Holy Grails

[Steve Klare]

Actually it's "Ultrasonic Sound" .

-I think this means the pitch is so high only dogs can hear it! ()

[Rob Young]

“Ultrasonic” sound. Brilliant!

[Douglas Meltzer]

Osi,

I checked my Columbia catalogs and you are correct. They only put out Tell-Tale Heart in b&w. Someone did bring a beautiful color print to CineSea, but it must have been 16mm. Let's move that to a 16mm Holy Grail list!

[Osi Osgood]

Hmmm ... That may be a cartoon worthy of getting a super 8 print made up of!😇

[Gunier J. Kintgen]

Not on Super-8, but one film I'd love to own a quality 16mm print of is "Gulliver's Travels" from 1939. It was the 2nd animated feature film made in the US, the first made by my hero Max Fleischer. The story behind it is quite impressive too; He managed to make a film that rivaled Snow White in a quarter of the time it took Disney (a year after Snow White came out no less), with half the budget Disney had, all the while he was moving the entire animation studio from New York to Florida in the middle of production! Not to mention, the film itself is great!

My collection is very small at the moment, so right now my goal is just to get my hands on ANY Fleischer cartoon.

[Gunier J. Kintgen]

I'm sure I'll think of others, but since Mike mentioned the Columbia cutdown of The Giant Claw, I would love to find another Columbia sound release, the animated Tell-Tale Heart with good color.

Man, it's great to meet a fellow UPA fan! I hear than when they first showed this film to audiences, the people in the audience were laughing. They'd nver seen a cartoon with such a serious tone before, so their only instinct was to laugh at it like they would other cartoons! (I can't remember where I heard this, so take it with a grain of salt)

[Douglas Meltzer]

Gunier,

You should take a look at this post about a note that was included with Tell-Tale Heart.

[Mike Tynus]

Gunier,
The account of the audience laughing at Tell-Tale Heart is from Leonard Maltin's book OF MICE AND MAGIC.

[Steve Klare]

That's OK, back in the 1970s, the family across the street laughed their way through JAWS!

They didn't really think it was funny: this was basically hysterical laughter in response to what was going on up on the screen: once they got going, they couldn't stop!

(How'd you like to be sitting in the row in front of this bunch?!)

I was only 13 years old that summer and didn't go see it, so my biggest JAWS memory is how empty the local beaches were!

A Holy Grail I actually did manage to get was What's Opera, Doc?, often considered to be the greatest Bugs Bunny cartoon ever. One Friday it was on the Derann Used List and that day my timing was perfect. A few hours later, there was a flurry of discussion on one of the film forums: "Derann has a print of What's Opera, Doc? !"


I didn't know it until Monday morning when they confirmed the sale, but I'd actually caught the thing!

[Osi Osgood]

Gunier, "Gulliver's Travels" did actually make it onto super 8, but it is incredibly hard to find as a low fade print, almost all the copies were printed on quick fade Eastman.😞

[Michael O’Regan]

Osi,

I checked my Columbia catalogs and you are correct. They only put out Tell-Tale Heart in b&w. Someone did bring a beautiful color print to CineSea, but it must have been 16mm. Let's move that to a 16mm Holy Grail list!

Doug, wasn’t there a colour release on Standard 8?

[Douglas Meltzer]

Michael,

I would have bet on it! Looking at the catalogs, this was only ever available in B&W sound.

1966




1971



It continued to be listed in the sound section, last appearing in 1973. They later released a total of ten UPA cartoons in color, however Heart was no longer available.

[Joachim Schmidt]

I recently found two digests I was searching for a long time: The neverending story, 600ft, Derann, and „The Lady from Space“. Actually the second one I didn’t really searched for, since I never thought I could find a print. It’s extremely rare.
I am still searching the German 400ft digest of Andy Warhol’s Trash. Tricky…

[Rob Young]

Back the 90’s we were driving down to the BFCC in Ealing. My family were asking which feature film could tempt me. I said, “Raiders of the Lost Ark, but it doesn’t exist full length on super 8”.

I genuinely didn’t know that some copies had started to circulate at that time and it was less of a holy grail and more a pipe dream.

Can you imagine how I felt when we walked in and what was the first thing I saw on Perry’s movies stall?

Budget for the day blown in first 5 minutes, but boy was I happy…

[Gunier J. Kintgen]

Gunier, "Gulliver's Travels" did actually make it onto super 8, but it is incredibly hard to find as a low fade print, almost all the copies were printed on quick fade Eastman.😞

I actually saw a listing for one of those Super-8 prints on E-Bay not too long ago, film did look really faded & the whole thing was dubbed in French.
Good thing I'm looking for it on 16mm then! I'm banking on distrubution copies made for school libraries & TV stations to find a print of it, maybe an NTA print or something like that.