That Flintstone short looks to be 25′ that was a common length aimed at kids with toy projectors. And that’s another story.įor now, here’s a group of cool 8mm boxes ( click thumbnails to enlarge) that never fail to put me back in the zone. By the time I got to high school, I was ready to graduate to 200-foot super-8 sound reels… but that’s when I discovered the underground world of collecting 16mm. I bought many Betty Boop and Popeye reels, Walt Disney’s feature excerpts, Castle’s Woody Woodpecker films and sought out Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck (those were hard to find in my neighborhood).
![tom jerry cartoon print ad on cardboard tom jerry cartoon print ad on cardboard](https://sc01.alicdn.com/kf/HTB1oGz5s1uSBuNjy1Xcq6AYjFXam/230855648/HTB1oGz5s1uSBuNjy1Xcq6AYjFXam.jpg)
( An example of what my 8mm Flintstone film looked like is embed at the bottom of this post). I could unlock the secrets of animation – and back in those days, before Facebook pages or animation fanzines, I felt like I was the only one in the world who cared. I could study cartoons (with a magnifying glass) frame by frame. At 4pm, at 9pm, or even at 3am in the middle of the night. It was silent, black and white, and the light from the tiny flashlight bulb was dim – but damn, I could watch The Flinstones anytime I wanted. I recall my first film purchase was The Flinstones. How bad? First off, it was made of plastic (as opposed to metal) it used a tiny toy flashlight bulb for illumination and worst of all, it could only run small 50 foot reels (3 minutes of film). I figured if Forry was selling it, how bad could it be? (And besides, it was all I could afford). The first projector I bought was a $9.98 unit advertised in the back of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine. And the films were usually locked in a glass case behind the counter as if they were priceless objects – Abbott and Costello in “ Have Badge Will Chase“, or “ Double Cross at Criss Cross“ Woody Woodpecker in “ Tree Medic“ Boris Karloff in “ The Mummy“, and Lantz characters I’d never heard of: “Pierre Bear” and “Dynamo Doc”.
Tom jerry cartoon print ad on cardboard movie#
8mm films and movie projectors were only sold in Camera Shops or in Department Stores (in the Camera Department). The one way we could watch cartoons over and over again was to buy “home movies”.Ĩmm (or Super 8mm) home movie films were expensive.
![tom jerry cartoon print ad on cardboard tom jerry cartoon print ad on cardboard](https://pyxis.nymag.com/v1/imgs/2f3/e6b/4f8d37ff4555c6aedae051ff3080cf9b9f-05-animations-01.2x.rsocial.w600.jpg)
Owning physical copies of cartoons wasn’t only impossible, it was technically illegal. If you weren’t watching while the cartoons were being shown, you missed them. We were only exposed to cartoons on Saturday mornings and on weekday kiddie shows (and, if we were lucky, at the movies). I’ll begin this post with my personal recollection of collecting these little films back in the day.įirst of all, kids, you need to know that I bought my very first projector back in the 1960s – long before cable TV, VHS, DVDs, You Tube and NetFlix. In honor of my appearance on today’s live broadcast of Stu’s Show (at 7pm Eastern, 4pm Pacific, if you miss it: archived downloads available here) where we’ll be discussing collecting 8mm films – and as a follow up to my post about Looney Tunes on 8mm last March – I present this gallery of cartoon home movie boxes for closer inspection.īy no means a thorough survey, these images below are mostly gleaned from ebay photos I’ve collected – though a few are from my personal collection.