The history of the UPA studio goes well beyond their theatrical shorts, and there are still hidden gems to be found in the films from the studio that have been nearly if not completely forgotten. Today’s short is one of those films– and I think one of the important ones too!
First — some related Thunderbean news:
We’ve finally been able to get the big batch of five discs all out the door— with the last going in the next few days if we can manage to make it past the weather! Despite some disappointment with a pending deal that would have helped move everything forward much faster, we’re still plugging away at the new sets. One set, Mid-Century Modern, Volume 3, has been finished since last year as we’ve been trying to get it to replication. We’ve started a Go Fund Me to cover the replication costs and get this title to finished and out- and since launching late last week we’re more than halfway there. If you’re able, please help us get to the finish line on this set- and thanks to everyone that’s helped to keep the faith in this small company. Today’s featured film is on the set, so it’s sort of a sneak preview of one of the films on the Blu-ray.
CLICK HERE: https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-fund-thunderbeans-mid-century-modern-3-bluray
I feel like this is the one studio where a handful of key films have been largely left out of the history books – with some never seen at all, and others barely seen in not great copies. Accidents Resulting from Unfamiliarity in Aircraft, or The Rover Boys in Peril! is one of those films, full of things both stylistically and animation-wise that it takes it well beyond its simple training film designation.
Considering it was made for the Navy and never meant to be seen otherwise, it’s much, much better than it really has the right to be. It’s graphically sharp and stunningly designed, and, like the best of the studio, has its own design sensibility and ideas that are not really repeated in any of the other best work of the studio. It’s oddly a sequel of sorts to the famous Warner short The Dover Boys — at least in one way. It’s largely animated by Bob (Bobe) Cannon, who created the wonderful blur-drawings in his animation for that film. The same idea returns here in this short, along with beautifully posed scenes and what has to be the most excellent animation in any of the shorts the studio produced for the Navy.
I think it’s also the most entertaining of any of the Navy films I’ve seen. For many years now, I’ve been trying to track down good prints of many of the industrial films UPA made. Sometimes we’re lucky and a Technicolor print shows up, but frequently we’re limited to prints that were distributed in 16mm Kodachrome on these films. They tend to be soft in focus and have a somewhat fuzzy soundtrack. In the case of this short, we did manage to get a hold of a little it better of a print that cleaned up well digitally. Still, it’s not as great as I’d like it but I was pretty happy to get as good as we were able to out of it.
Speaking of its soundtrack: I asked our resident voice expert Keith Scott to identify the voices. Says Keith: “It’s John McLeish (also known as John Ployardt) as the narrator, and Marvin Miller doubling as the villain (Dan Baxter) and the General. Sounds like an actor trying to do Ezra Stone (radio’s Henry Aldrich) for Buster, but I can’t confirm that – or the other small parts”.
The Mid Century Modern 3 set turned out pretty nicely, and I’m so happy to have this short as part of that set. I’d rank this one among the best of the films they produced for industrial and training purposes- and it remains entertaining today, especially for animation fans.
Have a good week everyone!
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.
The rights to the Rover Boys were owned by the Stratemeyer Syndicate, which would have had absolutely no objection to UPA using its characters without permission in a training film for the U. S. Navy. The syndicate avoided lawsuits or any other publicity that might draw attention to the fact that it completely dominated the market for children’s literature. The Rover Boys was the syndicate’s first successful series, and the one in which founder Edward Stratemeyer took the greatest measure of personal pride. Other better-remembered series — the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Tom Swift — would follow in its wake.
The Rover Boys — Dick, Tom and Sam (not Buster) — were featured in thirty novels published between 1899 and 1926 that sold millions of copies. As it happens, the brothers took up aviation as early as 1912 in the novel THE ROVER BOYS IN THE AIR, or, FROM COLLEGE CAMPUS TO THE CLOUDS. The novel begins as follows:
“Fo’ de land sakes, Massa Dick, wot am dat contraption yo’ boys dun put togedder back ob de bahn yesterday?”
“Why, Aleck, don’t you know what that is?” returned Dick Rover, with a smile at the colored man. “That’s a biplane.”
I think I’ll stop right there. That should give you an idea why the Stratemeyer books were completely rewritten when they were reprinted starting in the 1950s.
Rover Boys, you’re no Dover Boys. Move over, boys!
As always, I look forward to receiving some of those special discs. I hope my orders were received properly. Thanks for this great cartoon and I look forward to the mid-century modern release.
My Mom donated to the GoFundMe for Mid Century 3
I guess there will be similar campaign for the Alice in Wonderland set in the near future?
Well, considering The Dover Boys inspired UPA, no wonder!
I see a fly in the screen grab from the Ford commercial. I hope that’s a real fly and I hope you left that in there. I don’t remember which one but there was also a fly caught in the photographing for a Warner’s. Just kind of a wonderful artifact of the physicality and maybe hardscrabble environs of the process.
Really looking forward to this one. And not for the flies, though they are welcome.
Thanks, Steve, for this nice piece of cartoon history. Don’t forget to check out another similar cartoon: when the UPA boys were still working at Screen Gems they also did a cartoon very much like this one, a cartoon that has been deemed a ripoff of the 1942 Warner classic “The Dover Boys.” It was called “The Rocky Road to Ruin,” released in 1943, and it not only resembled this Navy cartoon but was also narrated and laid out by John McLeish, the great design artist who had recorded the narration voice for the Jones cartoon back in 1941 while he was still at Disney. (I believe he and Chuck Jones met and became friends on the picket line during the Disney strike.)