Hello!

Yet another Joe Dante steer to a an excellent webpage … A site called Animation Obsessive has an article up from April 12, 2026, with the inside story of a mini-studio whose output we hold dear: United Productions of America, or simply UPA.

UPA is much more than Gerald Mc Boing Boing cartoons. We reviewed a sensational  DVD Collection years ago that came with good text on the company, but AO’s coverage in this article puts the subject in a new light. There’s even a downloadable full book available — on the company that began as an alternative for animators, away from the control of the Disney studio.

The photos from the early 1950s are really impressive. All these crazy-talented creatives come to work dressed as if for an architectural firm. Here’s the link:

Just a bit of poking around reveals an even more CineSavant-friendly article from Animation Obsessive, this one from April 25, 2026.

It’s about another UPA masterpiece that I remember seeing more than once at kiddie cartoon matinees around 1960 —  The Tell-Tale Heart. If the designs look familiar to Roger Corman fans, it’s because the artist-animator Paul Julian also put together several title sequences for Corman’s early pictures. On his own, Julian animated the creepy political fable  The Hangman as well.

Also, the article appears to answer the fan speculation about a 3-D version of The Tell-Tale Heart: it says that the 3-D version was finished, and describes an (exaggerated?) account of a screening. But Columbia ‘forced UPA to scrap the 3-D version.’  Interesting.

The article has the whole story, nicely illustrated:

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Once again Joe Dante sends along an article we can’t resist. Twenty years ago I listened from the next room while my teenagers keenly watched the TV show The X-Files. I’m not sure I ever saw a single episode all the way through, and I’ll accept that I must have missed something good. On the other hand it was their show, and they didn’t need Dad around, popping balloons with his obnoxious opinions.

Here’s one episode I clearly need to see. Having been a serious Buster Keaton fan, I think I would have picked up on the connections raised here by writer Marya E. Gates. It’s explained in a nice article from Cool People Have Feelings Too, dated June 28, 2026.

We love the photos, especially the one of Buster looking so sober in the middle of his crazy gag-men.

Second up, Michael McQuarrie isn’t letting go of the  Destination Moon theme, and we like it that way.

He’s uncovered this full comic book tie-in, in excellent condition. George Pal didn’t miss a trick, when it came to marketing. I wonder if he tried to interest a toy company in little rockets … or if they said kids couldn’t handle a pointy rocket toy, because, “You’ll put your eye out!”

Being the impish sorts that we are, we can’t help notice that the comic adaptation sticks close to the film’s science … but skips entirely the Cold War theme or Red sabotage/disinformation that’s so important in the movie. But it’s probably been dropped because it was considered ‘adult’ content.

The comic artists seem to have respected the film’s visuals!

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

This is an article forwarded by Joe Dante, about a screening/lecture series that most of us will miss. The article is fascinating in itself.

From IndieWire on June 26, 2026, writer Jim Hemphill describes the spell cast by Guillermo del Toro in his lecture series at the Academy Museum. Fresh thinking on Alfred Hitchcock is not easy to come by. Even the brief quotes given here express how knowledgeable, insightful, and articulate del Toro is.

The series is in motion now … when it is finished, del Toro will have covered Hitchcock’s Notorious,  Shadow of a Doubt,  North by Northwest,  I Confess,  and  Frenzy.  It sounds like a dream date for old-fashioned film students.

We got a good reader response from last Saturday’s Buster Keaton short subject, an informercial for a housing tract.

We’re intrigued by the fact that these ‘humble’ assignments don’t diminish the stature of the all-time top filmmaker, not one bit. He’s still Brilliant.

Michael McQuarrie tracked down more proof that Mr. Keaton didn’t stand still when studios weren’t calling.

We think these TV spots are really creative. They go for variety — the first has Buster as a mailman, and the vocations advance from there.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

Congratulations to filmmaker and disc producer Bret Wood. His very good 2002 feature documentary Hell’s Highway: The True Story of Highway Safety Films is getting a theatrical release on August 5 from Kino Cult.

