A Day at the Van Beuren Studio

New York City had three cartoon studios in the 1930s that were busy with theatrical releases. The Fleischer studio released its Betty Boop and Popeye cartoons through Paramount and was the best of the three. Terrytoons had several corporate relationships but its cartoons went out with 20th Century Fox features. And then there was Van Beuren, which released several other short subjects besides cartoons, and was partly owned by RKO. In 1936, RKO decided it would rather hand money to Walt Disney to make cartoons for it, so it closed the Van Beuren studio.

I feel bad for Van Beuren. Its early cartoons are not very well drawn at times and most have no real story to speak of, but there’s something likeable about them. The studio should have been able to get its act together. By 1936, it had some pretty good animators like Jack Zander, Bill Littlejohn and Carlo Vinci. It had solid properties in Felix the Cat and the Toonerville Trolley (though neither were owned by the studio). It had Joe Barbera, who knew how to construct a funny story and add gags along the way. Okay, it had Burt Gillett and his rather unstable style of managing. But if the studio had decided to go for slam-bam comedy, it might have finally turned the corner. But it was not to be.

Let’s tour the Van Beuren studio, courtesy of this feature story in the New York Herald Tribune of April 17, 1932. No one is quoted and no names are mentioned. It’s simply an outline of how the studio made cartoons. Interestingly, there’s no mention of dialogue, but the sound was added after the drawings were made and not before. And readers certainly got a lesson on how cartoons were shot in painstaking detail. Four people seemed to be working in the camera department at any given time.

Putting the Animation in Cartoons
For approximately fifteen years animated cartoons have been entertaining motion picture audiences with the antics of their funny characters and mystifying those who wondered how the little figures acquired life, how they learned to sing and how the sound effects were timed so perfectly.
A visit to the studio where Æsop’s sound fables are produced by the Van Beuren Corporation for RKO release will give an idea of the amount of tedious work that is required for one cartoon.
Motion pictures do not move of themselves, but are a succession of still pictures projected on the screen at the rate of ninety feet a minute, or a foot and a half a second. There are sixteen “frames,” or pictures to one foot of film and therefore twenty-four separate pictures are shown on the screen each second. Ordinarily motion pictures are photographed at the same rate of speed at which they are projected, but in animated cartoons the camera photographs but one frame of picture at a time. But before the photographic stage is reached there are many other details that must be taken care of.
In the days of silent pictures a staff of twenty-five men was sufficient to produce a cartoon each week. Today, not counting the music and effect men employed for recording purposes, twice that number are needed to make one cartoon every two weeks.
Artists Maps Out Story [sic]
First there is the story to be worked out. As so many technicalities are involved, outside scenarios are not solicited and the artists gather in a conference room to map out the story. At this meeting, in addition to the artists, there are the musical director [Gene Rodemich] and what might be termed a “song and dance” man [Jack Ward]. Music to accompany the various scenes must be selected in advance. Various steps or gags are demonstrated and the artists jot down their notes and make rough sketches. Also, they often attempt to illustrate the action of a character. Sometimes two or three days are required before the artists can return to their boards and get down to actual drawing.
Fifth men are employed at the studio, all of whom devote their time exclusively to drawing. These are divided into three groups: artists, or animators at they are genuinely called, the tracers and the inkers.

Fifteen artists sketch their drawings on translucent tissue paper. The average cartoon of 700 feet requires from 10,000 to 15,000 separate drawings, as well as from twenty-five to thirty backgrounds. This may seem an impossible task, but some of the drawings consist merely of a hand or a food, later to be superimposed over another drawing to make the complete picture.
The artist’s desk consists of a large drawing board with a square approximately seven by nine inches cut out of the center in which is fitted a piece of plate glass. Below the glass is an electric bulb, the reflected light enabling the artist to follow through several layers of paper the action of the figure he is drawing. The paper has two perforations at the top which fit over two pegs on the drawing board. This system of holes and pegs is used throughout the entire process, including photographing, the purpose being to insure proper registration of the drawings.
The artist now begins his scene, which may be a cat walking. The first sketch would show the cat starting a step. The next would show it finishing the action. By placing these two drawings above the light, the artist can see the start and finish of the action and he must then fill in the intermediate drawings to give the process smoothness. This is termed “animating” and requires great skill. The drawings are numbered according to scene and group and must be made so that the action will synchronize with the music. For this purpose the music is set up by the musical director by “beats.” Sometimes the artist will not even know the musical selection for the scene he is drawing, but if he knows the number of beats a minute he can make his animation in perfect synchrony.
The Tracing Department Enters
As scenes are completed, the drawings are turned over to the tracing department, where the outlines of the figures are traced in ink on specially treated celluloid. The use of celluloid is a great time-saver, but this will be explained later as its use more directly applied to the photography.
As the tracers finish the drawings, they are placed on drying racks and are turned over to the opaquing department, which fills in the outlines with black, white or gray paint, a chart being provided with each scene designating what shades are to be used on each character. When the opaquing department has completed its work, the celluloids or “cells” are ready to be turned over to the camera department.

