I have a question for some older projectionists.

My mother told me that many years ago film sessions used to have an intermission and also generally had a cartoon short as well eg Bugs Bunny.

These days we just seem to get a lot of ads, movie trailers and then the main feature. Does anyone know why they stopped the cartoons and took away the intermission? [I'd love to see those old Bugs cartoons up on the big screen at our local drive-in.]

It seemed to me to be quite a good idea and an enhancement to the cinema experience.

Why have we gone backwards?

The very best part were the serials which all of us kids would talk about all week. They kept you on the extreem edge of your seat.

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IMO, The cartoons are gone partly due to the fact that they are so readily available on television/video, and until recently many of the cartoon prints were in VERY BAD condition, some virtually unprojectable, either because of aging film stock (fading/VS) or missing footage. Warner has made some new prints of many of the classic Looney Tunes cartoons and I am sure they are still available thru Warners...

As for the intermission: Excepting drive-ins and some discount vennues, the double-feature has gone the way of the dodo the distributors want the maximum amount of 'doors' they can get out of each title,and a double feature diminishes thise prespects.

>>How were cartoons distributed? Were they attached with the feature or did each theater set up their own ongoing cartoon deal with a distributor?<<

Usually the cartoons were available independently from the distributors, RKO, then later BV handled the Disney cartoons, Warners, then MGM, then Warners again handled the WB stuff, Universal handled the Walter Lantz (Woody Woodpecker/Chilly Willy, etc) product, Paramount handled Popeye and several others, Columbia handled the non-Tom & Jerry Hanna-Barbera cartoons, MGM/UA handled T&J and Pink Panther.

The cartoons were separate entities from the features, and back then were almost never an attachment to a print. That practice is fairly recent, usually to 'fill space' when you have the latest animated 'feature' that is only an hour long or less...

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At an indoor theatre, cartoons reduced the number of showtimes available or pushed the last feature too late, and unless the feature was very short the cartoon was often skipped.

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The shipping was a ripoff. They wanted to charge us $40 for shipping from California to Montana, for ground UPS! When I said that was ridiculous, they lowered it to $15, which is still about 2X as much as it really costs, but not such a ripoff.

Print quality was OK to poor.

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For country houses usually the film exchange would put together approx. a 2 hour program, how many shorts thrown in depended somewhat on feature runtime.

The cartoon libraries were long ago sold to television but were still available to theatres. A double bill would nearly always be 2 features from the same studio, % about the same. Drive-ins needed a show & a half, but you could get a cheapie to fill in the middle, this need was often filled by AIP with awful lo-budget stuff, but prints could last a long time since it only ran once per nite. Some awful thing that ran only 80 min. would be perfect since if you had a good 1st-run movie from Paramount which was drawing, the AIP would have driven most of the people away by the 2nd reel and the ones waiting outside could start driving in. After the AIP another intermission and then the people would all be in place and settled for the 2nd show.

We also had a library of long 20-min. shorts which were useful on summer evenings when the sun set late. You'd start with one of these while it was still daylight, followed by a cartoon & some trailers & then finally it would be dark enough so the feature could be seen easily. This process prevented horns blowing from people wanting the show to start even tho could hardly see anything.

Today, Mike B. makes the excellent point that a classic WB cartoon would make today's feature look bad by comparison.

It's a lot of work, I had most of it done years ago, primarily from WTBS with about 125 VHS tapes full of shorts. I have about 90% of the Stooges shorts, 2/3 of the WB cartoons and most of the MGM's, assorted others like the chipmunks but usually I didn't record the junk. Quality varies from new prints to poor.

Today many of the MGM and WB shorts are seen on Turner Classic Movies channel, the Stooges are on AMC. Would like someday to have all of the Harvey singing cartoons, this is a missing hole in the library.

The way to do it today is get a tivo machine and program to catch the cartoon network when they are showing WB cartoons, for example, record to HDD at maximum quality, then transfer this to a final master on Hi-8, perhaps, with the commersh garbage perfectly snipped out.

Maybe someday I'll redo parts of it. Since the stooges on amc were all from 35mm prints I did about 25 additional tapes when they started.

From my own perspective, I find that animated cartoons do not look as good on tv as up on the big screen. Most of today's theatre patrons would probably not have seen a bugs bunny or loonie tunes cartoon projected up on the big screen.

In my humble opinion seeing these classic cartoons in their full glory (with a good print) is an experience in itself. I have not seen much animated stuff on the big screen but that which I have seen has impressed me. The larger screen gives the cartoon that much more impact.

I note that cinemas are today looking for new and innovative ways to bring in more cinema patrons. I hope that they can find a way to include these classic cartoons in their product mixes.

In response to cartoons looking better on the big screen, that is certainly no joke. Anyone who has seen an original IB tech print of one that is 50 years old will certainly agree they are something amazing to look at!

If you could get a print of one of these cartoons does this mean you effectively get to run it in your theatre for free?
http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Studio/9659/publicdomain.html

Are prints available of these public domain cartoons?

cheers Peter