The Extras - Restoring Max Fleischer Cartoons: Betty Boop, Popeye, Koko the Clown, and Superman

Episode Date: July 11, 2022

Max Fleischer was a pioneer in early animation and yet many of his cartoons are in desperate need of restoration.  Joining the podcast to talk about their restoration efforts in partnership with the Max Fleischer estate and Paramount pictures are Mauricio Alvarado of Rockin Pins, restorer Brandon Adams, and author and Max Fleischer expert Ray Pointer.Along the way, we discuss the the genius of "Koko the Clown" and how it has become a pop-culture phenomenon with young people.  And we discuss the beloved fashion icon status of "Betty Boop" and her origins in early cartoons.  We also touch on "Popeye" and "Superman" and their legendary status in animation history.Links: ROCKIN PINSLinktr.ee for Fleischer Cartoonswww.inwellimagesinc.comLinktr.ee for Not An Animation HistorianOtaku Media produces podcasts, behind-the-scenes extras, and media that connect creatives with their fans and businesses with their consumers.  Contact us today to see how we can work together to achieve your goals.  www.otakumedia.tvThe Sitcom StudyWelcome to the Sitcom Study, where we contemplate the TV shows we grew up with and...Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify The Extras Facebook pageThe Extras Twitter Warner Archive & Warner Bros Catalog GroupOtaku Media produces podcasts, behind-the-scenes extras, and media that connect creatives with their fans and businesses with their consumers. Contact us today to see how we can work together to achieve your goals. www.otakumedia.tv

Hi, I'm film historian and author John Fricke. I've written books about Judy Garland and the Wizard of Oz movie, and you're listening to The Extras. Hello and welcome to The Extras, where we take you behind the scenes of your favorite TV shows, movies, and animation, and their release on digital, DVD, Blu-ray, and 4K, or your favorite streaming site. I'm Tim Millard, your host. Today we have a really fun show talking Max Fleischer cartoons with three guys that came

together because of their passion for restoring classic animation. Mauricio Alvarado is the owner of pop culture merchandise company RockinPins.com and executive producer of the Max Fleischer Cartoons Restoration Project. He is a cartoon fanatic and producer working on the restoration and screening of classic an executive producer of the Max Fleischer Cartoons Restoration Project. He's a cartoon fanatic and producer working on the restoration and screening of classic animation in Los Angeles. Brandon Adams is a trained clinical neuropsychologist who became interested in learning about digital restoration of golden age animation so that he can improve the quality of his own personal collection. so that he can improve the quality of his own personal collection. He's currently working for Max Fleischer Cartoons, LLC,

helping the Fleischer family restore their vast library of animated films. And during his career, Ray Pointer has been a filmmaker for the U.S. Navy and has worked in animation for Hollywood Studios, film Roman, Hanna-Barbera, Universal, Disney Interactive, and Nickelodeon. And he's the author of The Art and Inventions of Max Fleischer, American Animation Pioneer. Guys, welcome to The Extras. Thank you. Hey, Tim.

Thank you. Well, I've really been looking forward to this. I've been seeing some of your stuff online, Instagram, Twitter, all of that. It's great to see all of the work that you guys have been doing and how you're able to get that out to the fans so quickly and easily these days. But maybe I'll start with you, Mauricio. Maybe you can tell the listeners how you guys kind of all got together for your interest here in classic animation.

Yeah, so with my company, Rockin' Pins, I basically started making merchandise with enamel pins. There was a big craze going on a couple years ago on Instagram. And I got the idea to do official merchandise. And then as my career went a little bit forward, I started licensing properties that I thought needed some more attention, some more love. I'm a kid of the 90s.

I grew up watching old VHS cassettes, public domain stuff. Actually, this is the tape that started it all. As you can see, it's got all these different characters, Felix, Casper, Popeye, Betty Boop, Superman. But all this stuff was kind of in my head as a kid. And then growing up, I just noticed that there really wasn't any attention to this stuff. You know, obviously there's companies like Funko that like to celebrate pop culture and classic stuff. But I saw that there wasn't really a movement to give people context to this stuff. Like sure, you could make a figure of Huckleberry Hound, but the new generation of kids, you know,

an eight year old is not going to know who Huckleberry Hound, but the new generation of kids, you know, an eight-year-old is not going to know who Huckleberry Hound is. If anything, when I do conventions and events, I see a lot of the older parents get excited about, you know, seeing Gumby or Mighty Mouse or whatever other character, but the kids are always the one that go, who's that? Or, you know, what is that? You know, they have no clue. And basically what I saw is there was, there was a disconnect with, uh, the classic media that we grew up loving. Funny enough, the stuff from the thirties, twenties, forties is nineties nostalgia for my generation. Like I said, you know, we grew up watching this stuff and funny enough, yesterday it was the, um, 34th anniversary of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. And I was kind of thinking of like,

you know, what happened? What's the timeline that created this, you know, cartoon craze? It was Who Framed Roger Rabbit. And then that started this craze with Cartoon Network in the early 90s. You know, Tiny Toons, Steven Spielberg got his hand into this stuff. And then that's when my generation got a hold of the classics. So then how did you connect with Brandon and Ray? Thankfully, thanks to the internet, with everything being so accessible, I mean, learning how to scan and restore stuff.

