The Extras
The Extras
The Enduring Legacy of George Pal and His Magical Puppetoons
Get ready for an exhilarating journey into the world of George Pal and his Puppetoons, with Arnold Leibovit as our captivating guide! Leibovit is a renowned film historian and documentarian of George Pal, the innovative filmmaker who inspired industry legends like Walt Disney, Ray Harryhausen, Gene Roddenberry, and Steven Spielberg.
We explore the evolution of Puppetoon animation, uncovering how Pal’s creativity led him to animate cigarettes for a commercial, and craft breathtaking short stories for Philips in Europe. This episode will also highlight the significant roles Walter Lantz, Leon Schlesinger, and Walt Disney played in helping Pal escape the Nazi's and establish his studio in the US. Leibovit also details the painstaking restoration process behind the Puppetoons, Volume 3 Blu-ray, discussing the challenges of restoring frame by frame, and the necessity for minimal compression for the best viewing experience. And then we get into a discussion of specific Puppetoons, starting with the first US production, "Western Daze," then" Bravo, Mr. Strauss," "Together in the Weather," and "Jasper and the Beanstalk ." And no discussion of George Pal is complete without a detailed look at the enchanting music of Puppetoon films and its vital role in enhancing the story and atmosphere.
This episode is a must-listen for all animation collectors, George Pal fans, and film enthusiasts!
Purchase PUPPETOON VOL. 3
Purchase THE TIME MACHINE SOUNDTRACK (remastered)
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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 Lard, your host. Well, I know we have a lot of animation fans who listen to this show, so I'm excited to have Arnold Liebelvit joining us today to talk about George Powell and his Puppet Toons, volume 3 Blu-ray, which is releasing on September 1st. Arnold, it's good to finally get you on the podcast.
Arnold Leibovit:Hi, it's great to be here, Tim. Good to see you.
Tim Millard:Well, I know we first chatted kind of through our Facebook connection a few years ago for your Volume 2 release and it just didn't quite work out for us to do a podcast on that. But I know it sold really well and it's had terrific reviews and so when you reached out to me about this Volume 3, I was like I'm so glad you did that because we kind of missed that opportunity. But it's on physical media. So even though we'll be talking about Volume 3, I want to let the fans know there's a Volume 2 out there as well. I read the terrific booklet, by the way, that full-color booklet you have in this release. I read it and you gave some background to your interest and how you got involved with the estate and just your interest in George Powell. But maybe for our listeners you can kind of paraphrase a little bit about how you got started in all of the restoration and the interest in George Powell.
Arnold Leibovit:Well, it really didn't just start with restoration. In the beginning I mean, it was really an accident I was working on a monster film, a Jaws on Land movie called the Descendants, and I was going to direct this film and I became friends with Dan O'Bannon, who wrote Alien, and he said you know, you should take this to George Powell and of course at the time I didn't know George was still around, it was close to 1979. Anyway, I was introduced to him and I went to see him at his house in Beverly Hills, introduced myself and the project and that was a life-changing moment for me because growing up George was one of my heroes, along with Walt Disney and Ray Harryhausen and even Cecil B DeMille. They were my heroes. The interesting thing is that all of my heroes all worked for George Powell. George was like the conduit. He hired Ray Harryhausen for his first job and of course I got to know Ray Harryhausen. Cecil B DeMille helped George with World's Collide and War of the Worlds at Paramount and Walt Disney and him worked very close friends and he influenced Walt and the Walt Disney studios enormously with his animation. So George was like all bundled up into that one sphere, which was quite amazing to me. So getting to meet him and knowing these people and everything was.
Arnold Leibovit:That was the way it all started.
Arnold Leibovit:It was meeting George.
Arnold Leibovit:A year later he passed away, which was a big blow to me, and I became friends with Mrs Powell for almost a quarter of a century and we stayed friends and it was a result of that that I made my films about George's life, my documentary which showed at the Academy, the Puppetoon movie, the first one I did, and eventually did the Time Machine.
Arnold Leibovit:Later on I did a remake of the Time Machine with Steven Spielberg and Warner Brothers and so it sort of the linkage was way back to that first meeting with George and he was such a nice man, he was a sweetheart and doing the documentary and Mrs Powell opening the doors for me which is what she really did I learned almost the birth of the movie industry in terms of the fantasy and science fiction aspects, animation, the linkage between all the famous icons of the industry and how it related to George and his influence in the business, and it was enormous I mean it's enormous and so even I didn't know I was learning as I was going all the linkage and all the people and all the talent and it was really a journey of a lifetime.
Tim Millard:So in 1985, that's when your documentary the Fantasy Film Worlds of George Powell came out right.
Arnold Leibovit:That's right.
Tim Millard:That's the one you're talking about and, for those who are interested, you do have that on YouTube so that they can watch that, and I was watching it recently and it's terrific. I mean, you have a ton of great interviews on there. Who are some of the people you interviewed for that one?
Arnold Leibovit:Just about everyone that worked with George. You know it has Ray Harryhausen. By the way, on the new release, several of those interviews are excerpted in the extras which are on there Ray Harryhausen, hua Chang, roy Disney, joe Danty, russ Tamblin and so forth, and the documentary had about 30, some people. I just re-digitized about 36 hours of material. I have not re-released it yet and I'm contemplating the possibility of incorporating some of these new interviews and other releases. But I would say Rod Taylor, alan Young, janet Lee, tony Curtis, charlton Heston, ray Bradbury, as they said, ray Harryhausen, gene Roddenberry, and every one of these people had linkage to George, which was quite significant. George was Gene's mentor, helped him when he was working on Star Trek. George had influences there.
Arnold Leibovit:Roy Disney talked about his relationship with Walt and the relationship of the studio and the nine old men who had all seen the puppatoons. And of course I met all the remaining living nine old men. When I was doing this I became friends with Ward Kimball who did Jimny Cricket, with Mark Davis who did Tinkerbell, with Frank and Ollie who did Bambi and Dumbo and Fantasia. They all saw the puppatoons at the studio. They were influenced by the puppatoons. Roy talked about them as being the precursor to audio animatronics. He said that it's a small world, is essentially a puppatoon and is acknowledged by imagining the tremendous influence of George. So there's those aspects. And the documentary has other people. It has Robert Block, who was a writer of Psycho he was a friend of George and worked on some projects with him. Dan Forth, who did the animation for Seven Faces of Dr Lau and the Wonderful World of Brothers Grimm. Barbara Eden, who was in the film, russ Tamblin, as I mentioned. I can't remember everyone, there's so many people.
