In 1961 UPA made an animated version of Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy comic strip. Actually it really wasn’t an animated version of the comic strip as Dick Tracy only ever made cameo appearances in each episode. Of course by this time UPA was only a shell of its early 1950s glory, so the show, which was made on a stingy TV budget, was not all that good. Still I do have some vague memories of watching this back in the day.
The complete Dick Tracy is available on DVD at Amazon.
I was looking through some old posts at Stephen Worth’s ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive and came across some UPA model sheets. Like the magpie (thief) that I am I thought that some of these would be good for my own blog. Here is one of UPA’s most famous cartoon, Gerald McBoing Boing.
You can view the Gerald Mc Boing Boing cartoon here, in a previous post that I made.
Continuing with the UPA theme, Georgie and the Dragon is a 1951 UPA cartoon directed by Robert ‘Bobe’ Cannon. This is one of the UPA cartoons that I actually remember from my childhood.
It would be good if the UPA cartoons, as well as the Columbia Screen Gems cartoons, were released on DVD. I believe that Sony have the right to these films and that John Canemaker was at one stage negotiating with them last year to get them onto DVD. I think that one possible stumbling block is that Classic Media owns the rights to the Mr Magoo name, which means that if Sony were to release the UPA cartoons onto DVD, they would not be able to use the name of UPA’s most famous character to market it. Ironically Classic Media is owned by Sony.
