Now Hear This is without doubt one of the weirder (and more difficult to find) WB shorts that Chuck Jones ever made, but it’s a nice reminder that even after twenty-five years of directing shorts, Jones was still open to experimentation and able to have fun with his chosen medium of expression. Credits include co-direction by Maurice Noble, sound effects by Treg Brown, and a co-writing credit between Jones and John Dunn, who I’m sure you’re all familiar with from the recent Animation Blast #9.

(via Mark Mayerson)

Brew reader Dave Stuckey has uploaded yet another crazy rare Ward Kimball clip: a Firehouse Five Plus Two performance from the MGM film Grounds for Marriage (1951). Just try to keep your toes from tapping, I dare ya. The cheesy acting inbetween the FF+2 comes courtesy of Van Johnson and Kathryn Grayson. Thanks Dave!

Here is one of the best MySpace pages I have seen devoted to a classic cartoon series.

Forgotten Flintstones contains a lot of fun images, facts, sound bites, and video devoted to offbeat Flintstonia (is that even a word?). Classic toys, commercials, and in-depth profiles of supporting players—including Jay Bondrock, Ann-Margrock, Gary Granite, Rock Quarry, Hot Lips Hannigan, Professor Rockimoto, The Wayouts and Ed Sullystone.

What more can I say? Yabba Dabba Doo!

Not to be overlooked in this year of great classic cartoon DVD releases (the Droopy collection goes on sale today) are these programs from our friends at Thunderbean Animation and Inkwell Images.

Steve Stanchfield from Thunderbean has been rescuing obscure cartoons for years and his previous compilations are text book examples of How-To restore and present this vintage material on DVD. His latest videos, The Little King and Cultoons, Part Two are vital additions to the collection.

The Little King is a collection of all ten uber-rare Van Beuren cartoons based on the classic comic strip by Otto Soglow. These films were produced in 1933-34 and, in addition to being animated by Jim Tyer, they are as surreal as anything the Fleischers were doing at the same time. As a bonus Steve includes the one Fleischer attempt to animate the Little King (co-starring Betty Boop) in 1936. And, Steve includes two rare Sentinel Louie cartoons from 1933 (this character was the “topper strip” on The Little King’s Sunday pages). If it can be imagined, these are even more off beat than the Little King.

Thunderbean’s second Cultoons collection is subtitled “Animated Education” as it contains 13 educational, industrial and commercial films from such diverse talents as Fleischer Studios, Terrytoons, Hugh Harman and UPA. These are the rarest of the rare and this set includes some informative - and hilarious - audio commentary by the likes of Mark Kausler, Milton Knight, Steve Worth, Mike Kazaleh and that little old winemaker… me.

We’ve plugged Ray Pointer’s program of rare uncut Alice Comedies before. But if you haven’t picked this up yet, now is the time. Ray has recently revised the collection (adding Alice Gets Stage Struck) and restored many cut scenes with rare footage only available here. These DVDs are highly recommended.

At the pace we’re going, by this time next week our site will likely be renamed Kimball Brew. But after seeing the incredible Ward Kimball interview with Tom Snyder below, I couldn’t resist digging into my collection and posting one more rare piece of Kimball video: his March 1954 appearance with Groucho Marx on You Bet Your Life. And don’t forget, Kimball’s got his own MySpace.

Over at CreativePro.com, writer Gene Gable has posted a great series of articles on all aspects of vintage design, discussing everything from bizarre children’s books to cocktail napkins.

On his post about Filmstrip propaganda, Gable posts frames from several cool old strips, religious parables aimed at Sunday School kids, mainly drawn by animator George Martsegis. But among the images he posts are two frames of a filmstrip created by Bill Hanna and Gene Hazelton!

Filmstrips were a popular teaching tool back in the 1940s, 50s and 60s, in the era before PowerPoint and video. The medium was a great outlet for commercial artists and cartoonists. I believe even Disney created filmstrips for educational purposes as well. I never knew Bill Hanna and Gene Hazelton did them. I wonder how many they made and when? Anyone have more info on these?

(Thanks, Lliam Amor)

David Mackenzie has gotten his hands on the hotly anticipated dvd set Droopy: The Complete Theatrical Collection, slated for release on May 15. This is big news as it’s the first time a set of Tex Avery’s MGM shorts have been released onto dvd. I was particularly anxious to hear how the set had turned out because…well…come on, it’s Droopy. David reports that there’s both good and bad news. He has a complete report on his blog but here’s the summary:

THE GOOD: Droopy’s Good Deed and Daredevil Droopy are both UNEDITED. Both shorts had politically-incorrect gags edited on an earlier laserdisc release. Also, some of the transfers, like the Ed Benedict-designed Dixieland Droopy, apparently look really nice color-wise. (More screenshots from the set are at the Classic Cartoons blog.)

THE BAD: Four out of the 24 cartoons on the set, or 16% of the shorts, are “DVNR disasters” according to David. He writes, “The affected shorts (termed “episodes” on the DVD, for some reason) are so badly eroded that the mangled lines are almost constant, not just in selected areas like on the Looney Tunes discs. Basically, if a character starts running, or the camera pans, you’ll see the artefacts. It’s pretty severe, severe enough to be spotted while fast forwarding.” Just look at the atrocious example below from Daredevil Droopy where both strings holding up Droopy’s swinging bar are completely gone.

DVNR, or digital noise reduction, has ruined countless classic animated shorts over the past couple decades. I wrote extensively about the technology in this article from 1998 which explains how the “restoration” process works and the effects its careless use can have on animation. During the course of research on that article, the common line I heard from telecine specialists was that it’s not the technology’s fault but rather the fault of the operators who set the machine’s levels too high. If that’s the case, then there’s got to be a hell of a lot of incompetent telecine operators in Hollywood because a huge (and growing) amount of classic animation has been rendered unwatchable by DVNR processing. The bottom line is most eloquently stated by David Mackenzie who writes on his blog, “Restoration, after all, is pointless if it ends up making the shorts look worse instead.”

A Hollywood production artist, part-time performer and animator, Paul Manchester, has inherited a cache of rare World War II animation artwork of great significance.

Manchester’s great uncle, Harold “Al” Curry, served as a storyboard artist under Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss) during the war. Paul recounts his story:

Before my great uncle Al died he was cleaning out a bunch of old stuff in preparation for a move and he gave me a manilla packet of old stuff he didn’t really know what to do with. I was following in his footsteps as an illustrator who occassionally worked in animation. At the time I briefly looked through it but was more distracted by the old art books and art supplies he gave me at the same time. Ten years passed.

Last month the National Academy of Sciences presented PRIVATE SNAFU VS. MALARIA MIKE as part of their Cartoon Medicine Show exhibition. It rang kind of a bell in the back of my brain and I pulled out the old manilla envelope and right on top was a rough storyboard drawing from Malaria Mike. I found four painted cels- two with backgrounds attached and a whole stack of roughs from HOME FRONT, PAY DAY (and others).

But the cool thing was an entire storyboard from an animated short called A FEW QUICK FACTS: WEAPON OF WAR. It has been bound into a small book maybe 8″w x 4″h and is about 1 1/2 ” thick- it has the entire script copy printed on the left side of the page and the image on the right.

Paul has scanned and posted all this great artwork - he even created a video, shooting the entire 89 page storyboard from the Weapon of War, assembled it in iMovie and posted it on YouTube.

Paul has set up a webpage to showcase his find. Original 1940s wartime cartoon art like this is extremely hard to find, as most of it was destroyed as classified material. Thank you Paul for making these rare pieces accessible to all.