The characters, the refined but gullible Fauntleroy Fox and the streetwise Crawford Crow, appeared in a series of animated short subjects released by Screen Gems through its parent company, Columbia Pictures.[2][3]
Although Tashlin directed no more films in the series (despite playing a supervisory role on the following two shorts, Woodman, Spare That Tree and Toll Bridge Troubles, prior to his departure), Screen Gems continued producing Fox and the Crow shorts, many of them directed by Bob Wickersham, until the studio closed in 1946.[5] Screen Gems had acquired enough of a backlog of completed films that the "Fox and Crow" series continued through 1949.
By this time, Columbia had signed a distribution deal with a new animation studio, United Productions of America (UPA), to produce three "Fox and the Crow" shorts, Robin Hoodlum (1948), The Magic Fluke (1949), and Punchy De Leon (1950). All three UPA Fox and the Crow cartoons were directed by John Hubley. The first two each received an Academy Award nomination for Animated Short Subject.
An unrelated, six-minute, silent animated short titled The Fox and the Crow, produced by Fables Studio, was released in 1921.[6]
List of shorts
Screen Gems
In 1943, due to the series' success, Columbia gave the Fox and the Crow their own series separate from the Color Rhapsodies; it lasted until 1946. All cartoons from Room and Bored (1943) to Mysto-Fox (1946) belong to this series.
The Fox and the Crow starred in several talking animalcomic books published by DC Comics, from the 1940s well into the 1960s. They starred with other characters in DC's Columbia-licensed talking-animal anthologyReal Screen Comics (first issue titled Real Screen Funnies) beginning in 1945,[7] then did likewise when DC converted the superhero title Comic Cavalcade to a talking-animal series in 1948.
The duo received its own title, The Fox and the Crow, which ran 108 issues (Jan. 1952 - March 1968). Until the 1954 demise of Comic Cavalcade, Fox and Crow were cover-featured on three DC titles. They continued on the cover of Real Screen Comics through its title change to TV Screen Cartoons from #129-138 (Aug. 1959 - Feb. 1961), the final issue.
The Fox and the Crow was renamed Stanley and His Monster beginning with #109 (May 1968), after the back-up feature, begun in #95 (Jan. 1966), that had taken over in popularity.[8] For the last ten years of its existence, The Fox and the Crow was written by Cecil Beard, assisted by his wife, Alpine Harper. The illustrator was Jim Davis (b. 1915), although it was generally unsigned.[9]
↑Maltin, Leonard (1980). "Columbia: Charles Mintz and Screen Gems". Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons. New American Library. p.214. ISBN9780452259935.
↑Markstein, Don. "The Fox and the Crow". Don Markstein's Toonopedia. Retrieved April 2, 2020.
↑Wallace, Daniel (2010). "1940s". In Dolan, Hannah (ed.). DC Comics Year By Year A Visual Chronicle. Dorling Kindersley. p.49. ISBN978-0-7566-6742-9. Animated cartoons were big business on movie screens, and lots of publishers hoped that success could translate onto the pages of comic books.... DC editor Whitney Ellsworth licensed the characters of Charles Mintz' Screen Gems Studio from their distributor, Columbia. The resulting anthology, Real Screen Comics, starred the Fox and the Crow.
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