Calico Jack. That name surely evokes vivid memories of watching his movies or TV shows as a kid. Maybe you had parents who loved you and took you to Eisleyworld to meet the 6-foot tall dead-eyed mascot suit version of everyone’s favorite “swashbuckaneer.” At this point, he’s become a cultural touchstone. There is no Eisley Pictures without Calico Jack. But did you know that there was almost a Calico Jack without Eisley Pictures?

Long before Calico Jack and the Pirate King hit theatres, Vanderbilt “Van” Eisley was a rising star at International Pictures. InterPics was an animation behemoth in the days of silent films. When Van first arrived in Hollywood, he had to fight his way into InterPics’ bullpen. Julian Wentz, the head of the studio at the time, was the kind of guy you wouldn’t want to put in charge of a Little League team, let alone a money-printing operation like the studio’s animation department.

Wentz knew all of the slimiest tricks of the trade, keeping the animators scrambling for scraps while he raked in a fortune. This man was a titan of the industry, and to him, Van was just another little pissant whose sole purpose in life was to make his boss richer. Of course, Van saw things a little different. When he created the Little Oliver (later Lil’ Ollie) character, he saw that audiences really responded to his work. Then he created Bucky Rabbit and had himself a bona-fide hit.

It might be hard to imagine now, but in the early 1920s, Bucky Rabbit was like visual cocaine. People would finish watching his shorts and then immediately pay to see them again. Van thought this was his big break. His character was making InterPics millions at a time when that was unheard of. So he got a bit cocky. He started publicly challenging Wentz over his predatory business practices, which was also unheard of. The studio would never fire him. He created Bucky Rabbit! If they got rid of Van, they would lose their cash cow too.

Unfortunately for Van, while he was a creative genius, he had a bad habit of ignoring the little details in his life. How much was the dinner check he picked up for all of his buddies? Who knows. How much is he paying in taxes? Who cares! What did that fine print on his InterPics contract say? Who gives a—oh, wait…what did it say?

It said that any characters created by employees of the studio while under contract belong entirely to the studio. The character name and design, the animation work, the publicity material, any merchandizing opportunities…they all belonged to the studio. If Van quit or was fired, he would be legally barred from ever using anything connected to his character ever again. And this was pointed out to Van by Wentz himself during the same meeting where he fired the insolent animator.

To say Van was furious would be an understatement. His best friend and fellow InterPics animator Wilhelm “Willy” Kellerman got the boot at the same time, and Wentz made it clear that the only reason for his termination was Van Eisley. After a night of heavy drinking with Willy and his brother Oxford “Ox” Eisley, Van came up with a brilliant idea: they would start their own studio, make their own iconic character and megahit films, and then they’d force InterPics right out of business!

When Eisley Pictures was officially founded in 1927, all of that still seemed like a pipe dream. They had three employees, no capital, no characters, and not a single reel of film. But that didn’t deter Van. He forged ahead, determined to succeed not simply because he wanted to be successful at his chosen profession, but because he wanted to destroy Julian Wentz, International Pictures, and most of all, Bucky Rabbit.

Van came to associate Bucky with Wentz, so much of his rage was channeled through his former creation. In his spare time, he would scribble little doodles of Bucky—heavily altered to look more like Wentz—enduring all kinds of horrible tortures and suffering the most sickening fates. One of these doodles was sold at a private auction for $247,000 in 2017, and it showed a beheaded Bucky using his own skull for…well, nothing good, I can tell you that much.

Eisley Pictures presents an idealized vision for the inception of Calico Jack. There Van was, sat in his living room as his children played cowboys and Native Americans, and his wife stitched up his last pair of underpants. He was sketching out his hundredth idea for Eisley Pictures’ first character, but like with all the rest, nothing was popping out at him as a potential hit. Ripping the page containing the failed concept out of his sketchbook, he tossed it in the fireplace. Then he took a deep breath, put his pen to paper, and tried again.

As he was starting to draw, his son decided he didn’t want to be a cowboy anymore—he wanted to be a pirate. Van was inspired to start sketching out a concept for a pirate character. It was some sort of anthropomorphic feline, and it seemed promising, but something was missing. His boys were throwing marbles at each other, pretending they were musket balls. One of the marbles hit Van’s inkwell, sending it toppling over. The black ink spilled on the sketch he’d been laboring at for the past hour.

