The Daydreamer (film)
''The Daydreamer'' is a 1966 stop motion animated–live action musical fantasy film produced by Videocraft International. Directed by Jules Bass, it was written by Arthur Rankin, Jr. and Romeo Muller, based on the stories of Hans Christian Andersen. It features seven original songs by Jules Bass and Maury Laws. The film's opening features the cast in puppet and live form plus caricatures of the cast by Al Hirschfeld. Among the cast were the American actors Paul O'Keefe, Jack Gilford, Ray Bolger and Margaret Hamilton (both from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's 1939 classic film '' The Wizard of Oz''), and the Australian actor Cyril Ritchard as the voice of the Sandman. Three of the voice actors: Burl Ives, and Canadian actors Billie Mae Richards and Larry D. Mann, were the voice suppliers for Videocraft's stop motion Christmas television special, ''Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer'' (1964). Some of the character voices were recorded at RCA Studios in Toronto, Ontario, under Bernard Cow ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Jules Bass
Julius Bass (September 16, 1935 – October 25, 2022) was an American director, producer, lyricist, composer, and author. Until 1960, he worked at a New York advertising agency, and then co-founded the film production company Videocraft International, later named Rankin/Bass Productions, with his friend, Arthur Rankin Jr. He joined ASCAP in 1963 and collaborated with Edward Thomas and James Polack at their music firm and as a songwriting team primarily with Maury Laws at Rankin/Bass. Early life Bass was born in Philadelphia on September 16, 1935. During his teenage years, he caught scarlet fever and nearly died from the disease. He attended New York University before being employed by an advertising agency. Career Bass started working with Arthur Rankin Jr. at the American Broadcasting Company in 1955. Rankin was an art director and Bass was a copywriter. The pair initially made television commercials, before moving onto television series and movies when they established ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Ray Bolger
Raymond Wallace Bolger (January 10, 1904 – January 15, 1987) was an American actor, dancer, singer, vaudevillian and stage performer (particularly musical theatre) who started in the silent-film era. Bolger was a major Broadway performer in the 1930s and beyond. He is best known for his roles in '' The Wizard of Oz'' (1939) as the Scarecrow and in Walt Disney's holiday musical fantasy '' Babes in Toyland'' as the villainous Barnaby. Bolger was the host of '' The Ray Bolger Show'' on TV from 1953 to 1955, originally titled ''Where's Raymond?'' Early life Bolger was born at 598 Second St., South Boston, Massachusetts, into a Catholic family of Irish descent, the son of James Edward Bolger and Anne C. née Wallace. His father James was first-generation Irish, and was born in Fall River, Massachusetts; his mother "Annie" who had a large Irish family, was born in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. He grew up and attended school in the Codman Square section of Dorchester neighborhood ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Billie Mae Richards
Billie Mae Richards (née Dinsmore, November 21, 1921 – September 10, 2010) was a Canadian voice actress, who also appeared onstage and on television. She was the voice of Rankin/Bass' version of the character Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer from 1964 to 1979, and of the Kid in the radio series ''Jake and the Kid''. Early life and education Richards was born Billy Mae Dinsmore, in Toronto to parents Garnett and Eva May (Stanton) Dinsmore. Enrolled by her ambitious father in dancing lessons as a toddler, by the age of five she was in a stage show with WW1 veterans.Schaefer, William M"Billie Mae Richards: The Voice of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" billiemaerichards.com; retrieved December 17, 2008. She enlisted in the Royal Canadian Navy and performed in the show ''Meet the Navy'' that travelled across Canada and in Europe. She attended the Lorne Greene Academy of Radio Arts in Toronto. Career Richards worked at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, speaking and singing in ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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The Wizard Of Oz (1939 Film)
''The Wizard of Oz'' is a 1939 American Musical film, musical fantasy film produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). An adaptation of L. Frank Baum's 1900 children's fantasy novel ''The Wonderful Wizard of Oz'', the film was primarily directed by Victor Fleming (who left the production to take over the troubled ''Gone with the Wind (film), Gone with the Wind''), and stars Judy Garland, Frank Morgan, Ray Bolger, Bert Lahr, Jack Haley, Billie Burke and Margaret Hamilton (actress), Margaret Hamilton. Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, and Edgar Allan Woolf received credit for the screenplay, but others made uncredited contributions. The music was composed by Harold Arlen and adapted by Herbert Stothart, with the lyrics written by Yip Harburg, Edgar "Yip" Harburg. Characterized by its use of Technicolor, fantasy storytelling, musical score, and memorable characters, the film was considered a critical success and was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Academy Award for Best Pictur ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc., also known as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures and abbreviated as MGM, is an American film, television production, distribution and media company owned by amazon (company), Amazon through MGM Holdings, founded on April 17, 1924 and based in Beverly Hills, California. MGM was formed by Marcus Loew by combining Metro Pictures, Goldwyn Pictures, and Louis B. Mayer Productions, Louis B. Mayer Pictures into one company. It hired a number of well known actors as contract players—its slogan was "more stars than there are in heaven"—and soon became Hollywood's most prestigious film studio, producing popular musical films and winning many Academy Awards. MGM also owned film studios, movie lots, movie theaters and technical production facilities. Its most prosperous era, from 1926 to 1959, was bracketed by two productions of ''Ben-Hur (1959 film), Ben Hur''. After that, it divested itself of the Loews movie theater chain, and, in the 1960s, diversified ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Al Hirschfeld