I managed to find Brandon, who started his YouTube channel, Not an Animation Historian, which basically he uses that to buy local prints, scan them himself, restore them on his own time. And through his YouTube channel, we just started connecting and saying, hey, you know, there's interest in possibly restoring some stuff, any chance we could get some help. Yeah. And yeah, he's been open to it. I mean, we've been working for the last year or so. Just on our own, we've been looking for prints of Felix the Cat, Mutt and Jeff. We just scanned some Ray Harryhausen fairy tale shorts that are going to be awesome that we're going to restore. But essentially, it feels like we have to do it ourselves. We have to kind of start this grassroots movement of handling, you know, finding these prints and getting them scanned and restored.

But yeah, with Brandon, he's been such a tremendous help because this isn't really his main gig. He's more of a professional doctor and he's got his clients and stuff. So the fact that he's taking his time to work with us to restore this stuff, I mean, it's all out of love for the cartoons, which is just amazing.

But yeah, Brandon's been just such a tremendous help and the fact that we've managed to get to this point after a little over a year is just amazing. But yeah, Brandon's been just such a tremendous help. And the fact that we've managed to get to this point after a little over a year is just amazing. And by connecting with him, I started reaching out to other people. And Ray Pointer was somebody that I should have connected much earlier, just because of the amount of work he's done in the past. Just to give a little background, he released his own DVD set of the Inkwell stuff. He's written the book on Max Fleischer. And sadly, there's not really a lot of historians of the Fleischer studios.

There's a ton of Disney stuff, of course, but there's only two books that I can recall. His is the Max Fleischer, Art and Inventions of Max Fleischer. And the other is Leslie Kabarga's, the Fleischer story. But the way I see Ray fitting into this whole project is his value. His knowledge is valuable. He knows the ins and outs of how the studio worked,

how the Fleischer's invented their, uh, the rotoscope, how they did the bouncing ball, how they did the 3d backgrounds. And I feel like the consumers now are the fans specifically. They want to know how this stuff was made. There's not a lot of books written. And if we can give people context and, you know,

answer their questions about how the Fleischer's worked, then I feel like my job is done. As a fan myself, I want to learn how this was done. So it's always great to hear Ray talk about the Fleischer stuff. But yeah, together, I think, you know, with Brandon, with Jane, with Ray, we want to give people the whole package of the Fleischer story. We want to tell them how this was started, how we're going to help restore them, how we're going to keep this alive. But yeah, it's been, it's been tremendous fun working with these guys. Ray, that's a good time to kind of kick it to you. How did you kind of come to be a Max Flasher? I mean, you worked in animation,

but what caused you to kind of focus on Max? Well, I was the first generation that saw a lot of these when they were first on television over 65 years ago. And I was a preschooler when I was exposed to the Out of the Inkwell films. And I think that's what created an interest in my becoming an artist. And then

a few years later, about five years later, I got into doing my own animated cartoons. And in 1967, just before I entered high school, I was interviewed at Jam Handy in Detroit. And that's where Max Fleischer was during World War II.

And it was through there that I started to hear all these stories about him being an inventor. And it just turns out that his best friend, Frank Goldman, was working there. And so during my interview, I was in the process of finishing an animated version of The Wizard of Oz I was doing with cutouts. I rigged up a 3D setup similar trying to recreate what Fleischer did in a lot of the classic Betty Gleason potlice

with the 3D backgrounds. I did it with glass panes. And in the middle of this, these two old men came in. I was introduced to these short little square-shaped men, Frank Goldman, a pioneer, and his very best friend, Max Fleischer. Max had stopped in to see Frank. I think this was just before Expo 67. And so he spent 20 minutes talking to me, talking to me.

And that's 20 minutes I'll never forget. After I graduated high school, after I heard all these anecdotes, then I started in full force to do the research in 1970. For several decades, there really had not been any comprehensive history on the history of animation since 1940. 1940 was when the history was first recorded in two books. One of them was by Nat Falk, and that covered all of the contemporary studios. And then there was a French book.

That was it in 1940. So you had a good 30 years where the history was not continued. It wasn't until 1959, Disney came out with another history book, but of course it was about their studio in commemoration with Sleeping Beauty. But still, all of the histories were concentrated on the Disney achievements and forgetting everybody else.

And my generation growing up with seeing the non-Disney cartoons on television got a true sense of animation history. And I think that's what motivated the wave of books that started to appear after 1970. And the one that started the whole cycle was Christopher Finch's book, The Art of Walt Disney, and then Leonard Maltin's book, Of Mice and Magic, and then it was one after the other. And then, of course, there was the Fleischer story that came out in 1976,

which I had a hand in as well. So just for our listeners, maybe you could kind of tell us a little bit about who Max Fleischer was and just kind of summarize that. Well, Max Fleischer was an Austrian-American. He was born in Austria, he and his brother, and came here with his parents when he was five years old and grew up in New York

and was associated with the cartooning circles. And he was so in love with cartooning, the story has it that he would have gladly paid $2 just to sit and watch the cartoonist draw. And they saw how earnest he was, so they hired him as an errand boy. And within a short period of time, he was promoted to an assistant cartoonist. And periodically, he would be assigned to do filler cartoons when they had the space available. And so that's how he got started. He attended the Cooper Union Art School in New York and also the Art Students League.

