Scraping eBay so I (and you) can research toys properly

Can't say I've met many people who like researching old toys. As for me, I'm a sucker for a weird old toy and love figuring out where they came from. I've made a few pennies from doing that too. It's fun.

But damn is it hard! One of the biggest issues with toy research is that people don't document things. You're forced to go toil through newspapers.com to find a few measly ads for it and even if you do half the time you're not going to find the company that made the thing. So then you have to keep looking. Sometimes you can find a copyright registration that might point you in the right direction, but most of the time when it comes to researching novelties you are brought to the mercy of eBay.

Most people don't care about old toys. They see them as something to sell or throw away. Because of this, nearly every toy I and others will research, that isn't your mainstream Transformer or Barbie, will only have documentation through eBay listings. This can be a listing of the toy itself or even just an advertisement for the toy. Yes, even a toy as famous as the Jo-Bo, the toy you squeeze and its eyes pop out, never had anything written about it until I had to figure it out for myself. One of the biggest leads I came across, outside of newspaper ads, was trade ads listed on eBay.

March, 1954 advertisement for Blake Industries' "Jo-Bo" line

The ad above did not come from a publicly accessible archive. It did not come from a magazine I own physically. The only way you can find this ad anywhere online is from one singular eBay listing. It is the only ad I've seen show the entire line of toys the Jo-Bo came from.

This advertisement came from a trade magazine called Playthings. Playthings ran for a century, detailing the struggles of the toy industry, what new products were coming out and what companies were getting into the madness. Many toys you'll see in Playthings were either never successful or have since fallen into deep obscurity. Playthings, along with Toys & Novelties, another trade magazine, is an invaluable resource for toy research.

The Strong Museum of Play was donated a collection of every single issue of Playthings in 2010. Their libraries are accessible to the public and theoretically one could come in and view them. The problem is that The Strong is located in Rochester and I am located in Dallas. I am not taking a plane to Rochester just to read some 70 year old magazines about toys.

There are many, many pages of Playthings on eBay being sold individually. Along with them are pages from boating magazines, Sears catalogs, aviation magazines, you name it. It doesn't matter how rare the magazine is, these sellers have bought the collections at a high price as an investment. Their process is to disassemble the magazines and sell them page-by-page as ephemera or research materials. Some go as far as to cover the issue name and date to "protect their data." There is a finite number of these magazines available on the planet, with that number slowly dwindling. Many of these eBay listings are the only way the majority of people can see these articles and advertisements until a digitally-accessible archive is made.

I had attempted to contact the main seller multiple times, asking if he kept a backlog of scans available and if he'd be willing to share them so that these magazines could be available for research purposes. Repeatedly he ignored my messages until I was responded simply with "No, I won't help you." Other sellers were just as unhelpful. Their reasoning for not sharing these ads outside of eBay listings, as well as sometimes even covering portions of them, was "to protect [their] hard won (and expensively done at that) data. Knowing where what when etc is the name of the game."

You may have your thoughts on whether or not this is ethical in the matters of historical preservation given that these people have made an investment to make money to support themselves. Some may argue it's no different than having an antique booth. However, the difference between this and an antique booth is 90% of the time and antique booth is selling things that aren't exceptionally rare and can be duplicated with ease.

Thankfully, something can be done about it. At least a little.

This is an issue I had discovered and pondered about maybe two years ago. My idea was to scrape all of the current listing images, which are decent jpeg scans, and upload them onto the Internet Archive so they could be permanently accessible as well as searchable with OCR. I am very bad at coding so an acquaintance was very generous and scraped the account for me. Soon, I was left with 70GB of listing data including images and descriptions. My next step was to OCR these and organize them by the magazines that they came from (often listed at the bottom border of each page). I found another person to help with this, but the process was slow and ultimately the project was canceled.

Quite recently, I revisited the project. This was appropriate timing given that new pages had been uploaded about a year prior that I had not yet scraped. Still, I am bad at coding, but understand it better. My acquaintance had since lost the script that they used to scrape the listings but had said that it was so bad I wouldn't have wanted it anyway. So, after studying how eBay's web layout worked, I instructed AI to write me a python script to scrape all the listings it could.

This sounds easy, but surprisingly it wasn't. For some reason, eBay's search query caps off at approximately 10080 listings. This account had over 34000. To get around this, I had the script make individual searches for each year given that every listing has the year of which the ad came from. This came with its own issues. A search could come up with, say, 48 results, but continue to show more results after those first 48 that were not relevant. I have no idea why eBay works this way. So, I had the script only scrape the number of results that were actually there. This may seem like a no-brainer when reading this, but you shouldn't have to specify exactly how many links it's supposed to scrape.

Anyway, then the script compiled every link it found into a TXT file. I then used another script to scrape every listing image from every listing, named after the listing title. By the end of it I had about 61K images. I did my best to check for duplicates between this and the previous scrape (though missed a few) and combined the scrapes together.

The images are then zipped into individual zip files by year. The collection can be accessed here. By the end of it, 79,986 pages were scraped. Eventually, other accounts that are doing the same thing will have the same treatment.

Interestingly, sellers are not willing to help because they think that doing this will decrease the value of what they're selling. I don't understand this, because when they make the listing and scan the page, they're making that page accessible for everyone as long as the listing is up. They've already "decreased the value" of what they're selling. Some of these listings have been up for years and I've seen a few of the listings already used for reference by other toy researchers already.

Regardless, I hope this helps people research a bit better or at least gives someone a fun half hour of pouring through old ads. There's always something weird in there.

The unfinished Pac-Man maze at the National Videogame Museum

In 2015, I was 12 years old. My parents had been restoring arcade games as a hobby in their spare time. We had a Dyn-O-Mite pinball machine that my mother had had since she was a kid, a Ms. Pac-Man, a Tron, and a Gorf. I don't remember if we had all of those at once, but those were our earliest machines if I remember correctly.

Anyway, around that time the National Videogame Museum was being built in the Frisco Discovery Center. I can't remember how they got involved, but near the beginning my parents became the museum's technicians. I remember coming with them to a dinner at the Outback Steakhouse with the museum's founders and some of the team trying to figure out what they should name the museum's arcade. My kid self thought the name they picked, Pixel Dreams, was one of the stupidest ideas I had ever heard. I've grown to like it over time.

