No! No! A Thousand Times No!

[Patrick McCart]

The above mentioned cartoon has my pick for THE worst print ever shown on Cartoon Network.

It's not even a UM&M print, it's from a 3rd generation dist. called Thunderbird Dist. of Los Angeles!

Ugh...if CN could just pay a little bit of $$$ to get nice prints from Republic...

[kiddiesunshine]

That cartoon looked TERRIBLE! Wasn't it made the same year as the cartoon that came on right before it? 1935, right? That's the worst print I've ever seen. It doesn't look like it can take another spin. I think it's gonna disintegrate! That was a bad one!

[DR. BELCH]

What a suggestive title. :p

I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought this was one of the worst prints I'd seen in a coon's age. It was badly faded, the character outlines were indistinguishable, and it looked like some fool had spilled milk on the filmstrip. Despite that, it was an enjoyable short about Betty on stage playing the heroine in a melodrama. The villain was a sneering mustachioed sort who looked like the predecessor of Dishonest John of Beany and Cecil and Hanna-Barbera's Dick Dastardly. And RockItShipper, who's into pretty-boy heroes, would get a kick out of Betty's leading man (it looked like he was wearing more lipstick than she!)

[kiddiesunshine]

There's something about Betty Boop cartoons that just interests me. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's because I don't see them as often as, say, SCOOBY DOO. But then again, nothing is shown more than "The dog that eats and never takes a dump." That's what my mother calls him.

[DR. BELCH]

Kiddie, your mom sounds a lot like mine...whenever she watches CatDog with me, she invariably asks, "How does it poop?" I usually mumble something about the requisite orifice being probably located someplace by the navel and let it go. If it's not that, it's some other d*** question I can't answer...like why when a cartoon character gets cooked, they're just popped in the oven alive, feathers, fur, bones and all.

IMHO, Betty's a hot little number. My five-month-old niece is more of a Popeye fan, though.http://www.planettribes.com/hosed/smilies/s/s/otn/other/11baby.gif

[Mike]

>>Ugh...if CN could just pay a little bit of $$$ to get nice prints from Republic...<<

Don't blame CN. AMC still has the TV rights to all the Betty cartoons, straight from Republic themselves. They used to show a half-hour Betty Boop show every Saturday morning, but they haven't done it for years. I've read that AMC still shows the occasional Betty cartoons as filler in between movies.

Mike

[Paul Penna]

>It's not even a UM&M print, it's from a 3rd generation dist. called Thunderbird >Dist. of Los Angeles!

Interesting - Thunderbird Films was the legit operation of a guy who had formerly been engaged in, and successfully prosecuted for, large-scale film pirating - Tom Donahue, I think was his name, now deceased. This was back when buying real film prints was the only practical method of film collecting for most people, pre-home video, pre-Betamax.

I had some Thunderbird Super-8 sound prints, and they varied from horrible to pretty darn good. My very first "Popeye Meets Ali Baba" was one of the latter, especially compared to the blurry, all-magenta "Popeye Meets Sindbad" I'd gotten from another outfit. Turned out that Thunderbird printed their 8mm films from 16mm negatives rather than 8mm dupe negatives, which made a big difference. As I recall, one of those two-reelers went for something like $45 in 1975 dollars.