Tim Millard:I guess the reason why I wanted to mention it was that I mean, we have limited time here on a podcast to go through a career like George Powell's career and the impact of him. But your documentary kind of puts it in a nice package and it looks pretty good for being that old and I thought it was great to have it on YouTube. And then, as you mentioned, you put a number of those excerpts of some of those interviews on the extras for this Puppatoon Volume 3 release. So I watched all those and, to your point, the Gene Roddenberry one that was really fascinating to me because I never thought about any link to Star Trek but he lays it out and, of course, their friendship that developed out of meeting him.
Arnold Leibovit:They've had a lot in common because George had a lot of tribulations, ups and downs in his career and Gene did the same. He had ups and downs. He kind of related on those levels. His offices were just down the hall from each other at Paramount and so they were very close to where they're in and they spent a great deal of time together. Gene loved George.
Arnold Leibovit:I actually asked Gene to be one of the speakers at the Academy when we had the showing of the film in 1985. Gene Roddenberry was one of the introducers of the film, along with Robert Wise, who I became very good friends with, who's also in the documentary, and Bob was a dear friend and helped me enormously and he knew George as well. Of course, this is the story I have with the project, and the subject is that I don't think there was anyone during that period that didn't have cross paths with George. There wasn't anyone quite like him. Nobody was doing fantasy and science fiction in the industry until George did it really in the way that he did it, certainly with the puppatoons. No one had been able to set up a stop motion animation studio facility until George came over from Europe and set up the puppatoons in the 1940s and he was the only one doing it and what made it unique is that he was so different than anyone else. Everyone was doing flat cartoon animation and George was doing this amazing three-dimensional animation, which today seems more common because of CGI, which is influenced by the puppatoons, by the way, but at that time it was the only thing there was and it was so different.
Arnold Leibovit:And Disney people, different studios, worked at the puppatoons studios. Fred Moore, for instance, who is the cover of Judy on my Puppatoon releases is a Fred Moore design, and Fred Moore was one of the great character animators and designers at Disney, doing things like the Seven Dwarfs and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and many, many other animations that Disney influences just all over puppatoons, and that's what makes it so great in terms of that. And also Warner Brothers too, because Bugs Bunny appears in Volume 2 in Half-Fill of Dreams, and it was the only time that Bugs Bunny was ever loaned out to another studio individual ever at that time, and Leon Schlesinger did that, and so Bugs Bunny appears in the second volume and also Superman appears. Dc Comics loans the costume and the look of Superman for one of the subjects also, so it's kind of a combo. Oh, I was wrong about it. The Bugs Bunny was in Jasper Goes Hunting, not Half-Fill of Dreams. I'm sorry, who's Superman is in Half-Fill of Dreams?
Tim Millard:And it was pretty interesting hearing Roy Disney talk about how Walt would have liked to have brought him in and worked with him or had him work for him or some kind of partnership. But it sounded like George Powell really. I mean he was a man who really wanted to be on his own and do his own thing and that's great that he did.
Arnold Leibovit:I mean Willie was his own George Powell and George being his own Walt Disney in a sense. You know films like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. I mean that was George's project and he was going to make that film and Walt came to George and during those days they had a gentleman's kind of agreement type thing and George left Walt go ahead with doing it Somehow. I wish George was involved in it but that didn't happen. But in any case there wasn't anybody making these kinds of films.
Arnold Leibovit:George was really the Steven Spielberg of his day. He was the one that set the science fiction and fantasy movie on a platform for a mass audience at a time when there was no mass audience. He didn't just do small films. When he made a film it was a big technicolor science fiction movie when worlds collide. They weren't making technicolor movies in science fiction, they were making black and white monster bug movies. You know, and here along George is making with the help of Cecil B DeMille.
Arnold Leibovit:He did a film like War of the Worlds or when Worlds Collide, which had great scope and character and technicolor and in stereo. I mean he was doing it in a really big way and so he made a big impression in the industry and everyone is been influenced by it and that's what got me involved with Steven Spielberg and George Lucas and everyone else, because they were all influenced by George Powell. So it was relatively easy for me because George was sort of the magic word. I mean I always use that expression, you know the magic two words was George Powell. It opened the doors because everyone loved him and respected him.
Tim Millard:Well, that's kind of the sci-fi influence which he did kind of in the era. If you were to break down his career, kind of after the puppatoons, right? Let's go back for a second to the puppatoons George Powell created in his studio in Europe before he came to the States, right?
Arnold Leibovit:Yes, that's true, he was, he was. He was actually making puppatoons for 20 years before he ever made a feature film. Right, he started out in Hungary. He was born in Hungary. He was born to an actor's family, but he didn't want to be an actor. He says he didn't want to mean to do with the stage. Believe me, the stage had a lot to do with George. You know he was the greatest showman of them all, but that's what he says. So he just he became a cartoonist. He started to do drawings, he started to do posters and eventually did animated cartoons flat animated cartoons in Hungary and he met his wife, jocha there.
Arnold Leibovit:And then they moved to Germany and he did films at Ufa, which was the largest studio in in probably in the world at the time. It was in Germany and Berlin and he made a lot of commercials, mostly animated, flat cartoon animation. Then he came up with this crazy idea of animating cigarettes. Mrs Powell told me the story. He had a. He was playing around with a cigarette in his hand and he saw it. It was like she knew the moment it was born where he came up with this idea of the cigarette. So he was doing a commercial about cigarettes for a sponsor. He said to the sponsor instead of flat animating it, why don't we actually animate the cigarettes? You'll get to see the trademark on every frame. It'll be there, and you know. And they love the idea. So then he started to move cigarettes to the rhythm of the music and he started to just animate three-dimensional cigarettes. So he basically turned the flat cartoon into three-dimension. That was his thing.