I remember watching a woman paint the mural on the wall for the consoles. She spent hours standing on an extremely tall ladder and I would pester her with stupid questions about video games. If you're reading this, sorry 12 year old me wouldn't shut up!

I nearly grew up in that building. My parents would take me with them and spend hours repairing machines in the half-built arcade and I would lay on the floor. It was interesting, but over time it got very boring. The museum's founder, Joe Santulli, was very kind to me and I loved talking to him. I haven't spoken to him since the museum's opening party in 2016(?), but I always looked forward to seeing him when he was at the museum.

Anyway, I remember when they were building the arcade, cutting foam for the pixel stripes and airbrushing the planets on the wall, they were also considering painting a Pac-Man maze on the ceiling. They got as far as drawing a sketch of it and then they just... didn't go through with it. I don't recall why. Instead, they put one of those party projectors on the floor in the core behind the machines where nobody could see it. It would project those moving neon lights across the ceiling. The kinda thing they put at raves and company parties. I'm not sure if it's still there anymore, but they didn't keep it on for very long.

If you ever visit the museum, look at the ceiling at Pixel Dreams! Part of the maze is still there. I'm not sure if anyone else has really talked about it.

I have more stories about being raised at the museum but they're not as fun. Just small stuff like cataloging the boxed Atari games that are at the game crash exhibit or donating a book of mine to be used in the bedroom. I also have an unused Pong console painted gold that was intended to be used in the sculpture in the foyer. I'm not sure where that went. It's probably in the attic.

None of Us Should Be Talking To You or: How I Became One With Marketropolis

Recently I made a documentary about the movie Foodfight! which I titled ROTTEN: Behind the Foodfight. My memory is a little hazy, it doesn't help this took a few years to happen, but I'm gonna try explaining as best I can how this all came together.

From what I remember, my interest in the film Foodfight! started, unfortunately, with JonTron's review of the film in 2014. I was a big JonTron fan at the time, I've seen all of his videos to a certain point, but for some reason Foodfight was probably the most memorable. This must have been around 2015, I was probably 12, and I don't think Foodfight ever really left my mind since then. Not to say I spent every day thinking about it, but it would come to mind every now and then.

For those who are new to this, Foodfight! is a 2012 animated film produced by Threshold Studios, the same company behind Mortal Kombat (the movie) and Beowulf. It took approximately 15 years to produce and is considered one of, if not the worst animated film. Because of this it's been quite the topic on YouTube ever since the genre of "commentary YouTuber" came to fruition. If you review movies or animation on YouTube, you've probably reviewed Foodfight, and if not, someone's probably asked you to.

Interestingly, as I would actually begin researching the production of this film- which was around 2021 when I was seriously looking into it- I would discover that we didn't really know all that much, and what we did know seemed... off. At the time, the gist of what we knew about Foodfight's creation was the director wasn't familiar with how to direct an animated film, sponsors constantly pulled out, and that the entire film was stolen in 2002 and it had to be remade from scratch.

That last part is what really intrigued me, as well as everyone else. Foodfight is interesting already just because of how bad it is, but the fact there's an entire heist attached to it and might actually be a reason why it's so bad, then that makes it far more intriguing.

In 2022, I started a YouTube channel Ok so..., a little channel dedicated to videos about somewhat niche subjects. Since the beginning I wanted to create a video about Foodfight, but I knew it would be pretty massive, so I had to start from scratch and let it grow.

Interestingly, before I came in, it seemed nobody had really interviewed the people that created this film. There were a few quotes in a few old articles, namely one in particular in the New York Times, but from what I could tell nobody had really talked to the crew after the movie had garnered its infamous status. To tell a story properly, you have to talk to the people who experienced it.

I started at the basics, where do you find the credits for people that worked on a movie in a convenient list? IMDB! I went to Foodfight's page, hit print, and a minute later I had six sheets of names to go through one by one. I started with the art department, knowing that it would be virtually impossible to contact any of the cast, and went from there.

Initially I had no luck getting in touch with the big three producers; Larry Kasanoff, George Johnsen and Joshua Wexler. I considered these lost causes for the longest time, however that would change later.

I started by contacting people on LinkedIn, the hub of all business. This proved to be fairly effective, but, many times those who I had reached had no interest speaking over the phone. Aside from LinkedIn I also tried ArtStation, email, Instagram, Facebook, anything. Sometimes, they had no interest in talking at all. It seemed Foodfight had really done a number on some people, and some of the responses I'd get would be like this:

A variety of responses I received when asking about Foodfight.

Interestingly, out of the people that said no, only two left it as simple as "not interested." The rest described their reasoning in such a way that it would destroy their lives. Eventually, though, I did begin to make some connections. Early during my research I was given a tip that the son of Chef Boyardee's lawyer had expressed interest in animation and Threshold sent him a packet in the mail to see if he'd be interested in a job with Threshold. This packet contained a script to the film, copies of news articles about the studio, character designs, environment designs, and packaging designs. For the longest time, this was our first and only source of concept art from Foodfight!

Later I got in contact with Loressa Clisby, an animator and script supervisor that worked at Threshold during the mid 2000s when they were transitioning to motion capture. Loressa was very open about her time there and was more than helpful. She provided a statement she had previously provided Empire Magazine around 2011 about her time at the studio. Apparently, Empire was going to do an article on Foodfight's production, but the allegations against the studio and Kasanoff were so big they didn't feel comfortable publishing it. 

We spoke for a few months over email and after a while Loressa was kind enough to pack me a very large zip file of what she had left over from her time at Threshold. This contained models from the early version of the film (and Dex's office from the later version), behind the scenes photos, another script, character designs, and bloopers. It was a massive discovery and I cannot thank her enough for taking the time to round it up for me. Loressa's statement also gave quite a bit of important information such as a witness account that the assets that were reportedly stolen in 2002 were still present in their servers, that Larry did bring his dogs to the studio often, and that production as a whole was overly chaotic. There were already theories and anonymous accounts that the movie was never stolen, but now we had something a little more concrete.

Loressa supervises motion capture performances with the script at the House of Moves mocap studio in 2006.

