It wasn’t their lack of persuasion from United Artists that caused the absence of a selection of this Chaplinesque characters antics in the Derann sales catalogues, no this ‘Pink Pests’ name was constantly brought into every conversation we had with our contact at UA, (head of TV sales… as they didn’t have a 16mm/8mm sales division), and his Argentinian boss from the States (who we called Ralph). No both of them, Ralph in particular, really wanted us to take a mixture ten or more of their cartoon shorts, which included not only their most popular character but also ‘The Inspector’, ‘The Ant and the Aardvark’, ‘Roland and Rattfink’, and ‘The Texas Toads’ shorts, all from the DePatie–Freleng Enterprises studios. For a time there was even a feeling that by rejecting the cartoons we may lose the whole UA deal, but thankfully that never happened. Walton Films had a selection of Pink Panthers (just where they got the rights, still puzzles me), as did Marketing Film of Germany, Film Office in France and the Italian distributor Avo Film, in fact Avo Film’s stand at Photokina was always plastered with Pink Panther images. No the truth of it was Derek and myself were were not particularly big fans of this cartoon character. The range from Walton Films sold very poorly and we believed that this was because the UK Super 8 collectors felt the same as ourselves. Were we correct or did we make a big mistake?
The Pink Panther Cartoons
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Comments
3 responses to “The Pink Panther Cartoons”
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Ged, I think you were right to pass on the DePatie-Freleng cartoons; they’re just weren’t something collectable like say, “Tom & Jerry”. Just my opinion of course but I dare say you didn’t miss out on huge sales.
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Liked the Pink Panther and Inspector cartoons. Bought a few of the Walton prints. That selection was ample they did get a little repetitive.
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I do still have a couple of Super 8mm sound Walton Pink Panther cartoons in my collection . Quite good colour and sound . However i was not overly keen on collecting them all . The reason being that they had previously been ran to death on the TV Pink Panther Show and i had shown and seen quite a lot of them during our Children’s Saturday Morning Club at the Odeon when i was a projectionist there . We also showed some of The Inspector and Ant and The Aardvark cartoons there too .
I wonder how many copies Walton Films sold of those Pink Panther and Inspector cartoons . So i find it hard to speculate if you made a mistake or not .Regards
David Hardy
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