The stop motion work of Phil Tippett and the now closed Tippett Studios is being preserved in a free-to-browse online archive.

August brought with it the sad news that Tippett Studios, the Berkeley-based animation and effects house founded by Phil Tippett, was closing down. The company had been in financial trouble for a while, and as it closed its doors on the 28th of that month, decades of props, memorabilia and art was sold off in a two-day auction.

As if the closure itself – and Phil Tippett’s retirement – wasn’t sad enough news on its own, there was the fear that huge amounts of art stored in the studio was about to vanish into private collections, never to be seen again. Tippett was, after all, the animator whose work illuminated the likes of Star Wars, RoboCop, Starship Troopers and too many other classic movies to list.

There’s now happier news to report, though. An anonymous person was at the auction in August, spotted a folder of CD-ROMs and other discs, and managed to acquire it for an undisclosed sum. Rather than keep the contents of those discs to themselves, that person has now uploaded it all to the Internet Archive.

“I quickly realized that some of this information wasn’t available online and might not ever be in the future in such high resolution,” the donor, who simply calls themselves ‘TippettFan’, writes. “So I purchased the disc folder and digitized all of its contents. What you have here are .ISO image files of the 90 key, non-duplicated discs from Tippett’s archives.”

There are a few clips in there that are available to view online, including test clips of CGI creatures and an interview with Phil Tippett from 2008. The bulk of the archive, however, is all in the .ISO disc image format the donor mentioned above – and there are gigabytes of files to download and comb through (listed here), with filenames describing behind the scenes images from RoboCop and Starship Troopers, slides of Tippett’s work on the original Star Wars, and, unexpectedly, publicity stills from the calamitous Catwoman.

In short, there’s a ton of film history here, and it’ll likely take weeks for historians and fans to comb through. We’ll be going through some of it ourselves, undoubtedly, and will report back if we find anything we think you might find interesting.

For now, though, what a treasure trove. Thank you to TippettFan, whoever you are, and thanks too to Brandon Sheffield for highlighting the archive on BlueSky.