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Cartoon Roots: An Interview with Tommy JosStathes

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On Saturday, we reviewed the recent Blu-ray re-lease of Cartoon Roots (http://theblackmari-a.org/2015/05/16/from-the-beginning-cartoon-roots-2014/), a phenomenal collection of earlyanimated shorts. The mastermind behind thecompilation, animation historian and avid col-lector Tommy Jos Stathes, graciously spoke

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with us about the process of putting togetherthe Blu-ray, his own cartoon roots, and hisplans on future releases.

Cartoon Roots features 15 shorts, covering atwenty-ve year period from the silent daysto the early talkies. Of all of the materialavailable to youboth in your private collec-tion and through other resourceshow didyou decide which cartoons to include in thenal lineup?

First, a little bit of background history. Few peo-ple know this, but the idea for this collectionwas actually born several years ago. Early on inmy collecting and archiving eorts, one of mygoals had been to eventually share most of mylms with the general public. Around ten yearsago, I decided to use the moniker Cartoons OnFilm to describe what I work with, and my closefriend and animation historian colleague DavidGerstein was kind enough to design a logo forme. Now I consider it a release label. In talkingabout releasing material, it was also David whocame up with the Cartoon Roots title for an ini-tial release. For many reasons, it took a verylong time to get the project o the ground,though I think it happened at the right moment,especially now that we can utilize HD restora-tions and Blu-ray.

Roots was always intended to be a general in-troduction to early animation, so the idea wasto include examples of notable characters, stu-dios, and directors from the early period. Froma historian standpoint, I wanted to make sureto feature lms that are very rare by our ownstandards, as well as a couple slightly-circulat-ing subjects that most animation fans might nototherwise see easily. I operate on a shoestringbudget (thats an understatement) so I wentahead and took advantage of some lms thathad already been prepared for other projects,such as Turner Classic Movie broadcasts. Wethen topped it o with a few more gems that,today, are exclusive to this Cartoons On Film re-leasemany of the titles included either havenot been seen publicly since their initial theatri-cal run, or they have not been shown on televi-sion in 50 or 60 years.

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You worked with Thunderbean Animation(http://www.thunderbeananimation.com/)to produce Cartoon Roots. What did the col-laborative process entail? Did you have ahand in any restoration eorts?

The process was a combination of a lot of fun,trial and error, and patience. The Blu-ray formatis still new to us as small independent produc-ers, and weve found many kinks to iron outduring the learning process of assembling andbuilding a Blu-ray. Thats more Steve Stancheldand Thunderbeans end of things, as Im less ofa 21st century techie and more the old-schoolanalog archivist. Most of us involved in theproject live pretty far away from one another,so much of the process is done remotely. Wellsend materials to each other, such as the origi-nal lms for transferring or hard drives contain-ing HD les to review, and well inform each oth-er of progress or problems by phone and showeach other images of materials by email to keepourselves updated. Its the type of niche projectthat only specic people can work on, given thenature of the kind of lms were working with,and what it is exactly were trying to do withthem.

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Since Im not too uent (yet) with restorationsoftware, my hand in the restoration eortswas more about instructing and requesting cer-tain xes on a case-by-case basis, and reviewingthe xes or catching mistakes, though consider-ing who I was working with, I could sit backmore and put a lot of trust into the others per-forming the digital miracles. Thunderbean doeswonderful work and has become a leader in theworld of breathing new life into historical ani-mation, so the Cartoons On Film collaborationwith them makes complete sense.

How did you initially become interested inearly animation? When did you begin amass-ing your own impressive collection of earlycartoons? How expansive is your collectioncurrently?