And that's where he got his commercial art training. And he eventually became a very revered commercial illustrator. And because of that, he got a job and sent him to Boston for two years. And eventually he came back to New York and was art editor for a popular science magazine. So now that era where he was first starting off in animation, what was that kind of the setting for that? What were the popular animations at that time or the cartoons? Stay with us. We'll be right back. Hi, this is Tim Millard, host of The Extras Podcast. And I wanted to let you know that

we have a new private Facebook group for fans of the Warner Archive and Warner Brothers catalog physical media releases. So if that interests you, you can find the link on our Facebook page or look for the link in the podcast show notes. on our Facebook page or look for the link in the podcast show notes. Well, first of all, his getting into that was quite accidental. As most of his achievements were, they were not planned. They were accidents. During the time when he was at Popular Science, his boss and his wife went to the cinema.

And the first commercially produced cartoon started to appear in 1914. But they were very jerky and very uncoordinated. And the story has it that his boss's wife, when she saw one of these, she says, oh, God, I hate this. And so his boss came back the next day. The boss's name was Wildermere Cleary clemfort really rose off the top and he approached max and he said you're a pretty smart fellow you know mechanics and photography can you find a way to make animated cartoons look better well knowing how winder

mckay worked where he would spend over a year to painstakingly draw these beautifully gothic illustration-style cartoons. He had to find another way of accomplishing the same thing, to create smooth animation. And so he came up with the idea of projecting live action and tracing from it as a guide. of projecting live action and tracing from it as a guide. Well, it just turned out that his other brothers had failed in an outdoor movie theater. And by the time the proceeds were settled, they were left with a collection of folding chairs and the projector. So they cannibalized the projector for a projection source and set the projector on an incline board with an easel that was elevated and they cut a square hole on it so that you have a piece of glass that you can see through.

And that was his first invention that led to becoming the rotoscope. Right. And it took him about eight months to a year working in his spare time. And there were several experiments over a three-year period. Tim, just to kind of go to the point with Max Fleischer, Max Fleischer was basically an innovator, an animator, head of a studio, Fleischer Studios, who created Betty Boop, Popeye, the Superman cartoons. He was Disney's number one rival. There were actually, you know, I heard stories that if you mentioned Disney around Fleischer, Max Fleischer, he'd get upset.

But outside of Max, there were, what's famous about them is there were a group of brothers. So it was Max, Dave Fleischer, who was, you know, he was credited as directing all of the cartoons, but, you know, between you and me, he didn't really. But he was a very important piece of that. Ray, can you also tell them about the other brothers and what their role was in the studio? Yeah, the amazing thing is there were five brothers, like the five fingers of a hand that worked together. They worked instinctively. So if Max would come up with an idea, he'd discuss it with them.

Here's the idea. What can we do? And they say, no problem. We know what to do. And they would carry it out from there. The older brother, Charlie, was an electrician. Now, oddly and unfortunately, he had studied law and passed the bar and then didn't go into the profession. So he became an electrician. Then there was Max, who had the artistic background. And then the next brother, Joe, was a mechanic. Then there was Lou, who was the musician and the mathematician.

And then Dave was the youngest brother and probably the least educated, but the most instinctive as far as show business was concerned, because worked as a an usher at the famous palace theater anybody who knows anything about the history of vaudeville theater knows if you played at the palace you've played at the palace you know the top line and so that was a lot of his influence about comedy and timing and that sort of thing. So that's how they work together. And incidentally, it's a present-day assumption that Fleischer was competing with Disney. It was the other way around, because the present generation is not aware of the fact

that there was a whole career a decade before that. That's one of the reasons why we're getting involved with this restoration period, because there was a ton of films before 1930, and three-fourths of those negatives no longer exist. So it was actually the other way around. And if you look at Disney's early career, you can actually see evidence where he was very much aware of what the Fleishers were doing, because in a lot of cases, he emulated what they were doing. were doing because in a lot of cases he emulated what they were doing the one thing that got disney started commercially was the alice comedies or they were affectionately known as alice in cartoon land he reversed the concept of out of the inkwell where out of the inkwell was 25 animation and

three-fourths of a live action with max fleischer in it as the established artist and the interaction between the live action and the cartoon. And also applications of his various inventions, the rotoscope and the rotograph, which did composite photography that combined the animation with live action back in the mid-20s, 100 years ago. So Disney reversed that idea and put a live-action girl in a cartoon environment. So what was the first kind of character that Fleischer Studios developed that was popular during that time?

Well, it was the clown. It was a clown that started in 1919. Well, first of all, the clown was popular because of the execution of the animation through rotoscope. But the clown character did not have a name until 1923. And that's when Dick Humer had left the Mutt & Jeff series and came over to work for Fleischer's. And he redesigned the character and actually set the style for the Fleischer Studios from that point with the handsome thick and thin ink lines so that was their their launching point the clown character that became Coco the Clown right so we can go through practically each decade and then you've

got a new milestone character so during the 20s it was coco the clown then we get into the beginning of the sound era it becomes betty boo and then in 1933 once they got popeye that really took off right and that was their their their a picture property which was licensed by the way and again as i said before all of their successes were accidental, if not slightly derivative. In fact, in a lot of cases, they were derivative. Coco the Clown was influenced by a vaudevillian by the name of Bessie McCoy, who had a clown outfit. And then Dave's costume was sort of influenced by that with some additions.