Arnold Leibovit:And he did commercials which were then called. They were really story films. They weren't typical one-minute commercials. He did these five or six-minute story films that happened to have a brief mention of a, of a commercial like the Phillips radio, and the rest of it was a story. And that's what he did in Europe for a good 20 years. He was doing commercials with all these stories and some of them actually appear on Puppetoon Volume 3. Four new cell animated films appear on Puppetoon Volume 3 that have probably never been seen before. They're in Technicolor, they're flat animation, they look like Disney animation, they're beautiful and I mentioned that because it's a really highlight, in my opinion, of Puppetoon Volume 3.
Arnold Leibovit:Anyway, he came to the United States. He was always keeping one step ahead of the Nazis. He had to leave Germany because the Nazis were coming in and he had some riffs with the brown shirts and so he eventually went to Paris, czechoslovakia, and eventually landed in Einhoven with a Phillips company, sponsored a whole series of commercials that he was doing, and then he always wanted to be in America. Mrs Powell and him loved America. They wanted to be here, and so he was able to leave Einhoven and only two months later the Nazis invaded Holland and he made out. He made it out of there before they were taken over by the Nazis.
Arnold Leibovit:So that plays a big role in George's perspective of the world, because he was really under that kind of pressure. Yet he always kept a sunny disposition, he was always positive. You would never know it looking at him or talking to him or seeing his films, you would never know the amount of stress and strain. He always had this sunny view of the world, always looking to tomorrow, always looking for a better world, a better life. And he loved being an American. He was so proud of being an American, being getting his citizenship papers. Here Walter Lance was a very dear friend of his and he helped him get his citizenship papers and it was a big thing for George to be an American and all I can say is in today's world, the way things are, I think he would be a guest at some of the things that are happening in the world today, believe me, but that's another story.
Tim Millard:So he's doing the puppetunes there and he kind of talked to the evolution. When he came to the States people already knew his work right so he did have people kind of helping him establish his studio over here and giving him some support.
Arnold Leibovit:Oh yeah, I mean he had various people like I mentioned Walter Lance, leon Schlesinger, walt Disney but it was really Paramount that did it.
Arnold Leibovit:I mean, paramount saw the puppetunes and they offered him a deal to set up doing them and he did them for almost a decade at his own facility. It was on the Caddon Place in Hollywood and he had a team of animators, just like he had in Europe. He had a team of animators they were the first in Europe to ever do it. And then he comes to the United States and they're first in the United States to do it, and that those animators some very famous Willis O'Brien, who did King Kong worked at the Puppetunes studios, ray Harryhaus and I may have mentioned he got his first job working for George doing puppetunes, and on Puppetune Volume 3, we have a great, great one it's Western Days, which is the very first puppetune George made in the United States and it's the one that Ray Harryhaus and animated and that's very important. The first two or three years of the puppetunes Ray did animation work and some of them are on this release. So that's quite significant as well.
Tim Millard:Well, why don't we talk about Western Days? Because I did want to. I mean, I put in the disc and I just played the first one, you know, that came up and that was Western Days and I was blown away. I mean the color reproduction and that might lead us a little bit into a discussion of the restoration, but I was watching that. I'm like this does not feel like a 1940, yeah, 1940 cartoon animation, whatever you want to call it, because it's stop motion, so it's got that three-dimensional. But all of the you can see the sets right, the quality of the image, you can see in detail those sets and everything that he did and it just looks great. Tell us a little bit about the restoration of that.
Arnold Leibovit:Well, there's a lot of elements going on there. It's a good point. I'm glad you were impressed by Western Days. I was waiting to do Western Days for almost 35 years. I was unable to get some of these films over the years because they were owned by different companies. Nta and then Republic Pictures had them. We contacted them but they weren't willing to let me do anything with them. I guess they felt they were going to be releasing these in other ways or they were going to sell the library, and that's what they did. They eventually sold the library to Paramount. So what happened was it went back to Paramount where it started, and it wasn't until it got back to Paramount that I was able to actually do this. And so Western Days was part of that early period of films that I was unable to obtain, and so I was after it for years to get, and it was such an important subject.
Arnold Leibovit:It had Andrew Costellanis doing the music. David Raxin, who won an Academy Award for Laura, was the composer. I met David Raxin, by the way. I had a class with him when I was at UCLA. He was a great guy, but he did the music, and Mel Blank is the voice of one of the characters.
Arnold Leibovit:Mel Blank, by the way, did the voices for Puppetunin's Right from the very beginning he was the voice in many of the subjects. He's actually in Grab it and Hide he's Hide. So he's of the two characters, that's Mel Blank, and Billy Bletcher is in it. Pat McGeehan is Jim Dandy, who's the voice of Jim Dandy, and Billy Bletcher is the voice of the other, of the other, a grab it, I think. Anyway, it has a huge, has scope to it. It was shot with a large stage set, and it was. It has a great sweeping vistas and animation to it and it almost is shot like a John Ford movie, the way it's done with wide shots and it moves in and out. It's really a spectacular, a spectacular subject and the music is great. So I'm very, yeah, I'm very happy you like that one, because that that was a landmark, a landmark film, right?
Tim Millard:Well, it's interesting because sometimes people wonder well, why didn't you include this one on volume one or volume two? And you just kind of explained that, even though you wanted to include these in an earlier volume due to legal reasons or ownership or the time it took to restore or find things. But that has a huge impact on why this is now on volume three. I mean, for people who buy volume three, it's terrific because it gives you a really great reason to buy it, even if you own the others. But talk a little bit about the people you had to work with in terms of the actual restoration, like Paramount Library of Congress, ucla.
Arnold Leibovit:Everyone. So many people were involved. There are literally dozens and dozens of people from all over the world. I'm a perfectionist. That could be one of my failings, I guess, but I'm really a perfectionist. I wanted it to be the best it could possibly be.
Arnold Leibovit:Number one I was dealing with the source material of successive negatives. These are the successive negatives. The original negatives, thank God, still exist on the puppatoons, which is amazing unto itself. Very rarely cartoons have this kind of integrity and those successive negatives existed. Paramount had them, which were handed down and we were able to access those 4K. Preservations were made and then we were able to restore from the 4K. So seeing a successive negative puppatoon is like something you've never seen before. It's unlike anything that people have ever seen. The few times they've been able to see puppatoons which they weren't widely exhibited in recent years Just to see them. One commentator said to me it's Technicolor in 3D. He said it's almost like watching a 3D film in 2D. It says to him that's how he viewed it. He couldn't believe. The Technicolor is so vivid and it's so three-dimensional and clear. Everything is so clear. It's almost like it was shot yesterday. It's so believable.
