This week’s post is a little unusual. It’s a Wednesday night as I write this, and I just got to upstate New York to do some scanning! It’s a hike for sure, but over the summer is the best time to do trips like this since I don’t have to be at the school.
As usual, we’ll be scanning a bunch of things at night and into tomorrow- mostly 35mm Technicolor cartoons.I’ll be running down to Flushing as well to borrow some more films beyond the batch of things I brought. It’s always sort of a whirlwind trip out here, but this time I’m slowing down just a bit and enjoying the process. I grabbed a Mighty Mouse out of the stack called A Soapy Opera, and am scanning it first to show here. The scanner, and Cintel 2, does a pretty great job of scanning old prints, especially in how it diffuses scratches.
The process involves scanning first, then making a QuickTime file out of the individual frames the scanner captures. Here is the raw scan. The print is beautiful, but of course missing the opening Mighty Mouse and end title— but otherwise it’s nice to see what a vintage print of this cartoon looked like in its original release. Even though this print isn’t for any ‘official’ set, I think it’s valuable to preserve the Technicolor experience as much as possible from these old film prints— and it’s nice this batch has hung around long enough for us to do it!
Since I’ll be busy scanning tonight, I don’t have a lot of time to write. I’m looking forward to seeing your thoughts on this cartoon.
Back to scanning! 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.
It would be nice if they released a Blu-Ray of some of the Best Terrytoons Shorts since I’m sure Thunderbean or Cartoon Logic could probably do it if either of them can get permission to use the Film Archives at CBS Paramount
Yes. and for the copyright owner, there’s only an upside to a Blu-ray release. I have a friend who’s a copyright attorney in Washington, and he tells me that if the copyright owner involves a family member, they often refuse because of obscure reasons
ok now terrytoons is borderline ripping off famous studios Popeye more and more at this point 👉
Thanks for the peek behind the curtain! Indeed it’s a beautiful print, but is sadly missing a good chunk of the first minute or so.
I loved seeing the actual scanning process, plus a trunkful of 35mm cartoons. I think the Escape has another 100,000 miles on it!
Why wouldn’t there be somebody who has a 35mm film scanner in their basement?
It really is a beautiful print; too bad about all the splices. As for the cartoon itself, it was one of the last Mighty Mouse shorts made before Paul Terry sold the studio, by which time the melodrama format with Harry and Pearl had worn pretty thin. Even stalwart composer Philip Scheib seems to have lost interest here and is now merely going through the motions, hammering away at diminished seventh chords in a vain attempt to generate some excitement. But there’s a lot of good animation and some interesting use of perspective, and it amuses me that the Mighty Mouse doll contains a seemingly infinite quantity of sawdust for out hero to follow to the villainous launderer’s lair.
I loved seeing how expertly you thread the film through the scanner. It looks like the kind of machine that, no matter how often I used it, would have me scratching my head and wondering: “Let’s see, does it go around this spool now… or that one?”
I unashamedly love the operetta bits of Mighty Mouse. Also, the “splash” sound effect which is in every Terrytoon. It looks great – nice ‘n’ sharp, good color!
Paul Groh says:
I’d say that it was ALWAYS pretty thin, especially due to the hoary old “operetta” style of the music, which was popular in the late 19th century but had already worn out its welcome by the early 1900’s— displaced mainly by ragtime, which was a new sound at the time and was toe-tapping fun, as opposed to all this dreary warbling.
Apparently, this music was what Paul Terry himself liked, having grown up with it. For him, it was as if the ragtime, hot jazz, and swing eras never happened! That was also true of Thomas Edison, and was a major factor in his shutting down his recording division in 1928. He had no taste for jazz or blues— and by the late 20’s, that was mainly what record-buyers were buying. Terry and Edison both suffered from a sort of “musical arrested development” and simply couldn’t adapt to changing times and changing tastes. Edison’s son Charles finally persuaded him to sign some jazz bands to recording contracts, including the very popular California Ramblers, but that happened too late to save Edison Records.
My generally low opinion of Terrytoons is largely the result of seeing these.things as a child parked in front of the “electric babysitter.” Learning how Terry screwed his long-time (and no doubt, long-suffering) employees out of any profits from the sale of the studio to CBS didn’t make me like his product any better— quite the opposite.
