Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer (1948) Max Fleischer Studios & Jam Handy Productions

The main reason I've fallen off from blogging is that I got a job over a year ago in the animation industry and have been putting in a lot of hours at work. It's been a fantastic adventure so far. But here we are, it's the holidays again, so I thought I'd purvey this little Christmas gem from 1948. It's only 8 minutes long so why don't you pull yerself up with a cup of morning coffee and sit a spell.

While Rankin-Bass gets all the love for their classic 1964 stop motion version of "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer", the above featured animated short by Max Fleischer Studios was actually the first telling of the original story as written by Robert May in 1939.

May, a 34 year-old copywriter for the Chicago based department store Montgomery Ward's, was assigned to create a property in-house that could be developed into a promotional giveaway intended to boost Ward's 1939 Christmas sales.

At first May pitched his story ideas to his five year-old daughter Barbara and within a week delivered a rough draft of a Christmas story with rhyming couplets modeled after Clement C. Moore's "A Visit from St. Nicholas".

Initially Ward's publicity department decided to pass on the story. The feeling was that the imagery of a "red nose" was associated with drunkeness, rendering May's Christmas pitch inappropriate for children.

Denver Gillen, "Rudolph the Red Nosed
Reindeer " by Robert May

It wasn't until Denver Gillen, an illustrator in the company's art department, produced some initial concept drawings that anyone realized how endearing a character like Rudolph could actually be.

Gillen's illustrations were so cute that the publicity department came to the conclusion that there was no way people would think of Rudolph as a drunkard and the story was approved for production.

On September 1, 1939, Montgomery Ward's retail sales department announced the Rudolph book internally to all store managers with the following: “We believe that an exclusive story like this aggressively advertised in our newspaper ads and circulars... can bring every store an incalculable mount of publicity... and, far more important, a tremendous amount of Christmas traffic”.

They were right.

That year 2,365,016 copies of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" were given away. At the time, a production run of a mere 50,000 copies could make a book a best-seller. This overwhelming success garnered the property the “largest first edition yet recorded” by the press.

In 1948, Max Fleischer, acting as Head of the Animation Department for the Detroit-based industrial film company Jam Handy Productions, supervised the first animated adaptation of "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer". It is this version that is more faithful to May's original story and Gillen's illustrations.  It's worth noting that unlike most Rudolph products, this cartoon has fallen out of copyright, and is now available in the public domain.

Happy Holi-daze, e'erbody!

Free Digital Collage Sheet - "Vintage Wall Street"

In response of the burgeoning Occupy movement that started on Wall Street a few weeks ago (but has since gone global) I thought it might be worthwhile to post this collage sheet I researched and put together. Perhaps you can use it in your mixed media and collage work?  All images are in the public domain.

Starting from upper left:

Image #1 (Upper left) - The Bankers Trust and Stock Exchange on Wall Street, New York. Photographed in 1912 by Irving Underhill.


Image #2 (Upper right) - The panic scene on Wall Street Wednesday morning, May 14, 1884 drawn by Schell and Hogan. Harper's weekly, v. 28, no. 1431 (1884 May 24), p. 333.


Image #3 (Bottom left) - Wall Street color lithograph. Artist Aug. Köllner. 1847.


Image #4 (Middle right) - Panic - "The Liveliest of Card Games” made by Panic Card Company, c. 1903.


Image #5 (Bottom right) - "Rotten Finance" cover of Puck Magazine, November 19, 1907. Illustration shows a stonewall labeled "Rotten Finance" constructed with stones showing the faces of many businessmen and financiers; on the ground, in front of the wall, is a broken egg labeled "Confidence". Among those pictured on the wall are John D. Rockefeller, J. Pierpont Morgan, and Edward H. Harriman. Artist Udo J. Keppler.

Below are the full resolution copies of these images available for download. Simply click on the image to embiggen.

"This Is Coffee" (1962) or "How To Percolate Coffee"

Last summer I went camping and enjoyed the best cup of joe I've had since my travels in Europe when I graduated high school. Maybe it was the great outdoors. Maybe it was the fresh clean air. My friend who brewed it fresh every morning swore it was the fact that it was percolated using a camping percolator coffee pot.

Life was good.

Summer came and went and along with it was those mornings of fresh coffee brought to my tent.

Sigh....

Cut to: this year where I'd been laid off and out of work for almost five months. Fun-employment can be pretty brutal and not so very fun so every day I went to my local multinational coffee chain store, paid $2 bucks for a cup of drip coffee and hammered away on my computer utilizing the store's free WIFI in search of my next gig which I got at the end of April.

