In the last two of this series a bunch of studios and some information about film stock and color were covered.
In this Thunderbean Thursday, I wanted to concentrate on two specific studios: MGM and Warner Brothers. Not only do these studios have some of the favorite films from the golden age, but both have interesting journeys in terms of what happened to the actual master film materials.
One of the most interesting things in working with master material has been how much information you can get about *other* master materials you’re not dealing with in the process. Shop talk is helpful, and sometimes pretty accurate, sometimes not entirely. So, that said, here is at least some information on two of the major studio’s masters.
MGM:
The MGM cartoons have always stayed as part of the assets of MGM, at least the company thought they did, with the exception being shorts produced in the 20s and the 30s. When I was working with the master materials on Flip the Frog and Willie Whopper, I learned a lot about how materials were catalogued and tracked. With MGM in the 30s, many of their shorts were actually produced by other companies under MGM’s logo. The cartoons of course were first produced by Ub Iwerks, then Harman/Ising. Through some luck, one page of Harman/Ising’s film masters requirements were mixed in with the Celebrity pictures material requirements in paperwork that must have gone from Celebrity’s hands to Commonwealth, then to Teleprompter and eventually Blackhawk.
Celebrity and Harman/Ising were asked to *keep* the master negatives of the films, providing a print master positive for MGM’s vaults. From looking through some of the materials that did managed to be kept as well as the paperwork, it appears that Celebrity made 3 master positives of most of the cartoons for MGM. Sometimes one still existed, and in a few cases more than one still exists to this day. It’s possible that MGM may still have some of theirs as well. At one point, Harman/Ising must have thought they retained rights to the cartoons produced by MGM, or thought MGM wouldn’t notice when they made a deal to distribute the films for home and non-theatrical use in 16mm by Silo-Crest films as well as Picto-Reels, a company with a British ownership. Mark Kaulser noted in the commentary for Winky the Watchman some years back that the MGM lawsuit dragged on for years over this dispute. So, when you see a Kodachrome print of some of the early color MGM cartoons, the reason they look they way they do is because they were printed in 16mm Kodachrome, sometimes at full length, sometimes shortened a bit. The black and white prints of the two-color Technicolor films appear to be from only one of the two negatives, indicting that Harman/Ising must have still had the master material (or a master positive) of the separations in the early 40s.
MGM’s nitrate and safety film all lived on the lot for many years. In the early 60s, the studio started to make acetate masters positives of a majority of their sound films, but didn’t always do that with silents. The famous 1969 fire saw the loss of many films, including a lot of nitrate separation negatives on their cartoon series. Funny enough, the Harman/Ising shorts managed to never be part of that particular vault. It’s possible that some of the nitrate that was part of the fire was there because it was on the stock manufactured during the war. Some of this stock seems to be much less stable and suffered much quicker from nitrate deterioration. While this is just a guess, it’s a pretty good bet that those particular years (43 though 46) were noted for the problems happening with the materials.
MGM’s 16mm TV prints made in the early to late 60s feature some pretty bad lab work. It looks like a lot of the cartoons were taken from combined color masters in 35mm, then reduced to standard print stock for the negatives. This process made the materials much more contrasty and grainy. The negative must have also been used a lot; prints often show 16mm print negative damage or replacement footage.
When Ted Turner acquired the MGM and pre-49 Warner libraries, instead of making video masters, he had new prints of many of the cartoons struck from master materials, making beautiful prints of many of the cartoon titles. Those prints were also made on LPP stock (out stuck between 82 and 85) so he did the collector world a giant favor by accident in many ways! Those prints are among the best 16mm prints of any cartoons on the collector market in 16mm.
Warner Brothers:
Warners, fortunately, didn’t have any giant fires. The cartoons did manage to be released a few different ways as time went on though, then managed to all come back to the same owner again eventually.
Guild Films:
Guild films made the first licensing deal with Warner Brothers. They appear to have been given a master positive of each cartoon they distributed. I’m not sure of the negatives for the black and white films they distributed ever left the hands of Warners, but it’s possible they did. The guild prints of the black and white Warners cartoons cut off the logos and, on occasion, references to the studio, as required by the studio for distribution. Funny enough, many of the Harman/Ising cartoons made for Warners didn’t have their logos removed at all. Why that is I don’t know. The Bosko cartoons all seem to have though.
Associated Artists Productions:
The nitrate masters on the pre-49 cartoons that were sold to AAP don’t seem to have left possession of Warner Brothers. Instead, a print master seems to have been made for AAP on all of them. Those print masters were used to make a 16mm reduction negative for each cartoon. The early 60s prints, in Eastman color, were mostly made at Deluxe labs, and suffer the same fate as many other cartoon series distributed around that time. One of the labs they used must have used Kodachrome for some of the masters since there are AAP prints in Kodachrome from the late 50s and early 60s and show up from time to time. That’s true of the Famous Studio’s Popeyes as well.
