The Rainbow Parades, Volume 2 Blu-ray is back from replication! It starts shipping tomorrow for pre-orders, and I couldn’t be happier. The collection gathers the second half of the series, produced by Van Beuren Studio from 1934 through 1936. The first half of the series was in Cinecolor, and the second half, gathered on this disc, was produced in Technicolor. They’re among the best known of the studio’s output, having been staples of TV and too-many-to-list VHS and DVD releases. Working with the existing masters was lovely, provided by Blackhawk films.
Burt Gillett and the other artists at the studio worked hard making these films, and now that the studio had access to full color, they took full advantage of the process, producing the best looking cartoon series the studio ever made. While Gillett was well-known for creating an unstable environment while working on these shorts, the results were well designed and animated.
The material used for the set from Blackhawk are the remaining master materials. They consist mostly of 35mm Technicolor prints of the films, with a few scattered single-color negatives of some of the films. The great surprise while working on the set was discovering a complete successive exposure negative on Bold King Cole, one of my favorites of the series. I was floored that we had it and was so happy at how great it looks on the set.
Our own Devon Baxter cleaned up Bold King Cole, and the cleanup team for the set includes Dave and Becky Grauman, Becca Smith, Autumn Norwall, Luke Virgin, Helge Bernardt and myself. Chris Buchman gave some nice notes on music for the booklet. Jay Diaz provided great music-only clips for many of the films for the set. The model sheet section came out really nicely, as did the other bonus features, including a short pencil test of some centaur drawings. I love having bonus features on sets like these that gather rare materials- it’s nice to have those on the collections.
I’ll talk a little more in the coming weeks about some of the films on the set, but for now here’s a little preview of the set. It’s available at the Thunderbean shop while the pre-orders are sending, then will be at the Amazon shop after.
Have a good week all!
