Pat & Mat DVD by aiF Studio (1999)

My thanks for this post go out to Jürg Schaeppi of the Pat & Mat Fansite, who has enabled me to see this DVD for the first time.

There have been many Pat & Mat DVD releases over the years, but this one is probably the most interesting. It is also the first. In 1999, DMP (Digital Media Production) from Prague released a DVD with ten episodes produced by aiF Studio.

Here is the original press release posted by the DVD's manufacturer Digital Media Production, found on an old version of their defunct website that can be accessed through Wayback Machine. It came out in support of the DVD's premiere on DVD Hall '99 which was an event opened in Prague on October 4, 1999.

The most successful Czech puppet series was created between the seventies an nineties in aiF studio. It was created by popular Czech caricaturist Vladimír Jiránek, experienced director Lubomír Beneš and composer Petr Skoumal. Pat and Mat are neighbors. Their friendship is strengthened not only by their desires to always produce, do or repair something, but also by the awkwardness that makes everything go wrong. Luckily for them, there is no lack of humor and cleverness with which they always cope with their clumsiness.
The two-handymen grotesque is being introduced for the first time in DVD format. These are the episodes present: Billiards, Safe, Windsurfing, Biscuits, Model Builders, Paving Brick, Convertible, Parquetry, Cyclists and Pipe.
The DVD Pat and Mat can be ordered via DVDexpress for 790 CZK.

790 CZK feels quite a lot to me, but maybe it wasn't as expensive 20 years ago. However, in Jürg's words, it was indeed crazy expensive. A further stumbling block was that he had to order the DVD from a Czech company and wait a few weeks for it to arrive to Switzerland. It seems the DVD was never made available outside of Czechia, which is a real shame as it was envisioned as an international release. This is already evident from the cover, which has the episode titles in nine languages: Czech, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Russian, Polish and, finally, English - which we know is a market the studio was especially looking to break.

1999 was a very tough year for aiF. It was actually its last, as the studio oficially declared bankruptcy on August 24. If you already haven't, I would advise you to read my post about the episode Karty and the studio's bankruptcy before continuing. It can be found here. You read that correctly - the DVD came out a month and a half after its producer bankrupted. This makes me believe it was in production for a longer period of time. The shadow of Karty hangs over every corner of this release. Even on the cover you can notice the hammers-pliers wallpaper that appears on Mat's walls in the episode. Later, there's even explicit mention of it. However, let's see what this DVD had in store for us way back in that time. I have to say that is one of the more ambitious Czech releases of the series, which says a bit more about the ones that followed. A lot of effort was undoubtedly put in it.

The DVD opens with a lovely claymation reproduction of aiF's logo that I had never seen before. Maybe it also popped up in Karty, who knows. What follows then is the 1992-94 series intro, but with the title cards updated. Instead of me describing it further, Rakso 98, a friend of this blog, has made a tour of it with various menus shown. This is the intro (when you watch it, only one warning message plays):

aiF filmed clay logo

updated aiF title card which zooms in

If you would like to explore the DVD for yourself at first, here is a video that features the rest of the menus, again by Rakso:

Two music pieces play in the DVD. One is a nice rendition of the series theme and the second, played in the Filmography section, is very catchy and joyful. Both must have been played by Petr Skoumal and have not been heard outside of the DVD (possible credits from Karty excluded). The menu, just like the disc, features images of Pat and Mat puppets. These are not ones used in 1992-94, but updated, probably the ones used in Karty. You can see the differences in the language menu, which uses an image from 1992.

The Contents section features rolling scenes from five episodes per page. 

When you open an episode, though, you're not immediately sent to it, but rather to another part of the menu, the episode's title in the language you had chosen. Titles were made for every language, which is very neat. Here are only five out of nine examples for Okap:

The most interesting part of the DVD is the Filmography section which, in fact, contains bonus features about the characters and their makers. Here first is the actual filmography - notice another set of pictures of new puppets.

When discussing Karty, we mentioned how one of its ideas was to give the characters more depth, to make them a bit different from one another. This characterization made Pat more foolish and awkward, while Mat acted almost as his older brother, which was also reflected in David Nykl's voices. The DVD goes along the same lines. It introduces character biographies for Pat and Mat. Watch out for a few references to the authors and previous episodes. The image for Pat was lifted directly from a scene in Karty. I don't know where Mat's image comes from exactly.

Next in the Filmography section (whose snapshot I also show now) is a video of one of the prizes the episode Billiards won at the World Animation Celebration in Agoura in March 1997 (1st prize for best animation for a daytime TV series; 2nd prize for best stop motion professional animation): the first one was shown. Interestingly, it was given out to both Alfons Mensdorff-Pouilly and František Váša even though only the latter was credited for animation. Mensdorff actually might have animated the opening scenes, but I am not sure about that.

The pages dedicated to the three authors don't tell us anything we didn't already know. The same goes for the studio's section. Strangely, Beneš's biography doesn't mention he had passed away! As a bonus, here's the photo featured in the menu, with Beneš and Jiránek looking at a script for an episode, taken by cameraman Ivan Vít in the studio in 1992. It can be found on some other promotional materials.

and now we come to the most interesting page on the DVD,

What's Next?

As you can see, there's explicit mention of Playing Cards, Karty's title in English. A second DVD is said to be in production, which might have featured then unreleased 1989-94 episodes. There's even mention of a documentary, behind-the-scenes piece about the series. All the details make me believe it had already been shot by the time the DVD menus were being written. If so, I would love to see it one day.

These menus are an interesting glimpse into the studio in a watershed moment for the series' production and history. By the time the DVD came out, aiF was already dead and buried. It's fascinating to think of where the series would have gone after Karty and what the projected DVD release(s) would have looked like. Instead, the studio's heads lost the rights to the characters after protracted battles and a new studio, animation people, rose out of its ashes. Sometime later, the aiF episodes produced 1992-94, whose distribution was one of the main reasons for the studio's bankruptcy, were pulled from distribution entirely. They could not appear on DVDs and could, I believe, not be broadcast as well. This makes me ponder whether selling the DVD was, in fact, illegal after some time and certainly explains why it presumably never appeared outside of Czechia's stores.

The fourteen episodes were locked until 2006 or 2007, when Ateliéry Bonton Zlín, who had previously acquired rights for 35 older episodes and produced 28 new ones as well, acquired their distribution rights. In 2007, they released Pat a Mat Speciál, a DVD which featured the ten episodes from this DVD plus the four from the series which had been left unreleased. DMP again produced the DVD and even retained the section about the characters. Here are a few snapshots from that DVD, which show how less ambitious it was from the original, considering it was eight years younger. The only available menus are for Czech and Slovak.

scan by cover.box3.net

This DVD used the same masters for the ten episodes that could be seen in 1999. Additionally, the quality of Blatník's master makes me think it was scheduled to also appear on the 1999 DVD. The other three unreleased episodes (Vrata, Nehoda and Živý plot) were sourced from even older TV masters, it seems, as they look worse. The masters for the 1999 DVD were OK for the 1994 episodes, with worse results for 1992 episodes (Okap was way too red, Kabriolet yellowish and too bright). Videos online have shown me that Korean releases had the episodes sourced from much better masters overall and why these weren't used is a question probably related to the various copyright battles. Anyway, here are a few comparison shots from the 1999 (first images) and 2007 editions of Modeláři. The second DVD has better encoding, but the master had already "aged" by that point and there's a lot more flickering.

The 2007 copies are still used as official videos. The 1999 edition remains historically valuable as a branch of an alternate timeline where aiF controlled the episodes and the characters. My thanks to Jürg again for making it come to light. Hopefully, we will see these episodes remastered in the future (and the same goes for all pre-2009 episodes, as stated numerous times) on a better DVD release. Until next time, ... that does it!