Tim Millard:That's why I'm really like I got to ask you about this one, because it hits you right off the bat. I'm kind of new to this puppatoon world. When I saw it I did not expect that that kind of three-dimensional element that you just mentioned, and how vibrant the colors were.
Arnold Leibovit:Well, technicolor was an amazing process. I think your viewers and listeners should know how this happened. I'll get to that and I'll get back to some of these in a minute. In the restoration the puppatoons are done in a unique way. They use a system that Powell developed called the replacement figure puppet. What that means is that for every frame of film a new puppet or puppet part is replaced in that frame. It isn't like an armature like in King Kong where they have a single armature puppet that is animated by the animator. In the puppatoons every frame is a new puppet head, body, leg. You'd have, say, 100 different heads, 100 different arms, 100 different legs, eyeballs, and on every frame they would have to be replaced, one frame at a time.
Arnold Leibovit:There were thousands of puppets made. For a typical puppatoon there could be up to 5,000 individual wood, either hand or machine-laved, carved puppet part or puppet. Then they had to be shot. You had something like because of Technicolor. Technicolor required a lot of light and it was a beautiful process. The dye process is unsurpassable. The puppet would be put in place, that part, and it would be shot. It would take a full minute to expose one frame of film because of the light and because of Technicolor, but also because you had to do three colors. You had to do a red, a blue and a green. Every frame of the puppatoon took three full minutes to expose. In a single day you were lucky to get 16 seconds of animation and there were 12,000 to 15,000 frames in a typical puppatoon. It took literally six to eight months to do a typical puppatoon.
Arnold Leibovit:Because of this incredible labor-intensive process, it's unheard of, but because he did it this way, it gives a stylized look and a reality that is not comparable to any armature type of animation. You see, because everything was preconceived, pre-designed and pre-constructed. It's almost like arithmetic. It's like everything was done to a science and those parts were replaced. It's amazing that they were able to create them so perfectly, to be able to blend together. So the character lived. He basically lived. He was brought to life with nothing but pieces of wood that were series together. It's incredible.
Arnold Leibovit:Yeah, so that's a big part of it.
Tim Millard:Yeah, I was watching some of the extras and people were talking a little bit about that, so I was piecing some of that together in your documentary as well, of just how labor-intensive it was, how long it took, and then how George Powell his background as an architect he really every morning he had this. Actually I guess they were talking about the night before they would set up what was going to happen in the morning, because once they hit the ground running they needed to be sure they got everything and didn't miss a step in the change out of the face expression, the mouth, vocalization, all that stuff. I mean it is a lot like math, I guess, in that sense, or even computers in a sense, but done by humans.
Arnold Leibovit:And the influence was great because the only film that was done, that equals that or you got close to was influence, I should say was Nightmare Before Christmas and I was there on the set when they did it and my friends animated it and I was there and I watched them do it. They used the replacement figure puppet for Nightmare, which was what gives it the reality. It has that illusion of reality because the puppets are replacement heads. Each head is a separate head in Nightmare. There aren't any other subjects that have done that, films that have done that. The puppatoons were the influence for Nightmare Before Christmas because I know I was there, the animators all watched it. They told me when they saw the puppatoon movie. So there was a great influence on that particular film.
Tim Millard:There were a couple others I did want to talk about. One was Bravo Mr Strauss, from 1943. I was watching that and the combination of the 3D animation, the messaging, which is very anti-war, and then the music, it was a terrific one. Maybe you could tell us a little bit of background on that one.
Arnold Leibovit:Well, for George. Holland was invaded by the Nazis and it was deeply hurtful to him because a lot of his friends, people he knew, were either taken prisoners, some were killed. The country was overridden, things were destroyed by the Nazis. That's what World War II was about. And so these were anti-war films, and he made three of them. Bravo Mr Strauss was one of three where the Scrooble Army is featured, which are the Nazi parody of the Nazis. They called them the screwballs. It was very, very smart and very clever use of the parody, and the Scrooble armies are featured in Bravo Mr Strauss, tulip Chagrot and Rhythm in the Ranks. Rhythm in the Ranks was one of the Academy Award nominated films and that appears on this disc as well. Tulip Chagrot is in my puppatoon movie and he all feature the screwballs. In this case it's Mr Strauss.
Arnold Leibovit:Mr Strauss was a symbol, according to George, of the will of the people of Europe to defeat Hitler. That's what Mr Strauss represents, and he uses his violin almost like a pipe-piper. It leads the Scrooble Army into the Danube River like Lemmings into the river like the rats in Pipe Piper, and they're all destroyed. And the theme that's used there is the Radeski March. And again, that's a subtle parody, because the key is that no Nazi can possibly resist a march. So it's the Radeski March, so they're marching to their deaths really, and so there's a little subtle parody going on over there. It's very interesting, and so you see this throughout Pau's films, not just in the puppatoons but even later on when he made his features, when he made War of the Worlds and the Time Machine. They all have this subtle aspect of man overcoming obstacles, of overcoming incredible odds, and it has a lot to do with his view of what happened to him with the Nazis, and so it runs through a lot of the themes he has in his life. But he's also, as I said, very positive. It was very positive looking ahead, always looking to tomorrow, and so that was part of his personality.
Arnold Leibovit:I wanted to come back real quick to you. If you don't mind, I completely skipped the whole restoration aspect. The restoration this was a four year effort to do the Puppatune Volume 3. And probably a 30 year effort just getting some of the films. So it's literally a 35 year effort just to get to this place, to be able to release something like this. And the restorations are very, very meticulous films to do because of the amount of work involved in doing these.
Arnold Leibovit:This is not like doing Puppatune. Restoration is unlike doing restoration for almost any other kind of film, whether it's live action or animation, even flat animation, because in stop motion every single frame has its own nuances and peculiarities. Frame by frame by frame. It picks up dust and dirt and spots and specs and there's all kinds of nuances that have to be done. And you need various programs to be able to solve this. And we use the variety of different restoration programs. We didn't just use one. Some people rely on, say, phoenix, some people use Diamonds, some people use PF Clean, some people use all sorts of programming and we use whatever was necessary to accomplish or overcome a particular artifact or nuance, because we couldn't rely on just one program to do it. And the same thing applied to the grading of the film. After you're done, cleaning, which could take let's say it took, could take six weeks or eight weeks just to clean a Puppatune, just to clean it, because it's so meticulous. That's to be done frame by frame. You can't use Auto Clean, you can't just run through it in Auto Clean, because you can actually erase pieces of the Puppet, you can erase the eyeballs or the hands. You have to go very slowly, frame by frame, very meticulous, to clean it and in the grading process I was very, very particular about that.
Arnold Leibovit:I wanted a professional grader to do this and I hired a professional grader, one of the greatest. His name is Joey. He's with DC Color. He's a very busy guy. He does a lot of features. He is a 20-year consummate professional in this field and he teaches restoration to the world with Dolby Vision and other forms of platforms and workflows. He was the supervisor helping me on this. I also had a fellow down in Peru His name was Fabio Bedoya, who was a young kid, but he is terrific and he has been helping me straight through this.
Arnold Leibovit:I reached out to people in other countries because the work ethic of doing restoration is a very specific talent and it requires a dedication that people in this country don't necessarily always have, or maybe they don't have the luxury to have. It's also a cost factor as well. The work ethic is different in foreign countries and it's more of a college industry. I was able to go to South America, to England, to Indonesia, to all sorts of places to be able to accomplish this, including the United States. This was a world effort. This was a world effort.
Arnold Leibovit:We would redo a subject several times. I get a subject back, we get it in pieces and we'd have to go back and redo things or just take time. I was very slow and very careful doing this. There was no rush for me on this. As far as I was concerned, it could take as long as it needed to take. I waited my whole life to do this and I didn't care if it took five years or ten years to do it. I wanted to be sure that it was absolutely perfect. I have to tell you, puppetoon 3, and I've been told this by others rivals some of the greatest restorations ever done on a cartoon subject or any subject, not alone makes it stand out of anything that's been done. I think your viewers and listeners will really appreciate it when they see this. It's a one of a kind. It literally is a one of a kind.
Tim Millard:That leads me to say that the volume two came out in 2020. When you released that, did you then think, okay, I'm going to immediately start on the rest of these? Or is it just one continuous thing? You just released what you had available and you were working on others and just hoping that someday down the line you would have all three.
Arnold Leibovit:It was a part of that, part of that and part of that. I was doing two and I knew that I would never be able to fit all the things I wanted to on two. Then it became three, but then three became this much bigger entity Because Puppetoon 3 has got nearly 30 subjects on it. It's five hours of content, whereas Puppetoon 2 is less than half that amount. That's one thing. The other thing is that Puppetoon 3 is a dual layer disk. It could literally be done as a two disk set, but I decided to do it as a dual layer so I would economize to save costs on doing it. Even so, a dual layer is more than twice the cost of a single layer Blu-ray. It has a higher level bit rate and it has higher ability to get more gigabytes on that disk. It was very important to me that the compression rate be as minimal as possible.
Tim Millard:After all.
Arnold Leibovit:I'm doing restorations, I want people to see them the best way I possibly could, next to a 4K UHD, which is really not that much more than a Blu-ray. To be perfectly honest, you can't get it to look any better. That was really important, that I had it done properly. When I was doing 2, it evolved that, okay, this was going to. I just had no idea what I was getting myself into when I got into this, but I knew that it had to be done. One thing led to another. The other thing is I wanted the restorations to be even better. I went even further with the restorations on 3. I advanced to the new programming, new talent, new grading professionals. I just decided, if I was going to do these successive negatives, they need to be done optimally, the best way, so the world can see them.
Arnold Leibovit:Remember, these films haven't been seen in nearly 100 years in some cases. In some cases, they've never been seen in this quality in history Never. It was important to me that when we exhibit these things and my plan is that we'll have shows at the academy and other places to show them so that people will see with their own eyes what it looked like on a movie screen in Technicolor, on a big screen, what these things actually look like. It's not only a revelation, it's jaw dropping, literally. That's really why I spent the time to do it, because I know how important these are. They are important to a lot of people. I wanted to make them as good as I possibly could. That's how I did this.
Tim Millard:If I'm hearing you right, it's not like hey, we just restored these, we released them previously on VHS or DVD and we restored them now and you can now buy them on Blu-ray. We're talking about these were not even available. This is the first time you're seeing these and you're getting this kind of image quality and restoration, Am I right?
Arnold Leibovit:That's right. This is the first time they will have been seen in history, except for there were seven puppatoons that were on volume one that are on this. I was never happy with that restoration. I wasn't involved in that restoration, it was done by another company and I was never happy with the quality and we decided to upgrade the resolution to go back to the original negatives. Paramount helped me do that and we did them in the current technology. We upgraded it to the current technology so it vastly surpasses what's on Puppatune 1. That's this process. Every time I do another one of these, it just gets better and better and better, because the technology just keeps improving. If, by some luck or miracle, I do another one, it will be even better, hopefully.
Tim Millard:Let's go talk about a couple more of these before we wrap up our conversation here today, and I think there are two that I really just wanted to talk about because I thought the music was so I don't know just enthralling. One was Jasper and the Beanstalk from 1945. While we all know the story that roughly it's based on, I love that music with Peggy Lee as the harp. The other one was Date with Duke from 1947, where it's basically this must be a very early example of live action and animation together, because you've got Duke Ellington live playing and then you've got the Puppatunes.
Arnold Leibovit:Talk about this. Yeah, the Perfume, it does the Perfume Suite. In that, actually it's 1947. You're right, it's one of the first uses of live action animation. But the thing is, if you go back to George's animation in Europe, he actually did some subjects that had animation and cell animation in the same film. He was doing it in the 1930s. So it's an evolution, but in Technicolor, in this way, it's probably one of the early uses of live action and animation. Like a Roger Rabbit, let's say, and that's what he was really. And even when Bugs Bunny was in it, bugs Bunny was cell animated and he had puppet animation next to a cell animated character that Robert McKinson did the animation for Bugs, the greatest bugs animator. He did the animation in Jasper Goes Hunting. So he did combine live action animation and several of these. So you have that element.