Betty Book was a caricature of Helen Kane, never intended to be a formal character, but as she evolved, she became the human girl that became the cartoon character. Popeye was licensed, and Max saw the value in Popeye when no one else did.

King Features did not believe that he could do anything with him. Paramount didn't. So that's why he snuck him into a Betty Boop cartoon. And of course, the rest was history. And this is back in the day when people, you know, movies were still early on. So people went to see these animations, correct? Oh, correct.

And then, too, the other advantage that sound cartoons had over live action at that time was, as you are probably aware, the early talkies were very restricted as far as movement was concerned because of the awkwardness of working around the limited microphones. Right. Cartoons didn't have those limitations. So you could go wild with the cartoons. Yeah.

And the novelty of these cartoons synchronized to sound, which was really a big deal. And seeing them singing and dancing, they wondered, how did they do that? And I want to circle back to our restoration project. So there are these different series that the Fleishers did.

The early ones were Coco the Clown. And I just want to add a cool little tidbit to that is that Max's brother, Dave, was the guy who was dressing up as a clown and being rotoscoped. So it's funny to see all those early cartoons. So that's, you know, if you see Coco the Clown running around and all that, that's Dave Fleischer being rotoscoped. So it's great to hear. You can almost recognize his face in it too.

So it's fun to see that the brothers would all work together. And I forget which brother, Ray, you could let me know, but there's one of them who invented the bouncing ball technique. So I'm sure everybody knows, you know, karaoke and stuff. Well, Lou's son says that nobody will admit who actually came up with the idea. But one thing that needs to be understood is that everybody involved agreed that it was a collaborative effort. And the understanding was that Max realized there had to be some sort of an indicator to keep the audience in sync with the tempo of the music. So they needed some sort of a pointer or a baton. And so it's quite likely that he came up with the idea of a ball to lead the audience. So he registered a patent on that. But it was Lou who actually performed in front of a camera

and moved the ball to the tempo. They shot it in live action and then double exposed it over animation cards on black. And funny enough, what kind of jump-started this entire mission was Coco the Clown, because there's a sequence in Snow White, Betty Boop's Snow White, where Cap Calloway is rotoscoped. They use Coco the Clown, and then he turns into the ghost. It's a very popular scene, and some rapper named Ghost Mane actually fan-made it, but they did a fan-made it using one of Ghost Mane actually, actually a fan made it, but they did a fan video using one of Ghost Mane's song. And currently it has like, I think 400 million plus views on this like 40

second video. And ever since then, kids have been tattooing Coco or the ghost or these characters. The way I kind of got the idea to restore this stuff was I went to my licensor at the time and said, Hey, can we make merchandise out of this clown, out of this ghost? Like, what's going on with this? Where are these cartoons? And then it showed me that we don't know. They're scattered all over the world. These specific Coco the Clown cartoons that Max did, which was before he started working with Paramount, nobody held them, nobody properly archived them. So they're scattered throughout the world. And that's probably our most important piece of this restoration thing is finding all those Lost Coco cartoons. Because I mean, between you and me,

I think those are the most amazing, innovative, just imaginative cartoons that I've ever seen, just with Max interacting with the clown and all this sort of stuff. But yeah, we're finding a lot of deteriorated prints, a lot of prints that need work. But Brandon, what do you think about, you know, the process of restoring these old 20s cartoons compared to like the colorized ones? Is it a lot difficult? Is it harder for you to work with that stuff?

Yeah. Like one of the first I did was a 35 millimeter Mini the Moocher. And one thing I couldn't find, because this was really in the beginning when I had just kind of, I started kind of trying to improve the quality of laser discs and then DVD prints and then eventually graduating to film. Because as I was digitizing my own collection, even if it's on a modern medium like a Blu-ray, a lot of times it's just old prints that was even transferred a long time ago then put on a disc, and the quality is really lacking on a lot of these things. And I was just trying to figure out how can one improve the quality of this stuff because at the time I didn't have film prints. I wasn't really connected with any scanning companies and stuff of that nature. So when I was kind of in the more kind of trial and error trying to figure

things out, one thing I learned between doing, working on a color versus black and white is the options available to you in terms of playing with the highlight, shadow, and the tones of a black and white film are just more limited because you don't have the red, the greens, the blues the way you do with the color film. They can really play with the waveform and get certain things to pop out. And in trying to find videos on how to grade black and white film on YouTube and other sites like that. There's just not really anything on there. There's videos on how to play with black and white with modern

digital recordings and make it look like an old film and stuff like that and grade through that way. But just isn't anything with where you have a black and white film. It's either washed out or really dark. And what are you supposed to do to figure that out? So that's kind of one of the things that I struggled with. And even with these films where we have a scan of a 35 negative or a film that has multiple elements that have been stitched together over the decades, you get different scenes that look just wildly different from one another. And part of the trick is how do you get it to match and tone to try to look like it was this one seamless print? And just when you don't have the different color to work with, you're working with highlights and shadows and balance and gamut levels and stuff like that.

shadows and balance and gamut levels and stuff like that at least for me and this just may be my my limited experience talking still it's just harder to to get that all to to match and be done together one thing i've uh i've had a few people on the show that have talked about restoration and everything and one of the things that i've kind of noticed, because I was no expert in this, but we live in an age and an era where a lot of software you can now use to help in this restoration. So there's a lot more tools. Is that, are you finding that to be true, Brendan? Yeah, I mean, kind of the evolution that I went to as somebody with no background in this and what a lot of people do initially, because what's you kind of use what's available to you and what's affordable because there are proprietary programs that are designed specifically for this process and they're extremely expensive to license.

