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FALL 2018 31 D E PA R T M E N T motion for its rescue. He considered the film a perfect candidate for restoration because it was unusual, a two-reeler, and in color. It was also a musical and featured a character that most people had heard of—Raggedy Ann. ASIFA-Hollywood frequently works with Scott MacQueen of the UCLA Film & Television Archive, who spearheads their restoration projects. The restoration they do with ASIFA-Hollywood is all analog film-to-film restoration. Restoring Technicolor is more expensive because each color film frame is a composite of three black-and-white pictures of the primary colors: red, blue and green. MacQueen says that the Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy cartoon had fallen out of distribution possibly because, like so many marginalized cartoons of that era, it wasn't an ongoing series with characters that are household names, such as Bugs Bunny. He adds that the prints of the film that are out there among collectors are usually on 16 mm. These cheaply made prints were created for TV use in the 1950s and 1960s and are scratched, worn, and completely color faded to shades of pink. The process UCLA went through with the Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy film involved printing the Successive Exposure—black-and-white negative to a master positive called a "Fine Grain." From that it gets three passes through an optical printer through color filters, to make a color negative which then makes a contact full color print. "The beauty of it is the fine grain master, which is on polyester base, now gives you an archival element that should last 500 years," says MacQueen. The original camera negatives before 1951 were all nitrate cellulose—which was pliable and strong, but also very flammable and decomposed if not properly cared for. Short cuts in manufacture and bad storage could cause it to decay fairly quickly. above: The prints of Max Fleischer's Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy, an unusual two-reeler, were scratched, worn and faded before MacQueen starting restoring it.