[[Originally gonna be a drabble, but I can’t think of the story.]]

In 1929, just a few days after the first-year anniversary of Steamboat Willie, people were starting to notice something…odd…about the world they were living in.

Oh, sure, Toons were running around, testing their new voices, but ever since things like 1908′s Fantasmagorie and 1914′s Gertie the Dinosaur, things like that were the norm. No, what people were really noticing was more to do with their own everyday lives. Somehow, construction crews started letting just anyone clamber up onto the I-beams. If there was any sign of music, people started to feel the urge to dance along, especially when it was a bad time. A few months down the line, anything heavy had to stay on floor level, lest a horrible pratfall happen (which they did, in any case).

The worst part is, no human gained the comedic survivability with all this. Physics, physiology, and psychology seemed to do everything to kill them off.

Not that Toons were faring much better. They got a dose of reality.

Anthropomorphic animals were beginning to have a hard time being anthropomorphic. Hammerspace was becoming more and more unreliable, even by Toon standards. Even basic stuff like stretching was starting to become a chore. The bounce left many a Toon’s step.

The animators and scientists worked around the clock, trying to figure out just what was happening. That is, when they weren’t trying to dodge the most intense form of Murphy’s Law.

The problem was clear: Toons and reality could not mesh well.

Even though Marvin Acme ran Toontown, there clearly had to be something else to separate fictional cartoon physics from our standard Earth physics.

History forgets who, but someone had the breakthrough idea to translate the Fourth Wall concept from stage and live action productions to cartoons. It wasn’t even hard to convince Toons at the time; as we all know, in cartoons, metaphors translate very well to reality!

And so animators created shoddy temporary Fourth Walls, for the mutual safety of man and Toon. Unfortunately, it was getting expensive, to the point that an animation studio was created in 1931 just to manufacture and sell more Fourth Walls (the name of this company, however, is lost to time).

Come May 4, 1932, after Betty Boop shattered a particularly shoddy Fourth Wall (thanks to @los-angeles-toon-patrol for this), animators were beginning to boycott the Fourth Wall manufacturer. The Walls were getting more expensive and less sturdy. Seeing that the company and reality were both doomed if something didn’t change, there was a last-ditch effort to save everything. The company began to take money to be used on a single, all-encompassing Fourth Wall (completed in just under three weeks!). This was their most durable creation yet, but there was still plenty of well-founded worry about it breaking. Toons cracked the Wall almost immediately.

The company, of course, saw opportunity here as well, and created a singular Fourth Wall Repairman to take care of the whole thing. After all, bringing even the simplest Toon to life was costly, and they figured a Toon could easily do it if that was all he had to do.

They survived off maintenance costs for a while, but eventually people forgot about the Fourth Wall’s importance, and the company closed its doors before the 70s.

The Fourth Wall Repairman, however, keeps at his job to this day.