toys – This Film Is 100 Years Old

These two films are both vaguely Christmas themed short news items from the Topical Budget newsreel in 1925.

The first item here is sent to us live from Santa’s factory, featuring some slightly bored old men and women assembling toys and making some terrifying looking dolls (see above). The second item features some camels (see below) and a joke so flimsy I feel kind of embarrassed for whoever originally made it, 100 years ago.

And that’s all the Christmas news (from 1925).

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Notes

1. I watched these on the BFI Player (Santa; Advice)

2. Topical Budget were one of the most successful newsreel companies (after Pathe and Gaumont), making over 10,000 different films/stories between 1911 and 1931.

3. You can read a bit more about them here on the BFI site.

4. Hopefully the rest were higher quality than this bloody camels one, though.

5. Even the exclamation mark in the title annoys me a bit.

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Film Information

Title: Santa Claus Factory
Year: 1925
Duration: 1 minute
Watch: BFI Player

Title: Our Advice This Festive Season!
Year: 1925
Duration: 1 minute
Watch: BFI Player

Playmates is a short film in which two actors dressed up as children show off the latest in groundbreaking animatronic toys from 1922.

Playing out like very early test screens for JF Sebastian’s workshop in Blade Runner, this is all usurprisingly horrifying, combining both the enduring disquiet of animatronic dolls with the utter mortal terror of human adults dressed as and pretending to be very young children. Completely monstrous.

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Notes

1. I watched this on the BFI Player.

2. I like the way these sort of horrifying animatronic toys have barely changed in a century.

3. Motorised beasts lumbering uselessly around in circles on a table in your local toy shop every Christmas.

4. Only occasionally received as presents.

5. But somehow endlessly disappointing whenever they are.

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Film Information

Title: Playmates
Year: 1922
Duration: 2 minutes
Watch: BFI Player