Another busy week here at Thunderbean. A final master for two titles went out today, with another in the coming week. All told four titles are in the process of being finished at the same time…. I never thought THAT would happen! There will be an announcement here for one of the new titles at this time next week, so stay tuned!
This is turning out to be a great year for seeing cartoons that were made in color but have only been available in Black and White for many years. Besides the Snow Man, a better Wizard of Oz and Teapot Town, here’s a piece of ‘See how they Won’ produced by the Ub Iwerks studio, the subject of a post a little while back. It showed up on Youtube, courtesy of the Alliance Boots Archive and Museum – and UK’s MediCity.
The ending animation is even more Devo-esque than I ever could have hoped for. Now, let’s hope to see the whole thing in color someday! As of today, Medicity has had it on Youtube up a few weeks, and the only video they have up… clocking in at 89 views. I think that may change a little now.
I find ‘orphan’ color advertising films are really interesting – they often found other homes minus their tags in the years after their first purpose. The early years of Television in some ways were a “wild west” of film packages. Two
companies in particular – Medallion film packaging and ‘Krazytoons‘ lead the pack in a strange mix of animated films from many sources, from bootlegged Castle films versions of Andy Panda cartoons to Iwerks, Van Beuren, Felix the Cat shorts, other silent films and often advertising shorts. Maybe they were one-and-the-same company. They were also very sloppy with the title placement. I had a print of Iwerk’s Humpty Dumpty with a “Krazytoons” title that said ‘An Ill Wind‘.