So for most people who would like to get this or do it yourself or whatever, it's just not really an option. You need some sort of outfit or whatever that will help kind of pay for that cost. So, you know, artificial intelligence, AI is kind of the first thing that a lot of us discover on our own because it has the ability to take something small like a 480p or 480i picture and then upscaling it to 2K, 4K and beyond. 480i picture and then upscaling it to 2k 4k and beyond so in working with that you kind of play with an experiment with it and so on and then you come to find at least when it comes to animation it doesn't do a great job or i should say for the old animation it doesn't do a great job if you

are trying to upscale a standard definition of a more modern cartoon with its sharp contrast and cleaner picture it would do a lot better but with an older transfer of a cartoon that's more blurry the foreground and background is less well defined there's compression artifacts or whatever it can just kind of make a mangled mess of things but that's kind of where i started right like with laser disc and dvd trying to get it from small to big and then realizing in order to do that you have to take it small and make it look as good as you can first and then make it big so that's kind of where i started learning how to begin trying to make something old and standard definition, improve the quality at that level before kind of trying to, you know, upscale it.

So that was kind of where things went. And it's just been a discovery process in terms of finding affordable programs that are flexible enough that you can kind of do any kind of work with. Because you want the process to be as non-destructive as possible. You want to try to maintain the integrity of what you have in front of you. And now that I'm mainly working with film, that's even more so important because you have a clean scanned image, even if there's dirt, scratches, warping, whatever, you want to be able to clean it and improve it without fundamentally altering it to the extent possible. Now, I see you, I mean, you working with the Fleischer family, is that kind of how you're finding or getting most of the assets that you've

been working on the race restoration? Because Mauricio, you did mention that there's a lot of this stuff is missing or not around. So there's some I'm doing on my own. I mean, through eBay and private collectors, there's a few scanning companies I've built relationships with in terms of being able to get them scanned. So I almost work exclusively now with film in some capacity. But what Mauricio and working with Jane Fleischer-Reed has been able to do with Paramount is to get them to start scanning, get new scans of these films with whatever best available element that they have, and then making that available for us to try to clean up and improve the quality of. Other sources as well are at the Library of Congress, particularly anything before 1927. So fortunately, a few of those important films are there.

But in a lot of cases, I've gone through this experience before because 20 years ago, I went there and I had released a two DVD disc set of 60 of the titles. There were still 30 that I've been searching for for years and they may turn up at this point. But the problem with the LOC prints is you don't know what condition they're in. And sometimes they've been viewed many times and they're splicing or they've gotten scratched. Or I might have seen something when I was in Washington, D.C. that I viewed that I thought looked perfectly fine, like Big Chief Coco. And then when I finally ordered it 20 years ago,

this wasn't the print that I looked at, things of that nature. But it looks like from what we've gotten scanned recently, they must have come up with other prints because they look better than what I had access to then. In other cases, there have been some things that have come up in 35 from as early as 100 years ago, 1922. For instance, bubbles. That was one of the early ones when they started their own studio. And to find a 35 of those is very rare because most of them are in 16 millimeter Kodasc cotoscope prints which i have unfortunately that's one of the prime examples of one that's got deterioration because you see

the picture weaving and wiggling everything and getting light and dark and that sort of thing so that's the poster child and in essence of why this restoration is just so important in other cases something has just been duped and duped and duped so many times that they're just completely bleached out. And it's not a true representation of what those films were about. Basically, the way I look at this whole project is, you know, a closed mouth won't get fed. If there's not like a public outcry, if nobody's asking for this stuff to be saved,

then they're just going to, these companies are just going to say, all right, nobody cares about them. We'll just leave them inside. You know, there's an interest in this stuff. I'm making the merchandise. Eventually, what we want to do is tour this stuff, you know, get people to come out to a big theater, watch this on the big screen. You know, they can come out, they can buy the Blu-ray at the merch table. But yeah, there definitely is a big demand for this. There's been a renaissance these last couple of years with games like cuphead it's now like a show on netflix

uh stuff like bendy and and we're looking to yeah just kind of restore this legacy of max fleischer his cartoons are amazing and then i really believe that they should be examined and looked at i mean my god the the Superman stuff alone is just incredible. And to Ray and Brandon's point about us, you know, going out and finding this stuff, we located 235 prints of Superman cartoons in Australia. And outside of Warner Brothers, that stuff is hard to find. You know, there's a lot of 16 prints of Superman. They look really ugly, faded, just beat up. But the fact that we got to find two 35 prints and we're getting to restore that in 4K and the work that Brandon is doing is just amazing.

He has a really cool comparison video that he has that shows you just how, what you can do with these programs. But yeah, it's just important for us to get this stuff out there, get it restored. Finally, it's a piece of art. You know, I think it's important culture. The fact that these cartoons are almost 90, 100 years old and they're still resonating with people. People are still, you know, trying to copy that style and essence of it. I mean, we just have to.

