About four months ago ...
And just arrived at my door today. Thanks to a certain always-wonderful person for converting it to DVD for me, but boy did you take your sweet time with it. Thanks.
I was knocked out by what I saw - it's amazing to see this material at long last.
The biggest find is a complete scene from the never-finished feature, The Amazing Nasruddin.
This is the movie that eventually became The Thief, but boy, at this stage, it was very very very far indeed from being The Thief. Completely bizarre to see.
The scene is the bread scene, and if you've seen the "Deleted Characters" section of the Recobbled DVD, you'll have seen me narrating this scene.
But now we have it for real. Some of the scene is only there in storyboard form - mostly shots of Nasruddin himself, and of the King of Persia (proto-King Nod). But most of the scene is fully animated and colored in - although we only have it in pan & scan black and white.
The most startling thing is the Grand Vizier Anwar, the character who became Zigzag. He looks completely different in these fully-animated scenes. He also SOUNDS different. The voice is being done by Kenneth Williams, and it has a vaguely Vincent Price quality, but isn't nearly as interesting as Price's take on it.
Price was hired in 1968 or so, so this footage has to predate that. I know most of it was pencil animated in time for the 1966 documentary "The Creative Man," so this dates this footage to 1967 or early 68.
This is from the 1970 documentary "One Pair of Eyes: Dreamwalkers," narrated by Idries Shah. There is an interview with a young Richard Williams talking about Nasrudin.
The scene is slow paced and doesn't work - the character of Nasrudin, who comes off as clever and cheeky in print, hasn't translated to screen because he and all the other characters talk very very very slowly ... the whole thing is very slowly, methodically paced .... they all have odd accents and sound a bit like Kenneth Williams. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that he was doing all the voices here, although I'm sure he wasn't ... I suspect Stanley Baxter and others filled in. Certainly Kenneth is doing a bunch of voices though.
The animation is much more limited than in The Thief, but you can see the seeds of its style in the way characters move ... here the characters tend to move and bit and stop, as in limited animation .... kind of odd.
The Grand Vizier does have rings which glow. It's very clear that Richard took this original design and then made him look more like Vincent Price to become Zigzag. (This character does appear in one of the Nasrudin books, as a jerk Grand Vizier type who Nasrudin plays a trick on.)
This VHS was sent to me by Tahir Shah, son of Idries Shah.
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Anyway, that's not all that I got today. I also got a DVD of a PAL VHS tape I once had in my possession, but I sent to a certain someone months ago to have transferred to DVD.
This is a VHS tape sent to me by Roy Naisbitt.
It starts off with the two Clapperboard specials from 1972, which I already have copies of thanks to H.L.
After that, we get a beautiful collection of Richard Williams Studio commercials. This includes a Frosties ad with Tony the Tiger and two Fanta ads with Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Goofy. A couple of these ads you'll have seen before, some you won't. The Tic Tac ad is here and so is the Frazetta-inspired "Sex Appeal" cologne ad (Conan type warrior on a rock). There's an ad for Cup O Noodle showing Samurai playing baseball, oh, it's all good stuff.
Annoyingly, the tape teases us occasionally by showing a few frames of some well-known commercial before cutting to something else. It feels like this tape was cut down from a larger collection. Too bad.
An excellent collection, and unlike the last collection, I can verify that these are ALL Williams studio commercials.
Finally, we have the Warner Bros Licensing trailer/showreel for The Thief. From around 1990 I'm sure. For those keeping track, this is the third trailer we've found for The Thief, not counting my own Recobbled trailer.
* Arabian Knight trailer (Miramax)
* Allied Filmmakers "Thief" trailer (Pre-Miramax Calvert Cut)
* This one ...
This trailer contains a few shots that don't appear in the final film. Innnteresting.
One shot is of The Old Witch saying something like "This is a difficult spell to lake." Seems like she should be saying "break," but she says what sounds like "lake." She says the same word in the "Thief Who Never Gave Up" documentary footage, so hm.
She is obviously talking about curing the spell placed on the Ogre Prince, whose entire character was cut out.
Anyway, this shot features an older character design for the Witch. She's seen with this design when examining the Ogre Prince in the Thief Who Never Gave Up documentary. It's drawn slightly more simply, more in line with the old Nasrudin footage. (There is a quick shot of her grabbing her shaking knee in the Calvert WIP which also seems to use this character design.)
It's ALMOST the same design, just a slightly different art style.
But there are two other shots in there that you won't see elsewhere.
First, we've got a test shot of Tack walking. This seems to be the animation from when Zigzag is saying "This lowborn cobbler of no worth ..." early in the film. Tack is shambling around. However, Tack is alone in the shot, placed on a temporary background looking out on The Golden City. A quick test shot then, done probably for this trailer, as this is the only shot of Tack in there. (The only shot of Yumyum in this trailer is also the first "test shot" ever done of her - "Oh rose of the land" as she walks away into shadow".) Clearly, Tack and Yumyum were just starting to be animated at this point, which dates this trailer to 1989 or 1990 or so.
The third shot of note is a shot of a brigand laughing. This shot is in the final film, but this version of it is a bit different. In the 1972 Clapperboard documentaries, you see Dick animating this shot (and probably voicing the brigand himself) ... you see the brigand alone on a background. In the final film, the shot is shorter (the 1972 version shows you more of the brigand before he laughs), the brigand has been redrawn to have much much wider shoulders, and there are brigands all around him.
Well, the version of the shot in this trailer has the much wider shoulders, with brigands all around, but it LOOKS like the 1972 version. It's longer at the beginning, and the extra footage shows that it's more amateurishly drawn than the rest of the film, showing it was done way back when. Basically just a longer version of the final shot though, I think. With brighter lighting or something.
The music for the trailer is mostly Scherezade .... if memory serves they also blare Carmina Burana. They mistakenly credit Dick with creating The Pink Panther ... Friz Freleng will have a few words with Warners about that. (And of all people, Warners should know The Pink Panther.)
The quality isn't all that great. Like this entire tape, the reel has slightly static-y color. The video is too contrasty so you get sickly bright colors. But it's watchable. (Better than my copy of Animating Art anyway.)
There are a few shots in this trailer of The Thief which only appear in the workprint otherwise (the entire bouncing off awnings scene), and the quality is probably slightly better than the Emule workprint, but yet I don't immediately feel like replacing the Emule workprint shots with this. That'll give you an idea of what this looks like.
I will be releasing this clip from Nasruddin on the Recobbled Cut Mark II DVD, in place of my old reconstruction of the same scene.
HOWEVER
I've already burned about 30 copies of the Mark II cut with the old bread scene on there, so sorry guys, I will be sending those copies out first, and only updating the bread scene afterwards.
I don't want to update the cut AGAIN for the mediocre quality clips in this trailer grumble grumble grumble.
I'll be releasing the commercials and Warners trailer on their own disc, but I'll probably remove Clapperboard from it and reauthor it with other stuff, or something.
Anyway, yeah, good news eh.