Albert Hirschfeld (June 21, 1903 – January 20, 2003) was an American caricaturist best known for his black and white portraits of celebrities and Broadway stars. Personal life Al Hirschfeld was born in 1903 in a two-story duplex at 1313 Carr Street in St. Louis, Missouri, and moved with his family to New York City in 1915, where he received his art training at the National Academy of Design. He married chorus girl Florence Ruth Hobby in 1927; the couple separated in 1932 and divorced in 1943. That same year he married actress Dolly Haas. Haas died in 1994, aged 84. They had one child, a daughter, Nina (b. 1945). In 1996, he married Louise Kerz, a theatre historian (b. 1936). Career In 1924, Hirschfeld traveled to Paris and London, where he studied painting, drawing and sculpture. When he returned to the United States, a friend, fabled Broadway press agent Richard Maney, showed one of Hirschfeld's drawings to an editor at the '' New York Herald Tribune'', which got Hirschf ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Fantasy Film
Fantasy films are films that belong to the fantasy genre with fantastic themes, usually magic, supernatural events, mythology, folklore, or exotic fantasy worlds. The genre is considered a form of speculative fiction alongside science fiction films and horror films, although the genres do overlap. Fantasy films often have an element of magic, myth, wonder, escapism, and the extraordinary. Prevalent elements include fairies, angels, mermaids, witches, monsters, wizards, unicorns, dragons, talking animals, ogres, elves, trolls, white magic, gnomes, vampires, werewolves, ghosts, demons, dwarves, giants, goblins, anthropomorphic or magical objects, familiars, curses and other enchantments, worlds involving magic, and the Middle Ages. Subgenres Several sub-categories of fantasy films can be identified, although the delineations between these subgenres, much as in fantasy literature, are somewhat fluid. The most common fantasy subgenres depicted in movies are High Fantasy a ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Musical Film
Musical film is a film genre in which songs by the characters are interwoven into the narrative, sometimes accompanied by dancing. The songs usually advance the plot or develop the film's characters, but in some cases, they serve merely as breaks in the storyline, often as elaborate "production numbers". The musical film was a natural development of the stage musical after the emergence of sound film technology. Typically, the biggest difference between film and stage musicals is the use of lavish background scenery and locations that would be impractical in a theater. Musical films characteristically contain elements reminiscent of theater; performers often treat their song and dance numbers as if a live audience were watching. In a sense, the viewer becomes the diegetic audience, as the performer looks directly into the camera and performs to it. With the advent of sound in the late 1920s, musicals gained popularity with the public and are exemplified by the films of Busby Ber ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Live Action
Live action (or live-action) is a form of cinematography or videography that uses photography instead of animation. Some works combine live-action with animation to create a live-action animated film. Live-action is used to define film, video games or similar visual media. According to the Cambridge English Dictionary, live action " nvolvesreal people or animals, not models, or images that are drawn, or produced by computer." Overview As the normal process of making visual media involves live-action, the term itself is usually superfluous. However, it makes an important distinction in situations in which one might normally expect animation, such as when the work is adapted from a video game, or from an animated cartoon, such as ''Scooby-Doo'', ''The Flintstones'', '' 101 Dalmatians'' films, or ''The Tick'' television program. The phrase "live-action" also occurs within an animation context to refer to non-animated characters: in a live-action/animated film such as ''Space Jam ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Animation
Animation is a method by which image, still figures are manipulated to appear as Motion picture, moving images. In traditional animation, images are drawn or painted by hand on transparent cel, celluloid sheets to be photographed and exhibited on film. Today, most animations are made with computer-generated imagery (CGI). Computer animation can be very detailed Computer animation#Animation methods, 3D animation, while Traditional animation#Computers and traditional animation, 2D computer animation (which may have the look of traditional animation) can be used for stylistic reasons, low bandwidth, or faster real-time renderings. Other common animation methods apply a stop motion technique to two- and three-dimensional objects like cutout animation, paper cutouts, puppets, or Clay animation, clay figures. A cartoon is an animated film, usually a short film, featuring an cartoon, exaggerated visual style. The style takes inspiration from comic strips, often featuring anthropomorphi ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Stop Motion
Stop motion is an animated filmmaking technique in which objects are physically manipulated in small increments between individually photographed frames so that they will appear to exhibit independent motion or change when the series of frames is played back. Any kind of object can thus be animated, but puppets with movable joints (puppet animation) or plasticine figures (''clay animation'' or claymation) are most commonly used. Puppets, models or clay figures built around an armature are used in model animation. Stop motion with live actors is often referred to as pixilation. Stop motion of flat materials such as paper, fabrics or photographs is usually called cutout animation. Terminology The term "stop motion", relating to the animation technique, is often spelled with a hyphen as "stop-motion". Both orthographical variants, with and without the hyphen, are correct, but the hyphenated one has a second meaning that is unrelated to animation or cinema: "a device for automatical ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Embassy Pictures
Embassy Pictures Corporation (also and later known as Avco Embassy Pictures as well as Embassy Films Associates) was an American independent film Production company, production and Film distributor, distribution studio responsible for such films as ''The Graduate'', ''The Producers (1967 film), The Producers'', ''The Fog'', ''The Howling (film), The Howling'', ''Escape from New York'', and ''This Is Spinal Tap''. History Founding The company was formed in 1942 by Joseph E. Levine, initially to distribute foreign films in the United States. The company entered film production in 1945, co-producing with Maxwell Finn the documentary ''Gaslight Follies'', a compilation of silent film clips narrated by Ben Grauer. Success Embassy found success in 1956 bringing the Japanese film ''Godzilla (1954 film), Godzilla'' to the American general public (in a re-edited version), acquiring the rights for $12,000 and spending $400,000 promoting it under the title ''Godzilla, King of the Monst ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |