The Big Bad Jewish Wolf -- CASE CLOSED

Fredrik Ekman d91fe at pteranodon.pt.hk-r.se
Tue Feb 15 23:44:33 CET 1994


On February 6, David Gerstein wrote:
> 	I talked to my friend Jerry Beck, an animation historian in
> Los Angeles, and at last found out the whole story about Zeke Wolf's
> Hasidic disguise in 1933's THE THREE LITTLE PIGS.
> 
> 	Here's the reason for our confusion -- there were *three*
> versions of the film!
>
> [stuff deleted]
> 
> 	[The first version] is one of the rarest cartoons of all time.
> Mr. Beck doesn't even know if the Disney Archives has a copy.  He has
> seen a French version at the Museum of Modern Art.

Here's a little something I found in NAFS(k)uriren 17. I suspect
that this is where Mattias got his original info as well. The text
is from an article about a visit to the Disney Archives. It was
written by Olof Siverbo and has been translated from Swedish by me.

 "Among many, many other things, [David R Smith] told us a clearly
interesting anecdote about the short film "Three Little Pigs" from
1933. In the version we know of this film there is a scene where
the wolf is disguised as a brush salesman. Dave told us that this
very sequence is reanimated as late as the fifties! In the original
version the wolf was disguised as a distinctly _Jewish_ salesman,
who also spoke silly Jewish language! The original version was
unfortunately not available for viewing at the Archives - all film
is archived elsewhere in the studio - but Dave had gone through the
trouble of finding the original sketches for the sequence, and
after having viewed these we were not at all surprised that this
part of the film had to be redone. According to Dave it should be
very easy to see that the sequence is made later once you know
about it."

This seems to indicate that the original version is indeed NOT at
the archives, but could be elsewhere.

  /F




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