Vintage: The Wizard's Duel

The Sword in the Stone is one of my favorite Disney films. Well, that's a lie...I really only like certain parts of it. Namely, the part with the squirrels, the part where Merlin packs his house into a bag, and this part...the wizard's duel. I found this at a flea market on the Cape a few months ago and snatched it up for the awesome illustrations inside. I've created a .pdf of the book and uploaded it to Scribd. That site is awesome! As you can see, (I hope), it allows you to share documents easily. I would like to start some sort of animation library on there, much like a Flickr pool, except for documents and books. So scroll through the pages, then if you like you can download the .pdf through Scribd. (When you open it in Acrobat, or FoxIt as I prefer, you can view two pages side by side, just as the book intended.)

Children's Illustration: Little Toot

More amazing old illustration! This time it's "Little Toot," by Hardie Gramatky. Toot is the story of a lost little tugboat. (update: so I'm sitting here reading 'The Illusion of Life' all weekend and what do I see? A little picture of a tugboat. And I think - hey, that's like that book...then I read the caption and it turns out Gramatky was a Disney animator.)

"When animator Hardie Gramatky left the Studio and moved to New York his apartment window looked out on the tuboats on the East River. Almost immediately he found a character like those he had animated. He called it Little Toot, sold the story to Walt, then went on to write book after popular book about the adventures of the youthful tugboat." - Illusion of Life, pg. 503

So that explains the amazing color and personality in these paintings. Looking for more 1950's-era illustration? Check out the Flickr group The Retro Kid, started by Ward Jenkins. Retro Kid features illustration from all sorts of thigns from the mid 20th century - album covers, toy packaging, food labels, etc. Also check out Vintage Children's Books, another Flickr group with hundreds of awesome pictures focused solely on books.

Now for the illys!

P.S. Has anyone figured out an easy way to download lots of pictures at once from Flickr? It's such a pain to click on each thumbnail for the larger version, right click, save, etc...Let me know if you have!

Flea Market Find

So I was out and about today and decided to stop at this sketchy flea market thing known as "Super Flea." I have never seen so many mullets and large quantities of questionable goods...except for maybe the flea market down in Niceville, FL. (But at least that was kinda indoors, this was just a parking lot.) There was one guy who had all these old trading cards...not baseball cards but actual fun old trading cards from the 80's. He had Dark Crystal cards (I already own the full set of those) and I got a pack of Gremlins 2 cards and one of Frazetta artwork. He had Harry and the Hendersons cards! Who knew they made those? But the real treat I found for a dollar was an Alice and Wonderland children's book/record. I haven't had a chance to listen to the record, but I will when I go home this weekend maybe. (Usually they're awful though.) The artwork in the book is actually pretty decent though! So I thought I would post a few of my favorite illustrations here, as this is obviously out of print and hopefully no one will sue me for doing so. No artist is listed anywhere in the book. (Disney has a nice way of not crediting many of their workers.)

The colors on this two page spread! And the composition! Very nice.

That last illustration there is very interesting because it features a character NOT in the film, the Jabberwock. Does anyone know if that was an original design for the film that was never used or maybe cut out? Its eyes are totally freakin' me out.

For more kid's records with full audio and artwork, check out the wonderful Kiddie Records Weekly.