''Rainbow Parade'' was a series of 26 animated shorts produced by

Van Beuren Studios The Van Beuren Corporation was a New York City-based animation studio that produced theatrical cartoons as well as live-action short-subjects from the 1920s to 1936. History In 1920, the Keith-Albee organization formed Fables Pictures for the ...

and distributed to theaters by

RKO RKO Radio Pictures Inc., commonly known as RKO Pictures or simply RKO, was an American film production and distribution company, one of the "Big Five" film studios of Hollywood's Golden Age. The business was formed after the Keith-Albee-Orpheu ...

between 1934 and 1936. This was the all-color series and final series produced by Van Beuren.

History

Many of the ''Rainbow Parade'' cartoons were one-shot stories with no recurring characters, but several of the films featured Parrotville Parrots, Molly Moo-Cow,

Toonerville Folks ''Toonerville Folks'' ( ''The Toonerville Trolley That Meets All the Trains'') was a popular newspaper cartoon feature by Fontaine Fox, which ran from 1908 to 1955. It began in 1908 in the ''Chicago Post'', and by 1913, it was syndicated nationall ...

, and

Felix the Cat Felix the Cat is a cartoon character created in 1919 by Pat Sullivan and Otto Messmer during the silent film era. An anthropomorphic black cat with white eyes, a black body, and a giant grin, he was one of the most recognized cartoon charac ...

. This series was purchased by Commonwealth Pictures in 1941 and was later syndicated for television, sometimes under the name Kolor Kartoons. In 2021, Thunderbean Animation, in association with Blackhawk Films and the UCLA, released a collection of the first 13 ''Rainbow Parade'' cartoons from the existing master materials, updating the DVD collection from 2009. The second half of the series is available from the best existing prints released by Image DVD/Blackhawk Films/Film Preservation Associates.

Filmography

The first 13 cartoons in the series were all produced in two-strip

Cinecolor Cinecolor was an early subtractive color-model two-color motion picture process that was based upon the Prizma system of the 1910s and 1920s and the Multicolor system of the late 1920s and the 1930s. It was developed by William T. Crispinel and ...

. Starting with 'Molly Moo and the Butterflies', the remainder of the series was produced in three-strip Technicolor.

References

External links

Other Studios : V : Van Beuren Studios : Rainbow Parade
bcdb.com Animated film series Film series introduced in 1934 American animation anthology series Van Beuren Studios American animated short films {{short-animation-film-stub