LLL #3: A Barnyard Mix-Up (1915)

Now, I'm not sure if any Vincent Whitman cartoons survive. This one? Naaaah.:-(

.COM

Things have been busy lately...sorry for the absence of moi from mein blog.
Along with the good people at PWEB | GamerCS (hosting) and with artistic help from Mike Matei, I am currently working on moving my DVD site to a .COM (yay!)
Say goodbye to a bland website and say hello to visual eye candy (for us early animation groupies, that is.)

The Lost Tom Stathes Cartoon

Below you will find a YouTube video of a VERY short animation I did at age 10 or so. In a meager attempt to clean what I call my bedroom (which looks more like a condemned film archive these days), I found these drawings I had made. I scanned them and sent the drawings to my friend Dillon of DANDU STUDIOS, and the outcome was this nice video file.
The animated sequence is only around 5 seconds long. I was going for the look and feel of very early Bray cartoons...and in the fashion of "Mickey Mouse presents", this is a Colonel Heeza Liar cartoon presented by Goodrich Dirt (hah! talk about obscure.)
Now I feel like making cartoons!

Copyright 2007 by Tom Stathes, of course.

Thunderbean's new LITTLE KING DVD

If you're a fan of obscure and ancient cartoons, you'll need to check out the new Little King DVD collection from Steve Stanchfield and Thunderbean Animation.
Our blogger friend Lee Glover has written a well-constructed review of this DVD on his blog, Mice Laugh Softly Charlotte.
Enjoy!

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!

Last chance for half-price DVDs!

Well folks, as the month comes to a close I'm offering a last-chance shot at buying some really nice early animation DVDs at HALF PRICE. Just to refresh your memory, the selection includes: Out of the Inkwell, Felix the Cat, Krazy Kat, Farmer Alfalfa, Aesop's Fables, Alice Comedies, Oswald Rabbit, and many more!
View the complete list at my Tom's Vintage Film sales site.
Yours,
Tom

Click here for my other collection site.

More from that Krazy Kat cartoon...

Special thanks to Craig D. for uploading these frames from his Super 8 print of that Krazy Kat cartoon. I have the same version on Standard 8mm, but sadly no quick easy way to take screenshots.






Here is a list of the 1925 Winkler Krazy Kats taken from Denis Gifford's American Animated Films: The Silent Era, 1897-1929. (McFarland, 1990). I suppose all of these home movie prints are from the 1925 entries, as the design and composition is slightly different from later titles held at BFI.

Hot Dogs
The Smoke Eater
A Uke-Calamity
The Flight That Failed
Bokays and Brickbatz
Hair Raiser
The New Champ
James and Gems
Monkey Business


Hmmm...could it be A Uke-Calamity?

Right in my own backyard

Below is an ad for the Gaumont film company. Gaumont made cartoons, most of which are invariably unavailable for viewing.

Awhile back I read in Crafton's Before Mickey that Gaumont was located in Flushing but didn't give it much thought. The moment I saw "Flushing, N.Y." listed on this ad, however, it piqued my curiosity. I'll have to do a little bit of detective work to find its old address and to see what's currently on the lot.

Krazy Kat, Winkler Style

Krazy Kat being beaned with a brick by Ignatz Mouse is probably one of the most well-known images in comic history. The George Herriman comic creation first appeared in newspapers in 1913 and was soon adopted for the screen by William Randolph Hearst's International Film Service in 1916.
Simple in composition, the IFS cartoons literally did seem like moving comic strips.

Some 10 of the 26 IFS Krazy cartoons survive.
After the 1917 shutdown of the IFS studio, Bray Studios began producing the series in 1920. The most popular title in this series has been THE GREAT CHEESE ROBBERY (1920), its first. An astounding 9 out of 12 Bray Krazy cartoons still exist in some form.
Fast-forward to 1925. Krazy had not been in any cartoons since 1921 and M.J. Winkler signed a contract to produce a new series of shorts after ceasing distribution of the Felix the Cat cartoons. A very succesful run, Krazy consistantly appeared in cartoons from this point in 1925; through the sound barrier, and well into the following decade.
Meanwhile, the negatives of the silent Winkler Krazy cartoons sat in storage. Not visioning a commercial future for these shorts in 1948 (just shy of widespread Television usage!) and not being able to afford the storage costs of the dangerous nitrate prints, Margaret Winkler ordered these negatives be destroyed. This one event immediately made the series very rare. A handful have turned up as shortened home movie prints, or in the case of four nitrate prints stored at the British Film Institute. Aside from these rare instances us enthusiasts are left to enjoy whatever scraps were used as "home movie" prints during the 1920s-1960s era of 8mm and 16mm projection in households.
Although I have a longer 8mm print of this particular clip, I was happy to find this 2 minute 16mm clip of a Winkler Krazy Kat in which Krazy is a dentist trying to pull a Hippo's tooth. Hope you enjoy some frames from this "Gem Safety Film" print retitled HIPPO AT THE DENTIST. (If you want to take a guess at what the original title might have been, drop me a line!)

LLL #2: Bobby Bumps' Adventures (1915)

In this #2 entry of Looks Like it's Lost, we bring you the synopsis of the second Bobby Bumps cartoon. Produced by Earl Hurd for Universal as a "Joker Split-Reel", this is the last cartoon in the series before Hurd went on to join forces with J.R. Bray and invent one of the most important animation innovations in the industry: the Cel Overlay technique.
Unfortunately, folks, "Looks like it's lost."

This is most likely a Moving Picture World review deposited at the Library of Congress as its copyright synopsis; where it has remained ever since.

A Word from 'Rashoom'

I'd just like to share this wonderful statement, as posted by Rashoom on the Animation Show Forums.
"[Tom], you can post all you know about the silent cartoons, and there will still be blank spots. In sharing the information you do know on your blog, you're now open to people from around the world who may be able to contribute some of the information you do not know. A lot of information is present in the shorts themselves. A lot of things that were mundane and commonplace back then seem new and alien to us. We see things in these cartoons that belong in museums today--things like telephones, cars, clothing, tools, and hair styles. Human nature, however, is still the same. That's why Felix is so enjoyable. That's why Alice is still so adorable. That's why we can still laugh at "Humorous Phases of Funny Faces", and the antics of Gertie. In just finding these cartoons, and in distributing them to the masses, you have told us much more about these shorts than we would ever have known from an interview. Any extra information about the people who made these cartoons, or the current events at the time they were being made, is an added bonus. Thanks for sharing what you do know, and adding to our knowledge of the silent era of animation."

What nicer words could be said? A big thanks to Rashoom.
I'll be posting something new either today or tomorrow. Stay tooned ;-)