The Missing Spark

“You ever heard of Lowell Animation? If you said ‘no’ I honestly can’t fault you. The subject is pretty obscure, so I thought I’d explain it.

You see, back during the earliest days of animation, when Walt Disney was just getting settled into the new industry, a well off man named Jack Lowell saw the results and the audience reaction and decided that he wanted a particularly big piece of the pie. So he set up Lowell Animation, got himself a team to work on stuff, and got to work.

Now, at this point, you’re probably wondering why you never heard of it, seeing how it was at the start of animating and would therefore be called a classic animation company. Well, the truth is, it’s because he didn’t have the spark that Disney did, but didn’t know because of his narcissistic attitude. No matter how hard he tried to be successful at it, it just wasn’t very good at all compared to more famous works of that time, so ultimately, his work never really got known outside his local area.

Unfortunately, this made him very angry, and he began to look for different ways to gain the fame that Walt Disney was getting. What he didn’t know was that he didn’t even have the technology to make colour animations, which left him livid when he saw Snow White. But he thought it was his staff not working hard enough, and would make them work ludicrous shifts every day to ‘make the work better’. Eventually, he fired them all and replaced them with what he thought were more talented individuals. Trouble was, he was getting more determined by the day, determined to overtake Disney and become the most successful animation company owner in the world. He even self proclaimed himself Walt’s rival and sent him hate mail saying he was a talentless idiot. Either Walt never received them, or just simply ignored them, but he never replied, reinforcing Lowell’s views.

At this point, you may be seeing this man as just another jealous jerk, envious of Walt Disney’s growing fame. But here’s where it gets worrying. When he got his new staff, he made sure that they performed better than the others. He made them animate the as perfectly as it got in the forties, made the voice actors recite their lines monotonously until he felt that they were good enough, and all this with very low pay and work times sometimes spanning over twenty hours. ‘What’s so shocking about that?’ I hear you grumble. Well, sometimes these workers would object, or refuse to do work, or even attempt a strike. And when Lowell caught wind of them doing this… Well, at some point, the stress from constantly trying to be successful finally got to him, and his demeanor went from snobbish and unfair to rather psychotic,and he decided that he would punish anyone who stepped too far out of line. And I mean punish. He would grab the offender and drag them into the basement, lock the door and do God knows what until he was sure that they had learned their lesson. Nobody is sure what he did down there, but it certainly had an impact on the unlucky few who endured it, with many people dying of shock from the experience, and this coupled with a number of people collapsing from overwork during shifts just all the more made the local people despise Lowell, but were too afraid to do anything about it.

Lowell’s controversial (but still widely unknown) practices went on until the sixties. At this point, he ordered his team to make a number of animations that used the Disney characters in situations definitely unsuitable for younger viewers. He thought that he could pass them off as real Disney works and turn parents against it. But his plan backfired when his animators hid the address of the company in the videos along with the message ‘Send Help’.

Of course, it didn’t take long for people to see these abominations and only a bit more time to identify the hidden messages. Before Lowell even found out what had happened, the police arrived. The production team told them everything, and Lowell was promptly arrested, but not without him making a huge scene as they dragged him off to a nearby police cruiser. It was apparent he had really gone insane. Realizing how damming this could be to their reputation, Disney initiated what has been called by some as their first ‘cover up’, namely, destroying Lowell’s works from the last thirty years, especially the Disney knock offs, and preventing the incident from being reported in the news, basically siphoning off his existence. And it worked. By the end of the decade, no one, save for the district he originally lived in, knew that Lowell Animation even existed. And that’s how it’s been for over fifty years.

Now that I’ve told you that story, the last thing you’re probably thinking is ‘How on earth do I know all this if it was such a successful cover up?’ Well, I didn’t know it myself until recently, but my home town is located in the same district as where Jack Lowell lived and worked. His legacy in my area stems from the fact that he somehow Managed to escape custody, and disappeared, leading people to this day to believe that he is still alive, and became one of those stories you tell your children to make them behave. I distinctively remember being told that an evil man would find me if I didn’t go to bed, or eat my dinner, and so on. About six months ago, I took the time to ask ‘Who Is the real man exactly’. Most people were a bit hazy on the details, but I was persistent, and six months of research later, I believe I’ve pieced together the whole Story of a man’s decent into madness trying to accomplish something too far out of his reach. The point I’m at now would be where people would stretch back and admire their work. But there’s still one Last detail I do not know.

What punishment did Lowell use when his employees stepped out of line?

To this day, all of the people who survived experiencing it blocked it out or simply forgot about it, so the story has been left incomplete. Some would give up. Not me. I know that it can’t have been good at all, and I know the mystery needs to be figured out once and for all, so I’ve decided to find out for myself.

You see, I have a lead.

A couple of days ago, a friend informed me that he had found an abandoned building in the woods near my town. And slapped in big bold letters on one side was ‘Lowell Animation’. I’m telling you all this because I plan to visit it within the week and try to solve a mystery that’s been unknown for over fifty years. At the end of the week I’ll make a post on my status. If I don’t find anything, or do not update for whatever reason, I’ll leave it to you, the reader, to find the truth for yourself. And if it comes to that, I bid you good luck!”

This post was recently discovered by yours truly on a Disney forum site. As far as I know, the author never made his second post, and I have been unable to find any trace of either him, or the story he’s talking about. I’ll let you decide if it was real or not, but I believe it Is, and I believe the author found something ungodly when he found Lowell’s old building, and discovered the truth that he was looking for.

S.S

Credit: Sam. S Credit Link: http://themushroompainter.deviantart.com/