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Godzilla, Whitewashed: A Special Report

As a new Godzilla (2014) is unleashed upon the world’s multiplexes this week, there is poetic justice in the fact that Ishiro Honda’s 1954 Japanese monster ur-text Gojira is, at the same time, quietly touring U.S. art-house cinemas in commemoration of its 60th anniversary. The Honda film is a reminder of Godzilla’s highly politicized origins, rooted in Cold War tensions and the conflicted postwar relationship between Japan and America. As most everyone now knows, the monster became a simple and crude metaphor for Hiroshima, but GOJIRA was really a clever and restrained indictment of the doomsday scenario that Harry Truman set in motion. Without ever mentioning the United States, Honda spoke truth to superpower.

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But now that Hollywood has, for the second time, spent hundreds of millions of dollars to refashion Japan’s celebrated low-tech monster in its own image (an ironic proposition to begin with), it’s clear that America is incapable of making an honest Godzilla. Consider the ways in which the new movie contorts and distorts history in order to avoid confronting the uncomfortable facts of American culpability in the monster’s origin: It offers a vague scenario in which Godzilla is an ancient sea creature that began appearing after World War II to feed on radioactive material; in footage made to look grainy and faded, the huge beast swims ashore at the Marshall Islands just as a hydrogen bomb is gloriously detonated on a beach. We subsequently learn that the nuclear testing program at the Pacific Proving Ground (comprising 105 atmospheric nuclear explosions from 1947 to 1962, with a total yield of roughly 210 megatons, equal to thousands of Hiroshimas) wasn’t intended to prove the killing power of the world’s most deadly weapons of mass destruction, but “they were trying to kill it”: the whole operation was just a big, unsuccessful Godzilla extermination project. And what of the hundreds of tests performed by the Soviets, British, French, and Chinese during this period? Would the filmmakers have us believe they were trying to kill their own Godzillas?

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Perhaps it’s debatable whether Legendary Pictures and Warner Bros. have an obligation to honor Godzilla’s origins after paying untold millions for rights to the character. But given Gojira‘s basis in actual events of the war and its aftermath, the brazen mendacity of the new film’s revisionism is rather astounding. It is not only an affront to the legacy of Honda’s Gojira, but it relies on the audience’s ignorance of and apathy toward history. Its inherent function—one that the screenwriters probably never paused to consider—is to maintain the American historical narrative about the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, events that needlessly killed nearly 250,000 Japanese civilians yet continue to be falsely remembered as necessary and justified actions to hasten the end of World War II and prevent an invasion of Japan, saving untold thousands of American lives. This narrative began with the U.S. military nearly 60 years ago and has prevailed with the cooperation of the education system and the media, including motion pictures. There have been great antinuclear films such as Dr. Strangelove and Fail Safe, but these assailed the madness of the Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine while avoiding questions about the legitimacy of Hiroshima. Hollywood’s only meaningful challenge to the narrative was the 1983 television film The Day After, which showed Americans being flash-incinerated by a Soviet nuclear attack, and used a doctored photo of the Hiroshima ruins to depict the post-World War III remains of Kansas City. The film was loudly protested by conservative groups, who feared it could endanger President Ronald Reagan’s nuclear arms buildup; the ABC network capitulated by cutting certain scenes and following the broadcast with a panel discussion of Washington right-wingers, who concluded that the film’s true message was that America needed to beef up its arsenal.