As time wore on I had made the decision with my mother that it may be best to shelve the documentary. So many warnings and red flags about Kasanoff's flesh-eating lawyers and stories about people losing their jobs after talking to the New York Times made us both nervous about my future. So, for a few months, Rotten was canceled.

It wasn't until I spoke with a colleague that I would make the decision to bring it back from the dead. That colleague is Kevin Schreck, a documentary director most well known for his documentary The Persistence of Vision. After a very long conversation about Rotten and documentary making we had decided that reducing this only to a YouTube video (because at the time I was considering making it a bit bigger) will significantly reduce the chance of getting in trouble. It's just a YouTube video, what's the worst that could happen?

And he was right.

I pulled up my old notes and back to work I went. I discovered that there were basically two entirely separate teams that worked on Foodfight. Between 2000-2005, Foodfight was being animated and rendered in the software Lightwave. After that, it was switched to Maya. Because of this change, essentially everyone that was trained in Lightwave was let go when the transition happened and an entire new team was hired to work in Maya instead. So since the Lightwave version (which was only about 10 minutes of finished animation if you're being generous) was scrapped, the only credited animators you'll see for the movie are for the final Maya version. This raised a problem; how was I going to know who worked on it before the change?

Thankfully, someone in the art department, who had been on the film for nearly its entirely duration, came to my rescue. Anonymously, he agreed to give me a list of the people he remembered working with there. This was a massive help and by adding that list to the people already officially credited on the film I was beginning to round up a pretty good amount of leads. Second editor Craig Paulsen was the first person that agreed to be interviewed over the phone. Craig's experience was fairly unique and one of the more positive experiences I heard from. He had mentioned he still had an early cut of the film on DVD and was open to sharing it, however later on he got cold feet and changed his mind. Given that he still works in the industry, this was a decision I could respect. Much of Craig's recollection of what went wrong at Threshold would be chalked up to "well that's just how Hollywood is." Interestingly, Craig wasn't the only person to say this, which is kinda leading me to believe it's true.

The more people I contacted, the more people I found that were open to talking. I was very happy to speak with G.J. Echternkamp, Mr. Clipboard's mo-cap actor. Echternkamp's surreal walking performance was actually derived from a dance he did on YouTube. Until then, I had thought that Mr. Clipboard's iconic stumbling march was animated by hand. I also interviewed R.C. Montesquieu (who requested to be off record,) Greg Emerson (who unfortunately I couldn't find any quotes that would fit), and Neil Fordice. Neil was a modeler on the film during the Lightwave era, most notably doing environment models to which I was shocked to find still displayed on his website. (%90 of the time, people have scrubbed Foodfight from their demo reels, portfolios and resumes.) Neil was a lot of fun to talk to and gave a lot of new insight on what it was like on the film's first crew. His experience seemed to be mostly positive, even mentioning how sometimes they would have games out on a basketball court outside the studio building.

Neil was nice enough to mail me a box of about 75 tabloid print outs of Foodfight's environment designs and storyboards. Originally, he had used these in his apartment and had them tacked up on his walls for reference during modeling when working from home. (Working from home was surprisingly fairly common during the Lightwave era.) The photo at the beginning of this post are those print outs. I had even gotten in contact with the Foodfight sound book illustrator, who was kind enough to send some thumbnails of an unpublished Foodfiight! coloring book. Later on the Foodfight subreddit a user by the name of Tiffany Amber had discovered a copy of the Foodfight! novelization and posted it on the Internet Archive. Immediately I sent her a DM and got her on board. She's been an awesome member of the team and sometimes makes me feel like I'm not a big a Foodfight fan as she is. I also discovered Ubern on Reddit, who initially tried to pull a hoax by modeling Dex and saying he had found the real assets (ironic given that later on we would find the real thing.) His modeling skills and interest in Foodfight felt useful and I recruited him as well. We three still talk constantly to this day.

Pages by Ron Zalme for an unpublished coloring book.

Surprisingly, there was someone who was actually excited to be interviewed about her experience at Threshold, that being texture artist and animator Mona Weiss. Mona gave a very long and fun recollection of her chaotic time there, an interview I will likely be releasing in full in the future as long as she's okay with it. Mona was the only one of two women who were open to talking to me. Threshold at the time was built greatly on men's entertainment and was a very masculine environment, so getting a woman's point of view always seemed to really point out everything wrong that happened there. Very slowly, my understanding of what it was like working at Threshold grew from nothing to understanding nearly anything they would mention. Eventually, interviews and recollections started sounding the same. I felt as if there was nothing new to learn. One person I was dying to speak to was character designer Jim George. Who, after a lot of research, I discovered became a stillness coach and had entirely retired from animation. I had eventually gotten in touch with his business partner to try to get through to him. His business partner had never heard of his animation history. Apparently, according to George Johnsen, Jim never talked about his past and much of his life is a mystery (even saying that Jim was once a member of Oingo Boingo?) Unfortunately, I never heard back.

Around the time I had finished all my scheduled interviews I began to put Rotten together. I had my partner, Ko Laluna, play the part of Loressa by reading quotes from her statement, as well as getting my father and a family friend to read a few quotes from anonymous interviews I had conducted with crew members. Ko's performance, of course, was fantastic and their "oh, Lady X" bit in the documentary seems to have made a few people chuckle. There's a part of Rotten where I had a bunch of people voice different forum posts about the movie that were made in the 2000s. For this, I had to ask basically everyone I thought might be interested. I thought it would be a fun easteregg as well if I got some of the lost media YouTubers in on it. Gratefully, RebelTaxi, LSuperSonicQ, and blameitonjorge accepted. My colleagues that helped with Rotten also provided voices (being Tiffany, Ubern, and Maxx.)

During the editing of the documentary I actually got in touch with George Johnsen, one of the producers of the film who hadn't talked about it since he left Threshold in 2007. It was a very enlightening conversation and to this day I enjoy catching up with him on the occasion.

Much of the actual compositing of Rotten was fairly normal and not much to report. I was going to fully recreate Threshold Studios as it was in the early 2000s and make some crazy renders with it for the doc but I got too lazy and that never happened. As for the music, I put out a casting call for any musicians that would want to go pro-bono for a documentary I was making for fun. On Discord I was messaged by John Taylor, who worked very quickly and was very receptive to my vague musical requests to create part of the soundtrack to Rotten. Mid-production, John got a new job and could no longer compose for me. Which was fine, but I had to find music to fill in that empty space. So, by combing music from the film during interviews (which at the time I had to rip myself using a 5.1 mix of the audio) and some music from a friend of mine, JoeyVFX, Rotten's weird little pilotredsun-esque soundtrack was in.

