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tservo2049 asks: Tell me everything about Fred Ladd. Give me the history and chronology of his companies, the information you know now. Were his 4 companies (Delphi Associates, Radio & Television Packagers, Color Systems Inc., and Entercolor Technologies) related in any way? If so, when did they become one of the other companies? I need this info desperately!
Here is a timeline of his career, with the emphasis on animation. He has worked on importing and dubbing many live action films, which I skip over in order to concentrate on our interests here. Fred is still working in Encino, California.
1950-60 - Radio & Television Packagers (Cartoon Classics, Space Explorers) Fred is employee of this company, not owner.
1968 - COLOR SYSTEMS, INC. (partnered with Elliot Hyman) begins with 78 Porky Pig cartoon, 100 Betty Boops, 18 Krazy Kats, test of FARMER AL FALFA, Mutt & Jeff cartoons; colorized 43 PD cartoons (including Felix, Bosko & Buddy titles) for former employer Radio & Television Packagers. 1974 - Dissolved COLOR SYSTEMS 1975 - Sets up GREATEST TALES INC. (to dub Japanese animated fairy tales (Snow Queen, Hansel & Gretal) for institutional market) 1974-84 various dubbing projects mainly live action; established PLAID PRODUCTIONS with Graham Place (Fleischer animator) did commercials, TALES OF THE GOOD BOOK (animated Bible stories). Note: Elliot Hyman dies July 23, 1980 1984 - Ladd in Los Angeles starts ENTERCOLOR TECHOLOGIES CORP. Columbia's Barney Googles, L'iL Abner, Oswald The Rabbit test, ten Mickey Mouse cartoons. 1986-87 - Entercolor colorizes Fleischer POPEYE cartoons for Turner - also 26 Turner Merrie Melodies and MGM Captain & The Kids titles. Ladd re-dubs G-FORCE (a re-do of BATTLE OF THE PLANETS) also for Turner. 1992 - dubbed color GIGANTOR episodes for Sci-Fi Channel 1995 - creative consultant on SAILOR MOON dubbing
PEBYRNE writes:I'm looking for information about a cartoon from my childhood - I think the name is "Snowman in July." It's about a snowman who is kept frozen in a freezer so he can see warm weather in July. It might be foreign. Any information you can provide will be appreciated. The cartoon many know as SNOWMAN IN JULY was originally called THE SNOWMAN (or "Der Schneemann"), which was produced in Nazi Germany in 1943 by Hans Fischerkoesen. Fischerkosen (1896-1973) was a great German cartoonist/producer who produced short color theatrical cartoons during the wartime era. Some of them were acquired, along with many other Europeon cartoons, for U.S. TV distribution in the 1950s in cartoon packages with names like CAPTAIN SAILORBIRD and BOZO'S STORYBOOK.
I am sure there are many WB cartoon fans out there ask themselves the same three questions. Could your page be so kind as to become the first in history to unmask the mystery? Here's a "Lost Warner Bros. Cartoon" that should remain lost, forever!
The Looney Tunes characters involved here were Daffy, Porky, Elmer, Yosemite Sam, Tweety, Petunia Pig (voice by Jane Webb), Wile E. Coyote, Foghorn Leghorn, Pepe LePew, and Sylvester. Mel Blanc provides the Warner character voices and he sounds pretty good here, with the exception of an awful baritone Elmer Fudd, and Daffy & Tweety who are sped up way too much, sounding like they are on helium! The Looney Tunes are drawn reasonably well with the exception of Pepe and Wile E. who look particularly terrible.
PLOT SYNOPSIS: The Groovie Goolies are at home watching a TV interview of Petunia Pig interviewing Daffy Duck about his latest movie "King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table". A clip is shown: Foghorn is King Arthur, Sylvester is his loyal jester. Foggy asks Sylvester to take his new son (an egg) for a walk. While walking, Sylvester decides to eat the egg. Tweety tries to stop him, but the egg hatches. Daffy (as Arthur in a baby bonnet) emerges.
The Phantom stops the screening and grabs the film. The Goolies & Looneys chase after him and corner him on a pirate ship set. The Phantom get's away and disguises as a little boy, hiding the film in his guitar. He runs into "Mad Mirror Land" and he and three of the Goolies become live action (!!). This is the best part of the picture, as the Goolies chase the kid using pixilation techniques. They chase into a western town set, then get distracted and begin to play music. Frankie grabs the guitar and his gigantic sneezes force the whole group through the mirror and back into cartoon land. The Phantom is revealed to be Claude Chaney, Drac's long lost uncle, a formerly famous actor who wanted revenge for movies going to color (??). Daffy gives Chaney a job, "King Arthur" wins an Ozzie Award, and the Goolies go home. The last scenes has some of the Looney Tunes, led by Sam, following the Goolie gang home to their castle.
SIMON asks: Some sources list Clampett's "It's A Grand Old Nag" (1947) as the only cartoon released by Republic, but I've also seen references to a series of travelogue spoofs called "Jerky Journies" that were apparently released in '49 by Republic. Do you know anything about these cartoons? Were they really released? Are they all lost now? Do you know who worked on them?
