1960-Life is nothing without Philips

Story

Thieves steal all Philips equipment from a family, but thanks to cooperation between citizens and the police, everything is returned. Although, everything? One of the thieves shows at the end a small portable radio he has been keeping back.

Trivia

Joop Geesink once started his career as an animation film producer with cartoonist/comic artist Marten Toonder. Many know Marten Toonder's work thanks to the cartoon characters from Tom Puss and Ollie B. Bommel. These cartoon characters live in a world populated exclusively by animals, who behave like humans.
The similarity with the characters is remarkable. This feeling may be provided by the fact that some 10 years earlier (1949), Toonder studios had to close the commercial cartoon studio. Many employees transferred to Joop Geesink's Dollywood. This included cartoonist/designer/animator and art director Henk Kabos. It was precisely he who was responsible for the design of ‘Life is Nothing without Philips’.
Yet the relationship to Toonder's work will not have been decisive. It is assumed that choosing to use animals for this film was a pragmatic choice. The client, Philips had no doubt discussed beforehand that this film would have a worldwide circulation. After all, the message is universal. Using animals as humans creatively avoided a multicultural problem. It also explains the wonderful mix in architecture. In the midst of the forest, conventional houses stand next to stilt houses. By this combination, it was presumably assumed that cinema viewers all over the world could identify with the characters.

Multilingual

This film copy shows that the film circulated in multiple language versions. The opening titles are in English, the tagline at the end is in German ‘Friend of the Family’. For each language, an appropriate alternative was used to match the local experience as much as possible.

Mickey Man

It is also notable that the clip is ‘interrupted’ halfway through by an integral fictional TV broadcast of Mickey Man. This is by cartoonist Børge Ring (1921 - 2018). He worked for Toonder Studios from 1952 to 1973. This completes the link to Toonder again. The reason for adding 1-minute fragment is not known. It cannot be ruled out that this cartoon fragment was available, without a destination. By adding it in this expensive puppet film production, it offered a bit of variety for the audience, but could significantly reduce the minute price. No documentation exists on this.

André Popp

A name we hear more often in Dollywood films is that of French composer André Popp. He made a big name for himself with the soundtrack of Piccolo, Saxo and Co. (1959). Later, he would also provide music for ‘Philips Cavalcade, 75 years of music’ (1966) and the catchy film ‘Philips On Parade’ (1964).

Cycling

Years ago, the editor of this article had the honour of speaking several times with animator Cor Icke. In those, this film also came up once. The topic was that it was always difficult as a filmmaker to empathise with what the customer ultimately expects to see. Cor Icke explained that he once made a film about a hippo on a bicycle. That was a ‘*** job’ to do. The hippopotamus puppet was top-heavy and the cycling scene was very long. So it took a lot of effort to get the hippo to cycle.

When the film was finally shown to the client, his first and spontaneous reaction was, ‘But .... that's not how a hippo cycles at all!’. Animator Cor Icke, who was present at the screening, responded with: ‘Alright, I'll go to the zoo this afternoon to see how he does cycle.’ :-). The scene remained unchanged in the film.