Yeah! The obscure, sometimes dubious packages of pre-existing cartoons (Whimseyland, Krazytoons, heck, even the Atlas/Carnival libraries of 8mm home movies if we're to include home movie companies into the mix) and whatnot from the early days of television have always intrigued me for a very long time - very much more so than the more legit ones from the same time period, NTA/UM&M, AAP and what have you. I guess it's a combination of multiple things that've made me gravitate to them, really.
The different cartoons from all different sources Morris Kleinerman and the anonymous proprietor of "Transvideo Artists" somehow dug up when compiling these packages, including some real oddities from obscure indie studios and what-have-you (silent Harman and Ising! Marty Monk! Bubble and Squeak!), for instance - that you've got to wonder how the heck they got ahold of them in the first place. There's a possibility that some of these bootleg prints might be the only surviving prints of certain films out there, and these dupers unwittingly preserved them for generations to come.
The air of mystery that surround the (admittedly sometimes weird or unfitting, like the "__ and ___" Astra/Cinepix loved, or "The Inventor" being the rename for "Felix Turns the Tide") new titles that these companies gave them, too - it's fun to ponder and guess what might be behind a title like "Junior Camera Bug" or "Tweety Tweet", and then, when you get a chance to watch the cartoon, or you stumble upon a print with the true name elsewhere, there's that "A-HA!" moment you get when you find out what it really is. And I love that.
The Kleinerman concern, in its various iterations, has probably been the one that's been of the most fascination for me, probably because I'm just so intrigued by the music cues they used (the non-Sharples ones, of course) - I'd love to know the source for many of them, like the score that frequently utilizes a soundalike of "The Dance of the Cuckoos" (y'know, the Laurel and Hardy theme) used on your print of "A King's Christmas", as an example, but that's probably because I'm a big production music nut as much as I am an animation fan (same reason I'm so infatuated with the Stuart/Guaranteed prints of Terry's Aesops and the R&TVP redrawns, as horrid as the latter are!).
Not to mention the fact there's so many different variants of these prints out there with different title cards, music beds - heck, the print of "Heavenly Daze" in your collection was actually one of the things I was most pleasantly surprised by when you resumed uploading cartoons to your YT a month or two ago, simply because it was a completely different version than the old print of it that's been floating around. All of that makes what is an admittedly VERY niche subject in television and animation history very fascinating to somebody like me!
Incidentally, Tommy! I believe I have
you to thank for kick-starting my love for these bizarre prints. I'm sure I would've found out about the wonderful world of abruptly-ending Bosko cartoons and silent Castle Films prints of Terrytoons with the intertitles spliced out and scored with Winston Sharples music eventually if I hadn't, but I can't help but think that my first exposure to Astra and their kind was seeing the prints you had uploaded on your YouTube over a decade ago, and seeing you talk about them on your old blog. I can't thank you profusely for unwittingly introducing this young animation enthusiast to that strange, beautiful corner of animation history that is these shady, black-market television distributors.
And I hadn't even thought that there might've been some of THOSE folks lurking here and thinking the very same - but the thought of one of them reading this, and grumbling about those ding-dang youngins' blathering on about bootlegged prints of cartoons and dismissing it as pointless use of ones' time is a rather humorous one. Ha! How little they know.
"With all respect to the great mousetrap."- Popeye, "The Spinach Overture" (1935)