Steve asked me to “do the honors” this week a select a favorite to highlight from one of his discs. That is a daunting task. But here’s a little film I always liked, the first Rainbow Parade cartoon, Pastrytown Wedding.
Producer Amadee Van Beuren was desperate to compete with rivals Disney and Fleischer, and in 1934 brought in Disney’s Burt Gillette (Three Little Pigs) to upgrade the quality of their product and take the studio into color production. Van Beuren started his association with Gillett by producing the short-lived kid-centric live action/animation series, Toddle Tales. Gillette then worked with independent producer Ted Eshbaugh to create two sponsored cartoons: Pastrytown Wedding for New York’s Cushman’s Bakery and Sunshine Makers for Bordens. Both productions were fashioned as commercial films and, with a little revision, were released as theatrical cartoons for RKO.
On Steve’s excellent Toddle Tales and Rainbow Parade Cartoons DVD collection, he features this beautiful (and rare) color print of the theatrical version – and a clip of the alternate Cushman version (in black & white). The DVD version is of much better quality than the You Tube embed below…
Below are a set of animation drawings and model sheets from Pastrytown Wedding that were found in the estate of Pete Burness – who apparently moonlighted for Van Beuren on several Rainbow Parade cartoons. Click each thumbnail to enlarge:
UPDATE: Library of Congress film archivist George Willeman has posted frame grabs from Ted Eshbaugh’s personal print of Pastryown Wedding (like this original title card, above) on Facebook. Go there NOW!
Jerry Beck is a writer, animation producer, college professor and author of more than 15 books on animation history. He is a former studio exec with Nickelodeon Movies and Disney, and has written for The Hollywood Reporter and Variety. He has curated cartoons for DVD and Blu-ray compilations and has lent his expertise to dozens of bonus documentaries and audio commentaries on such. Beck is currently on the faculty of CalArts in Valencia, UCLA in Westwood and Woodbury University in Burbank – teaching animation history. More about Jerry Beck [
Thunderbean Thursday is the best day of the week!
Van Beuren, you can’t much more obscure in terms of American animation than that!
Love that Thunderbean Thursday! And I always enjoyed the antics in Van Buren cartoons, having seen some of them so often on early morning TV. I hear those toons and I’m immediately transported back to that time when the airwaves were flooded with great old cartoons.
I clicked the link, but the resulting page on Facebook says “This content is currently unavailable”. Are those frame grabs off limits for those of us who are not, and don’t want to be, Facebook members?
I like when Steve Stanchfield fixes up these rarities! The PD prints that have been circulating on lousy $1 VHS tapes and DVDs look like they were fished out of a dumpster! To prove it, take a look at the PD Cinecolor print of “The Merry Kittens”! It’s complete with jerky splices and film dust. But the version used for the compilation of Van Beuren cartoons is very well fixed up. Without animation historians, these cartoons would be dumped in a wasteland somewhere!
I am posting this on June the 16th 2015, more than a year after the last post. I haven’t seen either of these films but I do remember when I was a kid, back in suburban Boston, that Cushman’s Bakery had delivery trucks that would ply their wares in our neighborhood. They were 55-58ish Chevy panel vans, probably all 6-cylinder with three-on-the-tree manual transmissions. The vans were black with white logos on the sides proclaiming “Cushman’s Bakery”. It seems rather fitting, if just coincidental, that the color scheme for these vans was “Black & White” as were the cartoons of the thirties.