Tuesday's Overlooked Film: The Hooked Bear (1956)

Suffering from a bad back I watched some VHS tapes with old animations in them and spotted this Disney cartoon previously unknown to me. I don't know how this has happened - the explanation is perhaps that I've seen some of the Humphrey the Bear cartoons, but forgotten all about them. Nonetheless, this was a pretty entertaining little film, directed by Jack Hannah.

 More Overlooked Films here.

Hurrah for the Fleischers!

We've been watching quite a lot of old Superman cartoons by Max and Dave Fleischer with Kauto. I bought an old VHS cassette some time ago and Kauto was enthusiastic from the word go. He said to me today he's gonna be a film maker when he grows up, and later he said he'll make a movie in which he shows how Superman is born and how the planet Krypton blows up. Didn't know we have Richard Donner living with us.

(Kauto also said that he'll make the world's longest movie that shows someone sleeping for 24 hours... We've been talking about the longest movies and I told him there's a film called Sleep. Kauto also said that it may be even 100 hours long. "No one sleeps that long", I said. "He's not a real man, he's fabricated!")

Those Fleischer Supermans (Supermen?) are fascinating. They are pretty well-made in their own right, but it's interesting to note how noirish they are in their design, with steep camera angles and very shadowy lighting, the use of silhouettes and such. It's at times like watching Citizen Kane.

Here's one that's not on the VHS I bought. I seem to remember my kid brother used to watch these, too, and this was one of his favourites.

Mickey Mouse in Finnish Big Little Books

I'm compiling an article on the Big Little Books for my fanzine, Pulp. The article won't be long, since I don't have much of first-hand information on the phenomenon and very few of these were published in Finnish.

However here are two Mickey Mouse books (or actually covers of them) that I suspect were originally Big Little Books published by Whitman. These two books, Mickey Mouse as a Pilot (based on Mickey Mouse Mail Pilot) and Mickey Mouse Is Looking for Treasure Island, were published in Finland by Werner Söderström in the mid-1930's. They are fantastically rare; last I looked they were about 500 euros each. (I looked these up at the university library where they stock just about everything that's been published here.) The format is right, the page count is right, the layout of the pages is right - it's just that at least the Treasure Island book has a wrong cover.

Sorry 'bout the black&white. Scanned them from photocopies taken at the university.

Broadway Laughs and Pete Wyma

Broadway Laughs (see below) was a humour magazine, with jokes, fillers and occasional short-short stories. The publisher was Crestwood, operating from New York. The editor was Samuel Bierman who also edited some pulp magazines, like Nickel Detective, back in the 1930's.

Here's the December '64 cover by Pete Wyma, who seems to be quite a well-regarded pin-up artist. I've also scanned one of Wyma's pin-up cartoons from the mag. There are also other well-known cartoonists and illustrators in Broadway Laughs, like Dan Orehek, but I'll scan them later (if I find some time).

Even though I have friends who'll hate me for this, I can't resist saying that I like the way Wyma draws his ladies. Not unlike Bill Ward... The jokes are stupid, that's for sure.

Edit: Samuel Bierman also edited the Lone Ranger pulp for Donenfeld, and he was also editor of WILD WEST STORIES AND COMPLETE MAGAZINE in the 1930s. He was also the owner-publisher-editor of Feature/Headline which I believe was also the publisher of Broadway Laughs under a different imprint. Thanks for this additional info to Will Murray and Steven Rowe of the PulpMags e-mail list!