Photographing an animated cartoon is a tremendous task necessitating two camera men and two assistants working from morning to night. The average time required is eleven to twelve days. With each scene that is delivered to the camera department there is also delivered an exposure sheet on which are shown the background and celluloids by number for each individual frame or picture. Four separate drawings are photographed at the same time, one atop the other, and here is where we see the saving of time made possible by the use of celluloid. Only objects that actually move must have separate drawings. The camera is mounted directly above a rack, or table, on which the camera man first places the background. On this background are shown the objects that do not have animation or life throughout the scene.
After the background is put in place, three layers of celluloid are placed on top of it, various characters appearing in the scene being on the separate layers of celluloid. For instance, three characters walk into the picture, one at a time, and then stand alongside another to sing a song. The camera man would first place his background with three blank celluloids above it and snap several frames to give the final picture continuity and so that the characters do not appear to rush in. This action would be marked on the exposure sheet for the proper number of frames.
Then the first character appears. To complete one step requires from five to ten drawings, depending on the speed desired, the faster the action the fewer the drawings. However, if too few drawings are made the action becomes jumpy. While the first character is walking in to take his place the action is confined to one celluloid, the set-up on the camera being first the background, then two blank celluloids and on top the celluloid on which the character appears. When the first character takes his position in the scene the second character starts to enter, the action being the same as the first.
How Celluloids Are Arranged
The set-up would now be changed so that first there would be the background, then the first celluloid with the character who is already in his place, then a blank celluloid, and on top the celluloid on which is traced the outline of the second character. When the second character is in his place the third character enters. Now all three layers of celluloid are in use until the third character is in place.
For the purpose of better illustrating the celluloid process, let us say that the three characters do not move their bodies while singing, merely opening their mouths in unison. The three figures would then be drawn on one celluloid and the three heads on another, so that separate drawings to animate the heads only would be needed, these being so set that when the celluloids are in place they would appear as one picture. there would then be an extra celluloid which might be used if the singers were to move their hands or feet for the purpose of adding gestures.
The camera man in photographing would following his exposure sheet which would read “Background No. 1.” “Celluloids 1, 2, 3” for the first frame or picture. The next exposure would read “Background No. 1,” “Celluloids 1, 2, 4” on down through the scene, the celluloids being changed by the cameraman as indicated on his exposure sheet. But this is not the only thing the cameraman must keep in mind. Sound enters into the photography as well as every other operation in the making of a sound cartoon. The cameraman is instructed on the rhythm or number of beats of the music that is later to be added and by means of a secret process [the Rufle baton?] registers the beats on the negative film.
When the photographing is completed, the various scenes are arranged in order and a master print is made. All this while the musical director has been working out his music and rehearsing it, arranging original composition whenever necessary, so that, by the time the print is returned from the laboratory, he is ready for a final rehearsal. Minor cuts are sometimes necessary, but as a rule the work is so perfectly timed that the operations go through without a hitch.

The operations now shift before the microphone. The essential requisites are a sound proof room, the necessary recording apparatus, a projection booth and machine for the purpose of projecting the picture (silent) on the screen and last, but not least, the men to supply the music and sound effects. The film is started, the men get their cue, and the score is rehearsed, music, footbeats, thunder and lightning effects, all coming in at their proper places. The preparatory work has been so complete that one rehearsal is generally sufficient. The microphone is next put into action and the recording takes place.
It now merely remains for the picture negative and the sound track negative to be delivered to the laboratory, matched up properly, and hundreds of prints made so that another cartoon may be presented to audiences around the world.

