Author Archive: Retro

At the Hunting Lodge there arrives a great braggadocio who boasts that he, while in Africa, only went in quest of big game, showing a lot of skins as trophies of his expeditions. Out he starts, accoutered in the most approved fashion, to add to his already extensive collection by bringing back some more embryonic floor rugs, and he came near getting them, or rather, they came near getting him.

A magician creates a butterfly woman and then a spider woman.

Action scenes of early automobile racing highlight this story of Papa’s efforts to thwart Mabel’s romantic infatuation with a race car driver.

Balduin, a student of Prague, leaves his roystering companions in the beer garden, when he finds he has reached the end of his resources. He is scarcely seated in a quiet corner when a hideous, shriveled-up old man taps him upon the shoulder and whispers vaguely of a big inheritance for Prague’s finest swordsman and wildest student if he will enter into a certain agreement. Balduin rebuffs him, satirically asking his weird companion to procure him “the luckiest ticket in a lottery or a doweried wife.” The old man goes off chuckling and thence onward persistently shadows Balduin, exerting a sinister influence over him, while Balduin is still disconsolate under the frowns of fortune. The Countess Margit Schwarzenberg, hunting with her cousin, to whom her father has betrothed her, meets with an accident. She is thrown over her horse’s head into a river, but Balduin, who has been directed to the spot by his evil [...]

Through a rapid succession of drawings, ingenious disguises and soft dissolves, the director portrays a quick-sketch artist who transforms to various characters according to the static outlines on his chalkboard.