As Steve Stanchfield is deep into a film-transfer project this week, I thought I’d fill-in today by continuing our look through the treasure trove of mementos from veteran animator Ray Abrams (Lantz, MGM, Avery, H-B) – courtesy of his son William Abrams. Today: Envelope art! Enjoy!
Here are more of the envelopes addressed to my mom. My dad used to make fun of where my mom lived. “Weiser…sounds like a disease” he used to say.
NEXT MONDAY: More from the Ray Abrams stash!
NEXT THURSDAY: A special Thunderbean post from Steve Stanchfield!
Jerry Beck is a writer, animation producer, college professor and author of more than 15 books on animation history. He is a former studio exec with Nickelodeon Movies and Disney, and has written for The Hollywood Reporter and Variety. He has curated cartoons for DVD and Blu-ray compilations and has lent his expertise to dozens of bonus documentaries and audio commentaries on such. Beck is currently on the faculty of CalArts in Valencia, UCLA in Westwood and Woodbury University in Burbank – teaching animation history. More about Jerry Beck [
Wow, those are simply gorgeous.
Super! Thanks Jerry.
It’s interesting how only 2 of those envelopes bear the same postmark location. I wonder if there are also multiple different return addresses on the reverse of these to indicate where Ray was living at the time.
These are incredible. You can sense the wonderful cartoony energy that defines the Oswalds of this period from these poses alone.
The bird envelope wasn’t sent via air mail?! C’mon, Ray!
He did – that five-cent winged globe is an air mail stamp. Ordinary letter-rate postage was two cents.
He did – that five-cent winged globe is an air mail stamp. Ordinary letter-rate postage was two cents.
Wouldn’t surprise me if that was a service offered at the time and people could live with the luxury if they so pleased!
What wonderful decorated envelopes! These look like animation extremes that Ray Abrams fitted on to the envelope space. Just wonderful stuff, thanks Mr. Beck!
Those are simply beautiful! They’ve got that great feel to them.
Thanks again, Jerry and William… and Ray!
Jerry, how many of these did you try to post? I’m seeing 8 of them, and then seeing a little box labeled “envelope 6” near the top of the page. I also thought I saw an “envelope 10” box at one point when the page was loading up. Just wanted to see if we were seeing all of them or not.
Thanks again!
There’s problems this week at my web server… photos are loading slowing. Hopefully this will be cleared up by Monday.
There are nine (9) envelopes in this post – hopefully you can see them all.
Thank you for sharing, Bill! I enjoyed this so much, I’m sharing this with my family. What a fun archive.
As someone who lives in Weiser, all 5,000 of us agree we sound like a disease