The new Godzilla is just the latest effort to negate the monster’s politics for American consumption, a whitewashing that began when Honda’s film was first imported to the U.S. in 1956. The images of death and destruction in Gojira, made nine years after the war, are harrowing references to not only the atomic bombings, but to the fire raids of Tokyo in 1945 and the Lucky Dragon incident of 1954, in which a Japanese trawler was contaminated by the worst nuclear fallout accident in U.S. history. The film shows vast swaths of Tokyo engulfed in flames, and the aftermath of the monster’s attack is a smoldering ruin, resembling photographs of the flattened Hiroshima. A makeshift hospital overflows with the wounded and dying, their skin scorched with radiation, and a doctor waves a clacking Geiger counter over a small child, the most innocent of victims. Godzilla itself was not an animal but a soulless killing machine, a manifestation of the bomb that created it; unlike King Kong or the Beast from 20,000 fathoms, it did not prowl the city looking for its mate or a place to spawn—its purpose was simply to destroy. A Hollywood distributor repackaged the film as low-budget, atomic-age science fiction film of the type so popular at the time, and Godzilla, King of the Monsters! famously included new scenes with Raymond Burr playing a journalist trapped in Godzilla’s path. By placing a bloodied and bandaged Burr in that hospital, this version portrayed America as the monster’s co-victim and thereby blurred references to Hiroshima. The movie was heavily re-edited, and most significantly, a closing speech by a disillusioned scientist (Takashi Shimura, star of Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai) was cut entirely: “If we keep on conducting nuclear tests, it’s possible another Godzilla might appear, somewhere in the world, again.” Certainly the world’s biggest practitioner of such tests wasn’t about to be lectured by a country it had just conquered and turned into a client state.

Then, 30 years later, Japan’s Toho Studios rebooted the franchise in 1984 with a new film, also titled Gojira, which ignored all the sequels, none approaching the import of the original, that had come in between. Godzilla was resituated in a world of heightened Cold War tensions and Reagan’s “peace through strength” mantra; in this outing, an American diplomat pressures Japan’s Prime Minister to abandon the country’s nuclear-free principles and allow the U.S. to attack Godzilla with atomic weapons. A Hollywood distributor with right-wing leanings got hold of the film and again re-cut it, this time with the effect of portraying the Soviet Union as the nuke-happy villains. And finally, there was Hollywood’s first attempt at adapting Godzilla in 1998, a mostly forgettable big-budget film directed by Roland Emmerich and starring Matthew Broderick. This time, the legacy of Hiroshima was sidestepped entirely, as the filmmakers tied the monster’s appearance to a series of controversial French nuclear tests in Polynesia.

Legendary’s Godzilla is the most egregious of all because, intentionally or not, it manages to turn Honda’s antiwar symbol into a spokes-monster for the nuclear status quo, all the while feigning an interest in the legacy of Hiroshima. In it, the military’s plan to exterminate Godzilla and its foe, the laughably named M.U.T.O. (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism—pity the fine actor David Strathairn, who had to utter those words without chuckling) involves—wait for it—nuclear weapons. Much of the film’s run time involves an inexplicably difficult operation to transport a single warhead, one out of the U.S. arsenal of roughly 4,800, to the desired location. There follows shopworn dialogue, straight out of a 1950s sci-fi flick; actor Ken Watanabe, as a scientist who divines Godzilla’s motives (because, we must assume, he’s Japanese), urges Strathairn’s brass buttons to reconsider the nuclear option. “We tried that before!” Watanabe pleads, and Strathairn retorts emphatically, “Millions of lives are at stake!” The climax has the monsters destroying San Francisco, while the assortment of uninteresting characters face a third-act screenwriter’s device borrowed from the 1997 Nicole Kidman-George Clooney actioner (!) The Peacemaker: the nuclear bomb with a ticking timer that can’t be disabled. The hero, a handsome young soldier and family man, gets the nuke onto a boat and out of San Francisco Bay before it detonates just a few miles offshore. We’d been told earlier the bomb is a massive one (“We’re talking megatons,” a commander says), yet the next morning the city’s residents are out and about, rummaging through the wreckage of the Embarcadero, not a speck of fallout anywhere. There was a teachable moment here, but that would have spoiled the happy ending. Instead, the world’s most deadly weapon is just harmless fireworks.

