After having my head nearly all the time into finishing the Flip the Frog Blu-ray, then nearly all the time on the Van Beuren Tom and Jerry Blu-ray and at the same time heavily on non-Thunderbean (but all cartoon) projects, I’m looking forward to a break from digital things. School starts this coming week, so working with students in my full-time job will be a nice ‘break’ from the full time work over this summer on all these films. It’s been so busy that actually finishing each thing feels impossible as its happening, but it’s all happening.

After spending these past few weeks working with a lot of successive exposure materials (both Fleischer and Iwerks), I’m starting to think about scanning the single color records on some of the Technicolor Rainbow Parades and combining them into the Technicolor prints by splitting those prints back into their separations, then rebuilding adding the fine grain single color record. It’s worth trying to compare results, I think, but something we can’t get stuck on too long since we have to keep getting through these projects. Pretty soon you’ll see a shift here of subject matter as we start working on these next handful of projects.

Since Tom and Jerry is on the cusp of being finished, I thought I’d share the final version of Dough Nuts (1933). As we progressed through the set, I thought we had a pretty good idea of what we had original titles on and what we didn’t. To my great surprise, just as we were finishing the set, Cartoonologist Thad Komorowski mentioned to me he had a 16mm print on this film, so I asked, on a whim, if he could check to see what the titles looked like. To my great surprise, they were the original ones (the only print I’ve seen or heard of that had them). We scanned the film as soon as we could, cleaned it up and combined the best footage from each print; Tommy Stathes’ excellent 16mm print was able to make the final version complete and splice-free.

Here’s the final, restored version we’ve finished for the set as a special sneak preview for everyone here. We’ve featured this cartoon before—it’s one of my favorites of the Tom and Jerrys, and it’s nice to see it as close as possible now to its original version.

This particular project has had a handful of people that played a large roll in being able to get the best materials possible. I’m incredibly grateful and happy it’s finally rounding the final corners!

Have a good week all and more soon!