I’m back home after a whole night up at the school steadying some films. The machines at the college are super fast compared to even the fastest machine I have here, so it made some sense when dealing with the 5k files to try and speed up the process. The last handful of days have just been filled with all sorts of digital tasks on so many things. I’m going to be happy to take a break to drive out east. It will be back into the digital world once there though, scanning films.
Since it’s Comic-Con week and our fearless leader, Jerry Beck, is traveling this week, I’ll keep the article a little short. I owe all of you a longer and more in-depth post sometime soon for sure though… and have a few things that I think everyone will like.
Now that I’m back and writing at home, I’ve pulled up the stuff in progress and almost finished. There’s a Van Beuren Tom and Jerry in cleanup that we’re working on here, and one more to be done after that, with the rest of the set now into the little tweaks stage. I’m ready to start working on the final timelines for that set.
As I’ve been looking through the proxy Rainbow Parade scans for the second volume, it’s clear I’ll be doing some traveling soon (!) in the other direction. I do enjoy the hands on aspects of these projects, although sometimes I wish they were ready for prime time.I’ll work on getting things a little cleaner before having them run through a scanner again.
One of the things we’re working on (and getting closer to finish) is the Mid Century Modern Animation, Volume 3 Blu-ray. It’s now up for pre-order at Thunderbeanshop.com, along with a special set called Dungeon of Lost Cartoons.
I was thinking today about how there really needs to be a lot more information on the many studios that have produced commercials, especially in the late 40s into the 70s. There is some information of course, but rarely a good way to see a good amount of the output from a particular studio. Since there’s so many different products and the commercials were made for many companies, it’s understandable in many ways while there isn’t curation of those spots. I think it’s time to work on changing that.
Here’s a few spots that are on YouTube that I really enjoyed this week. Have you found any recently that you especially like? Feel free to share in the comments! I really wish there were whole mornings of these types of commercials still!
One of the things I’d love to see well-documented are the commercials produced on the Disney lot in the mid-50s. While not official Disney productions, they sort of are, and are all interesting.
Here’s a recent upload of one I haven’t seen before, with Bucky Beaver as a stagecoach driver:
This one isn’t as good of quality, but I really love the animation. Bucky is a little mean to the bad guy here. I really enjoy a commercial with a story, however simple.
Here’s a cute little Navy spot from Playhouse Pictures – I’d guess early to mid 60s?
Here’s a Trix spot where the Rabbit seems especially sneaky. I don’t think the message is so clear here though…
Here’s one for Post Cereal with a dandy stop motion animated corncob. Does anyone have any idea who animated or what studio this one is from? Looks early to mid 50s from the Post packages….
Here’s a 1953 Kellogg’s Commercial. I wish I had a print on this one! This has to be a California spot, but I wonder who the animator was? There’s something vaugely Warners or Jones-esque in some of the face animation…
I remember this one form when I was a kid. I love the lifeless style here:
Ok – so, as Willie Whopper would say, sort of, Now you share one! Have a good week all!
Steve Stanchfield is an animator, educator and film archivist. He runs Thunderbean Animation, an animation studio in Ann Arbor, Michigan and has compiled over a dozen archival animation DVD collections devoted to such subjects at Private Snafu, The Little King and the infamous Cubby Bear. Steve is also a professor at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit.
Yeah, I remember some of those.as for the last, I wonder what Jerry Reed thought of the Funny Face lyric borrowing the first line.:) 😉
I thought that too but long before Jerry Reed was. a household name.
Just recently my brother and I were discussing some of the TV and radio commercials we grew up with for various car dealerships in the Detroit area. There was an animated one for two Ford dealers, Ray Whitfield Ford in Taylor and Alan Ford in Pontiac, both on Telegraph Road. The animated portion showed a cowboy with a banjo singing to his dog: “Here, dog! Come on, dog! Me an’ dog want you to go to Telegraph Road, right nooooow! Git a good deal!” I looked it up on YouTube and discovered that the animation (with different voiceovers) was used in commercials for other Ford dealers around the country. If any readers remember seeing the singing cartoon cowboy and his dog elsewhere outside the Detroit area, or know where the ad might have originated, I would be very interested.
