The Story So Far...

Okay, so after a month of delays and false starts and public pondering and questioning, I finally am ready to move on with the reviews of the shorts. I want to express my HUGE gratitude to Tom Stathes of Tom’s Vintage Film for getting me the DVDs of Alice the Peacemaker and other films I will need. At this point, we should be able to crank out the silent shorts over the next month uninterrupted, hopefully at a quicker pace.

But, since it’s been so long, let’s recap where we’ve been….

Walt Disney started making animated cartoons while still working at the Kansas City Film Ad Company, producing some short films called the Newman Laugh-O-Grams that commented on current events in the city. You can read my review of a few of those films here.

After the Laugh-O-Grams did well, Walt decided to strike out on his own and created his own company, Laugh-O-Gram Films, with friends like Rudy Ising and Ub Iwerks coming on board to help. They got a contract for six films from a shady distributor, who never paid for the films, driving the company into bankruptcy. Read reviews of the four surviving films by clicking on the Laugh-O-Grams link to the left.

Walt produced a live action short, Tommy Tucker’s Tooth, to try and keep things going in Kansas City, but to no avail. With the last of his money at the Laugh-O-Gram studio, Walt gambled on a new series of shorts, starring a live action girl in a cartoon world. The first film, Alice’s Wonderland, was not completed before Laugh-O-Grams went bankrupt.

With the print of that film and a few dollars in his pocket, Walt Disney headed to California, where he formed a new studio with his brother, Roy. In actuality, the new studio was his uncle’s garage, but that did not stop Walt’s enthusiasm as he completed the Alice short, and managed to get a contract for more from Margaret Winkler. Soon, the Disney Brothers Studio was hiring and cranking out more Alice films, starring young Virginia Davis.

However, as the live action parts of the films began to grow larger and the animation harder, Walt knew he had to do better. He enticed old friend and master animator Ub Iwerks to come out to California and join the Disney Brother Studio. The first film Ub would do for the studio is Alice the Peacemaker.



So, that’s where we have been. What have we learned about Walt so far? Well, in my opinion, we’ve figured out that Walt Disney was an exceptionally complicated man. He was a font of ideas, creating new characters and performances all the time, but he also relied on shortcuts and cost cutting measures (reusing footage, cycles, more live action in the Alices) to keep his business afloat. Walt loves fantasy in these early films, focusing on fairy tales and fantastic premises rather than the realistic portrayals of his later live action films. But most of all, we’ve learned that Walt Disney was a true artist, judging from the quality of work on the Newman films and the second Alice, Alice’s Day at Sea, that Walt animated mostly alone.
So, what will Alice the Peacemaker tell us? Stay tuned.

Tommy Tucker's Tooth

After finishing the Laugh-O-Gram fairy tales, Walt and his fledgling company attempted to collect the money promised them, but to no avail. The company that had ordered the films claimed bankruptcy, and Laugh-O-Gram Films would soon be no more.

With rising debt, Walt had to take on whatever jobs he could get to pay the bills. Since he had a camera, he was hired around town to do live action filming, including birthday parties and other such small tasks. One of the things he ended up doing, though, was directing live action shorts as well. The most famous of these, and the one that we can view today, is Tommy Tucker’s Tooth.

Tommy Tucker’s Tooth was commissioned by a local dentist, Dr. Thomas B. McCrum, to show the benefits of good dental hygiene, and also to provide a little commercial for himself. Walt was able to cobble together a long piece of work that has some redeeming value, but overall is quite a boring piece. I was almost asleep by the time it finished, probably because I worked out first, but it’s still not nearly as entertaining as the fairy tales.

The short opens with a woman telling an assembled group of children about two young boys, Tommy Tucker and Jimmie Jones. Yeah, you know where this is going. It’s Gallant and Goofus time. Anyway, the story continues that Tommy took his teeth seriously, brushing every night, while Jimmie did not do so.

Sure enough, in time, Jimmie Jones gets some issues. The woman tells the children that bad brushing habits can be bad for three reasons. Then we go into a loooonnngggg explanation of all three.

The first is toothache. The woman explains how food left in your mouth spoils and causes acid, which leads to the only animation in this film. The acid is illustrated by “acid demons” chipping away at a diagram of teeth. The acid demons multiply and create a cavity. It’s a quite funny bit, although unintentionally.

