In keeping with the Paramount cartoon theme, in today’s cartoon a turtle has to deal with Wolfie. I wish someone would give this poor wolf some food…
But first, life here, Thunderbean and related:
Yesterday was an incredibly busy and exhausting day here with the Senior Studio students at CCS all showing their final projects. It’s also a farewell or sorts, after spending four years knowing them and helping them through their college years. Some of the students graduating have helped more recently on Thunderbean projects, including digital restoration and cleanup for the things we’re doing for MeTV as well as a little animation for titles on the Blu-rays.
We’re nearly done sending a batch of eight special discs, and I’m working on preparing the next batch to go out hopefully within the month. I’m also helping Tommy Stathes finish off his excellent Dinky Doodle Blu-ray, a project with many years and many hours invested in it. It’s been one of my favorites to work on, as was the recent Back to the Inkwell Blu-ray/DVD set.
As I wait for several things to get back from replication, I’ve been putting the Cartoons for Victory set to the forefront after it was on a sort of holding pattern for a while. We were waiting for the four “Hook” cartoons from the Naval film archive. Sadly, we were recently informed that their prints of all four films are deteriorating, as were the prints that were scanned many years back. We’ve decided to no longer have the set in a holding pattern and are working on getting this Blu-ray upgrade together with the best material we have. We have the Hooks from the master tape we have and a partial print of one of the shorts. There’s so many great things on the set, and, as the other in progress titles, we’ll be glad to have this one out.
And – onto The Old Shell Game (1948)
I know a lot of you folks are enjoying the new Famous Studios Champions set from Cartoon Logic. It’s so nice to see these films from their master materials- a great improvement over previous available copies. Thad Komorowski did a beautiful job in cleanup/restoration of the shorts. If you haven’t gotten this set yet and like the Famous Studio cartoons, it’s a must.
Thunderbean did a DVD set of Noveltoons back in 2012. It was some of the first scans we did in HD, and cleaning them up with very primitive software back then was a real chore. We were so happy to get a good amount of the films in 35mm Technicolor prints. When we finally ported the set to Blu-ray, Thad was instrumental in cleaning up many of the films as well as providing a few commentary tracks. The set has been out of print for a while, and a few months back we decided to reissue it, re-cleaning up some of the films with the better, newer restoration software and replacing some of the prints. It will be out with the next batch of discs sent from Thunderbean within the next month or so.
Finding vintage 35mm prints in good shape on Famous Studio’s cartoons was always hard, but the collectors have been incredibly generous in lending things for so many of the Thunderbean projects. I’m glad there’s people that are involved in collecting that are generous enough to lend their rare prints. It’s not everyone of course, and some of the things we *really* want have been scuttled away for many years. Hopefully we’ll be able to borrow some of the those in the future.
Jerry Beck lent us this print of The Old Shell Game when we were producing the Blu-ray. It was pretty beat up and missing a little piece of footage near the end, but looked great in Technicolor otherwise. We’ve done a little more cleanup to the short now, removing many of the lines as best as we could. It’s still probably the most worn film on the set, but still a pretty fun watch.
I like the Famous Studios cartoons, and I always wonder how many of the stories came about in the 40s. It’s such a varied group of films in terms of themes and direction, with so many of them being really entertaining.
Let us know your thoughts on this one- especially if you have never seen it before (I bet most of you have though!).
Have a good week everyone!
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.
“The Old Shell Game” is a wildly funny cartoon, with fast-paced action, great personality animation, and a lot of inventive and unexpected gags. The final bit where Wolfie burrows under an outhouse in pursuit of a worm must have gotten a huge laugh from the audience back in the day. Nyung nyung!
I never saw it before, but I enjoyed it. Syd Raymond is perfect as Wolfie.
I was never a fan of the Wolf cartoons, each of them have the same premise (which gets old pretty fast)
My personal favorite Noveltoon is The Enchanted Square, magical and heartwarming to the Nth degree
A real, fun Noveltoons treat! There’s a lot of great animation done by Marty Taras and Morey Reden in this short. I also like how, much like the Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner cartoons, it’s a parody of the typical chase formula format that was becoming very prominent during the 1940s. Although ironically, Famous Studios pretty much did nothing but stick to formula.
One could say, with some justification, that Tex Avery’s Wolf is making a “guest appearance” in this cartoon— the character’s design and even his way of moving are rather shameless knockoffs.
