background. It is not known for certain who produced the film, though its style is believed to be that of Bray Productions. Filmmaker Buster Keaton rode the back of a clay-animated dinosaur in homage to Gertie in Three Ages (1923). McCay's first three films were the earliest animated works to have a commercial impact; their success motivated film studios to join in the infant animation industry. Other studios used McCay's combination of live action with animation, such as the Fleischer Studios series Out of the Inkwell (1918–1929) and Walt Disney's Alice Comedies series (1923–1927). McCay's clean-line, high-contrast, realistic style set the pattern for American animation to come, and set it apart from the abstract, open forms of animation in Europe. This legacy is most apparent in the feature films of the Walt Disney Animation Studios, such as Fantasia (1940), which included anthropomorphic dinosaurs animated in a naturalistic style with careful attention to timing and weight. Shamus Culhane, Dave and Max Fleischer, Walter Lantz, Otto Messmer, Pat Sullivan, Paul Terry, and Bill Tytla were among the generation of American animators who drew inspiration from the films they saw in McCay's vaudeville act. Gerties reputation was such that animation histories long named it as the first animated film. Around 1921, McCay worked on a second animated film featuring Gertie, titled Gertie on Tour. The film was to have Gertie bouncing on the Brooklyn Bridge in New York, attempting to eat the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C., wading in on the Atlantic City shore, and other scenes. The film exists only in concept sketches and in one minute of film footage in which Gertie plays with a trolley and dances before other dinosaurs. Since his death, McCay's original artwork has been poorly preserved; much was destroyed in a late-1930s house fire, and more was sold off when the McCays needed money. About 400 original drawings from the film have been preserved, discovered by animator Robert Brotherton in disarray in the fabric shop of Irving Mendelsohn, into whose care McCay's films and artwork had been entrusted in the 1940s. Besides some cels from The Sinking of the Lusitania, these Gertie drawings are the only original animation artwork of McCay's to have survived. McCay destroyed many of his original cans of film to create more storage space. Of what he kept, much has not survived, as it was photographed on 35mm nitrate film, which deteriorates