The movie you literally cannot watch: Don Catarino (1934)

So, can you actually watch Don Catarino tonight? Absolutely not, unless you have a time machine or a shovel to dig up lost Mexican archives. 🕵️‍♂️

History nerds who love chasing ghosts will find this fascinating. Anyone wanting a real movie night with popcorn will be deeply annoyed.

This is a lost 1934 animated short by Salvador Pruneda, and when I say lost, I mean really lost. Only a single surviving image remains of this unfinished project.

It's kind of crazy to think about. An entire piece of hand-drawn art, just completely gone.

The single picture we do have shows a character based on Pruneda's famous comic strip. He looks like a classic, slightly grump old Mexican man with a massive mustache.

I keep staring at that one image, trying to imagine how the movement would have looked. Probably choppy and very bouncy, like those early Fleischer cartoons.

If you want to feel the vibe of weird 1930s cinema that actually survived, you are much better off hunting down Beer Parade. Or maybe the odd musical short Paree, Paree.

But Don Catarino is a different kind of beast. It’s basically a ghost story.

Pruneda was a cartoonist first, so his transition to animation in 1934 Mexico must have been a chaotic nightmare of trial and error. There were no big animation schools down there back then!

It's like trying to make a big action movie like The Fighting Eagle but with zero budget and only a pencil.

The Mystery of the Unfinished

Why did he stop making it? Was it money, or did the ink just dry up?

We don't know, and honestly, that's what makes it cool to think about.

Sometimes I get more obsessed with what isn't there than what is. Like, I’ve spent hours reading about lost stuff like Jonny stiehlt Europa just because the mystery is so fun.

If you're the type of person who loves film preservation gossip, this is your holy grail. If not, go watch Dangerous Money and leave the ghosts alone.