Swiped Before It’s Even Out!

Swiped before it’s even out! Thunderbean’s Felix and the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg restoration in “Rubber Hose Rampage”- ripped right from the preview we showed here!

I really *love* the idea of a game using classic cartoon clips — so Revie Studio’s “Rubber Hose Rampage” is really fun to see- and play if you like playing these type of games! I really do wish it was a little better executed. But still, there are things I really like about it— and, as a small indie game developer, they were pretty smart in riding the coat tails of the ‘Cuphead’ game craze. It’s pretty fun , and bizarre (!) to see Minnie Mouse battling the camel from Van Beuren’s Gypped in Eqypt, the distrorting chicken from Swing You Sinners, or the body of a fairy character from Van Beuren’s Wild Goose Chase with Betty Boop’s head pasted on it:

You can see a game reviewer’s thoughts on the game here- there’s lots of other videos where you can see play through, and some of the other new levels, including one based on Oswald and another on Popeye:

One of my favorite things to do here at Cartoon Research is to share the things we’re working on in real-time, and, for the most part, the community of cartoon fans has really respected the work we’ve been doing on the various sets we’ve been producing over the years.

A few weeks back, I was absolutely astonished to see that Revie Studio’s didn’t even wait for our new Rainbow Parades 2 set to even be out before outright swiping ‘The Goose that Laid the Golden Egg’ restoration in progress we posted here last year.

And here’s some play through of the game:

In their game, they’ve cropped out the Thunderbean logo, but it’s clearly the new cleanup we’ve just completed from the 35mm Technicolor print. When several people noted it was the Thunderbean version responding to their posts, they responded claiming it wasn’t Thunderbean’s new version- noting that we do good work. It’s clearly the version we posted though since there are no other HD versions of this film available.

Now, the material *is* in the public domain, and so of course they are free to use it— but it was just really surprising to see the wholesale swipe of material that was *clearly* marked with Thunderbean Thursday. Quite honestly, the Felix level looks a little better than their original levels that often have been poorly traced from cartoon frames since they’ve cut them out from at least a somewhat better version.

I really do enjoy what we’re doing by scanning and restoring classic animation – and especially enjoy that it’s giving so many people the ability to see good copies of so many of these films. In this case, it would just have been nice if we were asked first, since we just did so much work on this film. Also, had we had let them use our new scan, it would have looked even better than what they were able to get from the compressed YouTube upload.

In Thunderbean news though, shipping is starting this week for the current gaggle of special discs. Rainbow Parades 2 is coming soon — right after Mid Century Modern 2 is finally out. Progress continues! Wonder if there will ever be a Bosko level?

Have a good week all!