The second problem is that your health will suffer. This leads to another unintentionally funny part, as the boys are lined up together in a very Nazi youth scene, then they are taken to a scale. Now, Tommy is a good looking boy, but he’s rather portly. Jimmie, although he bears a striking resemblance to Lon Chaney, is a regular weight. However, when they weigh on the scale, the teacher tells Tommy that he’s fine but Jimmie is underweight because he’s not brushing well. Very funny, but in the wrong way.

Our final dilemma shown in the film is the one that is the most interesting today. Jimmie and Tommy go to get a job. Apparently, according to the sign on the door, there is a “Boy Wanted.” I’m telling you, you couldn’t make this movie today.



Well, the two boys see the boss, and of course, Tommy gets hired because of his appearance, but Jimmie is rejected because of his. In the real world, Jimmie might snap and take out the boss, but in the film, he decides to go to the dentist, improve his appearance and return to finally claim a job.

The short is very silly by our standards today, but I imagine it must have been effective at the time. Jimmie Jones is a scary kid, and I’d be scared straight if I were watching this as a kid. Today, it’s not even close to successful. But that may say more about the way people are today than anything else.



What’s the most interesting thing about this short is that it’s Walt’s first live action directing job. Since it’s such a trite subject, there’s not much in the performance of the actors that tells what he will later become as a filmmaker, but it is a milestone nonetheless. Even better, the $500 that Dr. McCrum paid Walt is what he used to ultimately pay for the first of his Alice shorts, a subject we will delve into further as we go along.

Cinderella (1922 Laugh-O-Gram)

The final Laugh O Gram film completed by Walt Disney’s fledgling company was Cinderella, a modern take on the old fairy tale. You’ll remember the characters from the previous fairy tale short, Puss in Boots. They play similar roles here.

We open on a title card telling us about a girl who lives on her own with her friend the cat. Yes, my friends, the cat has returned again. The same little black cat from all of the Laugh O Gram films so far is back again for Cinderella. I know, there was no cat in the original story, but you can probably get the sense already that Disney has a thing for animals.

Cinderella is the same girl from Puss in Boots that was the object of the young boy’s affections. The roles are reversed this time. We open with Cinderella and the cat doing dishes – Cindy scrubs, the cat dries – while her stepsisters lounge in the backyard. The stepsisters are an interesting design – one fat, one thin. This is an interesting contrast to the later animated film, that we can discuss when we get there in about 30 years of Disney time.

The scene cuts over to the prince, who is played by the boy from Puss in Boots. He is chasing a bear while riding a horse and shooting, which takes quite a bit of talent. Riding a horse alone would be a feat for me, but this guy is shooting a gun and hitting a bear in the rear end while riding the horse. No wonder the card that introduced him as the prince called him “a wonderful fellow.” The dog from Puss in Boots is running along behind him as they chase the bear.

Ahead of them, several bears are having a little dance party, with one in particular dancing around in the middle while the others play music. That sequence involves some fun animation, with the main bear removing his tail to play as well. But when the bears see the prince coming, they flee into a nearby cavern to escape. It doesn’t work. The prince follows them into the cave, horse and all, and ends up dragging all the bears out with a rope.

In celebration, the prince has an invitation made for a ball, to be held “Tuesday, Friday the 13th.” I really don’t know what that gag means, but I’ll admit that it made me laugh. The prince loads the dog up with his invitations and sends the dog out to disperse them. This leads to my favorite sequence in the short, where the dog hops on a bike to deliver the invitations like a paper boy. He hits a rock and tumbles down a hill, emerging from a cloud of dust with a bandaged head and a crutch. A bystander comes by and says via word balloon “Are you hurt?” The dog simply looks at him, then bashes the man over the head with his crutch. I laughed out loud. It’s just the sort of thing that you don’t expect from a Disney cartoon, but it’s totally what would happen.

From there, you probably can guess the story. The stepsisters go to the ball, Cinderella wishes that she could, her fairy godmother shows up and bestows a flapper dress and a Model T on her, then she heads to the ball. Cinderella is the bell of the ball, which is a very contemporary (for the 20s) affair, with flapper dancing all over the place. The prince and she get together, but, as expected, at midnight she flees and her clothes turn to rags, but she leaves behind a shoe. The prince follows the shoe tracks the next morning, down on all fours sniffing the ground, only to find that the other shoe had fallen off as well and was now on a duck. However, he soon finds Cinderella, fits her foot to the shoe, and they live happily ever after.

