairly common.

One of my prize purchases features a favorite comedian, Billy Gilbert, doing his trademark sneeze. I never thought about it being part of a larger series, which is simply dumb on my part: it was issued by Topps (the bubble-gum card people) under the name Flip-O-Vision, and this is the series that Drew Friedman chronicles in his recent blog post. Click HERE.

You can even watch the animation of Harpo in action HERE.

Flip books are still part of our culture. Warner Bros. used this venerable medium to promote its cutting-edge movie The Matrix in 1999, and there are delightful flips of the early Pixar features. In the 1960s and 70s animation festivals in France and Canada commissioned contemporary animators to create new, limited-edition flip books, which are highly prized. (An aged but still agile Otto Messmer even devised a cute piece of animation with Felix the Cat, the character he started drawing in the 1920s.) In recent years I’ve bought scenes from classic Disney movies, Tex Avery animation, and even retro releases of scenes with Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe. It’s easy to find reproductions of early genre pieces including at least one with Charlie Chaplin.

Features
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More: Journal, Harpo Marx, Film Memorabilia, movie flip books

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5 Comments

  • Ken Bass | August 10, 2012 11:28 AMReply

    I had no idea there were so many of the flip books to be found. (I use to make my own, by drawing cartoons in the upper corner of some of my school books, but, that's another story.) Where could I look to find some to collect for my very own? We have a few, but, they're more modern day(Star Wars, etc.)

  • marc grabler | March 9, 2012 12:17 AMReply

    WHY ARE THERE NO EXAMPLES OF MIGHTY MOUSE FILMS ?

  • Norm | March 7, 2012 5:06 PMReply

    Is this an American device ? For the user, it really gives a connection to the film, person, idea...
    Imagine a person during the depression who couldn't afford going to the movies, yet was able to view a snippet thru flip books...

  • jared | March 7, 2012 3:37 PMReply

    Very cool! Is it possible to post some of the images from the "It" flip book? Thanks!

  • Jim Reinecke | March 7, 2012 2:28 PMReply

    You really jogged my memory with this one, Leonard! Are you familiar with a series of flip books that came out in the early-to-mid 60's which were licensed by Universal Pictures and featured brief images of their classic monsters? I remember 3 that I owned as a kid, one recreating Lon Chaney, Jr., in THE WOLF MAN in the sequence when he gets caught in the animal trap, a second showing the low-angle shot of Bela Lugosi as the monster walking into the town of Visaria in FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN and finally a third showing Boris Karloff in James Whale's 1931 film, this one replicating him pushing his way through the foliage right before he encounters the ill-fated little Maria. I would venture to guess that viewing these little snippets again would still be preferable to sitting through PROJECT X!

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