One that was almost lost forever

JOHNSTOWN, Pa. (WJAC) — ‘Frosty the Snowman’, ‘Suzy Snowflake’, and ‘Hardrock, Coco, and Joe’ are all returning for their yearly yuletide ritual.

The cartoons have been the holiday earworms of viewers across the Alleghenies for more than 60 years.

The black and white films from the 1950's may look silly today. But in their time, they were top notch productions.

‘Suzy Snowflake’, and ‘Hardrock, Coco, and Joe’ were among the first movies to use stop motion animation, with the puppets placed photographed and moved for each frame of the film. The Frosty animation premiered a short time after Gene Autry first performed the song.

But at one point they almost disappeared.

One day Dino Tessari, who worked behind the scenes at WJAC for more than 40 years, was looking through stuff left behind by the old WJAC Radio that had recently moved out of our broadcast center. On the ground, he found something he wasn't expecting.

“I looked down on the floor and saw these (film) cans of cartoons,” Tessari said.

Turns out someone had accidentally thrown out the original cartoon reels.

“I took it, had the film editor clean it up, and of course I made copies of it so it would never happen again,” Tessari said. “That would have made me very unhappy (if they were lost).”

If you want to see the cartoons: you can watch ‘Frosty the Snowman’, ‘Suzy Snowflake’, and ‘Hardrock, Coco, and Joe’ online by clicking the links. You can also watch them at 5:55 PM each day through the holiday season on 6 News.

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