Patrick - Yeah, more and more I'm realizing that the movie never changed much ... kind of startling, but it was all there from the start (apart from Tack). It looks like what happened is, he took the Nasrudin film, changed some of the character designs a bit, and had everyone keep animating the scenes/shots which didn't have Nasrudin in them. Tack became a cipher-protagonist to replace the missing protagonist, and he eventually figured out how to take the entire film without Nasrudin and have that still tell its own story. Using the same shots that had been boarded for Nasrudin. It's the same movie. Strange ...

John - The early films like The Little Island, Love Me Love Me Love ME, The Dermis Probe etc. are not on video sadly. I would really like to track them down. I'll send you these documentaries so you can see the clips from them.

Baz writes (yeah, I won't list his full name in case he doesn't want it listed):

I am a fan of the film also..it was one of the reasons I got into the
business......when I was 10 years old I used to rush downstairs with
great
excitement to watch a show on the BBC called The Do-It-Yourself Film
Animation
Show and was presented by Bob Godfrey (Rubarb and Custard)For a couple
weeks he
had on Richard Williams and they showed clips from A Chrismas Carol and
The
Thief and the Cobbler. There was one scene of a Vagabond starting to
laugh and
bursts out into full laughter..I was just in total awe ..it felt so
alive!..and
it was one of the things that stuck in my head and though "I want to do
that one
day".

Years later I found myself sitting at Richard Williams desk doing an
"inbetween
test" "Who Framed Roger Rabbit". I was so nervous..it was a very hot
summers
day and I had carried a huge portfolio up several flighst of
stairs...and the
sky light above wasn't shaded so it was really hard to see the drawings
and do
the inbetween as the light from the skylight was fighting with the
light from
the lightbox! I was also dripping sweat down on the drawing and it must
have
been quite soggy afterwards!Soggy or not it was enough to get me on a
training
programme for a few weeks and afterwards I got the job and I was on my
way to
becoming an animator!

A number of years later I was working as a Supervising Animator at Don
Bluth
Studios. It had just gone into liquidation and one of the Producers had
gotten
a sequence off Fred Calvert and the completion bonding company as The
Thief had
been taken off Richard Williams and now another studio or Producer was
completing or should I say destroying this film! Well I needed the
money and
took on a few scenes for freelance but felt sick at what I saw. They
had added
a voice to a character that hadn't initially been designed to speak and
added
songs and rotoscoping! This was all against the grain of the vision. It
would
be like adding a voice to Gromit in Wallace and Gromit...it's not
supposed to
happen!!! To top it all the animator directing the sequence had never
had any
contact with Richard Williams and had no concept of what he was doing
and fell
back on poor rotoscoping. I was offered some freelance on a commercial
in London
and gladly took it completeing one scene on the Thief taht I had been
given and
handing the rest back as I really didn't want to take part in the
savaging of
this film. I was glad I did and hate to admit to doing one scene on a
sequence
that should never have been added. In truth though most of the other
animators
needed the money, except the supervsising animator that had never met
Richard
Williams and had probably never heard of him and sadly probably never
wants to.
He lined his pockets and the masterpeice was destroyed....until I
believe Roy
Disney came along to help have it released as it was originally
intended.