I think a point that needs to be clarified here, though, too, is it's not as though there wasn't any interest in restoring these at all, because the restoration process actually started in 1980 when UCLA received Paramount's old negatives, and I visited over there one spring, and they had just started receiving them, and when I went through their index card file I found cards referencing negatives for poor Cinderella the first color classic and that's the only one that has Betty Boop in it in color and I came across a reference card for a red negative then I found one for a blue negative because previously there weren't any color prints circulating. And then I found another reference for a new Eastman color answer print that they had made.

So UCLA has spent a great deal of time selecting certain ones. ones but there are so many other of these films that are sitting there untouched because they can't just devote all of their their resources just to these cartoons alone i think so far they've done maybe six or eight of them but two of the um two reelers the raggedy and and the raven they restored those and um dancing on the Moon, I believe, Little Dutch Mill, is about the four or five of them that they have done. And one or two of the screen songs. That's about it. And unfortunately, this is taking too much time.

And we're at this point where we can't afford to wait another 20 years. Right. So how do you go about then getting the funding or picking the projects that you're going to be working on, Brandon? In terms of funding, I think as far as the Max Fleischer thing goes and what I'm kind of doing on my own on the side, it's mostly all self-funded. You know, you try to raise funds where you can but i mean we're kind of talking with an archive about getting some some new prints as well and we're negotiating we're figuring out how we're going to self-fund that as well so right now a lot of this is we're supporting it ourselves financially do you guys have any kickstarter type stuff or is it uh is it just coming from the merchandise sales?

Honestly, right now it's, yeah, it's all funded through me and Jane and just, uh, my merchandise and, uh, I don't knock on wood. I just got an email as we're talking from the film foundation, which is Martin Scorsese's, uh, restoration company. Right. And they just sent me a list of the cartoons that they want to restore from the Fleischer library. So there you go. Funny. I just came in as you were asking about that. So fingers crossed, we might get some funding from some great companies like that. Yeah.

Yeah. And I think getting the word out, like, you know, on this podcast and other, other places to people who are interested in restoring films, animation, I think is an important step too. And you are doing some live events, and I know you have coming up kind of exciting that you guys are going to be doing a panel at Comic-Con. Hopefully that'll get some of the people who attend that event to learn a little bit more about what you guys are doing as well.

How did that kind of come about? So Ray, as he mentioned, he has a couple of DVDs out and he has one for the Alice comedies. And one of the guys there at Comic-Con, one of the helpers, his name's Josh, he reached out to Ray about screening that. I guess they have another screening room where they could just run stuff for people to watch. And yeah, Ray forwarded that email to me. And obviously we're so involved in this Fleischer stuff and Comic-Con is such a big deal.

It's like, hey, could we potentially do a panel there? We're restoring this stuff and we got really cool stuff to show. And, you know, Comic-Con, we got Superman, we got Betty Boop and all that. And Josh put the word out. I honestly thought we were not going to get approved because he said like yeah it's too short notice and you know right maybe next year or whatever but we got approved and yeah through ray um we got that hook up there and yeah essentially what we're going to do is use

that panel to present our restorations kind of give people history and context of the studio a little bit, show them a little bit more of what goes into the process of restoration. And, um, I guess we'll announce this on your podcast, but we're going to have Bill and Kevin from, uh, tune in with me for me,

TV join us. And Bill's going to be the moderator for that. Um, so we're going to be able to have, you know, those guys come join us. And if you do go to Comic-Con, uh, we just finished the, moderator for that um so we're going to be able to have you know those guys come join us and if you do go to comic-con uh we just finished the i just got approval for it for we're going to give

out a free poster drawn by sean dickinson who worked on cuphead he does all the amazing art for that game so we're going to have an exclusive poster with coco and bimbo and betty and all those characters if you come out we're going to give you a free poster and all that but yeah obviously as you can hear we're excited about that so and I'll clarify that this is the San Diego Comic Con which will be here in July usually the third week of July and that will be in the

San Diego one and will you have a booth at that Comic Con as well where you'll be selling some of your merch or and just to yeah give the people the date it's going to be July 23rd, which is on a Saturday. It's going to be at 3 p.m. And they're saying that they're going to give us an option to maybe have an autograph session afterwards. Maybe I'll have some merchandise.

Funny enough, again, I just got my new design of Popeye versus Sinbad. I actually managed to get King Features, who owns Popeye, to let me make official merch of that cartoon. So we're going to debut that at Comic-Con. But yeah, I'll take some merch. Hopefully I could sell some stuff. But we're primarily there just for the panel. Right. And to go kind of back to the different characters, the Popeye is obviously popular and well-known.

And you'll be talking about that. The Superman you mentioned. By the way talking about that the superman you mentioned um by the way was that the mechanical monsters clip that you guys posted was that from that uh that's referencing oh that was a different clip well that was a different clip yeah so um i think like a couple weeks ago i forget time flies but there was um you know online there's twitter you know a day for everything and And apparently it was Superman Day. And I saw this. I literally saw this the last couple hours of the day, like nine, ten o'clock at night.

