Yep, I intend to scan and OCR the "Majestic Fool" Nasrudin screenplay for online viewing. I've requested that Mr. Dyson send it to me as an unbound stack of paper, so I can feed it into my document scanner - the same scanner I use for scanning the animation drawings for my Dance With Grandpa pilot.

Thief "did you notice" fact of the day .... in the scene where Zigzag discovers One Eye's camp, Phido blinks and his eyes blink literally sideways.

Ed Roberts has sent in big photos of a rare piece of promotional merchandise for "The Thief Who Never Gave Up" .... it's one of those little handheld games where you roll little ball bearings into small holes. In this case, the image is the Thief walking a tightrope to get the golden balls - and the ball bearings are three different sizes and represent the golden balls! Lovely ... the back is the Thief Who Never Gave Up logo.

I have some good news today, in that two more DVDs have been added to the collection .... hell, I should start calling it an archive at this point; this is historic stuff.

Both discs are from someone who's been nice and provided stuff before.

Here's a rundown of the rarities he's found for us this time round.

Well, the biggest news is that he saved many pencil tests from The Thief .... some 50 minutes worth of video. More on this in a moment.

We also have a whole bunch of interviews with Richard Williams on British TV from when Roger Rabbit came out. He talks briefly about his work on the film. Russell Hall shows up in one segment ... the great Williams Studio veteran animator who gave us Jessica Rabbit. Robert Zemeckis and Charles Fleischer also appear.

One interview from a year after Roger Rabbit is all about The Thief. We see Dick drawing the Thief character, and he discusses how he intends the film to be a masterpiece in the traditional sense of the word .... how when you feel you've mastered an art, you create a polished piece to show what you've learned.

We have Dick accepting his award at the British Film Awards .... a special achievement award from the Evening Standard. It's presented by Jeremy Irons and a member of the royal family, and a bearded Bob Hoskins is in the audience.

There's a lovely Air Canada commercial in there, and a series of introductions Dick gave to two nights where films by Canadian animators were shown. Dick's enthusiasm for filmmakers like Norman MacLaren is evident.

There's a much better print of Oscar Grillo's wonderful short Seaside Woman (music by Linda McCartney and Wings) ... This short has nothing to do with Richard apart from that Oscar used to work at Williams studio, but it keeps showing up on these DVDs, and it's welcome there. =)

He has also provided a decent print of I Drew Roger Rabbit .... nothing to write home about but better than my old one.

There's the start of the German titles to The Liquidator, but it quickly cuts off.

Anyway, let's talk about this 50 minutes of pencil tests, because there are some interesting oddities in there. The material is mostly Thief scenes, and we see the same shot over and over and over as it develops and timing is changed.

So I won't get into that, but there are some interesting things that make you go ... hmmm.

As always we get some extra footage that's not in the movie. I can verify that there's a lot of extra stuff in that Warner Bros. trailer, and we get one of their extra shots in pencil test here - the Thief falling down away from camera. We see more as he hits himself in the groin, and we see more as he's pulling up his robes before trying to run for the umpteenth time.

There is live action reference footage at several points. An Indian actress from a Bollywood film is used as reference for Princess Yumyum, who has not yet been designed. A shot of this Indian actress walking away matches the first test shot of Yumyum, which we get to see in pencil test form. There is also a shot of the Indian actress dancing. The actress looks Indian whereas Yumyum has more caucasian features.

There is live action reference footage for some shots of the war machine ... a tower falling down, and a tank going into the city. This all seems to be from D.W. Griffith's silent film Intolerance. The live action reference was not really followed but you can see the influence.

There is also live action reference of the camera falling down a "castle" into the moat ... apparently the Thief's perspective as he falls down into the water. Dick may have shot this himself - you don't see anything like this in the film. Crazy POV stuff.

In the final film, in Tack's first appearance, there is a very distant shot of him sleeping which pans over to The Thief. You get a very close look at these cels in this reel, and it's clear that this animation was a very early design of Tack. He still has his "Hawaiian Punch guy" look about him.

An early design of Tack is also evident in a test shot of the nurse walking by Tack. (Actually it's the same drawing of an early Tack I found in Andreas Wessel-Therhorn's collection.) Apparently one idea was to introduce Tack with the nurse walking by him with her bananas. She walks around him a bit.

There's also a "test" design of Tack in a sketch watching the Thief pole vault over the minaret.

The final designs of Tack and Yumyum aren't present in this reel.

But I'll tell you what IS present .... pencil tests of a few shots I REALLY wish I'd had when I was putting my Recobbled Edit together.