I tried to be as neutral as possible in Rotten. I still didn't really know whether or not the alleged 2002 theft really did happen, I didn't want to badmouth Kasanoff directly in case I got sued, and it's just good journalistic practice. When it was released I was very happy with the reception it received and was so glad I was finally able to put some ancient myths to rest. They never finished the old version of the film, the movie was never stolen, and it didn't cost $65 million dollars (an anonymous source would clarify for me that it was actually under $32 million.)

After Rotten was released, of course, I would discover new things I really wish I knew before I had released it. I would learn more details about Kasanoff's house fire (a story I still am not allowed to tell,) Threshold's studio flood (ever wonder why the floor is wet in Rotten's poster?), and, most notably, what ever happened to that Foodfight video game.

I learned a variety of other anecdotes later that I'd like to mention. Supposedly, one of Foodfight's investors was a gang of "Yakuza looking dudes." Which visited the studio to check out how it was going, to which Larry would hide from and just tell the crew to play Hershey's Really Big! 3D Show and just tell the gang that it's Foodfight. Also, apparently Mr. Clipboard was a later addition to Foodfight's story. Originally, Lady X was a robot (the size of an Ike) being piloted by Professor Plotnik (yes, he's literally that small), the mascot for prunes. Plotnik's plan was to take over Marketropolis with prune-creatures. Apparently this version of the story only exists as the 1997 treatment that so far nobody I've managed to contact knows the whereabouts of.

I would later try calling Joshua Wexler one more time and, as if my miracle, he responded as he was driving his car. Joshua had told me that a theft definitely occurred at Threshold Studios, however he wasn't sure what was stolen. We know the files to the movie weren't it because we have them in our possession. It's possible it was something physical, but as of right now it's still a mystery. According to another crew member, the FBI really did come to the studio and question crew members. We know for sure, however, that the movie itself was never stolen and the entire theft was likely used as an excuse to restart production due to Larry's inexperience with authentic animation. Of course, that part is covered in Rotten.

Eventually we sorted everything we had recieved during the research and development of Rotten into the Foodfight Archive, which has every piece of concept art, assets, documents, and anything else we got from the making of the documentary. I'm really happy to present all of these things to the public for free for their own research, and hope there's a possibility that more crew members will come forward and contribute what they have to this weirdo preservation effort.

Anyway, that's about all I got. If you have any Foodfight questions feel free to email me at ziggycashmere@gmail.com.

The 3D recreation of Threshold was later repurposed into the poster for Rotten, which my colleague Ubern was kind enough to contribute to with rigs and character models.

A History with Garrett Gilchrist

Edit: This post was originally published on July 21st, 2024. It was deleted about a week later out of professional courtesy. However, I feel that as it has been a month and these accusations continue to spread elsewhere, I decided it may be best to have my story available for reference. 

It was recently brought to my attention that Garrett Gilchrist, a prominent figure in animation and videogame preservation, made a rather lengthy post on Facebook about me, my work, and our past history. Unfortunately, much of what he stated was exaggerated or entirely fabricated. To clear these muddy waters, I've decided to give a full dissertation on my relationship with Gilchrist.

For those who are unfamiliar, and to have context for what follows, Garrett Gilchrist put together The Thief and the Cobbler: Recobbled Cut, a fan-edit of the unfinished animated epic The Thief and the Cobbler comprised of elements he himself sought after along with various alternate cuts of the film from different releases. Garrett was also responsible for getting the animated film Raggedy Ann and Andy's Musical Adventure scanned in 4K and restored from a 35mm print. He also uploaded a digital transfer of a promotional cassette of the soundtrack for the film Rock & Rule, which he was sent by the tape's owner. He is a well respected member in various animation communities.

When I was 15 years old (I'm 20 now) I contacted Garrett because I wanted photos of the cassette tape for Rock & Rule. At the time, I was not aware Garrett did not physically own the tape, however he did not make this clear and instead decided to call me mentally ill for wanting photos of the tape. At the time, being 15, I was pretty persistent in wanting photos because I thought it was "important" for preservation reasons. Later that year and the one or two that followed, I often smeared his name to my peers in lost media communities (mainly the Lost Media Wiki) because I felt slighted by his rude behavior. I also felt his attitude overall with The Thief and the Cobbler was/is inappropriate and would often complain of this. Because of this, through his eyes, his reputation had been tarnished and he no longer felt comfortable in many of the circles I inhabited. Later on, as I grew up and realized how dumb the situation was, I spoke of Garrett less. Later that same year I attempted in restoring the music to Rock & Rule and created a soundtrack album for the film, given that it never had one officially. For further context, Garrett had previously attempted in restoring the soundtrack himself, but I was not satisfied with his attempt. My own attempt used none of his work and only used the raw cassette transfers he had uploaded online, which he had been sent from the owner.

During the pandemic, I, like many others, grew anxious. Being a teenager with hormones and a recognizable presence on the internet I had decided to use a script to delete the first few years of my message history because I was afraid my address or legal name may have been accidentally shared. Because of this, my previous comments about Garrett no longer exist, however I have been told he has screenshots of them.

At 17 years old, in 2021, I became interested in the film Raggedy Ann and Andy's Musical Adventure. The film had never been released on a format beyond VHS, and Garrett had acquired a 35mm print of the film to get scanned properly. Excited by this, and someone who at the time was wanting to get a career in film restoration, I contacted Garrett and asked if he had planned to release the film in HD (at the time, only a low quality copy of his scan had been released) so I may attempt at restoring it. He asked who I was and why I was restoring his restorations, and told me not to. I responded in confusion that the copy I had seen was definitely not restored, being riddled with dirt and damage, and asked if I had the wrong copy. He then told me that he did not want me to touch any of "his" footage. After I further asked for clarification, I was blocked. Later on I would discover that Garrett did indeed have plans to restore the film himself, but at the time I had messaged him I was not aware of this nor was it public. Since then, he has been under the impression that I have been stalking him for reasons I am not fully aware.

