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Author Topic: What happen to the Cartoons? Steve Matz Jedi Master Film Handler Posts: 672 From: Billings, Montana, USA Registered: Sep 2003 posted 01-26-2014 07:42 PM                     I'm sure there are more than a few forum Members that remember the old Single Screen Days on Saturdays. You saw a Cartoon,News Reel,2 reeler,A Serial(or Chapter Play as Cathy Bates Character called it) and at least 2 sometime 4 features. In other words the Perfect Afternoon Babysitter for Parents in the 50's,early 60's. My friend here that opened-up a double screen Drive-in the 90's wanted some of the nostalgia of the old Days; so he wanted to show a Cartoon before the Feature Started. No such Luck, Film exchanges said they no longer carried Cartoons of any Kind. So what happen to all these TOONS. Were the Prints that were still in good shape sent back to the Studios, Were they chopped up, Burnt, etc. I remember seeing The old Fleischer,Lantz,IB TECH Cartoons and they were in excellent condition coming on 1000ft Goldberg Reels. Really a shame that a kid today can't see a Real Cartoon on the Big Screen like they use to be Made. This computer generated Garbage they see today is Pathetic...  |  IP: Logged Joe Elliott Master Film Handler Posts: 497 From: Port Orange, Fl USA Registered: Oct 2006 posted 01-26-2014 08:09 PM                     Back when I managed a drive-in in the 90's the only place we could get them, and our intermission reels, was Film-Mack studios out of, I believe Chicago. I do not know if they are in business any more. If they are in business, maybe they have them in digital also. A quick Google does not find them however.  |  IP: Logged Martin McCaffery Film God Posts: 2481 From: Montgomery, AL Registered: Jun 99 posted 01-26-2014 08:13 PM                        You can probably still get some from the Classics divisions of the various disturbs. But they aren't going to be cheap, and you probably can't get single cartoons The sub-distribs that used to handle them (Kit Parker, Films, Inc etc) lasted until about the early 90's. I remember getting mint prints of MGM stuff like Tom & Jerry at DI's up until the mid-80's. I think the Fleischer stuff, at least pre-Paramount is public domain and I know they can be gotten on DVD if you are interested in showing that way.  |  IP: Logged Bobby Henderson "Ask me about Trajan." Posts: 10973 From: Lawton, OK, USA Registered: Apr 2001 posted 01-26-2014 08:38 PM                     When I was a kid a couple of the theaters on Marine Corps bases where my dad was stationed would play cartoons in front of the movies. The Sakura Theater on the Marine Base in Iwakuni, Japan sometimes had Saturday afternoon blocks of cartoons. They even showed some black and white serial shows. This was in the late 70's. I even remember a few drive-in theaters in towns like Yuma, AZ playing Looney Tunes cartoons, Tom & Jerry or other animated stuff in front of the movies. I can see a couple reasons why theaters wouldn't do this sort of thing now. Money is the big thing. I'm sure movie theaters would have to pay considerably more in rental fees to play cartoons like that now. Time is another. Get the customers in and out ASAP, get the auditorium cleaned and ready for the next show. Get at least 4-6 shows per screen played each day.  |  IP: Logged Mike Blakesley Film God Posts: 12767 From: Forsyth, Montana Registered: Jun 99 posted 01-26-2014 10:39 PM                        After one of the big chains (AMC I think) did a promotional run on a bunch of the Looney Tunes in the '90s, Kit Parker Films had them for rent. You could rent them in sets of three, at 3 months for $150.00. (You picked the titles you wanted out of a catalog and they would each come on one reel -- OR, they had various "combos" that had three toons spliced onto one reel.) So you could play any or all of them during that period as much as you wanted. We used to pick out the 3 movies that most "needed" a cartoon--maybe a Disney flick, or a very popular movie that we thought might need a little more concession time, etc. The prints ran from decent to trashed, with some being spliced-up or having the beginning or ending footage clipped off. There's nothing worse, cartoonwise, than not hearing the opening slide guitar "riff" of the Looney Tunes logo! Overall I found that people didn't really appreciate the cartoons for what they were. I talked them up a lot, with the "you're seeing them on the big screen where they were MEANT to be seen" or "you're seeing something