The Butterfly Days of Summer

Had a really good day here, working almost exclusively with film elements rather than being in the digital world in any way. I’ve helped maintain a collection of 16mm and 35mm films at a major university library, unofficially and sometimes officially, since 1987— basically my whole adult life, and today I spent a good amount of time looking for films that were either starting to deteriorate or have other issues. Today involved going through a pile of things have has never really been completely organized, but has been sitting on the ‘Steve’ shelves for many years. That batch includes a few original camera negatives, old rental prints in 16mm, an exploitation film from the late 60s, World War II training films in Technicolor from Britain and lots more. As I look through this stuff, I’ve started taking note on unique materials that really need to be scanned in order to make sure these elements exist in the future.

It’s been a pretty good week in terms of catching things up. I had been in an accident a few weeks back; while I’m overall ok, my car wasn’t, and this whole period has been about getting back to normal. Within the next week, I hope to travel to Chicago and New York for Thunderbean things. With a car that is strikingly similar to my old one- there’s something comfortable in the familiarity of that.

A major aspect of a project I’ve been working on with several collaborators got finished this week; I’m sure you’ll be hearing more about that project soon, but for now I’ll just hint. Working on a team where everyone is putting the best efforts into different aspects is a lovely experience; the level of collaboration of this particular set really shows.

And, on the Rainbow Parade front, watching that set turn a major corner this week is encouraging. With limited resources we’re getting through it as fast as we can so we can jump more full-time onto finishing the Lou Bunin set.

Dave and Becky have been preparing for the next mailing for some time— waiting for the bottleneck that is me to put this finishing touches on each thing to get them dubbed and out. At the Thunderbean Shop, we’ll be taking down a good amount of the special sets that are still up there soon as they get closer to being finished, and there’s also a new one in pre-order, sort of appropriately titled Classic Cartoon Crash. It’s at the Thunderbean shop for a limited time! CLICK HERE!

Now, onto today cartoon… piece: Molly Moo-Cow and the Butterflies (1936).

There are now only two films that are not being worked on yet for the Rainbow Parades volume 2 set. We’re scheduled to have them all finished by mid-month, and hopefully in replication by the end of August. I’ve split the cleanup work on this film up into three pieces. The beginning is still being worked on, the last half was completed a little while back by Andres Tootill, a huge cartoon fan and now, with this first professional work, a restoration artist. I’ve finished working on cleanup for the middle of the film and am waiting for the first third to get the cleanup and grading done. While I was downstairs finishing this film, I was looking outside at the milkweed garden, and Mary was upstairs waiting for several monarch butterflies to eclose— that’s when the mature Butterly emerges from the chrysalis. Here’s a video Mary shot of one of them while I was working downstairs:

…and here’s a piece of Molly Moo-Cow and the Butterflies – a nice little companion piece to the real thing:

Have a good week everyone!