Direct message excerpt

Later that same year, I attempted at restoring Rock & Rule's soundtrack yet again. This version included official releases by some of the artists, an alternate copy of one song found on a dead fan site, and a few songs still sourced from the cassette Garrett had shared long ago. Again, none of the sources I used were previously modified or restored by Garrett. I spent time and effort on that project and would never bring myself to the low level of slapping my name on someone else's work.

When I was 16, I had the idea to try editing my own version of The Thief and the Cobbler, a project I didn't actually start on until I was 18. The project would be created using elements that Garrett had shared in the past along with various cuts of the film. Part of the reason I even came up with the idea, admittedly, was out of spite. But as I grew older that reason became a footnote and the actual reason was I was not particularly happy with how the Recobbled Cut portrayed the film, and given that nobody else had attempted in making their own version, I thought I should try it myself. The main reason for that was so I could have my own version of the movie to watch myself, and if anyone liked it, that's just a positive side effect. It was a great editing practice and I documented that journey in another post on this same blog. The biggest rule in that project was to not use any of Garrett's work. Not only was this not to step on his toes, but it's also a professional courtesy for restoration of this kind. Every shot in that version was placed by hand from raw elements sourced from Garrett's public raw scans and official versions of the film available from many places. None of what is in that project was modified from its original source by anyone other than me and my team. It was a long, laborious task that I never completed because I shelved it a year later. I still have a deep respect for Garrett's work in persevering and completing the four, soon to be five, versions of the Recobbled Cut

Later on, he joined the Lost Media Wiki server and made a rather large confrontation about my behavior when I was younger. Later that same day we spoke privately about our past altercations. It seemed he had assigned much of his previous abuse from other people to me. After I let him speak, I told him that much of what he was talking about I never did, but what I had done years in the past I regretted and I apologized for. He himself apologized for his own past rude behavior. Unfortunately, by this point, I had muted his messages because I was in the middle of my vacation and during this conversation he sent many messages accusing me of harassment that I didn't want to deal with at the time. Because of this, I never saw his own apology and opening for a truce. Later I had almost forgotten about the entire situation and hardly thought about him. However, a year later I noticed his message and responded with an agreement, he never got back to me. I'm not sure if this meant he thought I was ignoring him, but since then he seems to have changed his mind and that truce is no longer in place. I tried messaging him a few times afterwards to ask if he'd be open in talking about the Thief because of my own research and I thought it might be something he might want to talk about. I did not hear from him.

Direct message excerpt

Over a year later, in 2023, at 19, I began work on my book Drawing For Nothing, a free art book dedicated to animated movies that were never finished or were poorly received. For the chapter covering Rock & Rule, I thought it would be cool to have a proper photo of the cassette tape included because it's the only semi-official release of its soundtrack, an important piece of the film's history. At this point, I forgot how I was told this, I learned that Garrett did not own the tape and only had released the digital transfer after being sent it from the actual owner. So I emailed Garrett to ask if he could point me in the right direction to contact the owner. In response, he sent me a very long, insulting email in response.

My email

His response

I was very surprised by this response and didn't really know how to handle it. I felt it was needlessly violent and aggressive and came to my mother for help. She responded to him for me, stating that I would not contact him again but due to his allegations, the email has been recorded in her legal archives.

From there, I indeed did not attempt in contacting Garrett again because it was quite obvious he had no intention of making things right. Over time my career grew, I was interviewed by the Library of Congress for my book The Lost Media and Research Handbook as well as Cartoon Brew and the New York Times for Drawing For Nothing. Because of my new found passion in historical journalism, I joined the Facebook group Cartoon Research and made a post about Drawing For Nothing there. Garrett, who is part of the group, saw this as me stalking him and trying to leech from his fame, making baseless claims that I have stolen his own work and I have made The Thief and the Cobbler the face of everything I do, going as far as to claim I impersonated my own mother. My mother, of course, went to clarify this given that he had brought her into it. Moderators were involved and the comment was deleted. When my mother attempted in contacting him to clarify things, she was blocked without a response. Later that same day (four days ago from this writing), Garrett made a rather lengthy post on Facebook regarding me, my work, and our history.

I have not been stalking Garrett Gilchrist. The last time it could be argued that I harassed him is when I was in my mid-teens. Since then, I apologized multiple times when we attempted to make a truce that needlessly went nowhere. I never contacted him under "many aliases," whenever I contacted him under my pseudonym Ziggy Cashmere I fully expected him to know who I was, because he knew I was the same person when we spoke over Discord. It is possible he did not make the connection when I contacted him regarding Raggedy Ann, and if that is the case that is a mistake on my part. Ziggy Cashmere is the only alias I use to contact people and it is only used because it is what many people knew me as when I was younger. Since then, it is very easy to find my legal name with my alias, given that it has been published in multiple articles. As explained earlier, I did not impersonate my own mother. Every allegation I spoke about him in my mid-teens I did not make up and was either based off my own experiences or others. The only project one could argue I was going to "reclaim" is The Thief and the Cobbler, which as I specified was meant to be an entirely separate project.

Jealousy was never a problem, it was pride. I realize I made mistakes in the past, but I feel they were rather small and were done by a teenager who I hardly recognize anymore. This being started when I was 15 and he was 35, I can't help but feel this entire situation is rather silly. But given that my reputation is on the line, I feel I had to clarify that I am not the "imbecile" he claims I am.

 

Addition: I have not spoke ill of Garrett in a very long time, have never stolen his work or stalked him, I'm not entirely sure what he wants from me. Since this post was made Garrett had decided to make a meme spoofing the cover of my book Drawing for Nothing with a variety of accusations, including quoting my own mother's email. 

This was shared in multiple Discord servers, some of which I am in, as well as posted on his own Twitter account (with comments disabled.) After my mother sent another email threatening legal action, he continued to taunt her on Twitter.

 

Due to personal matters as well as having real life responsibilities, we never pursued legal action. In the end, I just wish for me, my work, and my team to be left alone. I am confused as to what exactly he is wanting, and given that he has blocked me on every platform imaginable, that isn't really something he can tell me. I no longer ask for a truce or an understanding, all I ask for is decency and not claiming my hard work was stolen from someone else or their image.

