I love rooting around the Hadley (MA) flea market and especially finding a pile of old Popular Science magazines as they frequently ran articles on animation. Perhaps it was a bit of a nod to Max Fleischer who had been the art director at the magazine.
The problem is that many of articles were either liable to error – such as the one profiling someone other than Jack Mercer as the voice of Popeye or writing about the Kong effects achieved by a man in a costume – or they were incomplete.
When I found the following I was amazed and a little cheesed that the name of the film profiled was not included nor were the names of the creators.
Well, the men who produced this film were German stop motion animators Ferdinand and Hermann Dieh and the name of the film is “The Race of the Rabbit and the Hedgehog." If the hedgehog looks familiar to you it's Mecki the hedgehog, an iconic German character who has appeared in a number of media as well as many. many dolls produced by Steiff.
The film as pictured in these stills certainly looks interested. I can't find out if it was distributed here and a Web search didn't yield a contemporary source for the film, but I bet if I read German I might be able to find it.
Love to hear more information about it.
From June 1939 edition of Popular Science
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