Spunky the Snowman

Sigh. Good intentions don’t always work out.

Here I was all set to post Christmas cartoons you likely hadn’t seen before, and I should have known Jerry Beck would have done it already, at least in this case.

In the 1950s, television couldn’t get enough cartoons. Kids were willing to turn on the set and watch them for hours. Stations and their advertisers will willing to accommodate them. Even hoary old silent theatrical cartoons produced by John Bray were resurrected with a newly-added soundtrack. But there were only so many American-made cartoons to go around and, at the time, producing fresh animation for television appeared too unprofitable.

Eventually, low-budget packagers turned to foreign cartoons. All that had to be done was add an English-language soundtrack and ta-da! Whole half-show syndicated shows were built on them; The Nutty Squirrels Present was one; so was Cap’n Sailorbird.

Among the cartoons that aired on the latter show was a Russian short called “The Snow Postman.” As Mr. Beck’s Cartoon Research site points out, the unedited (19½ minute) version won an award at the Institute of Chartered Foresters in Edinburgh in 1956. It was scrunched down for American TV use and changed from a New Year’s cartoon into a Christmas one (after all, those Godless Commies in the Soviet Union we were warned about were engaging in a war on Christmas, you know). For TV, it was called “Spunky the Snowman.”

Producer Saul J. Turell started out in the post-war ‘40s as the head of Sterling Films, which originally produced educational films for TV, and distributed old shorts for the small screen. He was involved in a number of projects for David Wolper Productions, including a “videumentary” on Rudolph Valentino and won an Oscar in 1980 for his short documentary on Paul Robeson. He died of cancer at age 65 in 1986.

The print below is very red-and-green (appropriate for the holidays, I guess) and it looks like there’s been some rotoscoping.