Back From the Ink: Restored Animated Shorts | Intro by Jillian Borders, Jerry Beck

Um, well, good evening. Welcome to the Billy Wilder Theater, home of public programs for the UCLA Film and Television Archive. All program public programs are free. Thank you to an anonymous donor. Yay. [cheering] All right. Um, my name is Jillian Borders and I'm the head of preservation for the archive and thank you for joining us for this fun night of restored animated shorts. Um, we are so pleased to partner with the film foundation and the Seth McFarland Foundation on these restorations. So, there are countless animated shorts housed in the UCLA archives. So, it's quite a feat to choose only 12 to restore for this collection. Todd Winer and everyone at the film foundation, Chris Morola, Jennifer Anne, and Margaret Bod were instrumental in the selection process. The film source the film sources for all 12 of these shorts were on deposit from Paramount Pictures. So, we are very grateful for their cooperation on this project as well as for the scan for Koko's tattoo. Yes, thank you. Give them a round of applause. Um, the shorts you will see this evening span a period of almost 20 years. I think 1928 to 1944. Um, from silent black and white to two-color technicolor to threecolor technicolor. And as such, they were restored from a variety of different source elements and with a variety of different restoration challenges. The black and white shorts were all scanned from original picture negatives. The negatives for the Betty Boop shorts all had the original main and end titles removed and replaced when they were bought for television in the 1950s. Fortunately, we were able to find other original titles from similar time periods, mostly surviving as tiny roles that had been left in the can instead of discarded like most main titles, and we were able to use these as a reference for digitally recreating the titles. Um, I should note that Koko's tattoo, the sole silent short in the collection, would normally have music to accompany it. Um, unfortunately, we were unable to get an accompanist um for tonight's screening, so it'll be truly silent. Um, our apologies. I know. Yes, we just put that music back on. Um, so the best surviving element for our only two-color title, An Elephant Never Forgets, was a welleused nitrate print. Um, the remainder of the show is in threecolor technicolor. Um unlike most live action tech uh unlike um live action technicolor um films that use three strip sep excuse me three separate strips of film for the three color records animated features and shorts most commonly used um successive exposure printing where each film would be photographed onto black and white film three times in succession with filters to capture the different color records. So each film would be three times the length of a black and white film because each film is tripled. Um the negative would later be skipp printed in three passes to combine the three die layers. Um fortunately now the negative can be scanned all in one pass and it can be digitally composited to perfectly align the three color records. The picture work including scanning, color correction and digital restoration was all done at Roundabout Entertainment. Thank you to Greg Garvin and Vincent Perroszie. Um, yeah, I'm pretty sure they're not here, but um, yeah, [laughter] the sound was captured by Simon Daniel sound, and Simon is here. Um, yay. Um, primarily from the Nitrate original track negatives. Um, and audio mechanics to the sound restorations, removing clicks, pops, and distortion. Um, senior film preservationist Mickey Shannon was instrumental in this project from budgeting to prep work, project management, and QC. Um, I'll apologize in advance. You'll see a repeat of most of these names again before each short in our credits. Um although each short can stand alone. Tonight will be the first time that we're presenting all 12 shorts from this project together. Um but tonight is the world premiere of the restorations of Wilbur the Lion, You Can't Shoe a Horsefly, and An Elephant Never Forgets. So you're the first audience to see these restorations. Yum. I'd also like to extend a special welcome to Jane Fleer Reed and Mauricio Alvarado of fabulous Fleer Tunes Restored Fleerunes.com um who have been compiling, caring for and restoring the work of Max and Dave Fleer. Also welcome to Arie Liit who is doing the same for Puppet Tunes at puppetune.net. Um and my last round of thank yous finally goes to our screening partners AIFA Hollywood UCLA animation workshop and the UCLA AMIA student chapter. Thank you all. [applause] If you appreciate our restorations, the UCLA or the AMIA student chapter will be doing a theater takeover later this month where they will be presenting four archive restorations, Native Land and the Killing Field Floor on April 27th and Just Another Girl in the IRT and Parting Glances on April 28th. I