In Thunderbean News: The beginning of summer always means I’ll have more time to devote to sets, and this year I’m working especially hard on catching up the projects that are near the finish line, and bowling down a whole bunch of the special sets. We’re started dubbing a pretty big batch of them— nine titles, and we’ll be sending these in the coming weeks. We’re also waiting for Mid Century Modern 3 to come back from replication. When it ships I’ll be wiring about it here as well.
In October of last year, I went out to Lightbox, an animation expo held every year in Pasadena. While I was out, I didn’t get the chance to visit as many friends as I wanted to, but did get to see a few. I visited my good friends Mark Kausler and Cathy Hill, saw some lovely drawings (by both Mark and Cathy) and was even treated to some cartoons I had never seen! A big surprise was, near the end of the visit, Mark handed me a reel labeled ‘Geesink’. I couldn’t wait to scan them, and finally got a chance a week and a half ago.
It turns out it was almost all Joop Geesink’s “Dollywood” shorts — commercials I had never seen before. The reel appears to be a reduction from excellent 35mm prints of the shorts, all adverts for Philips. The first on the reel is live action, with the rest being all stop motion animation. Dollywood shorts are sometimes pretty simple, other times really, really extravagant. The sets are often astonishing and beautiful. The two shorts involving outer space are my favorites on this reel.
Here’s that reel, courtesy of Mark and the scan I just did. They’re cute little shorts that need no additional introduction. If you enjoyed them, please leave a comment — I always love hearing what everyone thinks. What are your favorites, and what did you find especially interesting as you watched?
Enjoy them and 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.
I’d seen a couple of these before, but most of them are new to me, and they’re all delightful. As simple as it is, I really like “Libre Importacion”, although the last one might be my favorite just for its design and animation. Thanks for sharing!
Any word on the t-shirts that were offered through Thunderbean last year?
I first knew of Philips as a record label, long before I found out that the company also manufactured light bulbs and toasters and whatnot. Philips records always had remarkable clarity of sound, and I much preferred them to those of other prestige labels such as Deutsche Gramophon. They weren’t cheap, either, but you get what you pay for.
The conductor in the “Gala Concert” ad appears to have been modeled on Eugen Jochum, principal conductor of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam for several years in the 1940s and again in the ’60s, and a frequent guest conductor with the orchestra for many decades. When I was in my early teens I had a fine recording of Beethoven’s Third Symphony performed by Jochum and the Concertgebouw Orchestra — on the Philips label, naturally. Don’t know if he ever recorded Saint-Saëns’s “Danse Macabre” with them, but I doubt it; Dutch orchestras weren’t big on French music in those days.
And the funny thing is, Philips Records later became part of Deutsche Grammophon (at least in Germany, anyway) and both labels eventually became part of PolyGram, which is now owned by Universal Music Group.
If I remember correctly, my print of that reduction was originally owned by Jan Wahl. One of the dupers or collectors must have been selling prints for a time, 1980s or so.
JAN WAHL? The KRON-TV film critic and program host?
That’s what I remember her as.
Enjoyable stuff, and impressive for television commercials. Irresistibly reminded of George Pal’s early theatrical films for the same sponsor, which liked to reveal musical acts as residing inside Philips radios.
I absolutely love the Dollywood productions (and I’m not referring to Dolly Parton’s, but rather those by Joop Geesink).
When I wrote my essay on stop-motion in Spain (“Verbena en Muñecópolis”), I discovered that almost all the promotional films he made for Philips were released here with great fanfare, renting cinemas in various cities across the country for large-scale screenings. Among them, I especially love *The Travelling Tune* for its meticulous cut-out work and the music by André Popp. Not long after, I found one of the promotional posters for those films at a good price on a Spanish collectibles website, and now I have a wall in my house decorated with Geesink’s puppets.
It’s curious that this copy you’ve digitized, Steve (thank you so much!), must be one of those that was shown in those Spanish cinema sessions, as the voice-overs are in Spanish with a Spanish accent.