Terrytoons was an Hollywood animation studio founded by Paul Terry that operated from 1916 to 1968. Correction: The studio was located in New Rochelle, NY, not Hollywood, or any other place in California. Correction: Terry first worked for Bray Studios in 1916 with his Farmer Alfalfa series. Terry would then make a Farmer Alfalfa short for Edison, called "Farmer Alfalfa's Wayward Pup" (1917). Afterwards, some cartoons were made for Paramount. Finally, circa 1921, Terry founds his own studio in conjuction with Amadee Van Beuren called Aesop's Film Fables. Terry would churn out Fables every two weeks for eight years in the 20's. Finally, after being fired by Van Beuren for not wanting to make new sound cartoons, he founded TerryToons in the early 30's, and the rest is history.

Through much of its history, the studio was considered one of the lowest quality houses in the field to the point where Paul Terry noted, "Disney is the Tiffany's in this business, and I am the Woolworth's." To that end, it had the lowest budgets and it was the slowest to adapt to new technologies like sound and colour while its graphic style remained remarkably static for decades. This conservative attitude was aggravated by its inflexible release schedule which Paul Terry took pride for providing a new cartoon each week like a bottle of milk, regardless of the cost to the quality of the films.

Oddly enough Terrytoons got three Oscar nominations for Short Film:

• Sidney's Family Tree
• All Out for 'V'
• My Boy, Johnny

Its most popular characters included Mighty Mouse, Gandy Goose, Dinky Duck, Deputy Dawg, and Heckle and Jeckle.

The studio was sold outright by the retiring Paul Terry to 20th Century Fox in 1955. Fox put it under the management of UPA alumnus Gene Deitch, who had to work with even lower budgets. The most notable talent during this period was Ralph Bakshi who got his start with this company with his most notable work being the Mighty Heroes series.

Eventually after the departure of Bakshi, the studio basically petered out in the late 1960s (by this time the Terrytoons company was sold to CBS Films), but the film library was still regularly rereleased to theatres by 20th Century Fox. Fortunately for the studio, its existing cartoon library saw a long life in TV reruns. The Terrytoons cartoons (especially Mighty Mouse and Deputy Dawg) were syndicated to many local TV markets, and they were a staple of after-school and Saturday morning cartoon shows for over three decades, from the 1950s through the 1980s, until the television rights to the library were acquired by USA Network in 1989 and has hardly been used since.

In the 1970s, CBS Films became Viacom, which has been the company responsible for Terrytoons ever since. Fox, meanwhile, held the worldwide theatrical rights to Terrytoons until Viacom merged with Paramount Pictures in 1993. Today, Paramount handles the distribution of the classic Terrytoons library, although it has not been seen since it was withdrawn from television syndication in the 1980s.

In 2002, the Terrytoons characters returned to television in an original commercial for cheese. A brand-new feature-length animated film featuring Terrytoons is now in development by Paramount and sister cable network Nickelodeon.