Arnold Leibovit:The use of music. Well, that's a big subject. Tim George really understood music. It's been toyed around, and even as of today, the idea of doing new puppatoons, like doing a new puppatoon movie. Today you could say, well, toy Story is a puppatoon movie. You could say, anything being done today is really a puppatoon because it's all influenced by George. But doing a real new puppatoon. What would it incorporate?
Arnold Leibovit:Well, music is one of the key elements of the puppatoons Music. George understood music and he used it to great advantage. He had big band sounds, he had jazz, he had orchestral music. He really understood music. He was like a Stanley Kubrick in that respect. He really understood the use of music and how it implements into a story or into a general theme and the music really drives the puppatoons. It's like another world, it's like a flight of fantasy and everyone goes into this flight of fantasy where it starts at one place and then suddenly it goes into another world and music plays a huge part of that new world. And that's the beauty of the puppatoons. And George is really smart in understanding the use of music and he was, like I said, he was a huge fan of these things.
Arnold Leibovit:Ward Kimball, for instance, had his Firehouse 5 band and when he met with George, george didn't want to talk about animation. The two of them only wanted to talk about jazz and jazz music, because George was so interested in jazz and so was Ward in music. You see, music played a big part of it. And the same thing with Walt Disney's films. You see a lot of films. Music plays a huge part of how these films really played out and a lot of the composers that worked for George worked for Walt Disney. The biggest example would be Lee Harleen, for instance, who did the music in let's see, was it Snow White? I mean, lee Harleen was one of the great. He did music for George in the seven faces of Dr Lau, people that were in this field of fantasy. There were just certain composers, certain pieces of music, and George tapped into these people.
Arnold Leibovit:So that's the greatest thing about the puppatoons is my opinion, is the use of music. Music and its period music, it's that time in history as I call it a great. It's like a great of wonder and magic. It's a magical period. To me. It's like a time machine. You're going back in time and you're seeing something that is glorious in color, with music that just drives the image, and it's just wonderful stuff. It just feels so alive and in this age of cynicism and negative sentiment, when you go back to the puppatoons, you're going back to a time of great joy, just wonderful joy and just positive entertainment. And that's the beauty of them. It's just pure, positive, wonderful entertainment, just pure joy. Just what the puppatoons are. Pure joy To me.
Tim Millard:Yeah, and I think a great example was another one that I wanted to ask you about and that was this Together in the Weather from 1946. And it has the characters of Punchy and Judy, which I mean George uses a lot of his characters over again in different ones, but I thought that had a lot of sweetness to it and positivity to your point.
Arnold Leibovit:Yeah, and I discovered through the help of Keith Scott, who is a voice guy. He knows character voice and Byron Kane is the narrator of Together in the Weather and it was for many years. I wasn't really sure that that's who it was. I was in the liner notes that I wrote for this. One of the things that I did is I documented for the very first time, almost like a bibliography, the actual talent that works and worked on the puppatoons, because many people as I could find in terms of camera voice work, I tried to add as many new names as I possibly could and you'll see that even in the credits because I have a credit roll. If you go to the extras you'll see a production credit roll and I have every credit of every animator, music people. But Byron Kane was the voice in Together in the Weather and that was a big discovery to be able to at least figure that out.
Arnold Leibovit:And Robert C Bruce, by the way, is the voice in Bravo, mr Strauss. And Robert C Bruce was the voice in a myriad of Warner Bros cartoons during the period Looney Tunes and Bugs Bunny cartoons. The voice that you hear in those when you hear that narrated voice in the 1940s, that's Robert C Bruce, and Robert C Bruce did a slight kind of a twist of tenor on his voice and he did this for George in Bravo, mr Strauss, together in the Weather. It's like toys in a toyland. That's what it really is Right exactly.
Arnold Leibovit:One of the reviewers I've reviewed it recently in CineSavante. Charlie Lodge did this review and he called it a toyland and he said that the colors were so vivid it was like watching 3D. That's how he described it, and I said that earlier. It's really a showpiece. I think Together in the Weather in its current form, restore, restored, is a showpiece. It's so beautiful in terms of looking at it you can hardly believe that it was shot in 1940s, in the early 1940s. It was actually 1946. When you look at it it was like shot yesterday. It's so beautiful, yeah, yeah.
Arnold Leibovit:But it's a story of two clocks, weather clocks, and one clock has punchy and one clock has Judy, and Judy is luring punchy with fragrances of perfume and tight sweaters, kind of luring him in a romantic kind of you know it's kind of a period idea, you know to kind of come together, you know to marry together, so they sort of living in separate weather clocks, they end up living in a single weather clock, you see, and so the story kind of goes along that way and it's a very funny, very inventive, in my opinion, type of storytelling. And you just don't see storytelling like that. To me today it doesn't exist. So it's very, very funny, very unique. Judy is kind of the sexy character. You know the period that you might have seen. You know Tex Avery do.
Arnold Leibovit:Judy is like the early incarnation of what Roger Rabbit with Jessica became that Gary Wolf created in Roger Rabbit. I worked with Gary, by the way, on a couple of scripts, so I know Gary very well and Judy is really a precursor to Jessica Rabbit and so that's a very, very good subject to highlight and I think your people that come to the Puppet Toons will really enjoy that film. It's been released before and what's good is that now you get to see it like it's never been seen before, because it's a success of negative and it looks so, so beautiful, just beautiful.
Tim Millard:Well, I mean, I kind of cherry picking some of the ones that just popped out to me and everything, and I wanted to talk more but kind of kind of wrap up our discussion. I wanted to ask you about a cell animation actually, which you put on here and I thought it was noteworthy because I think you said that this was just recently found and that's the, a fairy tale about a melancholic king from 1934. How did you go about, like, finding that and who had it and how did that come about? And obviously that's some early work. That was 1934, I believe 1934.
Arnold Leibovit:You did it in Paris he was working for. He did it for the San Margerin Company. George did various commercials for different products, and it's really it was an accident. I was dealing with a fellow in Hungary. You know, george was born in Budapest, so the Hungarians are very high on George over there, and so I was contacted by him and was told of the discovery of a number of different puppatoons that seemed to be turning up in Europe, and the reason they're turning up is really an interesting story.