The Thief and the Cobbler: A Practice in Editing

My desk while editing The Thief: Polished, 2022

A little over two years ago I started a project titled "The Thief and the Cobbler: Polished" which was meant to be my own reconstruction of the film The Thief and the Cobbler explicitly using finished animation and storyboards. Not only was this an extreme exercise in video editing, which at the time was something I wanted to do a career, but it was also something I felt had promise and had never been done before. The only person to really step up and take the film by the reigns and recut it himself was Garrett Gilchrist, creator of the Recobbled Cut. Ever since his attempts, Recobbled Cut Mark 4 has been considered the definitive version of the troubled feature. While the Recobbled Cut is an incredible feat of editing, preservation, and perseverance, I always had the feeling that another approach could be put towards Thief.

The Thief was never finished, at least not to Richard Williams' expectations in what he wanted. Though, I don't think he ever truly knew what he wanted. I think I know what he wanted spiritually, to create his magnum opus, his love letter to animation, but I don't think he ever truly figured out what was best for the movie itself. Due to his constant need for perfection and his lack of organization, the film was taken away from him and "completed" in a way even he knew was wrong. Because of this, no cut of the film will be accurate. There will always be something missing, a creative decision made by the editor instead of Williams, something not polished to how he wanted. Through the various cuts of the film that we were given in the 90s as it passed several hands and the little bits and scraps Gilchrist managed to scrounge up from trashcan finds and eBay listings, we have the pieces to a jigsaw puzzle that can be put together in any decent way and be considered "complete" because there is no picture on the box for what it's supposed to be.

So while watching Recobbled Cut 4 for the fifth or so time, I decided I wanted to try my own hand. I went through and downloaded all of Gilchrist's old "Thief Scrapbooks" giant zip files filled with newspaper clippings, concept art, and clips he had accumulated from Williams' work, as well as other uploads he had put up over the years. Without Gilchrist's multi-year obsession for this film we wouldn't have half of what's currently available. It was impossible to do it properly without his collection. With that in hand along with whatever else I could find online, I created my own little collection of Thief material. One could, theoretically, put it all together in all sorts of ways to create their own version of the film.

I created a Discord server specifically for the project and invited people that, at the time, I had been talking to at some extent about the project and were passionate about the film like I was. In retrospect, in all honesty, most of them weren't very helpful besides bounce a few ideas around. However, Notelu, someone who I have known for many years, was helpful in upscaling the low quality footage we had on hand and did it subtly. Key word is subtly. Later on I had decided to invite a particular person to the project to help out with upscale and restoration, though that later proved to be a mistake. Their methods were far more abrasive, with every upscaled shot removing key details. Though the straw that broke the camel's back was when they wanted to use Gilchrist's restorations instead of doing it all by hand. When I told them stealing other people's restorations is precisely not what we wanted to do, but after that they decided to leave. Perhaps it was for the best.

A comparison between the original and restoration of spire turn around shot.

From the beginning it was a challenge. Though, thankfully, Notelu had sent me a link to some software named Phoenix Finish. It was the only film restoration software I managed to find for free that I could actually understand. Using Phoenix, I managed to remove the dirt and scratches from the beginning crystal ball animations. In the above comparison, I also attempted in creating what I call a contrast map, though I'm sure it's a technique that already has a name and has already been used by many others. I took the original animation, converted it to greyscale, and leveled the contrast for deep shadows, placing it on top and blending it with the original. This meant I could restore a shot using only what I was provided, without blending it with other sources such as pencil tests for better visibility. This technique, in my opinion, leads the viewer to understand it as simply a damaged film rather than an obvious restoration. I also made changes to the beginning crystal ball shots themselves, many unfinished and because of that, removed. This meant I had to shorten the beginning dialogue and speed up the ball's rise. This worked to my benefit, no longer do you have to wait 5 minutes for the movie to start. Originally, that 5 minutes wouldn't have been a problem, because the credits were meant to appear above the ball as it came towards the viewer. However, I felt that no one is qualified to mimic Williams' golden typography he had intended, and decided not to include them. This was a sacrifice I made for better viewing, not for accuracy. Such as many changes I made. The Recobbled Cut already covered most bases for accuracy.

The final title composite

I used a similar technique with the film title itself. Given it was renamed multiple times in the past, the best copy that can be found of the original animated title is on the 2009 DVD. I took that, greyscaled, leveled, stabilized, removed dot crawl, and placed on top of a still image of the logotype from a poster. It's probably the best rendition of the animated title card anywhere currently and probably the thing I'm most proud of out of the whole project.

The original workprint vs what was intended

Later on as I reviewed the workprint for the film I noticed that there were grease pencil markings at a few splices. Not every splice, just a handful. When mentioning this to Notelu she told me that they were left there by the editor, likely Williams himself, as a note for transitions. At the time I was very uneducated on 35mm film and how it functioned, and even now I find difficulty finding documentation on editor's marks on films. Even before I writing this I reviewed books on film editing from the time and none of them make note of specific marks that determine what kind of transition was intended. Nonetheless, it seems fairly obvious what they had in mind when reviewing the workprint.

Soon I'd notice more marks throughout the workprint. Lines crossing between each other between two scenes were dissolves, singular lines were fade ins/outs (or sometimes crossing lines- likely remnants from a past dissolve from an earlier workprint.) The scene with King Nod's dream of the soldier coming to warn him of One Eye made far more sense in how it was supposed to be constructed. The individual shots of the soldier and the growing eye were meant to dissolve into each other. Ironically, the lines that gave these instructions also obstructed the image, and I wasn't able to construct what was intended with what I had, given that the workprint was the only version of the film to include those shots.

As I was editing the film I would discover that many of the sequences that were never finished didn't really need to be included. While this, to many, may seem sacrilegious, I felt that it was worthy to try. Yum Yum never searches for Tack in the prison and only sees him again when he appears behind the curtain, that was the biggest change made. A few scenes were reordered as well. Another big change, and discovery, is when King Nod rejects Zig Zag's ransom to wed Yum Yum. This scene was never animated under Williams. When it was animated under Calvert, the lines were entirely rewritten. However, laying Zig Zag's animation on top of the audio from the workprint revealed that they had animated his reaction with that audio for reference. It is far from perfect and I prefer the original boards, however I included Calvert's animation anyway because of the goal of the project itself (not to use any unfinished animation) as well as how interesting the coincidence was in the first place.

