It’s fun to revisit something you first saw many years ago- and Eshbaugh, to me, is always interesting.

First, in the Thunderbean land:
We’re finishing off sending the current batch of special discs, and starting to prep the next batch. We’ve also launched a new official Blu-ray set called “American cartoons: 1929” The pre-order is at the Thunderbean shop for a limited time.
One of the things I love about collecting 16mm films has been all the odd little things that show up.
The 1939 World’s Fair seems to be one of those things that a lot of people shot home movies of. A really great reel was just auctioned on Ebay a week or so back – scroll down to see some of the pictures:
I was thinking a lot this week about different uses for animation other than in theatrical cartoons over the years, and how there’s a much better chance of a lot of this sort of material being lost since it often wasn’t distributed outside of the original exhibit or the like. There’s some films I’ve been working with that were produced for this sort of industrial use, but it got me thinking about one of the first things I posted for Thunderbean Thursday: Wonder Bakers at the World’s Fair. So, now, 20 years after doing the scan of this little film, I thought it would be fun to do an update with what has shown up since on the internet.
Back in 2013, I wrote a little post about Wonder Bakers at the World’s Fair (1939) with animation by Ted Eshbaugh, who did lots of this sort of industrial film stuff through the years.
Cartoonist and animation expert Mark Kausler has what appears to be a workprint of some (or all?) of the animation from this short, in a fair 16mm Kodachrome print. We own him a debt of gratitude for sharing it. I’m hoping to borrow it again and, using all this fancy new-fangled technology, try to get a little better version from this otherwise lost material. Perhaps if I’m agile enough to catch a lizard or two Mark will let me borrow it again.
My guess is that the print, at some point, belonged to Eshbaugh himself, since it’s similar in quality to (for a while) the only color print available of Eshbaugh’s Wizard of Oz cartoon. Eshbaugh gave that 16mm Kodachrome reduction print of ‘Oz’ to film historian William K Emerson, who had worked for Eshbaugh in New York in the 60s. Many moons later, Everson sold that 16mm print to film collector Tom Toth, who made 16mm prints of it using a better soundtrack (pulled from Jeff Missinne’s good black and white print of the short) and it was the best copy of that film in circulation until we scanned the 35mm Technicolor print at the Library of Congress back in 2014. Toth also sold a lot of public domain cartoons to companies like Goodtimes Home Video and Amvest for the cheap VHS kids tapes so many people grew up with. That is how that version of The Wizard of Oz got circulated. He also sold it to Warner Home Video as a bonus feature for a DVD release of the classic 1939 feature.

There’s a home movie of the ‘Wonder Bakers’ pavilion offered as stock footage at the link below. It’s sort of fun— especially the bizarre scarecrow made out of a female mannequin. The World’s Fair seems both slick and not-so-much sometimes! In the circle of characters there appears to be the John Tenniel designed rabbit from Alice in Wonderland. Seeing the ‘Alice in Wonderland’ theme on the outside makes me wonder why they didn’t use an Alice in Wonderland theme in the animation or larger as part of the theme of the company.
LOC has a picture and even notes the Alice in Wonderland Characters:
https://www.loc.gov/resource/gsc.5a30878/
There’s a nice shot of the characters ‘walking’ at 6:16 in this color footage, posted by Larry Urbanski: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-cZM2Ez8T0
I wish there was some footage inside the building just to see what it was like. Here’s a page from the Chicago Sunday Tribune (courtesy of Michigan State University) that at least gives some idea of what the tour looked like. I’ll bet the film was displayed from a 16mm print either in a small auditorium setup or back projection on screen.

From all the different home movie footage of the fair, you can get at least some impression of what it was like.
(A side note: For fun, look up Dali’s Dream Of Venus to see something truly bizarre.)
Have a good week all!
As always, I look forward to receiving some of these special discs that I have ordered over the last few months or years! Great post, as usual. I do remember the first time you actually released this an animated short film on one of your great DVD compilations! Thanks as always to your careful and diligent research. 1929 is turning into a banner year since more and more cartoons are falling into the public domain. Hopefully it will be easy to find good quality materials on some of these films, including early Disney and early Hugh Harman and Rudolph Ising.
Eshbaugh did some work for the Planter’s Peanuts exhibit at the 1939 World’s fair as well. That material has always interested me!
Frank Moulan, who wrote the words to the Wonder Bread “Yo Ho!” song, was a comic opera performer of considerable stature in the first part of the twentieth century, famous enough to have been caricatured (as Gilbert & Sullivan’s Mikado) by the great Al Hirschfeld. Moulan died in 1939, the year of the World’s Fair; the fact that he was writing commercial jingles at the end of his life suggests that he may have fallen on hard times. Certainly his quaint, operetta-like bakers’ chorus seems at odds with the state-of-the-art industrial operation that Wonder was promoting at the fair.
Jim Korkis did a piece here about “Mickey’s Surprise Party”, produced by Disney for Nabisco at that same World’s Fair. Interesting coincidence — wondering how execs / exhibit staffs reacted to such exact competition.
Also wondering if there are other location-specific animations out there. Fairs, trade shows, museums, etc. There was an era of industrial musicals, presented live and on film. In the 30s a bizarre live action short of Buck Rogers was shown at department stores selling his merchandise. Disney did many for the theme parks, ranging from almost freestanding shorts to brief cycles incorporated into rides and shows, but that was mostly in later years.