Arnold Leibovit:When the Nazis invaded Europe, a lot of the spoils of war were taken, whether it was paintings and jewelry, and one of the things that the Nazis took was was film. A lot of the films were were kind of left in a place, they were left in archives, and what actually happened is the Russians came in, and when the Russians came in they got a lot of the spoils of war, and so some of these subjects started to get dispersed in archives in the Red Curtain. Countries like Russia, czechoslovakia, you know, countries that were, that were communist, that now have become more democratic, and so some of these films are turning up in those archives, and this was one of them. I found it in Czechoslovakia, and it was. It was really a revelation. It's, first of all, it looks amazing. It's in. It's in a gasper color, which is an early form of technicolor, and it's a cell animation Beautiful. It's not a word spoken in the whole film, it's all done with just music, but it's very cute. It has the characters in it and it's basically a story about a king who's unwell and he's made well by the use of this margarine to cook with, so to speak, and he's fed this new, these foods by the chef of the court and he's made better.
Arnold Leibovit:So that one is the one, that one there is a really interesting film, and there's three others, by the way, that were discovered the old woman who lived in a shoe, the let me see what are they called, the queen was in the parlor, and the good bear and the bad bear and those we made for the Rinso soap, and they're. The animation in those is equal to Disney animation in terms of design. They look like Pinocchio. One of them looks like Pinocchio style animation backgrounds, and they all are. They're all scored to Jack Hilton's music, so they have wonderful scores to them, and those were recently discovered as well. I got those at the British Film Institute in England. They didn't even know they had some of these. By the way, I call this, I call this film archaeology. That's how.
Tim Millard:I characterize it. Yeah, it's fascinating. Yeah, it's really film archaeology.
Arnold Leibovit:And it's so interesting is. I'm getting them from world archives. You know it was in just here. It's coming from all over the world and it's just. I'm dealing right now with Germany, I'm dealing with the Kinematic and in the Bundes archive in Germany, and other films are turning up there as well. So it's very exciting and all I can say that on the horizon. Just keep your eye out, because I think there's could be some more coming, you know.
Tim Millard:Well, that's always good to know. I guess I was thinking about, as you were talking about these, you know, fines in Europe and everything. What is the international appeal to George Powell?
Arnold Leibovit:The international appeal is huge. George was a European, he was Hungarian. He is known, he was known in Europe as the Walt Disney of Europe before he ever came to the United States. When he was making these films, they were shown in movie theaters, just like commercials are shown on television today, and he was known all over the world. And that's how Walt Disney got to know him, that's how Paramount kind of defined him. And George was very well recognized in Europe.
Arnold Leibovit:So, yes, the Europeans know him. I'm working with a fellow now that's writing a book on the puppatoons. He's in England, he's been working on it for many years and hopefully that book will come out next year and will be a tie-in to show puppatoons as well. And he's a European and so he has access to a lot of the European sources there. But yes, george is very well known in England, in the Netherlands, in France, in Germany, certainly now in Czechoslovakia. So, yeah, definitely has an international appeal. And the disc, by the way, is a region free. It's a region free disc.
Tim Millard:I was going to ask you that. Okay, it is region free and, as far as I could tell, you need to go to puppatoonnet to order this volume three, correct, it's not available anywhere else.
Arnold Leibovit:No, I kept it exclusive. I generally try to do that.
Tim Millard:One of the main reasons I need to do it is I need to recoup the expenses, which are enormous. So for the shipping. Are you able to do the shipping then too? We have a lot of listeners on this podcast from the UK, europe, of course, and then also Australia. Are they able to get shipping?
Arnold Leibovit:Yeah, they get shipping. It's added shipping. It's its customary shipping cost. Whatever it is, it's usually under $20. Generally it's under $20. It's around $14 or $15 for Canada and it's around $20 for Australia, for England, for France, norway, sweden, germany. So it's an additional $20, but, yes, they can do that and they can also get puppatoon two as well, which I still have some left, and so I'm selling out of those. But I did this deliberately without bringing it on Amazon right away. I do this because I want to keep it exclusive. I have to do it because I need to recoup. I'm just one guy making this, I'm not one of brothers making this, so I have to be able to recoup as much of the money I can so I can pour it in to further restorations. I mean, that's what it comes down to for me and so, yeah, so puppatoonnet is where you go to get it and I hope a lot of people will enjoy it and hope we'll get it and they can watch the trailer, by the way.
Tim Millard:I'll post the trailer on Facebook as well and provide links to you and the puppatoon so that people can kind of just read on their own Obviously same with that your documentary on YouTube, and we'll get those links in the podcast show notes for those listening or watching. And then I'll also do some posting on Facebook and in our group as well, so that people can spend the time that they want to learn about it and really read through all the stuff that you have on your website too for the releases that you've done. We didn't even talk about the 500 hats of Bartholomew Cubbins.
Arnold Leibovit:Oh, that's Dr Seuss.
Tim Millard:I think it's kind of that's brilliant Dr Seuss. George did the first.
Arnold Leibovit:Dr Seusses, the first Dr Seusses, the very first Dr Seuss was a Warner Brothers. It was about the elephant that sat on the egg. I forget the name of it. Your listeners know. Hi, Jerry was here. Jerry Beck, he'd know right away and he would help me on that. He'll know that In dimensional animation the first puppatoons Dr Seuss were the first ones that were done. It was the 500 hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, which is on here as well as and to think that I saw it on Mulberry Street, which is also on here.
Arnold Leibovit:Right, that was the other one, so another bonus is that you're seeing the first early Dr Seusses both of them and there Did you enjoy it.
Tim Millard:Yeah, I did. I mean the story is terrific, right, but I really enjoyed some of the European feel to some of these pieces as well. Our family lived in Europe for a little bit and I don't know it felt very old school and it was terrific. And that story, of course, with the King and everything, has a real European feel to the story, but I mean it was very charming.
