Hello!

First, Joe Dante sends along an odd item, which he dubbed ‘a TV spot by a law firm with a sense of humor.’

Can’t get enough of those accident injury ads that cannot be avoided on TV?  It’s a variation on one — and liberally basted with text disclaimers.

The cartoon starts about two minutes into this WDW Pro mini-docu about the legal fight that’s expected … 1928’s Steamboat Willie is in the Public Domain, but wouldn’t Disney have other rights covering the use of Mickey Mouse?   It’s not as if the answer is automatic, apparently.

And a film archive discovery takes us to Indiana Univesity, where writer Eddie Stewart writes up a significant film find.

We just reviewed a 4K remaster of the silent film classic  The Cat and the Canary …. but few know that Universal remade it just three years later as The Cat Creeps, a very early talkie directed by Rupert Julian. The show is featured in plenty of film books, but for most of the last 95 years all that’s existed of the film is a short clip – probably saved for a promotional trailer.

The short article explains it all. Apparently it’s not the whole film, so it’s not as if a re-premiere is in the works. But film historians would want to see it — the show was a big hit, starring Helen Twelvetrees, Raymond Hackett, Neil Hamilton, Jean Hersholt and Montagu Love.

IU professor Russell McGee made the big discovery simply by looking through a vault listing for the IU Bloomington Moving Image Archive. That sounds easy enough, making one wonder why the ‘lost’ film footage stayed lost for so long. The answer is access. The whole point of a protected vault is to keep just anybody from rummaging through it for no good reason. That’s definitely the case at film studios as well. Professor McGee should be congratulated for his initiative.

The discovery of course makes us think of all the film treasures that could conceivably be squirreled away in colleges and universities, libraries, corporate offices …  A full print of a lost European classic was miraculously located  in a Norwegian mental hospital.  Who knows?  Maybe in storage somewhere under some old accounting records are stacks of film cans labeled  Mag.Ambers’s,  or  Lnd.Aft.Mid..

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson