Farmer Al Falfa
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Farmer Al Falfa (also known as Farmer Alfalfa) is an animated cartoon character created by American cartoonist, Paul Terry. The character was the quintessential grizzly old farmer. He first appeared in 1916 in a series a shorts produced by the John R. Bray Studios. After leaving Bray, Terry retained the character and used him frequently during the 1920s for his Aesop's Film Fables series, the character's most prolific period. When Terry made the transition to sound, so did the farmer. The first publicly released sound cartoon, Dinner Time, featured Farmer Al Falfa as an irritable butcher who had to fend off a pack of hungry hounds. However, the short failed to grasp the public's interest like Walt Disney's Steamboat Willie, released one month later.
In 1928, Terry left his producer, Amadee J. Van Beuren to open his own studio, with distribution covered by Educational Pictures. The farmer was again revived and made frequent appearances in the earliest Terry sound shorts. However, as Terry's studio began to grow and develop, Farmer Al Falfa wore out his welcome and was subsequently put into retirement. In the 1950s, the white-bearded protagonist starred in the television program, Farmer Al Falfa and his Terrytoon Pals, a compilation of the earlier black and white Terry shorts. Though no longer for sale in mainstream television market, most of the early cartoons, the silents in particular, have surfaced on public domain compilations including, most notably, Video Yesteryear's Cartoonal Knowledge VHS series from the 1980s.
In the early 1950s, the character was unofficially rechristened "Farmer Gray," probably by Fred Sayles, the host of a children's program called Junior Frolics. Sayles certainly named some of the subsidiary characters (presumably previously nameless), e.g., "Bumpy" the donkey, "Casper" and "Bad Mike," the cats and "Marty" and "Millie," the mice.
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[edit] References
- Crafton, Donald (1993): Before Mickey: The Animated Film, 1898-1928. University of Chicago Press.
- Maltin, Leonard (1987): Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons. Penguin Books.
