Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1021376
"Cartoons are just as fragile," Beck says. If no one preserves the first Loony Tunes or Porky Pig cartoon, he says, they'll disappear. With restoration being a costly process ($8,000 to $30,000 dollars per film) and funding limited, choosing which cartoons to preserve presents a dilemma. "It's a real Sophie's choice," Beck says. Once a year he presents a selection to the ASIFA- Hollywood board and makes his case for saving them. He is well versed in the classic libraries of the studios and communicates throughout the year with many archives. Invariably someone will call him with the discovery of a rare nitrate film that needs saving. Just recently the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences found a cartoon negative in their library and approached him because they couldn't find a reference to this film anywhere. ASIFA-Hollywood paid for creating a print after it turned out to be an unreleased UPA cartoon. Beck tries to focus on rare and historically important cartoons, that will tell a story to future generations about the studio's work. For example, this year they're restoring two Puppetoon films which are both unusual. One is unique because in the Paramount 1944 Puppetoon, Bugs Bunny, voiced by Mel Blanc and animated by the studio that made the Warner Brothers' cartoons, makes a cameo gag appearance. "It's too important in the universe of animation history," says Beck. "It's a little footnote, but it would kill me if that wasn't preserved." The other Puppetoon uses the character of Superman in puppet form. The Superman character was licensed from DC comics at the time, in the '40s, and Beck found it exciting to stumble across a forgotten piece of superhero history and bring that back into the world. Sometimes Beck will approach a studio and inquire about the status of certain cartoons. This is what happened with a rare Max Fleischer cartoon, Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy. When he learned that it was not preserved, he set the wheels in F E AT U R E 30 KEYFRAME