Cleaning Up A Film: “Tokyo Woes” (1945)

Sometimes the hardest thing about working on a Blu-ray project is the frustrations involved along the way.

Summer is the best time here to work as much as possible on Thunderbean projects. There’s always a bunch of things going on, and though the second half of may and into late August I tend to scramble to get as many things done as possible. By August there’s usually a lot of progress made, and this year is shaping up to be one of the most productive. Lots of really cool material is getting scanned, both with me and elsewhere for use on Thunderbean projects. As of now, a bunch of special sets are nearly finished and about to be a dubbing festival at the office, the Noveltoons set is re-replicated and shipping soon, and the Rainbow Parades 2 set is shipping within the month as well. A sort of semi-official/semi special set, The Other Betty Boops, Volume 2, will, for now, only be sold at the shop, and will be taken down as soon as it’s ready to ship. We also have several new special sets at the Thunderbean Shop.

If you saw last week’s post, I was out in New York doing some scans of various material. A lot of it was 35mm Technicolor cartoons and 16mm for special sets, but I was also able to get some things done for the official sets as well. The trip, as most of them are these days, was a whirlwind 3 days, and I’m still recovering from being tired!

There’s also a major project involving shipping more film across the country to scan than I’ve ever done before, but I’m really excited to finally get moving on that. More on this soon.

Since the days have been so busy with the things above and more, the nights have been a great time to work on the long-in-progress Cartoons for Victory Blu-ray. It’s an update to HD, combining the two volumes of WW2 cartoons we’ve released besides the Private Snafus. It’s going very well, but there’s a whole series of challenges that we’ve been working with to get the project done.

There’s been a few films that have been a special challenge. The four ‘Hook’ cartoons have easily been at the top of the list in terms of hard-to-get things. For a while, we *thought* we had a line on better material on all of them, from a major archive connected to the government. The Library of Congress and the National Archive, for the record, are absolutely wonderful to work with. The one archive that seems to have the Hooks finally, after years of attempts, stated that they’re unable to provide the materials since they are too deteriorated. That leaves us with the material scanned many years back, from Navy Cameraman Norman Hatch.

When I was working on the DVD of Cartoons for Victory back in 2005, I was lucky enough to have some conversations with Norman. The four Hooks were in bad shape back in the mid-90s, and after they were scanned he donated them to one of the archives, but couldn’t remember which. After attempting to track those down for many years, I ended up unlucky.

More recently, several years back I won an auction that appeared to be a print of Tokyo Woes (1945), directed by Bob Clampett. It turned out to only be *the can* for Tokyo Woes, with a WW2 Castle film inside! Ugh! Somehow the film got switched at some point. The Ebay seller didn’t have any other film, so who knows when the film switch happened.

My good friends David Gerstein and Tommy Stathes came to the rescue by lending a not-quite complete element on ‘Tokyo Woes’ for scanning. While not perfect, it’s debatably the best of the four and the only known 16mm element that still exists that I know of. I’m spending part of this week getting the film cleaned up, and handed about half to our own Devon Baxter to work on as well.

Earlier in the week I posted a video of working on the cleanup, in Diamant. It gives you a pretty good idea of what’s involved in cleaning up animation digitally – and it’s a really fun one to look at since the animation drawing is so great in posing and timing. Devon pointed out that this sequence in progress here is by Manny Gould. The restoration program finds the dust and dirt by comparing frames, but it also erases too much often in animated films, so a lot of the work involves highlighting the things that have been over cleaned and erasing them so the animation remains intact. As you can see here, the dust and dirt and damage is pretty heavy on the print, but animation that was done on 2s remains mostly intact, leaving the animation on 1s as the main thing to put back lines on.

So, for now, we’ll use the old scan for the missing shots at the beginning and the new scan for the rest.

Here is the whole raw scan of the print, with all the dust and dirt. We’ll show a cleanup here once it’s done.

Have a good week all!