Use 12,000 Units In Single Cartoon

Here some some figures prepared by a cartoon artist which give a concise estimate of the work involved:
Fifty artists make twenty-six animated cartoons a year.
Each cartoon averages 12,000 drawings.
Each drawing is handled five separate times—penciling, inking, opaquing (black, white and gray).
312,000 drawings are animated in one year.
312,000 drawings are worked on 1,560,000 times.
The drawings make approximately 18,200 feet of film.
All this, one year’s work of fifty men, can be shown in the screen in 3 hours and 20 minutes.

What Bugs Knows

“Stop right there, rabbit. How much do you know?” asks gun-toting Rocky. Bugs proceeds to ramble off some trivia. Rocky decides Bugs “knows too much” in Warren Foster’s parody of gangster film dialogue.

Bugs has some neat finger movements as he enumerates his facts.



Animators on “Bugs and Thugs” are Manny Perez, Art Davis, Virgil Ross and Ken Champin.

The Hot Dog That Failed to Escape

Oswald is selling hot dogs on the beach in All Wet, a 1927 silent cartoon by Walt Disney for the Winkler studio.

Almost 90 years later, it’s still an entertaining cartoon. Oswald points to his product with his ears and then attacks an escaping wiener.



No wonder Disney could bat these things out. This cartoon had eight animators.

The Not-So-Crazy Frank Fontaine

“I can’t look at him,” Jack Benny confided in an ad-lib to his radio audience, as he, and they, broke up over the routine of Frank Fontaine. If you know him at all, it’s for his appearances on the Joe the Bartender segment of The Jackie Gleason Show as Crazy Guggenheim.

Crazy was just another name for a character Fontaine did in nightclubs in the late ‘40s. He played an off-kilter sweepstakes ticket winner called John L.C. Sivoney. He brought the character to the Jack Benny radio show for a few appearances and audiences laughed themselves, um, crazy at his ridiculous monologues that were punctuated by a loud, laughing wheeze. That catapulted him into fame.

Fontaine’s home life could have been crazy. He eventually had 11 children. But the way the Boston Globe told it in a feature story published on December 13, 1953, things off stage for Fontaine were very orderly and he was in complete control of his career as well. Incidentally, you can read more about Frank Fontaine in this post.

TV Star Frank Fontaine Sticks Close to His Family of 9
By EDWARD L. JAMIESON
Frank Fontaine, the 33-year-old TV, radio and movie comedian whose livelihood depends on his ability to make people double up with laughter, is quite ready to tell anyone who wants to listen one thing that isn’t a joke.
That, says Frank, is raising a large family, a subject on which he and his wife, who has just given birth to their ninth child, are experts.
* * *
“Having nine kids may seem funny to other people,” says the creator of the muddle-headed John L.C. Sovoneeeyy, whose grimaces and buffoonery send thousands of people into gales of laughter, “but it isn’t funny to us. It’s a job.”
It’s a job, as a matter of fact, that Frank takes with a deadly seriousness that would startle his fans. “It just happened that way,” he said. “I didn’t intend to have 1000 kids. It’s not hard to have nine children. That’s not a big thing. But when all the kids grow up and are fine citizens, have good educations, and are married to nine people, then I have done something in life. That’s when I want to take my bows.”
In order to insure that his kids will grow up the way he wants them to, Frank Fontaine has turned his back on countless enticements of the entertainment work and settled for a moderate professional pace that gives him plenty of time to be with his family.
* * *

