One last batch of pre-WWII Japanese postcards for your enjoyment.

 

More of those great 1930s postcards from Japan! Apparently some of these "art deco" ones may have been drawn by artist Takahashi Shunka.

 

Thanks to some of you, over recent days I have become aware of the fascinating world of early Japanese Disney postcards (unauthorized). 

I will be posting some of my favorite ones over the next few days. I wish I could locate a big collector who could scan some of the originals for me.

 

I just picked up this postcard last week. I had never seen it before and I was wondering if anyone of you has any information about it.

Fun and very unusual postcard just found on ebay. Unfortunately the price went too high for me to pick it up.

Remember this postcard of the English Snow White set from 1938 I posted a few weeks ago? A reader of the blog, Peter, found a lot more about it:

[The Dwarfs' cottage was built for the 1938 Ideal Home Exhibition (an annual show sponsored by the Daily Mail newspaper, and held at Olympia in April). Although not featured in the illustration, it is listed as one of the exhibits on this advertisement: http://www.fulltable.com/vts/e/exhib/c.jpg

Here is a review of the exhibition (from The Catholic Herald). The cottage is mentioned, but the reviewer, lacking a young person in tow, was too embarrassed to go in!














http://archive.catholicherald.co.uk/article/14th-april-1938/13/for-those-who-are-thinking-of-marriage-an-ideal-ho

Finally, a quote from Annette Kuhn's academic paper "Snow White in 1930s Britain":

"Among the promotional ideas set out in a UK press book for the film is a short article on the dwarfs’ house and the expertise behind its creation. Alongside pictures of items of furniture from the house is proffered the suggestion that ‘practically everything in this fantastic but charming abode could be easily adapted to a modern country home or mountain lodge’. This rather far-fetched notion may indicate the depth of misunderstanding in Burbank, California, of daily life in Britain in the late 1930s, when not all Britons were strangers to aspirations of domestic perfection. At a time when hundreds of thousands of new houses were being built on the fringes of Britain’s cities, dreams–especially among lower-middle-class women–of the desirable (albeit suburban-modern rather than rustic) home found expression in the annual Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition in London [Ryan 1995]. It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that the 1938 exhibition featured a replica of the dwarfs’ house, its scale suggesting that it was made for small people–dwarfs and children. This suggests something of how Disney’s film and its promotion, at a time when consumerism had barely begun to emerge in Britain, keyed into popular, and perhaps profound, imaginings of ‘home’ and ‘homeyness’ to sell a dream of possessing things–tableware, ornaments, and the like–and above all an ordered and beautiful home. And indeed there is contemporary evidence to suggest that Snow White’s domestic topos and its homemaking scenes made a considerable impression at the time on audiences of all ages, an impression at least as marked as that made by the film’s vividly recollected ‘frightening’ passages."]

This just in from Douglas Marsh:

[A postcard image posted by Didier Ghez has piqued my interest. It depicts the interior of the Seven Dwarfs cottage, with Snow White perched on a tiny balcony inside. But this is a photo of an actual place. The back explains that it was built at "the Olympia," based on the work of Walt Disney.

Here's a quick look at what I was able to find on line. That's the fun part of the internet-- tracking things like this down.

Based on what's out there, I'm fairly certain that this was part of the 1938 "Radiolympia." This was a British trade show that introduced new radios and (later) television sets to the public. It started in 1926. In 1936 television was first demonstrated. By 1938 there was such interest that a complete model TV studio was built, with free exhibition broadcasts by the BBC. (Although you did have to pay 6 pence to go into the studio, rather than watch through viewing windows from the outside.)

The 1938 Radiolympia opened on Wednesday, August 24 with a gala live broadcast.
http://uktvschedules.a.wiki-site.com/index.php/27_August_1938

Part of this has been preserved in silent footage from the collection of Desmond Campbell.
http://grahamhayes.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=recent

At 2:40, there is an appearance by a familiar group of dwarfs!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFRoNw9K8mA

According to one of the participants in the broadcast, Maureen Potter, the Snow White section was performed only for the broadcast, and was not a regular part of the stage show. (It was repeated throughout the run of Radiolympia.)
http://www.reference.com/browse/maureen_potter

So... does this mean that the charming Dwarf's cottage was part of the broadcast studio? Another part of the show? Or entirely separate?

Historians???]

Some of you will enjoy this astonishing English postcard. The caption reads "the House of the Seven Dwarfs as built at the Olympia, 1938 by Richard Costain Ltd. from the Walt Disney & Mickey Mouse Ltd. drawings in the film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.]

 

An anonymous contributor to the blog was kind enough to point me in the direction of this Finnish site which contains quite a few vintage Disney postcards which I had never seen before. Enjoy!

I still kick myself for having missed to buy this extremely rare Swedish "By authorization of Mickey Mouse Ltd." postcard from the '30s, which was sold recently on ebay. Oh well, let´s hope I will manage to locate the buyer and get a high resolution scan at some point.

Actually, now that I think of it, there was something Disney-related linked to my visit to Yosemite. I found this postcard in the small city of Mariposa, right at the entrance of the park. Am I the only one seeing some similarities with part of an attraction originally planned for Disney's Mineral King Ski Resort and now featured in two Disney parks?