Jeff Missinne is, even though he wouldn’t have admitted it, important in the emerging fandom and subsequent revival of classic animation in the 70s, 80s and 90s.
I knew Jeff since he was 32. That was nearly 40 years ago now. I was a teenager then, collecting cartoons, and we often exchanged cartoons as well as many years of phone calls and letters. He was essential in helping me start “Snappy Video” the pre-curser to the things we do now at Thunderbean. I’ve kept all of Jeff’s letters, and rather me pontificating about Jeff, I thought I would be fun to put some of these up for you folks to get a flavor of what it was like knowing him.
In the bigger picture, I’m continually grateful for the generation of animation fans that are just a little older than I am. They kept the faith and did the research at a time where there just wasn’t much academic interest in such things. I’ve been lucky enough to meet and know quite a few of the people who I really looked up to as a teenager first discovering 16mm film collecting, and soon after it old issues of little ‘zine Mindrot / Animania.
The high school I went to was a few blocks from downtown Ann Arbor, and during lunch I’d often head into town, right after school, to my favorite used book shop. At first I was buying issues of Funnyworld, then asked the shop to do a search for a few particular books- that was the way you found a particularly rare book. I got Field’s Art of Walt Disney and two copies of The Fleischer Story that way, at a time where you just couldn’t find those.
At some point, someone sold them a big pile of Mindot’s, and I’d buy them for a dollar each or so, usually with lunch money. I still cherish those issues. Jeff wrote an column called ‘The Catbird Seat’ for many issues. Here’s one from Mindrot, issue 15, from 1979:
When I started to get to know Jeff a little better and as he started helping me navigate the particulars of figuring out how to transfer films, I was delighted to find that he would often write a personalized ‘Catbird Seat’ to me, helping with copyright searches especially since he had the much coveted ‘Film Superlist’ book that could be used to determine what films for Public Domain:
Sometimes Jeff would update me on the latest things he’d watched or what was happening in the news about new shows. Here’s an especially interesting one from 1990:
The letters would often have added drawings, like this example from early 1990:
He joked at one point about Snappy Video, my little company, releasing a set of PD Disney cartoons. Here was his joke cover. I actually used a few years ago as a reversible cover on PD mouse Adventures:
Jeff and I didn’t always see eye-to-eye, and he let me have it several times over the years. One of those times I credit as actually forcing the teenager I was at that time to put serious work into what I was pursuing. That particular ‘tough love’ was a difficult lesson, but lead to much better grounding for the company (more on that sometime soon).
We always managed to stay good friends and chat here and there. It was Jeff that first showed me many of the Van Beuren cartoons I’d never seen, including Piano Tooners, a majority of the Cubby Bears and Ted Eshbaugh’s Wizard of Oz (1933) in black and white. This led me on a lifetime pursuit to see Eshbaugh’s films in color. That is, of course, now old history.
I loved chatting with him all those years, and was very lucky to have had him as a friend.
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.
Since Jeff Missinne introduced Van Beuren and Ted Eshbaugh to you, and since Thunderbean introduced them to me, then it appears that I owe him a debt of thanks as well. Thanks for sharing this sample of his writing and artwork. It must have been a pleasure to find one of his letters in the mail. Also, any member in good standing of the Marina Sirtis Ogling Club is a kindred spirit of mine.
I remember many of those short-lived TV shows from 1990, but I had no idea that Frank Zappa’s two elder children were in a sitcom that year! I must have blinked and missed it. Those were the good old days, when Dweezil and Moon Unit were still speaking to each other. Because of the kids’ gross mismanagement of his estate and their personal vendettas, it’s doubtful that anyone will still be the least bit interested in Zappa’s music when it finally goes into the public domain, decades from now.
I wonder if he belonged to the fan publication “Animania”. After all “Mindrot“ turned into that, no?
He certainly sounds like he was one of us.
I’m sure I would’ve had many long conversations with him, he might have had a lot of the opinions of certain cartoons that so many other people do. He does sound like a 1930s type of collector. By that I mean, he would collect a lot of of 1930s cartoons, more so than what was ever the present day at the time. Sorry to see any animation fans go. My deepest condolences.
Mindrot was a great publication. I subscribed to Animato! as well.
Younger fans reading these today may be a little shocked about how basic the knowledge was about the cartoons. There was no internet. Want to watch any? Buy a 16mm film.
The rise of home video and the digging of a cadre of young animation researchers–some of whom are still active on-line today–were the building blocks that brought us to where we are today.
They also made the history, through confirmation via uncovered materials, a little more honest, and away from tales told by participants, though vestiges remain.
RIP Jeff. I remember him. Subscribed to Animato!
Steve C
Thanks to you, Mr. Stanchfield, I became a fan of the Van Beuren cartoons too, so I also owe Mr. Missinne a debt of gratitude.
By the way… Received the Molly Moo-Cows, I mean Rainbow Parade Vol. 2, in the mail last Saturday, the 26th. Watched “Bold King Cole” first, because I wanted to see what a color cartoon from the best possible source (successive exposure negatives) looked like. My goodness!
Keep up the good work. Are Ub Iwerks’s Comicolor Cartoons next? Whatever’s next, I know I’ll like it.
(Felix Felix Felix Felix Felix Felix Felix Felix Felix…)