Old TV prints

[ota]

Hi people.
this talk started in a thread about Woody Woodpecker show but I feel it´s more appropriate to open a new one.

It´s about the old film prints. I have not much information about that and would like to hear from the experts.

Please correct me if I am wrong.

As far as I know, before videotape became the standard, TV stations used film prints (16mm) with the shows. I think they projected them in a screen and that was transmitted to the public.

TV was B&W by that time, so the prints were in B&W, even if the original cartoons were in color.

Hanna-Barbera started doing color from the beginning, because they knew TV was upgrading to color so they spent extra money to do Ruff & Reddy and the frist ones in color, even if they were ehibited in B&W in the late 50´s.

Well, back to the subject, the owners of the tv shows made a lot of prints and rented them to TV stations worldwide. Now everything is in tape or digital-something but back that time the only way was the old 16mm projector...

Mos of those old prints are in the hands of collectors and not all owners have it in its vaults, for two reasons: first, some properties changed hands more than one time and something was lost. Second, there´s no need for those prints today, except for the collectors. some of the collectors transcribe the old prints to VHS tapes for more comfortable seeing.

The question is: what was lost? In subsequent re-editing of the shows many thigs were lost! The original Flintstones opening for the first season was lost for a long time and was restored only a few years back, when they found an old print in a foreign country and remasterized it for Cartoon Network. Before that, the same opening for the 2nd or 3rd season was attrached to season #1 episodes.

Also were lost some animation related to the sponsors. I recently saw a Huck Hound opening with Kellogs logo in real video in one of the pages related to Toonzone.

But back in the 60s those sandwich shows (Huck, QDMcGraw etc) had some fillers between the cartoons. Huck was a circus owner and the co-hosts did some circus tricks. Quick Draw also had a similar system.
I dunno exactly when they cut out the fillers and concentrated in the "ouverture+toon1+toon2+toon3+ending" formula.

Those and a lot of stuff are lost and were no more seen. I didn´t see anymore that Quick Draw stagecoach opening. And the ouverture for Huck Hound was ehibited some 8 yrs ago in the old Boomerang slot of CN (but not the fillers, and the replaced the co-hosts toons for other ones from the Huck libray).

The Bugs Bunny Show of the 60´s fillers were also never more seen -- in some VHS tapes you can see the general "this is it" opening but not the in-betweeners.

Woody Woodpecker shows live-action slots are also lost.

And many many more things.

Where are those missing pieces? Lost somewhere in the vaults of HB and WB or lost forever???

Ota

[Pietro]

Originally posted by ota
The Bugs Bunny Show of the 60´s fillers were also never more seen -- in some VHS tapes you can see the general "this is it" opening but not the in-betweeners.

Matthew Hunter has some complete, original and extremely rare "Bugs Bunny Show" episodes (which I'll be getting real soon in a recent trade with Matthew).

-Pietro:D

[Tintin]

Originally posted by Pietro


Matthew Hunter has some complete, original and extremely rare "Bugs Bunny Show" episodes (which I'll be getting real soon in a recent trade with Matthew).

-Pietro:D

I got me too a Bugs Bunny Show episode. :) :)

[Paul Penna]

Originally posted by ota
As far as I know, before videotape became the standard, TV stations used film prints (16mm) with the shows. I think they projected them in a screen and that was transmitted to the public.

Actually, they used what's called a "telecine," a combo unit consisting of a projector (with a special shutter to eliminate flicker caused by the 24 fps/30fps film/TV frame rate discrepancy) that projected the image directly onto the video pickup tube of a modified TV camera (much as would the image coming through the lens of a regular TV camera). These days, they use a thing called a flying-spot-scanner to transfer film to video, which does a much better job. Maybe something even more advanced than that now, for all I know.

As you correctly surmised, much introductory and bridging material was edited out of TV cartoon shows when they were syndicated, either because the sponsorship was no longer relevant, or for time reasons, or just to give local stations more flexibility. The stuff edited out was seen as no longer having any commercial value, so into the dumpster it went.

Incidentally, the dumpster is where many, if not most, of those old TV prints now in collector hands were rescued from.

