For those that celebrate, Merry Christmas! And if you don’t, I hope you enjoy these fun little films today anyway.
Thanks to everyone for visiting Cartoon Research and contributing to the community here. It makes this place a lot of fun to keep writing each week. I’m having so much fun working on restoring a lot of animation, and I’m so happy to be able to write about all this stuff each week here. Again, thanks.
And today’s stuff!
Here’s a little Christmas film that was most likely made for the home movie market — or perhaps it’s a really early theatrical snipe that made its way down to 16mm. Either way, it’s clearly late 20s or early 30s. No idea who made it.
Jerry suggested that it would be fun to put up some vintage tags and theatre snipes. Here’s a whole reel of them, included this year on the Christmas Cartoon Candy special disc (at the Thunderbean Shop). I really love this sort of stuff— even though this reel has an extended section with a whole series of cards for local businesses. There’s only one of these that I’ve seen before, so it’s a pretty fun little reel.
And, lastly, a repeat — but something worth repeating again. We featured this a few years back, and it’s one of my favorite things to watch around Christmas. It’s a little film produced but The Old King Cole Display company, touting their successful 1935 window displays. It’s lovely and magical:
Wishing everyone here happy holidays!
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.
After last week’s Popeye cartoon, I had the uneasy feeling that we’d be observing Christmas with another Famous Studios offering, like the Screen Song where the ball bounces on the lyrics to “Jingle Bells”. What a pleasant surprise to be proven wrong. Thanks for making my day merry and bright with these yuletide rarities.
“Santa Claus Is Coming” has beautiful backgrounds but a couple of blatant layout errors. When the elves in the workshop are helping Santa with his sack of toys, the figures in the foreground briefly disappear for one frame. Also, in the scene where Santa’s sleigh is flying through the sky, one of the cels was mistakenly placed upside-down, with the painted side up, so that the reindeer are facing in the opposite direction for one frame. The studio that made the film would have been staffed by some talented artists who were apparently inexperienced at cartoon production. It probably wasn’t around for very long.
In the window display film, that’s Parker Gibbs singing “Winter Wonderland” with Ted Weems and His Orchestra on a Columbia recording. It was a brand new song in 1934. The Guy Lombardo recording was a bigger hit that year, but I prefer the Weems version.
The Edison Travel one looks to be from the 1970’s, and is in Edison, NJ – recognized Route 27 and Parsonage Rd. as two of the main drags in that town. Not far from Menlo Park, where Edison had his laboratory.
I like the mixed messages in the last trailer featuring Santa on your trailer reel, Steve. In practically one breath he says that the sleigh bells celebrate the birth of the “Prince of Peace”, and then says that the Military is being celebrated too. So Santa believes in “Peace through Strength”? Maybe he believes in peace through war or threat of war as well? Thanks for posting this reel, I really enjoyed it. Mark
For a poor soul on December 30th, already mourning the quick-approaching end of the Holiday Season, let me tell you that this was a balm. Much appreciated! Thanks and God bless.