Aside from the animated shorts, Felix starred in a comic strip (drawn by Sullivan, Messmer and later Joe Oriolo) beginning in 1923,[7] and his image soon adorned merchandise such as ceramics, toys, and postcards.

The new Disney shorts of Mickey Mouse made the silent offerings of Sullivan and Messmer, who were then unwilling to move to sound production, seem outdated.

Joe Oriolo introduced a redesigned, "long-legged" Felix, with longer legs, a much smaller body, and a larger, rounder head with no whiskers and no teeth.

It was a success, and the Sullivan studio quickly set to work on producing another film featuring Master Tom, in Musical Mews (released on November 16, 1919).

Messmer claimed that John King of Paramount Magazine suggested the name "Felix", as in "feline", and for contrast of the felicity traditionally associated with a black cat.

On a visit to Australia in 1925, Sullivan told The Argus newspaper that "[t]he idea was given to me by the sight of a cat which my wife brought to the studio one day".

[14] In addition, at roughly the 4:00 mark in Feline Follies, the words 'Lo Mum' are used in a speech bubble by one of the kittens; this was a term for one's mother not used by Americans, but certainly by Australians.

Yet Messmer claimed to have single-handedly drawn Feline Follies from home, raising questions as to why an American would use the term 'Mum' in a cartoon he solely drew himself.

Both an Australian ABC-TV documentary screened in 2004[15] and the curators of an exhibition at the State Library of New South Wales in 2005 suggested that Thomas Kat was a prototype or precursor of Felix.

His fur color has not been definitively established, and the surviving copyright synopsis for the short suggests significant differences between Thomas and the later Felix.

The down-and-out personality and movements of the cat in Feline Follies reflect key attributes of Chaplin's, and, although blockier than the later Felix, the familiar black body is already there (Messmer found solid shapes easier to animate).

[21] Messmer himself recalled his version of the cat's creation in an interview with animation historian John Canemaker: Sullivan's studio was very busy, and Paramount, they were falling behind their schedule and they needed one extra to fill in.

Among them are Michael Barrier, Jerry Beck, Colin and Timothy Cowles, Donald Crafton, David Gerstein, Milt Gray, Mark Kausler, Leonard Maltin, and Charles Solomon.

The appearances and personalities of other 1920s feline stars such as Julius of Walt Disney's Alice Comedies, Waffles of Paul Terry's Aesop's Film Fables, and especially Bill Nolan's 1925 adaptation of Krazy Kat (distributed by the eschewed Winkler) all seem to have been directly patterned after Felix.

[27] This influence also extended outside the United States, serving as inspiration for Suihō Tagawa in the creation of his character Norakuro, a dog with black fur.

[32] There was a brief three-cartoon resurrection in 1936 by the Van Beuren Studios (The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg, Neptune Nonsense, and Bold King Cole), which are all directed by Disney alumni Burt Gillett, who was suffering from bipolar disorder at the time.

In these Van Beuren shorts, Felix spoke and sang in a high-pitched, childlike voice provided by then-21-year-old Walter Tetley, who was a popular radio actor in the 1930s, 1940s and even 1950s (Julius on The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show, and Leroy on The Great Gildersleeve), but later best known in the 1960s as the voice of Sherman on The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show's Mister Peabody segments.

[34] Given the character's unprecedented popularity and the fact that his name was partially derived from the Latin word for "happy", some rather notable individuals and organizations adopted Felix as a mascot.

The three-sided neon sign of Felix Chevrolet,[35][36] with its giant, smiling images of the character, is today one of LA's better-known landmarks, standing watch over both Figueroa Street and the Harbor Freeway.

They retained the insignia through the 1930s, when they became a fighter squadron under the designations VF-6B and, later, VF-3, whose members Edward O'Hare and John Thach became famous naval aviators in World War II.

[46] Felix was planned to make a cameo in the 1988 film Who Framed Roger Rabbit in a sequence set at Marvin Acme's funeral, which was cut for pacing reasons at the storyboard stage.

[51][52] Also for the anniversary, the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA) released an article detailing Felix the Cat's history with frames and clips from early animations.

[55] (The first The Felix Annual from 1924 issued in Great Britain shows the last two stories are not the usual Otto Messmer style, so a difference in Pat Sullivan-drawn cartoons can be noted.)

[56] In 1954, Messmer retired from the Felix daily newspaper strips, and his assistant Joe Oriolo (the creator of Casper the Friendly Ghost) took over.

Only after competing studios released the first synchronized-sound animated films, such as Fleischer's My Old Kentucky Home, Van Beuren's Dinner Time and Disney's Steamboat Willie, did Sullivan see the possibilities of sound.

In 1936, Van Beuren obtained approval from Sullivan's brother to license Felix to his studio with the intention of producing new shorts both in color and with sound.

With Gillett at the helm, now with a heavy Disney influence, he did away with Felix's established personality, rendering him a stock talking animal character of the type popular in the day.

In the late 1980s, after his father's death, Don Oriolo teamed up with European animators to work on the character's first feature film, Felix the Cat: The Movie.

Oriolo also brought about a new wave of Felix merchandising, including Wendy's Kids Meal toys and a video game for the Nintendo Entertainment System.

Oriolo's biography page also mentions a 52-episode cartoon series then in the works titled The Felix the Cat Show, which was slated to use computer graphics.