“I can’t have nine children and bring them up properly if I’m in Chicago, New York or California and away from them all the time,” he says. “A father really has to be there. It’s really fair to my wife or the kids if I’m not at home, so I mix my family with my business. I work in New York or somewhere two or three weeks and stay at home for two or three weeks.”
* * *
To provide their growing family with sufficient space the Fontaines have just moved from a seven-room home in Medford, where they lived for many years, to an expansive 11-room home in Winchester. Since Frank received his start in the big-time on the Ed Sullivan show in 1948, he has twice taken his family to Hollywood to live, has twice returned because his wife became lonesome for her family and friends in Greater Boston.
“I said if she’s not happy I won’t be, so we moved back here,” says Frank. “Now I know that this house is our home for sure, and I’m not going to leave here again.
“N.B.C. offered me a show like Sid Caesar’s and C.B.S. offered me a show like Jackie Gleason’s, but that would mean rehearsing five days a week to do the show the sixth day. I’d spend one night with my family. That’s not good, and that’s why I didn’t take the shows. I could go like a son of a gun, gain a lot of momentum, and multiply my salary many times, buy that would mean not seeing my family nine months or more of the year.”
Frank did 13 bimonthly TV shows from New York last year only because it allowed him to spend every other week with his family. He’s made nine movies, done many radio and TV shows, and appeared frequently in the country’s leading night spots. But he’s turned down anything that threatened to separate him from his family, including a bid to appear in London’s Palladium.
* * *
“I didn’t become a great big star,” he says, “and I’m content not to become one. I’ve only scratched the surface. I’m with my family and I haven’t burned myself out. I’m still a new face in motion pictures and a new face on TV.”
* * *
A couple of weeks ago, when Mrs. Fontaine, a handsome, dark-haired woman the same age as her husband, was expecting their ninth child, Frank came home and took over the household reins. Last week a new son, Eugene, arrived to bring the family up to seven boys and two girls.
Before Mrs. Fontaine and the baby left the hospital recently, Frank was kept busy getting their new Winchester home in shape to receive them. As usual, he had lots of help. All but the youngest of the Fontaine family are experts in some household chore. Bobby, 11, straightens out the clothing drawers and leads his brothers and sisters in prayers before they go to bed at 8 o’clock every night. Frankie Jr., who is 15, wakes everybody up in the morning and gets breakfast. Peter, 8, is responsible for cleaning the yard and making the beds of his brothers and sisters. Irene, 13, sets the table, helps do the dishes, and takes care of Alma, 4 ½; Paul, 3 ½; Lawrence, 6, and Christopher, 2.
* * *
You get mixed up a lot of times and pick the wrong name if you want something in a hurry,” says Frank. But any name is all right in the Fontaine household, because it’s sure to bring someone running. This help is invaluable to Mrs. Fontaine, who, even when assisted by a maid, has all she can do to keep track of her lively brood. “Everybody has got to do his part here, or you’d be walking around all day doing nothing but picking up towels,” Frank says.
* * *

Walking into the Fontaine home is an experience a visitor is not likely to forget. First he is surrounded by youngsters, a circumstance he might have expected. But then he notices with considerable shock that the children are all similar in a way that he could hardly have foreseen. They all roll their eyes wildly, stretch their mouths from ear to ear, and give out with a special brand and tone of lingo that is punctuated with idiot-like sounds. In short, they are living, walking miniatures of John L.C. Sovoneeeyy, the fictional character who shot their father to fame.
Frank is perhaps prouder of the children’s imitation of his act than any of their other accomplishments. “Anytime I want to make up a show around here I can do it,” he says. As a matter of fact, his four oldest youngsters have already appeared on a Hollywood radio show with him. Frank, Jr., who plays the guitar, will start out in show business on his own when he becomes 16 in February. All the others have similar ambitions.
* * *
The desire of all Fontaine’s children to follow his footsteps in the entertainment world, however premature it may be, is an indication of the veneration they have for their father. “They are,” says Frank, “my most appreciative audience. They think I’m terrific, the funniest, handsomest guy in the world.”
Both Mrs. Fontaine and every member of the family who was old enough at the time have seen all of Frank’s nine movies, some of them more than once. The children always inform their father delightedly that everyone in the theatre laughed at him and that he was, of course, the best one in the picture. Neither Mrs. Fontaine or the children ever miss a radio or TV show on which Frank appears, and they have even gone to nightclubs to see some of his early shows.
Fontaine, who now describes himself as a “comfortable” but “not a wealthy” man, came up from poverty and hard times, and still has a sort of child-like amazement that he is able to give his children some of the things he never had. But neither he nor his wife allow them to become spoiled. When he wants them to do something, he may use a little psychology by clowning with them in John L.C. Sovoneeeyy fashion, but his wishes are promptly obeyed.
Fontaine’s large family has made him the object of jokes and puns which increased as he had more children until they now number, by his own account, “40,000 a day.” People accused him of running a school without a license, sent every lost kid in the area to his house, asked him how he found room to eat at the table, and reminded him when he had only eight children that he needed one more to make a baseball team.
* * *
“I don’t want my family to make me a star,” he says. “When you go to a night club you like to do your act. You don’t want to talk about nine kids 24 hours a day. Anyway, I got confused answering particulars about each one. If nobody mentions the kids, I don’t, but when I’m asked about them naturally I joke about it.”
* * *
Frank will stay at his Winchester home until New Year’s, doing one-night guest shots in New York and flying home. In January he will appear at the Copa Cabana in Miami for three weeks, then come home for three weeks, go to Las Vegas for a three-week appearance, and while he’s there hop to Hollywood for a week or two to do a quick movie and a guest shot on the Jack Benny show.
But wherever he goes, he won’t stay away from his Winchester home very long. “After all,” he says, “entertaining is my occupation, but my family is my career.”

