by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
When I got home last night I watched part of a quite
remarkable program on Turner Classic Movies that was supposed to be a tribute
to the Van Beuren animation studios — though I only got to see four of the
seven cartoon shorts they showed and the only one I watched that was actually a
Van Beuren production was A Little Bird Told Me, an engaging mixture of live action and animation from 1932. The head
of the studio was Amedée Van Beuren and he was originally the business partner
of Paul Terry, who made the popular “Terrytoons” cartoons into the 1940’s. They
actually released the first sound cartoon, Dinner Time (1928), a month before Walt Disney’s pioneering (but
not quite as pioneering as the film histories have it!) Steamboat
Willie (indeed, Disney emerges as an
ongoing nemesis in the Van Beuren story!), and when Terry quit the partnership
in 1928 Van Beuren hired John Foster to take over the animation and continued
along similar lines. They put out cartoons with a pair of characters named “Tom
and Jerry,” though these were human beings (“a tall-and-short pair, usually
vagrants who attempted various occupations,” says the Wikipedia page on Van
Beuren, which makes them sound like an attempt to do a cartoon Laurel and
Hardy) instead of the famous cat-and-mouse pairing of the same names later
created at MGM. Van Beuren also produced a series based (at least nominally) on
Aesop’s fables, and eventually found success when they licensed popular
comic-strip characters like Felix the Cat and the Toonerville Trolley gang. They distributed through RKO Radio Pictures
and also released live-action shorts and bought the reissue rights to Charlie
Chaplin’s 12 masterpieces for Mutual Studios in 1916-17, dubbing in music,
sound effects and occasional “wild” voices (and, according to Chaplin
biographer Theodore Huff, ruining the films with their tasteless soundtracks —
fortunately the currently circulating prints of the Chaplin Mutuals have gone
back to a silent-style presentation with simple piano accompaniments and no
synchronized sound effects).
In 1932 Van Beuren embarked on what was supposed
to be the first cartoon ever shot in three-strip Technicolor, a one-reel
semi-adaptation of The Wizard of Oz
— only Walt Disney struck again; behind Van Beuren’s back he cut a deal with
Technicolor that for three years he would be the only producer allowed to make
cartoons in three-strip for U.S. release. Ted Eshbaugh, the director of The
Wizard of Oz, went ahead and finished the
film, and Van Beuren released it in Britain and Canada (where Disney’s ukase did not apply) but it couldn’t be legally shown in
the U.S. until 1935, by which time Van Beuren had closed his animation studio
(thanks once again to Disney, who’d signed a distribution contract with RKO and
thereby left Van Beuren without a distributor) and Eshbaugh ended up owning the
rights himself. Eshbaugh kept himself in business making commercial shorts,
including the other two on TCM’s program last night: The Sunshine
Makers (for Borden’s Milk), in which a
company figures out a way to bottle sunshine, deliver it in milk bottles and
convert a whole country of out-and-proud sourpusses to sunshine and happiness;
and Pastry Town Wedding (which
imdb.com lists in two versions, one from 1934 and one from 1940 — I suspect the
difference is the 1934 version was shot in Cinécolor and in 1940 Eshbaugh
reused the same animation art and reshot the film in three-strip Technicolor
once Disney’s exclusive deal expired — TCM showed the Cinécolor version), made
for Cushman’s baked-goods company and featuring Cushman products prominently
placed in the film. (I don’t know whether these films were shown in regular
theatres or not, given the allergy of the movie business to any commercial exploitation in the 1930’s, but in
today’s age of ear-splitting commercials in movie theatres it occurred to me
that I wouldn’t mind them so much if they were produced with the artistry and
imagination of Eshbaugh’s shorts.)
The Wizard of Oz is the most astonishing film of the four (though the
two commercial shorts are visually stunning and quite clever and entertaining),
and though it doesn’t work as an adaptation of the book — there’s no Cowardly
Lion, no Wicked Witch, and the Wizard is an honest-to-goodness wizard (or at
least a stage magician) instead of a total humbug with an electronic gizmo
simulating super-powers — it is an absolutely glowing piece of visual art and
it must have been seen by someone
at MGM working on the classic 1939 live-action version. Though the credits are
in color, when the film itself opens we see Dorothy (oddly designed to look
like Betty Boop, though the Scarecrow and the Tin Man have the familiar
appearances W. W. Denslow created in his illustrations for L. Frank Baum’s
novel) in her farmhouse in Kansas in blue-tinted black-and-white. When the cyclone comes and takes her to Oz (on her
own instead of inside her house in this version), her clothes change in mid-air
and she gradually takes on color, and when she lands in Oz everything is in
color. There’s been a lot of educated (and not-so-educated) guesswork about who
thought up the famous gimmick of beginning the 1939 Wizard of Oz in black-and-white (sepia-toned in the original
release prints and on the currently available video versions) and having it
turn to color when Dorothy arrived in Oz; whoever thought it was an obscure
cartoon director working on his own riff on the famous story for a tiny
independent studio six years earlier?