Later on I discovered that Gilchrist's scans of the film elements that remain of the war machine sequence were very poor. Gilchrist himself agrees with this, and has been wanting to get it rescanned for quite some time. The problem is over-exposure, everything red is too red and because of that many details in the machine have been blown out and lost. Incredibly, I managed to find someone who had an older scan of these film elements that were done for a previous mark of the recobbled cut. While they were of lower quality, the white balance was far more accurate and easier to look at.

Unfortunately, by the time I made it to this point in the film, I was beginning to get tired of the project. Most of what I wanted to discover and learn I had done. There was little to keep me motivated to keep working, knowing that there will never be a "perfect" version of this movie to watch. I realized, most of the reason I was doing this in the first place was just to have a version of the film that I preferred to watch and enjoy without jarring changes in quality. I edited it like a producer instead of a historian. As my motivation dwindled, I decided to cancel the project. I had finished editing it, mostly, but I had hardly done any restoration, which was something I was really wanting to do in the beginning. (It didn't help that I got a new computer half way through that for some reason does not work with Phoenix Finish.) Because of this, the war machine scene I just put in from the workprint. I did not have the energy anymore to edit the entire thing together from the film scans.

A little less than two years later, for reasons I don't even remember now even though it was quite recent, I decided to release what I had done. I opened the old premiere file, tied up a few loose ends in editing and shipped it out on YouTube. I think I may be the only other person to "complete" a ground-up edit from The Thief and the Cobbler. Nearly every shot I placed by hand from various sources. I found a new respect for the Recobbled Cut, fan edits, and editors in general.

Every now and then I think about revisiting it, by finishing it how I intended. But I don't think it's time. So, for the time being, here is the "it's good enough" version. Complete without credits! Like how it was intended to end. (Much to nearly every animator's dismay...)

This was Foodfight! the Videogame

 

A screenshot of the back alley level, 2006

In 1997 Larry Kasanoff and Joshua Wexler of Threshold Entertainment had the idea for a movie titled Foodfight!. It took 9 years to produce, 4 years to release, and is considered a colossal failure in the world of animation.

But, before everything went downhill, there were big plans for this film, to create an entire Foodfight! franchise, a Threshold Entertainment empire. With every successful animated film of the 2000s, there must be the video game adaption tie in.

In the beginning, in 2001, that first took on this challenge was Midway Games West. Not a lot is known about this version of the game, in fact the only reason we know it exists is because concept artist Jason Leong shared some concept pieces he did for the game. This was created during the time in which the character Dex was a human being instead of a dog, along with various other early differences such as the Keebler Elves still being part of the film. It's unknown why exactly this didn't go forward, likely because Threshold kept missing deadlines on the film's release.

Leong envisioned that the game could have
various mini games starring the mascots.

Around 2004, the game switched hands to what was then a fairly small game studio, Cat Daddy Games. But before I get into its development, I need to talk about how this was discovered in the first place.

Before now, all that was known to anyone outside of the studios about the Foodfight videogame was its appearance at E3 2006. No copyright information, no press release, no article on IGN, the game, seemingly, was never announced beforehand. Its existence was only known because of a few seconds of B-Roll at the E3 showing it as a playable demo. Later, it would be discovered that 2K was meant to distribute the game, and Global Star was a developer. However, strangely, when people contacted developers at Global Star, they had never heard of the game. This brings us to my friend, Reese, who after browsing Moby Games' catalog on 2K' licensed games, discovered that a heavily recurring name was Phil Mikkleson. Incredibly, after sending an email, Mikkleson knew exactly what Reese was talking about. Not only did Mikkleson recognize it, he was the producer.

Mikkleson stated: "I didn't know it ever came out as a movie. I expected it never would. When I was brought in on it there was a level or two that were playable (sort of) on the Wii. After a few milestones it became clear that this game was unlikely to be completed. I think it was going to be Wii, PS, and Xbox? ... It was pretty clear to me that this was not going to get done without more money and more time."

This was about a year prior to this post. After Mikkleson stopped responding to emails, Reese and nowhere to go. After I had released ROTTEN as well as the various materials I had accumulated during my research on the film, Reese mentioned this conversation online. After speaking with them directly, Reese directed me to Mikkleson and I decided to give him a call, and this is how I learned about the game's development.

Mikkleson stated, as said before, that the game was being developed for Wii, PS2, Xbox, and DS. It had a couple playable demos, but only demos, but he knew it just "wasn't going to happen." Even though Cat Daddy did a large amount of production and development on the project. He later mentioned that the game was headed by an "awesome game developer" Harley Howe, who just happens to be Cat Daddy's co-founder.

After calling Harley up, he told me that it was Cat Daddy's first "big" project, their first departure from smaller games like School Tycoon. Foodfight was being marketed as the next big thing, the rival to Pixar, and Cat Daddy wanted to be a part of that when they caught wind that Threshold was looking for a developer. After pitching their idea, Threshold signed the deal and it was officially in production. by this point, the film was being transitioned to motion capture and every piece of animation they had done to this point was never going to be used, but Cat Daddy didn't know that and neither did Foodfight's distributor, Lionsgate. Threshold sent Cat Daddy a large amount of files for reference including models for every main character, a teaser trailer, and environment and character designs. With just these for reference, the game was created as close as possible to what was presented. It was, according to Harley, created to look as close as possible to if you were playing the movie itself. With plans to even have the film cast to come back and record lines specifically for the game.

A comparison between the game and the original animation.

Harley recalled a specific story of Larry Kasanoff, Foodfight's director, visiting the studio to check on the game's development. According to Harley, Kasanoff arrived in a limo, in the rain, coming out wearing a fox fur coat with a six foot train. Kasanoff was very confident about the direction of Foodfight and as he toured the facility he kept reaffirming that Foodfight was going to be huge. However, the work that Kasanoff showed the development team from Foodfight was the same clips they had seen years prior. The movie, it seemed to them, wasn't budging an inch from the first time they saw it.

