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HISTORY In , George McManus , and Bud Fisher were all doing very well with animated cartoons based on their Hearst comic strips (" Little Nemo ", '' The Newlyweds '', and '' Mutt And Jeff '') may have had something to do with it as well, since Hearst was a sore loser. To lead this new studio, Hearst did what he usually did: lured the best talent away from his competitors with the promise of the kind of huge salary only a Hearst could afford. The supervisor was Gregory La Cava , who had animated for the Raoul Barré studio. La Cava was given director credit for all of the IFS cartoons. IFS cartoons were the first comic strip properties to give proper credit to the director and animators, as opposed to just the creator of the comic (their credit was in tiny print on the screen, but it was there). With him came William Nolan and Frank Moser , the fastest animators in the business. Hearst even hired Raoul Barré , head of another animation studio, to animate his first series and teach the new hires how animation was done. IFS jumped into eight different series right from the start. This was possible only because of Le Cava's extraordinary organization skills. On the other hand, the quality suffered. IFS cartoons are indeed "living comic strips", with little motion and lots of dialog balloons instead of the intertitles used by most other animation studios. As a result, they are not very interesting to look at today. The studio did give birth to one enduring series, however: '', Walter Lantz , Ben Sharpsteen , Jack King , John Foster , Grim Natwick , Burt Gillett and Isadore Klein . World War I proved the death-knell for IFS. Hearst had been pursuing an aggressive pro- German position for decades under the assumption that German immigrants were the core of his newspaper consistency. As a result, International News Service lost its credibility. The spiraling debt this created forced Hearst to cut out his least-profitable business, and that was IFS. The entire staff was laid off on July 6 , 1918 , a date referred to in animation history as "Black Monday". But Hearst still cared about his animated properties, so he licensed them to John C. Terry's studio. When that studio folded a year later, he licensed his former competetor, Bray Productions , to make the IFS cartoons. SERIES PRODUCED BY INTERNATIONAL FILM SERVICES
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