[Bobby B]

Originally posted by ota
Hanna-Barbera started doing color from the beginning, because they knew TV was upgrading to color so they spent extra money to do Ruff & Reddy and the first ones in color, even if they were ehibited in B&W in the late 50´s.



I think the first couple of seasons of Ruff & Reddy were filmed in B&W. (Of course, my source is Jeff Lenburg's Encyclopedia of Animated Cartoons, which says that "Snoopy Come Home" ended with Snoopy committing suicide...)

[ota]

Originally posted by Paul Penna


Actually, they used what's called a "telecine," a combo unit consisting of a projector (with a special shutter to eliminate flicker caused by the 24 fps/30fps film/TV frame rate discrepancy)

Thanks very very much for the excellent information, Paul.

BTW, the 24/25/30 fps story is still a problem today. I wonder why TV didn´t start in 24ps mode.

Ota

[ota]

Originally posted by Bobby B

I think the first couple of seasons of Ruff & Reddy were filmed in B&W. (Of course, my source is Jeff Lenburg's Encyclopedia ...)

Maybe this is true. But the important fact is that Hanna and Barbera knew that they would live from the income of the cartoons in a long-term basis and they realized that Color TV would be available soon and would be a standard in a few years.

So they spent more money (thus reducing even more their profits) to make the series in color, even if that was not needed by that time.

Ota

[Paul Penna]

Originally posted by ota
BTW, the 24/25/30 fps story is still a problem today. I wonder why TV didn´t start in 24ps mode.

It needs to sync to the electrical current to work; in the USA (and other countries using the NTSC television standard) we have 60Hz alternating. Half of that is 30. That's why the UK's TV system (PAL) is 25 fps, since their AC current is 50Hz.

[J Lee]

Maybe this is true. But the important fact is that Hanna and Barbera knew that they would live from the income of the cartoons in a long-term basis and they realized that Color TV would be available soon and would be a standard in a few years.

So they spent more money (thus reducing even more their profits) to make the series in color, even if that was not needed by that time.

Actually, WHO they sold Ruff and Ready to was the main factor -- NBC, whose parent company, RCA, had just won a fight three years earlier with CBS to get the federal government to approve their version of color television (NBC's was compatable with existing B&W sets, CBS' system was not).

Anyway, because of that, RCA was very much in the business of pushing the sales of color TVs on the American public, since for the most part in the late 1950s they were the only ones selling them. And one way to make color TV sets more attrative was to air more shows in color. So NBC paid companies the extra $$$ and shelled out money for their own productions to be done in color, includiing, in this case, agreeing to spend the extra money to have Ruff and Ready shot in color (note that at the same time R&R was debuting on NBC, over on ABC the Mickey Mouse Club was airing in glorious black & white, because they neither had the resources or the motivation of selling color TVs to make Walt do his show in the full rainbow. And Disney defentinely had more bucks to spend than Bill and Joe in 1957).

[ota]

still about 24/25/30fps (semi off-topic)



Originally posted by Paul Penna


It needs to sync to the electrical current to work; in the USA (and other countries using the NTSC television standard) we have 60Hz alternating. Half of that is 30. That's why the UK's TV system (PAL) is 25 fps, since their AC current is 50Hz.

In reality the 30 is 29.97 or something like that, which complicates even more.
But that is still getting trouble to a lot of people.

If we do cartoons, we can adjust them to 15 or 12fps (Bill Plympton uses 6 fps). Then convert it to video mode if it will be show in video. Or use the 24ps in theaters or movie festivals.
But the guys that are doing the reverse - i. e filming in video then converting to film experiment lots of trouble to make things work because of the flicking problem.
Making films in a digital camera is easier and cheapier than using tons of film. so some moviemakers are trying to film in digital then convert it to film. But there´s a synch problem with the sound.
some of them are filming in PAL (25fps) so the loss is minimum and some frames are cut by hand to fix.
Of course I´m talkin about low-budget moviemakers that want to save emoney and movie cans, not the big-shots that have whole armies of engineers working for them.

Ota