Mickey we remember, but what became of Mr York?

It is just 90 years since the ink was drying on Walt Disney's first cartoons with synchronised sound, featuring a character he hoped would save his studio in the Los Angeles hills.
Mr York of York, Yorks. Picture: Yorkshire Film ArchiveMr York of York, Yorks. Picture: Yorkshire Film Archive
Mr York of York, Yorks. Picture: Yorkshire Film Archive

Some 5,000 miles away in Yorkshire, another animated star was being brought to life – but the North of England was to be no La La Land.

Disney’s new leading man was Mickey Mouse, a name that has endured through the generations and created a billion dollar industry.

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Mr York of York, Yorks, on the other hand, melted away faster than a bar of chocolate left too long in the sun.

Graham Relton looks at archive film .
Picture by Gerard BinksGraham Relton looks at archive film .
Picture by Gerard Binks
Graham Relton looks at archive film . Picture by Gerard Binks

The character had been created for what is thought to be the first animated commercial with sound, for the York confectionery firm of Rowntree’s.

It had been forgotten for generations – but a new digitisation project has resurrected it and other gems from the region’s lost archive of animation, and placed it online for a new generation of viewers.

Mr York of York, Yorks was the Roger Rabbit of his time,” said Graham Relton of the Yorkshire Film Archive, who led the restoration project, with the British Film Institute and a lottery grant. It has a live action sequence at the beginning, which may have been filmed in York, and it’s six minutes long. Today, people are switching off adverts after 20 seconds.”

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Sporting a top hat and bearing a slight resemblance to the character Rich Uncle Pennybags, who appeared on the playing board of the game Monopoly four years later, Mr York of York, Yorks perambulates through the film offering a milk maid, a motorist and a policeman pieces of Rowntree’s York Milk “eating chocolate”, before throwing a tuppenny bar to the animator.

The film, which had the alternative title Meet Mr York – A Speaking Likeness, was released just two years after the first sound feature, The Jazz Singer, and shown in the first cinemas to have installed sound equipment.

Mr Relton said: “It was quite an extravagant production for its day. Despite being Quakers, the Rowntree family was very clued up commercially.” The film is one of several from the firm’s archive to have been digitised as part of the Animated Britain project. Others include a series for Aero, launched in 1935 as “the new chocolate” at 2d a bar and available initially only in the North of England. Its first cartoon advert featured bees excited by its honeycomb interior.

The collection also includes a more recent but equally little-known example of regional animation – a Yorkshire take on the legend of selling out to the devil in return for a lost youth, called T’Batley Faust.

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The work of Tony Hall, a student at Leeds University in 1979, it was based on a dialect story by the West Riding poet, William Beaumont, and has as its central character a mean-spirited industrial tycoon.

The national collection of resurrected cartoons includes many made in the early days of commercial TV from 1955 One of them, I Wanna Mink, is a cautionary tale, eight minutes long, of a marriage turning sour, voiced by the actor-director Sam Wanamaker and his real wife, the actress Charlotte Holland.

The collection also includes Tropical Breezes, a 1930 cartoon that appears to be a British take on Steamboat Willie, the first Walt Disney film to have starred Mickey Mouse.

Mr York was one of many “upper class” advertising characters of the time, mostly in newspaper adverts and on billboards.

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He resembled the dandy on the Johnnie Walker whisky bottles and the huntsman used by Tetley’s brewery in Yorkshire.

Mr York also appearing in newspapers, board games and on the front of a steam train hired by Rowntree’s for its employees in York.

Even in Canada, adverts featured “Plain Mr York of York, Yorks” visiting an orphanage and on board a stage coach.

His original cinema commercial can be viewed on the Yorkshire Film Archive website at www.yorkshirefilmarchive.com.

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