Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Prod. 2110 (101 Dalmatians) - Intro

It's been too long, folks! Therefor here a new treat, the complete draft to Prod. 2110, The Hundred and One Dalmatians (or, as it ended up being known as One Hundred and One Dalmatians).

It was a pleasure to be interviewed for the feature on disc 2 of the new Dalmatians DVDs. As could be expected, they only used a few small clips from the hour long interview, conducted by my good friend, the marvelous editor Les Perkins, who directed the shots but was not involved with the editing this time. I am proud to be on the disc at all, so enough said. I was a bit annoyed by there not being any credits on this disc for the people who put it together. And did they HAVE to use that awful puppy animation in the menus? Oh, and just so you know, all spots counted together make 6,469,952 spots...

The Dalmatians had their domestic premiere 1/25/61. In Denmark it premiered 12/26/61, five days before I was born. At a cost of $4mln, it was $2mln cheaper than Sleeping Beauty, and this made possible the continued existence of the animation department at the Disney Studios. And yet, according to IMDb, it was the highest grossing movie of 1961 in the USA.

This post shows the three documents inside the draft folder: two separate lists of sequences and one Cast of Characters. And then, from tomorrow, we'll see who did what for ourselves!
123
These are pages 001 through 003. Note that the last page is #226!

By the way, IMDb lists an aspect ratio of 1:1.75, and if this is true, it is very close to 16:9 - then WHY did they issue the DVD in 4:3?
Well, on the trivia page of IMDb, I read: "This film was shot in Standard Academy (1.33:1), although it was designed to be matted to a ratio of 1.75 for widescreen-equipped theatres. When re-released in the mid-1990s, the entire 1.33 frame was matted within a 1.85 (flat) viewing area, so that the entire animated frame could be seen, since most modern theatres no long have the equipment to run films in Academy ratio."
So... if we were not SUPPOSED to see the top and bottom, should it not be matted to widescreen? This is open for debate...

PS. I'm back Stateside for a while...

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3 Comments:

Anonymous Michael Sporn says...

WONDERFUL! This is one of my favorite Disney features, particularly the first half. I look forward to studying it.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Wednesday, March 12, 2008 at 5:44:00 AM PDT  
Anonymous Rusty Mills says...

I am really looking forward to this. As Michael says, this is one of my favorites.

Wednesday, March 12, 2008 at 9:46:00 AM PDT  
Anonymous Floyd Norman says...

I got drafted off "101 Dalmatians" to serve in the military. Lucky for me, I got back just in time to work on the film before it wrapped.

Friday, March 14, 2008 at 10:41:00 AM PDT  

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