The Puppetoon Movie | |
---|---|
Directed by | Arnold Leibovit |
Written by | Arnold Leibovit |
Produced by | Arnold Leibovit |
Starring | voices of |
Music by | Buddy Baker |
Production company | Arnold Leibovit Entertainment |
Distributed by | Expanded Entertainment [1] |
Release date |
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Running time | 79 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
The Puppetoon Movie is a 1987 animated film written, produced, and directed by Arnold Leibovit. It is based on the Puppetoons characters created by George Pal in the 1930s and 1940s which feature the eponymous Puppetoon animation, and features Gumby, Pokey and Arnie the Dinosaur, who host the framing story. [2] Its framing story stars the voices of Dick Beals, Art Clokey, Paul Frees and Dallas McKennon as the main characters. [3]
The original 1987 release of The Puppetoon Movie contained 11 Puppetoons. [4] The 2000 DVD release included 9 additional Puppetoons and the 2013 Blu-ray release added 7 more. [5]
In 2020, The Puppetoon Movie Volume 2 was released on Blu-ray and DVD, featuring 17 shorts not included on any of the Puppetoon Movie releases and The Ship of the Ether. [6]
In 2023, The Puppetoon Movie Volume 3 was released on Blu-ray, featuring 28 shorts, including 7 previously released on The Puppetoon Movie with higher resolution and vastly improved restorations. [7]
On a film set, Gumby and his friends are shooting a dinosaur movie. However, the Tyrannosaurus rex, Arnie, is reluctant to act ferocious. Upon questioning, Arnie feels unfit for the part, and explains that he once was ferocious, but thanks to the influence of George Pal, he has reformed. Gumby fails to understand the profound effect of Pal, so Arnie and Pokey show Gumby a set of Pal shorts to show him the significance of the artist.
Pal short films featured:
Afterwards, Gumby and the crew meet other characters who Pal animated, such as the Pillsbury Doughboy and the Alka-Seltzer mascot Speedy as well as the titular monkey of the Curious George books and the titular amphibians of the Frog and Toad books. Gumby thanks Pal for making all this possible. The screen pans out and shows a gremlin, who looks at the audience, says "George Pal!" in a raspy voice, then ascends a support beam while laughing hysterically.
In addition to the film shorts listed above, the following Pal film shorts are also included in the 2000 DVD edition from Image Entertainment and the 2013 Blu-ray edition from B2MP: What Ho She Bumps, Mr. Strauss Takes a Walk, Olio for Jasper, Jasper's Derby, Ether Symphony, Aladdin and the Magic Lamp , The Magic Atlas, Jasper and the Haunted House , and The Ship of the Ether.
The 2013 Blu-ray also includes the following short films previously unavailable on home video (all of which sublicensed by Puppetoons' original distributor Paramount): The Oscar-nominated And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street , The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins , Sky Princess, Rhapsody in Wood, Date with Duke, Jasper and the Beanstalk, and Rhythm in the Ranks. In addition, the Blu-ray also includes The Great Rupert which was produced by George Pal and the documentary The Fantasy Film Worlds of George Pal . [8]
A DVD edition from B2MP was released in 2013. [9]
The film received mixed to positive reviews. [10] [11] [12] [13]
George Pal's Puppetoon body of work was recognized by a Special Oscar at the 16th Academy Awards in 1944. Pal received the Special Oscar "for the development of novel methods and techniques in the production of short subjects known as Puppetoons". [14]
Gumby is a cartoon character and associated media franchise created by Art Clokey. Gumby is a blocky green humanoid made of clay.
Stop motion is an animated filmmaking and special effects technique in which objects are physically manipulated in small increments between individually photographed frames so that they will appear to exhibit independent motion or change when the series of frames is played back. Any kind of object can thus be animated, but puppets with movable joints or plasticine figures are most commonly used. Puppets, models or clay figures built around an armature are used in model animation. Stop motion with live actors is often referred to as pixilation. Stop motion of flat materials such as paper, fabrics or photographs is usually called cutout animation.
Tulips Shall Grow is a 1942 American animated short film in the Puppetoons series, directed by George Pal and starring Rex Ingram and Victor Jory. It was released by Paramount Pictures and originally photographed in 3-strip Technicolor. It later became the black-and-white edition by National Telefilm Associates.
Arthur Clokey was an American animator, director, producer, and screenwriter. He was pioneer in the popularization of stop-motion clay animation, best known as the creator of the character Gumby and the original voice of Gumby's sidekick, Pokey. Clokey's career began in 1953 with a film experiment called Gumbasia, which was influenced by his professor, Slavko Vorkapich, at the University of Southern California. Clokey and his wife Ruth subsequently came up with the clay character Gumby and his horse Pokey, who first appeared in the Howdy Doody Show and later got their own series The Adventures of Gumby, from which they became a familiar presence on American television. The characters enjoyed a renewal of interest in the 1980s when American actor and comedian Eddie Murphy parodied Gumby in a skit on Saturday Night Live.