My long-time impression of Famous after the Fleischers got the boot from Paramount has been that the quality of the animation remained generally high, with many of the old Fleischer stalwarts holding on to their jobs, but what started to decline was, sadly, that good old Fleischer inventiveness and originality.
This trend reached its nadir in the Popeyes, with only occasional departures from the endless “Popeye and Bluto fight over Olive’s affections” routine, which was completely run into the ground by the early 50’s. While there were a few exceptions, such as the outstanding “Popeye The Ace Of Space,” the series never regained its former momentum or its former popularity. Neither did the studio, as a whole— “progressing” from Walt Disney’s main competitor in the 30’s and 40’s to a rather long run as an also-ran producer of blatant kiddie fodder such as “Casper” and “Baby Huey.”
I can’t help but look at this forcible transition as one of the saddest stories in the entire history of American animation.
To be honest, I consider Fleisher and Famous two separate studios more or less.
I wish the Back to the Inkwell DVD or BLU-RAY were still available.
Steve, great job as always on the visuals. Crisp and sharp, and very much matching the color values I recall from the film as a student back in the days of the moviolas at the UCLA campus film building, where I screened their Paramount reference positive (not sure if it was nitrate or safety). It may have had the closing mountain slightly clipped, but was otherwise complete and spliceless – and scratchless.
However, I still have my issues regarding the soundtrack for the opening and closing credits. There is a faded print (or possibly a bad film transfer from an otherwise ok print with a lot of splices but good sound) with splicy original titles at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRx5Ajmep38&t=387s . It proves that the music cues on both ends are wrong. Your print uses the later version of the Noveltoons theme with the brass fanfare truncated at the beginning, and the extra few bars at the end in a change of music key to some minor chords – the music generally used for the “Featuring” character-face close-up of Herman, Huey, Blackie, Dog Face, and the like. But this cartoon has no “Featuring” card, instead showing the turtle as the background for the actual name of the cartoon and not giving a name to the character himself. The Noveltoons theme thus ended at the fade out of the title card, with no transpose into the minor key, as did many of the Noveltoons having no series character or featured star (such as, for example, “We’re In the Honey”, or “Cilly Goose” (though the latter used the longer version of the theme with the brass opening fanfare – not sure if this was also present on “Honey”). This abrupt ending to the theme music without the key transpose is demonstrated as present on the faded print at the site above, and I remember it on UCLA’s 35mm. Your print seems to have the length of the title-sequence shots and the timing of the dissolves mis-timed to fit the wrong length of music.
As for the ending music, I could tell from the first viewing of your original DVD version of this film that you’d had to cobble-on the end cue from Herman’s “Naughty But Mice”. I figured it was because your print had the ending partly clipped like the one in the faded version above. However, you can hear how the cartoon really ended from the faded clipped print – a simple, two-note ascending brass fanfare. About 80% of the last note is missing on the faded print, but there are two ways to make a fix. First, if you are super lucky, there was a sound version in black and white issued by Walton Films in England for 8mm way back. I own a copy, though I can only project it silent for lack of a standard 8 sound projector, and it seems to time out its substituted “A Walton Film” end card precisely to the timing of the expected cue, suggesting that the soundtrack is probably uncut. The master source they duped from has maybe about three places where a frame or two may be missing, but is notably more complete than any of the color sources I’ve seen for having the actual frames of animation at the beginning of the scene where the turtle swings through the trees by one arm while still tucked in his shell, rather than a “plug” inserting a few black frames in place of missing ones to retain synchronization. So again, it’s likely to have been sourced early enough to have the complete ending cue. If you can’t obtain such a copy, there’s another method which is a bit of a cheat (as the notes may not be quite identical but replayed live at another studio session) which can provide the last lost note. The identical two-note fanfare was used to end the uncut Polacolor print of “Popeye Meets Hercules”, and could be spliced in. I know that film’s under copyright, but wouldn’t borrowing of a mere two notes be considered fair use?
I don’t recall ever seeing this one before. It’s a funny cartoon with nice animation and an appealing color palate. At points it almost feels like a parody of a Warner Bros. or MGM short because of how exaggerated the gags and pacing get. The ending is fun. I have to wonder how many Famous Studios artists worked on the generic Funny Animal comic books of the day, as the characters in this short look like they would have stepped out of one.
I don’t remember ever seeing this cartoon. Thanks, because I liked it a lot! The gags were pretty funny and very inventive.
I also ESPECIALLY loved the background scenery on this one! It was a bit stylized, having some things drawn a little more “simply,” yet the colors were extremely detailed! I don’t recall ever seeing a background like this in any other cartoon!