Philips On Parade

Story

A Philips orchestra travels the world, bringing luxury, convenience and gaiety everywhere. The subtitle was therefore: ‘Wherever they play, depression gives away to gaiety.’ (Wherever they play, depression turns into gaiety).

A film full of visual gags.

Clever stylisation

This film differs greatly in style from the usual Geesink puppets. Staff jokingly called it the WC-roll film. While this is going a bit far, the stylisation is clearly sleek and low-budget. Despite lower labour costs in the 1960s, it had still become quite an expensive operation to model both all the orchestra members and the people in the crowd in the famous Dollywood fashion. The result is a fresh, innovative style. This must be attributed entirely to art director Max Keuris. He was also responsible for developing the narrative into a storyboard, in which he was able to incorporate numerous visual gags.

Max Keuris is not often mentioned in the credits of films, but his contribution to the studio was considerable. It is not without reason that he directed pretentious films by client Philips on three occasions. Each time with a surprisingly new style. Max Keuris is responsible for the design of The Traveling Tune (1961) and now On Parade (1964). Three years later, art director Max Keuris would realise a superlative production with the anniversary film ‘Philips Cavalcade - 75 Years of Music (1967). All these promotional films are 10 minutes in length.

Travia

The editors have a promotional poster, aimed at cinema operators. This one reports that the film was even available on the format TODD-A.O. This format is a 70 mm film, i.e. 2x larger and 2x higher than the usual formats. This 70 mm copy was optically enlarged from the 35 mm original. The added value of this was that the cinema operator could seamlessly connect this pre-film to a main film of this same format without switching equipment. Besides, the advertiser, Philips, was itself a producer of, among other things, the 70 mm film projectors.   Philips was the builder of the one legendary film projector DP70 for which Philips was awarded a Technical and Scientific Oscar in 1963. From that point of view, it was a logical decision to release the film On Parade on the 70 mm format. The moviegoer had probably never before seen the puppets so large on the big screen. 
The film was not rented, but sold for Hfl 1,500 (€ 750). The underlying reason was, that Philips was concerned about the high additional costs of having the screening copies produced in-house. History does not tell whether this form of film distribution was a success.

Credits

• Title:  Philips On Parade
• Client: Philips
• Year of production:  1964
• Duration: 9 minutes
• Composer: Ger van Leeuwen
• Performed by: Unknown
• Art Director: Max Keuris 
• Animation: Cor Icke / Günter Mandle
• Camera: Pieter Merkx, Roel Boulengier
• Puppets: Harry Tolsma, Ton Foederer e.o
• Props:  Theo Doreleijers e o.
• Format: 35 mm, Technicolor  / TODD-A.O. (70 mm blow-up)

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