My first experience with the Rainbow Parade cartoons were in Black and White prints!

The first time I saw Bold King Cole was a black and white print broadcast as part of Matinee at the Bijou in 1981. That somewhat murky telecine transfer at least did its basic job of presenting the cartoon somewhat intact (at the end a bad sprocket or splice flipped the picture a little, but it was the 80s!). No too long after that, I bought a black and white super 8 print of The Goose that Laid the Golden Egg. It would be another year or so before I’d have a 16mm projector, but when I did I was able to borrow a print from the Washtenaw Country Library in Ann Arbor- and that poor print was beat to death— but it was in color! Blackhawk films had released prints of these cartoons, making their own new negatives from the materials they acquired.

All these years later, five or six years less than half a century, we’ve been cleaning up the Rainbow Parades from what exists of the master materials on the series. It’s a mixed bag in that what does exist is mostly 35mm Technicolor prints rather than masters, but at least those exist rather than just 16. Because they were made by Commonwealth to use as the masters, those prints have stayed in pretty good shape, other than a little mold here and there that has been remedied already at this point.

This past week, I received another hard drive with some of the last scans for the set, and as I was copying files from the drive it went into click of death mode— throwing off the week of working on the newer films. The good new is that I was able to see some of the files before the drive died. So, now, it’s a wait again to get the new drive.

The folks at Blackhawk really are film heroes. I asked if it would be possible to take a look at some of the single color records and see if there were more there than we knew about or perhaps something was mislabeled (this was something I discovered while working with Flip — you had to pull *all* materials on any title since it was hard to say what was right or wrong since they were last looked at many decades earlier). One of the film cans was bigger for the yellow color record, and it turns out it *wasn’t* a yellow color record at all, but rather the complete successive exposure neg (all three colors) for Bold King Cole. So now, there’s actually a complete original camera neg of one of the Rainbow Parades. It’s clearly a lot sharper than a final Technicolor print and will look great once it’s combined and finished.

Since we’ll be using that material for the final, I thought it would be nice to share the Technicolor print we’ve scanned now. The whole set is working its way through the pipeline, and it won’t be too long before everything is finished. So, for now, here’s that scan, with no cleaning or color correction. I like all three Felixes in the series. This one always reminded me of Lonesome Ghosts- not so surprising since they have the same director.

Something to note is that there’s one element in this film that is actually from the earlier Van Beuren days- the moving staircase shot that appears originally in the first Little King, The Fatal Note (1933) gets used in several more Van Beuren shorts, including Pals (33) and Goode Knight (1934).

My guess is that this short was actually in production the longest of the three Felixes since it involves double exposure and a lot of pretty complicated layouts. The model sheets seems to coincide with the production order on both, with the model sheet for Neptune Nonsense dated November 12, 1935 and the model sheet for Bold King Cole dated December 3. Neptune was released March 20, 1936 while Bold King Cole was released on May 29.

I’ve always liked the little ditty at the beginning of this cartoon, and how Felix’s personality works with the story line. He’s somewhat incidental to a lot of the story here though, and I wonder if the king would have been left a shriveled mess if Felix hadn’t happened to show up that night.

I hope you enjoy the cartoon and have a good week everyone!