Disney Orphans Benefit 1934 X 1941 Side by Side

[All Darc]

A comparison of Disney's Orphans Benefit 1934 X 1941 version side by side.

Incredible similarities, almost frame by frame (indeed in most shots), like if animators used the orginal to guide the new shot by shot, or frame by frame.




I'm curious to know how that was made.

[boblipton]

It was made during the strike, so I strongly suspect a lot of it was the 1934 version that went to ink & paint.

Bob

[All Darc]

I suspected it too, specially due the baby "Kids Mickeys" moving in the audience. But there are some differences in the face, the modern eyes styles. It was probabvly tranfered to paper, adapting the face for the new eyes, and then went to ink & paint.

It was made during the strike, so I strongly suspect a lot of it was the 1934 version that went to ink & paint.

Bob

[wich2]

Yet another example of the fact that "colorization," in the broad meaning of the word, has been around in many forms since the flickers began!

[Rollo Treadway]

Other studios occasionally did the same, and some historian must surely have compiled a complete list. A few MGM cartoons (both Hanna-Barbera and Tex Avery) were redone in Widescreen in the late 1950s.

The only example I know from Warner Brothers is Bob Clampett's b/w Porky in Wackyland (1938), remade in color under Friz Freleng's supervision as Dough for the Do-Do in 1948.

As this comparison video shows, the character animation was kept pretty much intact, but the backgrounds went through major changes, upping the surrealism ante considerably.

[Marr&Colton]

I'm very familiar with ORPHANS BENEFIT.....the 1934 vs the 1941 had some subtle differences, but the charm
and hot temper of Donald Duck made each great....of course Technicolor is preferred.

[Great Hierophant]

The small Donald of the B&W Orphans Benefit looks very strange compared to the essentially modern version of the color film, made only seven years later. Still, there are a few little touches in the B&W version like "Free Ice Cream" in front of the theater and one point where Donald's beak turns into Jimmy Durante's nose, that are lost in the move to color.

While they essentially had to redraw most of the characters for Orphan's Benefit, Porky in Wackyland is much more a paint-by-the-numbers job for the animation. Perhaps because they did not have to develop the story and could reuse many animation cells, they could put more time into the backgrounds. The characters show less detail and simpler color schemes than you may have expected for a short developed for color at that time.

[Little Caesar]

In the wake of the success of Snow White in the late 1930s, Disney was considering several ideas for future feature-length films, and one idea was to produce an anniversary/commemorative film showing the various Disney characters attending a screening of some of their older cartoons and interacting with their cinematic counterparts. Given the transition to Technicolor, the sometimes drastic character design changes, and the desire for the Sherlock, Jr. style interactivity, there was a necessity to remake the older cartoons. While this feature was never made, the idea of remaking some of their older cartoons stuck around for a while. Disney figured that these remakes would be very economical to produce (no need to rerecord the soundtracks) and would provide some training to the more inexperienced animators. In some respects, this program would have been analogous to Columbia's partial remaking of various Three Stooges shorts in the 1950s. Orphan's Benefit was to have been the first of this series. Future entries would have included Mickey's Man Friday, On Ice, and a few of the black and white Silly Symphonies. For reasons that are still not entirely clear, production was halted on this series after the completion of Orphan's Benefit but not before some pre-production artwork had been done for Mickey's Man Friday (some of this artwork can be found with a google search). It's been speculated that the one completed remake wasn't as economical to produce as originally thought and that Disney simply wanted to concentrate more on newer product instead of rehashing older cartoons.