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“When the atomic bomb was dropped over Hiroshima, Americans felt both deep satisfaction and deep anxiety, and these responses have coexisted ever since,” write scholars Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell in the introduction to their landmark study Hiroshima in America: A Half Century of Denial. “Americans continue to experience pride, pain, and confusion over the use of the atomic bomb against Japan … It has never been easy to reconcile dropping the bomb with a sense of ourselves as a decent people. Because this conflict remains unresolved it continues to provoke strong feelings. There is no historical event Americans are more sensitive about. Hiroshima remains a raw nerve.” In our reluctance to prick that nerve, the authors observe, we have accepted a world where thousands of nuclear warheads are aimed at us, where we live in ever-present fear of extinction yet look to those same weapons for safety and survival. The likelihood of another Hiroshima, or many of them, grows.

Shortly before his death in 1993, Ishiro Honda said it had once been his hope that through the metaphor of Godzilla he might provoke a discussion about ending nuclear proliferation, but lamented that he had failed. His pessimism was understandable, and perhaps it was naive to think a monster movie featuring a man in a rubber costume trampling through miniature cities might inspire a serious debate about the dangerous precipice on which we all stand. Still, Honda—a soldier in the Japanese Imperial Army, who often told of passing through a decimated Hiroshima on his way home from the China battlefront—should be remembered for his willingness to challenge the prevailing Hiroshima narrative. By contrast, Gareth Edwards, the British director of Legendary’s Godzilla, does the opposite, offering a trite moment wherein Strathairn’s general and Watanabe’s Dr. Serizawa (whose father died at Hiroshima, pegging Serizawa at 69 years old; he looks maybe 50) share a hope that it never happens again, tacitly accepting the gospel of Hiroshima as necessary evil. Edwards has claimed that his film’s disaster pornography—digitally realistic images resembling Fukushima, the Indian Ocean tsunami, Katrina, 9/11—contextualizes the story for our dangerous modern world. But his film does not comment on those images or what they might mean, and so they unspool as hollow exercises in technical prowess. Godzilla is said to be a force of nature reawakened, but by what? Without that answer, the latest Godzilla reboot is about nothing.
Steve Ryfle is author of Japan’s Favorite Mon-Star, a history of the Godzilla film franchise. His writing has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Cineaste, and other publications. He lives in Los Angeles.

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The Best Movies You’ve Never Heard Of: “Bulldog Jack” (1935)

“The Best Movies You’ve Never Heard Of” is a series of articles devoted to little-known movies of exceptional quality that dedicated film buffs may be aware of, but have somehow fallen through the cracks of the general public’s awareness.

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The 1935 Gaumont-British comedy-thriller Bulldog Jack is almost entirely forgotten nowadays, which is ironic seeing as it was subsequently copied to death by the Hollywood studios. The basic premise is simple enough: An ordinary everyman (who’s also something of a well-meaning bumbler) dreams of becoming a heroic tough guy, the type who foils the bad guys and saves the proverbial damsel-in-distress. Fate conspires to place this everyman in real-life danger and, against all odds, he overcomes his fears, exposes the criminals, and successfully rescues the aforementioned damsel-in-distress, winning both the day and the girl. If this scenario sounds familiar, it’s because several of Hollywood’s top comedians appeared in countless variations on the theme, including Bob Hope in My Favorite Brunette, Danny Kaye in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, and Jerry Lewis in It’s Only Money.

Bulldog Jack was the brainchild of its star, Jack Hulbert, who is credited for “idea and dialogue.” Hulbert was one of Britain’s top three film comedians of the 1930s, along with George Fromby and Will Hay. Writing about Bulldog Jack in his 1972 book The Detective in Film, British-born film historian William K. Everson stated, “Hulbert was a song-and-dance comic (though wisely keeping musical interludes out of this particular film) who followed the Harold Lloyd technique of combining comedy with thrill. He had a breezy, cheerful personality and good diction which made him far more acceptable to American audiences than many of the regional comics from Britain with their heavy local accents. His films were always solidly produced, with good sets, camerawork, and well-staged action scenes.” (In fact, I would never have even heard of Bulldog Jack if it hadn’t been for Everson’s  enthusiastic recommendation of it.)

Jack Hulbert (left) with Mack Sennett (center), visiting the set, and director Walter Forde

Jack Hulbert (left) with Mack Sennett (center), visiting the set, and director Walter Forde

Clocking in at a breathless 70 minutes, Bulldog Jack was directed by Walter Forde, with a screenplay by J.O.C. Orton, Gerard Fairlie, and Sidney Gilliat, “in collaboration with ‘Sapper’ [the pseudonym of author H.C. McNeile].” (Gilliat’s name is familiar to many movie buffs, not only in connection with the screenplays he co-wrote for Alfred Hitchcock, The Lady Vanishes and Jamaica Inn, but also for the films he wrote and directed himself, most notably the classic whodunit Green For Danger.) Instead of inventing a generic detective hero for the comic to emulate (as was the case in My Favorite Brunette and It’s Only Money), the writers made use of McNeile’s already widely popular fictional sleuth, Bulldog Drummond. So, in addition to being a first-rate comedy in itself, Bulldog Jack also functions as a sharp, incisive parody of the melodramatic excesses of the Bulldog Drummond novels as well. (Indeed, Bulldog Jack has stood the test of time better than any of the official Bulldog Drummond film adaptations.)

Bulldog Jack gets off to a wonderful start, with the credits accompanied by composer Louis Levy’s appropriately dramatic overture, and interrupted briefly by a gunshot and one of co-star Fay Wray’s patented ear-splitting screams. (Wray was still at the height of her loveliness, having recently played the ultimate damsel-in-distress in King Kong, and made a most fetching heroine for Hulbert to rescue.)

The real Bulldog Drummond, played by Atholl Fleming (accurately described by Everson as “rather too mature and stolid an actor for the role”), only appears in the film’s first five minutes. In an introductory sequence worthy of Hitchcock himself, we see two sinister figures out in the British countryside in the dead of night, obviously up to no good as they tap a telephone pole’s lines and listen in on a conversation between Drummond and Ann Manders (Wray) in which she entreats the celebrated amateur sleuth to come to her aid. Unfortunately, Drummond mentions that he’ll need to stop for gas before meeting Miss Manders at his flat in London. So the two villains hightail it to the only gas station in that isolated area, bind and gag the attendant, and one of them takes his place. When Drummond arrives, accompanied by his pet terrier, the bogus attendant waits on him while his accomplice lurks behind Drummond’s car and sabotages the brake line.

Blithely unaware of the danger he’s in, Drummond drives down a steep, winding stretch of road ominously known as “Devil’s Elbow.” As he futilely tries to pump the brakes, the film cross-cuts between his automobile and another car heading up the road from the opposite direction. The two cars collide, completely overturning Drummond’s auto. The driver of the other car, a professional cricket player named Jack Pennington (Hulbert), sticks his head out of the window and casually inquires whether this is “the right way to Gilford.” The only response he receives is Drummond’s terrier sticking its head out of passenger window of the overturned car. Jack politely thanks the pooch and gets out of his car.

Jack accompanies Drummond, who has suffered a broken arm, and his dog on the ambulance ride to the hospital. After exchanging introductions, Jack fawns over the famous detective and expresses his lifelong desire to become a detective himself. Since he’s obviously out of commission for the time being, Drummond asks Jack to impersonate him long enough to interview Miss Manders and determine exactly who and what is threatening her. Needless to say, despite the potential danger, Jack gladly accepts the assignment.

Upon Jack’s arrival at Drummond’s flat, we are introduced to two supporting characters well known to followers of the Drummond novels, the first being Drummond’s faithful, unflappable manservant Denny, played here by Gibb McLaughlin, best remembered for his work in David Lean’s early films. The second familiar character to appear is Drummond’s perennial sidekick, “Algy” (short for Algernon) Longworth, the very embodiment of that archetype affectionately known as “a silly-ass Englishman.” In Bulldog Jack, Algy is played by Hulbert’s brother Claude, an accomplished comedian in his own right. (Few British comics could do “silly-ass” better than Claude Hulbert.) Algy agrees to go along with Pennington’s impersonation of Drummond and the two act as a team for the remainder of the movie. (The dynamic between the Hulbert Brothers is rather reminiscent of Laurel and Hardy, with Jack driven to a perpetual state of exasperation by Claude’s ineffectualness.)