This short was good, but compared to Puss in Boots or the Four Musicians of Bremen, it’s not nearly as inventive. This short is fairly straightforward in its storytelling, not offering new or different perspectives or innovative sequences like you see in the earlier shorts. It’s very interesting to me that this story is the only one from the Laugh O Grams that Walt chose to come back to later. Did he feel this was not done properly? Or did he just want to do a big grandiose fairy tale and didn’t care what the specific tale was?

Being the last of the Laugh O Grams seems to have hurt this short, because the cool little inside gags like the Cinderella poster in Puss in Boots are not here, nor are the extended sequences like the house being barraged with fire in the Musicians short. It is definitely entertaining, and the dog hitting the guy with his crutch is laugh out loud funny, but overall, this is the weakest of the shorts besides Little Red Riding Hood.

Note: I'm having a problem with getting my pictures to work, but you can watch the whole short here. Have a great weekend!

Puss In Boots

Well, it’s only day four of this grand experiment, and already we’ve hit a roadblock. An explanation is long and complicated, but here goes.

So, when Walt created Little Red Riding Hood, he was still doing it in his spare time in his father’s garage. That film was for training for himself, but would later be released. The Four Musicians of Bremen was the first short intended for release. Based on those two films, Walt secured a contract to produce four more films, after his boss at the Kansas City Slide Company (later Kansas City Film Ad Company) passed on the fairy tales.

At this point, Walt raised money from friends and family, and formally incorporated Laugh-O-Gram films. He hired animators and friends like Rudy Ising, Hugh Harman, Ubbe Iwerks, Lorey Tague, Carman “Max” Maxwell and Otto Walliman. These men got together in a run down office to produce the four remaining films on Walt’s contract, with the hopes of getting a national distribution deal.

The Original Laugh-O-Gram Studio

Although Walt’s cartoons showed higher production values than most, it was not enough to entice one of the national distributors to take him on as a project. At that time, nearly all animated cartoons were being produced in New York, so Walt’s vision of a Kansas City studio was a bit naïve at best.

The four films were produced, though, and included Jack and the Beanstalk, Goldie Locks and the Three Bears, Puss In Boots and Cinderella. Only the latter two have survived to the present day, which is where our roadblock enters. Since we can’t watch Jack and the Beanstalk or Goldie Locks, we must pick up with Puss in Boots.

I’m also going to try something a bit different with today’s subject. Originally, these films were silent cartoons, as were most films of the time. On the spectacular Inkwell Images DVD that I am viewing these on, they have added the sounds that would have been made in the theatre. It’s very entertaining, but not the way the cartoons would originally have been seen. So, I’m going to watch Puss in Boots with the sound on mute, then with the sound on, to see if the animation holds up with silent cartooning.

Okay, so this story is not at all like the Puss in Boots story you probably know. In this short, Puss is played by our friend the cat, who was present in the first two shorts. An interesting thing to note is that the four main characters in this film, a boy, a girl, the cat and a dog are in the new title card for Laugh-O-Gram Films, so this short must have been one that was produced early on.



The short opens with the cat and boy going to visit a young girl that the boy wants to marry. He woos the girl while the cat and dog get acquainted, even kissing at some point. Let me tell you people, Walt was into some weird stuff back then. Cats and dogs kissing? Can’t explain that one.

It turns out the girl is a princess, and when the king (again played by the old man in the picture frame from Little Red Riding Hood) discovers his daughter with this hooligan, he chases the boy and the cat away. The despondent boy and his cat stand in front of a shoe store advertising “$5 Boots Only $4.99”. A nice little sight gag, there. The cat asks for the boots, but the boy refuses and they head to a movie instead.


The movie theatre is another great sight gag, with one poster showing an ad for “Rudolph Vaselino,” an obvious play off of Rudolph Valentino. The other poster shows an ad for “Cinderella” by Laugh-O-Grams Films. Neat little product placement. Could this be the first product placement? Interesting.

The movie shows the hero beating up some bulls and winning the affections of a woman. Kind of obvious where this is going, right? Well, not to the boy. The cat says he has an idea of how the boy can win over the girl, but only if he’ll buy the cat the boots first. Hilarity ensues.