Non Black-and-White TV of Tomorrow

You can see how proud this suburban couple is about their colour T.V. of Tomorrow (from the cartoon of the same name).



However, as narrator Paul Frees notes, it’s only half paid-for. I like the sunlight glare on the TV screen here.



The cartoon was in development during the middle of a battle between CBS and NBC over colour TV. CBS developed a colour system that was approved by US government regulators in September 1950, and which NBC (RCA, the parent company, made TV sets) tried to keep off the market because sets that it used couldn’t show black-and-white programmes (made by NBC). To make a long story short, a new kind of colour technology (compatible colour) was approved by the FCC in 1953 (sorry CBS), though colour programming didn’t really become the norm until the mid-‘60s.

Rudy Cataldi Website

It’s nice to know that there are people from the Golden Age of Theatrical Animation who are still with us, and we can learn a little bit about them and their work.

One is Rudy Cataldi. Rudy was from Newark, New Jersey, where his father was a jeweller. He came west, studied at the Otis Art Institute, and was hired at Disney at the age of 16 in 1943. He was employed by a number of commercial studios in the 1950s, co-owned a studio with Lou Zukor and John Boersma called Animation Associates, then hopped over to Hanna-Barbera around 1963 and stayed for more than two decades. He also somehow survived directing for cut-rate producer Sam Singer, who told him there could be no more than three drawings a foot in each Sinbad Jr. cartoon (there are 16 frames in a foot of animation).

Rudy, I understand, has vision problems today, but he’s still around, and set to turn 90 next year. Rudy’s family has created a small web site in his honour, and that generous animation historian Jerry Beck was kind enough to alert me to it. So I’m alerting you. Click HERE. For me, the best part of it is the links to the Animation Guild interview he did several years ago. We hope the Cataldi family will find the time to add to it.

Ragtime Bear Backgrounds

Some background paintings in the 1949 Magoo debut Ragtime Bear. The background artist is uncredited. Bill Hurtz gets a design credit. Note the stylised bears in the first frame and the UPA-style humans in the lodge.

Don't Thank the Audience

Newspaper reporters chatting with Jack Benny in September 1953 had two choices: they could either pepper him with questions about Marilyn Monroe making her first TV appearance on his season premiere broadcast, or they could eschew that idea because everyone else would be doing it and just talk about his show in general.

The latter is what the author of the “Week on the Air” column for the Associated Press out of New York chose. Not a word about Monroe. However, the story revealed one of the things that bothered Benny, though he’s prudent enough not to state which comedian(s) he was referring to.

The story appeared in papers beginning September 13th.

"KEEP HUMOR ADULT," JACK BENNY ADVISES
By WAYNE OLIVER
NEW YORK, Sept. 12 (AP)—How has Jack Benny managed to remain among the top entertainers on the air for more than 20 years while many another star has come and gone?
The secret, he says, “is giving the audience credit for having intelligence.”
“We play up to them, not down to them,” he declares.
Tells Pet Peeve.
“I think all you have to do is keep your humor adult. You can do that and even the kids get it today.
“I don't think anybody on the air is too intelligent for the audience. But it's deadly to be patronizing.”
The Waukegan wit, who actually looks little over the 39 years he jokingly claims as his age, has some pet peeves of his own about TV and radio performers and their attitude towards the audience.
One of them “is somebody who is getting $8,000 a week who comes back at the end of end of the show and says, ‘Thanks for letting me into your living room.’”
“I hate it,” he fumes. “I don't thank the audience for letting me into their living rooms. A lot of them watch me because they have to—there's nothing else on in their city. And how do I know their set is even in the living room. It may be in the bedroom, or the den, or the basement.
“The audience doesn't like to be thanked. They just want to sit back and have fun—and feel free to give you the devil if they don't think the show was good.
22 Years on Air.
The veteran comedian, who begins his 22nd radio season on CBS and his fourth TV season on CBS-TV tomorrow night, declares: “I think they like good down-to-earth humor. But it can be down to earth and not corny.”
Benny, on a brief visit here from Hollywood the other day, said his radio shows all will be recorded on tape this season. That's because he's stepping his TV appearances up to every third week from the one-every-fourth of last season.
He said, however, that while he remains in radio, which will be “as long as the sponsor wants me to,” he'll give it all he has.
“Either you're on radio and do a good job, or you should get the heck off,” he added.
Benny said that two seasons ago, whenever he traveled, folks wanted to talk to him only about his TV show, but that during the last season “they talked about both, and my radio rating was higher than it was the previous season.” A CBS spokesman added that Benny’s average popularity over the last two decades has been higher than that of any other radio star.