And I even texted Brandon. I was like, hey, check it out. We should post something, you know, something from the Max Fleischer series. And yeah, I clipped out a scene from the first Superman. It's like, you know, 40 seconds. I posted it on Twitter. Has, hashtag Superman Day Fleischer. The next day, yeah, I think right now we're at 4.5 million views just on that clip alone. And that just shows you that there's still interest in this stuff.

And as I was going through the comments, it's a lot of young kids that never seen this before. They had no clue that this was, you know, a Superman thing at all from the 40s. They're amazed by it, by the way it looks. And yeah, that just motivates me to keep pushing this stuff out there. You know, we just have to show this new generation of this awesome stuff that came before us. Because, I mean, as a fan, quite frankly, Superman's kind of lame. But the only great thing about Superman are those cartoons. I grew up watching them.

And by the way, that's just my opinion. I don't want to get hate mail on it. But I think the only best Superman thing outside of the comics are those Superman Max Fleischer cartoons. So, yeah. As a matter of fact, the Max Fleischer cartoons. So, yeah. As a matter of fact, the Max Fleischer cartoons actually helped develop the comic book a whole lot better, too, because the original comic book, they weren't that well-drawn.

And the same thing happened with Popeye in the fact that after the first year, the animators saw areas where they had to tinker with the design a little bit to make him easier to animate, because originally he was rather stiff and limited about what you could do with it. And so that's one of the things that's a credit to Fleischer Studios in that they did a very successful adaptation of an established property and actually improved on it. And so the images of Popeye and Superman are based on what Fleischer Studios did to them to improve them. In fact, if I may, the idea of Superman flying came out of the cartoons. It didn't originate in the comic book. It came out as a a practical solution

about how to animate him traveling and it just looks silly to have him taking large steps or skipping along and so just to make it simpler make for a more dramatic shape the story has that max suggested is having compressed his body into a bullet shape and that looks very good right when it was a Warner Home Video, I know I worked a little bit on a release that were some of the Max Flasher Superman 1941 to 42. Is that the era you're talking about?

Or are you talking about even before that? Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. That's the era, okay. They got that license in 1940. The interesting story is that Republic Studios was supposed to develop a serial and they failed to do it and so then action comics took the license from them and gave it to fleischer in 1940 one thing i do want to mention that brandon was bringing up that you know obviously

right now we're in you know we want to be politically correct and not offend anybody and when i mentioned the Superman cartoons, there's a misconception that the Fleishers did the later propaganda sort of anti-Japanese cartoons. And Nazi. And I just want to put it out there, Fleishers did not make those. Once Paramount got rid of Max and the Fleishers, they created their own studio with Famous Studios.

And that's who ended up making those later kind of propaganda World War Two Superman cartoons. But there was a reason for that. There was a reason for that. First of all, thank a teacher if you can read. Because all the cartoons that no longer have the flyers names they have no connection to and so the first superman that was released under famous doesn't doesn't even credit famous by the way but the first one was japan tours but they they made a number of anti-japanese also anti-nazi so given the times that we were under yes they were compelled to do that because, believe it or not, the studios

had to agree to devote a certain percentage of their production to support the war effort if they were going to get film. Because the film being based on cellulose nitrate, cellulose nitrate is a gunpowder compound. And that was a priority for the war. Right. One of the characters we haven't talked too much about is the betty boop which is it just my opinion or does it feel like she is one of the most uh

recognizable max flasher cartoon characters she's so recognizable because of the merchandise but interestingly enough because she's been so saturated in merchandise that a lot of people don't realize that she originated as an animated cartoon character. They don't realize that she was the queen of the animated screen. And what's unique to that is the fact that at the time, animated cartoons were primarily these cartoony, humanized animal male characters.

And there were no lead female cartoon characters until she came along. And even after she came along too. So what is a little bit of the history of Betty Boop and what has led to her popularity? Well, first of all, she was another one of those accidents. It was an accidental birth because it originated in 1930. She was supposed to have been a cameo caricature loosely based on Helen Kane and never intended to be developed as a continuing character. And eight months before the cartoon was released, it was previewed in New York.

And there was such a sensation on that one sequence with this Helen Kane caricature that Paramount was impressed with that and told the Fleishers to continue to develop this character. And so that's why her next appearance came a month later from the release. And she continued to be developed and they slimmed her down so after one year she became a human character but she started out as a quasi canine character it was a very awkward design because she was three-fourths human to begin with there's a red grotesque head with these floppy ears and a black nose that looked like a woman with a mask on. And so

logically, they just turned that into Who Beer Rings and that's what became Betty Boop. And although Grim Natwick originated the original design of the head with the headdress and the spit curls and everything like that, he had already left the studio

by the time she evolved into the female human girl character. And so the credit goes to that when she was passed on to Bernie Wolf and Seymour Nytel. They were the ones who were responsible for shaping her as the character that we know now. Just to kind of give a point of view from the young generation,

sadly, people my age and younger only know Betty as kind of like a fashion brand, to be honest with you. When you tell someone younger that, oh, hey, actually Betty Boop has cartoons, they're like, what? Since when, you know? And that's kind of another mission

