It’s been a difficult week here. My friend, film collector and artist Jeff Missinne, passed away. I’ll be writing a tribute to him next week. He was a lovely person, and had a lot to do with getting my tiny company, Snappy video, off the ground many years back. In more recent years he helped with some rare films for the Tom and Jerry and Little King sets as well as others. He was also a contributor to Mindrot and the Animania zine, writing “The Catbird Seat” in the late 70s and early 80s- key to my learning about all this stuff.
Back on the Thunderbean front though, things are going in good directions. We’ve been sending a big batch of five special disc sets, along with Rainbow Parades, Volume 2. We’ve also launched two new special sets at the Thunderbean Shop. The stock for Noveltoons got lost by UPS a few weeks back, but thankfully Pressing Media re-replicated them fast, and they arrived yesterday.
These next few weeks most likely involve a trip to Los Angeles and New York if it’s somewhere in the cards (and gas and plane and Diesel prices agree enough). I’m incredibly happy to have things moving forward on many fronts right now, and especially looking forward to helping wrap several projects for Thunderbean and work with Tommy Stathes’ Cartoons on Film.
This week, on Sunday night (1:30am to 2:30am — so really very early Monday!) MeTV is starting a program called Animation Antiques, featuring a selection of shorts from the Thunderbean cartoon library along with other cartoons. For the films from Thunderbean, we went back to the masters we’ve done over the years and redid or revised many of them since we have better restoration software these days. We’re happy to be a part of the program.
The Thunderbean logo at the end of some of the films features our little character unraveling film. In a way, it’s an animated response to the comments about me unraveling film all over the place on the YouTube show ‘Tested’. Here’s that show.
While it’s definitely not the most organized week in this TB Thursday post, I’m happy that the Noveltoons Blu-ray is finally back in stock, and happy with the revisions in the new reissue. I thought a Noveltoon would be a good choice for a cartoon this week.
Yankee Doodle Donkey (1943) is Famous studio’s return to using Spunky from the Fleischer Color Classics. It wasn’t the last time he’d show up, but I guess his return didn’t spark much interest since it was 11 years before they brought him back again (!) in a Casper cartoon (Boo Kind to Animals, 1955). He returns one more time, in Okey Dokey Donkey, from 1958. You can watch a copy here.
Yankee Doodle Donkey is a fun cartoon. The studio’s animation is great, and the gas always make me smile on this film. I’m happy we managed to get a better of a print to clean up for the new pressing of the Noveltoons set. I especially love the music score on this particular cartoon. I find it a little strange that Spunky sort of talks at the beginning of the film, then never again. Maybe it’s supposed to be him musing in his head over the recruitment sign. I’ve always like the ant voices as well. I first had a very red and scratchy NTA print of this short in the mid-80s. I don’t remember what happened to that print, and I’m glad we were able to get better!
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.
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