Free With Your Bell and Howell Purchase
Playful Pluto (1934) As Companion To Home Movies
This Disney cartoon attained household
immortality for coming free with my father's late-40's purchase of a Bell and
Howell 8mm projector. Beyond home movies, it was all we had to watch until first
Castle reels I purchased in 1964. Sampler footage amounted not to the entire
short, but a half-in highlight of Pluto coping with errant flypaper, a segment
committed to child's memory that I was happy to relive after reading in Michael
Barrier's Hollywood Cartoons that it was a big advance on characterization
in WD's output. The difference, it seems, was Pluto's facial response to sticky
menace the fly sheets pose, his expression changed from frustration to
reassurance and back again. A deft animator named Norman Ferguson was
responsible for the leap, and so made a specialty of Pluto from here. Disney
progress was such that no one could touch him through a 30's rise, part of
that due to Walt's continual upgrades on technique and training he oversaw/arranged.
Pluto was the first cartoon dog to traffic in complexity, being a drawn
successor to Rin-Tin-Tin, Strongheart, and others, only minus their innate
heroism.
Dan Mercer remembers the bonus that came with his 8mm projector:
ReplyDeleteWhen I was very young, Santa Claus brought me an Argus 8 mm projector and a Heckle and Jeckle short from Castle Films. I don't know whether the film came free with the projector, but I rather doubt it. That was probably the creative choice of Santa's helper, my dear mother. Heckle and Jeckle, of course, were Paul Terry's "Talking Magpies." Though birds, they would occasionally display teeth. I understand that Jeckle had a refined English accent and Heckle a coarse, Brooklyn accent, but were identical in appearance. Since the film was silent, as was my projector--that is, it did not reproduce sound, though it made quite a lot of its own--the distinction was lost on me. Even so, I found the magpie mayhem somewhat amusing at the time.
Daniel