Quick Thunderbean news!
On break from the school as of Thursday, and getting though shipping a whole bunch of things, including pre-orders for the reissue of ‘Mid Century Modern 2’. We’re sending those this week along with a bonus disc and a handful of the special discs, and more next week when I’m back from a quick scanning trip in New York. We’ve have a BDR’ special disc’ of just black and white Terrytoons at the Thunderbean shop. Along with some of the discs that are shipping.
Now onto our cartoon – and a mystery solved sort of!
There was a camera store in New York (Willoughby-Peerless) that, for *years*, always had a whole bunch of 16mm TV prints of black and white Terrytoons- at $5 a reel! When I was first collecting cartoons in the early 80s. I met a collector in New York named Collin Kellogg, and he was one of the few cartoon collectors that would actually chat for a while, and I leaned all sorts of things about collecting cartoons from him. We traded all sorts of things over those years. One day he told me about that camera store, and he managed to get a few Black and White Terrytoons he already had from that stack, and offered them to me.
One of them was the TV-titled ‘Saw Mill Mystery’. I used to take prints to my high school and run them on the 16mm projectors there at lunchtime. One of the films in the stack was a print of Saw Mill Mystery. I didn’t get a chance to run it before lunch was over that day, and threw all the cartoons I had sitting out in a bag. Several days later I unloaded the bag and noticed Saw Mill Mystery was mysteriously missing! To this day, I don’t know if I somehow left it there or if someone swiped it, but when I went back to look it wasn’t there, or in any of the lost and found places at the school. It wasn’t until *this week*, 40 years later (!) that I actually finally saw this cartoon!
So, all this time later, it’s nice to see this Oil Can Harry (as a man) cartoon, with J. Leffiingwell Strongheart and Fanny Zilch, along with Puddy Pup, who has many master apparently. If I had been able to actually watch the print was back when, I’m sure I would have enjoyed it. Some of the animation and posing is especially good in this cartoon- especially Oil Can Harry. The operetta format and rover boys/ melodrama storytelling is of course the precursor to the format used in many Mighty Mouse cartoons.
So, The Saw Mill Mystery is no longer a mystery to me anyway. I wonder what happened to that print that I lost in 1986. I hope you’re seeing this one for the first time too – whether you’ve seen it or not, I hope you like this light little piece of entertainment…. 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 personally prefer the original blond Fanny Zilch of 1933. The 1937 version of the heroine appears to be a distant relative of the Oyl family. Still, it’s great to see such a clear scan of “The Saw Mill Mystery”, Fanny’s last hurrah, even if it’s from an incomplete, truncated TV print.
Puddy the Pup was Terry’s biggest star in 1937, not that that’s saying much. So it’s curious that he disappears from the cartoon halfway through after telephoning Strongheart. One would expect him to catch up with the cavalry and join in the fun of the final act.
I’ve read that a restored version of “The Banker’s Daughter”, the first of the Fanny Zilch melodramas and Oil Can Harry’s debut, has been made from the original film elements at UCLA. Now that’s something I’d really love to see!
Boy, I love these TERRYTOONS! I keep hoping I someday can see a fantastic fully restored TERRYTOONS title. I know we had a brief teasing look on the released “new adventures of mighty mouse“ set released years ago, and it was a “super mouse“ cartoon, not a mighty mouse. But I’d like to see more of this kind of stuff, so rare! Thank you for this sneak peek.
A literal “deus ex machina” at the end.
Nice perspective animation at 4:14, easily the best shot in the movie technical-wise.
I didn’t think there was ever a Human Version of Oil Can Harry before he became more well known as a Cat in the Mighty Mouse Cartoons
This is a very nicely animated cartoon. The characters are distinctively designed. I recognize the title card from the Terrytoons I used to watch on television as a child. And everything was in black and white then, because we had a black and white set. This is definitely reminiscent of the later Mighty Mouse cartoons.
As always, keep up the great work!
Willoughby-Peerless: The store was several floors of retail space and had a fairly sizable film sale/ rental department. There was a Terrytoons bin there for decades and at one point they were marked down to $2.99!
Steve, I too stopped into Willoughby-Peerless on a rare trip to NYC decades ago and left with an armload of cartoons (by this point I believe they were going for 10 bucks a pop.) One of the films was another Fanny Zilch item FANNY IN THE LION’S DEN. The interesting thing about this print, it was not the standard TV format with calliope music and TV title card! It was an original, full theatrical length with original release titles and end card (does not end with the fade out.) I’ve checked it against the TV release version and mine is a tad longer with a cute introduction missing from the television prints. I’ve been told the possible answer to this mystery is that one answer print was pulled for each of these old Terrytoons before they were edited down to the standard five minute versions. Did I end up with the answer print? Could be. And, yes, I still have the print.
Willoughby-Peerless was just off Herald Square, right near Macy’s and Gimbel’s gigantic department stores. It had quite a spectacular entrance, with several large plate glass windows that you could walk all the way around without going into the store. But who wouldn’t want to go in, after looking at all those fantastic (and expensive) cameras? My late uncle bought a wind-up 16mm movie camera there, and he used it to document all of the most important family events— weddings, bitrhdays, and so on. No funerals, though…
In the 60’s and 70’s, no one could have imagined that we would someday be shooting videos on a pocket phone, and that the visual quality would be many times better than 16mm was. My aunt preferred that marvelous space-age invention, the Polaroid Land camera, for still pictures, but after a year or so, the color photos would start to turn brown and curl up as the chemicals decomposed. I had some of them until a few years ago, when I found that it was impossible to digitally restore them decently. When I was a kid, I mistakenly thought that the brand name meant that it would only work on land, so you shouldn’t take it to a lake or an ocean cruise. Of course, that was the name of its inventor!
“It’s a marvelous world we live in today, entirely.” —Flann O’Brien (1911-1966).
Yes (for the time), that technology was pretty marvelous!
I remember buying films at Willoughby Peerless. The $5 Terrytoons deal was a steal! Only wish I had bought a boatload of them.
Oh.. I TOTALLY want to borrow that print Dave!!!
Oh, absolutely!!
And I TOTALLY can’t wait to see what comes from the loan!
OK, the log with the blazing saw, that is an homage to THE PERILS OF PAULINE (1914).
Compared to Fanny Zilch’s early cartoons such as “The Banker’s Daughter” and “Fanny in the Lion’s Den,” this cartoon pales in comparison; even the animation seems inferior to that provided by Frank Moser and Bill Tytla in 1933.
This shows us that the quality of Paul Terry’s cartoons had declined considerably by 1937, probably due to Frank Moser’s departure in 1936.