First — in Thunderbean news:

Next week is spring break at the school, so that’s usually catch up time at Thunderbean in various ways. This year, I’ve already been going sort of full speed with the current projects, so the break is more of a chance to catch some of the people in the Thunderbean freelance pool up to some of the upgrades. We’ve switched software for the digital restoration pipeline for the bulk of that process, and it’s a much more robust package- so much so that we’ll be hopefully switching the freelancers to it as soon as we can afford more ‘chairs’ of the software and faster machines to run it. Ah, technology. I really can’t complain- it’s speeding up the process so much to get the sort of results we’re looking for. Now the big debate is how to grow the little business enough to get it to another level of capability.

The best news of the week makes all of the growing pains, well, not painful. A few days back we managed to acquire what may be the rarest thing we’ve ever managed to get. I’m very excited to talk about it- but will wait until the scanning is done. You’ll be amazed this exists. Really.

I’m hoping to do another bigger scan session in the coming week too if all the pieces fall into place. It has always been a challenge to juggle all the things involved in the business along with the full time work and life, but when really good things happen as a result in terms of being able to scan or release this or that I couldn’t be happier. In some ways I’ve always been reluctant to have a business with all the moving pieces through these years. Still, when something becomes available and Thunderbean and other contacts made from it make it possible to share it – or I’m able to help move other things forward or get chance to lend or show things then everything seems worth it. Accessibility is everything. Each day when I get done with teaching, I can’t wait to get back to working on some aspect of the various projects going on here. I guess if I’m still having that much fun after all these years I should probably stick with it. The Little King and Flip are just about ready for replication now. I can’t wait for them to be actual finished sets.

Now – onto today’s animation!

A handful of years back I managed to get a bunch of negatives from Linus the Lionhearted shows. I’m currently loaning them to a new project (not Thunderbean) that is compiling the series for physical media release, on DVD/blu-ray. What I have are b/w negs with commercials, prepared for the Saturday airings of the show on ABC affiliates.

I thought it might be fun to share the commercials from one of those negatives this week – so here’s a reel of spots from that show. In the comments, talk about your favorites. We’ll show more sometime soon.

Have a good week everyone!