Ah my Little Munchkins, I'm thinking back to the early 1970s when I was in school, Nixon was in Washington and Internet downloads and DVDs did not exist. Back then if you wanted to see classic black & white pre-Production Code cartoons, you went to your local Movie Retro House.



For a minimal sum you saw a parade of wonderful old Betty Boops, Popeyes and Kokos, Clampett's Porky in Wackyland and other classics, followed by odd movies of old like Todd Brownings Freaks, Reefer Madness, Une Chien Andalou, Bergman's The Seventh Seal and Barbera Stanwyck in the G-String Murders.

There was a compilation of Fleischer's naughtier shorts released in 1974 called The Betty Boop Cocaine Follies. For those of us raised on Bambi and just getting used to the 1960's undergrounds like Fritz the Cat, watching a 50 year old cartoon of Betty jumping out of her little black dress was pretty surprising!

My favorite was the Elgin Theater on West 23rd St and 8th Ave in Manhattan. It was a faded old vaudeville palace that reeked of marijuana smoke and trickled plaster dust on your head everytime an A train rumbled underneath. But in the cool dark on a busted seat you took in a treasure trove of Hollywood's ancient best.

Other old palaces that come to mind in New York City were the Thallia, the Beacon, the wonderful Bleecker Street Cinema with accompanying gift store and coffee house, the Waverly in the Village or the Carnegie Cinema. Or you could go over to the New School of Social Research on 12th Street and pay to hear a lecture on sex and violence in cartoons by Gene London or that new young historian with the black beard- Leonard Maltin.

In LA it was the NuArt, the Vista and the El Rey. Always with a midnight showing of John Waters Pink Flamingos, David Lynch's Eraserhead or Cafe Flesh. Many of these theaters used to be vaudeville houses where the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges would try out their material in front of a live audience before committing it to film.

courtesy of Karl Cohen

In San Francisco when not doing light shows for Rick Munday the redoubtable Karl Cohen put on regular shows at the United States Cafe in the Haight Ashbury District for legions of grateful Flower Children.

In Toronto Pat and I used to go to Reg Hart's special screenings of pristine 35mm prints of Clampett cartoons and the silent Ben Hur, a print so good that the Museum of Modern Art once offered Reg to buy it. The Yonge Street Cinema used to show midnight shows of Japanese Monster movies like Ultraman and Ghidrah, that the Nelvana gang flocked to.

As collecting movies at home on video became commonplace and the variety of the selection covered the more exotic libraries, the need for the retro houses faded.

I reccomend everyone at one time in their lives should see a great old Hollywood film like Casablanca or Fantasia on the big screen the way the filmmaker wanted you to see it. You'll see it's a totally different viewing experience.

Like Pompeii or Tenochtitlan' these palaces are mostly gone, but for the memories left in the minds of we who saw them and shared the group experience of a well done cartoon projected in 1:3:3 aspect ratio. It was our research library, and we shall never forget them.. (unless you did a little too much of that weed!)

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Birthdays: John Eberhard 1822, builder of the first large pencil factory in the US- Eberhard Faber,Henry Jarecki, Baby Face Nelson, William S. Hart, Ira Gershwin, Dave Brubeck is 85, Agnes Moorehead, Tom Hulce, Wally Cox, Lynn Fontaine, Janine Turner, Steven Wright, JoBeth Williams, Aardman director Nick Park

Today if the FEAST of SAINT NICHOLAS, the patron saint of sailors and children. In the 350 AD Nicholas heard of a man so poor that he was about to sell his daughters into prostitution. Nicholas climbed into the man’s house and left gold coins in their socks drying by the fireplace. In some cities during the Middle Ages the custom was this day to elect a Boy Bishop who would reign in an honorary style until the Feast of the Holy Innocents December 28th.

1877- First edition of the Washington Post.

1915- MAX FLEISCHER PATENTS THE ROTOSCOPE TECHNIQUE- This system enables you to film an actor then draw the cartoons over the still frames of the live action to achieve a realistic motion. (an early form of Motion Capture) Max would film his brother Dave in a clown suit then draw Koko the Clown over him. Dave had already owned the clown suit because he had been seriously considering a change in careers. The Fleischer's New York studio would be Disney's chief rival for most of the 1920's-30's.

1933- U.S. Federal Judge James Woolsey decided James Joyce's novel "ULYSSES" is not a dirty book and can be published in the U.S by Viking Press. The book had been out in Europe since 1922.

1942- The movie the Cat People with Simon-Simon premiered.

1964- Rankin Bass' t.v. special 'Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer' first broadcast.