that I want to do is give people context to Betty Boop, that, you know, she's not just some, you know, cartoon on a shirt. So yeah, it's important for me to, to kind of save all those Betty Boops because a lot of them are still in the vault. There's a lot of really cool public domain cartoons of Betty Boops that people would still remember if I showed it to them that were trying to get out. And those early ones with her as a dog are some of the best animation out there, which is just amazing. As a matter of fact, some of those early ones actually had censorship problems. So there's a lot of them that are really funny, you know, sexy and kind of, you know, got

that dark sense of humor that I personally love. And I think that's what makes the Fleischer stuff really stand out compared to the Disney stuff. The Fleischers were immigrants. You know, my family is a family of immigrants and they, you know, we're in New York. They love the jazz scene. They love their environment. You know, I'm not sure people know, but they work with, you know, Cat Calloway, Louis Armstrong. They work with so many awesome people back in the day that, you know, it should be celebrated. Like I keep saying, it's just somebody's got to really push this stuff and make things happen. So I'm glad that we're finally, you know, getting this stuff done.

Point of reference, it was Max's brother, Lou, who was a big jazz fan, who brought a lot of that in. who was a big jazz fan, who brought a lot of that in. And the content of the music was primarily Lou's influence. And he had a relationship with jazz musicians, specifically Cat Calloway. And I think one of the headwinds working against Betty right now is there's kind of two eras for her films. There's kind of the, if Marie can kind of correct me, like the pre-code and the post-code, the Hays Code film, plus other variables where a lot of the post-code Betty Boops

are in the public domain, but they're more sanitary, honed down, and she's not even a central character so much in them anymore. They created these other peripheral characters feature and i think technically the last betty boop cartoon either she's like not even in it or or yeah she's not even in it if i can jump in a little bit here too part of the frustration and dealing with this stuff also was what happened to them when they were sold to television and uh one of the shames is I've been telling people they won't listen to me, but I know what I've seen.

But some of the cartoons from 32 to 34 that show that stage proscenium, there's a mountain that's in the background of the main titles. It originally opened with the Paramount Crest there, because why else would that mountain be there? And so when they were made for television, it opened with the Paramount logo right framed inside of that, and then you had these optical transitions. The very first Popeye is like that because a friend of mine had a print of that

that showed that. And so the other thing we want to do too is in the restoration process is to try to regain those original titles because when they went to tv they did stills and blew them up and if they retain the um production credits and some of them don't but if they did there's a there's an optical jump there is a a density shift and a size jump because of what they did to do the sill frame to obliterate the Paramount copyright line. And when the films were sold, because of antitrust complications, Paramount's name could not be seen on those. So any of those that have the copyright signature had the original date, but it's in the name of UM&M TV. And it's my wish to get rid of those

and put them back to the way they originally looked. Yeah, one of the series we're working on right now is the Inkwell M series that we're getting from Paramount. And because we have the scans, we can see the full frame and see what, in this case, UM&M did, where they kind of put an overlay over the title card the title cards were originally animated where the title of the film would fade in and then it would you know do a fade transition to you know the start of the film here they put

like an overlay over it so it's already pre-cropping the image and then they black out the bottom where the paramount logo and copyright is and then they put their logo and then it's just a rough jump cut into the film, but it's just that single frame, taking a picture once and then repeated. So we're kind of looking for other prints that have, because some of them did preserve the original Paramount logo. UNM didn't quite, I don't think they did all of them before they were bought out to buy NTA and

so on. So some prints do exist out there somewhere that do have the original logos with those elements we can use to restore them to how they looked originally. Well, I just love the work you guys are doing. And I know there's a lot more that we could talk about, but, but what's the, what's the easiest way Mauricio that fans can kind of learn a little bit more about what you guys are doing. If you want to obviously check out more clips and kind of more background

actually started with Jane Fleischer, these accounts, a Max Fleischer cartoon. So if you just go to maxfleischercartoons.com that sends you to a link tree and it has Instagram, Facebook. We even have a Patreon if you want go to max Fleischer cartoons.com, that sends you to a link tree and it has Instagram, Facebook. We even have a Patreon if we want to help out and support getting this stuff scanned, but max Fleischer cartoons.com to get all this Fleischer information and

a rock and pins.com. If you want to buy some Fleischer merch, official Fleischer merch. Thanks for coming on the show today and, and just kind of deep diving with us into what, uh, the work you guys are doing for the restoration of the max flasher cartoons. Oh,

thank you, Tim. Um, and Brandon, if you want to share also, cause Brandon also does stuff, you know, like Looney Tunes and stuff.

He's got some really cool comparison stuff. What's your social media, Brandon? Um, if you're on YouTube, you just search, not an animation historian same with

Patreon and Twitter as well. I think all those will be in the link still. And for Ray SyncWillImagesInc.com is that correct? Yes. Awesome. So thanks Ray, thanks Mauricio, thanks Brandon for coming on the show.

Thanks Tim. Thank you it's been fun. Thanks, Ray. Thanks, Mauricio. Thanks, Brandon, for coming on the show. Thanks, Tim. Thank you. It's been fun. Thank you, Tim. For those of you interested in learning more about the restoration of Max Fleischer cartoons and the live events that take place here in LA, I will have some links on the website at www.theextras.tv and in the podcast show notes. And I'll have links to Rockin' Pins and their social media. Also follow the show on Facebook or Twitter at The Extras TV or Instagram at TheExtras.tv to stay up to date on the latest episodes

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