2020 Wrap-Up (with a Special Surprise)!! (Patreon)

As we wrap up what amounted to a dismal year, there are some positive aspects for me to take away from this difficult period of our lives. I wanted to say extend my thanks to those who have supported this Patreon page this past year, and to the readership of my Cartoon Research articles.

My involvement with different restoration teams has kept me extremely busy, as some as you may have observed. During the year, I have performed digital clean-up, compiled photo galleries, and edited supplemental features on several Blu-Ray releases. These include Thunderbean Animation’s Popeye Original Classics, Stop-Motion Marvels 2, Flip the Frog, and the first volume of Van Beuren's Rainbow Parade cartoons—the latter of the three are soon to be released. I was also involved with another film contained in B2MP’s The Puppetoon Movie Vol. 2, and just last week, a trailer I edited for Tommy Stathes’ Cartoons on Film was released, announcing his latest Blu-Ray/DVD release: Otto Messmer’s Feline Follies. Currently, I am involved with some very important films (from a different company), but I won’t reveal that until at least a few months.

The following grew exponentially this year alone, which helps a great deal, financially. As I have shared in the “About” section, this Patreon is primarily used to help fund for resources that require a substantial fee. These include sites such as Newspapers.com and Ancestry, which require a paid monthly (or annual) subscription. These pledges would be beneficial for this Patreon page and American animation history.

There are also consultations I plan to make with off-site research involving the UCLA Special Collections. However, they require a fee for scanning and sending copies of their holdings.

Before the pandemic affected many research libraries and institutions, I managed to secure materials from the 1939 Walter Lantz cartoon Bolo Molo Land, a knockoff of Tex Avery’s travelogue parodies at Warner Bros (retitled "Bola Mola Land" when reissued for TV in the 1950s). This included a production draft with animators' names listed, as well as a small number of storyboard pages. The Patreon supporters helped fund these acquisitions, and for that, you should all feel proud for your contributions to animation history.

While it is not a great cartoon by any means, here is the animator breakdown video—along with the production draft and storyboard pages, some of which have gags excised from the final film. 

Happy New Year to you all!