At first, he was annoyed enough to snap at them for being so reckless. But then he looked down at the ink splotch, which covered half of the character’s face, giving him a sort of eyepatch. Van realized the character could be a calico cat with black markings in the vague shape of an eyepatch, really steering into the pirate concept. He beamed with pride as he showed his wife Annabeth his newest creation: Calico John!

Van explained to Annabeth that the name was a reference to Long John Silver from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. She told him she liked the design, but not the name. Then she suggested he change it to Jack. Calico Jack! And as if by magic, one of the biggest icons in entertainment history was born. It’s a great story. Unfortunately, almost none of it is true.

If we take a trip back a few years to when Van was still working at InterPics and Bucky Rabbit was hitting his stride, we’ll find one of Bucky’s shorts called The Sunset Swashbuckler. It was pretty standard fare for the character: Bucky was cast as the heroic “Buckbeard” in a mini pirate epic. One of the henchman of the villainous Scurvy Stu was an unnamed anthropomorphic feline with a black marking around one eye. On this character, it was more of a spot, making it better resemble an eyepatch. His design was suspiciously similar to the one used by Calico Jack in his first picture.

For legal reasons, Van could never acknowledge the similarities. Whenever he was asked about it, he just shrugged his shoulders and claimed not to remember the character, since he created so many throughout his life. But the truth was that Eisley Pictures was in dire straits right from the start. They needed to get working on a film as fast as possible, and anything they could do to save money and time needed to be done. So Van and Willy pillaged their old designs, working from early drafts that hadn’t been seized by Wentz when they were fired from InterPics.

Calico Jack wasn’t the only character cannibalized from the Bucky Rabbit canon of films. Nearly everyone in Calico Jack and the Pirate King came from the old shorts in one way or another. Even the pirate king himself, Captain Rake, could be traced back to the Bucky Rabbit short That Old Dame? and its secondary comic foil, Mr. Whistle. Van made sure to alter the designs just enough that most people would never make the connection. People remembered the main cast, which Van wisely stayed away from. Nobody is going to remember an unnamed henchman from a random short five years ago. Well, almost no one…

There was a reported named Heathcliff MacDonnell who worked for none other than the Emerson Valley Gazette. I don’t know if he was a massive Bucky Rabbit fanboy or just happened to rewatch The Sunset Swashbuckler at the right time, but he figured out that Calico Jack used the same basic design as the henchman. And as Van’s InterPics contract stipulated, any and all characters connected to Bucky and his films belonged to the studio. There was a very good legal argument that since Jack was clearly derived from a Bucky character, he belonged to InterPics and Julian Wentz. That was something Van wouldn’t allow, no matter what.

Ox had always been his brother’s “troubleshooter.” When Wentz tried to blackball Eisley Pictures by threatening to pull all of InterPics’ movies from any theatre that showed Calico Jack’s first film, Ox leaned very heavily on one until he caved. It worked out for him, since Calico Jack was a smash hit right out of the gate, and soon the other theatres were clamoring for the picture. Now there was this reporter who could destroy Eisley Pictures and their newly-minted superstar. Ox knew what to do without a single word about it ever being exchanged by the brothers.

A few weeks later, Heathcliff’s body was found in a cave a little ways off the trail in Blackwood Forest. He’s been mangled so severely by a bear who had taken up residence in the cave for a while that he was only identified through his dental records. The official story was that he’d gone for a hike and took shelter in the cave, only to discover his mistake when it was too late to save himself. In reality? Ox killed him and dumped his corpse where he knew the ravenous predators would feast upon it.

Years later, long after International Pictures folded and Julian Wentz was forced to make a living running a regional women’s magazine, the similarities between Calico Jack and Scurvy Stu’s henchman was brought to Wentz’s attention by an animation historian. Wentz reportedly sighed and said it didn’t matter anymore. Within a year, he would be dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Van Eisley, swimming in a level of success no mere mortal dared ever to dream of, allegedly hopped in his private plane, flew to where Wentz had been buries, and pissed on his grave. That bitterness that drove him never left. That is what makes somebody a success.

I hope you found this little history lesson illuminating. For legal purposes, I have to state that everything I’ve written is just speculation and not the God’s honest truth. Eisley lawyers are notoriously litigious when it comes to protecting their sacred cow, especially the mythos surrounding his creation. Anything that would damped that Eisley magic must be stamped out, no matter how true it is. So next time you see that happy-go-lucky swashbuckaneer, just remember: it’s okay to steal so long as they stole it first.

-Ashton Rook, Lifestyle, Emerson Valley Gazette