Quaker oats

Content

Singing, boxes of oatmeal march through the village. This attracts the attention of a little boy. At the end, the bus of Quaker Oats says, ‘Nothing is better for thee than me.’ (‘Nothing is better for thee than me.’)

Trivia

Puppets and sets were produced in the new paperdoll technique. This was a new speciality of the studios. The big breakthrough of paperdoll technology came with the long Philips commercial The Traveling Tune (1961). This short film shows well what the paperdoll is capable of. The name ‘paperdoll’ stands for the conjunction of paper and doll (puppet). Paperdoll was another fun variation on the studio's name: Dollywood, a corruption of Hollywood and the word doll. In reality, these so-called ‘paperdolls’ were not really made of paper, but of a metal base plastered with paper. With this technique, Joop Geesink once again established his own unique style in the world of animation, where fierce competition had been developing over the years.

Full-time

The man who specialised in the production of these ‘paperdolls’ at Dollywood, Jaques van der Boom, had a full-time job producing all the zinc models. He was therefore nicknamed ‘Mr Paperdoll’ within the studio. That name stuck with him for a long time.
The tune for this commercial is from ‘A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum’, music: Stephen Sondheim, from the song ‘Comedy Tonight,’ (1962). As no production records for this film have survived, it is assumed that it was produced a year or two after the musical was released.

Pins and holes

For realisation, metal replicas (zinc) of the packaging were produced. They were fitted with an original painting print. An ingenious mechanism was built into the metal skeleton that could ‘run’ the box frame by frame. Each box has its own mechanism with adjustable pins and pins to wobble, hop or turn. In the shot below, it is easy to see that the shadows betray that the boxes are hollow. No video editing programmes existed back then to retouch the film image.

The insides of the paperdoll 'human' figures were also hidden from view on camera. The ‘skeleton’ was zinc, cut to the puppet's contours. This material offered the possibility of soldering or even screwing the detachable limbs. When the figures were made entirely of paper, this sturdy construction was lacking.