The Last Puppetoon?

When George Pal stopped producing his stop motion Puppetoon short subjects in 1947, he kept his pioneering replacement animation technique alive in various feature films he made throughout the years (Variety Girl, tom thumb, Wonderful World of Brothers Grimm). He even made one last Puppetoon (The Tool Box Ballet) for Chuck Jones’ Saturday morning series Curiosity Shop (1971).

Stop-motion master Mark Caballero sent me this You Tube embed (below) and wondered if I’d seen it before. No, I haven’t… and it begs the question: Did Pal keep his Puppetoon studio going during the 1950s to do TV commercials? I hadn’t read that anywhere before or seen any others. But then again, how often is the studio and producer given a credit like this on a commercial?

At the time, Pal himself was immersed in producing sci-fi features like Conquest of Space or The Time Machine. It’s interesting that he kept the Puppetoon name (and logo) alive during this period, when the late series was finding renewed interest due to TV syndication.