hope you can join us there. It is now my great honor to welcome Jerry Beck to introduce the shorts. Uh Jerry Beck is a noted animation historian and cartoon producer. His over 15 books on animation history include The Animated Movie Guide, Looney Tunes, The Ultimate Visual Guide, and The 50 Greatest Cartoons. He currently teaches animation history at Cal Arts UCLA and Chapman University, curates a monthly cartoon club for Quinton Tarantino's New Beverly Cinema, and edits two blogs, Animation Scoop and Cartoon Research. As a film distributor, his company Streamline Pictures originally brought Miyazaki's Todoro and Otto's Akira to the US in the 1990s. And each year he presents the worst cartoons ever at Comic-Con International. For these restorations, Jerry aided in the selection of the shorts and was also very forthcoming with advice about the Betty Boop title recreations. So, please welcome to the stage Jerry Beck. [applause] Thank you. All right. Um, I'll try not to talk too long because I can talk a long time about each one of these films. And um, and we have a lot of films to run. So, uh, what I want to say though is I want to really really thank uh, Paramount Pictures. They finally have come around. This has been a this is right here a dream come true for me. This is something I've always wanted to see. restorations of the cartoons from their library uh and now showing them in a great theater and with a full house. This is exactly what I dreamed about years and years ago. Been trying to do it for a long long time. I really have to thank Paramount. Some studios um and I've dealt with them all. Um they they've they last thing the lowest thing on the totem pole is the cartoons. I understand the news reels. I understand that Laurel and Hardy comedies, the the classic movies, the live action films. Um, and but the cartoons are like below everything. Um, they're below the Dish Night films or whatever, whatever the lowest thing was. Um, and, uh, what they do is they think of the cartoons as kids fodder, old kids fodder. Um, you know, they don't have a place anymore. they don't have value anymore despite some of them having some very famous characters that are still wellknown today. Anyway, um we're going to prove all that wrong by our reactions and our what we're going to see on the screen when they're restored as you will see tonight. Um they're jaw-dropping. They're they're they're brand new valid entertainment that should not be buried in the vaults. They should be out there and enjoyed and seen like like any other classic movies from the golden age. And so that's what I want to say about that. Now, I'm going to look at the list here and quickly give a few notes on some of the cartoons that we're going to look at. Um, we're going to see cartoons from mainly the Fleer Studio, a couple of George Pal's puppet, and one cartoon a cult a cult favorite from Terry Tunes. Um, all of these are owned by Paramount as as has been said. Um, the Terry tune. Uh, here's the thing. Uh, those cartoons have looked awful forever. You know, they were looked awful when they were shown on TV in the in the 60s, you know, and later. Uh, spicey, fading, you know, and all that, you know, this is what they look like when they were played in front of a, you know, at a movie theater. Um, something I tell my students, um, I like them to understand as best they can how these cartoons were originally shown, what the context was of them at the time. You know, we grew up with them, uh, on a whole half hour of terry tunes or or a a video tape with that had an hour of terry tunes back to back to back. We live in a world with YouTube with, you know, with cartoon channels and this and that. We didn't have that world back then. And I think a lot of people here know that if people saw a cartoon, they only saw it once. It was like a comic strip in the newspaper. You know, you read the comic, you laughed, you threw the paper away. That's how cartoons were when they were shown in in theaters. Um, if they if if audiences gave something a good reaction, most studios, particularly Terry Tunes, remade the cartoon. You know, that's why there's so many cartoons with the same plots in them. The ones that stand out, of course, to us are the the ones from like Warers and other studios. tech savory where they didn't repeat themselves over over again or if they did they did it masterfully. Um the terry tune we're showing is uh the terry tunes were actually pretty cool uh into the 1940s in my opinion. Um we just don't see them. This particular one is uh similar to what was in vogue at that time which was what Tex Avery had started making fun of classic fairy tales uh and you know bringing them up to date you know with swing music or jive talk or this or that um and uh this one is uh actually on I don't understand memes internet memes but this one has one you know the the spaghetti the spaghetti thing the um the I