I admit it, I love film. I love the look of it. I love holding it. I love un-reeling a portion of it and looking at each frame with my magnifying glass. Yessir, I love it. In fact,
I've been collecting cartoons on 16mm for the past few weeks.
Don't get me wrong. I love digital. I think they're awesome. But that doesn't mean film can't be awesome. As far as old cartoons go, this is probably the best way to watch them. Especially with theatrical cartoons. By having it projected, you can watch it the way people decades ago did. Okay not really. They were projected from 35mm and were shown on a much larger screen. But watching it from a 16mm print is closer than through TV or even digital projection.
Film collecting, however, is not for everybody. For one thing, they're expensive. The price depends on what the title is and which characters appear in it. A good print of a cartoon starring Bugs Bunny, for example, can go up to $100. Sometimes more. Even a print of a Pink Panther cartoon can go up to $50.
And you have to know how to thread a projector. A mistake can cause the sprocket holes to be damaged. And then there's the maintenance of the projector itself. Is the bulb working? Are there dust in the fan
On a positive side, film, when properly taken care of, lasts. Hell, even a badly taken-care of film can still be played in one form or another. A film has to be really,
really damaged in order for it to be rendered unplayable. Usually the worst you'd expect from film are scratches on the picture, a splice here and there, and depending on the film stock, the color fading. A scratch on DVD can render the whole disc useless.
So do I recommend it? Only if you're very serious about it. And you pretty much have to really like old cartoons, too, since they're the only ones available on film in the first place. (the latest you can get cartoons on film are those made in the eighties).
But hey, I think film rocks, and if you ever see a film screening going on in your area, why don't you check it out?
(photograph from
this site; although my projector is that exact same model: Kodak Pageant AV-126-TR)
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