Terrytoons - Pretzels

Every month, I'll be posting a complete rare cartoon. Not the well-known shorts you see on television and DVDs, but some of the rarest theatrical cartoons around. Like my previous video, this one will only be available for two weeks.

This month's cartoon is the second Terrytoon that was made (in 1930): Pretzels. Largely animated by Frank Moser, this was one of the "boy meets girl, boy loses girl to villian, boy battles against villian, boy wins, boy gets girl back again" cartoons that were so typical of the early Terrytoons.

Here, I am proud to present a complete print. However, this is a French edition with German subtiles (it was shown on the German channel Arte). This print featured two scenes that were absent on the 1950's US television prints: the opening scene with Phil Scheib and his orchestra in silhouette; and another where the two mice, in the beer garden, orders for "two hot milks".

Enjoy!

Mighty Mouse Playhouse

Here is the first of (hopefully) several video clips that will feature on my blog.
This one contains the rare opening titles and break bumpers from the 1950's Terrytoons series Mighty Mouse Playhouse - in colour! These were taken from a couple of British 1980's Mighty Mouse tapes released by Channel 5 (not to be confused with the UK TV channel). It's a shame these tapes don't contain the closing titles (which I have in B&W, but are not included in this clip).
Enjoy!

PLEASE NOTE: Clips featured on this blog will be online for a limited time only. They will be available for two weeks before I permanently delete them (if it happens before the two weeks are up, it's likely that Dailymotion has deleted them themselves).

Ugly PD cartoon video covers in the UK

Many of you guys would have seen quite a lot of American Public Domain cartoon covers, and like me, you view most of them are pretty darn ugly. But over here in the UK, we do seem to get our share of ugly PD covers too. In this post, I will show you a selection of what I consider downlight ugly covers. I apologise in advance if some of you become temporarily blind after seeing these.
The first two are covers from a trio of 4-hour cartoon compilation videos released by Braveworld (later released by Polygram/Universial) in the early 90's. Some of you Brits may remember seeing some of the other "artist"'s covers on NTV's and Virgin Vision's own PD videos:



Ugly cartoon artwork has started to creep in on our DVD covers too. Here are two that are released by a German company called Planet Media Entertainment (under the name Planet Song):

Going back to VHS, perhaps the most famous PD cartoon video company here in Blighty was "Screen Originals". Each title had two different covers, one released by both Movie Makers and Diamond Films, and one by an unknown company (probably Screen Originals themseves). The latter had quite tasteful covers, but the MM/DF editions had some fairly awful artwork. Here is one example:
And if you think that one was quite bad, wait till you see the next one. In my view, this is the most scariest cartoon video cover ever (in the UK, at least)! No wonder I never see this title fly off the shelves:

Screen Originals also had the ugliest-looking UK PD video logo ever (no prizes for guessing who that character is supposed to be):