Mining More Rare Cartoons

Radio City's "New Roxy" at Left, and Auditorium at Above Right,
with Opening Night's Cartoon Depiction on Lower Right 

Where Cubby Bear Met King Kong

Looking for the ideal short to program with King Kong? 1933's Opening Night, a Van Beuren cartoon featuring Cubby Bear, is it. Whole of the reel is set inside Gotham's RKO Roxy theatre, one of sites where Kong premiered (the other was Radio City Music Hall). Van Beuren's output was distributed by RKO, thus the tie, and what we get in Opening Night is animated tour of a grand venue when it was brand new and a talk of the town. Within a month of Cubby circulating came King Kong (3-2-33), latter a historic hit for New Yorkers who could exit onto streets where action was set, the Empire State Building but blocks away. Imagine a biggest of all action thrillers played out on pavement you'd walk every day. Opening Night gives us added flavor of what a night out to see King Kong was like. The cartoon plays accurate re crowd control and masses of humanity shown to seats, over 3,500 of them. Has anyone of our generation seen King Kong with that many people? Imagine reaction to highlights from a mob like that.

Winston-Salem's Carolina Theatre seated 1,380. I watched King Kong three times from one of those chairs in March 1970. The place seemed packed, or maybe that's rose-tint glasses I now view the experience through. Sentiment enhances everything. The thrice-view allows me to remember where every laugh came, none as I recall at the expense of King Kong, or is that nostalgia overtaking reality again? KK special fx had not been surpassed by 1970, Ray Harryhausen still active and using same techniques applied to Kong and taught him by Willis O' Brien. Could King Kong be the supreme audience picture of all time? I might have said so on that Friday-Saturday. Older age doesn't hand you many moments like that. For all of thrill seeing King Kong at the Carolina, imagine tripling heads, and there for a sensation brand new to all, as in 1933 at the RKO Roxy. There had to be audible reaction, as in yells, gasps, cheering. We got that at the Liberty for King Kong vs. Godzilla in 1963, tepid a thing as it was, my party of four nearly thrown out for excess utterances.

I suppose nothing whips up children, or once did, like really big monsters in a really big auditorium. What we've lost is spaces of adequate size to contain them, or for that matter, an attraction to bring out so much youth. Opening Night, even though drawn, shows what enormous crowds really were like, and how organization had to be applied toward moving them along and getting everyone seated. A stairway shot has endless single files moving up toward balconies in what I'm satisfied was true caricature of mass humanity in orderly motion. Many an anecdote from the picture palace era refers to ingress and egress handled with mathematical precision, staff knowing a gum-up could put thousands where they shouldn't be, whilst thousands more seek entrance. There's romance to Gold Age exhibition from our distance, but ask anyone who worked the life, and they'd say it was shifts shot full with stress, bucks always stopping at the manager's desk, and no alibi for a botched presentation.

Opening Night is part of a just released Blu-Ray containing all twenty Cubby Bear cartoons made between 1933 and 34. Cubby was another attempt by the Van Beuren company to rival Mickey Mouse, to no soap result. The shorts washed out with a rest of Van Beuren tide, split among distributors who put them to home movie and TV plows, remembered by those for whom they'd be first cartoons seen on home tubes. Keith Smith of Modern Sound Pictures, a pioneer rental house, took what nitrate elements survived and did 16mm for customers. Steve Stanchfield of Thunderbean Animation, always on alert for rarities, got Smith's remaining inventory, plus survivor prints from far-flung collectors, to produce this best-quality-ever Cubby set. Opening Night, for instance, is a 16mm "print-down" (that is, from the camera neg) dated 1942. It looks for all the world like 35mm, as do many others in the group. There are the customary extras, plus liner notes, typical of Thunderbean releases. All of theirs demonstrate how cartoons should be gathered and presented. Greenbriar is pleased to have been associated with Thunderbean on several projects, including the Cubbys. Amazon has the Blu-Ray available now, and more background info from Steve Stanchfield is HERE.