The next person knocking on Drummond’s door, much to Jack’s disappointment, is not Ann, but rather an elderly foreigner (Paul Graetz) who claims that criminals are pressuring him into participating in a crime involving “the Goddess with a Hundred Hands.” (“Do you know what they want me to do?” the old man asks. “Wash them?” Algy guesses.) The man’s pleas are interrupted by the arrival of a couple of strangers who identify themselves as policemen. Convinced they’re imposters, Jack locks them in the kitchen while two other men, also identifying themselves as police, show up. Jack, however, smugly declares these two to be authentic and turns the old man over to them. Not surprisingly, the first set of men are the real cops and the second two are minions of the master criminal behind the sinister goings-on.

At last, Ann herself arrives (Jack is, of course, immediately smitten with her) and the plot finally gets underway. As Ann explains, the old man is Salvini, her grandfather, and he’s an expert jeweler whose professional services are required by the master criminal in question, one Professor Morelle. Played by a young Ralph Richardson (with bushy mustache and gray fright wig) in one of his early film appearances, Morelle is a satirical take-off on such sinister literary masterminds as Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Moriarty and Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu. (One of the main reasons that Bulldog Jack works so well is that Richardson, Wray, and all the other supporting actors play their roles absolutely straight, and only the Hulberts play it for laughs.)

The caper Morelle is planning is the theft of a priceless set of jewels embedded in the gigantic multi-armed statue of the Indian goddess Kali that is kept at the British Museum. Morelle needs Salvini to create replicas of the jewels that will be indistinguishable from the real thing, so that they can be substituted for the originals. When Savini refuses to give in to Morelle’s threats, Ann is also kidnapped by Morelle’s henchmen, and it’s up to Jack and Algy to track down Morelle’s secret lair and save her and her grandfather from the villain’s evil clutches.

In their quest, Jack and Algy are put through a series of perils typical of the average Bulldog Drummond story. At one point, they’re locked in a basement storeroom. (Algy suggests burning their way out. It isn’t until the fire is blazing out of control that it occurs to them that they might be incinerated as well.) They deduce that Morelle’s hideout must be located somewhere in London’s underground subway tunnels and—you can see this one coming a mile away—they’re forced to outrun a train when they start down a seemingly empty tunnel. (By the way, the film’s special effects are flawlessly done, particularly the miniatures used in the climax.)

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After sending Algy to go alert the police, Jack eventually reaches Morelle’s underground hideout, but his attempt to spirit Ann and her grandfather out of there by impersonating Morelle and hoodwinking his gang is spoiled by the inevitable appearance of Morelle himself. It’s at this point that Morelle demolishes Ann’s trust in Jack (she still thinks he’s Bulldog Drummond) by exposing him as a fraud and imposter (the film’s only touch of pathos). Undeterred, Jack still hopes to prove himself to Ann and give Morelle his well-deserved comeuppance.

There are some highly amusing sight gags in Bulldog Jack, most notably a literal running gag in which the good guys and bad guys are constantly hurrying up or down the London Underground’s circular staircases (an image beautifully punctuated by Levy’s score) and a frenzied nighttime chase through the London Museum after hours when Jack interrupts Morelle and his men in mid-robbery, climaxed by Jack utilizing the museum’s collection of Aboriginal boomerangs against the villains. At first, Jack successfully knocks out several of Morelle’s henchmen (complete with comic sound effects), but, as comedy tradition demands, the last boomerang he flings backfires on him.