In all fairness, though, Heckle and Jeckle have some good moments…
You’ve made this point before, Tom, but you’re mistaken about a couple of things. Operetta wasn’t “displaced” by ragtime around the turn of the last century, it evolved into the modern musical in the 1920s and ’30s. There was actually quite a lot of swing music in the Terrytoons of the ’40s and early ’50s — see the jitterbug sequences in “Aladdin’s Lamp” (the one with Gandy Goose and Sourpuss), “Mighty Mouse and the Wolf”, and “Moose on the Loose”, to cite just three examples off the top of my head — and Phil Scheib and his orchestra handled the idiom well. It’s not unusual for people to become less receptive to new styles of music as they grow older; in fact, it’s so common as to be practically universal. While the music in “A Soapy Opera” is admittedly uninspired, I think the operetta format suits other Might Mouse cartoons such as “Mighty Mouse and the Pirates”, “Gypsy Life”, “The Crackpot King”, etc.
Operetta remained popular with movie audiences well into the 20th century. Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy were top box office draws in the late 30s and pre-war 40s. In the late 40s and early 50s there were new screen adaptations, such as “The Student Prince” with Edmund Purdom borrowing the singing voice of Mario Lanza, a remake of “Rose Marie” starring Howard Keel and Ann Blythe, a new version of “The Desert Song” starring Kathryn Grayson and Gordon MacRae, and Lana Turner in a remake of “The Merry Widow.” That is to name only a handful. Not sure if they all did well financially, but the interest was there or the films wouldn’t have been made at all in the era of emerging rock and roll. I do know that the color remake of “Show Boat” in 1951 made money on its release.
The operetta genre faded more slowly than I indicated— I was trying to be concise in describing over half a century of American popular music’s development, and I condensed it a little too much. As a former print journalist, I do have a wired-in tendency to do that.
On the completely personal level, I’ll say that, as a wee bairn, whenever one of those operetta-style Mighty Mouse cartoons appeared on the screen, I felt an immediate urge to change the channel. Back in my long-distant youth, there was only one other vintage comedy series that had the same effect on me— the Little Rascals, who did have that same effect, but for different reasons. They just never made me laugh,
At the time, I didn’t know what the word “schmaltz” meant, but once I did, I found that one definition fit the Mighty Mouse musicales perfectly.
The literal definition of this Yiddish word is “chicken fat,” but this is the one that counts:
“The Figurative Meaning: Excessive Sentimentality In popular culture and the arts, schmaltz means extreme cheesiness, mushiness, or over-the-top sentimentality.
“The Context: This slang emerged in American entertainment and theater during the 20th century. Just as culinary schmaltz adds heavy, rich flavor to food, artistic “schmaltz” refers to art, music, or drama that is heavily “layered” with emotional sappiness.Example: “The movie’s plot was decent, but the romantic ending was pure schmaltz.”Derived Form: Someone might describe a sappy love song or a predictable holiday movie as being “schmaltzy.”
(Combined sources via AI).
For a capsule description, “emotional sappiness” works very well, along with my own phrase “dreary warbling.”
I can’t help but wonder what audience Terry was aiming for with these cartoons. The idea was too stuffy and dated for adult audiences and the more hip 1940’s teenagers, and at the same time, unrecognizable as a nostalgic memory to the little kiddies, who weren’t around during its heyday in the 1890’s and early 1900’s.
As an aside, wouldn’t a major Broadway production such as “Show Boat” have been considered an extravaganza, rather than an operetta? Its thoroughly American subject matter takes it pretty far from operetta’s European light-comedy roots.
“Show Boat” is sometimes classified as an operetta, though of course the designation is debatable and depends entirely on how liberally one defines the genre. There was a multi-record set of operetta recordings (released, if memory serves, by Reader’s Digest) which included “Show Boat” among the featured scores. With its extensive musical score and the fact that many classically trained performers have taken on the roles, the show can be looked upon as either an extension of the earlier art form or, as is more commonly considered, a trailblazer of a new musical drama art form. But regardless of whether it is or is not an operetta per se, the fact remains that a musical that proved popular in the 1920s was still considered viable in the early 1950s in the midst of social upheavals and emerging trends in music. Thus, not a far cry (musically speaking) from the musical Mighty Mouse cartoons.