The Rankin-Bass animation studio is best known for the 1964 television special, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, as well as The Little Drummer Boy (1968), Frosty the Snowman (1969), and Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town (1970).
But in 1960, it produced a 130-episode television series called The New Adventures of Pinocchio using the same "Animagic" stop-motion process used in its later shows. Here's episode 1. It's very cute, with an adorable cricket and beautiful mid-century style sets. I've never seen it before.
From Wikipedia:
A total of 130 five-minute "chapters" were produced in 1960–61. These segments made up a series of five-chapter, 25-minute episodes.[2] The show was deliberately designed to not emulate Walt Disney Animation Studios' popular 1940 version of Pinocchio in character design or characterization; the puppet wore a T-shirt and shorts instead of a Tyrolean hat, the Cricket (not Jiminy Cricket) had a high-pitched, grating voice, and Geppetto was calm and deliberate, unlike Disney's excitable and absent-minded woodcarver
I don't want to complain about the flavor of free ice cream, but I wish the video was higher quality.