How did the Marilyn debut go, by the way? The show’s on-line somewhere so you can watch for yourself and judge. It wasn’t one of Benny’s best, at least to me, and I’m still puzzled as to why Paul Frees was hired to do the voiceover at the beginning. Why wasn’t Don Wilson used? But at least my opinion of the episode isn’t as low as the one expressed by that wet blanket of TV critics, Jack Gould of the New York Times. “This is sex appeal?” he asked about Monroe, a question he answers in the negative. Said Gould:

[T]he end result was more like little sister raiding mother’s closet and vanity table, and doing the grand dame for the edification of the neighborhood brats.
Miss Monroe’s technique was elementary. The seductive voice was out of Drama 1 at the university playhouse—just don’t close your mouth at the end of a sentence and you’re in, honey. The fabled walk was the work of yesteryear’s unsung shoemaker who really knew his last: perch a gal up on six-inch spikes and she’s got to mince her way enticingly, or tip over.

Gould goes on to opine that Monroe’s dress was unnecessarily too tight, and that she wore too much make-up. Basically, his column complained she was not the girl-next-door. Gould must have mixed her up with Doris Day.

We’ve posted John Crosby’s review of the same show and you can read it here.

Eshbaugh's Cartoons of Many Colours

For a brief period in 1932, Ted Eshbaugh was in the animation spotlight, but it wasn’t because of his animation.

Eshbaugh was employed as a portrait artist in Los Angeles in 1930 but at the same time was working to develop a colour film process. And by 1932, it had been perfected. He tested it out on cartoons. There was just one problem. All the film studios that were interested in releasing cartoons—Warners, MGM, Paramount, Columbia and so on—had deals in place with other animation outfits. They didn’t need Eshbaugh’s cartoons, no matter how bright they were in lighting up the screen. So Eshbaugh released a few independently before packing up in Los Angeles in 1934 and moving to New York where he got a job at the Van Beuren studio.

Eshbaugh must have had a good publicist, because there was a flurry of stories around the same time about his colour process. We posted a few of them here along with some background on Eshbaugh. Let’s post another story, this one from newspapers published on October 12, 1932.

New Hollywood Firm Will Produce Animated Cartoon Shorts in Full Color
By GEORGE SHAFFER
[Chicago Tribune Press Service.]
HOLLYWOOD, Oct. 11—J. R. Booth, of Ottawa, whose lumber mills provide a lot of the raw newsprint used by American dailies, and Ted Eshbaugh, a young artist from Boston who mingles mechanical and administrative talent with his art work, have combined to form a new producing agency to put out animated cartoon shorts in color.
They have bought rights to all the "Wizard of Oz" published material, and already are half way through with the first film with Frank Baum, Jr., who succeeded his father as Oz author and publisher.

