Post by oneinathousand on Sept 29, 2024 3:29:35 GMT
I was reading the trivia section on the actor Peter Cushing today and I saw one bit of trivia that said he recorded voice-over work for an animated film called Walpurgis Night. I decided to look into this, but I could only find very small bits and pieces of information about it.
This film was being made by a guy named Zach Zito, who I couldn't find much info about except that he co-wrote a book in 1998 called "Monster Madness" and went to Ball State University. The majority of what little information I've found about this movie comes from a forum thread on Tapatalk here.
There's hardly anything about what this movie entailed except that it had something to do with the Frankenstein story and Peter Cushing voiced a character called "The Poor Traveler", which could possibly be a reference to the Charles Dickens short story but I have no idea. From what I can gather, Zito once made a student short film using paper cut-outs of Cushing, which might have been the inspiration for the movie. Years later, Zito began corresponding with Cushing and eventually convinced him to record voice-over work for Walpurgis Night, which he apparently did in 1989. Other voice actors included John Carradine, Joyce DeWitt, and Ferdy Mayne. After Cushing died, the magazine Starlog did a tribute article where they said that the movie wasn't expected to come out until possibly 1997, but of course that date came and went without a peep.
According to the forum, clips of Walpurgis Night were shown in an A&E special from 1994 called "It's Alive: The True Story of Frankenstein" as well as the 2009 Monster Bash conference, which had a Frankenstein theme that year. I have not found videos of either of these online yet. They're both available on DVD, so if I cannot find these posted anywhere online, I might cough up the money, cross my fingers that the DVDs arrive and are functional, and update this thread. If any of you know where I can watch both of these, you would be saving me some time and money lol.
I'm not expecting Walpurgis Night to have mind-blowing stop-motion animation because this movie sounds like it was made by one guy who doesn't have any credits in the animation industry from what I can tell, but I'm very curious about this movie because Peter Cushing is an actor I enjoy quite a bit, and since he was very sick for the last several years of his life this movie has his second-to-last movie performance, possibly his very last if you don't count the Hammer Horror documentary he did with Christopher Lee. This movie is to Cushing what Big Bug Man is to Marlon Brando.