The JERKY JOURNEYS were indeed released. There were only four. Republic was a low budget studio and I suspect that they were interested in promoting their "TruColor" process. Cartoons were a great way of doing that. Bob Clampett's "Charlie Horse" cartoon (released 12/1/47) cost $20,000. to produce. Republic got four JERKY JOURNEYS for a total of $46,787. This was possible because there is almost no animation in these films!
BEYOND CIVILIZATION TO TEXAS (3/15/49) THE 3 MINNIES: SOTA, TONKA & HA HA! (4/15/49) BUNGLE IN THE JUNGLE (5/15/49) ROMANTIC RUMBOLIA (6/15/49)
Three cartoons starring "Three Monkeys" were released in 1940 by Monogram: A BUSY DAY, THE BEAUTY SHOPPE and BABY CHECKERS. I believe these were produced by Ub Iwerks, sponsored by Boots Chemists in England and picked up by B-studio Monogram for U.S. distribution. These films still exist in private collections. There is a VHS tape available from The Whole Toon Catalog called "British and Australian Cartoons" that contains A BUSY DAY and THE BEAUTY SHOPPE.
MOE HARE asks: I would like to know if any of the "Toby The Pup" cartoons survived in any kind of form? I know that Charles Mintz produced the series and was released by RKO/Radio pictures and wouldn't Turner own the rights to the films today? Do you have any kind of images of Toby? And will any of these cartoons make it to video someday.
 Scenes from HALLOWEEN, courtesy of reader "Duckfilm"
Buzz Dixon asks: Back in the early 60s I saw a "serial" on a local morning kid show in Asheville, N.C. (I say "serial" because they ran other cartoons "serials" that were originally features, such as THE ADVENTURES OF MR. WONDERBIRD and several Russian fairy tale featurettes). The name of the serial was THE SPACE ADVENTURERS or something like that (in the mid-to-late 70s Universal 16 listed a film in their catalog that sounded very close to the cartoon I'd seen; that is the only published reference to it I've ever seen). The plot involved a young boy stowing away on a spaceship that was taking off to rescue his missing father, who had disappeared on an earlier spaceflight. What made the story quite memorable, however, was that the rockets and spaceflight scenes were live action miniatures, not cartoon animation as the rest of the movie. In fact, the live action footage came from an abandoned Barvarian film called ROCKETSHIP ONE TAKES OFF (or some simimlar variant title). Stills from ROCKETSHIP ONE can be found in several sources and a clip (without cartoon animation interior shots) ran on a Discovery channel special on spaceflight last year. My questions are (a) what is the origin of SPACE ADVENTURERS and (b) is it available on tape or disc anywhere?
The film is actually called THE SPACE EXPLORERS. It was put together in 1957 by a small New York company called Radio & Television Packagers, Inc. run by Fred Ladd (who would bring Japan's ASTRO BOY and GIGANTOR to America in the 1960s - see above). The film takes place in a futuristic "1978" where a young boy, Jimmy, stows away on a spaceship of Professor Nordheim and his female navigator, Smitty. They are en route to Mars, where Jimmy hopes to find his father, the first astronaut to land there, years earlier. According to ace cartoon researcher Ray Pointer, the plot goes like this: "Jimmy's father was "Commander Perry," and the spaceship that he took to Mars was The Polaris! (You get the picture?) When Jimmy heard that the Polaris was lost, he stowed away in a shipping crate that was loaded onto the rescue ship, The Polaris II, was commanded by the Professor and Smitty, his female assistant. "When Jimmy is revealed, the journey becomes a "vehicle" to teach astronomy. As it turned out, they stopped at the Moon, and it was there that Jimmy accidentally finds his father who has crash landed there, never landing on Mars. He did manage to bring back a several valuable photographs of the planet taken from outer space." According to Fred Ladd, he took a half-hour Eastern Europeon animated short film (he couldn't remember the original title), and made a two-hour movie of it by reruning and reusing the footage, and padding it with live action spaceship shots from a German film called VELTRAN SHIP and outer space and planet shots from a Europeon feature called UNIVERSE. Because the Sputnik craze was so hot, they rushed the first hour of THE SPACE EXPLORERS to television as soon as it was finished. They then released the second hour, a few months later, as THE NEW ADVENTURES OF THE SPACE EXPLORERS. In the 1960s, Ladd cut the film into 6 minute episodes for syndication! According to Ray Pointer, "The sequel, THE NEW ADVENTURES OF THE SPACE EXPLORERS reused material from the first with a new twist. The professor tricks Jimmy into going with him on a mission to Mars to retrieve a defective data gathering satellite. "In this one, aspects of Einstein's Theories are explained along with other interesting scientific information. Thinking back on it, I found that they cleverly integrated film footage with intelligent writing and made an entertaining educational series that keep this five year old excited about the prospects of interplanetary travel. "There was a similar educational series like this called JOURNEY TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA. It was similar in concept to SPACE EXPLORERS, made up of Eastern European animation cut together with live action footage about undersea life. Again, well done, but I liked SPACE EXPLORERS better. There was also another serialized adventure, JOURNEY TO THE BEGINNING OF TIME, but this was entirely live action cut together with the same narrative technique used in the other two series." Anyone out there know if these films are available anywhere (on tape or film)?
Buzzy Boop, Betty's michievous niece, appeared in two cartoons which are considered lost.
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