In the comments to the text"We talked about Pencil's best friend, Samodelkin, and I promised to tell you about his origins. I fulfill the promise, below is a kind of spin-off.
Samodelkin is almost like Homer. Seven ancient cities argued for the right to be called the birthplace of the blind storyteller. There are fewer contenders for the title of the creator of Samodelkin, but there are also enough.
Even the main source of knowledge about the modern world - Wikipedia in the article "Samodelkin" quite recently cited two names at once.
At first she stated:
The character was invented by the Soviet artist and director of animated films Vakhtang Bakhtadze.
and later elaborated:
In the early 1960s, the books of the writer Yuri Druzhkov were published, who, using the idea of V. D. Bakhtadze, made Samodelkin and his friend Pencil the main character of his books.
Behind all this, the true homeland of Samodelkin, the magazine "Funny Pictures", was somehow lost.
What was it really?
In fact, the real creator of the image of Samodelkin known to us is the artist Anatoly Sazonov, who invented and painted it for the Funny Pictures magazine in mid-1958. Here is the author's image of this character.
The date is fairly accurate because at the beginning of 1958, there were only five funny little men - Pencil, Pinocchio, Chipollino, Gurvinek and Petrushka. Here, for example, is a drawing by the famous artist (and editor-in-chief of the magazine) Ivan Semenov from the January issue:
Here is a page from the July issue. Pay attention to the frame.
As we can see, a 4-year-old Dunno, who was then rapidly gaining popularity, and Samodelkin, invented especially for the magazine, were added to the company. Later, in order to dilute the exclusively male company, Thumbelina will join them, and this will already be the canonical composition of the Club of Merry Men.
Where did the “Georgian version” come from? The fact is that in 1957, the Georgian animator Vakhtang Bakhtadze came up with a robot assembled from the details of the designer, and called it "Samodelkin". Here's what he looked like - quite a Georgian-looking mechanical man in the famous Svanuri cap.
The first cartoon with his participation - "The Adventures of Samodelkin" was released in 1957, and later Bakhtadze made many more films with this hero, the last one dates back to 1983. It cannot be said that these cartoons became very popular, but the first one made quite a splash, and even received an award at the 1st All-Union Film Festival in Moscow.
I note that there were enough animators among the staff of "Funny Pictures" - the same Sazonov was a very famous production designer and taught the skill of an animation film artist at VGIK for many years.
It turns out to be an interesting chain. In 1957, the Georgian Adventures of Samodelkin received a prize, and in 1958, Samodelkin appeared in Funny Pictures. But also - a fun robot, assembled from parts.
It is very likely that the magazine simply borrowed the name and idea of the character from the Georgians, but they came up with their own visual image.
And do not rush to brand anyone - do not forget that in the Soviet Union there was a special attitude towards copyright. On the one hand, copyrights were respected to a certain extent, money was accrued strictly for the use of someone's works, even restaurant labukhs made accurate deductions to the authors of songs performed in taverns.
On the other hand, the exclusivity of rights was not at all welcomed.
It was impossible to say: “Cheburashka is only mine, bring me money, and without an agreement with me, do not dare to use it!”. Successful finds were quite officially replicated at all levels and in all areas, and, for example, confectionery factories produced Cheburashka sweets without asking anyone and without paying anything to anyone. Simply put, you will always be paid for your particular book, but the character you invented is a national treasure. Otherwise, Chizhikov, with his Olympic Bear, would have been the richest man in the Soviet Union.
One way or another, Samodelkin immediately became a full member of the club.
I note that the image was not fixed immediately and at first varied a little. For example, Samodelkin, drawn by Migunov for the first cartoon about the Club of Merry Men called "Exactly at three fifteen", is somewhat different from the original.
Samodelkin very quickly gained popularity and even got his own section in the magazine.
In general, the robot turned out to be a very successful find for a children's magazine, and other publications followed the example of Funny Pictures. In the Pioneer magazine, for example, in the early 60s, its own robot columnist named Smekhotron appeared.
The last question remains - what does Yuri Druzhkov, mentioned in Wikipedia, have to do with the image of Samodelkin?
The correct answer is novelization.
The fact is that of the entire composition of the "merry little men" only Pencil and Samodelkin were not heroes of literary works. And then the editor-in-chief of "Funny Pictures" (and the creator of the Pencil) Ivan Semenov suggested that the magazine's employee Yuri Druzhkov write a fairy tale with the participation of his favorite characters - just like books based on popular films are written today.
In 1964, the story-tale "The Adventures of Pencil and Samodelkin" was published, illustrated by Ivan Semenov himself.
The second book - "Magic School" came out after the death of the author, and in our time, the writer's son, Valentin Postnikov, put the production of the adventures of Pencil and Samodelkin on stream.
The last thing I want to say is that Samodelkin turned out to be, probably, the most sought-after of all the characters of the Merry Men Club.
It is still used today in the tail and in the mane by all and sundry.
Samodelkin is "online store of steel containers", This "everything for low-rise construction", This "sale of garden petrol and electric equipment", This "wholesale and retail trade in building materials, fasteners and tools", This "development and sale of electronic systems and ignition circuits for outboard motors", This "the largest marketplace for buying and selling handmade works and designer items”- and all this only from the first page of the Yandex search results.
But perhaps the most unexpected use of this name was the experimental psychedelic film Samodelkin's Way, filmed in 2009 "based on the text of the same name by the artistic group Inspection Medical Hermeneutics (P. Pepperstein and S. Anufriev)".
Shot from the movie
But the arrival of artists who created “modern art” to Funny Pictures is a different story.
PS When this text was already written, thanks to the well-known animation historian Georgy Borodin, the “missing link” of this investigation was found - the comic strip “The Story of a Stranger” from the June issue of “Funny Pictures” that I did not have (No. 6 for 1958).
As you can read by examining the fine print, the artist is Anatoly Sazonov, and the author of the text is Nina Benashvili. The same Nina Ivanovna Benashvili, who, being a full-time screenwriter at the film studio "Georgia-Film", wrote the scripts for all Vakhtang Bakhtadze's cartoons about Samodelkin.
And which, apparently, is the real author of the character, assembled from details. The same one, in Georgian it was called Helmarjve Ostate (literal translation - “right-handed master”), and in Russian simply Samodelkin (by the way, quite a common Russian surname. Not the most common, but recorded at least since the end of the 19th century).
So the correct answer to the question from the title would be the following: Samodelkin from "Funny Pictures" is a half-breed, he has a Russian father and a Georgian mother. And with Samodelkin from Georgian cartoons, they are stepbrothers.
P.P.S When this text was read by one of my acquaintances, he stated the following, and I quote: “Somehow I had a chance to communicate with a Hindu (more precisely, Tamil) from Madras on one resource. As a child, he had a favorite Russian book, translated into Tamil, about Pencil and Sambarakarma. Frankly, I did not immediately understand what kind of book it was and who it was. Sambarakarma. The man complained that the book had been lost for a long time, and he would gladly buy a translation, if not in Tamil, then at least in English, to read to his daughter, but, unfortunately, it seems that Druzhkov’s books are not being published abroad now. And it turns out that they were published even in India.”
So Sambarakarma was added to the company to Samodelkin and Helmarjva Ostate. I wonder if there were other options?
Source: habr.com