Novelty stop motion shorts from the 30s are some of the most fun things you come across while collecting films – and how the three sound shorts with the Kinex films-styled characters came to be will probably always be less-than-clear.
First — some Thunderbean news:
Next week is Spring Break at the school I teach at, and I’m still hoping to take a trip that involves gathering a lot of films and scanning them in upstate New York. There’s a good amount of films all ready to go already– now all I need is a mechanical fix on my faithful ol’ Ford Escape. Harder than it sounds. We’re trying to get the next four or five special discs out late this month, along with Mid Century Modern 3 if it comes back from replication in time. We’ve also just finished putting together a 2-disc special set with two and a half hours of animated trailers, and a whopping 6 hours of Live Action ones. It’s at the Thunderbean Shop for a limited time.
“Pepper the Pup” In Toodle-oo-o is one of the oddities produced by John Burton and other members of the former ‘Kinex’ studios, who produced silent ‘show at home’ shorts for Kodak’s Cinegraph 16mm and 8mm libraries. It’s an interesting and ambitious little film, only topped a handful of years later by Hector the Pup (1935).
Back in 2015 we wrote about Horse Laffs (1934) the one John Burton short that has surfaced in color.
Since we’re left to speculate what happened after the small Kinex Studio folded in 1930, it seems pretty clear that John Burton, one of the principals of the company and perhaps the main animator through a lot of the Kinex shorts, went on to try and sell a series of stop motion shorts. He did have some success in having the independent distributor Screen Attractions pick up at least three: “Pepper the Pup” in Toodle-oo-o (1931), Horse Laffs (1934) and Hector the Pup (1935). It’s safe to assume they didn’t lead to a bigger deal in turns of funding. Stewart McKissick, my co-producer on the Stop Motion Marvels set, did a wonderful job with liner notes on that set— but, even with some clues and research, we were never able to uncover the reasons John Burton’s small studio folded. Other members of the Kinex Studio went on to work on the classic feature King Kong along with other effects in features as well as shorts, including some for the 1939 World’s Fair.
Toodle-oo-o is pretty fun. The stop motion character animation looks right at home in its 1930s design sensibilities. Burton has adapted and improved a lot of things between the silent Kinex shorts and this film. The character designs, sets and animation qualities are all at a much higher level. The later Hector the Pup (35) is another huge leap in quality. One wonders if there were additional films that never were distributed, or if Burton redid a lot of animation along the way on both these films. The musical score in top notch (by Carl Stalling, under the pseudonym Arch B. Fritz.)
The technical aspects of the film are overall pretty good, but you can still see reflections of the glass used on pan shots (I’m guessing these shots were done with the puppets laying on the glass rather than upright). There are some wires visible here and there that Burton used to hold up puppets at times- and they’re scratched out in a few shots. So many other tricks are very well done throughout.
I find these few shorts fascinating and hope someday more information will surface on them, but as of now, it seems like the Stop Motion Marvels booklet is the only source of gathered information.
Of course, after Hector the Pup, Burton would take a job at Warner Brothers, eventually working his way to the top of the company. One wonders if he ever had any screenings of his early work there!
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 doubt that John Burton ever screened “Toodle-oo-o” for the boys at Termite Terrace. They never would have let him live it down.
There’s a distracting bit of fluff dangling from the top of the frame for about two minutes in the middle of this film. I know that sort of thing can happen when lint gets into the film projector in the movie theatre, but how on earth did it happen here?
In the theater, the film is going through a projector. In the lab, a negative or a print is going through a printer which also has a gate where fibers and other gunk can get stuck. Seems like poor QC in the lab (lack of proper cleaning) while making one of the preprint elements.
I’m making all this up, but I can imagine a scenario where that issue is why this print survived in the first place. It’s rejected by QC and put aside; another element is made and goes off to live its intended life and ultimately lost/destroyed, while the reject rests forgotten on a shelf until rediscovery years later…
Interesting how stop motion never really caught on in the US like it did in the rest of the world, outside of special effects artists like O’Brien and Harryhausen. There was George Pals Puppetoons in the forties, and the fifties and sixties saw advertising mascots like the Pilsbury Dough Boy and Speedy Alka-Seltzer, plus Art Clokey’s Gumby and Davey and Goliath. And then there were the Rankin-Bass Animagic specials, but those were produced in Japan. It wasn’t until Will Vinton’s studio (now Laika) in the eighties that the US saw any significant stop-motion activity, but it still remains a niche industry here.
Regarding Screen Attractions Corp.: their entry in the “Production Programs” section of the 1935 Film Daily Production Guide and Director’s Annual lists “PUPPET CARTOONS–12 1-reelers, four completed; one in color” (that one, of course, being “Horse Laffs.”) Ads for the company in both the 1935 and 1936 Production Guides also announce twelve cartoons and say four are ready, suggesting no more had been completed. Steve Stanchfield listed the three known releases; it’s too bad the book didn’t provide a list of individual titles so we could find out what the fourth was.
I’ve been trying to order that new trailer 2-disc set all day but your store website won’t cooperate. Is there another way to order it?
Hi Cliff,
Check back- there was a glitch at the store earlier, but it seems to be fixed now.
It looks like this short-lived studio might have been trying to become the main competitor to George Pal, even if that wasn’t really the case. Was it? Who knows?
I’ll give this long-forgotten short an appreciative review, for the following reasons: stop motion animation in the pre-digital era was a LOT of very hard work, even to make a one-or-two reel short— having to move the three-dimensional, small characters one frame at a time for each exposure under such primitive conditions seems nearly impossible. Doing this under hot studio lights wouldn’t have helped with the comfort factor.
The “smoothness” of the movement here is just as impressive as the same kind of effect in a Pal film! And on a much lower budget, which goes without saying.
Also, this is a funny enough story for more than a few laughs, and the musical score is accomplished enough so that it always follows the movements of the script and the characters pretty closely. Mr. Disney had set the musical pace here, and everyone else had to follow it. A definite “E for Effort” grade is in order.
Thank you, Mr. Stanchfield, for discovering this odd little bit of animation history!