Animation Artifacts &Comic Art &Hubley 10 Feb 2010 09:20 am
Roll-A-Book Letterman
- The recent comments on Michael Barrier‘s post about the Dumbo Roll-a-book prompted Milt Gray to tell of his creating a homemade version of the device, which is well described in Barrier’s article.
Of course, any kid of the ’50s knows this device well. I’d made them hundreds of times, and, in fact, found that by drawing the pictures I could make my own “films” for the homemade Roll-A-Book. Getting an opaque projector meant that these rolls of picture stories could be projected, and that’s just what we, my brothers and sisters, did daily. Every night one or more of us always had some kind of funny home-drawn cartoon story to project – one image at a time. And they went on for hours – large rolls of pictures.
When I went to work for the Hubleys, I became the Letterman guy. After working on a couple of seasons of Letterman animated cartoons, John got a gig to draw comic strips for The Electric Company Magazine. That meant I was doing the strips which were adapted from the shorts as they aired in the series.
I designed these strips as mini-movies advising kids to create home-theaters essentially Roll-A-Book devices. (See sample illustration above.)
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on 11 Feb 2010 at 8:43 am 1.Stephen Macquignon said …
The mini movie projector reminds me of a book I still have from when I was a kid called “Simply Fun†the book is full of craft projects for young children to do using house hold items. In the book there is one called “Have a Comic Strip Show†very close to the “Mini Projector†I remember cutting a lot of my moms shoe boxes apart to use as a viewer
For my moving comics
on 11 Feb 2010 at 10:04 am 2.bill said …
Any “Letterman” pieces you post bring back warm childhood memories for me. I loved those shorts, so any “behind the scenes” pieces you put up are always appreciated.
on 12 Feb 2010 at 4:03 am 3.Eddie Fitzgerald said …
Wow! You did a great job on those Roll-A-Book strips! They’re really fun to look at!