In keeping with the Paramount cartoon theme, in today’s cartoon a turtle has to deal with Wolfie. I wish someone would give this poor wolf some food…

But first, life here, Thunderbean and related:

Yesterday was an incredibly busy and exhausting day here with the Senior Studio students at CCS all showing their final projects. It’s also a farewell or sorts, after spending four years knowing them and helping them through their college years. Some of the students graduating have helped more recently on Thunderbean projects, including digital restoration and cleanup for the things we’re doing for MeTV as well as a little animation for titles on the Blu-rays.

We’re nearly done sending a batch of eight special discs, and I’m working on preparing the next batch to go out hopefully within the month. I’m also helping Tommy Stathes finish off his excellent Dinky Doodle Blu-ray, a project with many years and many hours invested in it. It’s been one of my favorites to work on, as was the recent Back to the Inkwell Blu-ray/DVD set.

As I wait for several things to get back from replication, I’ve been putting the Cartoons for Victory set to the forefront after it was on a sort of holding pattern for a while. We were waiting for the four “Hook” cartoons from the Naval film archive. Sadly, we were recently informed that their prints of all four films are deteriorating, as were the prints that were scanned many years back. We’ve decided to no longer have the set in a holding pattern and are working on getting this Blu-ray upgrade together with the best material we have. We have the Hooks from the master tape we have and a partial print of one of the shorts. There’s so many great things on the set, and, as the other in progress titles, we’ll be glad to have this one out.

And – onto The Old Shell Game (1948)

I know a lot of you folks are enjoying the new Famous Studios Champions set from Cartoon Logic. It’s so nice to see these films from their master materials- a great improvement over previous available copies. Thad Komorowski did a beautiful job in cleanup/restoration of the shorts. If you haven’t gotten this set yet and like the Famous Studio cartoons, it’s a must.

Thunderbean did a DVD set of Noveltoons back in 2012. It was some of the first scans we did in HD, and cleaning them up with very primitive software back then was a real chore. We were so happy to get a good amount of the films in 35mm Technicolor prints. When we finally ported the set to Blu-ray, Thad was instrumental in cleaning up many of the films as well as providing a few commentary tracks. The set has been out of print for a while, and a few months back we decided to reissue it, re-cleaning up some of the films with the better, newer restoration software and replacing some of the prints. It will be out with the next batch of discs sent from Thunderbean within the next month or so.

Finding vintage 35mm prints in good shape on Famous Studio’s cartoons was always hard, but the collectors have been incredibly generous in lending things for so many of the Thunderbean projects. I’m glad there’s people that are involved in collecting that are generous enough to lend their rare prints. It’s not everyone of course, and some of the things we *really* want have been scuttled away for many years. Hopefully we’ll be able to borrow some of the those in the future.

Jerry Beck lent us this print of The Old Shell Game when we were producing the Blu-ray. It was pretty beat up and missing a little piece of footage near the end, but looked great in Technicolor otherwise. We’ve done a little more cleanup to the short now, removing many of the lines as best as we could. It’s still probably the most worn film on the set, but still a pretty fun watch.

I like the Famous Studios cartoons, and I always wonder how many of the stories came about in the 40s. It’s such a varied group of films in terms of themes and direction, with so many of them being really entertaining.

Let us know your thoughts on this one- especially if you have never seen it before (I bet most of you have though!).

Have a good week everyone!