Next week is the last week of classes for the semester at CCS, the art college I teach at. The creative work of the semester is shaping up and looking really nice; I’m pretty proud of them!Some really nice animation and films being done. I’m looking forward to the break and getting a lot of Thunderbean things done, and especially looking forward to being able to share news soon.
And now.. it’s the first Christmas cartoon of the season!
Christmas Daze (1959) is an unusual little Christmas short. It’s part of the “Tune Cartoon” series produced by Rowl Greenhalgh Productions in Australia for Television in the late 50s. Here’s a little information about the studio and Rowl Greenhalgh himself. In looking at the history of animation in Australia, it seems like, at some point, a majority of animators worked for Eric Porter’s studio:
I’m sort of a sucker for a fun Christmas short. The plot of this little musical cartoon has a tin soldier and ballerina toy hanging out with Santa, encountering humans and animals alike, then crashing strategically enough to have all the presents Santa has land in a tree. All to a rollicking version of ‘Jingle Bells’.
My friend Jeff Missinne introduced me to this little short back in the late 80s, telling me it was ‘the cutest thing to come out of Australia besides Olivia Newton John’. He suggested it as a film for the VHS collection we were working on called Christmas Stocking Stuffer, and had a telecine tape transfer done for me at a local TV station along with a gaggle of other Christmas shorts. We never sold a whole lot of them back then, but I always liked this little film, and we included it again on the ‘Yuletide Flickers’ Blu-ray/ DVD set.
This is the ‘Krazytoons’ 16mm print. Krazytoons was a TV package put together by ‘Transvideo Artist’s productions’ in the late 50s and early 60s. They basically took a lot of public domain cartoons (and a few that were not!) and made a TV package out of it. This particular prints doesn’t have the happy Krazytoons music at the front of it, but I’ll upload another thing soon that does. It looks like Huckleberry Hound is hanging out in the audience to the left…
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’ll have to give this special a solid “B” – the timing is a bit too rushed and the framerate gets choppy, but the short has some excellent character design and a few good backgrounds. As a brief bit of time filler this short still has enough heart left to entertain audiences during those holiday matinees.
I couldn’t find much else on Tune Cartoons, but I was able to find an upload of a short they did based on the Australian classic “Waltzing Matilda”. The article you posted mentioned how they were originally produced for Australia’s ABC network before getting picked up for stateside broadcast, so there might be more of these little shorts out there.
According to AUSTRALIAN ANIMATION: AN INTERNATIONAL HISTORY by Dan Torre and Lienors Torre (2018), this cartoon was made in 1957, and its original title was “Jingle Bells”. It was the second in the series of Tune Cartoons, the others being “Waltzing Matilda” (1957) and “You Never See Maggie Alone” (1958). All of them were made in full colour, even though Australia did not begin broadcasting colour television until 1975. Clearly Rowl Greenhalgh had an eye on the international market. Torre and Torre claim that the Tune Cartoons were sold to American television, but they give no details.
Of course most Australian animators of the mid-twentieth century worked for Eric Porter at one time or another. They don’t call him “the Australian Walt Disney” for nothing!
Not one I went wild over, but fine at 3 and a half minutes, a perfect length for an average TV segment of the time. I did become mildly curious about the Krazytoons package, and was surprised to find a “Krazytoons Kompendium” page on the Internet Animation Database with a most eccletic listing. Lots of great representation for early studios, but half the trouble seems to be identifying the very films in question, all of which were renamed for the package. The most interesting one to me: “Magazine Rack,” originally a 1933 Merrie Melodies entry called “I Like Mountain Music,” second in the odd subgenre of “bookstore characters come to life” that have fascinated me from childhood. (Bonus: Some prints reportedly swapped in an infinitely more notable Looney Tune, “I Haven’t Got a Hat,” featuring a majority of that series’ early stars, and the first appearance of P-P-P-Porky Pig. Wonder how many Boomer viewers got blown away by that!)
Not bad for Made For Television animation. I’d like to see more of the studio’s work.