Trans-Atlantic...Children's Favorites...(for real?)

Here's another popular 1980s PD re-hasher you may be familiar with. Trans-Atlantic of Hillside, NJ started putting their tapes with hilarious sleeves out on the market in 1986. In the following years, their sleeves would be updated at least twice and Children's Favorites as a series title would be replaced with the more sleek "Cartoon Favorites" (as you'll see later on.) IIRC, Trans-Atlantic may be one of the handful of companies consumed by Sterling in the mid-90s.
Enjoy the 1986 horror.

The Good, The Bad, and the UGLY: Amos & Andy

If rare is your thing, you'll appreciate these two PD tapes featuring Amos & Andy. We could probably all agree that this duo didn't star in very many PD tapes (aside from the VHS collection of the actual live action show, that is.)
Kids Klassics (1985) vs. Trans-Atlantic Video (1986). Enjoy the 'Rasslin' Match'.

Now for some info on the two Van Beuren Amos & Andy cartoons, graciously borrowed from imdb.com :
The Rasslin' Match (1934)
This is one of the few Amos & Andy cartoons, so you definitely won't see this around much! I have the two cartoons, and they are both hilarious, this one being my favorite. Kingfish somehow manages to get Andy to fight the champ, and of course Andy doesn't do too well, but he does make a few great jokes of course! It's also hilarious how during the big match, Amos and Andy's voices were done seperately than the crowd's cheers but on the same vocal track, so every time they spoke a line, the crowd was silent all of a sudden, then cheered again when they were finished speaking!. But this is serious old-school stuff here, no computer crap, real elbow-grease animation. (courtesy stevenfallonnyc@yahoo.com)

The Lion Tamer (1934)
'The Lion Tamer' is an animated short starring Andy Brown and Amos Jones, two black men with the voices of Charles J. Correll and Freeman F. Gosden. I have not seen other cartoons with these two characters and after this one I do not really want to. The story that involves Andy as a lion tamer, a fake lion with two men in a suite, and a real dangerous one is as predictable as these things can be. You can probably guess the outcome by reading the sentence before this one.

Besides the story that is not good we have a racist kind of animation. The black men (and the black audience watching the lion tamer for that matter) are caricatures, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but here it is sort of offending. Of course you should watch pass that, but with a predictable cartoon like 'The Lion Tamer' that's pretty hard. (courtesy rbverhoef@hotmail.com)

Kid Pics goes Jack [Warner] Crazy

Beloved blog fans, here is some more Kid Pics material for ya. If the Disney art didn't scare you enough, there will be much more of that later (snicker). On a sidenote, I did make some observations...not only was Kid Pics a division of Amvest Video, but also of Videofidelity Inc., which itself was a division of Audiofidelity Inc. (whew!). Audiofidelity, from the light online research I've done, seems to have been a huge corporation re-hashing all sorts of music and video material through the years. My next project is to track down the people behind this conglomeration.
Enjoy.

With Disney's blessings...or were they?

That's what Amvest Video, parent company of Kid Pics must have thought. Kid Pics was a cool line of public domain cartoon compilations aimed at kids, of course. The only difference with this company was that it did grab a hold of some rare stuff which was atypical for packagers like their competitors.
Kid Pics was in Rahway, New Jersey but it's very likely that several huge lawsuits didn't help them make it to the 1990s. More on this later, and from the samplings below, you'll probably be able to tell why.

Terry had his influences as well, it seems...*

Here's a rather recent discovery. Apparently, Paul Terry had a boy cartoon character in some of his early Aesop's Fables cartoons.
Here in these screenshots from FEARLESS FIDO (1922), we see what I would call a hybrid of Jerry on the Job and Bobby Bumps.

In my opinion, the character looks most like the Bray Studios film version of Jerry on the Job. This is not a frame from an actual film (and excuse the MS Paint corny-ness) but you can judge for yourself.


Aside from that, the character seems to be dressed a la Bobby Bumps, a big favorite of mine. Tell me what you think.


*Sorry to be quiet lately but I've been a tad busy. More tomorrow!