Kid Auto Races

OK. I'm past 'Making A Living' and onto the greener pastures of 'Kid Auto Races'...

I have three versions of this - The Blackhawk print (on laserdisc), WH Prod. 'The Pest' (on 16mm - unfortunately, missing the ending!), and the one that's on the Madacy set (Exhibitor's Pictures? No company listed). Of them, the latter has been re-edited and had completely unrelated crowd shots stuck in there as well. 'The Pest' looks great, and I'm convinced the Blackhawk was mastered from an incomplete 35mm copy of the WH Productions issue (too bad this print is missing the last minute... I wish they had tagged it on from a different source print!).

It seems that these are the only prints out there. Anyone heard of anything else? And I'm thinking that even the WH Productions version has been re-edited, because there's one shot of two cars coming down the road towards us that repeats in the film -and I don't think an original Keystone would have had a repeating shot of ANYTHING (didn't they cut up the original film at that time to make the negative? If so, there COULDN'T be footage that repeats!). Uh, oh.

Also note that the little Robinson book reproduces a scrapbook page that has an original introductory title card from Kid Auto Races and a still from a shot that no longer exists in the film. God knows when these scrapbooks were made, or who assembled them, or if that print (or copies of it) still exist anywhere... but it's the only sign of an original Keystone print that I know of.

I remember when Blackhawk released this on Super 8/16mm (with A BUSY DAY). The description in their catalog said it was the best quality they'd ever seen on a Chaplin Keystone. I bought it to see for myself- and was blown away by the quality.

I do too, but I assume there would have been a drastic shift in the quality, which is why they chose not to do it.