Being helmed by ex-Disney director Burt Gillett, they have very little in common with the Otto Messmer cartoons, completely throwing out the comic like art style and surrealistic tone in favor of pure fairy tale style cartoons, with Felix himself being revamped into a more child like character. In 1936, a few years after the original Pat Sullivan studio that produced the cartoons had folded, a very brief three short revival of the series was made by the Van Beuren cartoon studio and distributed by RKO as part of Van Beuren's Rainbow Parade cartoon series.

Copley Pictures distributed the sound cartoons from 1929 to 1931. In 1928, Educational ended distribution and several shorts were reissued by First National Pictures.

Paramount distributed the earliest cartoons from 1919 to 1921, while Winkler distributed the shorts from 1922 up to 1925, the year when Educational Pictures took over the distribution of the shorts. The newspaper comics and comic books are all derived from this era, but there is an overlapping period between them and the Oriolo Felix due to Joe Oriolo taking over the art and writing chores for them around 1954 and running them up to the early 60's. Felix is portrayed as a nomadic Anti-Hero who acts on his own in the bulk of these cartoons, with recurring side characters being kept minimal and only sporadically appearing. Unlike Joe Oriolo's softer take on the character, the original Felix the Cat cartoons were geared more towards an adult audience, and are unmistakably set in a surreal, comedic caricature of 1920's urban culture, with some fairy tale and fantasy elements sandwiched in. The original Otto Messmer cartoons that started it all, these are the original Silent Age and Golden Age cartoons that jumpstarted the famous Felix the Cat cartoon series.

Otto messmer