Forty Years Later, How Motor Cars and Other Living Things Can Find Happiness in the Dallas Freeway System Gets a Public Screening

Since last we posted mention of Texas Archive of the Moving Image's trip through town this weekend, I see a few Dallas-related golden oldies have been added to the collection -- the initial 82 has blossomed to 121. And that doesn't include Dallas City Archivist John Slate's latest find in the vaults: How Motor Cars and Other Living Things Can Find Happiness in the Dallas Freeway System, a long-lost 1970 cartoon narrated by none other than the late, great Mel Blanc.

Says the archive's outreach and education coordinator, Elizabeth Hansen, Slate found the film sitting on the shelves in the Office of Emergency Preparedness "just a few days ago." It was digitized at the Angelika only last night for a screening at 8 tonight, just before State Fair unspools at Mockingbird Station.

"It's a little faded," she says of the $26,400 price-tagged production, "but looks pretty awesome." She also sends a link to this 1970 News piece about the 25-minute short, screened initially for the city council, in which the star is " whimsical little automobile named Candide, who, accustomed to frolicking about the byways and country lanes of the wide open spaces, is one day suddenly swept into the Dallas Freeway System." Sooner than later, How Motor Cars ... will wind up on the TAMI Web site. But why wait?

Hansen reminds as well: Gather your home movies and assorted Texas-related odds and sods, no matter the format, and take them to the Angelika beginning at 10:30 this morning. She and the archive's crew will digitize gratis, so long as the archive can keep a copy.