As I write this, it’s the first week of school here at the College for Creative Studies, and I’m having a pretty good, but exhausting week. I haven’t had a chance to get to the Thunderbean office this week really at all, but they’re working on getting special discs finished and dubbed for the most part. More news on all those things soon; in the meantime, Here’s a cartoon from one of those special sets: The Case of the Gloomy Gondolier (1963)

The Sam Bassett cartoons are both bizarre and fascinating- and pretty hard to find prints of. The first one I saw of the series was called ‘The Case of the Kangaroo Kid’. I had found the print in a pile of ‘junk prints’ at the Columbus Cinevent some 25 years ago. Since then, I’ve learned very little about the series, but have managed to find more prints from it, mostly from one collector in Australia who claimed the cartoons were from there. After a little searching, I discovered that Cinemagic, the company that produced them, was actually formed in Europe, with American Phil Davis at the creative helm.

Tralfaz wrote a little about the series back in 2014, finding the origins of the series dated back to 1959. It looks like they were going to produce 52 of them; it seems like the initial 13 were the only ones finished.

Out of those 13, I’ve ended up with ten of the series in 16mm prints.

If you haven’t seen any of the Sam Bassett shorts, they’re bizarre first, but also pretty funny in their bizarreness. Sam Bassett is a Bogart-esque gumshoe, whose mute partner, Chapultepec, plays his guitar instead of talking- but Sam understands him. The film were recorded in Europe (probably France) with the animation produced in Zabreb. Our very own Jerry Beck has featured some of the series in his yearly ‘Worst Cartoons Ever’ show at the San Diego Comic Con, but I think Sam does deserve at least a tip of the hat for being good in a strange sort of way.

We’ve done some color correction for the special discs, and they’re looking a lot better than the DVD we did many years ago. They feel a lot like cheaper version of the King Features Popeye cartoons Zagreb made. Still, I have to admit I really enjoy them for their sheer strangeness.

This isn’t the final version that’s on the Blu-ray special set (we’ve done a little more to clean up since) I’d love to hear people’s opinions on this particular short!

Have a good week everyone, and don’t put a gun in your hat…