Pencil tests of a few shots I thought were never animated because they're only storyboards in the workprint.

The introduction of Yumyum ... the flower ballet.

Okay, so, Dick intended the introduction of Yumyum to start with the beautiful shot that's in the final cut of fully-rendered flowers dancing out over the city, then we see Yumyum's hands holding them, see her put the flowers into a little garden of flowers by her window, and then see her at the window peeking mysteriously through the flowers.

(I had to suggest this in my edit using still images.)

I thought that apart from the flower ballet this was never animated. But there are plenty of beautiful pencil tests here for these couple of shots. Nothing that's quite finished, but it's lovely to see.

You see many developing pencil tests for the flower ballet itself, and what's surprising here is that the flowers appear with stems, suggesting that Yumyum is holding them - in the workprint you can't really see stems on the flowers, giving it a more magical appearance.

Then there is a longer shot of Yumyum's hands holding the flowers (from her POV), which is beautifully animated as she continues the flower ballet, and there is a shot of her putting the flowers back into the box carefully and then peeking out ... this material is in early "test" mode ... her hand movements are graceful and properly animated but the background and her appearance is just being roughly tested.

So, very nice to see. If there's a Mark III, I'll have to do something with this material.

At one point, there is a strange moment where they seem to be doing camera tests for titles for another film entirely.

This is what the titles say:

A Film by John Patrick Shanley

Once there was a guy named Joe
Who had a really crappy job

And they lived happily ever after

The End

--- Very strange. I wonder what film this was .... John Patrick Shanley was at one point asked to help write the Thief script, but apparently little became of his involvement.

You can spot an odd alternate logo for The Thief and the Cobbler at several points.

I was surprised to see Richard Williams' OLD pencil drawings of a brigand laughing (which we know were finished as early as 1972) show up in this reel ... but this was a test because the animator was redrawing the shot to give the brigand much wider shoulders. So we see the tests for the bigger brigand too.

Then I saw a sequence which surprised me quite a bit.

Okay, we've got tests from the first scene with Phido and Zigzag. Most of this seems to be old footage being looked at again.

There's a closeup shot of Phido crashing into the table - different from what's in the movie - he crashes right toward us and we see that his design is the more baby like, small beaked, round headed design we've seen in some footage.

Then we get what I'm going to call the "Robin Hood Phido" scene. This scene is OLD, I'm going to guess late seventies. I believe it to be the work of Art Babbit.

We get the scene of Phido sliding down the table (screen left), stumbling and knocking over all kinds of stuff before dipping his burning self into liquid and dousing the fire.

Except there's something different this time. First off, Phido has the "tall pointy head" design we've seen in a couple of shots (Animating Art mostly). And his motion is completely different. Phido is walking and stumbling like a human being. He seems to be much more of an anthropomorphic bird, like a character out of Disney's Robin Hood. Obviously Dick's orders were to reanimate him to move like a bird, not a human.

Zigzag's hand then comes into shot - he painfully plucks two feathers from Phido and dips them into ink like quill pens.

Then, we get the most surprising find. A LONG Zigzag monologue, and I wish I knew what he was saying. This shot goes on for ages, unbelievably long. It's all animated in a wide shot, Zigzag has an earlier design to him and his body is drawn mostly as a stick figure, the way Art Babbit was known to draw him. The staging seems to conform to him saying "And with her as my royal bride, I'll rule in public sight" in the final film, but instead the shot goes on for something like a minute, with him doing Shakespearean type acting. He is holding the two feather "pens" throughout, and then throws them like darts at what is either two posters of Yumyum, or posters of Meemee and Yumyum. He throws them directly at their vaginas in fact.

Aaaand finally, we've got something which I think is going to force me to redo my DVD slightly, YET again.

More footage of our favorite deleted character, the enchanted ogre prince Bubba!

And this is a doozy. The pencil test here begins with something we've seen before .... every animated shot I've ever seen on Prince Bubba has actually been the SAME shot .... of the old witch examining the Prince, saying he's been hit by the "double whammy." She opens up his eyes, and sees a movie of a silhouetted dancing girl inside. (This shot appeared in the "Thief Who Never Gave Up" documentary.)

So we've got the full pencil test of that (at first it's just Bubba but then the witch appears partway through).

But then the test KEEPS ON GOING. We get a much longer version of the shot. After examining the prince, the witch looks shocked. She says something (no idea what), and then jumps off of him. And the shot ends.

Neat.

Yep, neat.