Backed by Great Wealth
Booth whose sister married Prince Eric of Denmark, is forty or fifty times a millionaire and a young man of 35, who commutes from Canada to Hollywood to participate in this latest interest of his. Eshbaugh as a youthful prodigy had a scholarship in the Chicago Art Institute at the age of 7, and was a scholarship winner in art when he and Booth met at the Boston Art Museum.
The pair are pioneers in a new system of applying color to films and did not take a step toward actually making a motion picture until their process was, in their belief, perfect as a result of four or five years experimenting at laboratories which Mr. Booth installed on his Ontario estate. That they really have something that appeals to the major film studios which have spent so much money in past efforts to give the American public satisfactory colored film is indicated much to the satisfaction of Booth and Eshbaugh, by offers made to them by major companies wishing to negotiate for their process. The offers were rejected.
800-Foot Reels
They call their new firm "Multi-color Fantasies." Their product will be one-reelers of about 800 feet each. Carl Stallings, creator of "Silly Symphonies," is doing their musical scoring and directing. All their films will be animated sound cartoons, although, according to Eshbaugh, their process can be applied to give color to action films also. As a sideline, Booth and Eshbaugh plan to come out within 90 days a 16 millimeter version of their animated sound films, the size used in home projection machines.

Eshbaugh explains that their pictures are colored on celluloid, and two negatives made of the same pictures at the same time, which are then superimposed to produce one print to which the colors adhere. "We were the first ever to get a good reproduction in yellow," he said. "We call our process perfected because it is the first time in applying color to films that any one has been able to get the effect of regular, ordinary everyday color. The reds do not jump at you. The colors do not overlap, glitter, get blurry or hurt your eyes, as theater-goers complained about in other color attempts."
"We are able to come out with it at this time because one year ago materials and operations made it five times more expensive to put out color films than at present. With our process, which we know is the most economical yet devised in the film industry, it now costs us only about twice as much to put out color films as it would cost to put out black and white."

Some of Eshbaugh’s films made it into theatres; to the right you see an ad for an appearance on a bill in Los Angeles. But there were troubles with his Oz film. Here’s a story from Variety; the year was 1935.

Baum Slaps Suit on ‘Wizard of Oz’ Tinter
Los Angeles, May 7.
In addition to Federal Court suit for injunction, Frank J. Baum has brought suit in the State courts to restrain Technicolor and Ted Eshbaugh from releasing a color cartoon based on “The Wizard of Oz.”
Eshbaugh started to make the cartoon by arrangement with Baum, son of the-author of 'Oz,' but according to the complaint failed to finish it within agreed time. Contract is therefore regarded as void by Baum. Technicolor has 730 feet of negative, which, under arrangement with Eshbaugh, company is declared ready to market unless enjoined.

Eshbaugh worked, mainly, on commercial and industrial films in New York. In 1950, he co-produced a musical-comedy fantasy called Bumps O’Dazy with Billy Gilbert, and it was shot in colour. He died in 1969. Here’s his obit in Variety

TED ESHBAUGH
Ted Eshbaugh, 63, film producer-director and animated cartoonist, died July 4, in New York. Eshbaugh, in 1931, pioneered with Technicolor in the development of the three-color process as applied to animated cartoons. He later produced the first color and sound animated cartoon, "Goofy Goat."
In 1932 Eshbaugh produced an animated short cartoon, "Wizard of Oz" for Metro preceding company's live version by seven years. He came to New York in 1934 to revamp RKO pictures’ cartoon department. During World War II his studios were given over entirely to production of U.S. Government films.
Among the animated cartoons and documentaries he later produced were "The Dale Carnegie Story," "The Frank Bettger Story," several color spectaculars for Radio City Music Hall, animated sequences for "Around The World With Mike Todd," and many tv commercials.
Survived by wife and brother.

Obscurity beckons people like Ted Eshbaugh, unless someone intercedes. And someone did. Several years ago, that lover of obscure and B-studio cartoons, Steve Stanchfield, restored three of Eshbaugh’s shorts and put them on his “Technicolor Dreams and Black & White Nightmares” DVD/Blu-Ray. You can go to Jerry Beck’s Cartoon Research website and read more about it.

Oswald's Sour Note

A trombone sounds a sour note, which is inspected by Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and sucked back into the trombone again in The Bandmaster (1931).

You’ll notice the wavy outlines in the first frame from the vibrations of the trombone music.



The “artists” listed in the credits of this cartoon are Tex Avery, Les Kline, Ray Abrams, Pinto Colvig, Manuel Moreno, Chet Karrberg and Clyde Geronimi. Karrberg’s life was cut short. He died on August 7, 1931 at the age of 21. He came down with pneumonia before a heart attack killed him. He had only graduated from high school in Asbury Park, N.J., in February 1929 and then got a job working on Krazy Kat cartoons with Bill Nolan.