Let's Ring in the New Year with "Along the Moonbeam Trail"

As a fellow admirer of crows once sang in a song that has been drilled in the tooth of my memory since high school, maybe this year will be better than the last.  God I hope so.  I at least intend to blog more, when I can; anything that strikes my fancy and is also too weird and/or wonderful NOT to post about.

Case in point: "Along the Moonbeam Trail".  This is a short silent film recently restored to the best of the editors' abilities (here's hoping they find the ending).  I'd like to thank Tyler Greenfield for posting a clip on Twitter because it's honestly astounding that I've never seen it or heard of it.  It has everything!  It is not my Entire Aesthetic (for one thing, I'd have more than one [1] major female character and she'd do more than being a Deus ex Machina), but it's about as close as a movie from this time period could hope to be:

Everything about this is great but I'm torn between the random witch, the "pterosaur" who's really one of the first movie dragons, and the stegosaurus and his cute skink-tongue.

-----

Art of the Day!

I painted this back in 2018 and I'm reposting it here to bring this wonderful magical energy into 2021.  Happy New Year!

Weird and/or Unsettling Christmas Cartoons!

This will be a "Public Domain Version of 'Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer' That Pops Up Everywhere"-Free list of old Christmas cartoons. :)

Hugh Harman's "Peace on Earth" - I'm going to start by posting the animated short first:

OK.
Now, this short is beautifully animated and notable (even admirable) for its pro-peace message delivered in the middle of wartime. But here's the thing: I first saw it as a little girl in the middle of a collection of more typical holiday cartoons. Let's just say I had a lot to think about while everyone else was eating cookies and singing "Jingle Bells."

Dave Fleischer's "Christmas Comes But Once a Year" - Everything is going to look like sunshine and lollipops after that last short, but this one's a little odd too. Mostly, it's because of Dave Fleischer's strange animation style. This is what Western Animation looked like before Disney came along and standardized everything. The special effects at the end are really cool:


The National Film Board of Canada's "Christmas Cracker" - I discovered this on NFBC's "Best of the Best" DVD collection, but the embed below comes straight from the Film Board's website. The animated segments range from the "aww how cute" to the "Augh I know I've seen this before!" The weirdness is provided by the jester MC and trippy version of "The Holly and the Ivy":


As a super-special-awesome bonus, here is the cheesiest/creepiest Christmas song and music video ever made: