This project was quite the labor of love, considering that the original was created back in 1974 and I grew up seeing it after Thanksgiving every year on our local CBS affiliate station, WTVF. Charles DePriest was an employee at that station, and took it upon himself to produce the piece almost entirely by himself. We’re talking hand-painted cell animation here. Some members of his family helped, and you can see some of their beloved toys and even their pet cat in the toy store scene.
The original began showing its age when the station went HD and changed its broadcast aspect ratio from 4:3 to 16:9 back in 2007. This not only caused an already somewhat blurry digital transfer to get even worse due to upscaling, but also left the flanks bare. I’d thought for years about how to remaster the piece and possibly add more content to the sides, but could never come up with a solid plan.
Somewhere in the middle of 2021, I had the idea of exporting each frame, bringing those frames into ProCreate on my iPad, and seeing how difficult it would be to recreate the artwork in 4K resolution. Initial tests looked good, so I moved forward with the project. I reached out to Mr. DePriest, trying to both gauge his interest in the remaster and to see if he had any original cells I could borrow and digitize. There were a handful of areas in the artwork where the detail had been so lost that I’d no idea what was originally there, and I’d hoped he could supply some input. He didn’t seem very interested at the time, so I worked with what I had. By November, I had a draft of the remaster to pass around and the feedback was positive. After a few tweaks I called it finished, and NewsChannel 5’s Chris Davis put together a nice story to explain the history of the piece and my efforts to properly digitize it. You can view that story here.
It began airing on Thanksgiving, and I heard from Mr. DePriest shortly thereafter. There were a few areas in my remaster that he wasn’t happy with. The cat’s face wasn’t right, and the details on some of the buildings were either missing or altered drastically. I wasn’t surprised at this, considering the low resolution of the reference material. Fortunately, he was able to send me high quality scans of a few of the original painted cels which I cleaned-up and used to replace the elements in question.
With those revisions complete, he and I both feel the remaster is complete and as accurate as it could possibly be. Hey, if Charley’s happy, I’m happy. 🙂