What 8mm films did I watch last night?

[Osi Osgood]

That review says it in a nutshell. Super 8, at it's best, is every bit as good as 16mm. It's true!

[Graham Ritchie]

I still have all my old FFTC magazines, here is the cover for the "Toy Story" release review, note the date 1996. I will also add the cover photo of the February 2003 issue, inside was the tribute to Derek.

[Steve Klare]

Hi Graham,

Yes, it was a very thoughtful gift! They say the best gifts are things people won't buy for themselves (of course it helps when the receiver actually, you know...wants the thing too!), it's just that even if I did resolve to buy this print, left to my own devices I probably would never have gotten around to it!

-and I didn't realize it at the time, but the window of opportunity was closing pretty soon!

I'm not great feature collector: I find shorts are a better value dollar and cubic foot wise. I have something around ten features, they range in quality from "some color left" all the way up to mint condition. I have one feature-length 16mm living in cans under a couch! (-storage issues!) Times being what they are, Toy Story is liable to remain my only bought-new feature-length film.

[Graham Ritchie]

Excellent Christmas present Steve we were all very fortunate that Derann released so many good films. One CGI film and to this day I regret not going for it, and that's the Derann Scope release of "A Bugs Life" however there were many CGI shorts like "Gone Nutty" which are brilliant.

[Steve Klare]

The Conclusion!

Short: Bored of Education (S8, Blackhawk) The Gang meets Miss Lawrence, their new Teacher on the first day of school. Spanky decides he and Alfalfa can skip class if he helps Alfalfa fake a toothache. Miss Lawrence catches wise and they are stuck to reverse their plans.

This is different from many Blackhawks of its era. it's only 200' as opposed to the usual 400'. This makes it great in a spot like tonight because the piece of feature was only about 300' itself and "-Education" didn't overwhelm it. (It's all about presentation!)



Feature Reel: Derann's Toy Story reel #4 (-of 4). This last reel of the feature is the high-speed escape of Buzz and Woody from Sid involving an RC car, a rocket, a moving van and a dog (-you had to BE there!). I remember a show much like tonight's when my 22 year old was maybe four or five and he saw Buzz and Woody blazing through stop and go traffic at highway speeds up on our big screen. He yelled out "AWWESOMMMMME!!!".

-and he was right!

These days, it's too easy to disregard Toy Story as just another CGI kid's movie. I see it differently. Back in 1995 when it first came out, I went to see it as if it was some kind of magic show: this "entire feature length film made in a computer". It did have a unique look, different from both live-action and drawn animated movies. Here and there when I was watching that first time, I wondered "How they did that?" because I kept lapsing into the idea of live action special-effects and hadn't wrapped my head around the idea that it was a pretty direct path between the filmmakers' imaginations and the screen, so within the limits of the state-of-the-art, they could do whatever they wanted!

What really struck me was how I started to forget about the Computer Thing very quickly and got wrapped up in the story and the characters. Pixar could easily have made this just a magic show and I would have gone home happy, but they decided to do the hard work of making a great movie and did the writing and the storyboarding and got the great voice talent and made these little plastic and cloth beings somehow...people!

The print itself is special in its own way: yes, it is a beautiful film any way you measure these things, but it has its own back-story. A couple of years after Toy Story came out, I went back into Super-8, including going into sound after I discovered this "Derann" bunch was printing brand new Super-8 sound prints.

They also had this:

TOY STORY 4 x 600ft. Col. STEREO Price code T.

-which was absolutely mind-boggling to me!

Now apparently I went on about this for some time and said how much I'd like to have one, but I talked about it a little too much as if I needed to win some kind of lottery for it to happen!

My wife decided to intervene and I got the thing for Christmas, 2009! (-not very long before Derann stopped printing film entirely!) Apparently she swore Gary Brocklehurst to secrecy on the subject until at least New Year's!

(She said something about "only living once", so...!)
.

[Steve Klare]

The Saga Continues!

Short: Do Re Mi! (Derann, S8, 'Scope). My wife is a staunch Sound of Music fan. In Airplane II (The sequel) Commander Murdock demands a list of "-everyone who's seen the Sound of Music more than 5 times".

-She may actually top that list!

This is actually her reel: I bought it for her from the Derann Used List ages ago. If I sound like I'm pretending not to like it, that would basically be a lie! It's a great couple of minutes of classic 'scope Cinema including wonderful music and scenery. It had its moment at CineSea back in Ocean Holiday times, and once maybe a year ago when I wanted to demonstrate CinemaScope to a crowd at home, I chose this reel.


