The Hunt For A Rare Original Title Card – and the 2016 “Thunderbean Thursday” Special DVD Set!

This week has been packed so far! Two different Blu-ray masters were finished here (one was ours, one for a collaborators), A package for another collaborator is almost done, and film transfers were done this morning for the last missing pieces of the Cubby Bear set. Tomorrow I’ll be headed to Columbus, Ohio, for the annual Cinevent convention and am looking forward to showing sneak peaks of things! The Saturday morning cartoon show is always a favorite there, with rare films shown from nice old original 16mm prints. Details on Cinevent can be found here.

This particular title card was one of the things I most wanted on the set and, happily, it showed up at long last!

Now, that said, look carefully at the spellings of the names above. This particular cartoon was produced by Hugh Harman and Rudolph Ising, but it’s clear that this (and World Flight) had the title sequences created in New York. Now, my guess is that someone either had horrible penmanship on the list of credits giving to the title card artist, or that the Van Beuren staff liked misspelling the names of the California studio’s members! Funny too is that the Cubby featured in the cartoon looks nothing like the drawing in the title card.

Van Beuren is fortunate to have many of their cartoons surviving in their original form, though most are really rare to find in 35mm. Original title sequences is a subject brought up fairly frequently, and I know a lot of folks get nearly as excited as I do finding rare titles. The hunt will probably always continue!

The search for the original title cards on the Cubbys is especially difficult – there just doesn’t seem to be any prints around anywhere on many of them with original titles. I’m amazingly appreciative of all the help I’ve had in getting the Cubby set looking as good as it does. We’ll have a master on this title done at some point this month.

Now- a special offer! After lots of requests to make another ‘Thunderbean Thursday’ set, we decided this week that we would indeed do it again – so, I’m announcing The Thunderbean Thursday 2016 special set featuring all sorts of rarities we’ve been gathering. It’s a Blu-ray/DVD combo set (BD-R/DVD-r) and features 15 cartoons, including a great recently acquired find- The complete Toby the Pup cartoon The Museum – something I’ve wanted to see forever. We’ve managed to get a handful of other Toby the Pups as well…

The set also features rare Felix, Koko the Clown, the Little King and stop motion films from around the world! The films are not cleaned up as in the ‘official’ releases, but the prints are overall very nice- I’ll let the titles be a surprise! We’re almost done with this set, and will be shipping these around June 15th. The proceeds will go directly into replication for Thunderbean Blu-ray/DVD sets. The set is $15.95 and is only available through June 15th. Details are available on the Thunderbean Website.

Thanks to everyone for your help in producing these sets! Have a good week everyone!