people haven't seen in a theater in over 50 years," etc. but people were mostly "eh," probably because the cartoons were overexposed on TV. I think they might have helped concession sales a bit though. Even after that, I still wish we could get WB to offer a deal where they would grant a "blanket" license for a theatre to play a Looney Tune cartoon for a week. We'd pay the license fee, and agree to play only one toon at a time. We'd create our own DCP from a Blu Ray, so no production expense on their part. But I've been told they won't consider such a thing, and I suppose even if they did, the fee would be ridiculous...I think $25 would be about right but I'll bet they'd want $100 or more.  |  IP: Logged Marcel Birgelen Film God Posts: 3357 From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands Registered: Feb 2012 posted 01-27-2014 03:23 AM                     quote: Steve Matz This computer generated Garbage they see today is Pathetic... I don't think you should blame it on the fact that it's Computer Generated. It started with Pixar, but Disney has been putting an animated short in front of many of their feature presentations for quite a while now. Most of those short films are anything but garbage, although they're all computer generated. Personally, I like the idea of running a cartoon or animated short in front of the feature animation, although only if you don't feed me with 20 minutes of garbage (commercials and endless trailers) first. And I like a new production just like any old classic, as long as it's made with some love and dedication.  |  IP: Logged Robert E. Allen Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1078 From: Checotah, Oklahoma Registered: Jul 2002 posted 01-27-2014 10:03 AM                     Back in '06 I wanted to get WB cartoons. I did. A reel of 6. That's all they'd rent me. $100. A couple of them were badly scratched. I spliced a couple off in spite of the fact there was instructions saying not to. So you can probably get a reel of 6 from your WB rep.  |  IP: Logged Sam Graham AKA: "The Evil Sam Graham". Wackiness ensues. Posts: 1431 From: Waukee, IA Registered: Dec 2004 posted 01-27-2014 11:47 AM                        The 13th Avenue Warren in Wichita occasionally had classic WB cartoon shorts in front of features right up until they went all digital.  |  IP: Logged Kenneth Wuepper Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1026 From: Saginaw, MI, USA Registered: Feb 2002 posted 01-27-2014 12:07 PM                     Most cartoons were like the early days of vaudeville where the theme was slapstick or made fun of some ethnic group. Modern audiences are no longer entertained by these things and consider slapstick to be "violence" and ethnic humor is most unacceptable. Roadrunner is violent and Heckle and Jackle are too ethnically demeaning to be acceptable while Elmer Fudd made fun of physically handicapped. Modern audiences don't seem to know or like the classical music that was used for many of the cartoons. As a projectionist doing changeovers, having that little 7 minute reel was fun to insert as flat between two reels of Scope.  |  IP: Logged Leo Enticknap Film God Posts: 7474 From: Loma Linda, CA Registered: Jul 2000 posted 01-27-2014 12:34 PM                        A lot of preservation activity has been done on "short subjects" (not just cartoons, but newsreels, "interest" films and historical trailers as well) since the late '90s, because the emergence of the DVD extra feature created a beast that needed to be fed. Both the studios and the big non-profit archives have done a lot of work on this material, and there have been collaborative projects, too (e.g. between Warners and UCLA in preserving the Vitaphone musical shorts from the '20s, many of which have been reissued on DVDs and BDs such as The Jazz Singer, and shown on 35mm at occasional festivals). Agreed with Kenneth that some titles would be very problematic just to drop into a regular program (infamous examples here and here, but there are many other milder examples that still wouldn't be appreciated by many in a mainstream theatre setting now). Some censored versions have been published - for example, there was a Tom and Jerry DVD set that did the rounds in Britain around a decade ago, in which Mammy's African-American accent was dubbed over with a more neutral one and some of her scenes cut altogether (plus some other politically incorrect shots, e.g. Tom blowing himself up and then appearing as a blackface caricature when the smoke clears). So if the studios are comfortable with whatever they publish on consumer media, I can't see how they'd have a problem with the same material being screened theatrically. And as Mike points out, a well-mastered BD can in many circumstances match an indifferent 2K DCP for subjective image quality, and so making them available to exhibitors again would purely be a case of licensing, i.e. virtually zero cost to the distributor.  |  IP: Logged Martin McCaffery Film God Posts: 2481 From: Montgomery, AL Registered: Jun 99 posted 01-27-2014 02:50 PM                        quote: Mike Blakesley Overall I found that people didn't really appreciate the cartoons for what they were. You ain't kidding. I once had a woman go ballistic on me for showing a cartoon before the movie. We were doing a nostalgia thing - newsreel, cartoon, movie all from 1941. She just came out incensed that we would show a cartoon at an adult show. It was, she said, "an insult to her intelligence." Jeez  |  IP: Logged Mike Blakesley Film God Posts: 12767 From: Forsyth, Montana Registered: Jun 99 posted 01-27-2014 03:01 PM                        Well...that shows she has very little intelligence! I was always a huge fan of Looney Tunes, but after listening to some of the commentaries and watching the "Behind the Tunes" features on the Golden Collection sets, I had a whole new appreciation for the amount of thought and work that went into those films. There's so much below the surface that most people don't see. They're not "just cartoons!"  |  IP: Logged Leo Enticknap Film God Posts: 7474 From: Loma Linda, CA Registered: Jul 2000 posted 01-27-2014 03:11 PM                        Agreed - they're very incisive social commentary. Wabbit Twouble anticipated the environmentalist movement over four decades before their concerns became mainstream. It explores the concerns both that car use/tourism damages natural beauty spots etc., and the idea that these places have to be packaged up and made safe for the new urban middle classes to visit (hence Elmer bringing a carload of mod cons with him). The Isle of Pingo Pongo does the same thing (natives on a desert island have to perform bang up to date western jazz in order to be tourist-friendly, and far from appreciating the native culture, all Elmer wants to do is shoot them), but that aspect has been (understandably, I guess) undermined by the obvious racism issues. Another one of my favorites is Bugs and Elmer parodying The Barber of Seville. It's full of jokes that you're simply not going to get unless you know at least something both about opera and the homoerotic references (neither of which is likely to apply to anyone younger than upper teens). Interestingly, this one makes jokes about homosexuality that are (to me, at any rate) every bit as potentially problematic as the racist ones in some of the infamous "censored eleven", but yet it's still easily and legally available, and has even been shown with a live orchestra at the Hollywood Bowl not so long ago.  |  IP: Logged Bobby Henderson "Ask me about Trajan." Posts: 10973 From: Lawton, OK, USA Registered: Apr 2001 posted 01-27-2014 03:19 PM                     Some of those old cartoons indeed had racist overtones or were just plain blatant about it. That kind of material would not fly with audiences today. I would prefer to see some of those classic cartoons prior to the start of a G or PG rated movie, as opposed to all the freaking TV commercials and other crap playing nonstop before the movie starts. There's no point in putting cartoons on the front of a PG-13 or R rated show. I like the Warren Moore theater's policy of having curtains shut and merely playing house music before the start of the movie. Too many other theater chains have a projector playing TV commercials and other crap at dim levels well in advance of the movie's start time. Then they have the 20-25 minute pre-show pack run at full brightness and then the movie. I suppose those chains have to keep all those ad dollars coming in, as opposed to playing something the audience might enjoy more.  |  IP: Logged Mike Blakesley Film God Posts: 12767 From: Forsyth, Montana Registered: Jun 99 posted 01-27-2014 06:32 PM                        quote: Bobby Henderson There's no point in putting cartoons on the front of a PG-13 or R rated show. Speak for yourself, man! I would love to see a cartoon before any movie. The day that society decided that all cartoons were for kids was a sad day. It sure put some stupid limitations on animation.  |  IP: Logged

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