Monday, December 3, 2012

A Max Fleisher Christmas

You may remember these from TV past or that random dollar DVD sitting on your shelf, but they are some of the best little classics to watch and very catchy.  Max Fleischer was also responsible for the classic you may remember like Popeye and Superman, but healso holds this accomplishment:

"Fleischer invented the "follow the bouncing ball" technique for his Song Car-Tunes series of animated singalong shorts beginning in May 1924. After a few films with unsynchronized sound (music and sound effects only), Fleischer added synchronized sound to this series, with My Old Kentucky Home (released April 13, 1926) with a dog-like character saying "Follow the ball, and join in, everybody." The sound entries in the Song Car-Tunes series — roughly 19 out of 36 short films — used the Phonofilm sound-on-film process developed by Lee DeForest. The Song Car-Tunes series would last until early 1927, just a few months before the actual start of the sound era. This was before Walt Disney's Steamboat Willie (1928), which is often mistakenly cited as the first cartoon to synchronize sound with animation. However, by late 1926, both the DeForest Phonofilm Corp. and Red Seal Pictures had filed for bankruptcy, and the Song Car-Tunes series came to an end." - Wikipedia

Christmas Comes But Once a Year

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

Frosty the Snow Man

For those who like some Christmas fun, I found this. The original Christmas Frosty cartoon. The black and white 1954 short.

"In 1954, the UPA studio brought "Frosty" to life in a three-minute animated short which appears regularly on WGN-TV. This production included a bouncy, jazzy a cappella version of the song and a limited animation style reminiscent of UPA's Gerald McBoing-Boing. The short, filmed entirely in black-and-white, has been a perennial WGN-TV Christmas classic, and was broadcast on December 24 and 25, 2005, and every year since, as part of a WGN-TV children's programming retrospective, along with their two other short Christmas classics, "Suzy Snowflake" and "Hardrock, Coco and Joe."
The three cartoons are also a tradition on WJAC-TV in Johnstown, PA, which not only broadcasts the cartoons on their station, but also make it available on their website." Wikipedia



Frosty the Snow Man