Before the Oscars

Another day where I really couldn't think of anything good to post about. There are any number of movies I've seen recently and probably ought to do a full-length post about, and in fact I thought about doing a full post on Buster Keaton's Seven Chances. But the DVDs on which it's available are all fairly monstrously priced. It would be bad enough to get a two-hour movie at a price like $30, but Seven Chances runs a little over 50 minutes. And it's not in the public domain either, having been released in 1925.

So I did a Youtube search on "Fatty and Mabel", since Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle and Mabel Normand made a bunch of short films together back in the 1910s, and anything before 1923 should be in the public domain. Youtube duly spat out a couple of videos of Fatty and Mabel Adrift, which I hadn't seen before. The videos all seem to be in a 16:9 aspect ratio, although from not having actually watched the movie yet (streaming video doesn't play nicely with my satellite internet connection), I couldn't tell if it's pillarboxed or stretched. The one I've posted below looks pillarboxed, but the establishing shot photo makes it bit hard to tell, especially from the other versions available. (Does Youtube allow 4:3 uploads any more? I don't post to Youtube, of course.) I also don't know the proper original tinting, or if there even was any tinting.