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Medford couple bring Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck into their living room By BILL VARBLE W hen Bill Tope gets his 8mm movie projector fired up, you enter a silent world of flickering black-and-white images. "I haven't run this thing in so long, I've forgotten how to run it," Tope says. He threads the film, turns a switch, the projector hums, and familiar characters spring to life on the screen across the room. Mickey Mouse rides Pluto to flee from an angry moose in the forest. Donald Duck sports a retro look but shows flashes of his familiar temper. With the Academy Awards looming, Tope's impromptu show in the mobile home he and his wife, Dolly, share near Medford affords a glimpse of the art and science of home entertainment in the days before video, DVDs and home theater. Dolly Tope says the films were part of her childhood as far back as she can remember. She's almost 70, so that puts them back to 1937, according to her reckoning. That's the year Disney made the groundbreaking "Snow White," the first feature-length animated film. "Mickey the Moose Hunter" is no "Snow White." When the world's most famous rodent is frightened by a very big moose, he jumps in the air and little lines emanate from him to suggest action, just like those in a print cartoon. In "Donald the Ham Actor," Donald Duck differs from his mature appearance, although his personality is already formed. He's performing on stage at an "orphan's benefit," and he gets angrier and angrier as little orphan mice heckle him and hurl objects that become more and more unlikely. Less than 5 minutes long and about the size of audiotape cassettes, the films came in little cardboard boxes marked Mickey Mouse Cine Art Films. Cameras were slow enough to cause the flickering that furnished a slang term for a movie. Creighton Barnes of Ashland, a writer who worked at Hanna-Barbera and other studios producing scripts for animated films, says the pictures are among those sold by Disney studios in the 1930s to the home entertainment market. In movie theaters even then, film was 32mm. Barnes says Tope's films are collectible but probably not rare enough to have great cash value. "A complete set would be valuable," he says. Dolly says the films came to her from her movie-loving father, Tommy Cosman, a wrecking-yard owner and race-car driver who drove in the Indianapolis 500. The Topes have vintage film of early Indy races and Rose Bowl parades and are converting lots of old family film to videotape. They were married 53 years ago and lived in Medford for some years, then in Colorado and Arizona until Bill, a contractor, retired and they returned to Medford. Dolly thinks there might have been other films in the family, too. "I don't recall any others," Bill says. "You didn't come along until 1949," she reminds him. Reach reporter Bill Varble at 776-4478 or e-mail bvarble@mailtribune.com |
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