Now I'm in a 9-5, at a desk with no windows so I remember fondly last summer's camping trip and the great coffee. I remember and wonder about my pals at my morning coffee klatsch as we pored over job listings and Craigslist posts.  But one thing's for sure: I don't miss spending $14 a week on coffee.

Do. The. Math: a two buck-a-day habit multiplied by 365 days and your average coffee expense amounts to a whopping $730 a year! That's a round trip ticket to Paris or a cruise in the Hawaiian Islands, egads! I mean, that's a lot of money, especially when you're coming off an extended bout of unemployment and accepting significantly less pay than you're used to because of this economy.

Now my new gig has a coffee service, and the coffee is just OK. The brand is good, so I'm thinking that maybe it's the coffee maker itself from which flows this mediocre coffee and wouldn't you know it? I was right!

I went out to my local thrift shop and got a good old-fashioned electric coffee percolator, cleaned it out really good with vinegar and starting making my own fresh perc'd coffee and let me tell you (exaggerated sotto voce): it tastes 100% better.

But it took awhile to get it right. At first, I was flummoxed. I paid only $4 bucks for the percolator but I didn't have the foggiest idea on how to use it. My camping buddy made the coffee daily, so while I was blissfully caffeinated I was also an utter doofus for failing to get the instructions on how to make it from him.

So I went on-line and found several forums and tutorials. There seems to be a huge debate from many coffee snobs who argue the merits of drip or even French pressed coffee over  percolated coffee.

However, for me, percolated coffee tastes better, is darker and stronger, and the equipment is much less expensive. There no filters to change or buy so I save the trees while making things easier on my wallet and the environment. Not only that,  but my co-workers also think it's better tasting than the company's coffee maker or the local multinational coffee chain store down the street.

I think the trick is I make it strong and the percolator dispenses it hot so like, who doesn't like strong hot coffee? Right?

This documentary was brought to you by the Coffee Brewers Institute and produced by Visions Associates. On one forum I read where this guy took a class from the institute back in the fifties when he claims he was the night manager at Hody's Restaurant in Hollywood.  He said that upon completion of instruction "We were awarded a 1/2 gold colored coffee cup and hung it over the entrance to the bar."

So when you get a moment, would you be so kind as to put down that cuppa joe and let me know your secret for the best method for making coffee? Cheers!

Today on GB-TV: Domestically Disabled (Part 1)

In today's show Jane and Alice plot to trick Jane's domestically disabled husband George into buying a new kitchen.

All this to get entice you to enter my drawing for my current giveway!

Click on the image below and follow directions to enter. Contest deadline is this Sunday, 4/11/2010

Digi-Freebie Easter 2010

Hello and Happy Easter! 

I've got quite a little show planned for you, dear reader, coming up later this morning. 

For now, the early bird catches the digi-freebie below

PNG 300 dpi

JPG 300 dpi

Digi-Freebie: Chain of Fools

Click images to embiggen

Enjoy these freebies of the Fool and his Major Arcana homies from the Rider Waite Smith Tarot Deck of 1908 which is available within the United States under public domain. True fact! No joke!

The US Games Company currently claims a valid copyright on certain colorized versions of the deck published in the early seventies so be sure to check the date on a set if you plan to use real cards in your art for commercial use.

CUT TO "The Tarot Card Scene - James Bond: Live and Let Die"



Jane Seymour plays Solitaire, a beautiful virgin tarot expert who has the ability to see both the future and remote events in the present. Using a stacked tarot deck of only cards showing "The Lovers", Bond tricks her into thinking that seduction is in her future and then seduces her. Solitaire loses her ability to foretell the future when she loses her virginity to him. Here's the thing: if she's that good a psychic, you think she would have known the cards were stacked! Just sayin'.

Happy April Fool's Day from Glamour Bomb!

365 Bedtime Stories - Illustrated by Janet Robson

I thought I'd share with you some photos from one of my favorite books when I was a kid. Called "365 Bedtime Stories" it featured a daily story for an entire year.  I still remember fondly when my dad would read some of these stories to me at night and how he helped me learn to read.

I've placed this and more images from this book in the Vintage Children's Books Flickr pool where thousands of others are sharing some fabulous images of books from long ago. I'll be uploading the Thanksgiving story later in the week for the holiday so join the pool if you want to check it out.

I know a lot of you crafty ladies out there love to share public domain imagery so I must warn you that this is still within copyright. If you're thinking of grabbing it then by all means enjoy!  I'm sharing it with you here. However,  I would highly recommend you use it in your art for personal use. Juuuuust sayin'. :)