Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Semi-Off-Topic: The Ugly PD Cover Contest

It's just one day until the Oscars, so I decided to post this contest that has an awards-show theme. GAC (not referring to the country channel, but Golden Age Cartoons, an animation fan and history website) has this annual contest to see if they can be a "legally-able" graphic designer for a public domain video company, or some studio release that had not passed on too well to Jerry Beck to even like the cover work. Depending on the user's mood, some just want to take advantage of the contest to just make an unoriginal joke so they can get their cover noticed (not me), or some have the same idea, but make a funnier version of it. Some are downright creepy, and some are laugh-out-loud. This pokes fun at: A) Unwary buyers B) The content shown in our favorite classic cartoons C) The imposiblity to have every classic cartoon ever made have the perfect official release that everyone can afford or have access to, never buying those knockoff tapes ever again (ya hear that DVNR inventors and Brad Grey!(and especially studios who did even the slightest whiff of badly on the sets- even with one minor error that got big complaints)

Of course, rather than get a job to PD video companies, they simply get videos and DVD's, both PD and official.


This contest is probably what I would call "postmodern" art whatever that means (correct me if I'm wrong), this is a good example:





All he could think about was "Golden Farmer Porky", so he decided to put in "a movie" with some "cartoons" and modified some swiped designs of popular-sample covers from contests' past.




I think the funniest covers that I could renember







Of course, Paramount Pictures (the studio that this blogs' cartoons are devoted to), gets a pat on the back for their backlog of cartoons' winning twice in a row as a theme.





Thursday, February 10, 2011

Betty and Koko- The Leftover Original Prints......plus some depressing news

First....the bad news.

I closed my YouTube account (from my Butterscotch and Soda post Youtube post, sorry it wasn't covered in this blog.) because someone offered me a gift (Paramount cartoon-related). I am no way comfortable accepting gifts even though I feel really both good and more extremely unwantingly (and perhaps undneedingly) guilty of this situation because it was too good of an offer to refuse. I made someone feel bad (and if he is obessed with things made him truamatized) because I did the right thing, and it just is really depressing. This is coming from a man who liked someone but she wasn't comfortable to talk to me which truamatized me and worsened my fantasies.


Now the good news....the site I left has some great B&W (and one orginally in color) prints of Inkwell Imps and Talkatoons/Betty Boop. A few have some recrations, but are mostly from the original negatives and are not as fake as the slightly faded 1947-1949 Technicolor mountain openings with the end title opening the cartoon on Archive.org Paramount color cartoons masking the NTA and a.a.p. logos that were on the TV prints (not sure what the deal with that "Old MacDonald" print with the fake mountain but original titles that turns up on YouTube on ocassion).




Anyways, these are left over from the UM&M negative cutting that irrates me. Why did all of the B&W cartoons have those UM&M titles than the color ones do?


Well, here they are.






























And a bonus time-compressed print of a Screen Song by Fleischer


Friday, February 4, 2011