When Harley and his team visited Threshold Digital Research Labs, it was apparent to them that the animators were only rotating models to appear busy. (Very similar to what Mona Weiss, a texture artist on the film in 2005, also stated she was told to do during tours.) Harley recalls they left the studio simply thinking "oh shit."

As Foodfight missed deadline after deadline, Cat Daddy realized that it wasn't worth continuing production and it was cancelled in early 2008. With only a handful of levels completed for a demo, the game was far from complete when it was canceled. While most of the mechanics and ideas were put in place, much of the meat was still missing. It was far enough along, however, for a pitch reel to be compiled and was sent off to Sony and other companies for approval.

Though it was never finished, Harley said that without the game, Cat Daddy wouldn't be where they are today. With Foodfight they bridged the gap from their previous work to their first big hit, Carnival Games, which was ported to many platforms and I myself remember seeing at GameStop for years. Most of the team that worked on the game still work at Cat Daddy today.

During our contact Harley was kind enough to have his crew put together what they have from the game and what Threshold had sent them for reference. The game itself, unfortunately, could not be included due to there not being a build on hand and not having the resources or time to compile a new one from the surviving source. However, what was sent was an incredible collection of film and game assets such as models, textures, scripts, and music. You can download the entire collection here and dig through it yourself.

Special thanks to Harley Howe for entertaining my Foodfight obsession. While it is a shame the interview we had planned never happened, I'm glad it got this far. Special thanks also goes to Reese, without them I never would've found it in the first place.

 

The Curious Matinee of Mr. Wonderbird

In 1947, French animator Paul Grimault began directing a feature animated film with screenwriter Jacques Prévert based off Hans Christian Anderson's story, The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep. The film, titled La Bergère et le Ramoneur (a literal French translation of the story's title) took a fair amount of liberties with the story, adding a "mockingbird" character and a king, but it was going an incredible direction. With a steadily growing team of animators at Grimault's studio, Les Gémeaux, which he founded with business partner and producer André Sarrut.

Prévert and Grimault during the production of the film, 1947

I won't tell you the rest of the production's story, partially because I myself don't know or understand all of it. Unfortunately most of the documentation on this film is in French or Japanese, and much of that hasn't even been digitized. Google Translate isn't of much help either. But, anyway, as production continued it got closer to going over budget. Sarrut was taking too much on at once and became nervous on whether or not they could make back their money and please financers. Because of this, over time, Sarrut began laying off animators and crew, including, unfortunately, Grimault himself. The next two years is shrouded in a bit of mystery, but the film was "completed," hastily, and Sarrut presented himself as the great savior of the film, much to Grimault's irritation. The film was released not at all to Grimault and Prévert's satisfactions, even being called unfinished. They disapproved to such a degree that they had their names removed from the film entirely.

It was, however, a favorable success. Seeing a release across the globe and finding an incredible success in Japan, where it was adapted into a manga and is cited by Studio Ghibli founders Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata as massive inspirations in their career of animation.

The manga adaption, published in 1955

What's strange, however, is its release in the United States. Unlike most theatrical releases at the time which got ads in the newspaper and magazines, trailers at the drive-in-theater and the occasional street poster, this film recieved none of that. In fact, though it was released in France in 1953 and Japan in 1955, the United States wouldn't see it until late 1956. It was dubbed in English and titled The Curious Adventures of Mr. Wonderbird,. The earliest mention of a screening is in the Buffalo Courier Express, on December 22nd, 1956, being screened at the Paramount Theatre. (Not the Paramount, but the one probably on 612 Main Street.)

From what I can find, this is the earliest mention of the film in any American newspaper. No advertising, not a mention of its future release, it simply popped up. Later the following year it would pop up again and again in children's matinee screenings at churches, museums, and dollar theaters. The strangest part is there is no distribution company attached to the film. No company on the poster, any news coverage, or the film itself. At a specific screening in 1961 organized by the University of California Extension, the coordinator couldn't even figure out when it was from, just four years after simply appeared in the U.S. I can't really blame him. Today it seems impossible to track down how exactly it came to the United States to begin with.

The San Bernardino County Sun, Jul 9th, 1961

The film would be screened rarely for the next few decades at libraries and universities as a free, public film. By this point, in 1967, Grimault had gained the rights for the film again and between 1977-1980, completed it how he and Prévert had intended, now titled Le Roi et l'Oiseau (The King and the Mockingbird.) This version of the film has a fair amount of additions and changes from the original unfinished 1952 version. However, in my honest opinion, much of the additions were unnecessary and can sometimes be quite jarring in their difference in animation.

In the 90s, Mr. Wonderbird began appearing on television. Copyright law when Mr. Wonderbird was released was funny. You had to have a copyright notice and registration of said copyright with the copyright office in order to be protected. Wonderbird had neither of these things. Therefore, it was forfeited to the public domain immediately upon release. Because of this, Wonderbird was shown again and again on any television network that wanted to screen it. As VHS became more affordable, it would soon be released on there as well, and later in the 2000s it found its final home on a DVD released by Digiview. Using an ancient, ratty, faded Technicolor (maybe) print, this is the only copy available to anyone in the public, likely using the same telecine master that the VHS tapes used just 20 years beforehand.

Interestingly, though Wonderbird was a fairly easy film to acquire for any projectionist of the 20th century, I have not seen a single print surface online. Quite literally the only copy of the English dub I've seen anywhere is the same ratty public domain release. The original French version is nowhere to be found by the public, sitting in France's film archive. The Japanese dub, as well as any other dub also aren't available anywhere.

Many animation-fanatics now regard The King and the Mockingbird as one of the best animated features ever made. Yet, funnily enough, English documentation on it is sparse. And even that documentation in its native French language is hard to come by. (Especially legally.) Those who love this movie also tend to hate on the unfinished version that was released in 1952, and to that I say they deserve equal respect. Grimault considers them separate films, and they should be treated as such. Just as the film was considered a novelty in the past, I think many still consider it such today. People watch it because they're told its an incredible moment in animation history instead of it being a fantastic story with an incredible art style. I hardly see any fan art for this film even though it's supposed to be so amazing. It's almost like hardly anyone really engages with the film itself and only watches it through a pane of glass like an artifact. We Americans can treat these birds better.

You can watch The Curious Adventures of Mr. Wonderbird here

You can watch The King and the Mockingbird here