Virtually the whole run of the publication through the silent era is available on archive.org but Mr. Scrappyland, Harry McCracken, alerted me to editions from the early sound era, with a good portion of the editions up to the end of 1936 available. They’re invaluable for researchers. Unlike Boxoffice, which has much of its archives on-line, The Film Daily is searchable. And the scans are pretty good, not murky like the ones at the vault at Boxoffice. Want to know when Tex Avery arrived at Leon Schlesinger? When Carlo Vinci left Van Beuren? Who produced the Bonzo series? It’s all there.
The ads are stunning. Many are in full, vibrant colour. And the ones for cartoons feature studio artwork so the characters look like the characters. I’m going to post some from 1936. The worst that can be said is some of the pages are yellowed and the gutter gets in the way so part of the image isn’t there.
The Popeye and Fleischer studios ads were part of an 11-pager by Paramount. Surprisingly, Warners forked out a two-pager for the short “Let it Be Me”—complete with credits.
You can click on any of them to make them larger.
The ads for 1929-30 are interesting. It can’t be under-estimated how Mickey Mouse created a huge demand for sound cartoons and studios started gearing up to make them. We’ll try to post some of those in the not-too-distant future.
The images on the Sindbad poster look like real cels.
ReplyDeleteThere was once an article on Bob Jaques' blog about the posters from "The Film Daily". Some from 1934 and 1935 featured designs similar or from "Sindbad..." and so he concluded that it was in production (or pre-production) much before...
That Sindbad ad is featured as a color plate in Leonard Maltin's "Of Mice and Magic".
ReplyDeleteThe Columbia Barney Google cartoons are considered lost.-
http://www.cartoonbrew.com/classic/columbias-barney-google.html
It's interesting, in the Harman-Ising ad, that when quoting The New York Times about the quality of Hugh and Rudy's efforts, they simply leave blank the spot where Mr. Disney's name would have gone. Some of that MGM hubris at work, no doubt (unless somehow they believed by mentioning Walt, Mr. Exhibitor would then run out to United Artists' regional rep to book their cartoons).
ReplyDeleteHR, I suppose if one searches through the articles, they might get an idea. I found another Sindbad ad from 1935.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the note, TC. Nice going, King Features. I found two more full-pagers for Barney from '35.
JL, sounds like the old newspaper "don't mention the competition" credo.