think he's supposed to be Greek, you know, kind of like Parker Carcass, you know, the the the Papa Bear. Um, and um, but I definitely identified it's Arthur K doing the voice, who's the voice of Gandandy Goose. So, that's for you people who are really really into that part of it. Um, the puppet. The puppet. Holy moly. We got to really thank Arnold Lieovit for getting those out of the vaults, restored, and he's been putting them out on Blu-ray. These are two particularly unique ones in my opinion. Uh, two gun rusty. Um, pal did many, many series of different characters. I think he did that because it was easier. They they had the puppets built already. So, let's make another one with this character. Let's make another one with that character. This is one of the first ones, not the first, with the character of Rusty, a little boy who has daydreams. Um, it's interesting to me because of a couple of reasons. At one point he's look Rusty before he goes to sleep. Uh, and this one you'll notice he's looking at it on his wall and there's a a liveaction cowboy picture and I think some people here will recognize that that's uh Hop Along Cassidy William Boyd uh and who was films were being released by Paramount at this same time. So I think that was kind of an interesting little tiein. There's a song in the film called Down in Santa Fe. And as far as I know, this is maybe the only puppet or maybe there's another one, I'm forgetting it, [snorts] where they actually issued the sheet music for this song. It's a western song. They never did that. You know, no more comment than that. Little bit of the Lion. Um, uh, the other film that we're looking at is an interesting film because it's a little bit like Disney's Bongo, which came out the same year, 1947. the uh bongo and this film are about circus animals who get uh get put back in the jungle, you know, and then they don't know how to deal with that, you know. Uh very interesting. But they have two different completely different takes on how you do it. Uh >> the voice on that one >> who >> Oh, I don't know. I don't know who that is. >> Okay. The um sorry [laughter] the um the Fleer Studio. Oh yeah, one more thing I want to say about the puppet. You'll see I think in the opening of uh one of them the the Oscar. Uh they got an Academy Award for uh the technique that Pal created. Uh the technique is uh what we call replacement animation today and it's done more often today at the films from Leica Studios and others. Uh where they literally make a different for example the character saying a word hello. They'll make you know five or six different heads with the mouth in a different you know what I mean? It's just a weird they replace the head instead of moving the mouth. And it seems crazy, but it actually works today much better since we have 3D printing. Um, it's a very unique technique that makes the cartoons, the pup tunes a little more cartoony. In fact, I believe they actually uh hand animated some of the scenes, some of the cycles, the walk cycles and things. Uh, and then back then they actually sculpted these puppets out of wood. I mean, when you think about it, it's pretty pretty crazy. Um, we're going to look at many many from the Fleer Studio. I I like many of you perhaps, I grew up seeing these on TV when I was a kid. And these are the stuff of nightmares, particularly particularly of the ones we're looking tonight. couple couple of them tonight that are particularly nightmarish is u greedy Humpty Dumpty about this crazy mad Humpty Dumpty character uh beautiful beautiful stuff in this film but it is it's scary I was scared of this character when I was a kid fresh vegetable mystery similarly um that's a cartoon where uh the cops who are potatoes are are round up the suspects in the mystery and they literally literally grill them literally um and uh do other kinds of police brutality to these harmless vegetables. Anyway, I like that at the end of course they they there's a bunch of mice who are the villains who uh are sort of based on the deadend kids and uh I that must have went over really really well when this was made because that was a thing with uh the Fleers and later the the Paramount studio. They kept doing what I called the Leo Gorsy mouse, which became Herman the Mouse um later on, but I think it starts right here. The little stranger, which is an uh an ugly duckling story. Several of these, maybe not all, but several of these have those three-dimensional stereo optical backgrounds, which are super cool. And I show them in my class, and the students constantly are, how did they do that? you know, uh, they did they built real liveaction three-dimensional sets and they they moved them behind the the characters who are on on a cell and it works. I mean, it it still amazes and delights today. I can't wait to see the recreated titles for the Betty Boops. I'm going to stop here. Enjoy the show. Thank you. [applause]