Probably my favourite animated commercial was one made for Wyler’s lemonade circa 1970, in a very trippy Peter Max/Yellow Submarine style. I think there’s a black-and-white version of it on one of the old Thunderbean Cartoon Commercials DVDs, but I would love to see it again with all the vivid colours in their original psychedelic glory. Personally, I vastly prefer the groovy commercial animation of that era over Mid-Century Modern. “Walla-walla-walla-walla-walla-walla-Wyler’s! Bobba dobba lobba doo BOW!”
The ‘Here Dog, C’mon Dog!’ at was animated by Ted Petok productions. Ted almost certainly designed it and Len Maxwell likely animated it. It was on TV *all the time* when I was growing up here in Ann Arbor, Michigan since most of the stations were coming from Detroit. When I met Ted Petok for the first time I asked him about that spot, and he said they did it quickly– a week or two, and shot in 16mm if I’m remembering correctly. There was a redraw of it done in the 90s or early 2000s just to make the technical quality look better, by a local animator here (I think I remember who but don’t want to misquote in case I’m remembering wrong…)
Thank you, Steve. I’ll have to tell my brother that the Telegraph Road ads were made by an Academy Award-winning director! Now if only someone can identify the Al Jolson impersonator who sang the Gene Merollis Chevrolet spots on CKLW radio. “Oh, that Merollis! What a great, great guy-y-y-y!”
I remember those Ford dealer commercials. I also remember that Wyler’s commercial (along with the jingle you referenced) from the ’70’s.
I remember that PeterMax-style, psychedelic commercials were popular back then. One of them that sticks in my mind is one for Good & Fruity candy. I remember the jingle refrain “There are rainbows in the flavor of Good & Fruity candyyyy…” I wonder if possibly it was done by the same studio that did the Wyler’s commercial?
1953 was around the time Warners briefly closed its cartoon studio, so it’s likely that one of the Jones animators (Abe Levitow is my guess) was moonlighting on that Kellogg’s ad.
Isn’t Sugar Coated Corn Flakes just Frosted Flakes?
“Lifeless style”? I think you mean “lineless.”
Steve, this isn’t related to the article but I just wanted to know what you think about people uploading cartoons from Thunderbean Blu-rays for free online.
There could be several articles here about just that.. here’s my thoughts, both long and short, but short for now:
The idea of doing *any* of what I’m trying to do with Thunderbean is access. Access is, literally, everything. I don’t think a single youtube upload, or the many hundreds of them, have hurt sales for the discs at all- in fact, I think it’s made the brand recognizable and has led to more sales. I love that people are seeing them– what *does* bug me is when people load a whole disc up, like on archive. org, or load things up several days after a new set comes out. At least let it attempt to get a good opening! Sales are what keeps me able to do these sets, but I love that people that couldn’t afford to or don’t buy discs get to see them too. There’s my basic thoughts.
The Kellogg’s ad is from the very beginning of the campaign for Frosted Flakes. At this point, they were rotating among a group of animal “spokespeople.” Eventually, it was decided the tiger was the most popular and hence Tony (voiced by Thurl Ravenscroft) became the face of the product (and has remained so to this day).
The past three generations know Bucky Beaver solely from his cameo in Grease–Here’s hoping Crest’s Cavity Creeps can be worked into the upcoming Wicked movie adaption.
Kelloggs Corn Flakes’ rooster mascot is likewise christened Cornelius, and is still seen today. The Post corn cob was put to better use in a nearby outhouse.
I can imagine the macro over the top health conscious mothers of today fainting away at the use of sugar coating to sell cereal back in the day. Ad I recall at one point Sugar Smacks changed their name to distance themselves of sugar image. Not the cereal just the name. Lol.