The dangers that Jack faces in the last fifteen minutes of the movie would not be out of place in an Indiana Jones film, with an emphasis on suspense rather than comedy. Jack pursues Morelle down to the subway tunnels and the two of them fight it out on the tracks, with the electrified third rail and an oncoming train posing serious threats. Finally, in a last-ditch act of sheer desperation, Morelle hijacks a subway train with Jack, Algy, Ann, and Salvini aboard. Intending to commit murder/suicide by crashing the train when it reaches the end of the line, Morelle locks himself in the lead train’s cab and Jack’s only hope of stopping him is to crawl out over the top of the moving train and get into the cab via the front door.

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Now, alas, for the bad news. The video transfer on the Region 1 DVD release by a company called Firecake Entertainment leaves something to be desired. At first glance, the image seems to be sharp enough, but it soon becomes apparent that there’s some rather annoying fuzziness in the picture. Although, in all fairness, it should be pointed out that this fuzziness is not bad enough to make the DVD unwatchable. (Lord knows, the transfer is nowhere near as bad as those 5th or 6th generation public domain dubs that have plagued unwitting video purchasers for decades.) The soundtrack, however, is clean and the dialogue is quite audible, which isn’t always the case in British films of the period.

On the plus side, Bulldog Jack definitely qualifies as “family friendly” entertainment. As Everson explained in his program notes for a 1963 New York screening of Bulldog Jack: “There was a lot of ‘blue’ comedy in the British films of the 30s, some admittedly very funny. Hulbert’s were always scrupulously clean.” Even if you’ve seen any of the numerous Hollywood knock-offs of Bulldog Jack, I think you’ll agree that the original can’t be topped, in terms of both laughs and thrills.


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Blu-Ray Review: “The Puppetoon Movie” (1987)

George Pal = magic. A contemporary and in many ways equal of Walt Disney but minus Walt’s business acumen, producer-director George Pal is best remembered today for his pioneering efforts in the sci-fi/fantasy genre: Destination Moon (1950), When Worlds Collide (1951), The War of the Worlds (1953), tom thumb (1958), The Time Machine (1960) and The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962) among them. But before all that, Pal made his name with the Puppetoons, one-reel shorts mostly employing the rare form of three-dimensional replacement animation. Unlike stop-motion, in which a single model is articulated one frame at a time, Pal’s Puppetoons involved carving and painting dozens upon dozens of heads and legs for a single character, reportedly upwards of 9,000 separate carvings in all for a single short. Replacing various body parts for each frame of film, the result was uncannily smooth and expressive facial reactions and motion, something like “liquid wood.”

Pal was born in Hungary, and began making Puppetoons in Europe, but established his official Puppetoons series at Paramount Pictures in Hollywood, where he made about three-dozen shorts between 1940 and 1947. (Paramount originally gave them the inapt title “Madcap Models,” a moniker nobody remembers today.) Some years ago I attended a nitrate film festival at UCLA where several of the Puppetoons were shown. Audiences were enchanted, to say nothing of being flabbergasted by the rich color of these three-strip Technicolor films.

Criminally, the Puppetoons haven’t been the constant presence in the same way Disney’s and Warner Bros.’s cartoons have. Partly this may be due to the fact that there weren’t enough shorts to establish a regular television children’s show (though they were distributed for a while by U.M. & M TV Corp., sometimes, appallingly, only in black-and-white), and partly because many of the shorts fell victim to misguided political-correctness.

Producer and archivist Arnold Leibovit sought to restore Pal’s faded reputation first with the marvelous documentary The Fantasy Film Worlds of George Pal (1985) and then with the equally essential The Puppetoon Movie (1987).

The new 2-disc Blu-ray of The Puppetoon Movie, released independently and limited to 3,000 copies (available at www.b2mp.net), is really two feature films and bonus shorts all in high-def, plus The Fantasy Film Worlds of George Pal presented in standard-definition, along with myriad extra features. In addition to The Puppetoon Movie, which featuring ten unabridged Puppetoons plus newer material, the set also includes the high-definition premiere of The Great Rupert (1950), Pal’s first live-action feature. Bonus Puppetoon shorts included on The Puppetoon Movie’s original DVD release are present, but the real treat are seven additional bonus shorts being released for the first time in any home video format, shorts in high-definition licensed from Paramount and restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archives and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences.
Awards.

