The following is a guest post by Kelly Chisholm, a Processing Technician in the Moving Image Section.
Yesterday I mentioned the J. Fred MacDonald Collection; it is a collection of 40,000+ reels that many of my colleagues in the Moving Image Section have spent a good percentage of our time working on over the last few years, so you will doubtless see us mention it over and over again in the future.
One of my favorite things I’ve come across while working on the collection is an educational film called Frances and Her Rabbit (International Film Bureau, 1956), which shows a little girl and her rabbit Hopper finding something to do inside on a rainy day. I enjoyed it for its great use of color and the fun of seeing a rabbit do some impressive tricks, something for which my own rabbit has shown no talent. But, as is almost always the case, the story behind the film and the different versions we found in the collection have their own tale to tell.
The producer of the film, Keller Breland, and his wife Marian were both animal psychologists who studied at the University of Minnesota in the 1940s under famed behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner. Keller worked on an experimental pigeon training project there, meant to help the American forces in WWII by using pigeons to guide bombs (the project was successful but never used in combat). However, the Brelands did not see a future for themselves in academia, and they chose to leave the University and start a commercial venture for their system of animal training. They ran a zoo in Hot Springs, Arkansas, that was open to the public for their specially trained animals, and Keller appeared on numerous television shows with the animals in the 1950s and 1960s, all as a way to promote their skills to potential clients.
Their company also began producing educational films, Frances and Her Rabbit