1887–1971 · American animator, founder of Terrytoons
Paul Houlton Terry was an American cartoonist, animator, screenwriter, director and producer who turned out over 1,300 cartoons between 1915 and 1955, and whose Terrytoons studio gave the world Mighty Mouse, Heckle and Jeckle and Gandy Goose. He was famously unsentimental about his own trade — “Walt Disney is the Tiffany’s of the business, and I am the Woolworth’s” — and it is his name, not Depew’s, that sits on the first known printing of the exercise joke in June 1937. Quote Investigator calls him the leading candidate rather than a certainty: the actress Edna May Oliver and the comedian Jimmy Durante were both credited within a year, and the trail may yet run earlier.