Night Descends on Treasure Island

Back in April 2013, I mentioned the Traveltalks short Night Descends on Treasure Island, which I had recently seen between movies on TCM. I think I did a fairly good write-up no it back then. Half of so of it is an extremely interesting look at a light show that was created for the Golden Gate International Exposition of 1939/40 on an artificially-constructed island in San Francisco Bay. I found the light show surprisingly stunning even 70 years on. The other half of the short is a look at the artworks on loan from various museums for the exposition. For viewers in movie theaters back in the day, this part was probably more interesting than it would be today, when we can just look up all of the paintings on Google's image search. Needless to say, I'm mentioning Night Descends on Treasure Island because it's on the schedule again tonight a little after 11:30 PM, or just after Captain Blood (9:30 PM, 119 minutes plus an intro/outro from Greg Proops). Other than the title, Night Descends on Treasure Island has nothing to do with pirates.

Night Descends on Treasure Island was actually not the first time James A. Fitzpatrick filmed a World's Fair for MGM. It was the second of a two-part series on the Golden Gate Exposition, with the first part unsurprisingly looking at Treasure Island by day. But two years earlier, Fitzpatrick had gone to the Paris World's Fair of 1937 and made Paris on Parade. Night Descends on Treasure Island did get released as an extra on DVD; I'm not certain about the other two. I can't find any of them on Youtube, either.

This airing also reminds me that I really need to update which posts have the Traveltalks tag.