Part II of our series on stop motion animation at the archive features commercials, industrials and innovative shorts from both the early years of cinema and from recent years.

Commercials and Industrial Films using stop motion:

Saint Paul Police Detectives and Their Work: A Color Chartoon (ca. 1941): This clever informational short contains lots of stop motion, to illustrate the daily activities of the Saint Paul police force.

Lucky Strike Tobacco Commercials (1948): Who doesn’t like dancing cigarettes telling them to smoke? The archive has them, courtesy of Lucky Strike, both marching cigarettes and square dancing cigarettes. *NOTE* The archive does not recommend smoking dancing cigarettes.

Japanese Coca Cola commercial (2001): Although the archive does not endorse feeding your infant child sugar soft drinks, it does endorse watching great miniature model animation like this.

Auto-Lite on Parade (1940): Auto parts have never been this exciting! The climax of this sponsored film features various auto parts (as well as pots, pans and other consumer goods) in a miniature town parade.
(animation begins approximately 19:37)

Aluminum on the March (Part I) (1956): In a strange way, this film heralds the onset of factory automation with its portrayal of marching steel, even including a foreman character made of steel who “directs” small blocks of steel to go forward to their “specific fabricating sequences.”

Other great stop motion films in the archive:

Checkmate (2003): In this independent short film, some random soundstage inhabitants mix up their daily routine with a short game of chess and various other shenanigans involving boxes and laptops.

Mud animation by Joseph Sunn (1926): The archive has three films by stop motion pioneer Joseph Sunn. Very little is available online about Sunn, who may or may not be the same man featured in this San Francisco Weekly article. Either way, the films are a joy to watch:
The Penwiper
Green Pastures
Long Live the Bull

Written by: Stephanie Sapienza

Anyone who has explored the archive’s Animation and Cartoons section knows that we have an extensive collection of animated titles. So extensive, in fact, that one can get lost trying to find certain types of films. In order to showcase some of our holdings that feature one specific style of animation – Stop Motion Animation – this blog will produce a series with some of the collection’s highlights.

This week – animation with toys! Here are four artists who have this technique down pat:

Spite Your Face Productions: Tony Mines and Tim Drage

LEGO’s are among the most popular toys used in stop-motion animation. Just do a moving image search for LEGOs on the website and you’ll see the massive breadth of entries in this area. Not that there isn’t charm to some of the amateur attempts, but after wading through a number of these, its nice to see the work of some LEGO pros like Mines and Drage. They have a budget behind them, impressive collections of blocks and even digital animation for the facial expressions of some characters. The archive contains the following films from these two filmmakers:

The Perils of Doc Ock (Spiderman II parody)

(Alternate Special Ending of Perils of Doc Ock)

One: A Space Odyssey

(Redux/Improved version of One: A Space Odyssey)

The Han Solo Affair

(Behind the Scenes of Han Solo Affair)

Monty Python and the Holy Grail in LEGO

All of the Dead

JamesFM Productions: James Maduzia

Another entry in the LEGO category, Maduzia’s film The Letter is smoothly animated and clever with its gags – we are anxiously awaiting more films from James in the future!

Svencentral: Sven van der Hart

Former comic book illustrator Van der Hart is another pro, who uses Playmobil toys in his films. In The Viking Five, two sets of Vikings argue about who gets to rob an inebriated monk. In the very short Santa’s New Ride, Santa gets tempted by a vehicle upgrade (and Sir Mixalot), and in the ultra-professional Bloody Snow, toys turn violent in a Western-style showdown.

Written by: Stephanie Sapienza

Produced by Vocational Guidance Films, Inc. and Holmes Burton Films, the Your Life Work Series was a set of educational shorts from the early 1940’s meant to inspire young post-depression workers into specific new careers. The “manuscripts” were penned by Iowa State College professor Arthur P. Twogood:

Finding your Life’s Work
Machinist and Tool Maker
Sheet Metal Worker
Life Insurance Occupations
Food Service Jobs
Pharmacist
Electrician
Bookkeeping and Accounting
Fire and Police Service
Forestry and Forest Industries
Welding
Airline Industry
Printing Industry
Telecommunications
Nursing
Cab and Bus Drivers
Librarian
Baking
Photography/Cinematography
Radio/TV
Woodworking
Journalism
Automotive Industry

Supplemental Text:

Choice of vocation, a selected list of books and magazine articles for the guidance of students – This vocational resource bibliography was put together by reference librarians in 1921.

