Jungle Prestige

Content

This film is about friendly neighbours. Puppet film set in Africa where natives take over a western woman's pressure cooker in exchange for local resources.
It is unlikely that this mode of advertising, now more than half a century ago, would be used. However, the commercial message is clear. Unfortunately, the film can no longer be seen in Technicolor. This is due to the mediocre quality of the videotape this film was digitised from.

Trivia

The film shows great similarity in design to ‘Lunch in the Jungle’ (1953). The exact year of production of Jungle Prestige is not documented, but it is believed to be around 1953. It is not known which film was produced first.

It turned out to be very efficient of the Dollywood studio to carefully store puppets and props. Dollywood had a large storage facility for puppets and props. After use, puppets were catalogued and stored. The directors had a photo album of the puppet archive at their disposal and could draw on it. Reusing a puppet from the archive saved on design and production costs.

In the 1950s, advertisers and the public were unaware of specific details of advertising campaigns from other countries. Therefore, it would never have been noticed that puppets and props were reused in different films. After all, the internet did not yet exist at that time.

When looking at Geesink's extensive set archive, one would quickly assume that every conceivable set was in stock. In practice, this was often not the case. Set pieces often had to meet specific technical or artistic requirements, which meant that the archive copy was unusable and a new one had to be made. Puppets were often reused as extras in sets.