Warner Brothers Television:
Warners also distributed various packages of their cartoons to UHF stations from the late 60s into to the 70s. Their network appearances through that same time period were often edited for gags, while the 16mm prints made for the UHF stations were not. Warners, of course, also had many of their Porky Pigs recolored in the late 60s, and that package would also play on UHF stations.
In the next article, I’ll cover a little bit more on major studios, plus talk about early TV bootleg prints of cartoons.
Have a good week all!
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.
I’ve paid close attention to film and television credits for as long as I can remember. So, as a literal-minded child, I assumed that “associated artists productions” was a company that was owned by an association of the artists who drew the cartoons. What else could it be? The name “Guild” likewise implies a professional association. Of course, nothing could have been further from the truth; they might just as well have called themselves the Holy Roman Empire while they were at it. In fact, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Sunset Productions wasn’t located anywhere near that famous boulevard.
Jacques Kopfstein, whose name appears in the credits of Pat Sullivan’s final series of Felix cartoons as well as Les Elton’s masterpiece “Monkey Doodle”, spent the last part of his career as an executive at a.a.p. in the 1950s.
Of course, some of the nicest 16mm color prints of Warner Cartoons were printed on Agfa-Ansco color stock. This stock is a lot like Kodachrome, but not as contrasty. They really look great projected. Do you know anything of their history, Steve?
Well, whaddya know! In the “Sunset Productions” introductory screen, that’s the Drunk Dog in the Audience at the lower right!
[From Freleng’s “Shake Your Powder Puff” (1934), one of the last black & white Merrie Melodies. See the 1989 book “Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, p. 30, for more than you ever wanted to know about the Drunk Dog in the Audience!]
I too am curious about all these early TV or film distributors like “Guild Films.” I seem to recall that most prints I’ve seen of Edgar Kennedy and Leon Errol shorts that I saw when I was still in grade school (on a fledgling UHF TV station) had the “Guild Films” logos attached to them. Wasn’t the “Sunset Productions” company owened by Leon Schlessinger?
Steve, I hope you talk a little about the history behind the infamous “colorized” (or I should say “re-colored and altered”) black-and-white cartoons that a lot of us suffered through over 30 years ago. You may recall that when I treid to get a POPEYE cartoon to show for our theatrical POPEYE event in Chicago back in 1933, we couldn’t get prints to show of any of the B&W POPEYE cartoons thrugh Turner. I was not about to spend money to borrow a so-called “color” abomination of CAN YOU TAKE IT (1934) when Myron Waldman was one of our guests. Quick thinking and (at the time) a good memory led to me borrowing a 16mm print from the University of Wisconsin – Madison’s film library. THAT University still had the 16mm originals (well, sort of, they had the AAP re-titlings on them). Had I been smarter, I would have asked Prof. Donald Crafton to hunt for a tamer POPEYE cartoon in their collection, like POPEYE MEETS WILLIAM TELL. You may recall that Mr. Waldman was embarrased as to how violent CAN YOU TAKE IT was and he barely spoke to me after the film was screened at the show!
I remember the colorized “Looney Tunes ” all too well. These beautifully-executed shorts were transformed into cheap-jack then-contemporary imitations of TV cartoons on television stations and networks.
Those abominations have also made it onto bargain bin VHS compilations (and later DVDs) of public domain cartoons, often running at a slightly slower speed. It took me years to realize that those cartoons were originally produced in black and white.
Yeah, the colorized shorts in general are cursed as a concept alone. Anyways, several but not everything of the pre 1943 Looney Tunes shorts and the famous studios cartoons pre 1960s are in public domain which explains them being in those public domain vhs and dvd stuff.
I believe that it was A. A. P. who bought the Looney Tunes and Popeyes for tv. And then U. M. and M. bought the Betty boops and Fleisher and Famous Studios cartoons.
I think the AAP logo feels like plasters of the Looney tunes intro. sometimes or usually the start of the intro is repeated twice!
I’ve heard it said that that picture of Goopy Geer holding his nose on the Guild/Sunset title cards is him expressing his opinion of a lot of those mediocre mid-1930’s Looney Tunes.
That isn’t Goopy Geer.
I always thought Goopy Geer was holding his nose because there’s a skunk in the opposite corner of the screen.
If MGM has such beautiful copies, why has a DVD/Blu-ray of the restored Harman & Ising cartoons never been released? Is it due to some rights issue? Or is it simply that they aren’t a very commercially viable product? I would really love to see a project like this come to fruition.