Quick Thunderbean news!
On break from the school as of Thursday, and getting though shipping a whole bunch of things, including pre-orders for the reissue of ‘Mid Century Modern 2’. We’re sending those this week along with a bonus disc and a handful of the special discs, and more next week when I’m back from a quick scanning trip in New York. We’ve have a BDR’ special disc’ of just black and white Terrytoons at the Thunderbean shop. Along with some of the discs that are shipping.

Now onto our cartoon – and a mystery solved sort of!

There was a camera store in New York (Willoughby-Peerless) that, for *years*, always had a whole bunch of 16mm TV prints of black and white Terrytoons- at $5 a reel! When I was first collecting cartoons in the early 80s. I met a collector in New York named Collin Kellogg, and he was one of the few cartoon collectors that would actually chat for a while, and I leaned all sorts of things about collecting cartoons from him. We traded all sorts of things over those years. One day he told me about that camera store, and he managed to get a few Black and White Terrytoons he already had from that stack, and offered them to me.

One of them was the TV-titled ‘Saw Mill Mystery’. I used to take prints to my high school and run them on the 16mm projectors there at lunchtime. One of the films in the stack was a print of Saw Mill Mystery. I didn’t get a chance to run it before lunch was over that day, and threw all the cartoons I had sitting out in a bag. Several days later I unloaded the bag and noticed Saw Mill Mystery was mysteriously missing! To this day, I don’t know if I somehow left it there or if someone swiped it, but when I went back to look it wasn’t there, or in any of the lost and found places at the school. It wasn’t until *this week*, 40 years later (!) that I actually finally saw this cartoon!

So, all this time later, it’s nice to see this Oil Can Harry (as a man) cartoon, with J. Leffiingwell Strongheart and Fanny Zilch, along with Puddy Pup, who has many master apparently. If I had been able to actually of watched the print was back when , I’m sure I would have enjoyed it. Some of the animation and posing is especially good in this cartoon- especially Oil Can Harry. The operetta format and rover boys/ melodrama storytelling is of course the precursor to the format used in many Mighty Mouse cartoons.

So, The Saw Mill Mystery is no longer a mystery to me anyway. I wonder what happened to that print that I lost in 1986. I hope you’re seeing this one for the first time too – whether you’ve seen it or not, I hope you like this light little piece of entertainment…. And have a good week all!