For those that care, an interesting article from 1974 on Blackhawk. If for nothing else, it shows how quickly things can change for a business due to new technology -- in this case about 10 years later the company pretty much went out of business, although the name has been carried forth until this very day via Lobster Films on DVD/Blu-ray. The article mentions that there was "no end in sight" even though the first VCR as we know it today became available to the consumer a mere 2 years later. (The first tape recorder for video was available commercially as far back as 1956, and for consumers in 1964!)
The heart of the article is actually about how they made their prints, which I thought might be interesting to post here due to the recent conversations on the restoration of the Stooges on Blu-ray. You can see how many generations away from the original negative Blackhawk prints were, yet they still maintained high quality. In fact, the article seems to say that the pre-print materia they worked with was often prints from collectors!
Blackhawk never printed Stooges shorts, yet they did sell most of what was available from Columbia in 8mm and Super 8 via their catalogs. The Stooges shorts in Super 8, particularly the "unedited" sound versions, were always better than even the best Blackhawks in Super 8 in terms of picture quality. I would love to see a similar article on how Columbia achieved this.