Written by: Stephanie Sapienza

It’s been a hot summer already, with massive fires springing up in Lake Tahoe and Neola, Utah in the past two weeks alone. Some researchers and fire safety organizations are trying to start warning us how to spot potential problem areas, especially if we own property nearby, or plan to camp in those areas. The Internet Archive would like to contribute to this discourse with a blog entry about fire prevention and safety. Our collections contain several newsreels and informational films related to historic fires, as well as narrative and animated films:

Your Fire Department (in two parts – Part I and Part II): Excellent and detailed 1949 documentary about the workings of the Los Angeles Fire Department, with several firefighting sequences. Shot in Kodachrome.

Stillman Fires Collection – Typical Fire: This is one example from the archive’s 40+ collection of Stillman Fires Films, one of the largest collections of fire safety and prevention films taken in different U.S. cities in the 1920’s through the 1960’s.

Vision in the Forest: Country singer Vaughn Monroe and his family learn a bit from Smokey the Bear during a camping trip in this musical educational short film from 1957.

Patti Learns what to do: Educational fire safety film showing a policeman giving a demonstration to grade school children about fire prevention. He follows an anecdotal precautional tale about a real life fire, the Chatsworth fire of 1947. Lots of archival footage of the fire, shot on film.

Story of a Forest Ranger: 1954 vocational informational film from the US Department of Agriculture, about the work of a forest ranger. About 19:30 into the film is a lengthy firefighting sequence.

Bark Out, Fire Ecology: The grassroots organizatino BARK leads a tour through the forests near the Clackamas River in Northwest Oregon on a fire ecology trip.

1923 Berkeley Fire Newsreel: Silent 1923 news coverage of the Berkeley fire that spread through the area north of the UC Berkeley campus, destroying almost 600 homes and leaving 1000 students homeless.

1906 San Francisco Fire: Scenes from the aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and subsequent four days of rampant fires that destroyed massive sections of the city. This is the first major natural disaster covered by moving images.

The Last Alarm (1940): Feature-length film about a bored retired firefighter whose sense of purpose gets renewed when he is called back to duty by a rogue arsonist.

A Fireman’s Life (1933): And now for something completely different – very early animated comedy short by Frank Tashlin and Vernon Stallings about a night in the life of two firefighters (also called Hook & Ladder Hokum).

Written by: Stephanie Sapienza

The Archive is now the online home to nine films by Bert Salzman. These 20-minute educational films were made in the early 70’s and shown in classrooms throughout the country. Their gentle and idealistic sensibility serves as contrast to the educational films from the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s found in the Prelinger Archives. Gone are the all-knowing narrators of the past: Each film features a child or teen learning to negotiate difficult circumstances on their own and from those around them. All of these films won awards, notably “Angel and Big Joe” won an Academy Award for best Live Action Short.

Angel and Big Joe (1975)
Felipa: North of the Border (1971)
Geronimo Jones (1970)
Joshua, Black Boy Of Harlem (1969)
Lee Suzuki – Home in Hawaii 1975
Matthew Aliuk: Eskimo in Two Worlds (1973)
Me and You, Kangaroo (1974)
Miguel: Up From Puerto Rico (1970)
The Shopping Bag Lady (1975)

“It’s the End of the World As We Know It, and I Feel Fine – the most depressing show on the planet!” is how episode 10 of this series of videos begins.

Addressing issues of global warming and energy conservation, this… um… “irreverent” show is a funny, foul-mouthed, and yes, depressing, look at world leaders, local movements, and big corporations.

Check out one of the 13 episodes currently available on the Archive. And beware, if you don’t like the F-word, you won’t like these shows.

— Alexis

Marriage has changed more in the past 30 thirty years than in the previous 3,500, or so claims scholar Stephanie Coontz (listen to her lecture from the link below). To help remember the changes and to celebrate wedding season, the Archive tosses this bouquet of films:

• Marriage is a Partnership (1951) Meet newlyweds Dotty and Pete and learn about their struggles to form a partnership.

  

• Who’s Right? (1951) Partnership eludes brooding newlyweds Honey and Frank in this oddly disturbing film narrated by their, um, wedding ring.
• The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (2006) Scholar and author Stephanie Coontz delivers a lively lecture about the historical changes in marriage that includes many surprising facts.



• Bride for Henry (1937) To punish her tardy groom, a bride marries her lawyer instead not knowing that he secretly loves her. This very funny film is directed by William Nigh.
• Are You Ready for Marriage (2004) A real-life couple remixed Prelinger Archive films (including Are You Ready for Marriage (1950) and This Charming Couple (1950)) to help create this hilarious video to celebrate their wedding.



• Justly Married (2004) Footage from San Francisco City Hall on February 15, 2004, the day many same-sex couples were married.