With his new boots, the cat goes out on the town to put up flyers promoting the Masked Toreador’s fight against the bulls. The king finds out about the bullfight and heads down with the dog and his daughter, to see the boy in his mask take out a bull with the help of the cat and his “Radio Hypnotizer.” The king is so taken by what he sees, he tells the Masked Toreador that he can marry the king’s daughter.


At that point, the boy reveals himself, and the boy, the girl, the cat and the dog jump in a car to escape, as the king chases them down the street to no avail. The car reaches 125 miles per hour according to the speedometer, which is very fast considering that the dog is driving.

This is a fun little short, probably the best of the three so far. It easily has the most linear, compact story of the three. The gags are subtle, which is not something you usually see in these old cartoons. There are not a lot of overt crazy items like the swordfish from the Musicians short. Instead, much is communicated through word balloons, much more so than in the other shorts.

The production value is also much higher here. The backgrounds are very detailed, with the crowd renderings in the bullfight scene deserving particular notice.

Again, this cat steals the show. I think it’s fair to say at this point that the cat is the precursor to some of the later Disney characters like Oswald and Mickey. The cat is a classic cartoon character in that he can do surrealistic things in a realistic world, like remove his tail and make a question mark as he does after the king throws them out. It’s very interesting to see the progression of this film from the previous ones.

Okay, as for sound versus no sound – was there a difference? Not really. See, in the previous films, there were very few word balloons, but here, all the main characters had word balloons when they spoke. Also, since the score probably was not designed specifically for this film, it did not jump out at you. In fact, the score for all three of these shorts has sounded quite the same. I imagine Inkwell just used similar music, but I’ll have to see if that’s the same on Cinderella, which we’ll look at next. Until then, have a good one!

The Four Musicians of Bremen

As we get started today, let me give great credit to a site that I just found last night, disneyshorts.org. It lists all of the shorts produced by Walt, and has write ups on each one. It’s an invaluable resource, and could really be a companion piece to the shorts reviewed on this blog.

The next film in the Laugh-O-Gram fairy tale series is The Four Musicians of Bremen, a cartoon loosely based on the story “The Bremen Town Musicians” by the Brothers Grimm. In that story, four animals, a donkey, a cat, a dog and a rooster decide to give up their former lives to become musicians, but along the way end up inhabiting the house of some criminals and scaring them off. A cute little story about being content with who you are, which is a moral that comes up in some of the later Disney films.

This is a much longer short, around seven minutes, and it is much more representative of what you may have seen from early Mickey cartoons. To start with, there are painted backgrounds in this short, as Walt was trying to save money by creating lush backgrounds that he could reuse. It works fine here, as many of the scenes take place over a generic landscape.

The short starts with a poem explaining that the four musicians try their best to play their music all around the countryside, but they’re not good at it, and when people’s nerves are frayed, they take it out on the four musicians. This fades into a scene of the four musicians, a donkey, a dog, a rooster and a cat being run out of town by a mob, throwing bricks at them. Strangely enough, one of the mob looks just like the old man in the picture from Little Red Riding Hood. That guy creeps me out.

Another thing to note is that this is the second time we have seen a cat like this. The cat is very much like the cat in Little Red Riding Hood, and he is the star of this short. The other four are mainly there for window dressing and to tie in the fairy tale plot.

As the musicians escape, they come to a body of water, and while the other three weep, the cat realizes that they are hungry. He urges his compatriots to play music, which drifts into the water and starts the fish and frogs dancing. One fish comes up to dance on the land, and the cat tries in vain to hit it with a 2’ x 4’, but he is, like so many of us, unfulfilled.

The cat chases the fish into the water, which leads to the most inventive scene of the short. The cat swims up after the fish, but runs into a swordfish that has removed it’s sword and is sharpening it. Right before the cat and the stray fish arrive, the swordfish tests out his new sword by cutting a fish in half ruthlessly. I’m serious! This is the most violent thing I’ve ever seen in a Disney short. The fish just casually turns around and cuts another fish in half. It’s like Pulp Fiction in the ocean or something. This is clearly not a swordfish to mess with.

