Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to everyone! And I'll note: I�m properly dressed for the occasion to write this week's post.
Merry early Christmas and holidays to everyone! I�m properly dressed for the occasion to write this week�s post.
First, news from Thunderbean world headquarters (a tiny office in a former ball bearings factory):
I�m enjoying some really busy weeks here, but it�s at least less busy than when I�m teaching. After wrapping up several projects here with Thunderbean (Van Beuren�s Tom and Jerry is in replication right now) we�ve been spending the week shipping things and finishing cleaning up the second half of the original camera material on Fleischer�s Poor Cinderella (1934). Devon Baxter is finishing the first half of the film at the same time; It�s a pretty decent way to finish things out for the year in terms of projects I think.
Mid Century Modern, Volume 3 is the next thing we�re finishing up. It�s already pretty close, but I�m hoping to add a few more things to round the set out. Rainbow Parades, Volume 2 and the Lou Bunin set are not far behind, and one other yet unannounced project will get a lot closer to finish before I chat about it here (and proper dress will be required).
Since the next time I�ll write here will be after Christmas, here are a few things that are fun to watch- and a film I bet most of you haven�t seen!
First, here is the �Happy Holidays� program we put up in 2021. I imagine most of you have seen this back then. I enjoy watching these ones each year:
And, on to an interesting little film: Christopher Mouse. This fourteen minute religious short, produced by Cathedral Films, seems to have originated as a filmstrip. Sometime after that, it was turned into a film with the same soundtrack from the filmstrip and distributed in 16mm. It appears be have been shot on Kodachrome in 16mm. I had never seen this film before or even had heard about it, so it was a great surprise to find a print on Ebay not too many month�s back. We put the film on this year�s holiday special Blu-ray. This particular print was part of the 16mm rental library at Modern Sound Pictures.
The end credits list �Animation Effects by Technamation, Hollywood, CA�. In searching for the studio on-line, I found a scan of a 1969 student paper from Kansas State University called �Essentials of Producing 16mm Animated Films� It has a fascinating list of current studios at the end. It lists Technamation as being at 3445 Cahuenga (across the street from Universal and near where Hanna-Barbara would build their studio) in Los Angeles. Ray Patin�s studio was nearly next to it, at 3435 Cahuenga. Here�s the link to that paper [LINK].
The story for the filmstrip and short is by Bill Hanna, with artwork by MGM cartoon layout artist Gene Hazelton. For most of you, I�m sure you would recognize the design sensibility as being from MGM�s Hanna-Barbara unit.
The narration/voices are by Bud Stefan, longtime performer on all sorts of radio shows, including the Great Gildersleeve. Here is a fascinating interview with Stan Chambers, talking about performer and director Bud Stefan and his career [LINK].
Don Yowp wrote a nice little article back in 2015 about the filmstrip version of this film. He found that the filmstrip version of the film was made in 1949, copyrighted in 1950 [LINK].
I hope you enjoy this little animation-related film. Wishing everyone great holidays!