The notorious docu is described as a ‘morbidly curious exploration of the near-mythical driver education films shown to American schoolchildren in the 1960s and ’70s. Produced in Mansfield, Ohio, films such as Signal 30 (1959) encouraged safety by force-feeding high school kids color footage of careless driving’s dark consequences: blood-stained wreckage, injured bodies, fresh corpses.’

It’s the kind of movie The Addams Family would watch to cheer themselves up. We reviewed it for DVD Savant,  back in 2003. It has reportedly been remastered and reconstructed, with new scans of the old Driver’s Safety pictures, and Wood’s 16mm interviews.

A Blu-ray will follow on September 8.

A new trailer has been prepared … the authentic live-action material always feels disturbing, like an invasion of privacy:

The dependable Michael McQuarrie has found us something cute — a prime example of a classic 16mm sales film, this one commissioned to sell a tract of houses in Arizona.

The reason we’re watching is that this one stars Buster Keaton. Mike says it’s from 1961. It’s in good color and the cinematographer is Hollywood’s Leo Tover; the director Joe Parker  worked in TV.

We can see Keaton checking that the money was good, showing up, and working directly with cameraman Tover when setting up his smooth gags. Buster gets distracted by an attractive woman (uncredited). He does terrific work for these real estate people!

I recognize the music under the title as a Fox cue from  The Gang’s All Here.

And this news just arrived in 187 languages along with their various dialects and sub-tongues … a deluxe 4K Ultra HD disc set of MGM’s Forbidden Planet is coming late in September. Content-wise it hews very close to the 2010 Warners Blu-ray, except that the new release is coming out under the Arrow Video label.

This promises to be something special. We’ll be keen to see what the ‘new’ colors look like, as we always suspected that the subdued pastels of the Blu-ray were the result of hard work on a faded negative. Just how do they decide what exact shade of green the sky is supposed to be?  In many ways, the show is a pinnacle of Sci-fi in 1950s Hollywood.

Promised new extras are a Perspecta Stereo audio option, and a new featurette on the ‘electronic tonalities’ creators Bebe & Louis Barron. As before, an encoding of The Invisible Boy will be included. As is Arrow’s modus operandi, 4K and Blu-ray editions will be separate.

This conjures nice hopes for fab 4K releases of more Warners-controlled fantasy, horror and Sci-fi.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

We had a good time reading and reviewing Joseph McBride’s latest book last month,  I Loved Movies, But… — but we also enjoyed this piece from FilmInt, an interview of the critic / author / educator conducted by Jonathan Monovich, from June 19.

Monovich gets quite efficiently to the center of Joe McBride’s main issues … his personal connection to film history through directors like Orson Welles and John Ford, his writing for the trades, for the AFI and for a major cult film. That’s capped by decades of experience teaching film.

The best thing about Joseph McBride is that his opinions don’t waffle — you always know where he stands. We can hear that in any of his audio commentaries. The best are as good as film history gets, as with his tracks for a set of John Huston’s  WWII informational films.

Are the movies dead?  Is film education dead?  Are new generations disconnecting from classic film appreciation?  The ever-opinionated Joe has sharp thoughts on several topics.

An in-progress Disc Organization Report.

Some readers are following the oh-so-important CineSavant project of making the horde of discs here more manageable. I’ve been doing it for maybe 6 hours a week since February or so, and so far it appears to be going okay. After being ill for a week I’m looking forward to getting going again on ‘enveloping’ more discs.

In the process of logging old CineSavant and DVD Savant Columns, I came across an article entry from DVD Savant in 2008. It’s funny — I’m whining about the exact same problem, apparently with the hope that a reader-correspondent will write in with the perfect solution. If my present project does work it will be by following the lead of friend Craig Reardon, who never let his disc collection overwhelm his house space or organizational capacity.

I have crossed the 3,000 mark in disc – filing, and have cleared 1.5 rooms of stacked boxes. I’m guessing I might be enveloping as many as 4 or 6 thousand more individual discs. Knowing what’s there and being able to Find Stuff will be an enormous benefit, besides not leaving an impossible mess for somebody else to straighten out / dispose of. It’s a worthy quest — I hope.

Here’s the link to the old 2008 article, with its reader responses, from David Martin, Jordan Benedict, Bill Shaffer, Dick Dinman, David Fletcher and Stuart Galbraith IV:

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson