Glad you did, because Astra TV, Guaranteed Pictures, and Stuart Productions weren't the only ones to use Winston Sharples' VB scores.

Castle Films had some newsreels on their catalog that features some of his music, too. Here's all the ones I could find:

News Parade of 1939 - last 30 seconds uses final scene from Molly Moo-Cow & the Butterflies

Coney Island - various (from Molly Moo-Cow and Rip Van Winkle, Toonerville Trolley, Grandfather's Clock, and others)

California Picture Book - sword fight in Felix the Cat and the Goose That Laid the Golden Egg

South American Vista - bull staring at red trolley in Toonerville Trolley, horse race might have a Sharples score, but I can't say witch cartoon uses it for certain

Roamin' in Scotland - 2:10 mark sounds very Sharples to me, don't know which cartoon (if any) used it

Mexico - bullfights use music from Felix the Cat and the Goose That Laid the Golden Egg & Toonerville Trolley

I don't know if any other newsreels or other film companies in general use Van Beuren music.

Thanks for pointing those out! A few other instances of non-Stuart entities using Sharples music I've come across over the years:

- The 1947 Official Film "A Present for Santa Claus" uses some music from "Grandfather's Clock" at the beginning.

- A few movie theatre snipes made in the late 30s/early 40s ("A Slight Case of Murder" and "April Fool's Day" in the Prelinger Archives collection) use music from "The Rag Dog".

- A Season 1 episode of "Monty Python's Flying Circus" ("Sex and Violence") uses the "medley" of Sharples music heard on several Astra/Whimseyland cartoon prints during the "Wacky Queen" segment.

Interesting thing I noticed about the "California Picture Book" film incidentally - beginning at 6:42 is an alternate rendition of an unknown track heard in a few Stuart/Guaranteed Aesops and Kokos, such as "Koko's Toot-Toot" and "Koko's Alarm", as well as the Arte "Cartoon Factory" prints of "Red Hot Sands" and "Closer than a Brother". I also remember, although the upload that had it is long gone, "The Transatlantic Flight" opening with it, and as well as closing with some pieces from "Molly Moo-Cow and the Indians" (ducks doing an Indian war dance and Molly giving the baby back to his mother respectively).

I also recognized some music from the Jam Handy educational film "Out of the Milk Bottle" during a scene with some bathing beauties, and I now wonder if there's any Stuarts we don't know of that use it.

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https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ntEy4ylkfJhRsX_ysnuurNAhpoOr09Exk2C5Ant3Nro/edit?usp=sharing 

For what it's worth (and because I have way too much time on my hands), I've put together a Doc with any interesting observations I've made concerning these prints (audio oddities, morals left in, etc.).

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I enjoyed reading the Google Doc, thanks for sharing.

A couple points...

Do you recall watching any well known early sound comedies like the Our Gangs or Laurel and Hardys, pre-restoration, and seeing momentary bits of black on screen? Those are called slugs. When the picture negative gets damaged beyond repair and some frames have to be cut out, slugs are inserted to keep the picture in synch with the separate track element. That's likely what's happening in the couple of cartoons where there are black frames; the intertitles would have been cut without any slugs inserted in those spots.

Re: morals being left intact in some—

There are multiple versions/printings of these Guaranteed Pictures/Stuart Production prints. The typeface in the opening titles and copyright bylines will vary slightly between the different versions. For example, different versions of the same cartoon will either mention Stuart in the copyright, or Pathe instead. From what I recall, the oldest printings seem to occasionally have the morals intact at the end.

My own notes about my prints aren't very detailed and I can't easily check them on a whim since they live away at storage... yet I'm inclined to say that there might possibly be older printings of more of the cartoons in this overall package where more of the morals are left intact.

FWIW and in case it's unclear for anyone reading, the versions used of these titles for Cartoon Factory are silent prints from the Commonwealth package; the main titles are a giveaway. The sound prints in that package used cues from the Valentino library and maybe others, but not the Sharples tracks. You're hearing Lobster take Sharples tracks from Guaranteed/Stuart prints and simply laying them over the Commonwealth prints to give the silent prints a bit of fun cartoony music for the program.

As always, thanks for your insight from your vast film collecting experience! I never know about the slugging process prior to you telling me, so I appreciate that a lot, knowing the true purpose of those bits of black.

I've actually noticed the different variants in the title cards, and copyright bylines and such before, but since I was just examining the individual cartoons in my doc, but it doesn't hurt to throw in these additional general observations for the heck of it.

That's interesting that seemingly the morals are on the earliest versions of much of these, and there's probably more than I would've suspected. I will be very flabbergasted if it turns out there's an alternate version of some of the already circulating ones with a moral at the end, but given that there's so many variations of these prints, the sky's the limit!

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I've found another non-Stuart/Astra project that uses some Sharples tracks: a series called "Yesterday's Newsreel", produced by the ZIV company during the late 40s-early 50s. The soundtracks on these films are somewhat Stuart/Guaranteed-esque in that numerous Jack Shaindlin cues heard in such fables as "Land Boom", "Little Parade" and "Marathon Dancers" show up quite a bit in them, but also because a few Sharples/attributed to Sharples cues pop up here and there as well.

A few examples of what I've been able to find:

"Light and Fantastic"  uses the solo piano track heard in "Ugly Duckling" when the mother hen is yelling at the titular duckling and he sadly walks away.

"Miniature Golf Sweeps Nation"  uses the xylophone novelty piece heard in such fables as "On the Links" and "School Days", as well as the "Puttin' One Over" home movie reissue of the Judge Rummy short "Yes Dear", among other places.

"Mrs. Atlas?"  uses a marching band cue heard in Stathes' Astra print of "Heavenly Daze" (aka "Koko's Paradise"). Not Sharples, but still an interesting find.

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Added a new title that's evaded me for a while: 1925's "Barnyard Follies", which is indexed along with other Guaranteed titles in the Library of Congress website as being from the Maurice Zourary (who later founded FilmVideo Corporation, whose name is found on a few Stuart Koko prints) collection.

In addition, a copy of "English Channel Swim"  has surfaced in, of all things, an 8thManDVD compilation video. This kind of overlaps with my Astra thread as the sequence of Sharples music heard during the first couple minutes or so of this print was later edited into the "medley" of Sharples tracks (somehow taken from the isolated music tracks for a few of these prints, "Hunting in 1950" and "Gold Rush" alongside the aforementioned "Channel Swim") that was one of their go-to backing music tracks for whatever silent prints were in their package.

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