Joe Oriolo

Joe Oriolo
Joe Oriolo at his drawing board when he worked at the Fleischer Studios. As you can see by the character charts in the bg, he was working on “Mr. Bug Goes to Town”. While he was there, he animated Popeye, Superman, Gulliver’s Travels, etc.
Born	Joseph Oriolo (1913-02-21)February 21, 1913 Union City, New Jersey, United States
Died	December 25, 1985(1985-12-25) (aged 72) Hackensack, New Jersey, United States

Joseph "Joe" Oriolo (February 21, 1913, Union City, New Jersey – December 25, 1985) was an American cartoon animator, writer, director and producer, known as the co-creator of Casper the Friendly Ghost and the creator of the Felix the Cat TV series.

Oriolo was born in Union City, New Jersey in 1913. As a child, he drew constantly and dreamed of becoming a cartoon animator.

In 1933, at age 20, he went to work for Fleischer Studios as an errand boy, where his talent as a draftsman and his ambitions advanced him to the position of an animator within one year. During the late '30s he worked on a number of studio shorts, and when the studio moved to Miami in '38 he went with it. There, in addition to the shorts, he worked on both of the studio's feature-length films, Gulliver's Travels and Mr. Bug Goes to Town, as well as the two-reel Raggedy Ann & Raggedy Andy. Paramount took over the Fleischer studio in 1942 and reestablished it in New York as Famous Studios. Joe Oriolo met Otto Messmer (who was employed with the studio as a storyboard artist from 1944–46) before leaving in 1944.

In 1939, he and author Seymour Reit created the character of Casper the Friendly Ghost for a children's book. Two subsequent books, There's Good Boos To-Night and A Haunting We Will Go followed, before Oriolo sold the rights to Famous Studios. Casper went on to become one of the studios' most popular animated series before being sold to Alfred Harvey (whose Harvey Comics began producing Casper comic books in 1952) on July 27, 1958.

After leaving Famous Studios, Oriolo began working as a freelance animator on films for the armed forces and industrial films, as well as some of the earliest TV commercials. He began drawing comic books (including Fawcett's George Pal Puppetoons), and began working with Otto Messmer on the Felix the Cat comic books until they ceased publication. In 1954, Oriolo assumed authorship of the separate Felix daily comic strips at the request of King Features Syndicate, which he continued to produce until 1969.