Animation on TCM, and a schedule note

Tonight on TCM, they're running a special feature called Back to the Drawing Board, a salute to vintage animation. They're going to be running three collections of shorts whcih in some cases go back almost a hundred years, followed by four feature-length films, of which the most famous might be the Fleischer brothers' 1939 version of Gulliver's Travels, which is listed on the schedule for 1:30 AM. I have to say I know very little about the shorts that make up the first half of the evening's schedule, although I have a feeling I saw one or two of them the last time TCM had an animation festival. I just don't remember when that festival would have been.

The 1:30 AM start time for Gulliver's Travels is probably right, although some of the earlier starting times may be a bit off. The first studio honored, at 8:00 PM, is Winsor McCay, and the schedule lists those shorts as running 113 minutes. However, the next set of shorts is schedule at 9:45. That and the other block of shorts are listed as being just short of an hour, although by the time the person sitting down with Robert Osborne to discuss the shorts finishes, the whole thing will run over an hour in each case, which is why those blocks were -- correctly, I think -- given 75-minute slots in the schedule. My guess is that the second block will start at 10:00 PM, with the third starting a bit after 11:00 and catching up in time for The Adventures of Prince Achmed (12:15 AM, 67 min).