Please note: if an earlier link doesn't work, it may have changed following an update! Check the Category Labels in the side-bar on the right! There you can find animator drafts for sixteen complete Disney features and eighty-six shorts,
as well as Action Analysis Classes and many other vintage animation documents!

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Three Peg Bar

As one can see in the table on my paper-and-pegbar page, the Disney studio first added three pegs with a center peg for the 1935 short film Mickey's Garden.

However, already in February 1927, a patent was filed (granted May 1929) that describes the three peg system. It also gives good reasons to implement this system. The inventor named is Frank Lyle Goldman, who according to this page was Max Fleischer's best friend! (If this is the same person, but what would be the odds there were two of that name in animation at that time on the East Coast?)

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Those of us who "grew up" using good old ACME pegs, or you East Coast-ers using Oxberry pegs, may have wondered why one professionally would not just use two pegs which seems simplest. Well, here is the explanation. Having manufactured aluminum animation discs myself back in 1983, I must admit that this did not come as a surprise to me. Obviously, the pegbars that we were used to had flat outer pegs (and yes, one could lay a ruler over the outer Oxberry pegs), but the principle is the same as in above patent.

Do we know when Fleischer started using flat-round-flat holes in their animation paper? Did the Disney studio have to pay a licensing fee for using the three pegs in addition to their regular two round pegs?

[Still really busy - not much time for blogging!]

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1 Comments:

Anonymous David Nethery says...

Odd to think that Schlesingers/Warner Bros. Cartoons continued to use a two-hole peg system up until about 1954 or '55 , when they finally switched to Acme pegs.

Did any other studios use a two-hole system past the 1930's ?

Example of Warner's 2-hole paper c. 1954

Another Warner's drawing from 1954 - 2-hole paper


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Wednesday, September 22, 2010 at 4:59:00 PM PDT  

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