The Sunshine Makers (1935)
Cheerful gnomes bottle sunlight into magic milk and deliver it by cricket-drawn cart, until a gloomy goblin attacks their village, prompting a milk-bottle cannon battle that ends with the goblins won over to the gnomes' side.
Made for Van Beuren’s Rainbow Parade series with sponsorship from Borden’s dairy division, The Sunshine Makers is essentially a milk advertisement rendered as surreal Cinecolor fantasy, and its gnomes-versus-goblins imagery has stuck with generations of viewers who saw it on television long after its commercial purpose was forgotten.
Background
The Sunshine Makers was directed by Burt Gillett and Ted Eshbaugh for Amadee J. Van Beuren’s Rainbow Parade series, distributed by RKO Radio Pictures and released January 11, 1935. Five cheerful, red-robed gnomes march out each morning singing a song of praise to the sun, then bottle sunlight into a special milk inside their hillside workshop. Their idyll is interrupted by the Blue Devils of Melancholy, a gang of gloomy sprites who storm the gnomes’ village, setting up a battle fought with bottles of the gnomes’ sunshine-milk as ammunition.
What to watch for
The climax turns the dairy pitch into something closer to a fever dream, as the defeated Blue Devils are not destroyed but transformed outright into Bluebirds of Happiness once the gnomes’ milk hits them, an image stranger and more memorable than the short’s advertising purpose would suggest. Widely considered the best-remembered entry in the Rainbow Parade series, it owes some of that staying power to Borden, the dairy company that sponsored and rereleased the cartoon in 1940, keeping it in circulation and later in television rotation long after Van Beuren’s own studio had closed.
