Season in Tyrol

Regular readers know that I like to mention the Traveltalks shorts that show up frequently on TCM. Today I'd like to mention another travelogue that's not a Traveltalks short: Season in Tyrol. It's airing early tomorrow morning at 5:39 AM, or just after Rascal (4:00, 85 min).

Season in Tyrol was produced at Warner Bros. in 1969, well after the end of James FitzPatrick's career, and at a time when I would have thought the studios for the most part weren't doing shorts any longer. So when I first saw this one come up in the schedule some months back I thought it was going to be a featurette on the making of something like Where Eagles Dare which, if I'm not mistaken, was filmed in part in Austria. But no, it's just a straight up travelogue, looking at the four seasons in Tyrol, and many of the customs that the people of Tyrol had been practicing for centuries during those four seasons.

I'm not certain why this short was actually made, but I'm glad it was. It's a reasonably nice look at Tyrol, with some visuals of the mountains that would really be gorgeous if the short were restored. If memory serves, TCM showed this in a 4:3 aspect ratio, although IMDb doesn't have any information on the original aspect ratio. (I'd guess the standard then was 1.85:1 since Cinemascope filming had ended, but I don't know if whatever shorts were produced generally were made in widescreen.) I don't know how much the old traditions are still practiced; a lot has changed since the radicalism of the late 1960s. Just like the Traveltalks shorts, this is a good look back to a time when international travel wasn't as easy as it is today.