Arnold Leibovit:There's a wonderful sensibility that these have that makes them unlike anything else that you would see. They're just so unique because they have a feel, as I said, it's a time and a place and a sensibility of another era, but they live today and they work today, which I think is very interesting. Here we are, what, 80, 90, 100 years later and we're still watching them and they're still being enjoyed as they were when they were originally were seen and, by the way, they were big hits when these films came out in the 1940s, I should tell you they were big hits. I talked to people who saw them. I have friends of mine whose parents who now passed away, but when they were alive they told me that they saw these puppatoons in the movie theaters in the 1940s and they were a big hit. People saw them and really look forward to them. They're watching some musical or Western or some black and white movie and here comes this tactic color puppatoon on the screen in three dimension no less, and it was a big, big deal to people who had never seen anything like this before. And George was able to bring that to the American population to see that in the theater and people talk about today I still have letters of correspondence from people you know when they're no longer alive. But they told me just seeing those puppatoons when they were younger in movie theaters in the 1940s were life changing for them, believe it or not. Even at that time they were life changing for those people that saw it when they first came out. And here we get to see them again, beautifully restored. So I hope everyone will enjoy it. I hope everyone will come to enjoy this and take the time to really take your time and watch these.
Arnold Leibovit:The way to watch these puppatoons is watch them one at a time and really take them in. Remember they didn't come out all at once. It isn't like watching a feature film. They came out with a movie and then maybe six or eight months later there'd be another puppatoon and then maybe six or eight months later there'd be another puppatoon. So they weren't designed to be watched one after the other. We can do that, but think of yourself in 1940 and watching them one at a time. Imagine yourself in a movie theater and seeing that for the very first time and just transport yourself to that world, and I think it's a very life changing experience if you put yourself into that kind of time machine. When you watch these, I keep coming back to time machine, of course.
Tim Millard:Well, yeah, I mean, it makes a lot of sense you put in and you're watching 80 year old films and they feel these transfers, many of these feel like they could have been done much more recently than that, that's for sure just because of the style, the technicolor and just the storytelling as well.
Arnold Leibovit:Yeah, yeah, I really do appreciate your interest and your enthusiasm, tim.
Tim Millard:Well, I mean, I'm kind of watching that and I just, you know, I'm coming as a novice and I'm just like, wow, this is. This is really neat to see. You know, it's a great disc you put together and that's what we talk about on this podcast, and so it's highly recommended and I appreciate you coming on and explaining you know some of the stories behind it, because to me that always adds a lot, and I think that's why people probably will enjoy the booklet that you include in there with this. I don't know, it's like the 20 page booklet or something.
Arnold Leibovit:It's like the maximum.
Tim Millard:Yeah, and those are not cheap to make.
Arnold Leibovit:And I should add, by the way, jim Titus did the graphics for me. I must mention Jim. Jim is one of the leading graphic designers in the business. He does a lot of work, for he did ET recently Jurassic Park, he did Superman, he did a lot of the big feature films for Spielberg and Lucas and he just and the reason he did this because he's not inexpensive he did it as a favor at a much reduced rate.
Arnold Leibovit:For me, because when he was growing up, his father was a huge George Powell fan and he the time machine. For his father, like for me, seeing the time machine, which we didn't even talk about, was a life changing moment, and so he was a kid and his father was talking to him about George Powell and the time machine, I mean. So that's the reason he was interested in this is because of the iconic nature of how it influenced his father and how it now is a part of him. So I just mentioned Jim because he's a great, great graphic artist. He's really one of the great, great graphic artists. So I'm very, very lucky.
Tim Millard:Yeah, I mean I worked at the studio and I saw your packaging, your key art there and I saw this booklet and I was like, wow, that is studio level or better. You look at the cover. That's got such a terrific three-dimensional look just to that cover. And that's also the cover of the booklet. So Kudos to him and I'm glad he brought his talents to you. And it's great when people who are in the industry bring their talents and they know, hey look, this is not the studio, this is just you and they're willing to help out because it really makes this a great disc for collectors to have on their shelf and be very proud of how it looks as well. And I know people are like it's all about the film and that's true. But when you enjoy collecting, the packaging does add a lot, and great artwork always adds a lot.
Arnold Leibovit:So I'm indebted to Jim and so many people that helped me on this, that worked on this, the amount of effort that was put in. I'm just so much gratitude I have for so many people. I don't know what to say, but it would never be possible without a team of probably there's got to be 100 people easily that have worked on this over the four years. One other thing the company that does one of the platforms they're called Phoenix. Phoenix is one of the cleaning programs in Europe. They actually are supporters of the project. They became supporters and they've been doing articles and they just did a podcast as well in England and next week, a week after next, I'm doing one with the Ray Harryhausen Foundation in Europe because of George's connection to Ray and they've been wanting to do one of these for a long, long time. I was contacted in Glasgow, scotland, by a museum that was doing a big Ray Harryhausen exhibit and they're going to be doing other ones and they want George to be part of that exhibit. So there's all of that happening.
Arnold Leibovit:A will happen, I hope, at some point, and the puppatoons. The great thing about it is at least this is something new. In other words, we've seen his feature films. They've come out, but the puppatoons stand alone in my opinion and many, as some of the greatest works of animation in the history of animation, and so they have a place unto themselves and in my view, it could be George's greatest work. The puppatoons could be George's greatest achievement in his whole career, and so that, I think, is important. So that's a testament. So here you are, in 2023, talking about what was made in the 1930s and 40s. It's unbelievable.
Tim Millard:Well, arnie, it was a real pleasure having you on the podcast and I hope that this sells very well and then does very well for you, and that it continues to bring the world of puppatoons and George Powell to the public. So thank you.
Arnold Leibovit:Oh, thank you, Tim, it's been absolute joy.
Tim Millard:For those who would like to learn more about George Powell and puppatoons, I have posted the link to the documentary on YouTube and to the Puppatoon website in the podcast show notes. This new Puppatoon movie, volume 3, blu-ray, is highly recommended just on the entertainment value alone. You don't need to be a George Powell collector or animation fan to enjoy these timeless tales, but if you are a fan, you'll definitely want to add this Blu-ray to your home collection. If this is the first time you've listened to the show, I hope you enjoyed it and that you'll think about following so that you get all of our podcasts. And you can find us on social media on Facebook, twitter or Instagram. So look for those links in the podcast show notes as well. Until next time you've been listening to Tim Mellard, stay slightly obsessed.