One of the things I really love about the internet is how many little discoveries you make if you decide to do a little bit deeper of a dive…

Its a short one today since Jerry, who lays out every article for Cartoon Research, is at the San Diego ComiCon – so I’ll keep it simple since he’s going to be putting this together in a hotel room. Have a great Con, Jerry!

I was out in Los Angeles briefly over last weekend, working on organizing a whole lot of vinegar syndrome film in a little under 7 hours. I’ll be back out again as soon as able, and maybe this time will get to visit more friends. It was nice to visit with Jerry Beck and Mark Kausler though– even though I was pretty sweaty by the time we got some food.

Mark Kausler, Jerry Beck and yours truly, Steve Stanchfield

Back in Thunderbean land, packing continues pre-orders with more special discs just getting finished. There’s a few more special discs available at the Thunderbean shop, and those will likely get to be a more rare occurrence soon.

There’s four projects being worked on at once here, and my brain goes from one to the other to the other. As things get closer to finishing, the priorities become what can get finished fastest! Until this week, I was done with my own work on the Rainbow Parade films and just waiting for one more scan and the other folks to finish the ones they had. As I was waiting, I spent time on Cartoons for Victory and the Lou Bunin set. We have the last film for the Rainbow Parade 2 set now, and it’s now an unofficial race between myself and another freelancer to see whose film will be the last to finish! It won’t be our own Devon Baxter though, who turned in his excellent restoration work on “Bold King Cole”. It’s been a great summer of progress so far.

And — onto this week’s… tags!

A handful of weeks back I found these spots that Lou Bunin did for CBS. This is the sort of thing I absolutely love — basically lost animation that was hidden for many years. These tags, for various CBS shows, have a lot of charm and imagination and keep a ‘theme’ for the season. Bunin’s animation makes these a really unique, forgotten chapter in a broadcast year. They must have been fun to see back then.

I think Bunin’s stop motion animation style is really enjoyable. It has a lot of personality, and is often popping quickly in strange ways into a pose, then slow action before quickly popping into another extreme. His work hasn’t been studied in the same ways as many animation director’s work has been over the years, but if you start to take a little bit more of the dive you’ll find all sorts of fun and creative decisions in both character design and ways of thinking about personality animation. Really interesting to watch frame-by-frame. Each of these tags is pretty creative and simple, and, like most of Bunin’s work, very personal in style.

So, here’s three minutes of fun! These are all separate on Archive.org, but I’ve made an edit of them all together. I hope you enjoy them!