An Unrestored American Worker

Here’s the reason why Steve Stanchfield and his team at Thunderbean Animation are needed.



The poor frame you see above is from Going Places, a 1948 cartoon from John Sutherland Productions. It’s a piece of pro-business propaganda, but was also released theatrically by MGM. After all, distributing a ready-made cartoon was less expensive than having the Mike Lah-Preston Blair unit create one with Metro’s money (Sutherland cartoons, more or less, replaced the unit).

Sutherland was a minor player in animation. But Steve decided some of the studio’s shorts were worth restoring and has put them on home video, including my favourite, Destination Earth, and A is For Atom. Steve made a business decision that people want to see—and will buy—theatrical animation that isn’t from the A-list studios. He and his little group have very painstakingly and lovingly restored cartoons that don’t get a lot of love—series from Ub Iwerks and Van Beuren that were relegated to the public domain. Other small companies, such as Tommy Stathes’ Cartoons on Film, have done the same thing with niche cartoons.

To get back on track, a beat-up print of Going Places uploaded more than 20 years ago in low resolution to the Internet Archive has been copied and re-uploaded hither and yon. This one deserves a restoration job, too. It’s a typical Sutherland short of the period about building profits, lowering prices for consumers and how this benefits the American Worker through a higher standard of living.

There’s an interesting sequence where a factory worker strolls along in a walk cycle where he swings his fists back and forth. The backgrounds change as he moves along. The warehouse dissolves into the front office, where he accepts his pay.



Our worker, having received his “high wages” (thanks solely to management), is able to take a vacation (on a women-only beach, it appears), and deposit the remainder of his salary to a smiling bank teller. Note the diagonal changes in backgrounds.



And, thanks to his “comfortable, colorful working conditions,” he is able to own his own home. The bank background dissolves into his front yard.



There are no credits on this short, but the music is unmistakeably by Darrell Calker as it is arranged and scored similar to his cartoons of the late ‘40s for Walter Lantz.

The book “Sometimes in the Wrong, But Never in Doubt” quotes a 1961 New York Times article that Going Places had aired on 63 of the 107 TV stations in the U.S, reaching at least 6.7 million people through television. It will reach even more if Thunderbean, or some similar outfit, scopes out a good print and goes to work on it for home video.