IN: Review: For animation buffs it's a must, but even general audiences will enjoy THE CAMERAMAN'S REVENGE, a very early example of 'pixilation' by the hard-working pioneer Wladyslaw Starewicz. Starewicz and his helpers painstakingly manipulated a cast of flexible insect figures to tell this story, paving the way for the likes of Willis O'Brien, George Pal, Ray Harryhausen, and legions of modern digital effect creators.

THE CAMERAMAN'S REVENGE is only about 10 minutes long, but packs in lots of amusing detail as the story follows the amorous adventures of two beetles from their home to a nightclub, a hotel, a cinema, and, eventually, a prison cell. There are two brief dance numbers at the nightclub (performed by a frog and a dragonfly), a scuffle between a beetle and a grasshopper, and a large-scale donnybrook at the cinema, which ends with the projector bursting into flames. Pretty elaborate goings-on for 1912, when even John Bray and Winsor MacCay were just getting started, and Walt Disney was still in grade school!

It's interesting to note, too, what an impact the alteration of a silent movie's title cards can have on the story being told. I've seen two versions of this film offered by two video companies, and watched them back-to-back, and although the image content itself is almost identical, two different sets of intertitles tell two very different stories. (And the plot outline someone provided above tells yet a third story, which suggests that there's another version out there somewhere.) The British Film Institute's print, which has rhyming intertitles, tells the story of two sibling beetles, each secretly married, who hide this information from one another in order to inherit their late father's fortune. The other, Russian print, tells a simpler story of married beetles who are each guilty of infidelity. In the Russian version Mr. Beetle visits his girlfriend at the "Gay Dragonfly" nightclub, while in the English version brother Bill Beetle visits his wife at the music-hall. Personally, I prefer the straightforward-- and spicier --Russian story; the BFI version tries to cram too much plot into what should be a simple tale, and some of the rhymes are a bit awkward.

Still, in any rendition, THE CAMERAMAN'S REVENGE is a delightful film, and would make an ideal lead-in to that other great animated work which features beetles, YELLOW SUBMARINE.
What is this review like?
OUT: positive

IN: Review: As I write this review in 2008, we are mired in a remake culture. Movie studios seem determined to ruin as many classic films as they can with thoroughly pointless updates including 'King Kong, 'The Wicker Man' and practically every film that ever starred Michael Caine. This lazy remake mentality is not a new phenomenon, however, as 'Dough for the Do-Do' proves. An entirely pointless colorized version of Bob Clampett's surreal masterpiece 'Porky in Wackyland', 'Dough for the Do-Do' sucks the life out of the original by splashing colour all over Clampett's original footage and adding some lame new footage overseen by Friz Freleng. Freleng was an entirely unsuitable director to be tampering with Clampett's source material, although in truth no director could hope to come close to Clampett's inspired insanity. Inevitably, then, 'Dough for the Do-Do' is nothing more than the raping of a classic with an appalling new title attached. For cartoon fans like myself, its equivalent to a colorization of 'Casablanca'.
What is this review like?
OUT:
negative