Feature Reel: Derann's Toy Story reel #3. This one is best labeled "Sid's House" and is mainly about Buzz and Woody's trials and tribulations surviving and escaping Sid's custody over them.

Toy Story, like many Pixar movies is full of cultural references and hidden Easter eggs. For example both the ball and lamp from Luxo Junior are there and the books on the shelf in Andy's room are all titles of earlier Pixar shorts. As the titles and stories piled up, these became more and more common in later years. (The pizza truck from Toy Story pops up again and again!)

One of the weaknesses of CGI is made into a strength here. In order for there to be carpeting on the floor in Sid's house, it's not enough to send somebody out buy some and have it installed on set. In a movie like this, they needed to imagine carpeting and render it in the computer, and then place it in the virtual "set".

-of course if they had to imagine carpeting, they could imagine any carpet they wanted:
.

-and they chose the carpeting from the Overlook Hotel in The Shining, just to go along with the threatening atmosphere of Sid's house.

[Steve Klare]

One Reel a Night Continues!

Short: Elephant (16mm) This is part of the Silent Safari series. The idea was to show students a short film observing animals in a national park in Kenya without any titling or narration and have the class write about what they saw and discuss afterwards. There are about 7 animals in the series and I have four of them.

I was nice to my wife and son and allowed them to skip the writing assignment...just this once! (We DID have the discussion.)

Feature Reel: Derann's Toy Story reel #2. Woody feels his status as Favorite is threatened and plots to (at least temporarily) get Buzz out of the picture. The lamp from Luxo-Junior accidentally gets involved and things get way out of control!

-contains that great scene in the gas station:
.

YOUUU ARRRRRE A TOYYYYYEE!!!!

[Steve Klare]

Tonight, we did kind of an old family tradition here: Feature on film, one reel per night.

If you thing about it, watching a feature is kind of a commitment: you need to dedicate at least one hour, which gets a little complicated in the craziness of modern life. If you could bust it up into sections, it would be more like reading a novel a chapter per night. This is where a feature on multiple reels shines! Whether you want to or not, those breaks are there! We often split a disk-based movie in two and getting back where you left off can be tricky!

The tradition is "a short and a reel". The short can be a cartoon, a home movie, an educational film, a theatrical trailer reel: basically anything!

It's one reel in the summer, sometimes two and a short in the winter with long nights and less other things to do.

Tonight:

Short: Canoeing in Austria (Just maybe because it rained on our vacation and our boats stayed up on the roof racks for 600 miles!)

Feature Reel: Derann's Toy Story reel #1. We meet the gang and discover that Buzz really can fly! (-or was that falling with style?!)

My son is 22 now, and this was a favorite of his growing up. He hasn't seen it for a couple of years and admits there are some jokes he only got THIS time!

This show will be running until Wednesday night.

[Douglas Meltzer]

I watched the 400' UA-8 Standard 8mm cutdown of the 1945 George Gershwin biopic Rhapsody In Blue. Nice print and a decent edit, I just wish UA had smoothed over some of the abrupt audio cuts.

[Osi Osgood]

Just for a hoot, I decided to watch an optical feature I bought years ago, and was surprised to see that it still has good color, "Romance of a Horsethief", a quirky historical comedy starring Eli Wallach and Yul Brynner.

[Brian Fretwell]

Hot weather and light evenings have put me back on viewing, but I did rewatch "Rabbit Seasoning" to check its colrour (faded but all stil there, blacks reddish) and check part one of "The Quatermass Experiment", that was on the title card despite the box spelling it Xperiment! It seems to be on real Agfa B&W stock.

[Graham Ritchie]

Hi Brian

I bought a copy of ""Night Mail" new from Derann many moons ago and agree the master material was not that great, however I still watch it every so often. The Walton print below has held its color really well over the years, and its another film I like to screen every so often.

[Douglas Meltzer]

3 nights in a row! Brian, you have quite a streak going. Don't stop!

[Brian Fretwell]

Third night was railway themed, The Great Train Robbery (a collectors club print) and "Night Mail" both B&W and showing the age of the master material.
After that a pause before trying "The Quatermass Xperiment" 4x400ft.

[Brian Fretwell]

Last night a Pink Panther cartoon (Agfa, great colour) "Pink on the Cob", a 1934 Movietone News of the year, Tweety & Sylvester in "Bad ole Putty Tat" (faded and pink) and "The Soup Song" from Snow White.
Slow progress due to checking and cleaning before projecting.