Blogroll: ReFrederator



Back in the days of VHS, one of the common items were cheap compilations of cartoons that had fallen into the public domain, and which could therefore be distributed by third party companies. (I still have a Daffy Duck videotape from 1989). Nowadays, thanks to the wonders of the Internet, it's possible to see the same cartoons online for free. Archive.org is the dean of public domain video sites, but ReFrederator is a new site that, incredibly enough, posts a new cartoon each weekday!

The cartoons include everything from old-fashioned Popeye action and Warner Bros. mischief (with looney standbys like A Corny Concerto, Pigs in a Polka, and Wackiki Wabbit) to the exploits of far more obscure characters like Flip the Frog, Molly Moo-Cow, and Willie Whopper (Ub Iwerks's studio is the most consistently entertaining of the lesser-known studios sampled).



Stylistic experimentation abounds in cartoons like The Dover Boys, Chuck Jones's pioneering 1942 foray into stylized animation that anticipates the style by a full decade, while also managing to be funny in spoofing the Victorian-era fiction of half a century earlier. (On the other hand, RF hasn't had much animation made with alternative, non-cel techniques; Ray Harryhausen's early puppet stop-motion version of Hansel and Gretel is the only stop-motion cartoon yet posted.) Propaganda ranges from the prototypical WWII piece Scrap Happy Daffy to the soft-sell milk promotion of The Sunshine Makers to the Red Scare barbs at the Soviet Union and the IWW of Alice's Egg Plant.





There are also a number of science fiction and horror entries, from the straightforward skeleton-filled haunted-house horror of Spooks and The Mad Doctor, to the techno-futurism of the Fleischer World's Fair tribute All's Fair at the Fair (complete with dancing robots!) to wild combinations of both genres, like the Willie Whopper tale Stratos Fear (in which he floats into space and encounters everything from self-decapitating birds to a Harpo Marx caricature).

Today, in the middle of an all-Popeye week, they posted a brisk 1931 jazz song about Popeye that I had pointed out to them.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Announcing the Carl Sagan memorial blog-a-thon

Next month, December 20, 2006 will mark the tenth anniversary Carl Sagan's passing. In his honor, I am organizing a special memorial "blog-a-thon" among Sagan's fans throughout the blogosphere. If you're a Sagan fan with a blog, you can participate by posting something related to him on or near that date. Read or reread a Sagan book and review it; discuss cool things that you've done that's been influenced by him; pontificate on one of the many topics he treated (SETI, astronomy, critical thinking, the history of science, human intelligence....), or post about something completely surprising. Contact me by email or by leaving a comment, and then when the date approaches, I will create a meta-post that links to all the stuff people are doing, providing a network of the participating bloggers. A list of Sagan stuff online that may be a source of ideas. Carl's son Nick Sagan on the blog-a-thon . Publicity for the blog-a-thon includes Cornell Univer
Read more

another day, another pair of letters to the editor

Image
The Russians were going to have come in 2010! "U.S. and Russia in space"  in the Queens Chronicle looks back at the little-discussed sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey , and how it envisioned less tense relations between the US and the then-assumed-to-still-be-Soviet-in-the-2010s Russia.  (I should also clarify that I am not now, nor have I aver been a member of the Russian conspiracy, though I technically can't truthfully deny association with  "H.U.A.C."  since the "House of Un-American Activities" was the unofficial nickname for the home of some college friends back in the day.) This image is a rerun, but so is the content it's illustrating. "Reducing costs"  in the Queens Examiner  (and the other outlets in the Queens Ledger/Brooklyn Star Newspaper Group) asks free-market advocates to stop brushing aside concerns about "materialism, social inequality and economic instability" and instead start pointing out how econom
Read more

AOL Hometown shutting down, and taking a bit of bronze with it

Well, with the announcement that AOL's Hometown service is shutting down by October 31, one of the truly old school web hosting sites from the early days of the Web, up there with GeoCities and Tripod, and all of the websites hosted at URLs "hometown.aol.com", "members.aol.com" and "users.aol.com", will be going the way of Xoom into the land of dead bits. The shutdown is pretty abrupt; the formal announcement was only posted on September 30, and according to it, if webmasters don't back up their website files by the 31st, they'll simply be gone. All Hometown pages have one of two prominently placed banners atop the pages announcing the shutdown, one of which says "AOL Hometown is Closing its Doors. Find out how to BACK UP AND SAVE YOUR FILES before we say goodbye for good." and the other stating that "A Blogger is Always Prepared. DON'T GET LEFT BEHIND. Learn how to BACK UP & SAVE YOUR INFORMATION now." (desp
Read more