Sometimes commercials can be a bright spot, and four them them can be bright spots!

But first, a little Thunderbean news:
Interesting week here. While some things have been going quite well, there was a pretty ‘digitally’ devastating incident: one of the main hard drives failed, causing a loss of most of the cleanups we were doing for the Rainbow Parade, Volume 2 set. Other things have been delayed because of it, but, in the larger picture, it’s more of a setback than the end of any one thing. We hope to catch the set back up soon, along with the other things we’re finishing off. In the whole time running Thunderbean, I’ve never had a disaster that’s this big, but a few smaller, frustrating ones that didn’t cause us to lose much have slowed us down before. There’s so many other good things happening that we really can’t let this bring us down too much…

Last week’s article has a whole bunch of great responses! It’s worth looking back at it, since it’s a great list of great films.

Now, onto some commercials!

I had posted these way, way back (in 2014), but I’ve found the YouTube account they were posted in is no more. As I was looking at materials (as I will be a lot in the coming weeks) I found these and took a little break to watch them again.

Many years ago (from late 1987 to early 1994) I worked for the University of Michigan in the Film and Video Library, and helped with the archive films and other collections. These spots were unearthed originally by a University of Michigan archivist, who called me over to take a look at them while he was viewing a 1949 Kinescope broadcast of a University of Michigan Football game sponsored by Ford. While the rest of the broadcast was a Kinescope (shot on video and filmed from a monitor), the four animated Ford Commercials were not- and were in excellent quality to boot. I’m pretty sure Ford had UPA make seven of these all together, but, so far, none of the other ones have ever shown up. None of the others were on any other U of M broadcast, sadly.

Our own Devon Baxter noted that the first spot features animation by Bill Melendez. I’m not sure who animated on the others or if it’s Bill as well on some, but I find them all to be really enjoyable and well-animated.The inking is beautiful on these spots, and especially nice on the closeups.

So, now, let’s all hope the others show up sometime— or even better, sometime soon.

Have a good week all!