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Gorillarama wrote:

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Here are some close ups of the still numbers - it's just as you had suspected. What about the numbers are curious? I am not well schooled in the nuts and bolts of period film ephemera and any insight you might have would be appreciated.
What was the source of the the cap you posted? Any chance you might have other images you wouldn't mind sharing?
This fella can never get too much monkey!

'9872' is a curious prefix for a 1930s still code, simply because it doesn't fit with usual US codes of the era. The suffixes simply refer to the individual still number within the sequence of available images for the film, so we know from '9872-6' and '9872-18' that these were the 6th and 18th stills available for this particular movie title. The prefix is the all-important indicator for which movie (or which release of a movie) one is dealing with.

Since INGAGI was an RKO release, one might expect the still code prefixes to be alphabetical, rather than numerical, since RKO simply used the initials of the film's title as a still code... for example, ATOC- is the prefix for ARE THESE OUR CHILDREN? (1931), C- is the prefix for CIMARRON (1931), LF- is the prefix for the Lon Chaney serial THE LAST FRONTIER (1932), MB- is the prefix for MUMMY'S BOYS (1936), and so on. Since RKO added its own codes in this way to stills from its own productions and bought-in independent productions alike, the likely RKO still code prefix for INGAGI would therefore be simply I-.

Of the other US companies using numerical systems to identify their stills during the period, only three used four-digit prefixes; however, in none of these cases did the numbers ever get anywhere near as high as '9872'. Paramount's four-figure prefixes only reached 1300- during early 1931; Educational Pictures reached around 2800- that year; and Universal's four-figure prefixes peaked at arond 5300- in 1930, at which point the company reset the counter to zero and started prefixing stills from 1- again (hence why DRACULA photos bear the low-numbered still code 109-).

Of course, INGAGI was not a standard release. It started off as an independent release before being picked up by RKO, and '9872' could have been a code that meant something to the people at 'Congo Pictures'. Equally, due to the nudity in the images, RKO may not have been able to use its regular printing/processing house, with the house that handled the order instead assigning its own code. Or --- the stills could be from a non-US release of the film, or from a re-release; certainly, the movie seems to have stayed in circulation for a number of years on the roadshow circuit, making the latter a very real possibility. Indeed, the way the stills have toned to a rich sepia is very similar to the effect one sees with stills produced from the mid-1930s through to the mid-1940s for 'National Roadshow' and 'American Film Co. of Philadelphia' roadshow attractions; it always makes the stills look about twenty years older than they are, and both companies were wont to add their own arcane still codes to photos. So I lean towards thinking these are likely from an early non-RKO re-release on the roadshow circuit. RKO's 1930s stills generally do not tone in this way, although this would of course be a moot point if the company had to use a non-standard printing house to process these nudity-laden images.

As for the cap I posted, it's one of around 100+ images that Robiss (who inaugurated this thread) had up online a year or so ago, and which he was hoping someone here at CHFB might mirror-host (as per his posts earlier on this thread). While most of the 27Mbs of caps showed endless African stock footage, the 'gorilla hunt' shots below were of considerable interest to me too. One point worth noting is that the print in question bears an 'approved' certificate from the Pennsylvania State Board of Censors, which was not exactly known for its leniency; this leads me to suspect that there could likely be some topless-women-meet-Ingagi footage absent from this print.

Gorillarama wrote:

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Oddly, the images do not display when viewed via Firefox - I had to use Explorer to see them.
If they were indeed used on the roadshow circuit (the possibility of which, thrills me to no end) I am very surprised that they are not in worse shape. Would the promotional material follow along with the film or would the independent exhibitors have freshly printed material provided for them?

I can see the images fine using Firefox... this yuku environment is a very quirky beast when it comes to picture files, though.

I've collected roadshow material for years (which still doesn't mean it's particularly thick on the ground), and it really depended on the individual circuit/company involved as to how they dealt with promotional 8x10s. Some companies would send along the same set of stills to be pinned up at each location, for sure. However, other companies were set up pretty professionally, disseminating material from bricks-and-mortar offices which anyone could walk into, rather like the roadshow circuit equivalent of the National Screen Service. The American Film Co. was one such operation, and I've included a 1943 image of its exchange office in Philadelphia below from during the campaign for BUCKET OF BLOOD (in fact a retitling of a 1934 British version of THE TELL TALE HEART); the ballyhoo ethos seems to have extended to appealing to passers-by as much as to potential distributors, and I found a guy a few years back who had a near-pristene set of 16 stills from the 1943/44 roadshow attraction DR TERROR'S HOUSE OF TERRORS, which he'd simply walked into the Philadelphia exchange and purchased for US$1.60 (10 cents per photo!) back in 1944...

Where nudity was concerned, new 8x10 'souvenir photos' were sometimes made available to patrons after a show, as well. I could certainly imagine your second still having been distributed in this way, and indeed, a somewhat comparable 8x10 still was among the 'souvenir photos' that were sold after screenings of another 1930s women-and-gorillas flick, FORBIDDEN ADVENTURE, when it was handled by Roadshow Attractions Inc. in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Here's a NON-WORK SAFE copy of that photo, which I've nevertheless optically blurred, since Photobucket won't allow me to host nipples, no matter how vintage they might be!!: link to image.

Add to the above the list of people along the chain of movie distribution and exhibition who simply held onto anything (frames, photos, posters, etc.) that they considered even remotely titillating as it passed through their hands... and there's all kindsa ways that these stills could have survived in the great shape that they're in (thankfully!)...

1943 ballyhoo for BUCKET OF BLOOD at the Philadelphia exchange of the American Film Co.: