Building character(s)

When reading articles about Pat & Mat, you will often find a sentence reading something like this: "It was in the first TV episode Tapety where they got their definitive look." On the face of it (pun intended), that's a mostly correct statement. However, I would say that the final important change to Pat and Mat's look is a subtle one which happened in 1982, specifically in the first of that year's episodes, Sťahovanie. That change would the last one to shape the characters into the ones we know and love today.

The handymen before and after 1982 were identical ― except for their faces. The faces were redesigned at that point; the eyes became thinner, their shape going from thick ovals to either an almost rectangular shape or a small circles, depending on the puppets used. The mouths were also changed. Before, different expressions were used to convey the two's emotions, with a circle representing shock or surprise and :( representing what it usually does, sadness and disappointment.

Mat going from sad...

... to confused in a matter of frames

the duo shocked at the end of Grill

Even though they were possibly made to conserve time, these changes brought about several fresh ways to handle the characters and imbued them with more comedic potential. When their eyes became smaller, Pat and Mat became less goofy, a bit more aware of what they were doing. This gave their DIY failures an even bigger punch as the "heroes" could be held even more responsible for their complete failures.

Brief message

I would just like to mention that two new features were added to the blog a week ago. Now you can follow it directly via e-mail: every time I post something, you will receive that whole post in your inbox. To subscribe, enter your e-mail and click Submit. That will open up a pop-up where you need to tick a Captcha and accept the subscription. Then, go into your inbox for the activation e-mail and click on the provided link. Also, you can contact me directly with the message form on the right. That message goes directly to my inbox.

Secondly, if any of you have trouble commenting on my posts, please try to do so in another internet browser or send me an e-mail. Blogger has been having some trouble with embedded comments in the last year. Even I cannot comment on my own posts in Firefox! But, I can do it in Chrome and on my smartphone.

I would also like to mention that I've spent last night editing the Wikipedia page for Pat & Mat. I've added information about the 50th episode and some other details and also cleared up some misinformation that was there, for instance the origin of Pat and Mat's names. To anyone who stumbled upon this blog from Wikipedia, welcome!

Currency mismatch

5 lipa coin in my coin collection

Somebody from the Anima studio must have visited the Croatian coast and was left with a 5 lipa coin they couldn't use any more, or was thinking ahead enough to figure out it would be a good prop for the studio.

When Pat and Mat break open their piggy bank in the Wheels (Kolečka) episode, we can briefly see an authentic Croatian 5 lipa coin.

The coin was perfect for filming as it's very small, only 18 mm in diameter. Of course, that also makes it almost worthless, being worth just 1/20 of the Croatian kuna.

However, there's a saying that goes: one man's trash is another man's treasure. Can some of you perhaps identify any of the other coins?

 

The scene following that one features a subtle gag that's only understandable to Czech and Slovak audiences and one which I became aware of only when doing research for this post. If I am correct, what Pat pulls out is a 100 korun banknote, but one from Czechoslovakia, which was withdrawn in 1993, ten years before this episode was made. Almost as valuable as his 5 lipa coin, then.

Perhaps I should have gotten rid of these sooner...

Lubomír Beneš interview (1994)

Lubomír Beneš, February 1995 (photo: ČTK)

Lubomír Beneš died in 1995, so there aren't many interviews with him around. However, I was able to find two newspaper articles which feature interviews with Beneš from 1994, a year before his death. They were conducted when seven new Pat & Mat episodes were completed and premiered. My thanks for these articles go to Tereza Hunkařová from the Masaryk University of Brno, who included them in her bachelor thesis titled Večerníček jako dramaturgické specifikum v televizní tvorbě pro děti a mládež, or Večerníček as a dramaturgical specifics in television production for children and youth, which is available at this link. She in turn got the newspaper clippings from Ateliéry Bonton Zlín, so my thanks go to them as well. I've translated the articles from Czech, so if there are any mistakes, feel free to comment on them.

The first article is from Blesk magazín:

“What is: ... and it is!” - Blanka Kubíčková’s interview with Lubomír Beneš

The clumsy, inventive egghead screwball pair: puppet do-it-yourselfers Pat and Mat. But first, a word from director Lubomír Beneš and artist Vladimír Jiránek. In a studio where seven episodes were recently filmed, the two did not want to talk to me. Lubomír Beneš did so for them instead.

When were these two handymen born and how did they get together?

Vladimír Jiránek and I started inventing hijinks in 1976 because we wanted to let off steam from what was happening around us, from totalitarianism. We drew and designed until we came to the look of the two figures. They were a little different than the audience knows them today ― without caps and more plump. The first part was called Kuťáci. We wanted to continue shooting, but Krátký film did not allow us to do so. The reason given was that Kuťáci are just ordinary entertainment and not appropriate for the cultural policy of the time. However, Slovak Television showed interest in further episodes, and in the end we filmed twenty-eight episodes for them.

Repurposed sets

Pat & Mat's 1984-85 cottage on exhibition - or is it? (source: unknown)

Constructing the scale models used in filming of stop motion animation, as well as making all the props, is an elaborate and time-consuming process. The drill Pat & Mat use, as we've already mentioned, is as old as the characters themselves. If it works and looks good, there's no need to change it. As such, some of the sets used for the series are actually repurposed sets from other shorts or series.

A certain part of Lubomír Beneš's Král a skřítek (The King and the Goblin), his version of the King Midas tale, revolves around a fountain with a golden dragon on top. Here's what it looks like in that 1980 short:

Four years later, the fountain resurfaced in a short scene from the opening of Klavír, ...a je to! episode #25. This time, the top was changed to a statue of Mat (?) ― yes, I don't really understand it either.

Interestingly, an iconic set of the 1979-85 series had also been repurposed.

an intruder at the house?

DVNR disfigurement

"Where the hell is half of my hand?!"

The 2002-04 Pat & Mat episodes are a bit of a technological hybrid. They were the last episodes to be shot with analog cameras on 35mm film. Those films were then transferred digitally and (not counting the pilot, Puzzle) opening and closing titles were added on to the digital copies. The results were not satisfying. The first batch of episodes (especially those from the Patmat studio) have somewhat washed out colors and the transfers are full of dirt, which made the episodes look older than they were and they were, in fact, brand new. The results improved from episode #63 onward, but the digital processing team at Ateliéry Bonton Zlín, the producer of the series, obviously still had  reservations. They tried to fix the situation with a pretty bad solution: DVNR.

As Anime News Network writes, DVNR or Digial Video Noise Reduction is a digital filter that's applied to video to remove video noise, film dirt, and other undesirable artifacts from the image. DVNR mostly combines two methods: comparing each pixel to its neighbors to figure out if that pixel is a tiny speck that's standing out too much and comparing the same pixel location in neighboring frames to see if it disappears. DVNR can have beneficial effects on live-action films, but using it for animation is not recommended. In animation, many things move faster than they would in real life, leading the program to think that they are in fact dirt. The program then tries to remove those items as it believes they are obstructions to a clearer picture.

DVNR was applied to four episodes, #72-75. Those four episodes are: Fax, Jahody, Hrají golf and Někam to zapadlo. I first noticed something was wrong with the video while watching Jahody. There seemed to be something wobbly with the animation and I couldn't figure out why. A slower playback discovered that the episodes suffered from bad DVNR. Whenever there was rapid movement, the computer thought it was actually excessive dirt and tried to correct it, ruining many frames in the process. The most affected were Pat & Mat's hands, with parts of them obliterated when they moved in quick succession. See the results for yourselves:

Fax

Mat's kulich missing its top

 DVNR does not just take away, but also adds where it shouldn't.

Here Mat receives an extra limb:

Unreleased episode Karty and the dissolution of aiF Studio

Introduction

Pat & Mat's history is full of great stories and tidbits. Marek Beneš, the current director of the series, often tells the story of how he went to a market in Iran while promoting the series there and stumbled upon a seller with unofficial Pat & Mat merchandise. The vendor repeatedly tried to assure him that Mat was in fact the one with the yellow shirt, completely unaware of who he was talking to. However, there is one story that captures the imagination of anyone who even superficially looks at the history of the series and it's the story of the would-be 50th episode of the series, Karty (or Playing Cards in English), a fully completed episode from 1998 which never officially saw the light of day. It is like one of the duo’s ridiculous inventions ― prepared, animated, completed and then never seen, making it completely dysfunctional. 

our heroes playing cards in the eponymous episode

Naturally, as soon as word got out to that this blog exists, a request to cover the history of the episode was requested. This text will cover the episode’s history and the dissolution of aiF Studio that produced it. But first, let’s take a closer look at the mythology built around this episode in the preceding years.

How did we get here? Info about the episode online

Karty’s existence would have probably been mostly unheard of before 2014 had it not been mentioned on the aiF Studio’s official website back in the day. According to the website, Karty was supposed to have been the first in a series of 52 new episodes which would also have been dubbed. This was an insanely ambitious project and would have taken several years to complete. However, the website, available to this day, but on a different address, also contained an important remark: the episode was not authorized for release or distribution. 

aiF Studio's mention of Karty

The Pat & Mat fansite, which served as the most informed website about the series during the early 2000s, also found the episode to be a complete mystery, except for the fact that two snippets of it could be seen on a Korean website. We’ll get to that later. 

Info about the episode on the fansite

The official website of the Patmat studio, opened in 2001 by Marek Beneš, ignored the episode’s existence completely, as it does to this day, which is given the episode’s status completely logical. This was how things remained until sometime around 2006 the website of the studio animation people uploaded these four screenshots of the episode.