I was flicking through the TV channels today to find something very surprising – an Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoon on TV (Lantz era The Quail Hunter, 1935)!

For those in the UK who want to check it out, the channel is listed as Information TV, though the logo on screen calls it SVTV. It seems this cheap channel shows a lot of vintage movies (including silents), TV shows and music videos and frequently has blocks of classic cartoons. After the Oswald came a Colour Famous Popeye and then a block of Betty Boop. Sadly the cartoons look pretty awful (blurry image and far from original aspect ratio), but it was such a surprise to find them (I haven't seen an Oswald cartoon on UK TV for well over 20 years and it's probably more than a decade since I've seen Popeye or Betty Boop on the telly).

There were a couple of disclaimers after the Popeye cartoon which tell where there versions of the cartoons are coming from. It was described as "New digital content (c)2014 www.johnmurphydistribution.co.uk" and included "A Timeless Tevelevision Production" logo. This has made it easy to find out a little more (it seems a lot of this channel's content comes straight from this distributor).

Here a link to the classic cartoon page:

http://www.johnmurphydistribution.co.uk/Classic-Cartoons.html 

Slightly-OT: I noticed recently Boomerang UK have been showing remastered copies of Tom and Jerry, including the Golden Collection V2 transfers and the Cinemascope cartoons cropped to 16:9 (I presume these transfers came from the Spotlight Collection DVDs). They look wonderful on the HD feed especially, with a very nice saturated appearance though some of the interior shots in the GC V2 restorations come off as quite dark.

I've noticed they've aired remastered Looney Tunes in HD as well. Mainly random selections from the three Platinum Collections favouring Bugs and Daffy cartoons; in fact, they aired "A Wild Hare" a day before it's 75th anniversary.

I don't have Boomerang at home, but I did watch a little Tom and Jerry on the channel while on holiday recently (didn't notice the restorations, but they looked quite nice and I didn't catch Looney Tunes).

I you wanna watch this "Information Channel", it's number 212 on Virgin Media. I recorded the rest of this morning's line-up – lots of Betty Boop, colour Popeye, Superman and a Colonel Bleep TV cartoon. Out of curiosity, I'm recording all the upcoming cartoon blocks just to see what pops up – it seems there's an hour's worth every weekday and next Saturday there's about seven hours of cartoon programming!

It's also on 212 on Sky and the classic toons are on at 1-2PM. Quite rare that they'd be shown in the middle of the day!

I'm lucky to still have the classic Looney Tunes and Tom & Jerry cartoons airing on Boomerang where I live. And it's even airing re-runs of The Flintstones, The Smurfs, Scooby Doo Where Are You?, The New Scooby Doo Movies, and Courage the Cowardly Dog.

BTW, why does the John Murphy website look abandoned?

I'm not sure, but he also has the similarly designed Timeless Televisionw website. Strangely, the cartoon preview is featured on the contact page:

http://www.timelesstelevision.biz/Contact-Us.html 

As far as I can gather so far, "ToonTime TV" is the hour block that's being shown every day from 1 till 2, these cartoons are linked by a puppet host. On Saturday there are also lots of half hour blocks labelled "TeleToons", these aren't linked by a puppet, sometimes you'll get three random cartoons, other times it'll be a group of 3 Superman cartoons or 3 Betty Boops (with a brief title sequence titled "Betty Boop and friends").

I've been recording these shows to see what's been on. When I first found the channel, I was reminded of watching The Children's Channel as a kid where they'd show an early morning block of classic cartoons. I'd never know what was coming next and it seemed like a lot of exciting rarities would pop up. Now I know about public domain cartoons, and in this age of the internet, the line-up of cartoons on The Information Channel doesn't seem quite so special.

I don't think I've spotted anything that couldn't easily be found on YouTube and usually in a similar bad quality (That said, aside from not being in their OAR, the Superman cartoons do look great). The line-up sometimes includes cheap TV cartoons I have no interest in (Colonel Bleep, Space Angel, New Three Stooges and Spunky and Tadpole have popped up). It seems Paramount cartoons pop up the most (and often the same ones get repeated).

Still it's something of a novelty to see cartoons on TV and I have stopped the fast forwarding to watch an occasional Boop, Parrotville, ComiColor and Color Classic. Plus another Oswald was on today – The Bandmaster.