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The Puppetoon Movie opens with a sweet and technically impressive prologue, done entirely in animation itself (supervised by Pete Kleinow). A fearsome Tyrannosaurus Rex threatens a Bambi-like fawn, but the former turns out to be gentle Arnie the Dinosaur (voiced by Paul Frees, who died before the film’s release and to whom the film is dedicated), and advises the fawn to run away. A voice yells, “Cut!” as the entire scene is part of a movie being directed by Gumby (Dal McKennon) and assisted by his pal Pokey (Art Clokey). The not-so-terrible lizard explains he’s been a vegetarian ever since his days working for producer George Pal, where his inspiring, humanist Puppetoon shorts changed his ways. The foursome move into an editing room (decorated with one-sheet posters from Pal’s features) and look at some of Pal’s best shorts on a Moviola.

At this point the movie segues into what’s essentially a Puppetoon film festival featuring three pre-Hollywood shorts, Philips Cavalcade (1934), The Sleeping Beauty (1935), and Philips Broadcast of 1938 (1938) before moving on to seven Paramount Puppetoons, complete with their original main titles: Hoola Boola (1941), Tulips Shall Grow (1942), The Little Broadcast (1943), Jasper in a Jam, Together in the Weather, John Henry and the Inky-Poo (all 1946), and Tubby the Tuba (1947). The movie ends with a touching final tribute to the late producer (who died in 1980), with various stop-motion characters, including King Kong, The Pillsbury Dough Boy, and Alka-Seltzer’s Speedy making cameo appearances.

Though famed animators such as Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen worked on these shorts, Pal’s personal stamp and interests dominate. One of the best, Tulips Shall Grow, is a parable reflecting Nazi Germany’s invasion of Holland, where Pal worked prior to moving to London and then America. They reflect Pal’s love of classical and contemporary music; the Leopold Stokowski-like Mr. Strauss was a semi-regular in the shorts, and Tubby the Tuba, its title character bored with Oompah-Pah orchestrations and yearning to play a beautiful melody, is almost indescribably sweet.

The shorts vary widely among decidedly European-flavored takes on classic fairy tales like The Sky Princess and Jasper and the Beanstalk (included among the extra features, the latter featuring Peggy Lee’s singing voice), animated interpretations of modern jazz (Jasper in a Jam, Rhythm in the Ranks, and Date with Duke (the latter featuring Duke Ellington), there’s a particular interest in American folklore, and even early Dr. Seuss stories were adapted.

Pal was criticized then and long after the Puppetoons had ended for his occasional racial stereotypes. Jasper, the most popular among the Puppetoon characters, was a little black child Pal innocently saw as the “Huckleberry Finn of [African-] American Folklore,” but the character was attacked in publications like Ebony. While there’s no denying racial stereotypes reflective of the times are present, they are also resolutely without malice. Jasper, for his part, is really just an ordinary little boy who happens to be black. Indeed, in all-black shorts like John Henry and the Inky-Poo especially, Pal offered overwhelmingly positive portrayals of the blacks in all-black stories at a time when most of Hollywood relegated African-American characters to minor roles as maids, porters, and chauffeurs in stories completely dominated by whites.

The Puppetoon Movie’s 1.37:1 high-definition transfer sources a 35mm interpositive, with the original Puppetoons looking good-to-great and the prologue-epilogue especially fine. Surprisingly, this was originally mixed for 4-track stereo and has been remixed for DTS-MA 4.0 surround and 24-bit 48kHz stereo, all to good effect.

