It’s been more than a busy week here and continues to be, but a cartoon showing is still in order! This post is a summer rerun – which will happen on occasion as the company expands. This was first posted on August 29th, 2013 and I’ve modified it slightly to include additional information sent in by readers in the original comments section.
When I was first collecting cartoons, I found this film in a giant stack of odd reels being sold by a guy named Jerry Nelson. Jerry was a well known dealer who would also go to the film collector shows, usually with a batch of unmarked or poorly marked reels of every kind of film imaginable. Some collectors and dealers would make sure things were labeled before selling them, but not Jerry- he’d haul those milk crates full of films right into the show, the trail of disintegrating film smell trailing strongly behind him as he carried them (a side note: acetate film prints start to emit a foul smell as they return to the earth, sort of like old plastic purses smell and get sticky. This has been termed ‘Vinegar Syndrome’ because of the smell, but it’s really just the organic materials in the acetate breaking down).
Jerry must have been in his late 70’s when I first met him at a show, and that was after buying quite a few things from him over the years. He was always very kind. I would usually look for his ad first when the film collector magazine came. It was called The Big Reel and big it was – it was folded in half on newsprint and sent with a white newsprint cover surrounding it. At one point he had a whole bunch of Scrappys on his list… and I remember making a deal with him (and giving him whole paychecks from my high school job) to buy a handful each week. He also had a whole slew of Columbia Rhapsodies (most in original IB technicolor) that were more beat up than almost any film I’ve ever owned. I remember calling him many times right when I got the paper, trying to buy whatever treasure he had for $10 or something, usually being beat to the punch by likely some of the cartoon collectors that are reading this now. Jerry would pause, looking at his list and say, “No, no Steve.. I’m sorry, it’s sold”.
At the film show it was another story- his boxes were usually full of stuff that he hadn’t looked at yet. He handed me a roll of masking tape once and asked me to label as I went along!
In one of those boxes in 1984 or so was this cartoon, The Black Duck, released by Film Highlights. It’s clearly a silent Aesop’s Fable from the late 20’s, but what is really great about it is an amazingly bizarre soundtrack that appears to be half ad-libbed if not almost entirely, with a nice musical score by Winston Sharples.
I especially like “Hiya Kid…. meet me. I’m Butch the Cat from over the hill. I bet you get tired of lookin’ at dem dare ducks!”.
A few years later I found another, A Lad and His Lamp, also with the ‘Fabletoon’ titles. My guess is that these tracks were done in the late 30s or early 40s (from the sound of the Sharples scores), composed for these particular films rather than stock music. Paul Terry gets complete credit for the animation here, with Sharples getting the sole other credit. Maybe one of our other cartoon-ologists will know more about these two releases than I do, or if there are others in this series. For now, here’s A Lad and His Lamp too:
• From the comments section of the original post, here’s Don Yowp with a bit about the releasing company – from ‘The Film Daily,’ Jan. 10, 1946:
ROSS LEAVES FILMS, INC. TO ESTABLISH OWN FIRM
Martin Ross, for the past 10 years associated with Films, Inc. as a sales executive, has formed his own company for the production and distribution of 16 mm. and 8 mm. sound and silent short subjects. The company will operate under the name of Film Highlights, Inc. at 330 W. 42nd St., New York City. Maj. Manny Jacobs, recently discharged from the Army Signal Corps, motion picture division, will be in charge of production.
Television was still fairly nascent so it could be they were for home viewing.
• From reader Paul Verlander – Here’s an ad for Film Highlights from a trade magazine, Film World, August 1946. [CLICK HERE].
Enjoy the week. Back with an original column next week.
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.
I don’t mind these summer reruns at all, even though it’s still winter in my part of the world.
Nowadays, people like Tommy Stathes and Thad Komorowski who package cartoons of the silent era for the home video market make every effort to present them as they would have been seen when new, right down to the original titles (or reconstructions thereof if the originals cannot be found). Specialist musicians like Charlie Judkins and Robert Israel provide soundtracks that, although new, are thoroughly grounded in the style and performance practice of the period, making the viewing experience as authentic as possible. They wouldn’t dream of furnishing these films with recorded dialogue, as Film Highlights did with these Fabletoons, because the cartoons had never been presented that way (except in Japan, where silent films were typically accompanied by a seiyuu, or narrator, rather than music, but that’s another story). By and large, today’s purveyors of silent cartoons show a lot more respect for the material, and I have to say I’m all for it.
That said, I also have to admit that the dialogue and sound effects in these Fabletoons gave me quite a chuckle. I think the soundtracks are too well-synched to have been adlibbed; they certainly enhance the absurdity of the visuals. It’s good to be reminded that, despite the total output of the Terry studio being largely dismissed or derided over the decades, the Aesop’s Fables cartoons were wonderfully entertaining and well-made. There’s some brilliantly executed animation in these two, for example the drunken waiter in “The Black Duck”, and the giant gauntleted hand in “A Lad and His Lamp”. Terrific!
As for the climactic swordfight in “The Black Duck”, I had to examine it frame-by-frame to figure out exactly how the mouse defeats the fox, as the coup de grace goes by so quickly. Answer: the mouse stabs him right in the groin. I know, yeesh, but with no Production Code authority to answer to in those days, why not?
The scenes you mentioned in “The Black Duck” were both directed by animator Vet Anderson, in fact Anderson seems to have animated most of this cartoon, leaving a few rare scenes to his colleague John Foster. Ironically, Foster was given the director’s credit alongside Paul Terry, who was no longer animating at the time.
They made Milton Mouse sound like Mickey! I rather like the added audio; they did a good job making it match the scene. Animations nice, with some good gags in both cartoons.
A neat story, but the title is wrong. “Fabletoon” is not really explained, beyond a brief mention. Are “Fabletoons” the reels bought from 70 year old Jerry? It is all very unclear.
The hippo in the steam cabinet (did people really use those to reduce? Doesn’t work, does it?) cries “help” then her voice somehow changes to a different woman’s voice and you hear her go “Help, Popeye, I’m stuck, get me outta here!” Say what? You gotta love this slipshod approach – Hey, it’s good enough for the kiddies and who’ll even notice, am I right? I mean, maybe a century from now… Nah!