HALF-CRAZED FRUIT DROPS & THE POLISH EDISON

In chapter 12 of A Companion to Russian Cinema (Wiley Blackwell) essayist Phil Cavendish quotes Victor Shklovskii as characterizing color film as "half-crazed fruit drops [vzbesivshiisia landrin]."* 

The first full Soviet feature in color:
The Nightingale

Schklovskii was deriding a popular push among Soviet ideologues to develop a Soviet answer to Disney's color process. But this failed to prevent Fedor Provorov (inter alia) from developing a two-color subtractive process, which was used for the 1936 film The Nightingale (i.e. Solovei-Solovushko = Соловей-Соловушко, but it's also known by the name of its protagonist Grunia Kornakova)).

Other exciting tidbits can be gleaned from Cavendish's essay, e.g. just the existence of Polish inventor extraordinaire "Jan Szczepanik, 'the Polish Edison'", who apparently developed a color film process, among a multitude of other things. According to Wikipedia, Mark Twain met and wrote an article about him entitled The Austrian Edison Keeping School Again.

*A note explains that landrin derives from popular confectionery founder Fedor Landrin, but that the quote was repeated so extensively by Soviet writers that its provenance is uncertain.

SHEEP AND SACKPIPES

Leaping headfirst into the macabre picaresque maelstrom that is Simplicius Simplicissimus, I am immediately rewarded with a raucous evocation of herdsman-royale King David, and how his example solaces Teutonic everyman Melchoir Sternfels as he protects his father's flock of sheep from wolves with the aid of his trusty Sackpfeiffe (i.e. bagpipes). 

In his words,

damal gleichete ich wol dem David auſſer daß jener an ſtatt der Sackpfeiffe nur eine Harpffe hatte welches kein ſchlimmer Anfang ſondern ein gut Omen fuͤr mich war

Englished:

"So I was much like David -- though in place of a bagpipe he only had a harp -- which was no bad start but a good omen for me..."

Dann von Anbegin der Welt feynd jeweils hohe Pesonen Hirten gewesen wie wir dann vom Abel, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, seinen Sohnen und Moyse selbst in H. Schrifft lesen welcher zuvor seines Schwehers Schaf huten muste ehe er Heerfuhrer und Legislator uber 600000 Mann in Israel ward.

 "Since from the beginning of the world high persons have been shepherds, as we read in Holy Scripture of Abel, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and his sons, and of Moses himself, who tended his in-law's sheep before becoming the leader and lawgiver of 600,000 men in Israel."

The novel, written by the fantastically named Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, recounts the miseries and misadventures of the aforementioned Teutonic everyman during the Thirty Years War -- an unimaginably destructive catastrophe that was basically WWII and WWI rolled together.

From vague references throughout the years I've gathered that it's something like a cross between Eine Frau in Berlin and a Huckleberry Finn. Whether this impression has any basis in reality remains to be seen. 

p.s. I'm reading the excellently produced online edition on the DTA Deutsches Text Archiv website, which features facing pages from the original, a facsimile and the normalized orthography.