The additional high-definition shorts are Date with Duke (1940), Rhythm in the Ranks (1941), The Sky Princess (1942), The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins (1943), And To Think I Saw It On Mulberry Street (1944), Jasper and the Beanstalk (1945), and Rhapsody in Wood (1947). They look even better than the shorts in the main feature.

Twelve more shorts, originally included as an extra feature on the DVD of The Puppetoon Movie are here as well, albeit in standard-def: What Ho She Bumps, Mr. Strauss Takes a Walk, Olio for Jasper, Philips Calvacade, Jasper’s Derby, Hoola Boola, Ether Symphony, Aladdin and His Magic Lamp, The Magic Atlas, Jasper and the Haunted House, The Philips Broadcast of 1938, and The Ship of the Ether.

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The Great Rupert (1950), also in high-definition, was Pal’s first feature film, originally released by Eagle-Lion. A fantasy-comedy about an amazingly talented performing squirrel and the two families whose lives he innocently if profoundly impacts is a modest success.

The picture starts out wonderfully well, with struggling Vaudevillian Joe Mahoney (Jimmy Conlin) rehearsing with the little squirrel, whom he’s taught to dance a Highland Fling while dressed in full Scottish regalia. But Mahoney’s agent isn’t interested. Joe and Rupert are evicted for non-payment of rent, and Vaudevillian colleagues – juggler Louie Amendola (Jimmy Durante), his wife (Queenie Smith), and daughter, Rosalinda (Terry Moore) – move in, unaware Rupert has secretly moved back into the nest above their flat in a corner of the ceiling. Meanwhile, skinflint landlord Frank Dingle (Frank Orth) has come into money, monthly payments of $1,500. Rather than spend the dough on his family, he stashes it away behind a wall, unaware that he’s deposited it directly into Rupert’s nest.

Hard-up for cash, Mrs. Amendola prays for a miracle (“Lord, it’s so difficult to find a job for a human pyramid!”) just as Rupert, annoyed with all the unwanted cash, casually tosses it out, and Mrs. Amendola misinterprets the bills fluttering down from yon high as an answered prayer.

More than Pal’s later features, the movie resembles the early comedies of Preston Sturges, particularly Christmas in July (1940), which has a similar plot. The presence of Jimmy Conlin, part of Sturges’s stock company of character plays, adds to this, as does much of the humor and the story’s happy resolution.

Rupert (playing himself, according to the credits) is performed by a real squirrel some of the time, but about 50% of his footage was managed through stop-motion, animation so good and expertly integrated with the live-action many assumed he was a supremely well-trained animal.

The movie loses its way a bit when Rupert is forgotten about for most of the film’s second-half, but it also unmistakably bears Pal’s personal stamp and desire to create a warm, magical family film.

Pal’s sweet nature is also reflected in The Fantasy Film Worlds of George Pal, a more conventional but engaging documentary, with interview subjects like Alan Young, Russ Tamblyn, Ray Bradbury, Roy Disney and others attesting to both his incredible innovations as a filmmaker and great kindness as a human being. About 40 minutes worth of extended interviews are also included on the bonus disc.

Moreover, the Blu-rays also include an audio commentary on The Puppetoon with Leibovit and animation historian Jerry Beck, who also contribute insightful liner notes. There’s also footage of Pal at one of the Cinerama premieres for The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm and on the set of Destination Moon.

The Puppetoon Movie and The Great Rupert, and The Fantasy Worlds of George Pal, and all the bonus Puppetoons and supplementary material) all add up to one the year’s best Blu-ray releases.

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, The Puppetoon Blu-ray rates:

The Film (out of ****): ***1/2

Film Elements Sourced: ***1/2

Video Transfer: ****

Audio: ****

New Extra Features: ****

Extra Features Overall: ****
Arnold Leibovit Entertainment/B2MP
1987 / Color / 1:37:1 / 79 plus 88 min (feature films) / $49.98

Stuart Galbraith IV is a Kyoto-based film historian whose work includes film history books, DVD and Blu-ray audio commentaries and special features. Visit Stuart’s Cine Blogarama here.