Ive had some form of an interest in it all theway back to my toddler days, even though Ididnt explicitly realize what exactly I was inter-ested in, at that age. Thanks to inexpensive car-toon VHS tapes family members would buy forme at the supermarket or drug store, it seems Iwas always watching classic cartoons. On a fewof those tapes were some early black and whitecartoons, and even a couple from the silent era.Even at that young age, I found the mono-chrome characters fascinating and striking in away that was much more impressive to methan their Technicolor counterparts. Beyondthose early passive exposures, Ive always had anatural interest in history and collecting thingsas well. At age 5 or 6, I began asking adults howold a certain object or building or lm was, andI learned about collecting antiques, in additionto the VHS tapes I was already collecting by thatage.

When I was around 8 or 9, my father found asmall cache of 16mm Castle Films with attrac-tive cartoon character boxes, knowing I wouldlike them as cartoon-related objects and as vin-tage items. I loved them, but had no idea whatthe heck to do with reel lm. Soon after, anolder relative told me he had a projector andcould play the lms for me, and I was hooked.There was such a magic tied to watching adecades-old machine project even older lms ina way that was so technical, involved, and wildlydierent from how I was used to watching lms

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as a child in the 90s. At the same time, throughreading animation history books and scouringVHS catalogs, I simply realized many of the ear-ly cartoons were not available for purchase, andthe 16mm format was the only way I might ndand see more early cartoons. The rest is history.As of this writing, I have partial or complete lmmaterials (16mm, 28mm, 35mm) on approxi-mately 750 silent-era cartoons, and approxi-mately 600 mostly black and white sound-eracartoons.

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Tommy Jos Stathes with Turner Clas-sic Movies host Robert Osborne in

2014. Photo credit: TCM

Last fall, you appeared on Turner ClassicMovies (http://www.tcm.com) to introduce aretrospective of Bray cartoons (http://the-blackmaria.org/2014/10/05/back-to-the-drawing-board-the-tcm-classic-animation-event/) to celebrate that studios 100th an-niversary. You also collaborated with thenetwork in 2012 for another night of rare an-imation (http://trueclassic-s.net/2012/10/20/rare-animation-on-tcm-join-the-party/). Are there any plans in theworks to collaborate with TCM in the future,to further showcase classic animation for abroader audience?

First, I should say that Im incredibly grateful formy relationship with Turner Classic Movies andI admire their eorts to add more varied andunusual programming to their line-up. I do be-lieve weve really helped each other, in the

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sense that Ive been able to bring them rare andscarcely seen lms for their audience, and theyhave in turn supported my archival activitiesand career. Meeting Robert Osborne was won-derful, of course, and part of me still cant be-lieve that I was on the set with him to co-host aprogram of lms I collected. At this moment,there are no immediate plans for another pro-gram sourced from my archives, but thatdoesnt mean there wont be one or more indue time. Fingers crossed!

Are there plans for a follow-up Blu-ray col-lection to Cartoon Roots? Perhaps we can an-ticipate a collection of Bray shorts?

I think many people are curious about that verysubject. In an ideal world, and based solely onthe amount of material I have, there could easi-ly be at least a couple dozen releases comingout under my label. The trick for me, especiallythis early in the game, is to fund more releasesthe proceeds from just one release are notenough to both support me and to invest inmore releases, at this time.

Funny you should mention Bray, though. Thestudio is the one Ive researched and archivedthe most lms from, and I naturally want to doan introductory collection featuring a cross-sec-tion of the studios important series and charac-ters. Later on, it would be great to assemblemore focused collections consisting entirely ofone series, character, or a particular directorswork. The studio produced well over ve hun-dred animated lms, and the surviving exam-ples (there are many; just check my color-codedBray Animation Project (http://brayanima-tion.weebly.com/) lmographies) deserve newexposure. In any case, a Bray set will probablybe my next project, and Ill likely have to rely oncrowdfunding to make it happen. Anyone whois interested in this should simply stay tuned formore and probably very soon!

Many thanks to Tommy Jos Stathes for tak-ing the time to speak with us! Cartoon Rootsis currently available on Blu-ray/DVD(http://www.amazon.-com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00O5TOD0K/bla-mar-20) through Thunderbean Animation.