The Twenty-Six Old Characters (1947)

★★★★ · The price of Ink · Spuzz · 2005-08-13

Well, this was a surprise, a mini-history of the alphabet and the modern fountain pen, told seamlessly and (excuse the expression) fluidly here for the 20 minute time frame. Although the Alphabet is given a bit too brief of a history, the film does show major developments in the forms, and gives a bit of interesting trivia to go along with it. The pen (since, yes, this film is brought to you by a pen company) is given more of the attention here as we see how the modern pen came to be, how it works, and some new advancements in pen technology (A push button ink sucker! Say it isnt so!).…

★★★ · A Link With Ink · Dodsworth the Cat · 2023-04-05

The storyline in this short cleverly morphs from the development of the alphabet, to the way it is written, to praise for the soon-to-be-obsolete fountain pen. While one maker of fountain pens touts the benefits, all I can think of is how a group's valuable old minutes were destroyed as their hand-written book got soaked with water and the ink washed off the paper. The narrator, happy and smiling, skips over this possibility. The Jam Handy writer slips in a bit of comic relief to keep the audience interested and make the film a little more enjoyable.