The Globe Trotters

This is a really rather entry in the Mutt and Jeff series and the last that Bud Fisher himself (along with Charley Bowers) would produce.

There is nothing whatever amazing or wonderful about the sonorisation and colourisation carried out by the Modern Films Sales Corporation sometime in the early thirties. It is a two-colour system but a really rather poor one, Kromochrome. The two-colour systems had been around since the 1910s and Technicolor two-colour was far superior to this (see the surviving Toll of the Sea from 1922)and by the thirties three-colour Technicolor was already available (see the surviving The Viking from 1928). So by this time many much better natural colour systems already existed but would have been doubtless too costly for this kind of exercise.

Several Mutt and Jeffs were sonorised and colourised at this time but, where they still exist, the original silent black and white versions are distinctly superior. This films seems only to have survived in its remade form but Sick Sleuths, for instance, also survives in black and white and Westward Whoa seems to exist in a sonorised version that has not been contaminated by Kromochrome. Some other Mutt and Jeff films survive in their original form but many alas were redrawn, sonorised and colourised for television in the 1970s.

I've seen several Mutt 'n Jeff cartoons from the 1920s and the laughs in "The Globe Trotters" don't hold up as well as they did in other films in the series. Now this doesn't mean it's bad--it just lacks the humor I liked in the other films. So, in this sense, the film is a bit boring. HOWEVER, it's also really amazing to watch and I recommend it--simply because of the wonderful use of Two-Color Technicolor. This is an early type of color that seems pretty primitive when seen today since it is made using three strips of overlapping film--black & white, orange-red and blue-green. Often, the films just look VERY orangy and green. However, this is one of the better ones I've seen, as the colors are unusually vivid and pleasing. It is also possible this is Cinecolor--another type of two-color system. IMDb doesn't indicate which it is--but it does show that folks were watching things in color a lot earlier than you might imagine. One other innovation which was added later were sound effects and the bizarre sounds that were meant to indicate Mutt or Jeff was talking--a bit like the way adults sound in "Peanuts" cartoons! Often in the late 20s and early 30s, they took old silent cartoons and added these effects. Because of this and the color, it is a pretty amazing product for 1926--even if the cartoon itself is just okay.