Despite sending some of that affection to the musical stylings of Frank Sinatra and science education over the last decade, Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane hasn’t forgotten his first love: his precious cartoons. That love has served him well at the Fox network, where his animation domination ruled much of the 2000s and 2010s. Now he’s giving something back—and not more Ted, though we’re sure that’s on the way too.
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Per Deadline, through his Seth MacFarlane Foundation, MacFarlane is teaming up with Martin Scorsese’s The Film Foundation to restore historically significant animated shorts from the first half of the 20th century, the first batch of animated movies restored by the Film Foundation ever. It’s unclear how many restorations the pair will be working on together, but to start, nine Max and Dave Fleischer animated movies, a George Pal stop-motion Puppetoon, and a Mannie Davis Terrytoon were selected. The Fleischers are probably best known for creating Betty Boop and their revolutionary 1940s Superman cartoons, but music was also a significant factor in selecting them. Deadline notes that MacFarlane, a prominent jazz- and Great American Songbook-head, focused on Fleischer cartoons for their jazz soundtracks featuring Cab Calloway and Louis Armstrong. The titles include:
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- Koko’s Tattoo (1928)
- Little Nobody (1935)
- The Little Stranger (1936)
- Greedy Humpty Dumpty (1936)
- Peeping Penguins (1937)
- The Fresh Vegetable Mystery (1939)
- So Does An Automobile (1939)
- Mannie Davis’ The Three Bears(1939)
- George Pal’s Two Gun Rusty (1944)
The fruits of their labor will come to bear on, when else, 4/20, bro, when TCM premiers Back From The Ink: Restored Animated Shorts at the TCM Classic Film Festival. The presentation begins at 6:30 with an introduction by MacFarlane.
This is a net good regardless of what one thinks of Seth MacFarlane, who has become a “love him or hate him” animator and comedic filmmaker throughout his career. A 1997 report from The Los Angeles Times on Scorsese’s Film Foundation stated that only 10% of the films produced in the U.S. before 1929 survived, while more than half of those made before 1950 are gone. This is due to poor handling and care of the movies and because film stock from that period was highly flammable and corrosive. The Film Foundation has spent the last 34 years preserving movies from all over the world and has thus far restored and made public more than 1,000 films. Animation is routinely disrespected to this day—after all, it took a thousand movies before the Film Foundation considered restoring an animated one—so we have to assume that much of the work animators made in the first half of the century is in grave danger.