The swordfish catches wind of the cat and chases it out onto the land, picking up the three other musicians and chases them off a cliff. They fall one by one into the chimney of a house, and a band of criminals runs out of the house, scared off by the falling livestock. Which, come to think of it, is a good reason to be scared. I mean, if you were sitting in your living room, and donkey, a dog, a rooster and a cat fell down the chimney, I think you’d run, too.
So the criminals band together, get some weapons, and attack the house. The conflict is finally resolved when the cat hitches a ride on a cannonball, and detaches his tail to knock all the criminals out. The end title assures us that the musicians lived happily ever after.

In day three of watching these shorts, this was the first one that felt like a Disney cartoon. Now, it feels very primitive still, but it had some inventive gags, a lush background, and a mischievous but fun main character. Sound familiar? The formula here is not that different from Mickey Mouse. I have not yet seen all the Oswald the Lucky Rabbit shorts or the Alice Comedies, but this reminds me a great deal of Mickey.

The animation on this was again done by Walt and Rudy Ising. There is still some great detail here. At one point when the cannonballs are assaulting the house, there is a close up of the roof, and there is detailed crosshatching on the underside of the roof. There’s no story or artistic reason that has to be there, but yet it is. Considering that these shorts were being done in Walt’s spare time, it’s amazing that he chose to put that much attention into these sorts of things.

Ultimately, this short does not tell the story of the Grimm fairy tale, but instead is an excuse for Walt to try out this cat character. The cat is loveable enough, but is very much in the trickster mode of things, pulling off capers against the other characters. We’ll see if there are more similarities as we continue. More Laugh-O-Gram Fairy Tales to come!

Images courtesy of Disneyshorts.org

Little Red Riding Hood

As mentioned previously, after the success of the Newman Laugh-O-Grams, Walt Disney signed a contract for six fairy tale cartoons. The first film Walt produced under this deal was Little Red Riding Hood, although it was not for release, according to the Legendary Laugh-O-Grams DVD. According to this version of the story, Walt animated it with friend Rudy Ising as an exercise to get ready for the task of completing these cartoons. However, other animation historians list the film with a release date of July 29, 1922, making it the first of the fairy tales to be released.

That alone is an evidence of the man’s attention to quality over quantity. Although the cartoon of Little Red Riding Hood is extremely simplistic, by the standards of 1922, it is good enough. But as you’ll see throughout his work, good enough was never the right thing for Walt. He made compromises here and there to get the product out, but it would be the extra work that Disney cartoons had in them that made his product so successful.

The beginning of Little Red Riding Hood is a bit surreal, as it offers no hint of what relation this animation has to the beloved fairy tale. In the early portion of the film, a mother is making donuts by throwing pastry into the air, while her cat shoots a hole through the pastry, and then landing the whole mess in a frying pan. This goes on for several seconds, but what makes it surreal is the old bearded man in the corner of the room that is leaning through in a picture frame.

I’m not sure what that guy is doing there, if he is Red’s father or what, but frankly, it’s a little weird. We get a few quick shots of the old guy laughing, and it’s still weird. Is he a picture, or is it a window? I’m not sure, and I probably should not obsess about this sort of thing, but it’s just a very strange addition to an otherwise straightforward cartoon.

After a while, the cat eats one of the donuts, then dies, and his nine lives fly out of him as a counter in the bottom right of the screen keeps track. The mother gives the donuts to Little Red Riding Hood, presumably to take to Grandma. Red gets her car out of the garage bearing her name, and we see that it is powered by a dog that is being drawn forward with sausages dangled on a stick behind the car. A strange contraption, but hey, if it works, it probably saved Red a lot on gas.

She has a flat tire and blows up one of the donuts to fix it, which, based on the cat, is probably better than eating it. Then the “Wolf” shows up. The Wolf in this film is really a dirty old man, who shows up in a car headed the other way. He makes some overtures to Red, and then they part ways. The camera follows the Wolf instead of Red, and we see him get to Grandma’s house first.

Grandma left a note that she has gone out to the movies, and the Wolf takes the opportunity to sneak inside. We all know this story, right? Red arrives and heads inside, and we see the house shake and cries of “Help!” emanating from the house. Red’s trusty dog runs away to seek help, and finds a conveniently located man with an airplane. Always nice to have one of those laying about.
The dog loads up on the plane, and the man flies over the house with a dangling hook, that drags the house off the top of Red and the Wolf, and the Wolf scampers away in his car. Red gets the hook the second pass over and is pulled up into the plane, where she kisses her rescuer. As we fade out, two hearts dance into the screen and a caption reads “And they lived happily ever after???”