Blondie, I remember that too. At some point in time (’70’s? or 80’s?) all the cerals with “sugar” in their names, changed their name. Sugar Pops became Corn Pops, then eventually just Pops. Sugar Smacks became Smacks, then Honey Smacks, Super Sugar Crisp became Golden Crisp, and Sugar Frosted Flakes just became Frosted Flakes.”Sugar” was like a four letter word when it came to cereal names!
Commercials sure were fun back then. Brusha, brusha, brusha. I think by the time of that Funny Face commercial they’d retired Chinese Cherry and Injun Orange (around the same time cereals were beginning to stop bragging about their sugar content).
And I’m with Paul Groh about those Wyler commercials. Even if the fake root beer flavor was kind of nasty, the commercials, which as I recall were on during “The Brady Bunch,” were cool.
Since you asked, I stumbled upon commercials from Australia for a bug/pest control product called Mortein.
Here are some examples:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UupBBVDXol4
And here’s a reel of commercials from 1995-2006 done by Arthur Filloy of Ren and Stimpy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_AfxbkCjsM
Mortein’s mascot Louie the Fly was allegedly created by South Africa-born writer Bryce Courtenay for the McCann Erickson ad agency, but I have my doubts about this, as Courtenay only arrived in Australia in 1958. He would later become one of Australia’s best-selling novelists. Louie was designed and first animated by artist Geoff Pike, later an animation director at Artransa, who worked on some of the KFS Beetle Bailey and Krazy Kat cartoons for Paramount. Louie was initially voiced by actor Ross Higgins, but when the famous jingle was introduced in 1962 it was recorded by singer Neil Williams, with Higgins as one of the three background singers. After that, Higgins resumed voicing the character exclusively until he retired in 2011 at the age of 80.
It’s worth remembering that Australia only began to broadcast television with the Melbourne Olympics in 1956, so it was a brand new milieu when Louie was introduced in 1957. Louie and Mortein are still going strong after all these years; I always keep a can of the stuff under my kitchen sink.
It is probably too late to ask this for this post, but…
Mr. Stanchfield, have you or any of your cohorts – or ANYBODY – been able to find a print of the Rainbow Parade cartoon “The Foxy Terrier” (1935) by James Culhane?
(I think that was before he had himself credited as “Shamus.”)
Just wonderin’ …
“The Foxy Terrior” is the title “In Notice” at the Library of Congress for the cartoon “The Rag Dog”. If you look at the release dates too you’ll notice the one out in notice is the same as the final film. It was the working title for the film.
The stop-motion ear of corn has a certain style to his movements that reminds me of Tadahito “Tad” Mochinaga, who animated for Rankin/Bass but had a career of his own outside of that, and before. Not sure a U.S. ad agency would contract production on the other side of the world, though.
OMG, that Navy commercial! I must have seen that almost every day as a very young kid, run on Channel 6 (then WDSM-TV) from Duluth, MN; in between a noon-hour showing of bootleg Krazytoons (which followed their noon news) and NBC’s afternoon soap-opera block, which may have started with “Young Doctor Malone.” In those days, a lot of the soaps were carry-overs from radio, and as in radio, most were 15 minutes each.
Back then (I may be wrong) recruiting spots were classed as public service, and stations ran them gratis. The upside was this cost nothing, the downside was that they were run wherever the station had a spot they couldn’t sell. Not too surprising that the services switched to paid commercials, where they could pick programs favored by high school or college age males, rather than 4-year-olds and their grandmas.
Some of you may know I collect vinyl records; and I can never pass up radio transcriptions if they’re affordable. I have discs of U.S. Government-produced radio series like “Here’s To Veterans!”, “Voices Of Vista,” “Music In The Air,” etc. The most unusual might be some episodes of a Spanish-speaking series with Rita Moreno as a DJ playing Latin hits and delivering messages about Social Security. You just know that if stations aired these things at all, they played them off in dead-dog time slots like 4:30 AM on Sunday mornings. (And that was the pre-automation and voice tracking era.)