Raymond Frederick Harryhausen was an American-British animator and special effects creator who created a form of stop motion model animation known as "Dynamation". His works include the animation for Mighty Joe Young (1949) with his mentor Willis H. O'Brien ; his first color film, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958); and Jason and the Argonauts (1963), which featured a sword fight with seven skeleton warriors. His last film was Clash of the Titans (1981), after which he retired from filmmaking.
Mickey's Christmas Carol is a 1983 American animated Christmas fantasy featurette directed and produced by Burny Mattinson. The cartoon is an adaptation of Charles Dickens's 1843 novella A Christmas Carol, and stars Scrooge McDuck as Ebenezer Scrooge. Many other Disney characters, primarily from the Mickey Mouse universe, as well as Jiminy Cricket from Pinocchio (1940), and characters from The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949) and Robin Hood (1973), were cast throughout the film. The featurette was produced by Walt Disney Productions and released by Buena Vista Distribution on December 16, 1983, with the re-issue of The Rescuers (1977). In the United States, it was first aired on television on NBC, on December 10, 1984.
George Pal was a Hungarian-American animator, film director and producer, principally associated with the fantasy and science-fiction genres. He became an American citizen after emigrating from Europe.
The Fleischer Superman cartoons are a series of seventeen animated superhero short films released in Technicolor by Paramount Pictures and based upon the comic book character Superman, making them his first animated appearance.
ComiColor Cartoons is a series of twenty-five animated short subjects produced by Ub Iwerks from 1933 to 1936. The series was the last produced by Iwerks Studio; after losing distributor Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1934, the Iwerks studio's senior company Celebrity Pictures had to distribute the films itself. The series was shot exclusively in Cinecolor.
James Danforth is an American stop-motion animator, known for model-animation, matte painting, and for his work on When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970), a theme-sequel to Ray Harryhausen's One Million Years B.C. (1967). He later went on to work with Ray Harryhausen on the film Clash of the Titans (1981) to mainly do the animation of the winged horse Pegasus.
Puppetoons is a series of animated puppet films made in Europe (1930s) and in the United States (1940s) by George Pal. They were made using replacement animation: using a series of different hand-carved wooden puppets for each frame in which the puppet moves or changes expression, rather than moving a single puppet, as is the case with most stop motion puppet animation. They were particularly made from 1932-1948, in both Europe and the US.
Tubby the Tuba is a 1975 animated musical-comedy film, based on the 1945 children's story for concert orchestra and narrator by Paul Tripp and George Kleinsinger. It was released on April 1, 1975 by Avco Embassy Pictures. The film was produced by the New York Institute of Technology, under the supervision of its founder, Alexander Schure, who was the project's director.
Jasper and the Haunted House is a 1942 American animated short film in the Madcap Model series by George Pal. It is an early entry that features the popular yet controversial Paramount Puppetoons characters Jasper and his friend/nemesis Professor Scarecrow and Blackbird.
Mickey's Delayed Date is a 1947 American animated short film produced by Walt Disney Productions, distributed by RKO Radio Pictures and released on October 3, 1947. The film was directed by Charles Nichols and was animated by Jerry Hathcock, George Kreisl, George Nicholas, Harry Holt, Bob Youngquist, Marvin Woodward, and Max Cox with effects animation by Jack Boyd and Andy Engman. It was the 120th short in the Mickey Mouse film series to be released and the only one produced that year.
Arnold Leibovit is an American director, producer, and screenwriter of feature films and musical productions.
The Fantasy Film Worlds of George Pal is a 1985 American documentary film about Academy Award-winning producer/director George Pal. It was written, directed, and produced by Arnold Leibovit.
John Henry and the Inky-Poo is a 1946 stop-motion animation film written and directed by George Pal using Pal's Puppetoons stop-motion style. The film is based on African American folk hero John Henry.
Tex Avery Screwball Classics is a series of single-disc Blu-ray and DVD sets by Warner Bros. Home Entertainment's Warner Archive unit collecting various theatrical cartoons from animation director Tex Avery during his tenure at the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio's cartoon division between the years of 1942 and 1955. It is the first comprehensive collection of Avery's MGM shorts to be released on home media in North America since The Compleat Tex Avery series of laserdiscs in the 1990s, with many of the shorts having been previously unreleased on DVD or Blu-ray.