"Your Name Here" (1960)... brilliant!

[Joel Cairo]

Having spent far too much time as youth watching educational and industrial films that taught me the importance of aluminum sulfide in everyday life, how to be a good citizen, how to survive a direct atomic blast by ducking and covering, etc., I was ecstatic to find that someone had the sense to make fun of these bits of celluloid history in a way that looked so... authentic.

Well, I should have known... who better to poke a stick at the inflated premise of these movies than the people who made them!

That's right-- The Calvin Workshop, probably the leading industrial film producer in the nation back in the 40s and 50s, occasionally produced satiric in-house parodies, which would be featured at company get-togethers. Nothing racy, mind you, just a little something to wink at the viewer and say "Ridiculous-- isn't it?"

Of course, since the production of these gems invariably used the same production staff, cast and crew involved in the company's other projects, the effect of viewing one is delightfully... surreal.

"Your Name Here" is a somewhat loopy take on the budgetary pressures that were always present when dealing with industrial clients, which the company proposes to eliminate through the development of an "all-purpose" [read: generic] business film. The scary part is, the finished product is just good enough that someone might have taken them up on it!

Time, however, has not been kind to the original film elements of "Your Name Here"... almost certainly duplicated on Eastmancolor stock, the surviving print is visually, a faded mess. For all intents and purposes, it might as well be sepia-toned black and white. After I saw this little jewel, though, I knew there was no way I could leave it like that, so my restoration polishes up the image, returning much of the original color and depth-- allowing all of us to view the movie in a form that it hasn't been seen for nearly 50 years.

I've attached a few images to give an idea of the "before and after" results of the restoration... I'm guessing you'll know which is which!

The entire restored 10-minute short is now online at HungryFlix, where you can have your very own iPod-formatted copy for $1.99 (a portion of which will be donated right back to the Forum!):

http://www.hungryflix.com/my-movie.php?my=871

Remember-- "You are about to witness history in the making!!"

Hope you like it, folks!

-Kevin