So, it’s a familiar story, although somewhat more realistic and gritty here. Some people who have watched it think the Wolf is raping Red, but I think the intent is probably more simplistic. Simply menacing her is probably the intent, but who knows. The idea of having the Wolf be a man, though, is a bit creepy, although not as creepy as the old man in the picture frame.

The artistry here is good, but not spectacular. Just from the look, it does seem as though Walt had a heavy hand in the production of this film. The look compared to the Laugh-O-Gram slides is very similar, with sparse backgrounds and clean lines.

The main thing you notice is the storytelling. Most cartoons in the 1920s were about a collection of gags more than anything else. This cartoon starts that way, with the donut gag, but from that point forward, it is more or less a linear story. There are some gags along the way, but it is interesting that Walt chose to move towards storytelling rather than out and out gags.

All in all, it’s an absurd and funny film, and I recommend you check it out. Next up is the Four Musicians of Bremen, another of the Laugh-O-Gram fairy tales.

Images courtesy of Disneyshorts.org

We Begin Again - Newman Laugh O Grams

If you read earlier along in this blog, you’ll see that I made an aborted attempt to try and start this project back in 2007, to begin in 2008. A new job and a potty training child derailed that attempt, but this time I am back and ready to go.

So, to recap, the idea is to watch all available shorts and feature length films that were produced by Walt Disney, in the hopes of learning a little more about the man, his life and some of the things his films can tell us. We’ll start with the Newman Laugh O Grams, which are a complicated matter, so probably a good place to begin. I've already done this review, but I figure it is only fair to start again from scratch, so here we go.

The Newman Laugh O Grams were short films that were produced by Walt Disney himself, some of the few things that Walt actually animated. By the time we got around to Mickey Mouse cartoons, Walt didn’t do much drawing anymore, but had discovered his true talent as a producer. The Newman films were produced by Walt alone, after he and his friend Ub Iwerks had failed at their own commercial art studio.

Walt took a job at the Kansas City Slide Company, which produced commercial cards to go in front of the films at the Newman Theatre. At the time, the Midwest theatres got all their cartoons from New York. Walt convinced his boss to accept films that he would produce, and he rented a garage from his father to shoot his rough animation.

The surviving films can be seen on the DVD The Legendary Laugh-O-Gram Fairy Tales, produced by Inkwell Images. I recommend the disc if you are into early animation. I’m only interested in this stuff for what it tells me about the man who would later create such amazing masterpieces, but it’s well worth watching. You can also view them on YouTube.

The films begin with Walt sitting at his desk, and as he begins sketching, we see the cartoon take shape on his drawing board. This was a common tool of the day, and was used in many cartoon series, such as Out of the Inkwell. The first drawing is the image of a cop kicking a criminal out of Kansas City, followed by a storefront window of ladies’ hosiery. Both have some social commentary impulses to them, but it’s hard to say what they are trying to communicate at the time.



These two static drawings are followed by flat drawing of a car bouncing on potholes, again, assuming that there is social commentary involved about the state of the roads in Kansas City.

The last film on the disc is a true animated cartoon, with moving characters. The shot features cops going into the precinct, then being stripped of their uniforms and booted out onto the street in a clean up of the force.

All of these films reflect the cutesy animation style of the time, with cherub cheeks on the women and round doughy figures for the men. What’s interesting is that Walt chose to tackle social issues in these films, even though in his later years he would be averse to such things in his movies. Very rarely, with the exception of the war films, would Disney ever get involved in current events. Was this just a young artist who was trying to put out anything he could, or did Walt really have a socially conscious side that he repressed for commercial sake? That’s something to explore in later blogs.

The quality on these films is obviously rough. All animation of the time was very herky jerky and not smooth and seamless like we expect from films like Snow White. However, there is artistry present. All the drawing includes subtle details, like shading on the ladies’ hosiery, stripes and stubble on the crooks, and other small details. Even here, you can notice an eye for detail in Walt’s drawings.

There’s not a great deal to say about these films, because they are so elementary. But, the next thing on the list for Walt was selling a series of six fairy tale cartoons for $11,100. Unfortunately, he was not yet a great businessman, and accepted a downpayment of only $100. The films were produced, however, and the first of those will be the subject of tomorrow’s blog.