"Buried Treasure" (1938) (Patreon)

Here’s another rare Captain and the Kids cartoon presented here on Patreon—Buried Treasure, released September 17, 1938. In this entry, Hans and Fritz draw up a phony treasure map that manages to fool both Der Kaptain (Billy Bletcher) and Long John Silver (Mel Blanc).

This is sourced from a screen recording via the WatchTCM app, so the frame rate might not be ideal. However, this is one of a handful of Captain and the Kids cartoons not included as a bonus feature on DVD, which makes this quite a rarity in its decent picture quality.

It should be noted that a few of the animators on this cartoon that worked in director Bob Allen’s unit were Paul Sommer and Dick Bickenbach. 

In an interview, Sommer recalled Allen as a picky director that ordered small revisions in the animation. Just how picky, exactly? In Sommer’s words: “[Allen would] get on the Moviola and he’d take the wheel and go back and forth from one frame to the other, while you were standing there, getting a little uptight. He’d look and look and look, and the guy was just looking for something to criticize…He’d say, ‘Well, you’d better give this two more exposures’—that kind of crap. You’d think if something was wrong, you could see it like that, when you’re running the film at speed, but he’s not running it at speed, he’s just going back and forth from one frame to the other.”

Enjoy!